Small Business Mavericks

JULY 24, 2012

It wasn’t too long ago that shady SEOs discovered they could engage in negative SEO tactics and kill their competitors in the search engine rankings. But recent changes at Google have weighed in favor of the innocent victim. Matt Cutts explains negative SEO briefly in a recent Google+ post : If you received a message yesterday about unnatural links to your site, don’t panic.

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SEO Issues Engineering Google 156

Small Business Mavericks

JULY 22, 2012

Search engine optimization has a bad reputation. Many people don’t trust it and it’s largely due to bad advice that SEOs often give. Some of those SEOs are shady characters who just don’t have any ethics. Others are people who giving advice based on blogs they’ve read and outdated information. Others are just people with their hearts in the right place but not experienced enough to give solid advice.

SEO 156

SEO Reputation Engineering Google 156

Small Business Mavericks

JULY 15, 2012

Constant Contact has a post listing 21 ways non-profit agencies can use Facebook to spread word about their missions. It’s a great post and made me think that small businesses can do the same thing. I think all of these could just as well apply to small businesses. Here’s the list: Behind the scenes footage - Yeah, why not take photos and video of your employees working and post them on your page?

Facebook 129

Facebook Small Business Education Survey 129

Small Business Mavericks

JULY 29, 2012

Blogging has often been called the bridge between social media and search engine optimization. Once you understand it you’ll know why. With blogging you are feeding the search engines every time you create a new blog post. If you blog once a day, that’s a new web page on your website. The blog pings a list of services that help the post get crawled and within hours your blog post is indexed and searchable in the search engines.

Social Media 107

Social Media Engineering SEO Feed 107

Small Business Mavericks

JULY 26, 2012

Are you linking to your social media profiles? If you’re like most small business owners, then the answer is no. In fact, fewer than 20% of SMBs link to social media profiles, and they’re making a big mistake. There are two primary reasons you should link from your website or blog to social media websites : It builds your social authority.

Social Media 107

Social Media Social Graph Reputation SEO 107

Small Business Mavericks

JULY 13, 2012

Some people call it “negative SEO.” Malicious links are a competitive tactic that utilizes time to create bad low-quality links for another website with the intent to downgrade that website’s search rankings. It’s important to point out, however, that if you’ve experienced a decline in search rankings, it does not mean that you’ve been a victim of this type of malicious link building.

SEO 107

SEO Campaign Engineering Team 107

Small Business Mavericks

JULY 23, 2012

There is more to analytics than simply looking at how many website visitors you have and where they are coming from. One often overlooked analytics measurement is which part of your pages are the most popular among your website visitors. To get that information you need to employ eye tracking studies so you can see where your visitors are spending the most time.

Conversation 105

Conversation Analytics Study Buy 105

Small Business Mavericks

JULY 17, 2012

If you think people are happy using Facebook, then you just aren’t in touch with reality. According to a recent survey , Facebook has more users than any other social network but those users don’t necessarily like Facebook. Google+ users, on the other hand, score the highest on the Happy User Scale with a customer satisfaction score of 78 out of 100.

Social Media 101

Social Media Wikipedia Survey Yahoo 101

Small Business Mavericks

JULY 12, 2012

One of the worst things that you can do online is ignore your customers on social media. Even if they post negative content about your business such as a complaint about your products or service. Or, I should say, especially if they complain about your business. Any business that doesn’t take customer complaints seriously is telling its customers that they aren’t important.

Social Media 101

Social Media Reputation Cost Products 101

Small Business Mavericks

JULY 31, 2012

You’ve likely heard that a DIY social media campaign is free. It doesn’t cost you any money. But I beg to differ. Sure, it’s free to sign up for a social media account. Whether you sign up at Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or one of thousands of social media websites online, it doesn’t cost you anything – most of the time.

Social Media 98

Social Media ROI Cost Course 98

Small Business Mavericks

JULY 27, 2012

Great content is everyone’s goal. That is, everyone who attempts to market their business, product, or service online. But why is great content so important? Can’t you do the same thing with mediocre content? That seems like a silly question, but there is a lot of mediocre content on the Internet. And a lot of bad content. After all, not all content can be great.

Content 98

Content Engineering Questions Products 98

Small Business Mavericks

JULY 25, 2012

Microsoft has announced that starting August 1st they will charge for the use of Bing’s API. This is going to kill a lot of free SEO tools, and it could very well put a dent in Bing’s overall market share as well. Let’s face it, pursuing a solid SEO strategy is getting more expensive all the time. Some smaller companies already cannot afford to pay an SEO consultant for services, so they end up doing it themselves if at all.

API 98

API Microsoft SEO Engineering 98

Small Business Mavericks

JULY 20, 2012

Facebook recently made a couple of relatively quiet announcements regarding its analytics product Insights and how Reach is measured on brand pages. The first change has to do with how Reach is measured. Facebook said that Reach going forward will be determined by a page visitor who scrolls down and actually loads a news item. In other words, it wasn’t measured this way before so it could mean that Reach for most pages will down as a result of this change.

Facebook 98

Facebook Analytics Policies Mobile 98

Small Business Mavericks

JULY 14, 2012

More and more, businesses are using social media for more than just marketing. It’s quickly becoming a way of life for online businesses. But is that good or bad? Personally, I think it’s good. While branding and reputation management are certainly important, maintaining strong relationships with your customers, partners, and suppliers is equally important.

Social Media 98

Social Media Reputation LinkedIn Tools 98

Small Business Mavericks

JULY 6, 2012

The mark of a good social media website is how serious its owners are about improving it. If the ownership team is serious about creating a useful and rewarding user experience and trying to keep up with the rapid changes of the web, then you have a good social media website. There are a few good ones out there, Pinterest now being one of them. Pinterest started out as a way for marketers to share images with their friends.

Video 98

Video Marketing YouTube Engineering 98

Small Business Mavericks

JULY 3, 2012

Blogging, more than any other kind of marketing, is multi-dimensional. In fact, I’ve identified 5 key dimensions of your blog and they have all equal value. When you blog you should keep each of these 5 dimensions in mind. Here they are, the 5 dimensions of blogging: Search engine optimization – Every blog post is a separate web page. Since search engines rank web pages , if you blog every day for a year and each blog post is optimized for 3 key phrases, then you’ll have 1,095

Reputation 96

Reputation Compete Engineering Conversation 96

Small Business Mavericks

JULY 19, 2012

I never thought I’d say this, but the Fortune 100 are learning how to market themselves online – and they’re doing it in rather unexpected ways. Of course, we’re talking about companies that are accustomed to interrupting our regular programming to blast us with marketing messages on our televisions and radios. Now, they’re doing it on YouTube.

Video 93

Video Marketing YouTube Small Business 93

Small Business Mavericks

JULY 18, 2012

Are you afraid of that old pill called duplicate content? Should you be? I want you to feel free to pursue a dynamic content marketing strategy , so I’m going to share something with you that few online marketers are willing to let you know about. Most of your competition want you to be afraid of duplicate content penalties. And that’s why they won’t tell you about syndication.

Syndication 93

Syndication Content Marketing Engineering 93

Small Business Mavericks

JULY 16, 2012

No matter what kind of business you are in, you can develop a process or methodology of accomplishing your important tasks and then teach that to others. That is really the essence of running your business like it’s a book. And if you think about it, a book is nothing more than a teaching tool. At least, that’s how John Jantsch thinks about it.

Newsletter 93

Newsletter System Course Process 93

Small Business Mavericks

JULY 7, 2012

Don’t sweat it if you have been marketing yourself online and not been using Twitter. There are good solid reasons to use Twitter for marketing and it’s never too late to get started. Here are 5 solid reasons to include Twitter in your online marketing efforts. Twitter now uses autocomplete. This is a search feature, so what does it have to do with marketing?

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Twitter Marketing Discount Hashtag 93

Small Business Mavericks

JULY 1, 2012

Small business owners all over the world are about to get a big boost in helping them brand their businesses online. If television advertising has been off limits to you because of the high cost of production, maybe you can turn to online video marketing – or video branding if you prefer – instead. It seems that YouTube is working on putting together a marketplace where video marketers and on screen video talent can hook up.

YouTube 93

YouTube Video Brands Small Business 93

Small Business Mavericks

JULY 21, 2012

Some small business owners seem a bit confused about the difference between local search engine optimization and geotargeting. I can sum up the difference in a single sentence: Geotargeting can take place across any geographic area. If you build a website, for instance, that targets services toward anyone in Minnesota, that’s geotargeting. But it can hardly be called local search engine optimization.

SEO 170

SEO Engineering Small Business Campaign 170

Small Business Mavericks

JULY 9, 2012

As a marketer, and as a social media consultant, I get a little defensive whenever someone says anything negative about my profession. But Shel Israel recently had a thoughtful post on marketing and social media at Forbes. One thing he said in particular threw me for a loop. Organizations are back to measuring social media programs in terms of ROI, which makes as little sense as determining the ROI of wearing clothing to a business meeting.

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Social Media Marketing ROI Consultant 98