Small Business Mavericks

OCTOBER 28, 2015

Whoever your audience is, whether you are targeting businesses or consumers, the first rule of marketing is to go where your clientele hangs out. So if you are targeting other businesses with your online marketing, then read what they’re reading and hang out in the same places they are hanging out at. For social networking, you should join LinkedIn.

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Small Business Mavericks

OCTOBER 23, 2015

Have you noticed that content marketing is currently trending toward long-form content? By that, I mean the following types of content: 2,000-word plus blog posts. White papers. Books and e-books. Long articles, such as what you’ll find at Medium and Longreads. The question is, why is online current trending toward the long form? Marketers Destroyed the Short Form.

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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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Real Estate Small Business Sites Buy 70

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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Apparel Statistics Marketing Retail 70

Small Business Mavericks

SEPTEMBER 21, 2015

One might be tempted to think that, since YouTube is the second largest search engine online, video marketing is an over-used–or, at least, widely used–form of online marketing. In fact, while it is used quite extensively (as of November 2014, 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minutes), I’d say it’s still a bit under-used.

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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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Directory Engineering Social Media Review 70

Small Business Mavericks

AUGUST 21, 2015

Social media has come into its own as a lead generation system. Of course, like a lot of other things, it matters how you do it. If you expect to join Facebook today and get inundated with leads tomorrow without a strategy, then you will be disappointed. Strategy is everything. That said, here are 4 uncanny ways to generate more leads using social media channels: Write an E-book - This might seem out of place on a list like this, but you can actually use an e-book to generate leads through soci

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Small Business Mavericks

JUNE 26, 2015

Small business owners often confuse website design with website development. While they are similar, they are completely different tasks. Here’s a little discussion on how they are different. What Web Designers Do. Web designers are the beauticians of the Web. Their job is to make websites look beautiful. This requires a certain set of skills in both graphics and coding.

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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

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

APRIL 3, 2015

'There is a deceptive slogan floating around our culture–one that says, “If you build it, they will come.” This movie misquote leaves out an important factor: If they don’t know it exists, why would they come anywhere near it? How would they find it? A Case Study in Word of Mouth. I thought of this when reading How a Simple Online Marketing Strategy Resurrected Molem Kgomo’s African Doll Business on Destiny.

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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 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 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

MARCH 10, 2015

'Michael Powers of Marketo recently wrote about planning a multi-channel event the right way , and he has some good points: Start early — it takes time to get approvals and gives you room for flexibility when the situation calls for it. Get all your channels involved — social, PR, content, demand generation, product marketing, even executives should have a role that they value.

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Small Business Mavericks

MARCH 9, 2015

'“A site’s URL structure should be as simple as possible. Consider organizing your content so that URLs are constructed logically and in a manner that is most intelligible to humans (when possible, readable words rather than long ID numbers). For example, if you’re searching for information about aviation, a URL like [link] will help you decide whether to click that link.

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Small Business Mavericks

MARCH 6, 2015

'Moz is asking for your input by announcing the 2015 Online Marketing Industry Survey. Cyrus Shepard’s post has links to start taking this fifth edition of the survey that has been such a benefit to all of us in the past. Once the surveys are complete, the data is compiled and available (without the identifying personal info) to everyone. You can finish the survey in about ten minutes.

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Small Business Mavericks

MARCH 4, 2015

'Nobody wants their email campaign to end up unseen and unopened. But it’s pretty easy to get there, especially when we make the 5 mistakes that will land your email in the spam folder given to us by Aleksandr Peterson on Entrepreneur. Here’s his list: Inadequate permissions — it’s a good idea to have a two-step process to opt in for emails, where a verifying email has an embedded link to complete the sign-up.

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Small Business Mavericks

MARCH 3, 2015

'One of the most important things in marketing is the ability to see your targeted demographic as the people they really are instead of the numbers you analyze. Most of us can look around and see it happening with other companies, but it’s hard sometimes to see it in your own. Here’s what happens: a small company does a good job connecting with the customer. as a result, there are more customers. because there are more customers, the company gets bigger. as the company gets bigger, p

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Small Business Mavericks

MARCH 2, 2015

'If you were online at all last week, you probably saw one of the viral links to either a picture of a dress, or an explanation of why some people saw white/gold and some saw blue/black. I’m not going to discuss what color it is, or why people saw different colors. I want to talk about why we cared about a picture of a dress most people wouldn’t wear.

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Small Business Mavericks

FEBRUARY 24, 2015

'It used to be that LinkedIn was thought of as the ultimate job site, a place where job searchers and recruiters could connect and the all-important professional networking take place. It is all that, but as Louisa Chan says recently on Copyblogger, “it is evolving into a lead generation and publishing hub for content marketers.” She suggests 7 ways to build online authority with LinkedIn : Complete your profile — this is how they know who you are when the readers check you out

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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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Analysis Analytics Small Business Sites 136

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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Small Business Mavericks

DECEMBER 19, 2014

'Joe Pulizzi has a lot to say about content marketing. His recent post on Copyblogger is what he calls a “how-to-think” post, and he proposes a different approach to the subject. 5 Steps to Revising Your Content Marketing Strategy to Attract and Retain Future Customers reverses the traditional timeline for most businesses. Most businesses will start with the product.

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Products Proposal Small Business Strategy 164

Small Business Mavericks

DECEMBER 18, 2014

'Did you know that many of the ads served on the web don’t actually show up on the screen? Isn’t that kind of crazy to think about? But it makes sense when you remember about who reads the web — humans and computers. The robot sees what the person doesn’t, and that’s why served impressions have been important. Still, the industry is shifting to valuing viewable impressions instead.

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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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SEO Engineering How To Small Business 102

Small Business Mavericks

NOVEMBER 25, 2014

'This is the time of year that mice come into the house. In a silent moment, I’ll realize something is moving around behind an intended project that has been sitting in one place, move that pile, and discover a stash of the dog’s dry food that has been carefully hidden by a mouse intending to stockpile for the winter. My house has a life that goes on without my permission until I take steps to stop it.

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Small Business Mavericks

NOVEMBER 24, 2014

'It’s pretty hard to be involved with social media and never make a mistake — not even a teensy weensy one. Most of us make mistakes, and it kind of is reassuring to me that it’s universal. On the other hand, when a business is trying to invest wisely in social media marketing, the stakes are higher, and mistakes can be harder to overcome.

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Social Media Marketing Social Media Management Resources 107

Small Business Mavericks

NOVEMBER 20, 2014

'It’s always a little risky to deal in predictions because nobody knows exactly what will happen next year, but this is the season when we will start to see those predictions multiply like the things-to-do list on your holiday planner. I think we all are interested in looking ahead, and Say Daily’s Venn has Beverly Macy’s predictions for the Top 5 Trends in Digital Media for 2015.

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Marketing Mobile Trends Data 102

Small Business Mavericks

NOVEMBER 19, 2014

'I know we don’t mention Bing Ads nearly as much we discuss that competitor of theirs, but it isn’t because nothing has been happening. They recently have gone for the trifecta of close variants on phrase match, exact match, and broad match modifier keywords, according to Ginny Marvin at Search Engine Land. Here’s what that can look like with phrase match keywords: minecraft game online = minecraft games (plural vs singular). pizza delivery near your hometown = pizza deliveries

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Hotels Small Business Engineering Campaign 102

Small Business Mavericks

NOVEMBER 18, 2014

'With all the changes happening in SEO, it makes sense that some would declare the keyword to be dead. But then you read what others say, and they say it isn’t dead at all and keywords still have value. We have talked a lot about the changes in keywords on this blog. I don’t think of “keywords” as a magic formula where the keyword was sprinkled liberally throughout the text for no other reason than catching a search engine’s attention is alive, but I do think that

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Engineering SEO Small Business Types 107

Small Business Mavericks

OCTOBER 10, 2014

'I just came across an interesting survey, BRANDfog’s 2014: The Global, Social CEO. This annual look at social media engagement in the C-Suite explores the changing role of a business leader’s involvement with social media by surveying 1000 employees in both the UK and the US. The industries represented are diverse, and the company size varies from startup to Fortune 1000.

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Social Media Survey Startup Reputation 107