Ideas for Business

After all has been said and done about link building campaigns and the importance of driving inbound links to your company’s website, many small business owners and marketers are still confused by link building. But is it really as hard as they’re making it out to be?

To be sure, there are a lot of things to think about when building links.

• Should I request reciprocal links?
• What makes a link relevant?
• Quantity vs. quality
• What exactly is a quality link anyway?
• Do directory submissions really help?
• Is article marketing still effective?
• Does blogging build good links?
• Link age
• Domain age
• Anchor text
• Title attribute
• Surrounding text
• Are image links effective?
• Forum links vs. blog comments
• Social media profile links
• Is social bookmarking really link building?
• Do press releases build quality links?

I could go on and on. There are hundreds more questions and concerns that could be brought up in the discussion of link building and many of them don’t have any real definitive answers. So I can understand how confusing it can be for someone just getting started.

It is sometimes better to think about link building in terms of the negatives – that is, what you should not do versus what you should.

• You don’t want to place your links on pages with thousands of other links.
• You don’t want links on websites associated with warez, malware or other evil creatures of the Web.
• Stay away from iframe links and nefarious redirects.
• Don’t pay people to link to you.
• Don’t do too much link building too fast (although, as a caveat, it’s fairly difficult for a small business to break this rule as “too much too fast” often means thousands of links in a short time frame such as days or weeks).
• Don’t engage in questionable link building tactics.

If you have any questions or concerns about proper link building techniques, read the search engine guidelines – particularly Google and Bing. If they say it’s OK then it’s OK; if they say it’s not then it isn’t.

Link building isn’t hard, but it isn’t exactly easy either. It is important. If you feel like a fish out of water when you try it then you might want to find someone you trust to help you with building solid links with benefits that last a long time.

Cynthia Boris makes a good point. If you can’t measure the effectiveness of your social media then why are you using it?

This is the dilemma of the modern marketer. Social media has proven to be an effective marketing channel for a lot of marketers. But so has television. That doesn’t mean the medium is a proven marketing channel for everyone who uses it. Any marketing channel requires a knowledge of its use that consists of strategies and tactics that have worked for others and that might work for your situation. Without a solid grounding in marketing principles and your market niche, your chances of succeeding in any marketing channel are pretty slim.

Even then, having the ability to measure your results is necessary if you want to gauge your effectiveness. And that’s what social media has lacked for the most part.

Yesterday, we talked about a new addition to ShareThis – social media analytics. And Twitter has had third-party analytics tools available for it for quite some time. Many marketers report they use traditional tools like Google Analytics and Omniture. These are fine. The bottom line is to use something that will give you a visual on how your marketing efforts are panning out.

Remember this maxim: What you don’t measure you can’t change. So measure your results and the next time someone asks you why you are using social media, you’ll have an answer.

Since social media has become popular there has been a huge problem for marketers – measuring results. How do you measure your results and analyze the effectiveness of your social media campaigns? It’s been a big challenge.

Finally, ShareThis adds analytics for social media marketing.

The analytics are centered around two very important marketing concepts:

• Audience Index
• Reach

The Audience Index is the measure of your audience’s influence compared to that of other websites generally and those within your niche. This metric also allows you to see how influential your audience is or, rather, how you engage with key influencers on your site. It is important to know how well you connect with key influencers because those are the people who will pass on the benefits of your product or service to their audiences and influencers generally have large audiences. That’s why they are called “influencers”. It’s an important part of your audience segment.

Social reach is a metric that deals with how widely your content is distributed and shared. It measures how far your content travels and the resulting return in traffic based on those shares.

Both of these metrics have the potential to help you gauge how effective you are in reaching your target audience and whether or not you are reaching the right influencers based on your niche. As far as social media analytics go, this is a step in the right direction.

All over the blogosphere for the last couple of days I’ve seen the same thing over and over again. Bloggers are upset about a Philadelphia decree to start charging bloggers $300 for the privilege of running their online business. Does this mean that there will be fewer blog start ups in Philadelphia?

Of course, cities have been requiring business licenses for a long time. It’s only now that business licenses for online businesses have become news. And for the record, Philadelphia isn’t the only city requiring licenses for online businesses. Boston, L.A. and the District of Columbia do as well.

But it’s unclear whether the Philadelphia business license would apply to small businesses who use a blog to promote their off line business. What is clear is that if your blog runs ads then it qualifies as a business. And that $300, for clarification, is a one-time fee – not an annual tax. Does that make a difference?

I don’t think the license fee will slow down the number of blog start ups. It’s a relatively small fee and even a modestly profitable blog can earn that back within a year. Since the licensing requirement is a lifetime fee, that makes it pretty darn affordable. There is just one thing that you should consider when you start to do business online – just as you would when starting your off line business. Make sure you meet all your legal requirements. Otherwise, you could land in hot water.

Online marketing is becoming increasingly more important as companies struggle with competition and the costs of doing business. In many cases, marketing your business online is cheaper and easier than doing it off line. But it’s not a make it or break it deal. In other words, if you fail online it doesn’t mean your business will fail.

Glen at Viperchill wrote a great blog post on how to make a living at self-employed Internet marketing. But as a small business owner, can you apply his principles to your business?

You aren’t trying to earn a full-time living from Internet marketing. You’re just trying to market your off line business online and make it profitable. Is that possible? It sure is. Here are a few tips from Glen’s post that you should consider for your own business.

• Write a mission statement. No one else needs to know what it is. However, if you have a business that caters to customers then it might be helpful to state your mission on your website and other marketing collateral. Still, whether you share it or not, a mission statement can keep you focused.
• Identify what you’re good at and drive it home. That is, focus on your strengths and exploit them till you succeed.
• Instead of wasting time on nonessential tasks, identify what the most important tasks are and do those every day.
• If you don’t start you’ll never finish.
• If you are self employed it might be difficult to establish working hours, but you should do it any way. Even if you don’t have specific client work starting out, establish your working hours and make sure you work on something during those hours.
• Don’t go on spending sprees and waste all your profits.
• Don’t let yourself down. Your needs are important too. Don’t let others take you away from what you know is important.
• Don’t put on airs or pretend to be bigger than you are. People do business with people, not nameless, faceless enterprises.
• Remember that anything you do online is marketing. It will have a public consequence.
• If you have a problem with something then, chances are, someone else does too. Fix the problem and capitalize on it.
• This is easy to do online. Become a member of your own market. If you are selling something then network with others who sell something similar or who do business in your niche. In the Internet age, markets are conversations.
• Set launch dates for yourself and stick to them. Meet your own deadlines.
• Set your own rules. You are the boss. If something doesn’t work for you then don’t do it. On the other hand, if something does work for you and no one else is doing it then do it any way. Self employment means you are doing things your way. Even online, you are the boss of your own business.

In this day and age, marketing a small business means marketing both online and off line. Learn to integrate them successfully and you’ll do well no matter what you are doing.