The How To Marketing Magazine features free marketing and sales articles and resources for small business owners. We are serving the Small Business, Retail, Restaurant, Non Profit, Real Estate, MLM or Direct Sales sectors. The articles included in this issue include:

Marketing Tips And Tricks

Marketing Is A Team Sport
Do I Need Internet Marketing?
How to Really Get Noticed on Facebook
Your Brochure is a Sales Letter
Social Media and Email Marketing
Newsletter or Blog Content Review

Time Management

The 80/20 Does Matter!

Your Business Focus

Are you in the right business to succeed?
Increasing your Network Marketing Biz!
3 Deadly Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make

Small Business Success

Outsourcing Your Bookkeeping
Home Office Decorating
Marketplace

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Knowing how to create online competitive analysis can come handy at times. It can be used to analyze your competitor’s website, line of products or even one particular product. The 5 tips below will highlight tips to create competitive analysis when evaluating your competitor’s organic search result potential. Let’s get to it.

1. Domain Age – The age of the domain i.e. when the domain was first registered is highly regarded by the search engines. The older the domain is, the more authority potential it will carry. To check the domain age of your competitor, head to Domain Tools and use their free whois tool.

2. Indexation – This competitive term relates to getting more pages included in Google’s index so they have the opportunity to rank well. It can also be viewed as an indication to your competitors website potential, for example if it has 100 products and they are all indexed you can safely assume it’s been build in a search engine friendly manner. To check the number of pages indexed in Google type [site:site-name-here.com] and for more precise results try to fine tune this query on a folder level, for example [site:site-name-here.com/folder-name/]

3. Back Links – The number of external websites linking to your competitor is a crucial matrix in the online competitive analysis. The more quality websites linking naturally to your competitor the more likely they are to influence its ranking positively. To check how many external links your competitor has, head to Yahoo Site Explorer and type the domain name.

4. Number of Products / Services – The number of products or services offered by your competitor could provide an advantage when it comes to organic search result potential. The more products or services offered, the more chances are each will have a unique page which will help indexation and improve web traffic.

5. Site Technology – Some types of web technology are more search engine friendly while others are less. For example, websites build using flash will find it harder to rank well compared to websites build using html coding. To find which technology your competitor is using head to Built With and type the domain name.

Now that you have the different key matrix to check, create an excel sheet and compare your competitors. Hopefully my tips will point you in the right direction when conducting online competitive analysis.

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Guest article by Michelle Strassburg Head of Sales and Marketing at online wooden worktops vendor Wood and Beyond. Michelle has over 10 years experience managing online marketing.

How you are going to go about branding your small business is one of the most important things to consider when starting your company (or when making any big changes). This involves the creation of a business ideals, objectives, and values which would eventually be given life through the use of logos and other marketing collateral. Branding is what would set your business apart from the competition and would give it face in your niche industry. It is what provides a public face for your business and gives it some retention value for potential customers and existing clients to remember you by.

Here are some important things you need to consider when branding your small business:

1. Refer to your business’ mission and vision – Every business has its established set of mission and vision. The mission often talks about what the business is set to do while the vision answers more on how the business foresees its own growth. These are important things to look at because these are the components that give value to your branding. It justifies what comes off of the brand that you will create for your business.

2. Consider your business values – Aside from your mission and vision, your business also has specific values which may also become its own business ethics. These are codes that your business live by as it conducts its business. Values may have a bearing on branding because it can dictate what type of key messaging should you include in your business branding. It may give you an idea how you need to project your business as you begin to brand it.

3. Make your logo and tagline complement each other – Logos and taglines are the ultimate symbols of branding. The logo and its corresponding tagline summarizes the whole brand of your business so it should be symbolic enough to explain what your business is all about and what it aims for. You should also make sure that you won’t have any issues with other existing logos and taglines thus far.

4. Identify your marketing collateral – Your business branding will make sense and be widely used in your marketing collateral so identify which ones you would need and for what purpose. Examples of these are company profiles, AVPs, brochures, and even calling cards. You might not need to have these all at once but a business event would call for such materials to be developed. Make sure that when you implement your company branding with these marketing collateral, it stands out exactly the way you have developed it to be in the first place.

I bet you are asking yourself what You Tube SEO is! Well it is the way to make the most of your You Tube Video opportunities to drive traffic and get free website clicks! There are some basic things that most people do not do when optimizing their You Tube videos for SEO. This post will list my top You Tube SEO Tricks and shortly will have a link to the video.

When I decide on a topic, the first thing I do is search on YouTube to find out who has the most popular video in that category. For this exercise I searched “YouTube SEO”. The first time I typed in “You Tube” and the internal search engine asked if I meant “YouTube”, all one word. Well I can guarantee that they ask everyone that so it makes sense to use the correct spelling.

When the top video in that category came up, I studied what they were doing so that I could have the same kind of success that they are having. I looked at their title, clicked more info to get access to their description and title tags, and made sure that I had similar content that added to the knowledge so that I wasn’t just tricking people, but adding value also.

You Tube Title – When you are picking a title make sure that you are capitalizing on the popularity of another video so that you come in the “Related Videos” area. Make sure to include the main keywords that the popular video is ranking for!

You Tube Tags – Use similar tags to your target video so that you will appear in the “Related Videos” area.

You Tube Outbound Links – This is probably the most important one, make sure to link back to your hub site (or money page) so that you can get incoming links from your YouTube video. Many people rely on a link graphic, but having a hard coded link right to your site is the best way to get incoming traffic.

Email Marketing

Here are some useful ideas you may want to consider when preparing your email marketing campaign:

1. Identify the collateral which you will be sending through email – These days, various email programs have become stricter with delivering mails into their recipients’ inbox. You will be surprised that file size may often become a problem to consider. It’s good to have something sent which is roughly under 1MB so that aside from preventing it from being identified as spam mail, you can also be sure that it gets carried over the server without further ado.

2. Create a mailing list – You cannot just do an email marketing campaign with a random list of emails. Well, unless of course you actually know these people personally. It would be good to create an opt-in list first before you start with this so that the people on your list will know why they received certain emails from you in the first place and would not end up flagging you as a spammer and then blocking future emails from you. An opt-list is built the right way. It is usually protected with an agreement that those who are included in its directory express their approval on being sent different materials coming from you via email.

Mad Mimi and Aweber are two great options!

3. Prepare your auto-responder – The whole point of creating an email marketing campaign is mostly to increase your website traffic and your interaction with possible customers and existing clients. One of the most important things that your email marketing campaign should have is timely response and since you might not always be there to accomodate replies, having an auto-responder built in with the email marketing system is a great idea. This way, people would know how long they can expect a reply for you especially if they have other questions regarding what you just sent them.

Most of my readers are small business owners who are serious about their business and brand building marketing efforts. They do not have time to cruise YouTube in search of the fun recent marketing innovations.

Lucky for them I do!

My husband, uber-geek of the free world sent me this video. It is about a raw whole chicken, the Metal hair band Dokken and Norton Anti-virus. The geeks are excited about this and sharing it with each other. To quote Johnny Jacobsen, “I like Norton, Symantec now.”

How does this relate to your business? Well if you know who your customers are (males between the ages of 18 and 50-ish), and you know what they like (juvenile humor and hair bands) you can produce something that might spread ONLY to the people you are trying to target.

Most of the group that is interested in this ad are NOT interested in marketing so I couldn’t do a raw chicken Dokken campaign and think that it would cross over. BUT I could do something clever with reference to the 80′s (many of my readers are in the 35-55 range).

Why not capitalize on all the marketing dollars, research and focus groups that your big name competitors have spent on rolling out a campaign and scale it down to fit your business?

Here is follow-up ad – the chicken gets a chance!

Free blogs are a GREAT way to extend your marketing dollars. There are MANY different free blogging platforms like wordpress.com and blogger.com. Doing a google search revealed 460,000,000 of them! Setting up a blog takes minutes and will help your marketing efforts.

That having been said, I think free blogs are a great feeder into a “real” wordpress blog like this one. There are limitations to free blogs like being able to add advertising and customized contact us forms.

If you are going to commit to growing a blog (free or paid), there are some key things you need to focus on…

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If you want to set up a self hosted wordpress blog, WebHostingBuzz.com offers custom IP addresses (good for making blog networks) and one click WordPress setup. If you want even easier, we set up self hosted wordpress blogs for $500!
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Identify your blogging objectives – Before launching your blog site, you need to go through your list of objectives first. Ask yourself why you need to establish a blog in the first place, are you driving traffic to a website or collecting email addresses? You also need to identify your target audience for your blog so it will be easier for you to identify what sort of topics you should write about. Your blogging objectives should also include establishing a specific identity or branding style so you can effectively differentiate yourself from the others.

Draft a series of topics for a month or a monthly theme – Once you have setup your blog, your biggest challenge would be to regularly fill it up with new entries. Remember that your blog hits will depend mostly on what’s been published on it. Since you are blogging for business, it would be good to align your blogging topics with your business plans–include things such as interesting industry information, products or services to be launched, industry reports, new client acquisitions, among other things. You might also want to try having a monthly theme to keep your blog’s consistency.

Learn about SEO – To keep your blog site successful, make sure your blog is properly optimized so it can also attract more readership. Search engine optimization involves a lot of different processes which mostly relies on keywords sprinkled in blog posts for better chances of making it on the top ranks of search engines. Make blogging a more effective marketing tool by using the power of SEO.

Want to learn social networking the easy way? Check out our social networking video classes that walks you through social networking from setup to handy dandy tools to make your life easier!

Social networking is the new free marketing thing that everyone is talking about! It is an amazing opportunity for small business marketers to get the word out about their business AND get leads from interested people. Here are three great reasons to use social networking to help grow your business!

Social Networking Makes You More Approachable

It is funny how intimidating it can be to call someone you are considering hiring or even considering buying a product from. It seems like there are scam artists all over and no one likes to get “taken”. When someone sees you on social networking, they can get a feel for how you operate. They can ask their “friends” for social proof that you will do a good job. If you are just building up your network and would like to try out your mad skills on someone, please feel free to add me onwww.Facebook.com, LinkedIn.com or Twitter.com. (I am Taradactyl on all of these and would be your friend – just ask!)

Social Networking Lets You Help People

People can watch what you are doing and can copy it. If I find a great new site that could help get me new business, more than likely I will be posting something about it online. If you are in my network, you will see it and be able to take advantage of that opportunity.

Social Networking Is, Well, Social AND Ranks Well On Search Engines

There are many things that you can add to your profile which will be found by humans AND by the search engines. I hear all the time that you need to have backlinks to your site to make it more google friendly. One of the easiest ways EVER to get FREE backlinks to your site is to make them yourself. In your profile make sure to add your website!