Ideas for Business

Having an online presence is very different to an offline one. Offline, you can publish a catalog and no one really cares if some descriptions are very similar if not identical (apart from name or color references). Online, the opposite is true. If you have products that have identical or near identical descriptions, then you could find that some of that content never appears in search results. The reason? Google won’t even index it let alone have it appear in search results.

Duplicate content on the web has been a big problem over the years. Search engines, in particular Google, do everything possible to filter out the duplicates. If you have product descriptions that are the same, then the search engines will consider some of them to be duplicates and filter them out. It’s not just on your main website either. If you are a little lazy and copy those descriptions to your blog, or if you have affiliates that publish your content, you could have similar problems.

Google has become fairly adept at determining which content should be classified as the original, however, it does get it wrong on occasions, so your blog, or worse yet, an affiliate’s content, could be indexed as the original. If you have a number of similar products, you have a couple of choices. You can write original content for each product or group them together under the one description. The latter generally makes the better option.

If you have a blog, be sure the content is original and that you’re not just duplicating what’s on your main website. If you have affiliates that sell on your behalf, be sure their terms include a denial of the right to copy content from your web pages. They too should be creating unique content to promote your products or services.

Finally, when creating articles for guest posts or article marketing, ensure that each article is only published in the one place. So-called ‘spinners’ rarely do a good job of rewriting content, and content produced is generally poor quality and hard to read. Avoid duplicating your content and you’ll have more pages indexed for search, and that means more opportunities to be found.

If you have been an active publisher on the Internet, then you will most likely have content in a wide range of websites. You have probably also put together profiles on a range of social media websites. Wouldn’t it be nice to have all of your content linked to your name and searchable? It’s almost impossible to connect everything online at present, however, there is a lot that you could be doing that will make either (or both) your name and your brand more searchable, especially in Google.

There is a guest post on Marketing Pilgrim by Ann Smarty that goes into some depth on this issue, and she has some good advice on what you should be doing, and how to do it. I won’t go into the hows; you can read her article for that. What is important is that, in most cases, her tips are once off actions, and they don’t take too long to accomplish. The end result could be far more exposure in the search results than you currently see. Ann suggests three must do actions:

1. Verify the authorship of your articles
2. Create a master feed of your contributions
3. Claim your brand (or name) in the major social networks

You should already be working to claim your brand and your name in the major social networks. The more popular you become, the more likely it is that someone else will claim it to capitalize on your hard work. That can be a real danger to your long term reputation management, especially if they use their account (with your brand or name) for negative, illegal or brand damaging activities. It can be hard to prove that the account being used is not attached to your business.

It doesn’t take long to complete the three tasks that Ann has suggested. The end result is better brand and name protection whilst helping to boost your presence on the Internet.

Are online coupons good for small businesses? Like every marketing strategy, coupons have good points and bad points. It all comes back to management and control – lose control and you can cause serious damage to your business. That was the case with one (of many according to social gossip) business who decided to run a campaign through Groupon. While much has been said about Groupon’s role in the demise of this business, the business owner has to take some responsibility. In this case, they failed to put a cap on the number of coupons sold, and when Groupon sold 450, the cost was enough to break the business.

Group deals do need careful attention. The particular deal in question was a $15 coupon for $30 of product. Groupon charged $7.50 leaving the retailer with $7.50 for $30 worth of goods – a loss of $22.50 for every transaction. With 450 deals sold, that was a loss of over $10,000 to the business. Coupons can be an ideal marketing tool, however, if you’re a small business, you need to limit your costs. In this case, it may have been wise to cap the coupons at 50 or 100 – better yet, to rethink the whole process. The Groupon deal was clearly not going to favor a small business such as this.

Twitter has been an ideal channel for the promotion of coupon type deals. Through Twitter (and Facebook) you can announce short deals; for example, you can offer a decent discount for all lunchtime (11:30 am – 1:30 pm) transactions. You can also announce similar deals – one day, five days, the first 100 customers are good examples. The important consideration here is that you, the small business owner, have a lot of control of the costs – the downside, you are generally promoting to existing customers.

You can use independent coupon sites, however, you do need to be in a position to control the number of coupons that are in the marketplace, and you do need to set firm expiration dates. Don’t fool customers by hiding dates in small print in obscure places – be up front. If the coupon expires, they’ll need to wait for the next coupon issue.

Online coupons are great promotion tools for new products, new shopfronts or websites, or for increasing traffic flow during quiet times. As a business owner, you need to maintain as much control as possible over the issuing of coupons; otherwise, you’ll have cost blow-outs that could cripple your business. On a side note, this business was lucky, the local community worked together to revitalize the business, but that’s a story for another day.

One of the platforms behind search engine optimization is content. “Publish useful keyword content regularly” has been the mantra for over a decade now, however, one wonders if that is all about to change and that content on websites could become defunct. I know that will raise eyebrows, but then, we do know that Google, the number one source of traffic for many websites, is trying to escape the inbound link component of their algorithm.

There’s an interesting article on TechCrunch which, while discussing privacy issues related to Google+ and Facebook, also had this to say:

Google’s PageRank algorithm is seriously out of date. It promotes pages based on the number of links to it. Today, pages are no longer the unit of publishing. Far smaller items than a page dominate our senses. And those smaller messages are produced in huge quantity and in real time.

Those smaller messages are references to Facebook, Twitter and many other social media sites, forums included. This raises the question of content on websites – will it become defunct and replaced by short messages? I for one hope it never comes to that. The content on Facebook and Twitter can never really adequately answer a question. Forums are a different story, questions are answered, often in depth, and with a lot of input from a range of users. You are more likely to find an answer in a forum than you will on Facebook or Twitter. Interestingly, most small messages on those two sites generally include links to more indepth answers often on blogs.

Logic would then suggest that the indepth answer is more relevant and more important than the smaller message on a social media website. Keith Teare, the article’s author, is right when it comes to the privacy issues facing social media. However, when it comes to content, I don’t think we’ll be losing that anytime soon. Yes, Google will find a way to reduce the effects of links in its search ranking algorithm, but that will be because they have found a better way to measure worth, and yes, social media mentions will most likely lead that change.

I wouldn’t be tearing down content or reducing the amount published in too much of hurry. Rather, I’d be concentrating on content that individuals find important enough to share with others. Blogging for small business is still one of the best ways to communicate with the rest of the world, and that won’t be changing anytime soon.

Social media can be a great marketing tool when things go right. It can also be a nightmare when things go wrong. A recent article looks at McDonalds; yes, we’re talking about the famous golden arches, which experienced the highs and lows of social media marketing, all in the one campaign. One of the most difficult areas to manage when it comes to social media is that of control. In most cases, businesses have little control once a campaign starts to move, and once your marketing campaign goes viral, then you have lost all control.

Of course, if you’re fortunate enough to have a positive viral outcome, control is not really an issue. You can sit back and harvest the results of that viral marketing campaign. It’s when that viral campaign is negative that problems really set in. Trying to wrest control back is almost impossible, leaving business owners with a reputation management problem that requires a lot of effort to repair.

For Mcdonalds, they spent money buying Twitter hashtags. There’s no problem there, and their first campaign, using #MeetTheFarmers as the hashtag worked reasonably well.  A cynical reader may well surmise that its success related more to the fact that readers didn’t relate that hashtag to McDonalds. MeetTheFarmers is the kind of hashtag that doesn’t really invoke many emotions. Where McDonalds went wrong is when they changed their hashtag to #McDStories.

Everyone has a story about McDonalds, and we’re talking about bad stories, not good. That hashtag immediately hooked into people’s emotions and it opened the floodgates. Every bad story about McDonalds steadily flowed through Twitter. About the only upside to this result was the humor that many found in these tweeted stories. The other upside is that others, like us here today, are talking about how McDonalds lost control of a social media marketing campaign. That, of course, is from an optimist who tries to find a positive in everything.

The lesson for small business owners is simple. Watch what you write, and watch how you use hashtags. McDonalds does have a poor reputation amongst some sections of the community, so a hashtag like #McDStories was bound to have a negative effect. If you do lose control, you will need to work hard to either reduce the damage or to turn it around to make it a positive.