Ideas for Business

It is very important for a small business, whether you intend to engage in traditional marketing or Internet marketing and whether you intend to market your business locally or globally, to develop a sales funnel. You have to plan how you are going to drive customers to the final sale. Sometimes, and I’d say many times, it’s more than a one or two step process.

Your sales funnel may include several sales throughout the process. For instance, your first sale may be to offer a free e-book or video download in exchange for an e-mail address. Technically, it’s not a sale, but in reality it is a sale. You have to “sell” your website visitor on the benefits of giving you their private information. You use the free download as a selling point to encourage that behavior.

Next, you use the e-mail address and the e-book to entice your customer to buy something else. After that purchase, you may offer another product, one of higher value. And so you develop your sales process and drive your customer interactions toward a particular goal.

This is just one example of a sales funnel. There are many possibilities and every situation is different. Your sales funnel will not look like my sales funnel and neither of our sales funnels will look like someone else’s. You have to develop your own sales funnel, one that works for you and your customers. But it’s important to understand, before you start marketing, where you want your customers to end up and make your sales pitches based on those goals.

To learn more about the small business sales funnel, download my free e-book now.

Charles McKeever has a great post about the importance of optimizing your business blog. I fully agree with his two recommendations. He suggests the following two websites to help you better analyze your blog so that you can make the proper changes and more efficiently optimize your blog’s performance:

• WebsiteOptimization.com
• Google’s Website Optimizer

WebsiteOptimization.com is a great resource and all you have to do is type your blog’s URL into the box and the website will return an analysis of your elements. It looks at html, css, graphics, and both internal and external files to see where you can improve your blog’s load time and make it more crawlable. These are important issues. The slower your load time the less likely people will stick around to read and you also get dinged a little bit from the search engines and you’ll have a lower PageRank. So you want to increase your load time as much as possible. It’s a free tool and highly valuable.

Google’s Website Optimizer is probably the best tool on the planet. Through this tool you can test different versions of a web page before it goes live. It allows you to test two versions of the same web page to see which one will perform better for you and increases your ROI. But you can also perform multivariate testing, which allows you to test several elements side by side to see where on the page you’d like to place them. Highly beneficial.

If you are doing any kind of business online and you own a website, I highly recommend both of these tools. They will help you grow your business the smart way - by optimizing it for maximum performance.

It’s time to consider online reputation management into your monthly marketing budget. If you have never thought about reputation management for your business according to Wikipedia it’s “the process of tracking an entity’s actions and other entities’ opinions about those actions; reporting on those actions and opinions; and reacting to that report”.

With more and more user generated content online your company’s reputation is under constant threat of attack be it from bloggers, review sites or even your direct competitors. A well planned marketing strategy can be completely taken down by a few well placed bad remarks.

Let’s take one example I stumbled upon recently.

I was researching different car dealers in my area while looking for a nice new car. I did a quick search for a dealer, a friend of mine had recommended, in Google and the first two listings that popped up even before the dealer’s own website were both from a review site and the review sites listings were not flattering. Below is sampling of this dealers search results:

(slightly changed to protect the dealer)

1. “ToyotaDealer – Worst Experience Ever”
2. “ToyotaDealer – Highly do not recommend!.”
3. “ToyotaDealer ‘s own Website”

The sad part is that this dealer has more than likely lost a sale from me even with a personal recommendation just because he hasn’t taken the time to review his search listings and diligently do online reputation management.

Now I know what some of you are thinking isn’t this illegal or at the very least trademark infringement for these people to say these things about me using my company name? The Quick answer is No.

Review sites in the U.S are protected under the Communications Decency Act, which says in a nutshell says when a user writes and posts material on a website, the site itself will not be held legally responsible for the posted material. Along with this, 47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1) states, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

Bloggers are also protected under the Free Flow of Information Act of 2007 that basically says bloggers have the same rights and protections of a journalist.

So how do you go about protecting your company and your site? It’s both easy and hard.

First the easy part, finding out what is being said about your company:

The easiest and least expensive way is with Google Alerts. Google will notify you whenever it finds a mention of your company on the internet and where. Just visit http://www.google.com/alerts and in 4 easy steps you’ll have next to instant information on what’s being said about your company.

1. Enter your company’s name in the Search terms
2. Enter the type. I suggest Comprehensive so you get information from all sources
3. How Often: Go with as soon as it happens for instant notification
4. Enter Your Email

Or if you interested in a more comprehensive solution and don’t mind a small monthly fee you can try Andy Beal’s Trackur which monitors multiple sources and provides charts for tracking purposes.

Now the Hard Part:

You can’t make a website take down, in most instances, negative information about your company so you have to fight it another way and the only real way to win the search engine reputation management game is to out rank them for the terms in the search engines.

A couple of the many things you can do for this are:

Perform Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing on your main site to bring it to the top of the listings when searching for your company’s name.

Set up other listings through social sites such as Namyz or Kudzu that you control.

Create “sister sites” that use your name but that you control.

Notice on both those examples the keywords are “that you control” and that’s because that’s what it really comes down to. You need to be in control of your online reputation no one is going to do it for you and as much as you want all your customers to be happy customers there’s a good chance a few won’t be and it’s easy on the internet to let all your frustrations out without fear of retaliation and in complete anonymity.

Tags: Reputation Management, online reputation management, search engine reputation management, internet reputation management, brand reputation management

Networking has been a core tactic for building and marketing businesses long before the internet came of age and certainly even more so with the explosion of services such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Ning. Web technology and the mass appeal of making connections online makes social networking an attractive channel for businesses that want to extend their word of mouth reach, credibility and influence.

While there’s plenty of buzz about social networks (socnets), most companies aren’t quite “wired” for enganging social communities just yet. Amidst all the shiny new objects of Web 2.0 web applications, it’s important to understand which networks are influential and relevant. Hence, our Reader Poll:

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.

For these options, I am including Twitter and FriendFeed as social networks, even though most would characterize them as having social features, but not necessarily pure socnets in the sense that LinkedIn and Facebook are.

Many people use multiple social networks. For example, the three I use most often are: LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. YouTube and Flickr offer social networking features, but I suspect the majority of users are personal, not business.  For this poll, just pick one and share others in the comments including an anchor text link to your profile if you like.

Please also share other business social networks, especially any that are niche or vertically specific.

Sponsored By: Start a Career in Search Marketing Announcing the best online SEM courses from SEMPO Institute.

Andy Beal is one of the most well known and respected Internet marketers in the world today. The owner of Marketing Pilgrim, he is also a recognized expert on reputation management. He recently wrote that he purchased a dot ME domain name. Specifically, reputation.me.

This is important for a number of reasons, but primarily it says that domain name extensions don’t really matter for rankings. Now, Beal hasn’t proven that with a high Google ranking yet, and he may never, but the fact that he is willing to endorse the .ME domain says a lot. He says as much in his own words:

In the meantime, Reputation Dot Me serves two purposes:

1. Provide anyone with a constant stream of online reputation management data.
2. Shows how easy it is to put a $20 domain name to work–even a .ME one!

If it’s so easy to make a lower-level domain name extension work for you then why aren’t more people doing it? Everyone seems to be so interested in dot com and dot org. Not much else.

I think it stems from a misunderstanding. Most high ranking websites are either dot com or dot org. That leads some people to believe that you have to be a dot com or dot org to rank well, but that’s a myth. The reasons so many dot coms and dot orgs do well in the search engines are:

1. They’ve been around longer than most TLDs
2. Optimization practices were set on .coms and .orgs
3. Widespread community support for the major TLDs
4. A misunderstanding of SEO tactics related to TLDs

I think it is more important to have your primary keyword in your domain name, no matter what the TLD is, than it is to have a specific TLD extension. I also believe that it is just a matter of time before a minor TLD achieves high rankings in Google for important keywords often enough that the myth will be busted by best practices alone. You can high rankings for minor TLDs in Yahoo! and MSN a lot quicker than you can in Google, but I think Google is realizing that they can’t put a fence around minor TLDs forever. Eventually, they’ll have to let in some minor TLDs and established and influential folks like Andy Beal taking a chance on them will be the reason why.

Learn more about SEO best practices.