Small Business Mavericks

MARCH 6, 2012

If your business has an online presence then you are now in a very competitive market. Unlike traditional bricks and mortar businesses, an online presence has to compete with a much wider range of entities. You are not competing with just your business competitors – you are also competing with those looking to make a quick buck through Adsense or affiliate marketing sites, and mom and dad blogs that often attract good search placements and social media attention.

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Small Business Mavericks

JANUARY 5, 2012

Have you ever wondered where all those ads on Facebook and Twitter come from? And, how do you get your business ad there? Although some people may think that the advertising are interrupting the games they play on Facebook, or are just annoying. However, it is a really good place to put your business. More people will see you just on social networks alone.

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Small Business Mavericks

SEPTEMBER 24, 2012

I’ve changed my thinking over the years about how small businesses can make that first all-important step to achieving an online presence. Advice I’ve given in the past is the same advice that most small business marketing consultants give: Buy a domain name, pay for hosting, set up a website, etc. The problem with this advice is that many small business owners don’t have the time to manage their own website, let alone learn everything they need to learn to set up a business on

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Small Business Mavericks

AUGUST 31, 2012

SEO gurus can sometimes shroud the work of search engine optimization in mystery. It’s usually done to make people believe it’s difficult work so they can sell more services. The truth is, it’s really not that difficult. Here’s an article that sums it up nicely in a cute little nutshell. The sad thing about the article is that natural writing on the Web is really nothing new.

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Small Business Mavericks

JUNE 26, 2012

Marketing Pilgrim has an interesting take on video marketing. I like what Frank Reed says in this paragraph: You must consider how your product is able to be ‘pitched’ via video. It’s that simple. Whether your business is large or small people want to know what you do in the quickest and easiest format for them. So what if you feel that video is too expensive?

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Small Business Mavericks

JUNE 13, 2012

If you’ve been online for very long, then you know one thing: Things change. A lot. Google, in particular, is well known for changing things. They add new services and take them away. And word has it that they go through hundreds of search algorithm changes every month. That’s a lot of change. Well, one of the things that has changed about Google in the last year is a strong emphasis on a social media service called Google+.

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Small Business Mavericks

JUNE 5, 2012

There is a lot to be said for search engine optimization and paid advertising. Both have their places. But social media is a two-way conduit that requires your interaction. It’s a way for you to dialogue with your audience about your products and services or your niche and nose your way into their minds. If you do it right, you can win new customers and make old clients happy with just a little effort.

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Social Media Reputation Engineering LinkedIn 170

Small Business Mavericks

JUNE 1, 2012

Before you start marketing yourself online, you should develop your online marketing strategy. But what should that consist of? The first step to developing an online marketing strategy is to assess your current state of online marketing. What have you done until now and how has it worked out for you? Once you have a complete picture of your current online status, then you’ll be able to tell what has worked and what has not.

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Small Business Mavericks

MARCH 27, 2012

Do you provide a service to customer at your business, away from your business, or a combination of both? For businesses that use a go-to-client business model, you may wake up one day to find your business’s listing has disappeared from Google’s local search results. That will hurt your business and how much will rely on the amount of business you generally receive through local search.

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Small Business Mavericks

NOVEMBER 2, 2012

You know how I feel about mobile marketing. It’s here and it’s time to start using it. Well, a recent report indicates that Smartphone click traffic has gone up 105% year over year. The same study shows that tablet traffic has increased 339%. This is just more evidence that mobile marketing is coming into its own. And it’s just the beginning.

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Small Business Mavericks

JUNE 25, 2012

After you develop your website and you’re ready to set it to live and go into business, how do you promote it? I’ve identified up to 12 ways you can promote your new website and drive traffic to your landing pages to get new business. Search engine optimization – The search engines will always be a good source of traffic for your website.

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Small Business Mavericks

MAY 24, 2012

A small business blog has a number of benefits, however, it can also be a tax on valuable time resources. Having a blog is, too a certain extent, a waste of time if you don’t have the resources to actually promote it, to put the content in front of readers. Once you build a readership, you can spend less time promoting your blog’s content, however, in the early days, promotion is as equally important as publishing the content.

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Small Business Mavericks

JANUARY 31, 2012

Social media can be a great marketing tool when things go right. It can also be a nightmare when things go wrong. A recent article looks at McDonalds; yes, we’re talking about the famous golden arches, which experienced the highs and lows of social media marketing, all in the one campaign. One of the most difficult areas to manage when it comes to social media is that of control.

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Small Business Mavericks

JANUARY 24, 2012

What’s the one problem that every small business owners faces when it come to social media marketing ? Time. There are just not enough hours in the day to manage a business, often work in the business, manage traditional marketing problems, and then manage a wide range of social media interactions. Having a Facebook page is becoming a must and for many businesses, a Twitter account as well.

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Small Business Mavericks

NOVEMBER 23, 2012

Google+ Hangouts is more than just a promotional tool, but it is a great tool to use for any business, partly because it’s free. But you have to have a Google+ account to take advantage of it. So, once you do have a Google+ account, what can you do with hangouts? Here are just a few of the powerful ways you can use Google+ Hangouts: To introduce new products or services.

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Small Business Mavericks

JULY 11, 2012

I was taken aback after seeing how marketers and ad agencies differ in their use of specific online marketing tactics. It seems that neither marketers no ad agencies have increased their value on blog content since 2009. Yet, both marketers and ad agencies see more value in online advertising, mobile marketing, and video marketing. Don’t get me wrong.

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Small Business Mavericks

JULY 8, 2012

One of the most important parts of the SEO process is keyword research , yet few small business owners actually conduct a full and complete keyword research exercise before engaging on their first SEO campaign. It often leads to fatal results. Keyword research is important for a number of reasons: First, conducting thorough keyword research before you get into your SEO campaign can ensure that you are using the best and most profitable keywords for your campaign.

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Small Business Mavericks

JULY 2, 2012

It is natural for websites to rise and fall in the search engine rankings. In fact, when new sites are discovered by the search engines and receive their initial rankings it is quite common to see them rise high into the search engine rankings. Google particularly is good at this. With its emphasis on fresh search results, new pages get an unnatural boost in search engine rankings.

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Small Business Mavericks

JUNE 21, 2012

Here’s an interesting blog post on title tags at SEOmoz. I’ll have to agree with Ruth Burr’s conclusion here. Google seems to be doing some wonky things with title tags now. It used to be 70 characters for your title tags was a hard and fast rule that most SEOs lived and worked by. I’d say that’s probably not the case any more.

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Small Business Mavericks

JUNE 17, 2012

Google+ made history last year when it became the fastest growing social media website to date – in one month. But it has a special significance beyond being a mere social networking website. It’s also a product of Google, which means it has some SEO benefit. Many Google+ users report that their Google profiles have risen to the top of the SERPs just by using Google+.

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Small Business Mavericks

JUNE 6, 2012

Before you can succeed you need a plan. If you want to get from Point A to Point B, it helps to chart a course and it also helps to have a road map. Small Business Mavericks can be your road map. Our 4-step online marketing strategic plan is real simple. It’s hard to implement if you don’t have direction, but it’s a simple concept.

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Marketing Small Business Course Research 164

Small Business Mavericks

MARCH 28, 2012

A business blog doesn’t have to be boring, in fact, it shouldn’t be. To gain readers, you need content that satisfies their need, and the only way to catch their attention is by writing a great blog title. From experience, there are two ways to write blog titles, the hard way and easy way. The hard way is by trying to be 100% original whilst also trying to have a stand out title.

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Small Business Mavericks

MARCH 22, 2012

Every time Google releases a piece of advice on how to optimize a website for search, they repeat the same old message – produce content for your visitors, not for the search engines. In the past, many website owners, and quite a few SEO ‘experts’ ignored this advice, often producing content aimed fairly and squarely at the search engines.

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Small Business Mavericks

MARCH 20, 2012

Pinterest is one of those social media sites that could be a real boon for small businesses. Big businesses are already finding clever ways to promote their business, perhaps the best is that of Peugeot’s. There are a number of tactics used on their page, and they all come together quite nicely. I said clever, and for some, it may be too clever.

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Small Business Mavericks

SEPTEMBER 14, 2012

In the early days of Web marketing, webmasters spent their SEO capital writing impressive meta descriptions and stuffing their web pages with keywords. Particularly important was the meta keyword tag. It was not unusual to visit a website, view source, and see hundreds of keywords stuffed into the meta tags that didn’t even appear on the page.

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Small Business Mavericks

SEPTEMBER 11, 2012

Is it necessary that your domain name be an exact match for your primary keyword? Many SEOs still believe that it does, and many of them teach their clients that it does. However, many websites have been successful without exact match domain names. Here are a few: Google. Facebook. Yahoo! Twitter. Bing. YouTube. Flickr. Small Business Mavericks. And of course there are plenty more!

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Small Business Mavericks

JULY 30, 2012

If you’ve wondered when it would happen, here’s the good news : Google+ is now being integrated into search engine results. But what does that mean for you? It means that, more and more, small business owners should think about using Google+ as a social media service. Not only does it help your reputation by posting often to Google’s social media service, but your posts and comments on that service now could be integrated into the SERPs.

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Google Reputation Engineering Small Business 161

Small Business Mavericks

JULY 10, 2012

The Panda and Penguin updates that Google introduced over the last year-and-a-half have shaken up the Web a bit. One way that really took a lot of webmasters by surprise is something called the thin content rule. If you have just a few words of content on a web page, then Google won’t necessarily index that web page – or they could bury it down in the search rankings somewhere.

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Small Business Mavericks

JULY 5, 2012

If you run an off line retail shop and you’re wondering how you can compete with your online counterparts, well, don’t think you can’t. You might actually have an advantage. Online-only stores have no way to take cash payments. If a customer prefers to pay cash, that’s too bad. The options are a credit card, wire transfer, or online pay service such as PayPal.

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Small Business Mavericks

JUNE 23, 2012

Guest blogging is a great marketing method. I highly recommend it. You pick a few high profile, highly trafficked blogs in your niche and send them a query or a blog post and hope they publish it. If they do, you get a link back to your website and some additional reputation points. Good for you. But guest blogging is not the only marketing method to pursue online.

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Small Business Mavericks

JUNE 7, 2012

If you like Google’s Webmaster Tools, then you’ll likely find Bing’s new Webmaster Tools helpful. Some of these look like they’re mirrored or modeled after Google’s tools. And they probably are. But that doesn’t matter if they’re helpful. Here’s a look at the new tools Bing is offering webmasters and that are now in beta: Link Explorer.

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Small Business Mavericks

MAY 23, 2012

Search and social marketing are often discussed on these pages mainly because they are have been the best use of a small business owners time and money. Both help businesses connect with potential customers and when successfully applied, help businesses grow and become stronger. Many businesses are now finding that mobile apps are filling a missing link between the online world and their bricks and mortar businesses.

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Small Business Mavericks

MAY 21, 2012

When it comes to meaningful comments, and deep discussions, forget Facebook and Twitter. If anything, they can flood you with banal comments that take a lot of time yet deliver little in results. If you do go the Facebook and Twitter route, you need to maintain a lot of control over what you do and don’t become involved in. There are other sites where comments reach a more meaningful level, and often lead to much deeper conversations.

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Small Business Mavericks

MAY 8, 2012

The Panda and Penguin Google updates have certainly spooked a lot of people. The slightest move in website traffic volume is now being blamed on either one (or both) of these updates, and whilst significant drops in traffic are a worrying sign, a closer inspection sometimes shows the opposite to be true. I recently looked a website that had seen a 50% drop in traffic, and that drop coincided with the Google Penguin update.

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Small Business Mavericks

MARCH 25, 2012

Google have added two new features to their Analytics tool. The first measures social media interaction whilst the second measures page load speeds. These are two areas that we know Google are keen to include in their search algorithms. Page speed is an important issue for any website owner. The new tool added to Google Analytics makes it easy to see at a glance how a page is performing over time.

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Small Business Mavericks

DECEMBER 26, 2012

It seems that some electronic products manufacturers are considering the introduction of $99 tablets. But some of those may not be sold in the U.S. Still, I can’t help but wonder how a $99 tablet would affect social media marketing, mobile marketing, and e-book marketing. As it stands now, anyone can write and publish their own e-book very inexpensively.

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Small Business Mavericks

OCTOBER 4, 2012

Google does more than help searchers find information online. It also helps content producers come up with good ideas for their content. These 4 unusual keyword research tools are perfect for webmasters and content producers come up with ideas. These are not the only keyword research tools Google offers, but they are ones you likely have not used. I encourage you to use them.

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Research Google Tools Trends 156