SmallBizBuzz Marketing

If you own a small business or organization, SmallBizBuzz Marketing has the full line up of tools you need to succeed.

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Starting A Business on a Budget | SEO & Website Development

The main expense will be in the development of your website and SEO, which can be done, with the right partner, on a small business budget.

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Don't Stop Pushing Your Limits | SmallBizBuzz Marketing

Don't Stop Pushing Your Limits

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We know Monday's are tough but you can do it! #smallbusinesssuccess #entrepreneurs

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Is owning your own small business all it’s cracked up to be?

Did you really think that when you started your own business you would have the ability to take vacations whenever you wanted to?

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Tips to Reduce Your Stress & Increase Your Success

Reduce your stress and make the most of your day by asking yourself some important questions.

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You'll need a marketing plan | SmallBizBuzz Marketing

Jumping into marketing your business without a marketing plan is like driving blindfolded.

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What can market research tell you | SmallBizBuzz Marketing

Are you ready to make a marketing buzz?

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Do likes matter | social media | SmallBizBuzz Marketing

Our Buzz Tip for the day encourages you to look before you leap into building your likes and followers within social media.

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With a quickly evolving online marketing landscape, you need to have a marketing plan that addresses and responds to these changes in ways that allow you to hit your goals.

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Are you allowing an 18-25 year old to head up your social media program? Here are a couple of reasons why you should reconsider.

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Here are some market research flubs that can cost you credibility and business.

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While many small businesses set their primary goal as getting followers on their Facebook fan page, the true success comes from “engagement”. Sure, the more people you have to broadcast your posts to, the better. But like any good marketing campaign, truly connecting with your market is more important than simply broadcasting to them. And on Facebook, getting your followers to like, share, and comment on your wall posts is where it’s at.

Facebook uses its “Edgerank” algorithm to measure fan engagement. This determines how your updates appear in the News Feeds of your fans. If you post and no one engages, your Edgerank score drops and then you don’t appear in your fans News Feeds. And if you aren’t appearing there, it’s less likely they’re going to pop over to your page to see if you have anything going on. If, however, your fans share, like, and comment on your posts, your ranks goes up and your gain more visibility. So even if you have thousands of followers, if no one is engaging your posts, your future posts could be seen by very few people.

How do you create posts that are engaging? Here are three key questions you need to answer.

1. Who is following you?

How well do you know your Facebook fan base? Facebook provides you the data. First, you can follow New Likes in your admin panel to the upper left of the masthead banner. To the right of that is the Insights section. If you click on the “See All”, you can access some drill-down data that shows you various data, including “Likes”. This shows you the demographics of the people who like your page, from their age to where they’re located, and the languages they speak. It helps to know who you’re reaching out to when you post your content.

2. What is of value / interest to them?

Now that you know who’s following you, you can target your posts to what is of interest to them. While you may be tempted to sell, sell, sell, social media isn’t the place. Instead, you should be thinking what they find valuable. For example, if you operate a furniture store, you don’t want to simply post your latest deal of the day. Instead, you can focus on things like decorating tips or inventive ways to care for furniture. You can add in mentions of your deals, but your posts need to be more about conversation. Find a healthy balance of education and entertainment. You may need to do some trial and error to find out what works with your followers.

3. What are you giving them that is different from the competition?

We believe that it helps to keep an eye on what your competition is doing, but it isn’t healthy to mimic them. Even though you’re in the same market, what works for one following doesn’t always translate to another. You need to find the fresh, original content that is in line with your brand. You can’t do the same thing as your competitors and hope to gain an advantage as a follower.

If you are struggling to find ways to engage your following on Facebook, we’re here to help. Contact us online and we’ll respond to your SOS call.

All the Best,

Doug Dolan & Maria Fuster SmallBizMedia.tv Strategize. Optimize. Socialize.

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There’s the old business expression that people must get to “know, like, and trust” you before they buy from you. The length of time it takes to funnel prospects through these three levels leading to a transaction depends on how desperate the buyers are and how robust your business’s brand is. And today, branding online is huge for generating visibility and credibility, as well as profitability. Here are six top criteria you want to review concerning your online brand.

1. Clean up your website look and navigation.

First impressions are everything. And with most people performing searches online to find the products and services they need and the brands that stand behind them, it’s imperative that you create a website that conveys credibility. Most visitors will take all of three to five seconds to form an opinion of your site. If it doesn’t load quickly, or offer a clean and easy to follow navigation, you’re likely to lose them. Other common mistakes many sites make that loss them credibility points are using images and animation excessively and adding copy with a mix of fonts and colors. If your site is lacking quality, prospects instinctively believe the same holds true for the quality of your products and services.

2. Make it easy for people to find your contact information.

There are two basic places people will assume that they will be able to find your contact info: in the header or footer sections of each page and on a Contact Us page. The same holds true for your social media profiles. Simply adding in a form where it appears you force one-way communication will diminish your online credibility. If you want to improve your inbound marketing where people reach out to you, make it easy for them by providing multiple methods, from phone numbers, to email addresses, fax numbers, and a physical address, along with the appropriate contact names. The more info you supply, you create a sense of your accessibility. If you limit your contact information, you send out the signal that you’re more interested in taking people’s money than you are in talking to them.

3. Tighten up your copy.

If you’ve ever created a resume, you know that grammatical and spelling errors are signals to potential employers that you may not be the best candidate for the job. The quality of the copy on your website and in your social media profiles are your online resume.

Take an honest assessment of the copy on your site. Does it convey who you are, who your ideal customers are, the products and services you provide to them, and the benefits they will experience when they invest in your business? Is your copy written for people, or search engines? Is it free of spelling and grammatical errors?

Realize that online copy for your website and social media profiles is different from other forms of writing. If you aren’t a copywriter, get some outside help … or at minimum get some critiques from other people who aren’t afraid to tell you like it is.

4. Avoid any bait and switch.

With the advancements in online technologies for branding businesses and connecting with customers, there’s a multitude of means for you to connect with your ideal customers and tempt them with offers. If you promise a 15% discount, deliver on it. If you dangle a free white paper as a carrot in trade for someone’s contact information, make sure you live up to your end of the arrangement. Sounds simple enough if you’re honest, right? Not always. You need to test your delivery system online and make sure that the experience and benefit you think you’re delivering actual happen the way you intend it to. Otherwise, you may have a number of people trying to take advantage of your offer only to be left with a bad taste in their mouths because your online system didn’t deliver.

5. Build your social presence.

No, you don’t need to go out and sign up for every social media site, just those where your customers spend time and expect to find you … or your competition. The big networks today are Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. There are other industry specific blogs and forums where your audience connects. Make sure you’re there, too. Your online credibility depends upon it.

6. Include credibility stamps.

Do you belong to any organizations? Do any third parties endorse you? Are customers promoting you? If so, you need to add some recognition of it on your site and social media profiles. It’s best to use some visual stamp, like what TRUSTe or the BBB provide instead of just a link. The same visual rule holds true for customer testimonials. If you can include a company logo or the picture, name, and title of the person who gave you the testimonial, it increases your credibility significantly over a testimonial that only includes a name … or a partial name.

There are a number of SEO and Internet marketing tactics you can use to create robust inbound marketing campaigns. Before you invest the time and money into these campaigns, take a thorough review of your website and your social media profiles where you want your ideal customers to come to.

Are you maximizing your online credibility? If not, send out your SOS call by contacting us here at SmallBizMedia.tv. We’re here to help.

Thanks,

SmallBizMedia.Tv

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If scrapbooking isn’t one of your hobbies, you may be wondering why you should spend any time on Pinterest. While social media networks may start out with one specific intent, if they become popular, businesses are sure to find a way to repurpose them for increasing their brand awareness, connecting with their customers, and converting sales.

Let’s roll back the calendar a mere 12 months ago. Chances are that you probably weren’t aware of Pinterest. Your time was likely spent on other social media networks, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube. Since that time, Pinterest has firmly pinned its name on the leader board as a top social network. According to comScore, this fast-growing site had 18.7 million unique visitors in March.

We don’t believe in playing follow the fad … just because everyone else is using a new form of marketing that you should, too. However, we don’t believe in avoiding something either, just because it seems to be the latest craze. Here are four questions to ask yourself to determine if pinning on Pinterest is right for your small business.

1. What are my goals with social media?

How many times do you decide you’re going to spend say $2,000 on a week’s vacation, and start by jumping in the car and driving without any idea of where you’re going, how you’re going to get there, and where you may want/need to stop along the way? Chances are that you’ll run out of money or time before you feel like you’ve had any fun.

Social media without goals accomplish pretty much the same thing, except translate fun as success. Many small businesses wonder if social media is right for them. Those that struggle with it often start by simply getting started and figuring it out as they go along. Good luck.

2. Are my ideal customers spending time there?

If you’re a B2C business, you may balk at the thought of spending time and money on building a robust LinkedIn strategy. In many cases, you may be right. LinkedIn is an intensive B2B network. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, or other online networks and forums may be more advantageous for you. It’s hard to say without taking the time to perform some market research and analysis to see where your ideal customers are spending time, how active they are, and how they may be engaging your competition there.

3. Are my customers into scrapbooking?

At first glance, Pinterest may seem like a simple photo sharing site. You need to look beyond the “what” people are doing to the “why” and the “how” they are doing it. In today’s fast-paced Web 2.0 world, where we can share information at the speed of a mouse click and no entrepreneur wants to be late to join in the conversation, we’ve become more ADD in our communications. This leads us to an increase in the use of truncated text of minimal character counts and visual communication. We embrace the saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”

This is a big reason why Pinterest has become so popular. Sometimes it’s just easier to share a picture to make a point than to invest the time to write or read a lengthy message. And this holds true for many industries.

4. Should I spend time on a site that has “nofollow” links?

Pinterest did announce that their links are “nofollow”, meaning you won’t see the SEO benefits of borrowing authority from a high PR site. Don’t allow this to be the only criteria for deciding whether participation is worth the investment. Some SEO consultants will tell you that “nofollow” links are a waste of time. Not true, in all cases. There are other factors to consider.

A strong SEO strategy looks to satisfy people and not just the search engine algorithms. Ultimately, it’s about increasing customer conversion. If a social media site has “nofollow” links, but accomplishes the following, is it time well spent:

• Increases brand awareness? Yes. • Attracts your ideal customers? Of course. • Increases the amount of targeted traffic to your branding site, landing page, or a social media profile where you can build better relationships and convert more sales? Absolutely.

If you need help building and managing your Pinterest strategy and profile, contact us.

All the Best,

Smallbizmedia.tv

[email protected]

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Why do you create online content? What are your goals with it?

Your answers may range from …

“Create awareness for my business”

“Generate leads”

“Grow my business”

“Sell more”

All of these answers are possibilities. You may create online content for a variety of reasons, whether it’s to build a bigger following on your social media profiles, or to get people to opt-in on a landing page as a lead generation source, or increase sales through a sales page. While each of these reasons may seem to be different, they all have one common goal … to get someone to do something. It’s as basic as that.

The online content you create is bait. You’re fishing waters with a number of other companies who are hoping to stand out in a sea of mass media to get some bites. So they chum the digital waters with blog posts, videos, infographics, and more. You throw your content out there with the rest of them. Are you getting any hits? Little nibbles? Or are you reeling them in on a regular basis?

While it’s tempting to target getting traffic spikes to your site or producing content that inspires social shares, you may fall into the trap of creating content that isn’t properly optimized, and as such, it has a low conversion rate. Here are the top conversion optimization attributes you need to consider when you are creating your online content:

Provides a Paradigm Shift Does your it include a paradigm shift to the conventional wisdom or does it come off as another “me too” piece? Simply being controversial may grab people’s attention, but are they the right people? Does it inspire them to take action with your business? Push the limits within the boundary of what your brand stands for instead of doing gimmicky stunts.

Shows Vision Does your content open your audience’s eyes to new possibilities or does it fall within the spectrum of recycled ideas? To be a seen as a visionary, create content that brings clarity to a confusing or frustrating situation.

Stands Out from the Masses Are you presenting an original idea to your audience or delivering it in an unique way as compared to content that is the same old stuff? To stand out from the masses, you can either talk about something completely original … or you can take a current topic and address it in a new way. Most content fails because it serves up the same dish that people are already eating instead of venturing out.

It’s Leading Edge Are you delivering the latest breaking news and information or are you only joining the conversation that everyone else is having? When you want the latest information about a particular topic, what sources do you go to? If you were to ask the same question to your audience about your area of expertise, would they list your business?

Exhibits Expertise When consumers digest your content, do they feel like they’ve receive the inside scoop from a trusted source or are they underwhelmed by its lack of depth? Many small businesses fall into the trap of creating content that focuses on mass appeal over building trust and credibility. When your content can display in-depth insight not presented by other sources, you will be seen as a thought leader. And people follow a leader.

Manages Attention Does your content follow a narrative that captures your audience’s attention and holds it through to an appropriate call to action or does it meander and leaves them hanging? Your content needs to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and at the end, you need to include a call to action that is relevant. It doesn’t need take long to guide them on this journey, it just needs to keep them interested and provide something of value at the end.

Many small businesses lack the experience or don’t dedicate the appropriate budget (of time or money) to content creation and optimization resulting in pieces that are slapped together in a hurry to meet a deadline for posting instead of focusing on the attributes listed above. If you’re experiencing this dilemma and need help with your content creation and optimization, contact us to answer your SOS call.

All the Best,

Doug & Maria with Smallbizmedia.tv

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If you’ve been managing your social media accounts sharing content, but seeing little love in the way of comments, links, and shares, you’re probably scratching your head wondering, “What does it take to see a little social media sharing success?”

You’ve tried adding your blog posts, referring to content from other reputable sources, and maybe a little humor, but your interaction seems to be hit or miss. Some content catches fire while other posts leave you feeling like you’re having a conversation with yourself. So what’s the difference? Jonah Berger and Katherine L. Milkman, two professors with the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School, released their findings from a study they conducted to identify the answer.

Awe, Anger, and Anxiety

Sometimes, it’s easy to get caught up in the professionalism of posting social media content that you forget to include personality. Professionalism tends to lean more logical, while personality brings in emotion. So which kind of content gets more attention and shares?

“Positive content is more viral than negative content, but the relationship between emotion and social transmission is more complex than valence alone,” they wrote. “Virality is partially driven by physiological arousal. Content that evokes high-arousal positive (awe) or negative (anger or anxiety) emotions is more viral.”

As you can see from the graph included with this post, content that evokes anger, awe, and anxiety have higher shares than other emotions. The professors came to their conclusions by studying how often people shared close to 7,000 NYT articles by email. They had a computer scan the articles for “positive” and “negative” words, followed by human readers to determine if the articles inspired awe, anger, anxiety or other feelings.

The Fundamentals

There seems to be a mixed reaction to the study from the chatter amongst the online community. Some feel that the demographics for New York Times readers may be skewed as compared to other business-related content. There are some basic fundamentals that you should follow to improve social media sharing regardless of your demographic.

1. Have a plan. Your social media should enhance your brand and coordinate efforts with your overall SEO strategy. You want to compete for top visibility on a set of specific keyword phrases that your target audience uses to find the information you share, and the products and services you offer. While your personal social media activities may include randomly sharing whatever strikes you, your business strategy should have a specific focus. It helps if you create an editorial calendar, listing the content you plan to share over the next 30 days. This will help keep you on track.

2. Be consistent. You need to build trust before you can develop a rapport with your audience. Consistency is critical. Not only will the consistency of frequent content raise your top of mind awareness, it creates a comfort and an understanding of what your audience can expect from you when they see your brand. And people interact with a brand they know and understand more so than a brand that seems random and pandering to the latest trends.

3. Focus on conversation. Do your posts sound like conversations you would have with someone or do they sound like robotic, mass-market blasts that a computer would generate? People want to connect with people. And your brand needs to show its personality.

4. Be aware of the emotional impact of your content. Portraying a professional image can leave you leaning towards being logical, informative, or educational and void of emotion. This is especially true on B2B platforms, like LinkedIn, where emotion is often played down. However, the business community isn’t run by robots. You’re still interacting with people. You need to be aware that content you create has emotional triggers.

If you’re tired of dealing with the negative emotions you experience by struggling with SEO and your social media marketing, contact us. We’re here to help.

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It’s been a couple of weeks since we reported that Google released a new update to their Penguin algorithm. This latest algorithm targets sites and online content that use web spamming tactics trying to trick the search engines into giving them better visibility on their SERPs (search engine results pages).

Here’s a partial list of negative SEO tactics that are being targeted by the Penguin:

• Keyword stuffing • Link spam • Hidden or invisible text • Meta-tag stuffing • Article spinning • Scraper sites • Doorway pages • Mirror websites • Cloaking

According to recent interviews with Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team, they seem pleased with the results they’ve seen so far. Yes, there are some glitches; sites that should be tagged for negative SEO, aren’t, and some other credible sites that shouldn’t have been negatively hit, were. However, the number of mistakes seems to be relatively minimal … unless, of course, you run one of the sites that dropped in ranking.

So how does the Google Penguin impact small businesses?

No, the latest algorithm doesn’t discriminate against sites run by small businesses. However, the SEO tactics that small businesses use because of a limited budget or lack of SEO expertise can put them at high risk.

As a small business owner or head of the marketing department, you may be tempted to apply your marketing spend to services that offer faceless, “budget friendly” packages. Many of these packages cast a wide net across an expansive list of online directories and social media and bookmarking platforms. Low cost and wide exposure sounds like a good deal, right? Not usually when it comes to SEO.

If you simply submit a payment to a company and you don’t have a relationship with the people who are actively managing your SEO strategies, you may be at risk. We’re not saying that all packaged options are bad; they aren’t. Obviously, you want to see a structured program and have a clear understanding of how your marketing dollars will be invested. However, the primary purpose of SEO is to connect with your human audience and not trick the search engines into liking your online presence. To accomplish this, it takes human interaction between you and your SEO service provider to make sure that your goals, your target audience, and your brand are understood and supported by targeted SEO strategies.

It’s tempting to take advantage of the options online marketing offers where small business SEO creates the possibility for competing with the bigger competitors, especially when they’re offered at aggressive prices. Get 5,000 backlinks for $20 sounds like a bargain. However, if these links are coming from foreign sites that have no relational purpose to the products and services you offer, not only will they not funnel in the human traffic you desire, but they may get you flagged for negative SEO practices. To avoid unknowingly falling into this the trap, make sure you interview any SEO company or service before you invest in them.

If you are confused about what the bulleted items above are and how to create an effective SEO strategy while avoiding these tactics, don’t start spending dollars testing faceless, automated services trying to figure out what works. You will put your business at risk for spending money that not only doesn’t produce positive results, but has a negative impact.

For more information about Google Penguin, small business SEO, and creating an SEO strategy to match your company, your market, and your budget, contact us.

All the Best,

Doug Dolan & Maria Fuster SmallBizMedia.tv Strategize. Optimize. Socialize.