Small Business Mavericks

NOVEMBER 15, 2011

Skype is one of the leaders in voice over internet technology, if not THE leader in VOIP. They have some awesome services for businesses who are ready to enter the 21st century. Consider these: Free Skype to Skype calling. You can have your own online phone number. Anyone from anywhere can call you and it’s local. Conference calls through Skype.

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Wireless Small Business Mobile Conference 101

Small Business Mavericks

NOVEMBER 21, 2011

Yahoo! has announced that today spells the death of a search tool that has been with us since 2005. That was when Yahoo! actually tried to be a search engine. Yahoo! Site Explorer is no more. Yahoo! Site Explorer is a tool that many webmasters used to see who was linking to them, and who was linking to their competition. For years, every webmaster who wanted real live link metrics used it.

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Tools Yahoo Sites Metrics 98

Small Business Mavericks

NOVEMBER 20, 2011

It didn’t take long for some people to figure out early on in social media marketing circles to link up their social media accounts.That is, whatever you post to one automatically posts to another. It’s a great time saver, especially if you have several social media sites you are a member of and you tend to post the same information to them.

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Tumblr API WordPress Aggregator 98

Small Business Mavericks

NOVEMBER 14, 2011

If you troll the social media websites – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and various social bookmarking websites – you’ll find a lot of online marketers just posting links to their content. It’s pretty bland. But what if these marketers took a different approach? What if they took a less self-interested approach? Like John Deere.

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Social Media Social Bookmarking Marketing Project 98

Small Business Mavericks

NOVEMBER 9, 2011

This is no joke. Funny man Louis CK has decided to abandon traditional media and deliver his own comedy routines via his website. He’s going to charge $5 per download. Is that really a good idea? There have been similar experiments before. About ten years ago Stephen King conducted his own experiment on a book download that didn’t turn out so well.

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Small Business Social Media Twitter Brands 98

Small Business Mavericks

NOVEMBER 7, 2011

It’s on. Who’s going to win? Is it Facebook? Twitter? Google+? LinkedIn? YouTube? For about five years now, we have seen social media marketing rise to the top of the Internet marketing practices and become the most important aspect of marketing and branding online. The social media sites themselves are striving to be No. 1. Currently, that position is held by Facebook.

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Social Media YouTube Engineering LinkedIn 98

Small Business Mavericks

NOVEMBER 5, 2011

Online marketing is a 24/7 endeavor. That’s because the Internet never sleeps. But what if you run a Monday through Friday 9-5 type of business? Should you work on off hours? Of course, I don’t know your schedule so I can’t tell you when you should work. But if you have trouble performing essential online marketing tasks such as social media updating, SEO for your website , and other tasks associated with managing your online reputation, then you have to fit those activities in

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Social Bookmarking Reputation HootSuite SEO 98

Small Business Mavericks

NOVEMBER 4, 2011

Copyblogger podcast radio host Robert Bruce interviews Copyblogger CEO Sonia Simone about privacy and other content matters. So the question is, is privacy important for marketers and small business owners? I think it is. Here’s the best way to think about this. Your clients don’t want you to sell their private information. They’d rather you protect it at all costs.

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Privacy Small Business Energy Data 98

Small Business Mavericks

NOVEMBER 1, 2011

One hard truth that every sales pro must learn sooner or later is that perception is reality. What the prospect perceives to be true is true. Or it may as well be because the prospect is going to act as if it is true, and you will either win or lose based on that perception. That’s true whether you are doing business online or off line. The same thing is true of your current customers.

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SEO Reputation Skills Communities 98

Small Business Mavericks

NOVEMBER 29, 2011

Ask Aaron Wall who’s taking over the Web and it seems as if he is saying it’s Wal-Mart. He makes some good points in this post, but there was one paragraph that really stood out. In the meantime, I expect Google to keep increasing search complexity such that it’s prohibitively expensive to make & market a small independent commercial website.

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SEO Domain Name Hosting Small Business 93

Small Business Mavericks

NOVEMBER 26, 2011

First there was Black Friday – the biggest shopping day of the year for most brick and mortar stores. Then there was Cyber Monday, which turned out to be the biggest shopping day of the year for online merchants. Now, small businesses can relish in the day that is their’s. Small Business Saturday. Today, of all days. Small Business Saturday is a way for small businesses to get in on the action and you can do this whether your business is an online-only business, a brick and mortar bu

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Small Business Resources LinkedIn Video 93

Small Business Mavericks

NOVEMBER 23, 2011

This weekend is the weekend that every Internet marketer and every offline marketer will be looking at to determine the state of the economy overall and the state of their business. We all know that Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, is the biggest shopping day of the year – off line. The following Monday is the biggest shopping day online.

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comScore Trends Marketing Small Business 93

Small Business Mavericks

NOVEMBER 22, 2011

A recent survey shows that Facebook is the king of social media for small businesses. I think there’s an interesting study here. Why is Facebook so effective for small businesses? 36% say it’s very effective and 47% say it’s moderately so. That’s 83% who say that Facebook has any level of effectiveness. Is it just because there are 800 million users?

Social Media 93

Social Media MySpace Facebook Small Business 93

Small Business Mavericks

NOVEMBER 19, 2011

Online marketers like to talk about the long tail, but what is it and why is it so important? Of course, many online marketers don’t do anything about the long tail. The might talk about it. But you’ll notice, if you watch for long, that they don’t do anything about it. Think of search engine results as a lizard. If it helps, picture a chameleon.

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Small Business Mavericks

NOVEMBER 18, 2011

Hashtags got their start on Twitter. It was a way for tweeters to keep tabs on a conversation that was taking place and to follow that conversation because their Twitter streams were moving so fast. Without hashtags, many tweeters would have been lost, only capturing some of the conversation around a particular topic. Hashtags are real simple. You include a key phrase preceded by the # symbol.

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Small Business Mavericks

NOVEMBER 16, 2011

Newsletters have been great business communication tools for years. In fact, the 20th century has seen a proliferation of newspapers of various sorts. When desktop publishing became fashionable in the 1990s, everyone soon had a newsletter. It became possible for small businesses to have their very own newsletter at an affordable price – as long as they had the time to do it themselves.

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Newsletter Small Business Fashion Price 93

Small Business Mavericks

NOVEMBER 11, 2011

Let’s say you want to order a pizza. So you Google “pizza wayzata minnesota.” If there is a popular pizza joint in Wayzata that is getting a lot of +1s on Google’s new social platform Google+, the search engine could tell you that in the SERP. Thanks to the Google Operating System blog for pointing this out. This could have far-reaching consequences for local businesses trying to increase their search engine positioning.

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Google Data Badge Engineering 93

Small Business Mavericks

NOVEMBER 10, 2011

Google+ business pages haven’t even been out a week yet and already they’re getting criticisms. Petty criticisms at that. I’m not saying Robert Scoble is wrong, just petty. I hear that the things he wants Google+ to do are on the way. Should Google have added those features before rolling its pages out publicly? Possibly so. But that’s neither here nor there.

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Google Products Features Company 93

Small Business Mavericks

NOVEMBER 8, 2011

If you’ve been following the Google+ soap opera, then here’s another twist for you. You can now get your very own Google+ page for business. This is the moment we’ve all been waiting for, folks. If you have a Facebook page, then you know how terrific it is for marketing and branding your business through Facebook. The Google+ business pages are going to do the same thing for businesses.

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Google Discount Training Facebook 93

Small Business Mavericks

NOVEMBER 3, 2011

Search engine marketing professionals love to talk about ranking factors. Sometimes they get a little too deep in the weeds. But I like what Danny Sullivan has done at Search Engine Land in creating The Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors. I like that he kept is simple and that he made it visual. That’s a big leap forward in terms of learning SEO for someone new to the game.

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SEO Engineering Sites Buy 93

Small Business Mavericks

NOVEMBER 2, 2011

Mikal Belicove makes a good point when he says that not all publicity is good publicity. Are you still sending out press releases to every online source you find? You might want to rethink that strategy. Reputation matters and if you get associated with low quality spam sites, that will be a hard reputation to shake. It could stay with you for the rest of your online life.

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Press Release Reputation Publishing Sites 87

Small Business Mavericks

NOVEMBER 28, 2011

Today is the biggest online shopping day of the year. Or is it? According to Mark W. Smith of Detroit Free Press , it’s all a sham. You’ve been had. Just as Hallmark created days for greeting card sales, the candy makers created days to make more candy sales, and the Easter Bunny is in cahoots with Santa Claus and the credit card companies to keep you busy twice a year.

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Retail Buy Company Small Business 70