How to Set Yourself Apart In The Sea Of Online Marketers

Do you feel odd when you write marketing material to publish online? Do you read over old marketing items and wonder why in the world it says what it does? Do you think, “I can’t believe I published that!”? Do you hire a copywriter and just accept whatever they come up with? After all, they are professionals!

If your online marketing material stimulates an image in your mind that is just not you, likely you’ve been trying to model your approach after someone else or you’ve been using work produced by someone else without giving them the benefit of knowing you, learning your approach, sharing your ideas and interjecting your personality into the material.

Let’s admit it. We all do it!

When we get ready to publish something online we surf the net. We look for articles, ezines, web pages or auto-responders that resemble what we are working on, usually those published by direct competitors or sometimes published by mentors that we admire – successful online marketers.

While everything is fresh in our minds, we start to work on our own online marketing materials, thesaurus at hand, and we sometimes use words we don’t even know the meaning of. We end up with something that sounds really good to us because it is comparable to something we’ve read. We publish it.

So what happens?

We end up with a hodge-podge of material on the internet, published in our name, that doesn’t sound a bit like us. What’s really interesting is the mixed image that results. Two articles on the same topic may even reflect different points of view or different personalities.

So, what’s the solution?

The solution to this dilemma is to be ourselves and let our personalities show through in our online marketing materials.

If you are a Texan and the word “ya’ll” is prevalent in your vocabulary, use it! If you are writing a blog entry in the midst of a snow storm and it is “a bit nippy outside” don’t hesitate to say so. When you let your personality shine your image will be your own, not one you have crafted that will change from day to day depending upon what you have read most recently.

There’s lots of talk about branding in regard to online marketing. The basic principles of branding are to decide on the image you wish to portray and what message you want to drive home.

While some people could write a book on how to brand your business, there are really only a handful of factors to consider – 1) your image; 2) your purpose; and 3) your marketing message. The purpose of a brand is to craft something that will stick in the minds of people and help them to remember your business.

Creating and building a strong brand does not have to compromise your personality. The only real decision is whether you want to be casual or professional. We all speak differently when we are in a business setting than we do when we are hanging out with friends, but either way, our whole personality doesn’t change when we walk from one setting to the other.

In the world of online marketing, retaining your personality and your identity will go far in branding your business. You’ll be much happier with the long-term effects of your online marketing if you don’t try to be someone you are not. Be yourself and have fun!

Dr. Ande
SEO Tips for Small Business

Take Control Of Your Future And Start Your Own Business!

New businesses are the backbone of the American economy. They provide new innovations, new jobs, and fresh concepts to the business industry. And owning a business is the dream of many Americans as well. Being your own boss has been ranked as one of the key goals of many Americans. The attraction of the freedom of running your own business, with no limitations or glass ceilings is impossible to deny. This mutualism has created a huge growth of small businesses in the nation, and today, many more people think about owning their own businesses than ever before. But starting a business requires money. Without startup capital, very few people have the resources available to launch a successful business idea. A new business needs a dependable source of income until it can generate the profits it needs to cover its own costs and produce an income. A unsecured start up loan can alleviate a lot of stress.

If you’re thinking about starting your own business, you are probably in need of a start up loan. Unless you have a significant amount of money saved up, a unsecured start up loan is the first step in turning the blueprints of your new business idea into a reality. With a start up business loan, you can get the tools you need to make your first start the right start. You can build a strong customer base right from the beginning, a key factor in initiating and maintaining a successful business.

If you're starting a business, it's more than just a job. It's a personal dream and a quest for success. This idea may leave you feeling simultaneously liberated and inspired. But it also has an edge. Specifically, it's also your obligation to finance it beyond the "I've got an idea" stage. Starting a business requires so much more than an ingenious idea, and even more than planning, marketing strategies, and a well thought out future. How do you get start up business financing that will either advance your idea to the point where it can attract outside capital, or perhaps jump - start you into profitable operations?

There are several options that an individual may take into consideration. If you have nothing, you may find it's difficult. If you have personal assets, the hard part is putting them at risk, and doing so is the rite of passage to both success and failure.

Obtaining financing can sometimes be the most grueling part of starting a new business. The loan approval process for a business startup loan sometimes seems like a maze, with stringent credit requirements, complicated business plans, and paperwork full of terms that are like a foreign language to the layman prospective business owner simply trying to get a loan. Options can be rather slim and unfitting when it comes to financing for the new business owner; unrealistic collateral requirements and proof of projected business profitability can sometime seem more like a joke than a reality.

Collateral is often the biggest obstacle to the prospective business owner. Not only does a new business not yet have any commercial collateral to provide; but it is asking a lot for an entrepreneur to put his hard earned personal assets at risk in order to start a new business venture. Yet, without collateral, getting a business financing can sometimes seem impossible.

The good news is, though rare, some companies to have specialized programs for exactly this scenario. An unsecured business start up loan can get a new business owner the funding he needs to cover initial business costs, without having to provide collateral and place his or her assets at risk. With this type of financing plan, the lender utilizes something the borrower has worked hard for and should be able to take advantage of - his good or bad credit. With this approach, the lender can still lend an unsecured start up loan at great rates and with a variety of programs.

Applying for a unsecured small business start up loan is easy, all the business owner need to do is just go on line and submit their loan details. Then the lenders will refer back to you with the loan decision in a few days.

Dr. Ande
SEO Tips for Small Business

Small Business Startup - The 90/10 Rule

Small business startups require a lot of work.  You might however, be surprised by what type of work should be taking up the majority of your time.   Computer consultants, when they contemplate small business startups, tend to focus on the technical aspects of the business.  The rational is that they want to offer a decent service and must have great technical skills before anyone will be willing to pay them.

In fact, the 90/10 Rule tells us that during small business startups, 90% of your time should be spent on direct marketing activities and only 10% on building technical skills. The types of small business startup activities to spend 90% of your time on include:

·         prospecting

·         lead generation

·         going out on sales calls

·         preparing proposals

During the small business startup phase you must be much attuned to the need for acquiring high quality clients. Every non client hour that does not have to go into administrative or organizational duties should be plowed into prospecting and networking.  This can ease up a bit once you start to get beyond the small business startup phase.  For now though, client generation is your priority.

The Bottom Line on Small Business Startup

For small business startups, following the 90/10 Rule is critical.  Spending 90% of your time on direct marketing and business development activity versus 10% on technical skills development is a trade-off that is well worth it.  There is no point gaining technical skills if you have no clients to practice them on.  Small business startup is a time that will make or break your business.  Put your training and certifications on hold for a while and get out meeting people and making as many contacts as possible.

Copyright MMI-MMVI, Small Biz Tech Talk. All Worldwide Rights Reserved.

Directory Submission to Generate Online SEO Promotion

Links to your site from other sites drive additional traffic. But since Google and other major search engines consider the number of incoming links to your website ("link popularity") as an important indicator of relevance, more links will help you rank higher in the search engines. Google has a measure called PageRank that reflects the quantity and quality of incoming links. All links aren't all equal. Links from trusted, popular sites help your site rank higher than links from lower traffic sites.


Submit Your Site to Key Directories, since a link from a directory will help your ranking -- and get you traffic. A directory is not a search engine. Rather, it is a hierarchical listing of sites sorted according to category and subcategory. Be sure to list your site in the free Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.com), overseen by overworked volunteer editors. But if you don't get listed right away, don't be impatient and resubmit, or you'll go to the end of the queue. A link in this directory will help you a lot.

Yahoo! Directory (dir.yahoo.com) is another important directory. Real humans read submission, so be careful to follow the instruction given. Hint: Use somewhat less than the maximum number of characters allowable, so you don't have wordy text that will tempt the Yahoo! editor to begin chopping. Yahoo! Directory Submit (ecom.yahoo.com/dir/submit/intro/) requires a $299 annual recurring fee to have your site considered for inclusion within seven business days. Other paid business directories that might help are About.com and Business.com.

6 Simple Search Engine Strategies

Perhaps the most important -- and inexpensive -- strategy is to rank high for your preferred keywords on the main search engines in "organic" or "natural" searches (as opposed to paid ads). Search engines send robot "spiders" to index the content of your webpage, so let's begin with steps to prepare your webpages for optimal indexing. The idea here is not to trick the search engines, but to leave them abundant clues as to what your webpage is about. This approach is called "search engine optimization," abbreviated as SEO.

1. Write a Keyword-Rich Page Title. Write a descriptive title for each page -- rich in keywords you want people to find you with -- using 5 to 8 words. Remove as many "filler" words from the title (such as "the," "and," etc.) as possible, while still making it readable. This page title will appear hyperlinked on the search engines when your page is found. Entice searchers to click on the title by making it a bit provocative. Place this at the top of the webpage between the <HEAD></HEAD> tags, in this format: <TITLE>Web Marketing Checklist -- 37  Ways to Promote Your Website</TITLE>. (It also shows on the blue bar at the top of your web browser.)

Plan to use some descriptive keywords along with your business name on your home page. If you specialize in silver bullets and that's what people will be searching for, don't just use your company name "Acme Ammunition, Inc.," use "Silver and Platinum Bullets -- Acme Ammunition, Inc." The words people are most likely to search on should appear first in the title (called "keyword prominence"). Remember, this title is your identity on the search engines. The more people see that interests them in the blue hyperlinked words on the search engine, the more likely they are to click on the link.


2. Write a Description META Tag. Some search engines include this description below your hyperlinked title in the search results. The description should be a sentence or two describing the content of the webpage, using the main keywords and keyphrases on this page. Don't include keywords that don't appear on the webpage. Place the Description META Tag at the top of the webpage, between the <HEAD></HEAD> tags, in this format:

<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="Increase visitor hits, attract traffic through submitting URLs, META tags, news releases, banner ads, and reciprocal links.">
The maximum number of characters should be about 255; just be aware that only the first 60 or so are visible on Google, though more may be indexed.

When I prepare a webpage, I write the article first, then develop a keyword-rich title (#1 above). Then I write a description of the content in that article in a sentence or two, using each of the important keywords and keyphrases included in the article. This goes into the description META tag.

Next, I strip out the common words, leaving just the meaty keywords and phrases and insert those into the keywords META tag. It's no longer used much for ranking, but I'm leaving it in anyway. I think it may have some minor value. So to summarize so far, every webpage in your site should have a distinct title and META description tag. If you implement these two points, you're well on your way to better search engine ranking. But there's more that will help your ranking....


3. Include Your Keywords in Headers (H1, H2, H3). Search engines consider keywords that appear in the page headline and sub heads to be important to the page, so make sure your desired keywords and phrases appear in one or two header tags. Don't expect the search engine to parse your Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) to figure out which are the headlines -- it won't. Instead, use keywords in the H1, H2, and H3 tags to provide clues to the search engine. (Note: Some designers no longer use the H1, H2 tags. That's a big mistake. Make sure your designer defines these tags in the CSS rather than creating headline tags with other names.)


4. Position Your Keywords in the First Paragraph of Your Body Text. Search engines expect that your first paragraph will contain the important keywords for the document -- where most people write an introduction to the content of the page. You don't want to just artificially stuff keywords here, however. More is not better. Google might expect a keyword density in the entire body text area of maybe 1.5% to 2% for a word that should rank high, so don't overdo it.


5. Include Descriptive Keywords in the ALT Attribute of Image Tags. This helps your site be more accessible to site-impaired visitors (www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/glance/) and gives additional clues to the search engines. The ALT attributes do help get your images ranked higher for image search (see #12 below).


6. Use Keywords in Hyperlinks. Search engines are looking for clues to the focus of your webpage. When they see words hyperlinked in your body text, they consider these potentially important, so hyperlink your important keywords and keyphrases. To emphasize it even more, the webpage you are linking to could have a page name with the keyword or keyphrase, such as blue-widget.htm -- another clue for the search engine.

7. Make Your Navigation System Search Engine Friendly. You want search engine robots to find all the pages in your site. JavaScript and Flash navigation menus that appear when you hover are great for humans, but search engines don't read JavaScript and Flash very well. Therefore, supplement JavaScript and Flash menus with regular HTML links at the bottom of the page, ensuring that a chain of hyperlinks exists that take a search engine spider from your home page to every page in your site. Don't set up your navigation system using HTML frames (an old, out-dated approach); they can cause severe indexing problems.

Some content management systems and eCommerce catalogs produce dynamic, made-on-the-fly webpages, often recognizable by question marks in the URLs followed by long strings of numbers or letters. Overworked search engines sometimes have trouble parsing long URLs and may stop at the question mark, refusing to go any further. If you find the search engines are't indexing your interior pages, you might consider URL rewriting, a site map, or commercial solutions.

3 Tips to Easy Business SEO promotion

Many local businesses struggle to find ways to promote themselves, get links, rank in search engines, and ultimately drive traffic to their websites. Most small businesses also have limited budgets making the task more difficult. For those businesses here are some ways you can promote your business online for free and generate some SEO traffic organically.

1. Email Signatures: Be sure to add your business URL to all of your outgoing email. Want to catch the reader's attention? Try adding your mission statement, or a catchy phrase to help people understand what you do. Change the statement a several times a year so people notice it again.
2. Syndicate Your Content and Ideas: Take advantage of article distribution Services like EZineArticles, ISnare, and IdeaMarketers to spread your message and approach. Use them to bring leads to your site by offering things like free eBooks or PDF’s that they can download after entering their contact information.
   
   These create link backs to you because you will include your business URL in your resource box. When you do this try and be just as creative. Don't just point them to the first page of your website. You can either create specific landing pages to send them too based on the company you post the article with or by topic (keep in mind this can become a lot of landing pages unless you write about one or two categories or topics).
3. Get listed: This is one of the most basic methods of business promotion, both on and offline. List yourself in as many business directories as you can; yellow pages, and local business Websites as you can find. Many of these will list your company for free, though some might require you to pay a small fee.
   
   This type of promotion is well worth the time and investment, as most people consult these publications when looking for a designer, plumber, electrician etc. You see the point.

Getting your business name recognized in appropriate circles is one of the biggest hurdles a fledgling company is going to face, but with a little fore-thought and some shameless self-promotion it's not as hard to get noticed as you may think.

Using Seminars to Promote Your Business

Promote your business by giving a seminar or presentation. You have expertise that other people are interested in! (You couldn't be in business if you didn't, and if you are an employee the employer is in need of your skills as only you can do it.) Why not share that expertise and promote your business at the same time?

For example, a local carpet company advertises a free seminar on installation techniques for a type of laminate flooring. Participants not only learn how to install this type of flooring themselves, but are offered special discount prices if they wish to purchase laminate flooring. Another local retailer who sells goods made of stained glass offers courses on working with stained glass on-site.

If there's no direct tie-in to your product or service, you can still give a presentation on a related topic. Nursery people or horticulturalists, for instance, often give demonstrations on topics such as tree-pruning, or slide shows of famous gardens they've visited. In my case, most of my business involves providing specific writing or training services to businesses and SEO advice so I give presentations on general topics such as "Promoting Your Business on a Shoestring" or "Using SEO to Increase Your Target Audience".

If it's not feasible to present the seminar at your site, because you're a home-based business or just don't have the facilities you need, arrange to give the seminar elsewhere. Many government-sponsored organizations, such as Chamber of Commerce, Rotary Club, Libraries and non-profit programs are always looking for experienced business people who are willing to give presentations. You may also be able to arrange to present your topic through the Continuing Education branch of your local college or university.

Scared? Start small and start building a name by making a presentation to one of your local groups such as your Home-Based Business Association or Business Women's network. If public speaking terrifies you, I can't recommend Toastmasters highly enough; this organization has helped a great many people get over this fear and be able to address groups of people.

So try using your voice to promote your business. It's actually one of the better low cost ways to do it.

Simple Small Business Marketing that Works

Here's a method that's sure to draw attention to your business.

Use every outgoing piece of paper, and every electronic document as business promotion. You have business cards, but you also put out a lot of other documents in the course of doing business. Check these to make sure you're using their promotional possibilities to full advantage.

For instance, business stationery is an ideal business promotion tool. Is your business name, logo, contact information (including URL if you have one), and slogan on your envelopes as well as on your letterhead? Or are your envelopes only printed with your business name and return address? What a waste! Your phone and fax numbers, your URL, and even a memorable slogan should be there, too. It's not just an envelope; it's a business promotion tool! You're sending it out anyway, so why not make it work for you?

The same goes for outgoing faxes, bill payments, receipts; whatever paper you send out should carry your full company message. And don't forget to make sure that your email has a complete signature that provides all your business information and a promotional tagline.

Electronic documents, such as email, are also easy to update with your latest business promotion information, whether it be a special price on your product or service, or letting people know that your company has won an award.

Articles and press releases are also excellent business promotion tools that you can use to promote your business inexpensively. Read on to learn what types of articles and press releases you should write and tips on where to send them to promote your business effectively.

3 Tips to Help You Cheaply Market Your Small Business

Okay you've heard the selling comment before, "you're not in business if you have no clients or customers." Well it's true, if no one knows you're there, how do you expect to make sales? No sales equals no business.

Try these 3 ideas out to help you market your business at a low cost.

1) Contact nonprofit organizations, schools and colleges, and even other businesses who have customers who may need your services. Ask for work or leads.

2) Get on the telephone and make "cold calls." These are calls to people who you would like to do business with. Briefly describe what you do and ask for an appointment to talk to them about ways you can help them meet a need or solve a problem.

3) Offer a free, no obligation consultation to people you think could use your services. During such consultations offer some practical suggestions or ideas -- and before you leave ask for an "order" to implement the ideas.

The point is to get samples of your product or your work into as many hands as possible. You want to use other people to sell your product or service. Instead of (or in addition to) selling your products yourself, in other words, go viral.  Nothing makes sales like word of mouth endorsements made by friends. Think of how many times you've eaten at a restaurant or tried a new store because one of your friends, family, or co-workers recommended it.

These three business promotion ideas are just some of the ways you can promote your small business without spending a small fortune. With a little experimentation and time, you'll find out which of these ideas work best for you - and best get the word out about your small business.

LOW-COST PROMOTION

Promotion and advertising can be a heavy expense, especially for a new business that wants to make itself known in a community. A home-based business, however, more often than not, has a very limited budget when it comes to advertising. The home business owner needs to make the public aware of his or her product or service at the lowest possible cost. There are many ways. A pet breeder in a large city was struggling for several years-until he came up with a novel idea. He started giving away customized "birth certificates" for the pets he sold. Almost immediately, his sales rose more than 10 percent. The owner of a new home cleaning service was trying to attract clients. She couldn't afford much advertising, so she began offering "home cleaning seminars" to civic groups. After two months of seminars, she was swamped with inquiries and clients. Promotion often makes the crucial difference between business success or business failure.

Look at your business and decide what kind of complimentary fund gifts or give a ways can you do to help add and attraction to your clients. What quirky or offbeat things add a smile to your face when you see them and how can you apply them to your business?

Just look around or you can even ask your friends and family what ideas they have about what you could do to generate sales. There's always something you can do to help you stand out in an over saturated market place that will draw attention.

Think about it McDonald's had signs that said "Over a billion sold" long before we ever knew what "one billion" was. Nike, says, "Just Do It" and Walmart has "Rollbacks". Take a look at what you are offering and just make one tweak that will be catchy, evoke an emotional response or just get people talking about your business.

Low cost advertising is simply a matter of adding a little something extra to give your customers more perceived bang for their buck and you get more clients; without breaking your bank.