Blog - Small Business Marketing

Friday

05Mar2010

Twitter is like hula-hoops-a fad, will fail, waste of time! Who cares? Micro blog v2.0 will quickly fill its place, oh dear!

Friday, March 5, 2010 at 9:43AM

I've spoken to hundreds of business owners and managers during my seminars about Social Media. When I ask them about LinkedIn or Twitter nearly all of them say: "it's a fad", "waste of my time", "Twitter is rubbish". The logic here is that Social Networking platforms will inevitably fail.

The particular business model of a Social Networking site doesn't matter, and yes some will fail. But if they do, moving your profile and audience won't be a major effort - the new 'Twitter' replacement will make sure of that. It's a bit like those people who started calling the internet "Dot-Bomb" after the Tech meltdown in 2000. It wasn't a bomb at all - just media hype and poor business models for the many unfortunates caught up in the moment. A short term problem that after a year or so fixed itself.

Participate in Twitter and make micro blogging work for you. It can be an incredibly effective marketing tool. And so what if at some time, maybe, possibly in the hazy future Twitter might get replaced by Twitter 2.0 or Flitter or whatever micro blog takes over: and it will be faster, more powerful and smarter. And most likely have a great revenue model so it will survive.

Don't opt out just because it maybe won't work in the future - seize the opportunities available to you now. Micro blogging is a big one!

Lead Creation |

URL Tagging: how you can track the statistics that lead clients to your small business

Thursday, March 4, 2010 at 10:08AM

To gain more information and analytical insight into the productivity of your online marketing, it is crucial to tag all URLs linked to your business. This includes pretty much every event posted online, any campaigns, even your Tweets. So, why is tagging important for small business marketing? Well, tagging helps to:

Identify a search engine, newsletter name or other source
Distinguish medium
Highlight keywords in an ad
Differentiate ads or links that point to the same URL
Recognize specific product promotion or strategic campaign

Tagging your online advertisements is an important tool that allows Google Analytics to show you which marketing activities are really paying off.

Tagged links consist of a URL address followed by a question mark and your campaign variables (criteria). Now, let’s say I have an event on Eventbrite.com and I’ve put that link on my website. You would assume that this is tracked in Google analytics because it’s on your website. The fact is, it isn’t. You would need to tag it-- that is, identify variables that would make it found. Now, Eventbrite has an option to add this automatically, but there is also the manual way. They will both appear the same.

When a person goes to the event page, rather than it appearing as:
http://mynewevent.eventbrite.com/

It can appear as:
http://mynewevent.eventbrite.com/?utm_source=event%2Bbrite&utm_medium=email&
utm_term=small%2Bbusiness%20marketing&utm_campaign=Lead%2BCreation%20Event

If you have a look at the second URL I have provided, it indicates the number of people who came on this page using the “small business marketing” keyword phrase. These were the people that received an email sent from Eventbrite promoting a Lead Creation Event Campaign.

Using URL tagging for small business marketing now means that we can measure the amount of traffic coming from our predefined keywords to reach a page that we have optimized for those keywords. These statistics can be automatically tracked on analytics platforms such as Google Analytics.

Now, we can’t aimlessly be throwing a dart hoping it will hit the bulls-eye. It is necessary to tag as many online sources as possible in order to measure its effectiveness.

Lincoln |

Unloved LinkedIn profiles, with 3 sad lonely connections, why do they even bother? Oh dear!

Wednesday, March 3, 2010 at 12:44PM

Not much more to say here, but what do you think it's achieving? What could possibly be the benefits? More importantly, what is the downside of going public? We advise to always put your settings as public as possible. You can always turn them to private later, little by little, if you're getting too much traffic in your inbox.

You are wasting a valuable opportunity by being anonymous and contributing very little - No wonder you aren't getting much out of LinkedIn or the other sites! "You've got to be in it to win it!" is the saying that applies here, and that means YOU, not the anonymous version of you. Participate, be part of the community, contribute and get known! That's how to make this marketing opportunity work for you.

Or just stay out of it. A much better and simpler option than "Anonymous" or "Your Company Name."

Lead Creation |

1 Comment |

tagged

LinkedIn in

Darwins

Thursday

29Oct2009

7 Quick Tips to Maintain a Website that Will Generate Leads

Thursday, October 29, 2009 at 1:44PM

The main tasks lead creation undertake in order to improve the SEO of clients’ websites (and that you can do for your own website) are:

Click to read more ...

Lead Creation |

1 Comment |

SEO,

Website

Monday

26Oct2009

Finding Keywords - The Foundation of Effective Marketing

Monday, October 26, 2009 at 11:24AM

The most effective strategy to obtain your keywords is the free Google AdWords Keyword Tool. This was obviously developed by Google, and it can tell you the best traffic on certain keywords. You should create an account for yourself at adwords.google.com. You don’t have to pay anything here unless you put a campaign online. You are still able to access the keyword tool without an account. What about the other search engines? In Australia, Google totally dominates—to the extent that the others are irrelevant. In fact, we have started calling it GO for Google Optimisation, and not SEO!

Click to read more ...

Lead Creation |