by Jennifer Cario

(If you are new to Pinterest and don't already have an account, make sure to read part one in this series.)

Now that you've gotten youself up and running with a Pinterest account, it's time to put it to use to start collecting ideas, links and pictures. Remember, Pinterest is a powerful online filing system that gives you visual access to the things you might wish to use down the road. Back in part one we talked about setting up some topical boards to sort the "pins" you find. Today we're going to talk about how to find those pins.

Browsing Your Friends' Pins and Repinning

The absolute easiest way to find pins (and the way most people get started) is by looking though the feed produced for you by your friends' activity and "repinning" their pins. A repin is the Pinterest equivalent of a Twitter retweet or a Facebook share. When you log in to Pinterest, your friends' activity feed is the first thing that pops up.


You can scroll through these listings to see if anything strikes your fancy. If it does, you have one of two options.

The first is to hover your mouse over it and wait for the Repin, Like and Comment options to pop up. Clicking the like button will add your vote to the mix right there on the page. Clicking the comment button will add a comment window to the bottom of the listing and clicking the Repin button will pop up a screen designed to let you pin the item to your own boards. It's important to note you can also check the Facebook and Twitter boxes in this window to automatically share your pin there as well.

You can select the category you wish to pin it to from the drop down menu or create a new one right there in the menu. You can also choose to pin it with the existing description, or write your own. Once you've hit submit, the pin will be added to your category and will show up in the streams of users who follow you.

Your other option when you see a pin you are interested in is to click on the image itself. This will take you to the actual pin listing page, which looks like this:

Apart from getting a larger picture and a full description plus comments on this page, you also get some interesting information to help you dig deeper with your Pinning habits. At the bottom of the listing, you'll notice three key areas. "Pinned onto the board," "Originally Pinned by," and "Pinned from."

The first one tells you what board the person who pinned it placed it in. The thinking here is that if you like this pin, you may like the other pins they've collected on that topic. It will also give you some thumbnail snapshots of other pins from that board to check out. Below that, you'll find a link to the person who originally found the post and added it to Pinterest. Again, chances are high you may want to consider following this person as well, since you like the content they added. Finally, the "pinned from" section will give you a full page showing the other pins that have been added from that site.

This can be an excellent way to find a new site to visit and even more ideas to pin.

Finding Pins by Topic

One of my favorite ways to use Pinterest is to browse the pins being added by all members to specific categories. If you look at the top of the page when you are logged in to Pinterest, you'll notice a link that reads "Everything."


Click on this link and you'll get a drop down menu that allows you to select a category. Select your category and you'll be taken to a real time feed of the most recent pins added to that category. (There are also links to view the latest video pins, the most popular pins and a breakdown of product pins by price.)

This is one of the things that makes Pinterest such an addictive time killer and that keeps people on the site for so long. In fact, the average time on site for a Pinterest user in the month of November last year was 88 minutes. Making it the third most "sticky" social media site behind Facebook (394 minutes) and Tumblr (141.7 minutes), according to Billboard.

Finding Pins by Searching

The absolute most useful thing about Pinterest, in my opinion, is the search feature. Take a gander at the top left side of the Pinterest home page and you'll spot the search box.

Type in almost anything you can think of and you'll be treated a vast array of ideas gathered and archived by millions of Pinterest users. It's one of they key features I use when I need a specific answer or idea. Trying to figure out how to create an indoor herb garden for my kitchen? I ask Pinterest:


Looking for some color palette ideas for a new web site design or for a home decorating project? Yep, you can ask Pinterest.

But it's not just about using the content that is already on the site.

Pinning Content Using the "Pin It" Button

Another common way to pin items to your board is to make use of the "Pin it" social sharing buttons that have started to pop up on web sites across the web. For the most part, this button is still rare, showing up mostly on wedding, recipe and craft related sites, but as more and more Internet users discover the benefits of visual bookmarking, it's beginning to spread.

When you visit a blog post or product page, just look for the red "Pin it" icon that often shows up along side the +1, Like and Tweet buttons at the top or bottom of a post.


Clicking the button will launch a pop up window much like the Pin it option within the Pinterest site. Use the drop down menu to select your category, edit the description to something of your choosing and decide whether or not to share to Facebook and Twitter before hitting "Pin it" and sending the image to your board. Pinterest will take care of linking the image to the proper page.


Pinning Content Using the "Pin It" Bookmarklet

Since so few sites have added Pin it buttons to the mix, most Pinterest users rely on the Pinterest Bookmarklet. To install it, go to the Pinterest Goodies page click on the Pin it button and drag it to your tool bar. This will create a handy little bookmark on your tool bar that you can simply click on any time you are on a page you'd like to pin.

The nice thing about using the bookmarklet is that it gives you a choice of what image to use for your pin. (The other options select the picture automatically.) Clicking the bookmarklet while on the blog post shown above will take you to a page like this:

Simply browse through the images from the page and click the one you'd like to feature. This will launch a pop-up window like the one seen before, allowing you to select a category, add a description and publish it to other social networks.

Coming up in Part Three

Ok, so maybe you are sold on the idea of using Pinterest as an image based bookmark solution, but you're asking what it does in terms of marketing. In other words, can you use it to drive traffic to your site? The answer is a definite yes, but hinges on the concept that most traffic campaigns do...high quality original content. We'll talk more about this coming up in part three.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

by Jennifer Cario

Pinterest is a virtual pin board that allows you to collect images and links to things you like on the web. If you've ever seen someone pull out a scrapbook filled with recipe clippings or a binder full of wedding or home remodel ideas, you've got the general idea. The difference with Pinterest is the fact that it all takes place online in an environment where you can share your collection with your friends and vice versa. To put it in the simplest of terms, Pinterest is an image based version of bookmarks.

Pinterest is Growing Rapidly

A few months ago, I would have forgiven you if you hadn't heard of Pinterest. It was like a sneaky, lovable cat. The kind that curls up in your lap and gives you the warm fuzzies while you pet it, but that remains quietly invisible to anyone not already in the know. The past month or so though, it's all begun to change. Pinterest has finally reached it's tipping point and the masses are starting to pour into the site to explore what it has to offer. If you are a marketer, a blogger, or a business owner, it's time to invest some effort into learning whether or not Pinterest needs to be part of your marketing strategy.

I first heard Pinterest mentioned last summer by a friend who is a professional photographer. She mentioned it as a great place to stash your collection of ideas and inspiration. It sounded intriguing, but not enough so to actually visit the site. (Since I was sort of busy with an out of state move and planning a wedding of my own.) I found my way back to the site last fall while hunting for some Christmas ideas online. Every other crafting site I ran across had a "Pin it" button showing up s part of the blog post. Within ten minutes of finally visiting the site, I was hooked.

Since then, I've been a daily Pinterest addict. It's my new time killer when I'm waiting in line or killing a few minutes of boredom. It's my source (and storage) for inspiration on food, my home, and a huge portion of the things I do in my every day life.

Intrigued yet? You should be.

Let me give you a tour.

When you head over to Pinterest, you're going to see a bunch of random picture with commentary and some numbered tallies underneath them.

There's no rhyme or reason to it because when you first log in, you're just going to see the current most popular posts. At this point, if you click on an image, you're going to get a notice to sign up for an account.



When you fill out the request for an invite, don't fret. Most folks seem to get their invite within 12-48 hours these days. You'll be up and running in no time. Of course if you have a friend using the service already, they can send you an invite which you'll receive almost immediately.

Once you get your invite, click the link in the email to get started. It will take you to this page.

You'll have the choice to link your account to either Twitter or Facebook. It's a personal preference that doesn't hold a LOT of weight because Pinterest will only share your pins via those networks if you ask it to. For the purpose of this article, we'll go with Facebook. Clicking on it will take you to your Facebook sign-in page.



Once you're signed in, you'll need to approve the app to work in Facebook.



To note, if you haven't already upgraded to Facebook Timeline, you'll need to do it to get Pinterest synched up. Consider whether you want to leave things set to display to all your friends or if you want narrow the friend group, then click through to move along. From there, it's onto finally setting up your Pinterest account.



Once you've finished this step, Pinterest will try to get you started with some people to follow.



My suggestion? Refrain from picking categories you like unless you want Pinterest to fill up your boards with people you don't know. For the sake of this article, I set up an account for my husband and it set him up with a dozen people to follow. I had to then go unfollow them all. It will also look to see which of your Facebook friends are on Pinterest and will follow them as well, so plan to edit people out accordingly.

Your next step in the process is to create some boards. Boards are Pinterest's version of visual filing cabinets. They are usually topical and give you a chance to categorize your pins for easy access. Take a minute to set one or two up, but realize you can add more at any time.



Once you've set up your starter categories, you're ready to get going. At this point, you'll be able to view your Pinterest stream. In this case, that stream looks like this:



Of course chances are high you'll see a lot of things you aren't interested in. Just because you're friends with someone on Facebook doesn't mean you're interested in every little thing they want to save in their scrapbooks. There are two different ways to work around this. The first is to delete people totally. To do this, click on the username that shows up under the photo. This will take you to their Pinterest page where you can find the greyed out "unfollow" button under their avatar. Click this button and you'll remove them from your stream.



Now, let's say you've got someone in your stream that you want to follow, but who posts WAY more content than you are interested in, or things you simply don't care about. Say, for instance you have a friend who has great taste in food, but also has a love for polymer clay and crafting that is flooding your stream. Find one of their posts, click the username and go to their page the same way you did when you planned to unfollow someone. Click the unfollow button again. At this point, each of the "boards" (categories) the Pinterest user has created will have a follow button associated with them. Scan through their list and follow any of the boards you think you might be interested in. This will segment their feed and serve up only a portion for you. (One of Pinterest's strongest features, in my opinion.)

Once you've done this, you'll find your feed has cleared out a bit and feature more post you are interested in.



Now that you've gotten everything set up, you can begin using Pinterest. There are three primary ways to do this. You can browse the overall database of pins you can browse your individual feed or you can go looking for new things to add to Pinterest.

We'll explore those options coming up in part two of this series on Pinterest.

Want to learn even more about Pinterest and how to use it to market your business or drive traffic to your web site? Join Jennifer Cario for a FREE Market Motive workshop on Pinterest next Thursday, February 9th at 12:30pm EST. Registration is required.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

by Mike Fleming

Cutting through all the clutter of data, which metrics are your critical few?  You probably have at most three critical few metrics that define your existence...If you can't take action with anything, then perhaps you are using the wrong metric for your business...the simple process of identifying a metric as your key performance indicator and creating a graph of it rarely helps you find insights...before you diagnose how to improve a metric, you have to identify all the influencing variables...analyzing the variables will help you identify where the true opportunities for improvement are...it forces you to dig in a methodical manner and let the data, not opinions, drive action...

-Avinash Kaushik (@avinash), Web Analytics 2.0

 

We've talked about what makes a good metric to look at for your business.  But, you have to be careful here.  There is soooo much data wrapped up in what seems at times like an endless amount of possible metrics. If you are not careful, you will catch yourself wasting your time lost at sea with no idea how to get back home where you belong.  By "home" I mean those critical metrics that will measure what needs to change at this specific point in time for your online efforts to improve.  So, before you dive in and drown in data, the first and maybe most important thing you can do is determine where to focus your attention.  By doing this first, you create a map that will guide you to the right places to dive for those golden insights you so desperately need to make your next decisions for action.

This is what you want, right?  Don't get me wrong, it's great to take a few moments and bask in the glory of your achievements or sulk in the pain of your failures.  Both can be tremendous motivators.  But the bulk of your time looking at all the pretty charts, graphs, numbers and arrows should be to find out what to do next.  What should you do more of?  Less of?  Who should get a raise and who should get fired?  Remember, these decisions shouldn't be faith-based initiatives.  Don't let your opinion get in the way.  They should be backed by solid data that tells a story that leads you to conclusions that show you actions that give you results.

But, remember the data you're looking at should be that which will tell you if what you were shooting for with your previous actions was accomplished or not.  This is how you and everyone else working with your site should be judged.  If what you were shooting for was to sell 20% more stuff than last year, who cares if visitors went up by 40% if it didn't result in 20% more sales!  There's a problem.  And who cares if visitors didn't go up at all if sales went up by 20%!  Someone deserves some love.  Sure, the two will most likely be intimately tied together, but why worry about what doesn't directly matter.  Focus on what matters and figure out what you can do to make it better.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

by Stoney deGeyter

In the world of business, marketing and advertising is everything. Marketing is at least as important as the products or services you sell. Without marketing, you have no one to demonstrate the superiority of what you offer!

There is a reason people build businesses in cities surrounded by people, rather than in a desert surrounded by cactus! You need people to market to, and you need customers coming in your door. The success of your business relies on how well you market your product or service first, and second by how well you deliver it. Very few businesses survive on word of mouth alone. But what many small business owners fail to realize is that while marketing is everything, everything you do is marketing!

Everything you do, as a small business, has an impact on your marketing message and ability to get that message out to your customer base. How/whether you answer your phones, how you reply to email messages, what you say on Twitter/Facebook, the presentation of your website, and your ability to produce satisfied customers all play a role in your ongoing marketing efforts.
How are you perceived?My company helps business owners build and execute their web marketing strategies. But all too often, many are missing even the most fundamental marketing and common-sense business development components. We can help them online, but lacking the offline aspects, we are simply attempting to fill a bucket that has holes in it.

Perception matters. If your potential customer's perception of you, true or not, is less than they expect, you're going to have trouble selling them. Would you trust a mechanic with a poorly tuned vehicle? A lawyer who drives a Yaris? A contractor with a run-down office? A landscaper with an overgrown lawn?

You might, but I guarantee you'd think twice before you do. None of these things demonstrate how well any of these business owners do their job, but the perception is, if they can't take care of themselves, how can you trust them to take care of you?

When performing link building for our clients, they are often picky about where we get links from. So are we, but they often want to get links only from high-caliber sites, when their site is somewhere below that. In link building, people will generally only link to site's of equal or higher caliber than themselves. If you want a link from a high-caliber site, you have to be one. Otherwise, take what you can get from those below you!
The little things matter the mostBusinesses purchase online marketing because they want to increase sales. But if the SEO is doing its job but sales don't follow, there may be something else at play. Lack of business success doesn't always fall on the marketer's shoulders. In fact, such woes may directly be caused by how the business is being run.

The SEO's job doesn't include running your business. There are a lot of things that fall outside the SEO's area that can make or break your business success, and even your search engine rankings!

As an SEO, we routinely try to help our clients in areas that fall far outside the SEO box. We'll provide feedback on design, programming and presentation, just to name a few. We want our customers to succeed, and sometimes that means we have to help in areas that we were not necessarily hired for.

Everything matters, and when it comes to business success, everything should be on the table for a discussion on how to improve your ROI. If your SEO thinks your design isn't great, it may be worth discussing in greater detail, even if you love it. There might be a reason they hate it that goes beyond personal preference. If your SEO provides a recommendation on how something looks or appears on the website, it many worth noting, even if you can't change it right away.

Little things can create big perceptions. Especially when it comes to usability issues. It's not just website design, it's also communication, problem resolution, response times and a whole lot more.

A picture on your website may be worth a thousand words, but perception is worth 1001. You are what you're perceived to be. That's true whether you believe it or not.

Follow me at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

by Dave Cosper

A business owner recently asked me how to go about building positive reviews in a way that would "optimize" their Google Maps listing. This is about as provocative a topic as it gets in the Local Search community, I know, but it's also an unavoidable subject worth addressing. Search marketers ponder the same "How To" question, if for nothing else to try and understand every aspect of local search ranking factors and translate this to practical advice for SMB's.
Google Places has become an essential tool in increasing popularity of a business on the Web to attract local consumers. It is a huge opportunity for local businesses to get exposure, but ranking in Google Places does not happen automatically - and building reviews takes time (any effort to improve ranking should be measured in months not weeks).
For every local search, Google does its best to display relevant businesses, favoring those its algorithm determines to be prominent (well-established) and well-liked in the area.
If Google made a habit of recommending local businesses that offered poor products and service, how long do you think people would continue using Google Maps? So Google has more confidence in "recommending" a local business if it has mostly positive reviews and ratings.
Google Places reviews have four primary signals that affect local search ranking:

1. Volume of reviews/ratings
2. Velocity of reviews/ratings
3. Sentiment of reviews/ratings
4. Keywords in reviews

VolumeThe quantity of reviews needed to improve rankings depends on the business type and the number of reviews relative to local competitors. It's important to identify how many reviews competing listings have acquired and use this as the relative benchmark.
VelocityAmassing lots of reviews is great, but acquiring them all in bulk or too quickly is not - this will set off red flags. Steadily building quality reviews is ideal.
SentimentWhile most review building strategies focus on soliciting reviews from happy customers, a natural distribution of mostly positive and even some negative reviews is best. There are a number of signals Google relies on, and crawling review content and extracting sentiment analysis is one of them.
KeywordsThe quality of the written review is also important. While keywords in the review have been shown to help a listing rank, it's important that the description not appear spammy. Keyword stuffing in reviews is NOT good. But, the appearance of multiple reviews with consistent use of the right keywords, used sparingly, typically has a very positive impact on rankings for those particular keywords - especially long-tail keyword phrases.
Some examples:
Not good: General dentist Dr. Williams in Chicago, IL provides general dentistry and general dental care procedures, such as: Chicago general dentistry for children, general dentistry in Chicago for adults, and Chicago general dentist for seniors.
Good: Chalk up another great appointment with Dr. Williams in Chicago. He really cares about your teeth and takes the time to explain all procedures to make you feel comfortable. The entire staff is very friendly and prices are reasonable. Beyond general dentistry he also offers cosmetic dentistry like dental implants and natural looking filings. I highly recommend Dr. Williams!
To sum up Google's review policy: No fake reviews, no keyword-stuffed reviews, and no direct incentives for reviews. And apparently, according to Mike Blumenthal's blog, representatives of Google claim on-site review stations are permissible and even encouraged.
Additionally, other factors of influence include quantity, velocity and sentiment of reviews stemming from relevant third-party sites: IYPs, vertical/niche directories, and data aggregators, Facebook page likes, social media mentions on sites like Twitter, Foursquare check-ins, and Google+ shares. The entire local-social-mobile ecosystem is becoming increasingly more connected and continuing to play a bigger role in ranking.
Google's assessment of reviews also relies on the relative prominence of the person (account) posting the mention. A person with a history of quality reviews, on Hotpot for example, carries more weight.
The Anatomy of Stellar "Optimized" Reviews:
After five or more reviews, an average star rating with the total number of reviews appears on the search results page along with the listing:
It's common to see a boost in both ranking and conversion once five reviews are achieved and the average star rating has been activated - as long as the reviews are good!
Optimally, the person writing the review places the best descriptive text at the very beginning of the review as a concise summary statement. The summary can then be expanded upon in the rest of the review. Google routinely places select keywords from the review in bold.
Below is an example of how bold keyword phrases appear in the published review:
Google also offers review guidelines to share tips on how to write constructive reviews. Some of these tips include how to make the reviews informative and insightful, using real stories and not stuff that didn't actually happen, being nice even with negative reviews by making them constructive and not disrespectful, and finally writing them using proper grammar - avoiding excessive capitalization or punctuation.
Spammy Reviews Can do More Damage than Good:
What happens if business owners write their own (fake) reviews? The business can end up in Google purgatory!
Google employs a number of measures to prevent fake reviews including checking to see if reviews are being left by an email address tied to the business's domain or stemming from the same or similar IP address. If Google is suspicious of fake reviews or sees too many reviews all happening over a very short period of time, the listing could wind up suspended and perhaps even permanently blacklisted if the tactics are blatant enough.
Bottom line is, if you own a business you need to commit to an effective and long-term strategy in building online reviews. Instead of direct incentives, focus on encouraging happy customers at, or shortly after, the point of sale. From a local search marketing standpoint, this topic cannot be ignored. After all, Google Maps is, at its core, a recommendation engine.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

by Miriam Ellis

If you've been walking on the sunny side of a clean street on your Search Marketing journey, hopefully you've skipped right past that dark and narrow alleyway in which lurks the spin monster. The practice of 'spinning' articles for directory submission isn't new, but it has come to my notice that marketing firms are currently utilizing this as a post-Panda effort for avoiding the dread Google duplicate content label, and I'm writing this article today to describe what the process is. If you're about to hire a marketer/SEO whose methods of promotion include submitting 'spun' articles to content sites, read this first before you sign that contract.

How To Spin An Article

In a rancid little nutshell, spinning articles involves creating synonyms or alternates for words and phrases within the body of the copy so that the text can be hashed up and put together again as though it were multiple pieces of content instead of just one. Here is an example of what this looks like:

{Some marketers | Some SEOs | Some consultants} {persist in | insist on} believing that it is better to {attempt to | try to} {hoodwink | fool | trick} Google than to devote {time | effort | money} towards playing by the rules for their clients' long-term success.

From the above example, you can see how choosing the alternate wordings would enable one to create copy with a certain percentage of distinctness. The whole point, as far as I understand it, is that you can then submit the spun articles to multiple sources for the sole sake of backlinks. The education, engagement and reading pleasure of human beings is definitely not the object.

You can hire a 'copywriter' to manually spin articles for you, or you can shove the task off onto a helpless computer program which is, of course, incapable of protest. Either way, you are engaging in a practice which I can only view as one of those ugly outcomes of Google's historic dependence on links as a metric for relevance and authority.

Why I Think Article Spinning Is Shady

As a professional copywriter, my instinctive response to what this practice does with the English language is one of revulsion. Language can be so powerful, and to see it reduced to this purpose is like watching someone whittle a Redwood into a toothpick. In my opinion, this type of marketing hinges on the lowest form of communication of feeding the stupidest of the bots. Why settle for this when your alternatives have the potential to inspire, enlighten and satisfy those real human beings - your customers?

My tender personal feelings about fine prose aside, every business owner must realistically confront the fact that everything published by him and about him on the web is a piece of his reputation. Do you really think that having your linked signature on an article at garbage-content.com is going to show you in a professional light? Consider that.

Thirdly, I find article spinning to be a poor concept from its very foundations because it is built on deception. The intent is to deceive Internet users, search engine bots and, possibly, content sites. If your marketer thinks that the best way to get ahead is with a good old lie - well, you've got a problem on your hands.

Finally, the fact that dubious marketing firms are apparently seeing this as the answer to Panda means that some people have come out of that web-wide shakeup without having learned a lesson. Instead of trying to become more genuine in their business practices, some business owners/SEOs are simply trying to find other ways to game the system. Of course, there is some money to be made in being tricky, or no one would be doing it, but in my opinion, everyone comes out of this situation a loser. Why?

The public loses because the web is further polluted with flotsam and jetsam that is devoid of usefulness or real expertise. The business owner loses because he is wasting his own profits on a marketing strategy that will attach his name to idiotic documents across the web. Further, the next panda-esque debacle may include new sophistication that will render an increased number of content farms inert. The time and money invested will thus be voided. The marketing firm loses because it is risking being called out for selling bad product and it is making its money by offering the worst kind of education to its own clients. It may well be soliciting its own demise.

But Isn't There Any Value In Article Marketing Anymore?

We can debate this for days. I thought Michael Gray's 2011 article on post-Panda article marketing was pretty on-target, but frankly, I am still convinced that building out your own website's content brings greater rewards than handing it away to somebody else. There will, of course, be exceptions to this, and linkbuilding is every bit as much on the SEO table in 2012 as ever, but be honest with yourself about what you're actually doing.

I have found it exceptionally interesting to watch Social Media begin to sway the big discussion towards genuineness. Being real with your real audience, being accountable, being transparent and honest - these are the practices that are now being cited as carrying the richest long-term rewards. I can certainly recall the days of the really dumb bots of a decade ago, and confess I was even amused at some of the gaming going on, but remember this - the humans were never dumb.

All of this stuff your business is putting out there on the web - an audience is on the receiving end. That audience contains your potential customers. And, honestly, they are not going to be impressed by finding 6 versions of your story about pet allergies that cleverly substitute the word 'canine' for 'dog'. There are more intelligent ways to engage people.

We can do better than this.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

by Mike Fleming

...life is about taking action, and if your work is not driving action, you need to stop and reboot...hits and pageviews don't mean anything except that someone came to your site and consumed some content...metrics are a dime a dozen, so how do you know which ones to use?  They should have the following four attributes...

• Uncomplex - If you want action, everyone involved in the decision-making must easily comprehend performance.
• Relevant - they must be measuring the success objectives that are unique to you and your website.
• Timely - Even the greatest metric in the world is useless if it takes nine days while your world changes every three days.
• Instantly Useful - you need to be able to find insights as soon as you look at it.

-Avinash Kaushik (@avinash), Web Analytics 2.0

Your business is different than everyone else's, so why would you look at the same measurements of success as everyone else?  Everyone looks at visitors to their site, but what does that tell you about how your business is doing?  If you sell a high-end product and the only people coming to your site are those looking for a cheap solution, it doesn't matter how far up and to the right that blue line goes for visitors, your business isn't growing. You want to look at the metrics that will tell you if you are progressing with growth.  That's why the most important step you can take toward success is identifying the metrics that will tell you if what you really want to happen for your business is happening or not.

What actions do you need your customers in order to achieve the site outcomes you desire?  Do they need to consume more content?  Do more of them need to make it to your product detail pages instead of bouncing off your home page?  Do you need to increase visitors from a certain website that sends high-converting traffic?  Do you need more conversions from PPC traffic?  What needs to happen on your site to get your business to where you want it to be?  Once you've got this down, you can now find out what metric will tell you if it's happening or not.

If I need visitors to consume more content so that they can learn about how my product or service benefits them, my metrics for success might be Time on Site or Pageviews/Visit.  If more visitors need to make it to my product detail pages, I might make Product Detail Page Entrances on my site my chosen metric and ramp up my PPC and SEO to those pages.  If I need more conversions from PPC, I might use clicks and conversion rate as my primary metrics. Bottom line: what you spend your time looking at and trying to improve should align with the outcomes that will grow your business.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

by Stoney deGeyter

Designing a great looking website is good. Putting it on a strong information architecture is better.

Rolling out a newly optimized website is good. Checking it first is better.

Investing in SEO is good. Investing in ROI is better.

Optimizing your e-commerce site is good. Using optimized concantenation schema is better.

Quick-fix SEO is good. Long-term SEO is better.

Performing SEO correctly is good. Doing what you can quickly is better.

Keyword research is good. Keyword research and segmentation is better.

Adding keywords to content is good. Following user-friendly keyword optimization guidelines is better.

Having content on your website is good. Having unique content is better.

Being unique is good. Being remarkable is better.

Meeting your audience's needs is good. Making your audience feel special is better.

Optimizing for your important keywords is good. Optimizing for a lot of great keywords is better.

Expecting rankings is good. Getting rankings is better.

Getting rankings is good. Growing your business is better.

Increasing traffic is good. Persuading visitors to buy is better.

Growing your business is good. Increasing profits is better.

Understanding algorithms is good. Understanding analytics is better.

Charging (or paying) for SEO services is good. Being fair with charges is better.

Writing about SEO is good. Writing about SEO while trashing Will Ferrell is better.

Follow me at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg.

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by Mike Fleming

...the bottom line for magnificent success is the people...invest multiple times more in her or him, or more of them, if you truly want to take action on your data. Otherwise, you are simply data rich and information poor...a great tool in the hands of your reporting squirrel is useless.  A free/inexpensive/underpowered tool in the hands of your analysis ninja will yield massive results that impact your bottom line...

-Avinash Kaushik (@avinash), Web Analytics 2.0

Web data is easy to get at; and it can even be free.  Yes! That is awesomeness.  But, you know what's not easy to get and is not free?  The insights you can get from the data that will result in wise decisions and actions for business growth.  Since this is the case, it just makes sense that you would spend way more on what will get you insights than you do on what gets you the data.  The bottom line is that you have to invest in talented people.  Without them, your data is useless (except you may FEEL good if the blue line goes up and to the right).

That is what you want, right?  To build your business?  Well then, you have to know what to do next to make it better.  Your opinion, although well-intentioned, may not be well-informed.  Well-intentioned decisions tend to cost more in time and money than you'll ever invest in people that can give you well-informed insights.

If your goal is to grow your site's effectiveness, then you need analysis ninjas that know what to do with all that data you've been gathering in your analytics tool.  Without them, you're relying on faith alone.  Faith is good, but faith without data is dead.

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by Mike Moran

As social media has (somewhat) matured, an interesting culture has grown up around the idea of editing social media content. And for reasons that I don't understand, it isn't one culture--it seems as though every kind of social media has developed its own culture around editing content. It is as if we can't decide whether social media is a realtime force that is stream of consciousness and should never be changed, or it is a permanent record of activity that ought to be updated as it changes, or something in between. Some kinds of social media (Wikipedia) couldn't exist without editing while others (Twitter) do not even allow editing. What gives?

To me, it shows both that we use different kinds of social media for different purposes (think Wikipedia vs. Twitter) but it also shows an ambivalence over what we expect social media to be. So, while it is perfectly reasonable for most people to say that Wikipedia is all about the editing--what we want to see is the latest groupthink on a subject--Wikipedia also contains and exhaustive revision history for every page for transparency into how the page has evolved over time.

But most social media venues fall far short of that kind of transparency. As the founder of the Biznology blog, I struggle with exactly how to handle edits. Very frequently, I see typos, broken links, or other problems crop up on blog pages--sometimes freshly-minted posts and sometimes posts from years ago--and I usually just change them without documenting the changes. One exception is when a commenter points out an error--then I thank the commenter and note that the change has been applied.

Now, if there is a substantive error--a fact is wrong or a breaking story needs to be updated--I change the post and clearly mark that it was updated, along with the date it was changed. This has evolved as the way to edit posts in the blogging world. But I struggle as to when to do that. I have many posts that give advice that is now outdated, because it was good advice in 2006 but not terribly relevant now. Those posts are still out there and they come up in search results. Often, much of the post is still good advice, so I am not sure I should remove the posts, but some of the advice is not helpful. Should I go back and edit those? There is no clear blogging editing norm for outdated posts.

How about YouTube? Mostly videos don't get edited. They just sit out there forever and you can upload a new video if you want to cover the same subject again. Does that make sense? I don't know.

But social networks are my favorite. Facebook and Twitter allow no editing at all. So, you can post something that gets retweeted a hundred times and notice there is a huge, dumb typo in it and you can't change it. You are forced to leave it out there or to delete the tweet. How many stories have you read about someone tweeting something embarrassing where the offending tweet has been deleted by the time the story runs, leaving you with the obligatory screen shot of the rogue tweet to prove that it really happened, because Twitter now has no record of the exchange. There is something wrong when the most newsworthy things that happen are lost to history. Bloggers can take down their own content also, so it's not just Twitter and Facebook, but bloggers could edit a post to add an apology and they can answer comments with new comments.

Google+, ostensibly the same type of social media as Twitter and Facebook, does allow editing. While Google+ has not caught on yet, I think that Google will stick with it until it finds a following, so it will be interesting to see if people take advantage of being able to edit an embarrassing Google+ post, and how transparent they will be as they do it. Does Google show everyone that you edited your post? Or, like blogging, is it up to you how transparent you are?

Message boards are equally schizophrenic. Some do not allow any editing of posts. Some allow editing whenever you want. Some allow editing, but only within a short window and then the post becomes permanent. As with blogging, it's up to you as to how transparent you are about your changes.

One of the reasons editing is so important is that social media often starts a conversation. If I write something and ten people start talking about it, then is it reasonable for me to edit my original post even if it makes the conversation that already exists look weird?  Wikipedia hosts a discussion about improving the page which obviously becomes outdated as those improvements are adopted, but at least you can look at the version of the page that people were talking about if you want to.

I don't know what the answer is here, but it strikes me that as social media ages, we'll need to make conscious decisions about which content needs to survive for years and create a record of what happened, which content needs to be updated to remain accurate, and which ought to be deleted as too ephemeral to be relevant. And all of it needs a transparent method of editing it. Where is a good historian when you need one? Calling all archivists and librarians: Big opportunity here...

Originally published on Biznology

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

by Mike Moran

As social media has (somewhat) matured, an interesting culture has grown up around the idea of editing social media content. And for reasons that I don't understand, it isn't one culture--it seems as though every kind of social media has developed its own culture around editing content. It is as if we can't decide whether social media is a realtime force that is stream of consciousness and should never be changed, or it is a permanent record of activity that ought to be updated as it changes, or something in between. Some kinds of social media (Wikipedia) couldn't exist without editing while others (Twitter) do not even allow editing. What gives?

To me, it shows both that we use different kinds of social media for different purposes (think Wikipedia vs. Twitter) but it also shows an ambivalence over what we expect social media to be. So, while it is perfectly reasonable for most people to say that Wikipedia is all about the editing--what we want to see is the latest groupthink on a subject--Wikipedia also contains and exhaustive revision history for every page for transparency into how the page has evolved over time.

But most social media venues fall far short of that kind of transparency. As the founder of the Biznology blog, I struggle with exactly how to handle edits. Very frequently, I see typos, broken links, or other problems crop up on blog pages--sometimes freshly-minted posts and sometimes posts from years ago--and I usually just change them without documenting the changes. One exception is when a commenter points out an error--then I thank the commenter and note that the change has been applied.

Now, if there is a substantive error--a fact is wrong or a breaking story needs to be updated--I change the post and clearly mark that it was updated, along with the date it was changed. This has evolved as the way to edit posts in the blogging world. But I struggle as to when to do that. I have many posts that give advice that is now outdated, because it was good advice in 2006 but not terribly relevant now. Those posts are still out there and they come up in search results. Often, much of the post is still good advice, so I am not sure I should remove the posts, but some of the advice is not helpful. Should I go back and edit those? There is no clear blogging editing norm for outdated posts.

How about YouTube? Mostly videos don't get edited. They just sit out there forever and you can upload a new video if you want to cover the same subject again. Does that make sense? I don't know.

But social networks are my favorite. Facebook and Twitter allow no editing at all. So, you can post something that gets retweeted a hundred times and notice there is a huge, dumb typo in it and you can't change it. You are forced to leave it out there or to delete the tweet. How many stories have you read about someone tweeting something embarrassing where the offending tweet has been deleted by the time the story runs, leaving you with the obligatory screen shot of the rogue tweet to prove that it really happened, because Twitter now has no record of the exchange. There is something wrong when the most newsworthy things that happen are lost to history. Bloggers can take down their own content also, so it's not just Twitter and Facebook, but bloggers could edit a post to add an apology and they can answer comments with new comments.

Google+, ostensibly the same type of social media as Twitter and Facebook, does allow editing. While Google+ has not caught on yet, I think that Google will stick with it until it finds a following, so it will be interesting to see if people take advantage of being able to edit an embarrassing Google+ post, and how transparent they will be as they do it. Does Google show everyone that you edited your post? Or, like blogging, is it up to you how transparent you are?

Message boards are equally schizophrenic. Some do not allow any editing of posts. Some allow editing whenever you want. Some allow editing, but only within a short window and then the post becomes permanent. As with blogging, it's up to you as to how transparent you are about your changes.

One of the reasons editing is so important is that social media often starts a conversation. If I write something and ten people start talking about it, then is it reasonable for me to edit my original post even if it makes the conversation that already exists look weird?  Wikipedia hosts a discussion about improving the page which obviously becomes outdated as those improvements are adopted, but at least you can look at the version of the page that people were talking about if you want to.

I don't know what the answer is here, but it strikes me that as social media ages, we'll need to make conscious decisions about which content needs to survive for years and create a record of what happened, which content needs to be updated to remain accurate, and which ought to be deleted as too ephemeral to be relevant. And all of it needs a transparent method of editing it. Where is a good historian when you need one? Calling all archivists and librarians: Big opportunity here...

Originally published on Biznology

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

by Jennifer Cario

As we roll into 2012 companies are looking at ways to either boost their social media campaigns, or in some cases, launch them for the first time. One of the big questions they have is whether or not they're too late to the game. While I'm not going to lie and say it's the easiest it's ever been to get in the game, I can say more companies will find it easier to get involved today than they ever have before. I see six key reasons for this.

Reason #1 - Social Media has Reached a Saturation Point

While I work with all shapes and sizes of business, small business is where my heart lies. Limited staffing and limited budgets leaves little room for "let's just try this" in the small business marketing budget and forces you to really focus in on what you want to accomplish and how to get there in the most efficient manner. That means I spend a lot of time watching social media outlets and making judgement calls on when they've reached a saturation point. I rarely suggest a company begin utilizing a social media outlet until it's crystal clear that outlet has enough members of their target audience to be worth the time and effort.

Social media as a whole has reached a saturation point. Forrester research now reports that 86% of the online U.S. population engages in social media these days. Its no longer a growing medium, it's simply an accepted form of communication. Facebook claims one out of every thirteen people on EARTH have an account. 86% usage rates means your customers ARE on social media, end of story. You'll still have to do some research to find out where they are, but they ARE there. You can stop wondering if it's worthwhile to be there and start worrying about what you'll do to reach them.

Reasons #2 - Social Sharing Continues to Rise

If you get involved with social media for no other reason, it should be to take advantage of the sheer volume of sharing that happens online on a daily basis. Add This shows astronominal growth rates for sharing on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, among others. Interestingly, copy and paste from the URL bar into emails, intant messages and other social channels still makes up an ever larger portion of sharing than simple "click to share" options. That means a ton of people are sharing, without even realizing they're taking part in "social media."

Very few businesses can't benefit from word of mouth. Unless you are one of them, you need to have a plan in place to leverage it online. Social media is what helps you do that.

Reason #3 - Social Media is Diversifying

For some reason, a large portion of companies still think social media equals Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. It's a short sighted way of looking at things and for specialty, niche and most B2B businesses, it's a mistake. Whether you're a small online clothing boutique hawking your wares through Polyvore, a donut shop in Youngstown, Ohio pulling new customers from UrbanSpoon, an extreme fitness studio attracting new students from LivingSocial or a Etsy shop driving sales from Pinterest, the options online are almost limitless. Sure, it's great to build at least a baseline presence with the major players, but more and more companies are finding success by building strong and loyal following on some of the specialty social media sites.

If you are only looking at the biggest players, the game is going to seem a little overwhelming. If you start digging deeper to find those pockets of conversation your audience is having online, there's wonderful opportunity to build a grassroots social media campaign.

Reason #4 - Staffing is Easier to Come By

Sure, there's still a distinct lack of people in the marketing world who really understand social media from the perspective of how it can impact your business...but it's way better than it was even just a few years ago. College students and recent grads understand the new environment and are constantly exploring new outlets. Find one with grea communication skills and provide them with a little direction from someone with actual marketing experience and an understanding of your business and you can go a long way in a short time. Whether you choose to hire a team in-house, hire out a consultant to help keep your team focused, or turn the entire thing over to an agency...there are enough workers out there now to actually give you a choice in whom you hire.

Reason #5 - Social Media Analytics Have Come a Long Way

Remember when people cheered because they gained a Facebook fan, or got X number of retweets? Those things still count, but we've finally matured social media to the point where we dig deeper. Social media isn't just about presence and engagement anymore. The tools are rising to the challenge issued by marketers and our ability to track actions across networks gives us more data than ever. We're understanding the need to create social media specific metrics like amplification and applause and we're finally getting companies to look at business goals and figure out how social media can be used to address them.

This makes it easier than ever for companies to carve out dollars for social media. It was one thing to say "we need to try this." It's an entirely different thing to say "we need to accomplish X and we have Y dollars to do it. Can you make this work?" Companies that embrace social media from the latter perspective will see far more success.

Reason #6 - Offline and Online Experiences are Converging

 A girl walks into a bar and sees a cowboy, a clown and a priest having dinner. It may be a joke, or it may be a social media post. With the proliferation of smart phones and social media apps, our every day lives now intersect so tightly with our online lives that they're barely distinguishable. Congregations check in on Facebook on Sunday mornings to share their choice of church with their friends. People take pictures of the things they want for Christmas and post them to their Tumblr accounts for all to see. Live tweeting happens during everything from conferences to earthquakes. Brick and mortar stores are finding new ways to encourage foot traffic to broadcast their activity online by offing coupons, discounts or special experiences. Every experience is sharable and every share is trackable, giving businesses more insight into their customers than they've ever had before.

Do It, But Do It With a Goal

Here's the one down side to all this. The more options you have, the more likely you are to get caught up in the rush and get lost. Take the time to think about the goals you have for your business in 2012. Write them down. Then look at them and ask yourself if you can think of any way social media might be able to help you reach those goals. If you aren't certain, ask a trusted voice in the business. A good social media marketer will tell you if you just aren't ready, or if your goals aren't realistic. Once you find a fit though, it's time to map out a strategy to meet those goals and to get yourself to work.

Photos via Creative Commons license from Flickr users Fabio.Dilupo, laubarnes

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by Miriam Ellis

Whether 2012 is the year you start marketing a local business from scratch or the year you get serious about learning how to use Local SEO to best advantage for a company that's been drifting in Local limbo for years, here is my must-do checklist for your success in Local!

Some of these tips may sound like no-brainers to you, but fora across the web are filled with business owners who have skipped steps in the Local learning process and are failing to get the results they want because of it. My advice: don't skip a single tip on this list!

1. Invest Real Money In Your Website

Don't pick your web designer out of a hat with your eyes closed. If you run a local-focused business, hire a design firm that designs local-focused websites. This is a world apart from designing national or global-focused sites. Your website is way more than 1/2 the picture in terms of your ability to compete, rank and serve. Be prepared to make a serious investment in an excellent, usable, optimized website if you want to see serious results.

2. Read The Google Places Quality Guidelines

From my work with my own clients and my work at SEOmoz and Cre8site Forums, I would estimate that 1/2 of all Local-related questions being asked could be answered by a few minutes spent reviewing the Google Places Quality Guidelines. Determining your business' eligibility for inclusion, the number of Place Pages you are allowed to have and how to avoid committing what appear to be the most common violations are all explained in this simple page of guidelines. Read 'em! A couple of times a year - because Google does update the guidelines periodically and the changes can be very important to your business.

3. Read The Google Places Review Guidelines

Spam with a capital 'S' is everywhere in the review portion of Places/Maps, much of it quite deliberate...but you are an honest business person and don't want to accidentally spam this area of Google just because you've never read the Review Guidelines. Who can leave reviews of your business, can you incentivize reviews, can you have reviews removed? All of these issues are covered in the guidelines.

4. Follow The Guidelines To The Letter

Once you've read the guidelines, you are ready to create a violation-free listing for your business or to attempt to clean up past violations you have committed. I wish I could then promise that all will be peachy keen, but Google Places remains bug ridden. Despite your best efforts, you may run into bugs and errors. Google has repeatedly admitted its own mistakes in regards to Places and a single bug in this arena has the potential to affect thousands of business owners. But hang on...don't give up hope. Read tip 5!

5. The Google Places Help Forum - It's Alive! It's Alive!

For a number of years, the Google Places Help Forum has been the best evidence of the damage and confusion being wrought by the Frankenstein-like monster Google had created. Thousands of agitated questions in ALL CAPS flooded the forum, demanding help but almost never receiving any answers. It was a pretty sorry situation.

Things Have Changed! Very, very recently, remarkable alterations have occurred in Google's staffing and in their handling of the forum. Googler, Vanessa Schneider, is doing a commendable job at the helm in the forum, and of perhaps equal importance, the folks Google has deemed to be 'Top Contributors' have been given some very important powers in offering assistance in the forum. These TCs include friends and colleagues Mike Blumenthal, Linda Buquet and Nyagoslav Zhekov.

If you run into a mind-bending problem in Places, having any of these 3 TCs respond is likely to be a real lifesaver, and each of them has the ability to communicate directly with Google if they can't resolve the problem themselves. Google Places remains a buggy juggernaut, but the new energy being poured into offering help and guidance to local business owners is a landmark improvement of the first order! You are operating in a very different environment in Local in 2012 than you were just a year ago - an environment in which problems are much more likely to be resolved.

6 Don't Forget All Those Non-Google Opportunities

Yahoo! Local has telephone support! Best of the Web has a slick interface. MapQuest has such an easy process for listing your business, you almost feel like getting listed is over too soon, too simply. And then there's HotFrog, Merchant Circle, Yelp, Bing Local...the list goes on.

Get your business listed in as many local business indexes as you can. Some will act as citations for your Google Place Page and others are just smart places to be included. Myles Anderson's Top 50 Citation Sources For UK and US Local Businesses post at Search Engine Land is a truly fine place for you to start figuring out where to list your business.

7. Read Mike Blumenthal's Blog

This simple tip, if followed, will be your surest route for keeping current on the most important changes in Local - and Local changes constantly. Mike's Blog wins my vote as the industry standard in Local reporting. Nobody does it better!

8. Be Sociable

From Facebook, to Twitter, to Google Plus, to check-in sites, coupon sites, video and photo sharing sites and review communities, there are so many directions you can go in once you've got the basics of your powerhouse website and clean listings covered. You may not be able to do everything all at once. Pick the platforms that make the most sense to you and see how far you can get with them.

9. Realize You've Gone Into The Publishing Business

Every business taken onto the web has just gone into the publishing business. So many business owners fail to realize this very critical fact. From the tiniest text description on a business listing to the most in-depth article on a website, words are the chief content of the Internet. You've got to be prepared with an arsenal of nouns, verbs and adjectives if you want to be recognized. Don't know what to write? Hire a copywriter who writes for local-focused businesses and who knows how to produce persuasive, clean, optimized copy. As long as your business exists, you will need to keep the words flowing on your website, your listings, your profiles, your reviews. Get writing!

10. Do Something Not On This List

The tips in this article are standard, best-practice advice. Creativity and a spirit of innovation can take you a step beyond. Do something no one has ever thought of before, online or off, to put your business on the map of the public mind. Ideas sell and persistence is rewarded.

May Your Local 2012 Be Your Most Profitable, Exciting Year Yet!

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by Stoney deGeyter

There are a lot of phases to the buying cycle. Searchers begin with a thought and then start researching answers via their favorite search engine. As they learn more about their query, they move into shopping and buying modes that hopefully lead them to a satisfied purchase.

In each phase of this cycle, the searcher is typing in a unique set or words or phrases. Each search is designed to provide more relevant information than the last. As the searcher learns, the search phrases reflect what they know and what new information they need.

There is value in building a website that provides information to each of these searchers, but the value in each isn't the same. By understanding the full marketing value and potential of your website, you can build an effective sales funnel that provides each and every visitor the information they need to make the decision you are hoping for.

Your website is a pre-sell channel Not every visitor who comes to your website is ready to buy right now. In fact, many searchers are merely curious and are looking for knowledge they don't already have. These researchers could turn into buyers, but the chances of making a sale today are slimmer than me turning down a free lunch at Chipotle. It can happen, it's just not likely. (Try me and find out!)

Instead of trying to force your visitors to give you what you want, why not give the visitor what they want?

Every business website should implement a variety of pre-sell strategies. If you think about it, only your product/service pages are doing the actual selling. This leaves the rest of your site to walk people through the research and shopping cycles, pre-selling them on what you offer, so that when they are ready to buy, they come you.

Your home page, product category pages, about us pages, etc., are great places to engage in active pre-selling. They provide a goldmine of opportunities. Use these pages strategically to talk about your brand, your product selection, your value, quality of service, and whatever else will give your visitors confidence in you and your products. This won't sell any single product by itself, but it will reinforce to the searcher that you are a reputably and trustworthy site to purchase from.

Content: Enter stage right

A lot of ecommerce business owners tell me they don't like SEOs that want to add a bunch of text on the page. Instead, they just want to push the visitors to the product. This is the right strategy for those searchers already in the buying phase of the cycle, but most aren't. At least not yet. And those that are - they are likely using search phrases that deliver them directly to your product pages!

If you're not writing great content for your category and sub-category pages (or are hiding it), you're not using your website as a pre-sell tool. This leaves you only with the sales channel after the visitor has already performed all their research searches on Google. Ultimately, you'll have missed out on a lot of potential traffic and branding opportunities that would likely have brought many of the buyers back to your site for a purchase.
Your website is a sales channelThe sales channel is where the majority of the "value" of any website comes in. It's certainly the most trackable and justifiable. Implementing analytics and conversion testing will allow you to tweak your conversion funnel to capture more sales and generate a higher ROI.

A lot of websites focused on selling products or services fail in this area. It's almost like they tried to recreate the magical experience of the paper catalog online. File that under 'FoMP' - Failure of Monumental Proportions!

Your website sales channel must express your unique value to your potential customers. This is especially true if your products are sold at any number of other outlets. Why should they buy from you instead of that other guy?

Your customers should feel you know your products better than the manufacturer does. You can do this by writing unique product descriptions and value-based headlines and using language that is customer-needs centric. Telling your customers what you or your products do is good. Telling your customers the benefit you or your products provide is better.

Building up your tips, tools and helpful article database can be an asset to the active sales funnel. If a potential customer has a question that can be answered right from your website, helping them finalize their purchase decision, you both win.
Your website is a post-sales channelWhen the sale is done, the sell isn't done!

We all know it costs far less to keep a customer than to get a new customer. Unfortunately, too many online marketers fail at pursuing the customers they already have and continue to spend, spend, spend on acquiring new ones. (A great book about this is Flip the Funnel by Joseph Jaffe.)

A good portion of your online marketing budget should be used to maintain customer loyalty. There are a lot of ways you can do this; you can provide customer loyalty and rewards cards, re-marketing through PPC, coupons and discounts for a follow-up purchase, email follow-ups with "on sale" updates, etc.

Give your customers a reason to come back to your site, or, at the very least, a reason to stay in contact with you.

Social Media: Enter stage left

A great way to do this is with regular blog updates providing helpful tips and tutorials that let your customers know you care about them, not just their wallets. Use Twitter and Facebook to engage your customers and deal with potential PR nightmares before they get a chance to take a foot hold. Make sure your website allows customers to easily contact you when there is a problem.

If you're not implementing some kind of follow up or engagement after the sale, you're losing thousands of dollars worth of profit. Who better to convince to buy from you than an already happy customer?

We often build websites with a singular thought in mind: selling our products or services. Unfortunately, we usually do that with a singular method--getting a sale. But we don't think about what happens before the sale is ready to be made, or after it has been completed. We have to be willing to lay a little groundwork to build credibility, build branding, and lay the foundation for a potential sale in the future.

And once the sale is complete, why give up there? Continue to pursue the customer. Let them know just how much you appreciate them and wish to continue a mutually beneficial relationship. Don't just focus on getting new sales. Focus on building customer relationships before, during and after the sale.

Follow me at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

by Mike Moran

I don't know a lot about robotics, but I have read a few articles recently about the biggest problem that robot manufacturer have in entering the home. They need the robots to behave differently so that people know how to interact with robots. For example, if a robot needs to open a door, it moves to the door and then must scan the door to locate the doorknob, identify the kind of doorknob, and then begin moving its robotic arm to open the door. Sometimes it takes a little time to do all these things before starting to move its arm, which to a person looks like it is frozen. But when designers began having the robot move its head up and down while scanning, people realized what it was doing. Having robots signal what they are doing to watching people is called "readability," and it is important for your marketing as well.

Why do robots need readability? Because a person who thinks a robot is frozen will intervene (resetting it, physically moving it, opening the door for the robot) when nothing is really wrong. Someone who realizes that the robot is simply scanning a strange door to understand what to do next will leave it alone.

So what does this have to do with marketing? More than you might think.

We talk a lot about transparency, by which we mean that we should be more forthcoming about what is going on inside our companies. And that is a very good thing, but I want to think about a related concept.

I want us to start thinking about readability, so that people will leave us alone when nothing is wrong. For example, suppose a prominent blogger reports a serious problem with your product. Instead of scrambling the jets to figure out immediately whether the blogger is right and figure out how to respond, immediately respond.

Not sure what to say? If you don't know what is going on, how can you respond? Just say something! Say that this sounds terrible and that you'll get to the bottom of it. That way, everyone can see that you are scanning the unfamiliar door and figuring out what to do. That's readability.

Now, when you find out what is happening, you can tell everyone the truth, which is transparency. But readability comes first. Make sure that you aren't a "black box" to the outside world. If you let people know what you are thinking, they'll cut you more slack then if you don't.

Originally published on Biznology

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by Mike Moran

Have you ever asked yourself whether you paid search program is all that it can be? Most of us suspect that we fall short in some areas, but who has the time to stay on top of every aspect of a Google AdWords account, on top of everything else we do all day? Or perhaps you want to check out what kind of job your agency is doing with all your paid search money. Well, WordStream has put together a scoring tool called AdWords Grader that tries to do exactly that--show you how your paid search campaign compares against everyone else who has scored their own campaigns. And best of all, it's free.

Recently, WordStream CEO Larry Kim took me through the thought process behind AdWords Grader and shared with me two contrasting anonymized reports--one for a horrendous AdWords account and one for a great one, to show off what AdWords Grader can do. Check them out one after the other and take a closer look here and  here.

That's a lot of data for a free tool, so Larry Kim and team should be commended for providing such value, and the tool is extremely simple to use, also. All you need to do is to put in your credentials for Google AdWords and the tool does the rest.

I asked Larry what his motivation was for the tool, and he told me that "PPC is hard for SMBs" and that "advertisers are struggling more than I previously thought."

Larry told me that "the problem is that people have the wrong expectation--an instant success--but lack of time and education produces crappy campaigns get penalized by Google and starts a downward spiral that keeps raising your click costs." He compared the start of most campaigns to "making a bad impression on your in-laws."

And much of the data revealed by AdWords Grader truly can help search marketers see what they have been missing. Helping people understand Quality Scores, Clickthrough Rates, and their share of impressions can be extremely useful.

Having said that, some of the metrics shown seem dubious to me. As much as I hate to criticize a free tool--I laud WordStream for giving this away--I am not sure that merely looking at negative keywords truly identifies wasted spending or that flagging accounts for less activity means that they are somehow missing the boat. But these are minor quibbles with a tool that is valuable and--did I mention?--free.

It is valuable to know how you stack up against other Adwords accounts, not because you should sit back if you are scoring well or freak out if you're not. But to the extent that it shows you important metrics that help you focus on where to take action, it's a good thing.

Originally published on Biznology

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by Mike Fleming

...you need to drastically rethink what it means to use data on the web...there is a lot of data, but there are fundamental barriers to making intelligent decisions...because clickstream data is great at the what, but not at the why...it's important to know what happened, but it is even more critical to know why people do the things they do on your site...and the what else, which is perhaps the most underappreciated data on the web...your web analytics tool can report only what it can record...if you marry the what with the why and the what else, you'll have a lifetime of happiness...

-Avinash Kaushik (@avinash), Web Analytics 2.0

 

You've got enough work to do, right?  All you want is a report.  You just want to see that all of that hard work you are doing for your website is paying off.  You want to see that blue line go up and to the right.  It makes you feel good.  Hey, I know the feeling.  The problem is that if you stop there, you will fall behind.  Likely way behind.  The web 2.0 world that we live in requires more than getting more visitors to your site.

Although those reports make you feel good, they don't tell you what to do next.  They don't tell you what your competitors are doing and how you can and should react.  Yes, there is value in feeling good.  But feeling good doesn't grow your business.  It doesn't give you insights that will push you ahead into the future.  In fact, looking at a visitor line in your web analytics that goes up and to the right doesn't do much of anything at all.  It just means more people found your site.  Unless they're buying, more visitors mean nothing.

What will push you ahead, on the other hand, is information about your customers that your competitors don't know, information about your competitors that they don't know about you, and the ability to turn that information into experiments and apply what you learn.

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by Mike Moran

Mastercard and VISA certainly hope not, but Larry Page wants to be in your wallet. Well, not exactly--he wants to replace your wallet. Last month, when I talked about Google's new strategy--we do everything--I mentioned that Google is working hard to unseat PayPal, the online payments leader, but I think that I undersold Google's ambitions.  Google wants to be the leading form of payments anywhere, not just online.

So, how might they do that? Let me count the ways:

• Near Field Communication (NFC) was in the Google phone and Google wants Android support for NFC chips to give it a leg up on using your phone to pay for things in physical stores. Who wouldn't want to wave their phone at the cash register and be on their way?
• Google Wallet is stalking eBay's PayPal to take a piece out of the online payment market. eBay sued Google within hours of the Google Wallet announcement, so don't think this will be a quiet fight.

Well, that wasn't hard to count, right? Doesn't sound too threatening--I mean MasterCard is even a partner on Google Wallet.

Well, look a bit closer. What is really going on here is that these are just a couple of more data points in the Google orchestra of data. Google has Google Analytics and Google Checkout and Google Search and a dozen of other properties that all work together to find out more and more about what people are buying and where.

What would stop Google from analyzing all these shopping patterns and launching Goo-pon? By looking at all this behavioral data, Google could provide shopping savings that we could all like: saving money without the hassle. In fact, Google's recent purchase of ITA must have sent shudders through the ranks of Travelocity and Expedia. Google is doing the same thing they do. Why couldn't Google use all of the data they have collected to offer any discounts they want, because they know the price point to pitch each one? Information wins this game.

But information isn't all that is needed. One area where NFC still lags is security. Reports of physical security being hacked (if you walk by someone, they might be able to charge your phone) and the different legal status of NFC--a fraudulent charge on your credit card won't cost more than $50 in the U.S. by law--might both be impediments to wary consumers adopting NFC. Remember how long it took for consumers to be willing to enter credit card numbers online? There were far fewer real dangers there than for NFC.

So let's return to the original question. Google wants to be your new credit card because it is its new source of growth. They'll start with the easy stuff. but don't be surprised if they are working to remove the middle-man at some point. Because Google doesn't suffer its partners for very long.

Originally published on Biznology

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by Mike Fleming

For far too long our online efforts have accurately been classified as faith-based initiatives...that's exactly how we made decisions for our offline efforts, and when we moved online, we duplicated those practices.  But online, in the glorious beautiful world of the Web, we do not have to rely on faith...you have a God-given right to be data-driven...to understand the impact and economic value of your website by doing rigorous outcomes analysis...web analytics is like Angelina Jolie; sexy, powerful, and a force for good.

-Avinash Kaushik (@avinash), Web Analytics 2.0

Highest Paid vs. Data

In a typical business, the highest paid person's opinion usually wins.  This does not mean that their opinion is always the most informed though.  It's just the most powerful.  The problem is that it is also the least accountable.  But, in the world of the Web, there's a new sheriff in town.  Data.  This is because data (when used correctly) can provide accountability for decisions made.

It gives us a basis for determining if a decision is working or not.  Previously, if the highest paid person thought the billboard should be a certain color, there was no way to tell if that was the right choice or not.  Now, when the highest paid person believes that a button on a site should be changed, he can be held accountable for that belief.  Either the change gets better results or it doesn't.  Do you see how this changes the whole game?

When it comes to something as important as marketing your business, why would you rely on your opinion when you can swim in facts? Allow the facts to show you what to do rather than take shots in the dark.  We've moved into a time where data and (more importantly) the people who turn data into changes that make more profit should be higher paid people.  

Your turn: What do you have to add?  Learn anything new? Have anything to correct?

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by Mike Moran

Perhaps you saw the announcement of Google+ for Business--it made big news for a day, but there isn't that much to say about it. Honestly, if you understand how Google+ for individuals works, it will take about ten minutes to get up to speed on Google+ for Business, which is rather disappointing, because after months of development, Google added just a few fields for a business name and a photo.
So, if you have a business or a brand or a product or a local place, you can now set up a Google+ page. That's about it. Lots of businesses jumped in at launch and Google famously deleted all those profiles, so now everyone can get in and put their business name in. That's about the end of the excitement.
Now, you should do that. Your profile can help Google understand who you are, where your Web site is, and it can use your Google profile to connect lots of other stuff. Putting a +1 button on your page can't hurt anything. And the more Google knows about your social media footprint, the more credit Google gives you for high-quality content, so you need to create a Google Profile and Google+ pages to maximize your impact here.
But it's still disappointing. I really expected that Google was holding off on business pages because they were doing something really interesting, but they didn't. Now, you might argue that Google+ all by itself is interesting, so opening that up for businesses is interesting. Perhaps. And for all you out there who are not familiar with Google+, here is a cheat sheet of just some of the functions:

• Privacy. Facebook scurried to match this feature because it got so much attention. Google+ Circles allow you to decide which of your connections can see which posts, instead of sharing everything with everyone.
• Huddles. These are similar to text messages within your Circles.
• Hangouts. Some people have found this the most interesting feature--they are Skype-like multi-user video chats that are great for impromptu Web meetings.

These are all cool features, but they were already there, so the fact that businesses can use them is not the most exciting announcement Google has ever made. So, if you liked Google+, you'll like Google+ for Business, because they are hard to tell apart.

Originally published on Biznology

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