Ideas for Business

There’s still time to enter the GONZO Business Carnival. The carnival is scheduled for January 13, 2009. The deadline is January 9, 2009. But you’d better enter now. The sooner you get in the better spot you’ll get and as you know, in business, location is EVERYTHING!

The GONZO Business Carnival is open to all blogs, business or not. But your blog post must be about business. The following samples are examples of the types of blog posts you might submit:

• What the business of business means to you
• Your experience as an employee, a manager and/or a business owner
• Tips for success
• An area about which you have questions or can use help
• A company or business person you admire
• Tales of the glass ceiling
• Your experience as a customer, either in general or with a particular company
• Anything related to Internet marketing

You don’t have to write a post specifically for the carnival. Your post could have been written at any time. It just needs to be about BUSINESS.

Please submit your blog post in the following format, with this information:

—(-)-> Your name as you would want it to appear in the post
—(-)-> The name of your blog
—(-)-> Your blog URL
—(-)-> The title of your post
—(-)-> The post URL

Send submissions to gonzobizcarnival @ gmail.com. Delete the spaces before and after the @ sign.

In conjunction with the GONZO Business Carnival, the following two carnivals are also taking place on January 13:

• The Gonzo Social Media Carnival
• The Gonzo Gratitude Carnival

The GONZO Business Carnival is sponsored by For Your Success as a part of the Gonzo Blog Carnival Series.

Be sure to enter before the deadline: 11:59 p.m. on January 9, 2009.

As part of  maintaining the BIGLIST of search engine marketing blogs, we’ve posted a list of the top SEO blogs that publish their RSS feed subscriber counts and on this last day of 2008, I thought I’d put up just one more.

A few more SEO blogs have been added to this list from the last two times and a few blogs have switched places as the old guard makes way for the up and coming.  Fire up your feed reader and start subscribing:

Matt Cutts

SEOmoz

Search Engine Land

Search Engine Watch

Search Engine Journal

Search Engine Roundtable

Online Marketing Blog

Search Engine Guide

Marketing Pilgrim

Pronet Advertising

Graywolf’s SEO Blog

Get Elastic

HubSpot

Yoast

BlogStorm

Small Business SEM

Web Analytics World

Sugarrae

SEO Pedia

SEO Scoop

SEO 2.0

StepForth SEO News Blog

Cre8pc Blog

aimClear Blog
 

It would be great of SEOBook, WeBuildPages and similar popular SEO focused blogs could be on this list, but they don’t publish their subscriber counts through Feedburner’s FeedCount. There are a few others we’re waiting for as well.

If you’re aware of other SEO related blogs that publish their feeds through Feedburner and have the FeedCount feature turned on, please drop the URL in the comments.

            Subscribe to this Feed

Here are five Adwords tips to help you get more bang for your buck with Google Adwords.

1. Put your phone number in the Google ad, because some people are likely to call instead of clicking through.
2. If you are on a small budget, have your ads scheduled to start running later in the day to give some time for some advertisers to blow through their daily budget.
3. Geo target your ads to prevent paying for clicks outside your servicing ability.
4. Make sure to use negative keywords when setting up your keywords, and review them often.
5. Try and target your products or services which have the best profit margin.

When it comes to your image, or the image of your brand, reputation management is a word you need to know.  The internet is a very powerful and quick force and a negative comment on a blog, Twitter, or forum can literally spread across the internet in minutes and can result in a loss of business and profit. That’s where reputation management comes in.  Monitoring what is said about you on the internet and responding when appropriate can reduce the spread of negative comments, but the real damage is done when the negative comments gravitate to the top of Google or Yahoo.  Here are a few tips to manage your reputation before it becomes a problem.

1. Check your website on www.statbrain.com, checking your stats on Statbrain creates a link within their site.  This link tends to rank well on the search engines and can prevent negative comments from showing up on top of the search engine.

    2.  Check your stats on www.alexa.com, it has the same effect.

    3.  Check your site on www.compete.com,  (same effect also)

    4.  Check your site on www.websiteoutlook.com (same effect also)

    5.  Create a Twitter profile using your business name.

    6.  Create a naymz.com profile using your business name.

    7.  Create an aboutus.org profile using your business name.

    8.  Create a facebook.com profile using your business name.

    9.  Create a linkedin.com profile using your business name.

   10.  If these don’t keep the negative comments off the first page of the search engines, give us a call because you need a professional.

With the new year upon us in less than 24 hours, I`d like to challenge you to take your business to the next level in 2009 with social media.

Even if you have never touched a social media site or if you`ve signed up and never done anything about it, it`s time to actually get in there and start connecting with others. You`ll be amazed at how rapidly it begins to affect your business in a positive manner.

Since everyone works better with specifics, here`s the challenge: pick a goal that you can do on a regular basis. Some ideas include:

• Adding 2 friends to a network each week
• Stumbling or bookmarking 5 sites a week
• Asking someone to bookmark mutually once a month

Leave a comment here telling the world what your goal is (or you could blog about it and link back to this post). This is a great way to hold yourself accountable . . . others will know what you`re supposed to be doing. And then, let us know how you`re doing as you progress through the year with your new social media strategy!

Happy New Year and I`m looking forward to seeing your goals!