Social media for small business is one of the most effective ways of marketing your small business. If you have not checked out this new marketing channel yet, it is time to take a peek!

Social Media Marketing

Using Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter has brought back good old fashioned networking to the small business world. Not since old times has word of mouth marketing had such an impact on what people buy.

There was a great article about this trust factor over at mashable.com….

Why use social media?

Consumers are once again reverting to a need for personalization from businesses large and small. The need has been rekindled by the Internet and our ability to find anything we want, as well as a mistrust of advertising (think used cars salesmen).We’ve reached a point where the consumer wants to know the store owner’s name and that he can be trusted. Small businesses must look beyond their want to grow into corporations, and instead focus on their core customers. Thanks to social media, we’re able to foster these relationships easily and quickly.

…read whole article

Using tools like facebook and twitter allow you to get closer to your customers and to develop a level of trust that was not possible before these marketing channels opened up a couple of years ago AND do not even get me started on the power of a blog to compound these efforts!

We are dedicated to helping small business owners learn how to use Social Networking to grow their client base and gain revenue. Click the link to learn more about how to use social media marketing for your small business?

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.

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.

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!