Small Business Mavericks

OCTOBER 30, 2015

Last week we discussed the importance of long-form conten t. This week, we’ll talk about ways to package your long-form content. Keep in mind that long-form content is not the only way to approach content marketing. We recommend a mix of long-form and short-form content. But here are the ways you can use long-form content to supplement what you are doing with short articles: Blog posts – Anything over 2,000 words is considered long-form in blogging.

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Small Business Mavericks

OCTOBER 7, 2015

If you need proof that social media continues to improve, just look at the two recent updates from Twitter. I think I agree with Cynthia Boris, if you’re going to send a private tweet to 20 people, then you may as well send a public tweet. But what if you are a corporate manager and you want to send a tweet only to people you directly supervise?

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Small Business Mavericks

OCTOBER 2, 2015

You may find it surprising that there are still folks link building like it’s 2010, but I was recently approached by a company that wanted me to write a 200-300 word blog post on why their real estate product was a good buy. And I was supposed to link back to their website. The pay was good, but there was one problem. Small Business Mavericks isn’t a real estate blog.

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Small Business Mavericks

SEPTEMBER 25, 2015

In August, Smart Insights published some statistics on e-mail marketing for various sectors within the UK and U.S. markets. You’ll find these insights useful, but more importantly, they say something about how important e-mail marketing really is. Let’s take a look at some of the stats: Of 46 business sectors, e-mail open rates range from 13.9% to 29.4%.

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Small Business Mavericks

SEPTEMBER 4, 2015

How important is search engine optimization (SEO)? Is it so important that you should pore over every word on your blog and website to find ways to improve your SEO so that your content ranks higher in the search engines? It’s become fashionable in the last couple of years to claim that SEO is dead and that you should just simply write “great content.” Rand Fishkin of Moz says “good unique content” must die.

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Small Business Mavericks

AUGUST 31, 2015

If you aren’t generating traffic for your website, you can’t increase your conversions. So your first step to increasing your online business is to generate more traffic. Here are 6 powerful ways to generate more traffic for your website’s landing pages. Search engine optimization – Start by optimizing your web pages for search engine traffic.

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Small Business Mavericks

AUGUST 26, 2015

Internet marketing has come a long way since 1990, when the World Wide Web had its grand kick off. In the early days, companies joined traffic rings and wrote articles for each other’s websites, or paid for display ad space. It didn’t take long for directories to pop onto the scene. Yahoo! was one of the first, and was the first commercial success story.

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Small Business Mavericks

AUGUST 5, 2015

Search engine optimization (SEO) is just as important today as it ever was. Many online marketers have jumped on the “ SEO is dead ” bandwagon, but I assure you it isn’t dead. While SEO isn’t dead, it isn’t quite the same in practice as it used to be. The search engines (especially Google) have changed the way they index web pages so often, and so drastically, that true SEO doesn’t resemble anything like what it used to be.

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Small Business Mavericks

JULY 3, 2015

Social media marketing is a necessity in today’s online marketing world. It’s not optional any more. The only question to answer now is, which social media sites are most appropriate for your brand? Why Social Media Is Necessary. Social media has become a marketing channel of its own. Your competition is there, your customers are there, and your suppliers and business partners are there.

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Small Business Mavericks

JUNE 17, 2015

Your body’s health is important. If you don’t take care of yourself, you’ll run your body down and it will quit working. From time to time, you may feel the need to visit a doctor just to prevent your health from declining or to keep your health up to speed. Well, your online health is no different. From time to time, you need a check up.

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Small Business Mavericks

MAY 29, 2015

SEO has been around a long time. For as long as there have been search engines, if you think about it. Certainly, it has been around long enough to collect some myths that should be debunked. Here are a few of the worst: SEO is no longer being used in internet marketing. This one is kind of silly, because as long as there’s a search engine, there will be a way to optimize your site for it.

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Small Business Mavericks

MAY 18, 2015

Every two years, Search Engine Land updates their Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors. They do this by asking internet marketers & others in the industry to take the SEO Success Factors Survey. This way there is current information and adequate contribution to a popular resource. What they do is break search engine optimization into broad fundamentals using a Periodic Table of the Elements-style format.

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Small Business Mavericks

APRIL 10, 2015

'I admit I searched this title online to see what would come up, and didn’t find anyone who agreed with me on the first page. Does that mean my idea of the biggest marketing mistake is wrong? Not necessarily. Many of the ‘biggest marketing mistakes that show up on search could fit into this category because the biggest marketing mistake you can make is this: Failure to provide what is promised.

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Small Business Mavericks

APRIL 9, 2015

'We marketers like to speak a lot of trust. We discuss how we can build trust with our audience and ways we can earn trust, foster trust, and command trust for our brand. But we don’t talk much about the other side of that coin: Trusting our audience. It’s just as important as earning trust from our audience. Why You Should Trust Your Audience.

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Small Business Mavericks

APRIL 8, 2015

'It isn’t enough to churn out daily content if your content has no purpose. To be truly effective with online marketing, you have to define your goals and make every task you perform fit into your business’s mission. To do that, each content item needs to have its own purpose. Format is largely irrelevant. Each content format has its unique advantages, but the purpose for creating that content is what dictates its message.

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Small Business Mavericks

APRIL 7, 2015

'A marketing professional recently told me an interesting story — one that I haven’t verified but can easily imagine being true. A real estate agent had a slump in business and decided to experiment with IFTTT (IF This Then That), Twitter, and her business page on Foursquare. (Brianna Collier has a simple guide to this process on the Showing Suite real estate blog.

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Small Business Mavericks

APRIL 6, 2015

'Every one of us has a perspective on internet marketing that is the result of our experience, and that perspective is valuable. Moz is now accepting community speaker pitches for MozCon 2015 , which means your online marketing experience could be the perspective they are looking for to round out the presentation. Details & Deadline. Talks must be about online marketing and are only 15 minutes in length.

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Small Business Mavericks

MARCH 20, 2015

'Internet marketing and social media are intertwined because the technology is overlapping. It is amazing when you think about it: we can connect on an individual basis to people scattered all over the world. The message we want to communicate can be individualized down to the greeting on an email and we are accustomed to this fact. Facebook has established the idea that we can be ‘friends’ with people we never see.

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Small Business Mavericks

MARCH 19, 2015

'I was talking with someone who works in a company specializing in helping local businesses become effective in their internet marketing. She told me that she’d spent all day working for one particular client. For over a year, they’d been painstakingly repairing the results of some really bad advice. This particular company had done what so many small businesses used to do a few years back — they bought links.

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Small Business Mavericks

MARCH 18, 2015

'Jennifer Slegg of The SEM Post makes a valuable point about PPC landing pages in her post on What SEOs Need To Know About Google’s Doorway Pages Search Ranking Adjustment. Here’s what she says: Pay per click landing pages – particularly ones that take a minimalist approach – can also be mistaken for doorway pages by search engines. And with this change having the potential to impact an entire site, you should definitely block Googlebot from these landing pages (but do allow the AdW

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Small Business Mavericks

MARCH 17, 2015

'Joe Putnam said something interesting on Search Engine Journal in 5 Lessons From Expertly Designed PPC Landing Pages : …make sure you don’t send visitors to your homepage, which may be the biggest advertising faux pas a lot of businesses make when it comes to PPC landing pages. It’s a very common mistake you don’t want to make. That was #5 of a very good addition to SEJ’s Paid Search 101.

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Small Business Mavericks

MARCH 16, 2015

'Do you have the difference between Google Local/Google My Business listings and Google Localization straight in your mind? That difference is barely mentioned in Loren Baker’s How To Compete In Localized Google Results on Search Engine Journal. But the difference between the two reminds me of how easy it is to miss something important. Listings are where your business is located — localization is where the searcher is located.

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Small Business Mavericks

MARCH 12, 2015

'When someone decides to contact a company, they generally will figure that the contact page will be their best bet. Unfortunately, some contact pages are not so great at actually letting the user contact a real person in the company. Bizjournals just took a look at the contact challenge in Brandon Bruce’s post on 6 must-have elements for your website contact page.

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Small Business Mavericks

MARCH 13, 2015

'Do you remember the Digital Transition of 2009, when U.S. television did the switch from analog broadcasts to digital transmissions? Do you remember the whole converter box controversy and the confusion that made massive call centers spring into existence to answer the public’s questions? Do you remember the effect it had on business? Maria Contreras-Sweet, The SBA Administrator, used the DTV scenario as an example in her speech at the White House Summit on Cybersecurity and Consumer Prot

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Marketing Education Software Advertising 70

Small Business Mavericks

JANUARY 15, 2015

'Copyblogger has done it again; giving us the 2015 Cost of Online Business Report by Demian Farnworth and giving us some good examples of how the same basic information can be presented in various ways for maximum impact. The report itself is interesting because it includes the results of a survey conducted on businesses operating online. More than a fourth of those in the survey identify as Small Business Owner, and the biggest challenge is seen as generating traffic.

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Small Business Mavericks

JANUARY 14, 2015

'It’s becoming a standard need for businesses of any size — the whole Search Engine Optimization thing is no longer the realm inhabited by the computer geeks. Everybody should understand enough of how the internet works to utilize SEO, even if all you are doing is trying to find something. For a business, though, SEO skills are increasingly sought among employees.

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Small Business Mavericks

JANUARY 13, 2015

'There is a good way to take an event your business hosts, like a workshop or seminar, and turn it into a lot of opportunities for SEO. Think of it as a big box of stuff you can unpack, label, and put where it can be used. Unpack The Content From The Event. There has been a lot of information generated for your event, right? How would someone looking for information ask about it?

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Small Business Mavericks

JANUARY 12, 2015

'Search Engine Journal has consistently been a source of good ideas. Recently, Kristi Hines’ 10 LinkedIn Tips and Strategies You Need To Know has some great ones. These are helpful suggestions that may be exactly what you are looking for: Learn how to unsubscribe from blog posts and unclutter your inbox. Changing the frequency of a group digest can make life less hectic.

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Small Business Mavericks

JANUARY 8, 2015

'An interesting observation was made in Jennifer LeClaire’s CIO Today article about customer service trends. The observation is that today’s “digitally native customer” (those who are comfortable and competent with technology) prefers a site that is self-service to working with an agent. I have to agree. If I want an answer about a company’s service or product, I’d much rather go on the site and get the information immediately.

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Small Business Mavericks

DECEMBER 26, 2014

'Landing pages are important. Your landing page, according to Google , affects quality score, ad rank, and advertising costs. But the effect of the landing page is most powerful with user experience. So what does Google look for in a landing page, and how does it actually play out with the real people who visit your site? Think About Experience. Here’s what Google says it looks for: providing relevant, useful, and original content. promoting transparency and fostering trustworthiness on yo

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Sites Cost Mobile Google 146

Small Business Mavericks

DECEMBER 24, 2014

'Have you ever opened a gift that really wasn’t all that great? It was a filler — something that made your pile of presents look bigger than it actually was. This time of year is legendary for gifts being returned because it happens to all of us. The pressure to give what looks like a lot of gifts makes it tempting to give some real junk.

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Small Business Mavericks

DECEMBER 23, 2014

'One of the best things to do at the end of the year is look back and see what was good about it and what you can change to make the next year better. At the end of 2013, I predicted that 2014 would be The Year of Social Metrics. Facebook had risen to #1 status online, LinkedIn and Twitter were going strong, and social media was an increasing part of daily life.

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Metrics Strategy Social Media LinkedIn 107

Small Business Mavericks

DECEMBER 22, 2014

'As the 2014 year wraps up, the predictions and lists for 2015 are starting to roll out. Just like all New Year’s Resolutions, there are some good ideas that everybody agrees they should do. The challenge is doing what you planned, right? B2C has a good look at SEO in 2015: the 5 Essential Elements of a Successful Strategy by Keely McGroarty, and I think some of these should make it on to your list next year: Responsive design — because mobile is only going to be more prevalent in th

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SEO List URL Small Business 126

Small Business Mavericks

DECEMBER 4, 2014

'We just got past one of the most intense weekends for marketers — the official start to the holiday shopping season. Whether you celebrate Christmas or not, this is the time of year to shop. It reminds me of the opening day of fishing season, when anglers stand shoulder to shoulder along the banks and cast their lines into the water in hopes of snagging a fish.

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Mobile Banking Overview Small Business 98

Small Business Mavericks

DECEMBER 3, 2014

'“ Both Facebook and Amazon are coming at Google’s lock on advertising from new angles–that’s why this could be an honest to goodness fight for online advertising dollars and beyond.” – Ellen Gipko, SEJ. Ther are some interesting developments in the world of online advertising. Over at Search Engine Journal, Ellen Gipko has taken a look at Why Amazon and Facebook Are Gaining on Google and gives us what she sees as pivotal in this turf war.

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Small Business Mavericks

DECEMBER 2, 2014

'I have to admit, I like infographics a lot — if they are done right. There’s something about seeing a visual that helps me visualize, and someday I might jump on the infographic bandwagon myself if I can figure out a reason to do it for Small Business Mavericks. Pending that day, I look at the wisdom other marketers have compiled and learn from their mistakes so that I don’t make those mistakes myself.

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Small Business Mavericks

DECEMBER 1, 2014

'Okay, you’ve managed to manipulate your stuff into a great SERP ranking — so what? The best rankings in the world aren’t going to give much of a return on your investment if people visit your site and leave because it isn’t what they need. The whole promise of a high placement on the search engine results page is that these sites will deliver.

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