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 2, 2015

Did you know 97% of all local product purchases begin online? That’s right. When customers walk into your store to purchase an article of clothing, a pair of shoes, a new door for their bathroom, a lawn mower, a book, or whatever, there’s a better than even chance that they’ve already researched that product online. They don’t have to be sold.

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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

JULY 22, 2015

Do you know what the most effective Internet marketing is? We get this question all the time. Sometimes it is asked, “What is the best way to promote a business online?” Or someone might ask, “Which Internet marketing tactic gets the most results?” No matter how the question is asked, the questioner always has one goal in mind–to ascertain the most effective strategy for marketing their business online.

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Small Business Mavericks

JUNE 29, 2015

If you’ve been markting online for a while, then you likely know a little bit about content creation. Even if you aren’t sure about the practical strategy aspect of content marketing, you know you should be doing it. But what about content curation? Is there any value in curating the content of others? There are a couple of ways of looking at this question.

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Small Business Mavericks

JUNE 19, 2015

It’s easy to dive into social media and get lost. Many small business owners, when they first discover the usefulness of social media, forgot what they’re really there for and spend hours just playing around. A post on Facebook from So-and-So that leads to an interesting article about an important topic related to your business leads to another interesting article about a similar-but-unrelated topic.

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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 27, 2015

David Lizerbram is an attorney and business law strategist. His advice on the Marketo Blog – Dot Your I’s and Cross Your T’s: Don’t Let Copyright Law Be Used Against Your Content Marketing – is good advice for anyone creating content for internet use. To quote Mr. Lizerbram, “DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) states that if you own the copyright to a piece of content, such as written copy, images, or videos, and someone uses it online without your permission, you can se

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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 15, 2015

'One of the best ways to develop a reputation for knowing what you are doing is writing a book about your subject. There is something impressive about being responsible for all those words, right? With the ease of digital publishing, it’s not difficult to put together some e-books and become a published author. It makes you authority and it also is an excellent marketing strategy for your business.

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Small Business Mavericks

APRIL 17, 2015

'ScienceDaily has an interesting report on a recent study from Ithaca College. In this research, assistant professor of integrated marketing communications Lisa Barnard looks at how consumers felt about being tracked. Her experience in New York City’s advertising industry raised questions about the conventional wisdom of targeted ads. “My experience was that consumer’s reactions to it were not good.

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Small Business Mavericks

APRIL 13, 2015

'Moz just came out with an interesting look at The Incredible Shrinking SERP — 2015 Edition. In the post, Dr. Peter J. Meyers walks us through his research on the changing Google results pages and explains his reasoning before concluding with this statement: If we’re stuck in the mindset of only one “true” organic, then our opportunities are going to keep shrinking every day.

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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

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 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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Small Business Mavericks

MARCH 11, 2015

'Did you see this Google+ post by Gary Illyes? Here’s something for y’all web wranglers: please tell search engines about your HTTPS URLs! A recent, small scale analysis we ran showed that more than 80% of the HTTPS URLs that are eligible for indexing (i.e. no crawl issues, no noindex, all’s good), can’t become canonical because website owners don’t tell us about them.

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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 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 18, 2015

'Every website really has to speak at least 3 languages to be effective. How does your content measure up? HTML — Hypertext Markup Language. This is the language that exists behind the words, that the computers use to navigate your site. This coding is essential because it determines how your site looks and how it is accessed by the search engines.

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Small Business Mavericks

FEBRUARY 19, 2015

'Have you seen the term, “Grammar Nazi”? It’s generally used in a slightly derogatory way when one of the people who care about language point out flawed application of its use. Some people don’t care about mistakes in grammar, the wrong use of a word, or where an apostrophe is placed. But many do. The reason why it’s important in business is that mistakes erode your authority.

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Small Business Mavericks

DECEMBER 31, 2014

'I love this time of the year because it is a natural transition from looking back to looking ahead — and the future always is full of possibilities. In the field of marketing, I think there are exciting things happening: FCC Auction 97 is on hold until January 5 and current bids are totaling well over 44 billion dollars. When that kind of money is being spent on wireless licenses, it means businesses see the potential for making lots of profit on their investment.

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Small Business Mavericks

DECEMBER 30, 2014

'By now, you probably have seen the “Facebook Year in Review” storm over the way that some users were presented with painful memories from the past year in a happy sort of way. Eric Meyer, an expert web designer, became the inadvertent spokesman for the opposition when he took issue with the practice on his blog. His recent post on the whole subject has some very good points for any business that has an internet presence to consider carefully.

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Small Business Mavericks

DECEMBER 29, 2014

'One of the trends in online marketing is the increasing use of video. People just love to watch stuff, and as wireless services expand and mobile devices multiply they will be watching more stuff in the year to come. Helena Clark’s recent Search Engine Watch post has some practical tips for getting the content right on YouTube ads. As she rightly points out, “ AdWords for video offers search marketers the chance to reach a big, very engaged, very specific audience with rich content.

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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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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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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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Small Business Mavericks

NOVEMBER 28, 2014

'By the time you read this, Macy’s massive Thanksgiving ad campaign will be in full swing on Facebook. The plans, according to Internet Retailer , include targeting every woman in the United States who is over 21 with a video ad promoting their holiday magic & spirit. Anybody who interacts with the ad by commenting, sharing, or liking it will be targeted with follow-up ads about their sales.

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Small Business Mavericks

NOVEMBER 26, 2014

'Unless you have been ignoring the world of SEO, you have an idea about semantic search. I think it’s exciting to see how the focus in marketing is coming back around to the humanity of connections rather than the mechanics of coding, although you still need both. The two are getting blended in semantic search. A Dozen Things To Do. In the article Ian Harris wrote for Search Engine Journal, he suggests 12 things you should be doing right now for semantic search.

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