Market Know-how and Success
Published December 1, 2011 | 
Common Business Mistakes You Want to Avoid
Look for the Best Marketing Strategies to Grow your Business
If you find yourself constantly trying to determine the most effective marketing strategies for your business, you’re certainly not alone. Marketing, which has always been a major challenge for small businesses everywhere, has developed into even more complex sets of issues as the number of marketing channels available to reach customers continues to expand.
The individual who scours the web searching for the best price on printing business cards may never look in the local newspaper where you’ve placed your most recent ad about a business card set up special. The woman who receives a text message from a nearby restaurant telling her that today’s lunch special includes a free drink may never make an effort to look at the coupons your sandwich shop mailed directly to her with a similar offer. 
The homeowner who needs a kitchen appliance repaired may choose to look first at the classified ads in the local “weekly” newspaper. Just as the high school teacher who thinks her students, their parents, along with everyone else spend way too much of their time each day using computers or other digital devices, and may never see the ad for a free sample pastry you’re running on Facebook.
So, the simple question is “what is the best way for you to promote your business today?” If it were only that simple, but unfortunately, no one easy miracle-solution marketing idea exists that will propel a long steady stream of customers to your business door. No matter whether you sell products, services or both, in today’s market-environment you have got to use overlapping marketing strategies to effectively catch the attention of, and keep customers.
There is a variety of strategic marketing solutions and ideas. But understand that while some of the ideas are pretty basic, more often than not, it’s those all-important basic marketing strategies that businesses forget or ignore, and prove most effective.
Now, if you’ve been operating your business for a long time and haven’t changed your marketing methods over the years, you should pay particularly close-attention to the strategies and solutions involving the Web and digital marketing. And, that no matter how your existing customers were able to find you, it’s a fact not to be ignored that businesses and consumers today regularly turn to digital media to gather and collect information in relation to their needs. And they almost always research service providers before making the decision regarding which service provider they’ll use. Of course, you want them to find and make the decision to use your company.
Make Poor Quality Marketing Excellent for Successful Results
Published September 28, 2011 | 
Not too long ago, I was having a conversation with a business owner friend of mine, who owns a local beauty salon. One of the questions I always ask is how business is doing and she said, “OK, given the economy.”
Okay, so I can’t tell you how many times I hear that in my many daily conversations with business owners, some of whom may even be clients. If you own a business, how many times have you said THAT, almost automatically? It’s like talking about the weather, but it can be a tell-tale sign of possible marketing issues.
The economy, as it turns out is a convenient excuse; but, the marketing reality is that it’s a sign of mediocre or poor quality marketing. Just imagine for a second the quote on the website home page:
“ —-Salon and Day Spa serving the Hometown, TX area with extraordinary services to exceed the most demanding standards.”
I think we would be “extraordinarily” generous to characterize it as average and commonplace. Surprisingly, we see that type of advertising WAY, WAY too often, or all of the time.
What’s wrong with it?
In one word: boring, mind-numbing, wearisome, dull and lackluster. Okay, that’s more than one word, but you get the point.
Maybe I shouldn’t be so harsh, but I can’t ever be as harsh as the market and it’s response to such ads, which is to never give the business a second thought simply as a result of ads that go “Blah, blah, blah, blah.”
To be more constructive let’s just say it misses what an ad tries to do on several fronts:
- Effective Marketing is really all about stirring emotions, touch on the target prospect’s pain or problem and show solutions, or visualize a dream, and show how to get there, with your help of course.
- Marketing should always simply and distinctively tell your target prospects why you are different from your competition.
- Marketing should also always clearly instruct prospects how and why they must take action, but they must TAKE ACTION.
Clearly understand that while there IS a level of art to it, marketing is more of an actual science than most people consider. Using proven techniques or formulas, with someone who writes good effective words for action, you can increase the effectiveness of your marketing materials and content many times more than they have ever been. I know… I’ve seen it happen.
Understand Advanced Search Engine Optimization
Published August 30, 2010 | 
Search Engines use algorithms that are well protected intellectual proprietary secrets and are continually evolving over time. It is important for you to focus on making your website as accessible as possible to Search Engines, while ensuring you have high quality content. Keep in mind these are well-established principles that are guaranteed to improve the rankings of your website, regardless of how the Search Engine algorithms continue to advance.
Search Engine Optimization practitioners can sometimes try to abuse the Search Engine algorithms in order to give their clients an advantage, and at times they might look to benefit and improvement through loopholes or sometimes shady methods. One simple example is using invisible text (white text on a white background) to “stuff” a page. 
Of course, this is invisible to the human eye, but Search Engines used to index this content, and if it is taken one-step further by stuffing the page even more with unrelated (but popular) keywords, it then becomes ‘spamming’. That was then, this is now and Search Engines are much smarter today and will definitely notice these sneaky tricks, and will heavily penalize any websites using such tactics and tricks.
Advanced Optimization is not simple and therefore carries risk if badly planned and executed. You should always keep in mind that what might work today is innovative, but runs the risk of heavy penalties in the future once people abuse it to the point where results are skewed, so always be careful of the introduction of any initiatives that fall into this class.
You probably have the question in mind that if you apply Search Engine Optimization management to your website, how long before you see the results? Understand that Google re-indexes websites every single day of the year, and it follows a process to ensure every entry contained in its vast database is re-indexed every 4-6 weeks. Google will also re-index sites like “news” aggregators much quicker, many times daily in order to stay most current. 
You can be sure that other Search Engines use roughly the same re-indexing timeframes, and therefore expect it to take up to 4-6 weeks before you can observe changes in the rankings.
You are still probably wondering if Search Engine Optimization will improve your ranking. Yes, but will they keep you there? No. Understand the Search Engine algorithms always continue to evolve over time and Search Engine Optimization is a form of marketing, and you therefore must have clearly defined processes of monitoring, interpreting results and tweaking.
Remember, Search Engine Optimization is not the only tool you need when creating and maintaining a profitable web presence, it is only one important component of your Web marketing strategy. Seasoned Web Marketers understand and realize that there is more to the Web than just search engines, as they know obtaining links from reputable websites, mixed with advertising using traditional media and ensuring your customers recommend you to their network of friends enjoy the same level of importance.
Search Engines and Optimization
Published August 27, 2010 | 
I think I’m safe in saying that anyone who operates a website wonders how to get it into the top 10 search results, and that one thought has created an industry with the tools and knowledge to answer this very question, and the process has come to be known as Search Engine Optimization or SEO.
Many say that SEO methodology has become more of an art employed to bring improvement to the ranking of a website in Search Engine results given certain targeted “keywords,” and I tend to agree with that consensus. You need to understand that “keywords” are the words or phrases that your target market uses most to limit search results to more specific sites including product or services that you might offer.
To illustrate, you might want your website to rank high for “Disc Golf accessories,” but you couldn’t care less if it rates high for “Garden Supplies,” because that is NOT your target market niche.
Most people of course don’t realize that Search Engines are actually very limited software programs, which don’t have the intelligence built into them to understand everything they encounter on the Web. What they use is constantly evolving rules to score and rate a website’s capability to answer a very specific question, and now that we understand this knowledge, we can break down the Search Engine Optimization process into the following three categories:
HTML code: This is the part of Search Engine Optimization for programmers, since an in-depth knowledge and understanding of web coding standards and techniques is required, and typical software packages have historically produced poor results which take a lot of the human touch and intervention to ensure optimum results.
Tailoring the Content: When given a set of keywords, a Search Engine rates pages according to their respective relevancy, so that you have to build your content with those specific keywords always in mind. What is fundamental to determining just which keywords are relevant is a complete understanding of your target market niche, including knowledge of the typical questions they ask when searching for answers. Is important for you to know and understand there are websites (i.e. www.wordtracker.com, www.google.com/insights/search, etc.) dedicated to helping you determine the most commonly used keywords, and you should make extensive use of them.
Keep in the back of your mind throughout the process, that this is not a race of numbers to see how many keywords you can fill the page with, because there is an optimum keyword density. Too dense with too many keywords and it will be considered spamming, and you will most certainly be penalized. Too little, and you are neither ranked nor considered an authoritative source of information. It would be wise of you to dial in on a specific set of keywords, and remember you are trying to optimize for only those asking a specific question.
Entrepreneurs, the Global Recession and eCommerce
Published July 9, 2010 | The main question to Global Entrepreneurs using the Web for eCommerce is how does the current global economic recession affect their commerce opportunities on the Web?
Recession is a relatively ugly word that continues to be referred to with great regularity as many think we are no longer in recession, but still a hair’s width away from slipping back into a “recession,” 
as many factors seem to be lining up to contribute to a new economic recessive event, worse then the previous. The current economic stagnation appears to be putting a stranglehold on more and more local markets, turning some into ghost towns as their inhabitants continue to abandon them for the hope of better futures.
The real estate industry is one that still has to deal with many serious issues, the value of the dollar is recovering, and unemployment continues without abatement, as the promise of cost and tax increases is looming on the horizon of 2011 and beyond, all contributing strongly to the future “economic uncertainty” that chokes off any hope of the level of recovery needed to spur increased economic activity including consumer demand, spending, and associated job and wealth creation.
On a more relevant and practical level, the question for anyone with an online business is how will the state of the global economy affect them? It is 
important to keep in mind that the same question exists no matter what the state of the global economy including good, recessive, depressive, or malaise, and with the mixed bag the Web and Social Media Technology always presents, you have to look for and always be aware of the silver linings.
What you have to remember when preparing for with the Web, is that business results tend to happen at a fast pace, unlike brick and mortar businesses that see delays in trends of months sometime, Web trends quickly provide evidence that make themselves apparent, and any drop in demands for products or services is felt in a very short time, sometimes a matter of days.
First, let’s examine the bad affects of economic recessions, which leads to one very predictable action, and that is a sometimes severe downturn in spending, and it’s a widely recognized fact that when people are not confident about the future, they tend to hold on to their money until confidence slowly returns. 
This of course means the general trend will be fewer dollars spent at many online businesses, a trend that’s even truer if the products and services offered are not valued by consumers as necessities of life.
There is a silver lining to keep in mind however, and one that you must plan for as the recession continues to slow, eCommerce leads to some positive results, one being less competition, since many competitors will disappear as a result greatly reduced marketing efforts to preserve remaining levels of cash flow including eCommerce efforts that they could never fully embrace and understand. On the contrary, focused and prepared Entrepreneurs recognize and capitalize on these opportunities to seize market share through fine-tuned search engine optimization, since when online businesses reduce their optimization efforts, the results are lost rankings with the search engines, and associated lost revenue producing opportunities of sales and advertising, while the prepared Entrepreneurs assume their place in the eCommerce market.
Another long-term silver lining is how changing consumer shopping habits are beginning to increase Web eCommerce traffic even further. Remember the global economy is dynamic, and naturally goes up and down, so try not to get to stressed when downturns happen and take the opportunity to put in place the tasks you need to accomplish and maintain optimal search engine optimization, and keep traffic flowing to your site regardless what state the economy is in, and with time the economy will experience strong growth again, and you will be positioned to enjoy even greater “Webtrepreneurial” success.