Ideas for Business

Read predictions about the future of Online Marketing over the past 3-4 years and you’ll undoubtedly find mobile mentioned in each one. With smart phones sales to pass personal computers and the smart phone race between AT&T and Verizon iPhones, Droid powered phones and everyone else has elevated the impact of mobile devices to unprecedented levels.  2011 may finally prove to be a breakout year for mobile marketing and mobile commerce.

With so many consumers spending time time on mobile phones, social networking, sending email and using social or geo apps, it’s a compelling task to stay on top of the marketing and advertising opportunities. In fact, mobile ecommerce is predicted to increase 65% annually through 2015.  Here are 5 mobile marketing resources that will help keep you up to speed:

Mobile Marketer – Let by Editor in Chief Mickey Alam Khan and a great team including Giselle Tsirulnik and Dan Butcher, this publication covers 360 degrees of mobile marketing and commerce.

Another useful mobile marketing news site is Mobile Marketing Watch, which offers a variety of news on the mobile space and is a great example of content marketing from it’s owner, mobileStorm.

Mobile Marketing Association – The MMA is a global organization headquartered in New York with over 700 members and a charter to promote, educate, measure, guide and protect the mobile marketing industry worldwide.

The MMA also hosts 5 global forum events each year called the MMAF (Mobile Marketing Association Forum) in Singapore, New York, Sao Paulo, London and Los Angeles.

Google Mobile Ads Blog –  With the acquisition of AdMob, Google’s mobile advertising resources have expanded significantly and this blog provides great insights into the world of mobile advertising.  Also check out the companion Google Mobile Blog.

Another hand mobile advertising blog worth checking out comes from the folks at Mobivity.

The Marqui blog recently curated a nice collection of PowerPoint decks on Mobile Marketing like the one above covering future trends and innovation in mobile marketing and advertising.

Also check out DMA Retail Roadmap to Mobile Marketing – a presentation by Joel Morrow of Mobile Fusion giving numerous case studies and best practices for retail mobile marketing.

There are many other resources including research reports, but few of value are available without requiring registration, so we can’t link to them directly.  What are your favorite newsletters, blogs, events/conferences and resources for mobile marketing and advertising? Would you like Online Marketing Blog to cover more mobile marketing topics, tips, interviews and best practices?

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | Essential Mobile Marketing Resources | http://www.toprankblog.com

Last Thursday, I wrote a blog post titled “Where Does Your Google Snippet Come From?”

To summarize, I mentioned three distinct places where Google takes your search page snippet from:

1. Meta Description
2. ODP listing
3. On-page content

Alex Hawkinson asked this question on Twitter:

Isn’t it all about micro-data vs. the things that you mention?

First, I’d like to say great question, Alex. Thanks for asking it.

Let’s start by defining “micro-data.” This is what Google calls microformats, or rich snippets. Alex himself wrote a short primer on this topic here.

In short, micro-data is on-page content that is structured for the purpose of alerting the search engines that particular text or other content on a page is more search-worthy than the rest of the content. It’s a way that you as a website owner can attempt to influence the search engine’s algorithm in obtaining information to be included in the search page snippet.

Taking that definition, I’ll now answer Alex’s question with these three observations:

1. Microformats, or micro-data, aka rich snippets, are a part of on-page content and as such fall into the third category from which Google takes information for your search page snippet. In other words, it isn’t “all about micro-data,” but it does include micro-data.
2. Currently, most small business websites are not using microformats, and of those that are, I’d say a small percentage are using them effectively. Therefore, they are not as influential as they might be with regard to local search algorithms.
3. And thirdly, there is no guarantee that using microformats will result in your preferred search page snippet being published. The search engines have the final say.

Consider this, taken directly from Google’s own website concerning rich snippets:

If I mark up my pages, does that guarantee I’ll get Rich Snippets?

No. We will be rolling this out gradually, and as always we will use our own algorithms and policies to determine relevant snippets for users’ queries. We will use structured data when we are able to determine that it helps users find answers sooner. And because you’re providing the data on your pages, you should anticipate that other websites and other tools (browsers, phones) might use this data as well.

Consider that Google rolled out its microformats support on May 12, 2009 (the date of the above published material). At that time, the only microformats Google supported were reviews and people. Now, the search engine has expanded its support to include products, businesses and organizations, recipes, events, and videos. Google also has a rich snippets testing tool so you can be sure that your microformats are working properly.

I highly encourage small businesses to use microformats. I believe they will only get better and the future certainly belongs to this form of on-page content. But the present still belongs to traditional modes of content. If you start using microformats today, you’ll be ahead of your competition. That doesn’t mean you should abandon current on-page techniques – they can be used together, the new and the old. And you just may influence your search page snippets for the better. But realize that rich snippets, or microformats, or whatever you choose to call them, are indeed a part of your on-page content.

I was reading an interesting piece from Lee Odden about social media marketing strategies. What he was talking about made perfect sense to me – but then, I am a professional in the business. It struck me early on in the article that most business people, especially those new to online marketing, would have been lost after the first two or three paragraphs.

There are a lot of online business owners, and I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that it’s the majority of online business owners, that know little about online marketing or SEO and even less about social media marketing. I could flippantly suggest they engage a professional like myself to help them through the maze, but that is not always a viable option.

What is a viable option is to use the one resource that many offline businesses rely on, and that’s networking with other online business owners. Networking can be done in a number of ways. You can get together with other business owners in your community, in an offline environment, and compare tactics and different approaches. You can then invite guest speakers to come in and discuss tactics with the group – I have been a guest speaker at several of these over the years to great effect.

You can also meet online with like-minded people in a variety of online forums and social media environments. Facebook and LinkeIn are two popular social sites that provide great networking opportunities.

If the online world is proving to be a frustrating and confusing experience for you, find a way to network with others of varying Internet skill levels. You will find you can learn quite a lot from your peers, and that over time, your confusion will start to clear, and the online world will actually make a lot of sense.

The just-launched Recipe Finder blog was a quick exercise of designing within the confines of the web browser. Usually the first step is to construct wireframes and head to Photoshop (or Fireworks, or even Illustrator) but in this case, it was more efficient to do straight-up coding.

First, the blog used graphic elements from the already-running Recipe Finder main site. Second, although the layout was different, there was no need to type up markup from scratch thanks to our WordPress theme framework of choice, Genesis. Lastly, any code that needed to be typed was simply copied and modified from previous sites we’ve worked on. Finding things to reuse is key.

Come check out the new Recipe Finder blog!

Public relations is an area that most small businesses don’t address nearly enough. When it comes to an online presence, the emphasis in recent years has been on reputation management and social media marketing. Yet little things like your About Page and Your Contact Page can mean the difference between developing trust, and having visitors depart for other websites.

In most cases, About pages seem to be non-existent. Yet they provide a perfect opportunity for business owners to tell the world about their business. You can talk about your businesses history, what your vision is for the future, why you promote a certain brand of products, and who you are. In any language, that’s PR.

Chris Brogan wrote an interesting post on his site that addresses this very subject. While tongue in cheek, he made one important observation – his About Page was the most trafficked page on his web site. It didn’t matter which page they landed on when they arrived on his site, a lot of visitors clicked through to his About page.

Make your about page interesting and informative, and give it a bit of your personality – don’t make it dry and formal. Visitors want to know about your business, but they also want to know about the people behind it. If you have several staff members, write a bio on separate pages that are linked from your About Page, you’ll be surprised how often they are clicked on as well. About pages can work well to link to more important internal pages so put any relevant anchor text to good use.

Contact pages are another area that is often underused. If you sell products, set up a range of email addresses, three or four at most, that are labeled to address various areas of your business. Sales@, CustomerService@, Returns@, Inquiries@ – are just examples, but they can help your website look professional. They can also act as a filing system when it comes to receiving emails from customers or potential customers. A snail mail address, fax number, and telephone may also be appropriate for some businesses.

Optimize these sub-pages for your users’ benefit and your website looks more professional, and helps to attract more customers. PR doesn’t have to be off-site. It all starts on your own website.