Why You Need a Powerful Web Presence

A successful web presence that attracts your ideal client and makes a great first impression is now much more complex, incorporating not only your website and blog, but also your social media profiles, business directories and review sites.

It’s no longer enough to just have a website. Your website is just one component of a complex network of information about your business that projects your brand and expertise to those in search of a product or solution.

The opportunity to develop an solid web presence as part of your online marketing is immense. A well thought-out plan can help you gain visibility, develop an expert reputation and create a large digital footprint that attracts attention of your ideal prospects.

There are many steps and tactics to make your web presence effective that will be different depending on your business model. But regardless of your tactics, there are six overarching elements that are required for successfully creating a powerful web presence.

1. Solid Strategy

Developing a web presence strategy is not a difficult exercise as it should be integrated into your overall marketing strategy. If you have your marketing strategy defined, include the following additional information:

• Figure out your goals for this effort. Are you looking to increase visibility, obtain an expert reputation or drive inbound leads? Knowing what you are trying to achieve heads you towards the right activities and eliminates wasting time on exercises that won’t get you where you want to go.
• Understand all the places that your business listing can be found and determine which ones are worth the time to claim. Do a search for your business name and catalog the various directories where it is listed. Compiling this list helps you understand the overall effort it will take to pull it all together and help you plan your time and resources.

2. Coherent and Consistent Brand

Web Presence - 6 Elements to Ensure Success

Is every place I can find a reference to your company consistent in what it says and how it looks?

Think about how many businesses that have a similar name to yours. When someone searches for your business and finds you on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+, or finds your Google Places page or a listing on a review site, including the Better Business Bureau, will they immediately know it is you?

To ensure people always recognize your web properties and to build a recognizable expert brand, be consistent in all you do including using the same design elements such as color, images and logos. When a visitor finds your business, make sure there is no doubt that they have found the right business.

3. Continuous Participation

You can’t just set it and forget it. You have to be present regularly to respond to questions, participate in conversations and acknowledge those who mention you on social sites. You also need to keep content flowing regularly, updating your blog, offering new content to your visitors and sharing content from others you find interesting.

On the local search front, it is also not enough to just let your business listings lay dormant. Seek them out and claim them, ensuring your company name, address, phone numbers and all other relevant information is accurate and consistent. To search engines, Masterful Marketing and Masterful Marketing, LLC are not the same.

4. Relevant Content

Creating the right content for your audience is difficult, but if you create a content strategy that defines what you are going to write and a content marketing strategy to define how you will use that great content to gain visibility, you will be more likely to be found when your audience is searching for a solution. Get their attention and help them out of a problem and you become a valuable resource they will keep going back to for advice.

5. Ongoing Optimization

You have an opportunity to optimize your web presence, including website, social profiles and business listings using your top keyword phrases. Once again, you can’t just set it and forget it because search engines change how they index web pages frequently, so you need to produce new content and incorporate basic SEO components to stay visible and highly ranked in the search engine results.

6. Religious Review

Periodically do a review of your web presence to be sure all listings are kept up to date. If something changes, update it across all properties. If you get a review on one of the review sites, know about it. You never want to be surprised by a good or bad review. Keep a spreadsheet of all the sites where you have claimed your listing so you can keep them updated when necessary.

How does your business look to searchers?

Web presence takes a commitment in time, effort and persistence, but the payoff is huge. Ensuring that all of your web properties work together to project the consistent image and professional reputation you want is important to getting found regularly. Make this the year that you commit to your online web presence and make it the best that it can be.

Have you done a web presence analysis and put together your plan?

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

6 Critical Elements to Guarantee a Successful Web Presence is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

Want to increase visitor response on your website? Then give them a reason to do something and connect with you!
If your website is simply a brochure for your company products and services, you are missing an opportunity to encourage your visitors to take some action that benefits them and you. Maybe it’s time for a website marketing makeover that includes an effective call-to-action strategy.

A “call-to-action” refers to active copy that compels a user to do something such as watch a video demo, download a useful tool or sign up for your mailing list. Visitors that find your website by searching may find what they are looking for, but don’t let that opportunity to capture their attention slip away by not providing them with an offer.

On the other hand, if you drive a visitor to your website through a marketing campaign and don’t provide a clear call-to-action, you run the risk of them getting confused, frustrated and leaving without connecting with you. Offer your visitors compelling content and something that benefits them and they will do what you want them to do.

But like other marketing activities, you need a strategy to focus you on what you are trying to accomplish.

Define the purpose of your Website

Do you want to:

• Develop your expert reputation? Encourage visitors to subscribe to your blog, connect with you on Twitter and LinkedIn or “like” your Facebook page.
• Build your email list? Offer a valuable free tool in exchange for their email address and name.
• Generate leads? Provide a free 30 minute consultation or a whitepaper that discusses one of their challenges and how to overcome them.
• Sell a product or service? Offer a free trial (software), a free chapter of your information product or provide valuable free “stuff” if you register for an event.

Once you have your goals and their priority, you can now design the call-to-action copy and buttons into your website so that they can be easily found.

Tips to make your call-to-action attractive to your visitors

Once you have your goals and understand which ones are the most important, create your offer and use creative website design techniques to make it visible.

• Put them on every page.
• Use colorful buttons to draw attention to your offers.
• Place them above the fold and at the top of your sidebar.
• Keep them simple and limit the number on any one page (it can paralyze people into making no decision)
• Use action oriented verbs and avoid “click here” whenever possible.
• Create short forms and ask only for the information you need.
• Use multiple offers that help those who aren’t ready to commit still take an action (watch a video vs. download)

An often overlooked opportunity

Put the same call-to-action as you have on the page into your meta description tag that is used to describe your page in search engine listings. When searchers see your description, a good call-to-action will encourage them to click through to your website from the major search engines.

What’s your strategy?

Think through how you want to weave an effective call-to-action strategy into your website structure. Don’t leave it to chance that the visitor will figure out what they are suppose to do and actually do it. Understand the goal of your website, create compelling offers for your visitors and convert new visitors into followers, repeat visitors and potentially new customers.

What ideas have you used to get your visitors to take action? Share your successes!

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Website Call-to-Action Strategy is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

Any small business that is not developing an expansive Web presence as part of your online marketing activities is missing an opportunity to gain visibility and develop an expert reputation. Think of your online presence as one entity with many customer touch points. Each of those touch points must effectively convey your brand and your message in order to help your target audience continue their effort to get to know you.

A Web presence analysis is an exercise that helps you determine how your business is perceived when someone searches for your area of expertise. Important to your online marketing strategy, this analysis answers questions such as:

• How well can your business be found when someone searches?
• Is your brand consistent across all of your online properties?
• How is your business seen with respect to your competition?

Evaluating how you are perceived online will help you pinpoint areas that need attention, enabling you to develop a better online marketing plan that focuses on these specific areas and puts activities in place that will improve the effectiveness of your online marketing.

Web Presence Analysis Overview

A Web presence analysis should include:

• Keyword analysis and research – For your top keyword phrases, where do you rank if at all?
• Search engine visibility – How well can I find you and what is missing?
• Website structure analysis – Does your website lack the proper items that lead to being found?
• Social media analysis – Is your social presence consistent and well integrated with other social properties and your website?
• Competitive understanding – How do you compare to your competitors?

To get started and to make this task easier, I suggest you download and install the SEO Toolbar for Firefox from SEOBook, a set of SEO tools in one convenient toolbar that enables you to gather a wealth of information about your website and those of your competitors that will help in the analysis.

Step 1 – Keyword Analysis and Research

For those of you who follow this blog regularly, you know that I am pretty anal when it comes to researching and then using your top keyword phrases in your web content, your social media profiles and all of your marketing activity. If you search this blog, you’ll find a post or two that talk about the reason for doing this research and the tools that make it easier. Speaking of tools, a nice feature of the SEO Toolbar is the keyword suggest tool. Type in a keyword, select the tools you want to use and get suggestions for other keywords.

Step 2 – Search Engine Visibility

There are two areas of search engine visibility:

• Where your website ranks for your top keywords
• How visible your business is in general (i.e. via social sites, directories and links to your properties).

To find out how well you rank for your top keywords, you can use the Rank Checker. Enter your domain name, your top keywords and hit start and it runs a report that says where your site ranks for those keywords in Google, Yahoo and Bing. You can save the report and run it regularly to track how well you are rising in the ranks.

To see how well your business is listed in various online directories, check out GetListed.org. They check Google, Yahoo, Bing, Best of the Web and now Yelp and HotFrog for your listing. If your business is not listed in any of these directories, you have work to do. Creating your local business listings has two benefits:

• It makes your business more visible throughout the social web;
• It creates more links back to your website.

Step 3 – Website Structure Analysis

How your website is structured has a lot to do with how well you will be indexed in the search engines and how readily you will be found. This may be something you will need help with, but if your site is created in WordPress, which naturally embraces search engines, you will be in good shape. If not, make sure your site isn’t loaded with JavaScript, Flash and other items search engines can’t index and that you follow the usual on page SEO techniques to help search engines better index your site.

Step 4 – Social Media Analysis

Analyzing your presence on the social media sites for this exercise is about brand consistency, message communication and participation across all the sites. Take a hard look at your profiles and make sure you are sending the same message to the same audience for all of them and that you are linking all your profiles and website for maximum visibility.

Step 5 – Competitive understanding

Now that you know how you are seen online, compare your results with that of your competition. Understanding where you are stronger or weaker in relation to their presence will help you determine where you should be channeling your marketing efforts. The SEO toolbar can be used quite effectively to gather that information.

• Visit the site and look at the information the SEO toolbar provides;
• Run Rank Checker for the same keywords to see where they rank;
• Use the “compare sites” feature on the SEO toolbar to get more statistics.

In addition, review their website and social media profiles for their messages, brand consistency and keyword usage.

How visible are you?

If you have never monitored your presence on the Internet to see how well your marketing activities are working, you should do one now to set a baseline for measuring your improvement over the next few months. As you increase your visibility, great things can happen for your business.

What have I missed? Is there something else we should include in this analysis? Add your ideas to the comments. And let us know how well you are doing.

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

5 Steps to Analyzing Your Web Presence for Better Online Marketing is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

Here are my top 10 marketing tips for small businesses that will help you gain more visibility with your target customer.

1. Create a vision and set realistic goals for your business. What’s that have to do with marketing, you ask? Knowing your vision will help you make decisions on what types of activities you will need to get where you’d like to go. Goals break the process into smaller pieces to allow you to get there one step at a time. Without a vision and a set of goals, you may make some decisions that lead you nowhere.
2. Know what makes you different and make sure you are able to communicate it clearly. Most of the time, it’s not something complicated. In fact, many of us overlook our key strength because it seems too simple to us. Once you identify what it is, clearly communicate why this is of value to your ideal client. Stay focused and develop your expert reputation around this unique skill.
3. Understand your ideal client intimately and know what keeps them awake at night. If you know your ideal client well, you will be able to create the content they need and the services that will attract them to you. This knowledge will also help you avoid tactics that won’t work, wasting time and money with little to no return.
4. Develop your list of keywords and use them strategically throughout all of your online properties. Knowing how people search for what you have to offer is critical to your online visibility. Do your research and make it a habit to use these phrases throughout all of your online profiles to help the search engines index your material more effectively.
5. Create a top notch WordPress website for your business. As the center of your online presence, your website/blog is the most important marketing tool you have. Don’t risk your image with a website that is poorly developed and hard to maintain. A WordPress website enables you to easily add new, relevant content that your audience needs.
6. Be generous with your knowledge. Give away valuable content that will attract prospects to you. Write an ebook, develop a white paper or write in your blog regularly. This content demonstrates your capabilities, builds your reputation as an expert and will help people decide whether you can help them solve their challenges.
7. Be consistent with your brand. Think through what you want all of your web properties to look like before you create them. Start with your Website and then develop your Facebook Business Page with the same look. Create a consistent Twitter background and don’t forget to brand your email newsletter. Try to create a user name that you can use across all social media sites that is relevant to your business.
8. Create a complete local business listing in all the search engines. Add images, a keyword rich profile and point it back to your website or blog. Get happy clients to write reviews as these can be incorporated into the listing. For your Google Local Business Listing, reviews are also compiled from third-party websites. All businesses should create free listings in these local business directories to help increase traffic to your website. There are many others that can be beneficial but start here and add new ones as appropriate.
   • Google Local Business Center
   • Bing Local Business Listing
   • Yahoo! Local
9. Get involved with social media. Start with a blog and post regularly based on what makes sense for you. Then incorporate other social media activities that make sense for your business. If you target market is not on Facebook, don’t immediately set up a Facebook Page. If you want to reach the CFOs of major companies, set up a rich profile on LinkedIn. You can determine what sites will be best for your business based on mastering tip number 3.
10. Don’t be afraid of online marketing. Although it seems overwhelming at times, online marketing is a process that can be planned, tracked and measured. Create a realistic plan (and get help doing so if you need to), put activities into motion and track them to see how they work. Don’t let fear paralyze you from taking action because doing nothing is riskier than doing something not quite right.

Final piece of advice: Take a little time to learn enough about online marketing so you can tell when someone is claiming they can do something that they cannot. Seek help and guidance from someone who can walk you through the steps. However, beware of those who claim to be online experts because they know how to use Facebook or Twitter. Find a true marketing resource with years of marketing experience who is willing to connect what these tools do with how to use them for marketing.

Share your small business online marketing tips. We can all use more inspiration.

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

10 Marketing Tips for Gaining Online Visibility is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

As I reviewed the information in the Google Webmaster Tools for one of my clients today, I noticed something different in the information being presented in the Top Search Queries report – it has expanded and now contains a lot of great information on how your site appears in the search results for various keywords. It just so happens that Google reported this new feature update in their blog just today: More Data & Charts in Top Search Queries. I love stumbling into something new!

Not only have they improved this report by giving you a significantly larger number of queries in the report, they have also provided detail that can help you determine how to improve your site’s ranking. And from a marketing perspective, this will help many small business owners determine how their websites are doing and what types of improvements they need to make to get better rankings.

What you get

You get the number of impressions and click-through information for each search query and each position that your site’s pages appeared at in the search results associated with that query. Plus you also get the pages that were linked to from the search results for that search query.

What can you do with this information?

Review the results for the top keywords to see how and why visitors are coming to your site. Make sure your site is being found for keywords associated with your business. Then find your top keywords using the search feature and review how they are working. Look at your position in the search results. If you see “3rd page +”, your site needs work for that keyword. Now use this information to:

• Determine how to get better ranking for your important keywords.
• Review your SEO for each page of your website to ensure you are including the right keywords on each page in the right places.
• Review your blog posts to ensure you include the appropriate tags and get into the habit of creating tags for your posts on a regular basis.
• Develop a content strategy to help you gain more visibility for your more important keywords.

Don’t forget to use the Google AdWords External Keyword Tool to get the search volume for keywords it determines from your website.

Let’s just say I learned a lot about my own website ranking and which keywords need some work while I was reviewing the changes to help you take advantage of this information. Now it’s time for you to do the same. What does your Tops Search Queries report tell you?

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Top Search Queries: Data to Help You Know How to Get Found is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

It’s nice to be friendly and welcome your visitors to your website, but unless you are in the hospitality business, using Welcome! as your home page header and title is wasting valuable real estate when it comes to SEO (search engine optimization). You can have welcoming content for your visitors without sacrificing the best practices of SEO. Remember that a website is your primary tool for marketing your business online and you need to do what it takes to ensure your website is found.

For those business owners that are writing the content for their website, keep these following on page SEO tips handy. Rather than provide the list in order of priority from an SEO perspective, I will present them in the order the human needs to address them.

10 On Page SEO Tips

1. Write quality body copy using variations on your main keyword phrase. Each page of your website should talk about a specific topic, which naturally optimizes the page. Use the most important keywords pertaining to that page early (within the first 50 – 100 words). Emphasizing phrases of your copy using italics or bold to make it stand out for the reader can have an additional benefit if the emphasis is on a phrase that contains your keywords.
2. Use heading tags (H1 through H6) strategically on your page. Search engines give headings more weight than regular body copy, therefore you should spend time writing great headings with appropriate keywords. A good example is the heading above “10 On Page SEO Tips” that uses a H2 (heading 2) tag. Although studies have shown that the heading tags have no SEO value, have your Web developer style these tags for your site and use them instead of trying to style the fonts manually. This will make your copy more interesting to your readers, even if the heading tags have little SEO value.
3. Use keywords as anchor text when linking internally. If you are offering a great ebook on the “Exercises that Can Cause Back Injuries”, use keywords in the text that links to the document rather than generic words such as “click here”. For example, use: Download your copy of “Exercises that Can Cause Back Injuries“, with the title linked to the actual file.
4. Write a descriptive alt attribute on the image tag for all images using the top keyword phrase for that page. Keyword rich Alt tags help your page get better rankings. Using the keyword phrase as the file name of the image also helps with traffic to your website.
5. Create unique page titles using relevant keywords. The page title is the most important on-page SEO element. Unlike humans that think of your Website as one entity, search engines ranks each page independently. If you are using the All-in-One SEO Pack plugin for WordPress, create different page titles for each page of your site using one or two keyword phrases that describe the content that not only is interesting to the human visitor but tells the search engine robots what the page is all about for proper indexing. Preferably, put the most relevant keyword first in the title. Don’t leave the page title with the default “Page Name | Blog Title”.
6. Get a domain name that contains your main keyword. If you already have a domain name for your business, this may be more difficult but if you are starting fresh, spend some time trying out different domains to get one that helps your ranking. A useful website for researching domain names is Domainsbot. Type in words and it spins out potential domain names.
7. Use “pretty permalinks”. WordPress handles the page and post naming based on the title you give it so think about what you want to call the page that gets you the most benefits. Having a Services page is nice, but having a Services page that is displayed in the navigation as “Personal Training Services” is better.
8. Control the content that shows up in the search engine results. Writing quality descriptions for each page increases click-through rates from the search engine results pages to your website. So although search engines don’t use the meta description tag directly, when your site does appear in the results, give the reader a reason to visit your site.
9. Create an XML Sitemap and upload it to the search engines. An XML Sitemap tells the search engines where to look for all of your content and ensure that pages on the site get indexed in the search engine’s directory. This is especially important on websites where content changes frequently (i.e. your Blog) or have a large number of pages. To easily create one on your WordPress website, use the Google Sitemap Generator plugin that does all the work for you including notifying the search engines that there is new content.
10. Keep your site structure simple. I usually recommend that your website go no deeper than 3 levels away from the home page in the site navigation. If humans can’t find your content, neither will the search engine robots. Important content should be close to the home page for not only the search engines but also to make it easy for people you are trying to create a relationship with to find.

For those of you who want more education on how to  build the perfectly optimized page, read the post on SEOmoz titled Perfecting Keyword Targeting & On-Page Optimization.

Search engine marketing starts with a website that has implemented the basics of search engine optimization. Nothing feels better than having your phone ring and a prospect is calling you because they found you on the Internet. It’s even nicer when they found you in the organic search engine results, regardless of which search engine they use. Strive to do the basics.

Have you implemented basic SEO on your Web site?

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

“Welcome” is Not a Useful Keyword – 10 On Page SEO Tips is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

Another week and another client calls me to ask about yet another company claiming they can optimize his website and guarantee first page placement on Google. After doing my usual research, I find a Ripoff Report by an unhappy customer who felt they were taken for a lot of money. One unhappy customer does not make the company bad. But this exercise got me wondering about why so many of these SEO and PPC companies have so many complaints posted all over the Web?

SEO and PPC are Not Commodity Products

These companies that call small business owners trying to sell them their software to manage their SEO and PPC activities are trying to treat Search Engine Marketing as a commodity – a one size fits all so to speak. This is absolutely not the case and most likely the wrong business model for success.

Each of my client’s search engine marketing strategy is unique. It takes a deep understanding of their business, their customers and what they are trying to accomplish with their online marketing. It takes creating relevant content that appeals to their prospects and attracts them to their Website. And, what works for one company may not necessarily work for another.

Are there common elements to setting up search engine optimization or a pay-per-click advertising campaign? Absolutely. But what is a common exercise is just a piece of the search engine marketing puzzle.

Take Ownership for Your Online Marketing Success

The following will help you get the most out of your online marketing effort.

Do:

• Remember that search engine optimization, pay-per-click campaigns and social media activities are all marketing activities. If you are looking for someone to help you, make sure these people understand basic marketing principals. The technology is a tool – the means to an end – not the end itself. Those who spew technical jargon to confuse you should be suspect.
• Find someone with whom you can develop a long term relationship. This doesn’t mean hiring a consultant on a retainer, but it does mean having someone you can call and pay to help you when you need it.
• Understand that search engine marketing requires a long-term commitment by you to make it work for you. Your site will get better rankings in search engines if you write content regularly, keep your social media outposts updated and active and you monitor your progress and understand what works and what does not.

Don’t:

• Hire a company that requires they take over your website, makes a copy of your website, replaces your phone number with theirs (to track phone calls as well as clicks) or transfers your domain to their control! Your domain name, website and content are assets of your company and you need to remain in control of your assets and your brand.
• Respond to emails that say they can optimize your site and guarantee that they can get your site on the first page of Google. If you notice, all the emails say the same thing exactly – they just get sent from different fake email accounts. These hopefully go into your SPAM folder and should stay there.
• Believe any sales call that claims that their SEO software can get your site top rankings ever will. Although it may work for some small businesses depending on where they are located and how competitive their industry is, most small businesses in and around major cities or in very competitive fields (like plumbing, remodeling or roofing) will never achieve their claimed results. Find someone who can help you with your overall marketing effort to differentiate yourself from your competition.

Matt McGee wrote a very good article on How to Get Started with SEO that can provide a starting point for those  interested in learning more. And although most small businesses may not need the $500 – $1000 per hour SEO consultant, you should plan to invest in someone who can help you do it right. At this point there are too many horror stories of small businesses being scammed out of a lot of money, time and visibility on the Web to not take this seriously.

What do you think? Can SEO and PPC be automated with software and become a commodity?

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Search Engine Marketing is not a Commodity Product is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

I got a call from a small business owner yesterday that reminds me why I focus on helping small business owners market their businesses. It disheartens me when someone spends a substantial amount of money with a company for pay-per-click or SEO services that do not get them any results. These companies charge $500 – $3000 per month for these services of which only a percentage of it is applied to your actual campaign. The rest goes into their pockets. They also redirect your website to a copy that they maintain, replace your phone number with one of theirs (to measure phone calls from their services along with clicks) and basically eliminate any ranking you may have in the search engines. They basically hold you hostage.

In most cases, what they actually provide can be done yourself with a little knowledge or with someone who can help you get your advertising off the ground for a lot less. Here is how you get started.

Determining Your Keywords

Finding your keywords are easy to do yourself with tools such as Google AdWords External Keyword Tool or the Google Search-based Keyword Tool. Both enable you to plug in your website and they return keywords that they associate with your website. They provide search volume and competition for the keywords. The Google Search-based Keyword Tool also provides a suggested bid price if you want to set up an AdWords campaign. These keywords can be exported so you can organize them into groups for optimizing your pages of your website or to build your pay-per-click campaigns.

Taking Care of Your Online Marketing

Before you rush into implementing a pay-per-click advertising campaign on any of the search engines, you want to make sure your website is optimized first. I just recently wrote a post on Five Easy Tips to Optimize Your WordPress Website so make sure you’ve implemented those tips and let your website get indexed by all three search engines.

Next, you want to set up your local listings in all three search engines local business centers. To make this effort easier, create a profile that contains the following information: name, address, phone numbers (office and mobile if you want folks to know it), web site address, contact email, hours of operation if relevant, payment methods, description of your business, products, services, brands and specialties, certifications, company logo, and a half dozen photos of your work if relevant. Put the content in a document where you can cut and paste it as necessary and have your images available for uploading. Then create your local business listing in Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Best of the Web. Here are the links to all three:

• Bing Local Listing Center - Log in with a Windows Live ID to create your listing.
• Yahoo! Local Listing – Log in with your Yahoo! ID to create your free listing. Yahoo! also offers enhanced and featured listings, but wait to sign up for those until you get all your free listings established.
• Google Local Business Center – Log in with your Google account to create your free listing. Google provides a dashboard that enables you to manage your listing. It gives you simple analytic data about activity and search queries used when people saw your listing. They also enable you to offer coupons with your business listing and post a message to your place page.
• Best of the Web – Create an account and submit your free listing.

I usually like to get the above done and let the search engines “do their thing” with indexing your site. Give them time to position your site for your major keywords. Then, if you still are looking for more traffic to your website, now consider creating a pay-per-click campaign. Google, Yahoo and Bing all have pay-per-click advertising that enable you to set up your campaign, manage your daily budget and monitor its progress. Setting up your campaign is simple in all cases. I usually recommend that small businesses start with a low budget and watch how the campaign sets itself up by monitoring your analytics information. You can see where your traffic is coming from, how the search engines are delivering visitors to you, which sites are referral sites and how many people come to your site directly.

In many cases, small business owners don’t really want to do this themselves. But if someone calls you with something that sounds too good to be true, most likely it is. Before you spend your money on these types of services, buyer beware – do your homework. Search the web for these businesses, looking for reviews by other small business owners before you give them your money. Better yet, consult with someone you trust to work with you on your online marketing efforts. You won’t be sorry.

Have you received these types of sales calls? How did you handle them?

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Why You Should Control Your Online Marketing is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

Striving for perfection is a nice goal, but sometimes waiting for perfection can hold you back.

The beauty of marketing on the Internet is that, in most cases, you can test, change, modify and update your campaigns once they go live. Having everything completely perfect prior to getting out there and being seen is no longer a necessity. It is more important to take action and become visible, even if it’s not perfect, than sit around and wait.

Recently, I’ve noticed this trend of waiting for perfection with some small business owners. The problem with this strategy is:

• The longer you wait, the more chance you give your competition to be found before you, potentially stealing the thunder from something you thought was unique;
• The Web changes too quickly to worry about finding small imperfections that can be fixed quickly once they are discovered;
• Marketing takes time to work and waiting just lengthens the time before you will see results.

Understand that I’m not saying not to strive for excellence in your business. However, there is a difference between striving for excellence as a goal and waiting for everything to be perfect before you take action. I totally agree that you should:

• Review your Web site and blog for spelling, grammar and other flaws that hurt the image of your business;
• Test your forms, landing pages and interactive components to make sure they work the way you want them to;
• Ensure that your brand is consistent and well designed;
• Target the right market, use the right keywords and communicate the right messages in your pay-per-click advertising.

But trying to get everything “right” (whatever that is), whether it’s your Web site, social media profiles, email campaigns or your pay-per-click advertising, is costing you clients, visibility and money.

Waiting to begin marketing on the Internet so everything is perfect is futile. Get it to a point where no one but you knows it’s not “done” and go live. The longer you wait for perfection, the more the world is passing you by!

Are you waiting for perfection before you begin a marketing campaign?

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Don’t Wait for Perfection is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

Eight down and one to go in the year end marketing review series to help small business owners get ready for a wonderful new year.

Before we plan our marketing activities for the new year, we have one more review  – do you and your business exist online? As a small business owner, how you are perceived when people search and find your information will determine whether they contact you about your products and services. So as hard as it may be to know the truth, we must understand whether:

1. We have an online presence or not;
2. Our online presence consistently projects how we want to be perceived.

Do You Exist?

This may be the easier issue to deal with as you get to start with a clean slate and do it right from the beginning. Make developing your online presence and marketing your business online the major part of your marketing plan this year. If you’re not sure how to go about developing your online presence, it may just be worth it to hire someone to help you make choices. Make sure this person has strong marketing experience in both online and traditional marketing and understands the challenges of small business owners. Make sure this person will guide you through the entire process, from brand and message development through implementation.

Is Your Brand Consistent?

With all the new tools and applications hitting us regularly, it is very common for our brand identity to get out of alignment and become inconsistent from one social network to the next. Maybe you wrote your profiles from scratch each time rather than create one document from which to pull all your information. With profiles on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Facebook Business Pages, Google, YouTube, FriendFeed, Technorati and … well you get it, it isn’t uncommon to find old information that never got updated when you updated one. And I bet if you go to your Website, your “about” section may say something different as well. Since you are already online, your marketing effort is to ensure consistency across all online profiles. This effort takes work and regular maintenance, but it is well worth it if you do take control.

What to Review and Tackle

• Start with a “vanity search” – that is search for your name and your business name and observe what comes up. Are you or your business easy to find? What is the first impression?
• Review your company name, logo and color scheme. Does it project what you do and who you are as a business? Does it work with your differentiators that you determined in part 4 of this review? If your brand no longer aligns with who you are, or you simply never had one developed, it is worth the investment to have one done professionally as it will be what people will see and associate with you. Not too long ago, you could manage with just your company name on a well designed business card. Today, marketing yourself online requires a visual identity that has strength and memorability.
• Do you have a Website and blog and are they up do date? If you don’t, get a quality domain name that aligns with your business name or a key differentiator. Have your Website built on WordPress so you can keep your content up to date. Add your blog and provide quality, relevant content that your prospects will appreciate.
• Which social networks are you currently using? Are your profiles consistent in what they project to your friends, followers and connections? Is there online content about you that you were unaware of and need to do something about?
• Once you determine the state of your online brand, update profiles for consistency and provide new content that will get indexed by the search engines. The more people can hear what you can do and how you can help them, the more likely they will think of you when they are ready to buy. Plus fresh, up-to-date content about you and your business is the best way to counter any old, negative information that may be out there.
• Plan to monitor your reputation regularly. Add Google alerts for your name, your business name and your field of expertise. See what people are saying and where your name is showing up.

Online Marketing supports Offline Businesses

Whether your business is a professional service or a local storefront, online marketing, including the use of social media, is a cost effective way to market your products and services. Your online “storefront” is always open for people to find out what you can do for them. And since 69% of people research online before making purchase decisions, your business needs to be online just to be considered. But once you are there, you must be consistent.

What does your online presence say about you and your business?

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

If I Can’t Find You Online, Do You Exist? is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.