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 4, 2015

How important is search engine optimization (SEO)? Is it so important that you should pore over every word on your blog and website to find ways to improve your SEO so that your content ranks higher in the search engines? It’s become fashionable in the last couple of years to claim that SEO is dead and that you should just simply write “great content.” Rand Fishkin of Moz says “good unique content” must die.

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SEO Engineering Small Business Fashion 70

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 26, 2015

Internet marketing has come a long way since 1990, when the World Wide Web had its grand kick off. In the early days, companies joined traffic rings and wrote articles for each other’s websites, or paid for display ad space. It didn’t take long for directories to pop onto the scene. Yahoo! was one of the first, and was the first commercial success story.

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Small Business Mavericks

AUGUST 5, 2015

Search engine optimization (SEO) is just as important today as it ever was. Many online marketers have jumped on the “ SEO is dead ” bandwagon, but I assure you it isn’t dead. While SEO isn’t dead, it isn’t quite the same in practice as it used to be. The search engines (especially Google) have changed the way they index web pages so often, and so drastically, that true SEO doesn’t resemble anything like what it used to be.

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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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Marketing Survey Newsletter Engineering 70

Small Business Mavericks

JULY 3, 2015

Social media marketing is a necessity in today’s online marketing world. It’s not optional any more. The only question to answer now is, which social media sites are most appropriate for your brand? Why Social Media Is Necessary. Social media has become a marketing channel of its own. Your competition is there, your customers are there, and your suppliers and business partners are there.

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Social Media Mobile Questions Industry 70

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

MAY 29, 2015

SEO has been around a long time. For as long as there have been search engines, if you think about it. Certainly, it has been around long enough to collect some myths that should be debunked. Here are a few of the worst: SEO is no longer being used in internet marketing. This one is kind of silly, because as long as there’s a search engine, there will be a way to optimize your site for it.

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SEO Engineering Reputation Analysis 70

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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Survey SEO Engineering Overview 70

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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Marketing Advertising Sites Products 70

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

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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Real Estate Foursquare Social Media List 70

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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Communities Training Small Business Groups 70

Small Business Mavericks

MARCH 20, 2015

'Internet marketing and social media are intertwined because the technology is overlapping. It is amazing when you think about it: we can connect on an individual basis to people scattered all over the world. The message we want to communicate can be individualized down to the greeting on an email and we are accustomed to this fact. Facebook has established the idea that we can be ‘friends’ with people we never see.

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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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SEO Engineering Small Business System 70

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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Analysis Journal Compete Analytics 70

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 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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URL Engineering SEO Issues 70

Small Business Mavericks

JANUARY 15, 2015

'Copyblogger has done it again; giving us the 2015 Cost of Online Business Report by Demian Farnworth and giving us some good examples of how the same basic information can be presented in various ways for maximum impact. The report itself is interesting because it includes the results of a survey conducted on businesses operating online. More than a fourth of those in the survey identify as Small Business Owner, and the biggest challenge is seen as generating traffic.

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Survey Examples Analysis Small Business 70

Small Business Mavericks

JANUARY 14, 2015

'It’s becoming a standard need for businesses of any size — the whole Search Engine Optimization thing is no longer the realm inhabited by the computer geeks. Everybody should understand enough of how the internet works to utilize SEO, even if all you are doing is trying to find something. For a business, though, SEO skills are increasingly sought among employees.

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Training SEO Course Skills 70

Small Business Mavericks

JANUARY 13, 2015

'There is a good way to take an event your business hosts, like a workshop or seminar, and turn it into a lot of opportunities for SEO. Think of it as a big box of stuff you can unpack, label, and put where it can be used. Unpack The Content From The Event. There has been a lot of information generated for your event, right? How would someone looking for information ask about it?

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SEO Eventful Content How To 70

Small Business Mavericks

JANUARY 12, 2015

'Search Engine Journal has consistently been a source of good ideas. Recently, Kristi Hines’ 10 LinkedIn Tips and Strategies You Need To Know has some great ones. These are helpful suggestions that may be exactly what you are looking for: Learn how to unsubscribe from blog posts and unclutter your inbox. Changing the frequency of a group digest can make life less hectic.

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LinkedIn Journal Engineering Research 70

Small Business Mavericks

JANUARY 8, 2015

'An interesting observation was made in Jennifer LeClaire’s CIO Today article about customer service trends. The observation is that today’s “digitally native customer” (those who are comfortable and competent with technology) prefers a site that is self-service to working with an agent. I have to agree. If I want an answer about a company’s service or product, I’d much rather go on the site and get the information immediately.

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Sites Compete Forums Engineering 70

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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Sites Cost Mobile Google 146

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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SEO List URL Small Business 126

Small Business Mavericks

DECEMBER 3, 2014

'“ Both Facebook and Amazon are coming at Google’s lock on advertising from new angles–that’s why this could be an honest to goodness fight for online advertising dollars and beyond.” – Ellen Gipko, SEJ. Ther are some interesting developments in the world of online advertising. Over at Search Engine Journal, Ellen Gipko has taken a look at Why Amazon and Facebook Are Gaining on Google and gives us what she sees as pivotal in this turf war.

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Advertising Adwords Yahoo One Spot 107

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 Reputation URL Applications 125

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 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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Video Facebook Marketing Retail 137

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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Engineering SEO Journal Guidelines 114

Small Business Mavericks

OCTOBER 21, 2014

'Google has confirmed that the latest update happened last Friday. Did you notice anything? Some people did, and others didn’t. Matt Southern at Search Engine Journal looked at the reaction so far , collecting input all across the web, and I appreciate seeing the best in one place. One thing he points out is that we don’t know how long this update will actually take.

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Engineering SEO Journal Small Business 102