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his webinar reviews a report written by Alaskarama that graded 100 small businesses for their website effectiveness. We show the different key components of what goes wrong and give suggestions on how to fix them.
Review archive of webinar
Review the slides:
Getting links to your website from authoritative sites is essential in moving your website up in the search engine results pages (SERPs). There are many shady companies out there that say they can get you thousands of inbound links for X amount of dollars. Using such techniques can get you onto Google’s blacklist, which is not where you want to be!
It takes many hours to build quality links to your website, but if you do the work yourself there is little or no cost involved. Your goal should be to build a portfolio of high-quality links from as many different means as possible.
Here are 4 proven methods of building links
1. Press releases and news outlets can be found online and offer a great way to attract visitors to your landing pages. But don’t forget your local media sources.
2. Write content for your blog, comment on other blogs, and feature compelling guest bloggers on your website.
3. Find some great forums and discussion boards that relate to your product or service. Offer relevant responses and information to build your reputation in those communities.
4. Get involved with your local community nonprofit and charity organizations. Maybe you can offer your services for free or make a donation, which will both help your business’ reputation and the community.
There are also reputable links you can buy
The only links we would suggest paying money for are Yahoo! directory, Best of the Web directory, and Business.com directory. Other directories are gaining ground and show up often in the SERPs, like Merchant Circle and local directories like BuyAlaska.com.
Do you know how many quality websites are linking to your website? Act now and we will review your website and send you a report.
Looking at the numbers alone, it is clear that the majority of small businesses who run social media networking campaigns enjoy positive results. Still, if you are a gambler, then you know that following the odds does not always ensure success. The following will help to realistically appraise the chances of success and tip the odds even further in your favor.
The 2010 Social Media Marketing Report posts that 85% of campaigns generate exposure. Additionally, more than half of the campaigns run: 1) increased traffic and subscribers; 2) resulted in new business partnerships; 3) increased search engine rankings; and 4) produced qualified leads. 48% of the responders to the poll reported that social media helped to reduce overall marketing expenses.[1]
What that means is that it is likely that starting a small business account on Facebook, Twitter, or Digg will help you achieve your marketing goals. It is still possible that social media can backfire, it is just unlikely. But to make it even more probable that your time will convert to marketing goals, I have included some tips below:
How to Avoid Social Media Marketing Failure – Bad Customer Feedback
One of the primary concerns of sole proprietors focuses on their product. They worry that consumers will criticize their product and generate bad buzz. First off, if customers would criticize your product on social media, then they are probably already criticizing your product in other areas, such as by talking to friends, writing bad customer reviews, and so on. So, really, what do you have to lose?
One of the benefits of social media is that it provides a free way to receive customer feedback. Reading what your consumers have to say can give you information that you can use to improve the product. In addition, engaging with customer feedback can be a great way to turn public opinion around .
But there is an even easier way to make sure that your social media contacts will praise your product. Rather than changing the product, change the customers. Simply find the people who will love your company, and market to them. Here’s how:
1) Ask – “Who will benefit most from using my product?”
2) Find them – Start with the network they are most likely to use – Facebook, Twitter, Digg, etc. – then locate groups they are likely a part of
3) Listen – Read what they are already saying
4) Engage – talk to them (Do not try to sell your product, social media is best used for gaining contacts. The sales will follow.)
Sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, give small businesses the opportunity to conduct real market research and interact with potential consumers. The odds are in your favor: if you start a Facebook fan page, you will achieve important marketing goals.
Still chicken? Read the next article in this series about the role small business employees can play in social media.
Social Media Networking is the small business trend of 2010.[1] The Small Business Survey, one of the most revered polls in the US, posted a 50% increase in the number of businesses marketing through social media within the last year. But that still leaves the majority without an active social media account. Still, only 36% of the businesses polled reported using social media to achieve marketing goals. Why?
In the last installment of this series, I wrote about how much contacts on social media are actually worth. I discussed a new statistic that was recently released that values each Facebook contact at more than $130. This article goes right alongside it, by explaining a little more about how much work each of those contacts will require on your end.
The Small Time-Slot Social Media Takes in the Average Business’ Work Week
Here are some statistics that show just the kind of time commitment people are afraid of stepping into. A marketer will spend between 1 and 5 hours each week on social media networking, on average.[2] That means that should you choose to step out into the land of Facebook or Twitter, you can expect that it will take up less than 5 hours of your time per week. Of course, if it works well, then you can commit yourself more for contacts, consumers, and sales…
Using Your Time Wisely, 2 Steps to A New Social Media Marketing Campaign
Plenty of marketers will tell you it is possible to lead successful social marketing campaigns for the low time budget of 10 minutes per day. Planning, organization, and focus can really make social marketing easier and more fruitful, so follow these steps to jump-start your online presence.
First, do some research. Take a look at some of your competitors and see if they have already created accounts on Facebook or Twitter. Try to find a campaign that has worked but could also use some work. You do not want to find a model to follow, just some brainstorming material.
Then, start your campaign. Decide which social media platform would benefit your business the most, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, etc., and focus on it alone. Divide and conquer, as Sun Tzu used to say. Also, pick a few different ways to get attention with posts, and try them out.
For instance, posting links to relevant content is a quickly growing trend on Facebook, especially since they added their equivalent version of Re-Tweet, Via.[3] Figure out what your customers are interested in, post relevant content, and watch your business name spread across the web.
[2] http://marketingwhitepapers.s3.amazonaws.com/SocialMediaMarketingReport2010.pdf
[3] http://mashable.com/2010/01/16/facebook-via/
Now, there are plenty of convincing reasons why social media networks would be a powerful tool in any company’s marketing arsenal, and yet so few businesses that actually stick their necks out into the cyber realms of Facebook, Digg, and Twitter. It is free press, after all. Why not get out there and play?
Estimating a Social Media Fan’s Worth
Many small businesses are convinced that opening up a social media account would not be worthwhile because they believe that fans do not do business. It is likely that this point of view comes from a research study, conducted about a year ago by Vitrue[1]. The study concluded that each Facebook fan was worth approximately $3.60 per year. Naturally, entrepreneurs were disappointed, especially small businesses who had spent hours of time on a 50-friend network.
Suffice it to say that Vitrue did not spend more than five minutes on its method. The study took the number of impressions each fan would have of the company (via wall post). Then, it applied the typical value for each impression to deduce the result. Wham, bam, done, right?
Wrong. More recently, a thorough study was released by Syncapse and Hotspex[2], which recognizes the value of social media followers in each of the following areas:
1) Product Spending
2) Brand Loyalty
3) Propensity to Recommend
4) Brand affinity
5) Earned Media Value
The big idea is that Facebook fans are more likely to be active agents of the brands they are affiliated with than non-fans. Some fans will buy products, while others will mention the company to friends. Some will invite others to become fans, while others will spread brand loyalty, either online or off. A social media fan is not just a consumer, he/she is a marketing agent.
PS The study concludes that each fan on Facebook is worth $136.38. How many fans does your company have again?
[2] http://www.syncapse.com/media/syncapse-value-of-a-facebook-fan.pdf
In the first part of this series, I broke down the most significant social media networking fears shared by small businesses. Because social media is such a great opportunity for small businesses to really get their name out there without spending money, I would not want to leave you hanging with those fears unanswered. The following develops examples, shows statistics, and discusses why social media networking is not as dangerous as it may seem. Also, follow the links to resources that give some how-to advice on each matter.
Small Business Fear #1 – Negative Publicity
What if someone criticizes your company, product, or even you on a network? Could it ruin your business completely? How do you respond to this nightmare? To address this concern, I am going to lean on a great example of a company that learned how to use social media, the hard way.
The higher they reach, the farther they fall. Many business people wondered how far Dominos would plummet when a video was released last year, showing a couple of employees doing some pretty disgusting things with Domino’s ingredients.
Fifteen years ago, Domino’s would barely have noticed. But with explosive potential of social media networks nowadays, the Youtube video went viral. It was a corporation’s worst nightmare. Before it could be taken down, thousands of people had seen it, shared it, and blogged about about it. Within a few days, the corporate image had gone from economical to disgusting.
This was a pretty terrible situation for a company to be in. The video caused a Domino’s location to be temporarily shut down for a health inspection, but that was the least of the company’s concerns. Thousands of consumers might never have spent a dime on the franchise again.
And they did, by fighting fire with fire. The President of the company, Patrick Doyle, immediately released a video that apologized for the video and expressed how seriously the matter was being taken. That video, a simple, single shot of a normal guy, would never have received the attention it did, without the prank video. Already, Domino’s was engaging with the online community, and repairing its status.
But the company did not stop there. Learning that the online community is much more forgiving of error, Domino’s fessed up to all of the negative customer feedback it had received over the years in an online campaign that documented the company’s turnaround.[1] The campaign was successful, and in fact, the pizza company’s revenue has made astounding leaps, reporting a 28.6% increase in dividends.[2]
Marketing Take Away: Responding to negative publicity effectively can promote company growth.
[2] http://www.rttnews.com/ArticleView.aspx?Id=1355959
Small businesses have so much to gain from using social networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Digg, so it is always a surprise when entrepreneurs are hesitant to create an account. Looking at traffic, Facebook accounted for 13% of visitors to big web portals as of December of last year. Now that’s impressive.
“But,” as the skeptical entrepreneur would say, “that does not mean it could help my site.” Even small web pages can benefit from the link-building that has taken off in the last year. Facebook users, for whatever reason, have begun sharing content with each other, much more than ever before. As of January of this year, 5 billion links were being posted on Facebook each week. That makes Facebook the equivalent of LaGuardia, Newark, and San Francisco airports combined.
Similar statistics abound for Twitter and Digg, which show a similar explosion in content sharing per person, even if they do not have the massive amounts of traffic that Facebook does. “But,” the skeptical entrepreneur will tell us: “There is still not enough reason to do so at this time.”
What could possibly offset a chance to take a small fraction of 5 billion links per week from one of the most reputable web sites out there? What downside could be that large?
(1) Negative Publicity – Companies are terrified that if their consumers were given the opportunity to discuss their products/services, that some of those people would complain and make them look bad. The same people believe that it would only take one post with negative feedback to ruin a company’s image.
(2) Hopelessness and Futility – Small Businesses fear that followers, fans, etc. will not convert to sales, or even leads, making the entire process a waste of time and effort. How can a fan on Facebook mean anything significant, even in the long run? (See part III for an in-depth discussion)
(3) Pandora’s Box of Work-Hours – Monitoring what people say about one’s product could blow up into an enormous burden. Will the company need to keep in contact with hundreds of consumers who have no one better to talk to?
(4) Adolescent Anxiety – New business owners fear that they will say the wrong thing about a product, or that what they say might be taken the wrong way. These people worry that once written, phrases like these might completely ruin the company’s public image!
(5) Disgruntled Employees – Many business-owners block employee access to social media networks because they fear what their workers would say about them as bosses.
Do any of these sound familiar? If they don’t, give us another by leaving a comment. What is your social networking fear? Also, be sure not to leave without looking at our answers in Facebookophobia (part II) Will negative feedback on social media networks destroy my small business?.
In the old western movies you may have noticed that the bad guys wore black hats and the good guys wore white. So when you hear the term, “Black Hat SEO,” what do you think of? Exactly. Black hat SEO tactics are ways to get higher search engine results using unethical practices. And since your are a reputable small business, you don’t want to be caught using Black hat SEO on your website. Believe me, the folks at Google are smart enough to find out.
White hat SEO helps you rank better in Google because your website is working within the guidelines. You are playing fair. Black hat SEO exploits the tools by tricking the system into ranking. Even though it might work temporarily, it is not a sustainable way to improve your rank.
So what are Black hat SEO tactics and how do you avoid them? Here are 6 of the most common to look for. In fact, if you have a webmaster doing your website, pull it up right now and look for these signs.
Stuffing your page with keyword after keyword and no other content. It might get you ranked, but why? Why would someone want to come to a page like that?
White Hat Approach: Create fabulous content with a main keyword phrase in mind. Use those keyword phrases in titles, descriptions, headings, and in the article/page.
Delivering different website content to Google than what is delivered to people. This is the best way to get banned!
White Hat Approach: The purpose of you website is to get leads that will eventually become a customer, or to provide information. Create your website with fabulous content, using a well thought out list of keyword phrases, and they will come!
Putting white text on white background, or any color match. Google sees it but people do not. Kind of a form of invisible keyword stuffing.
White Hat Approach: This sounds like a recording I know, but you only need a few keyword phrases per page on your website. Have your keywords in the places they are most effective like the titles, descriptions, headers and in the text on the page. Keep analyzing those keywords to find out which ones perform the best.
Creating a fake page that a visitor to your site will never see. The visitor is redirected to another page usually unrelated to the keyword search entered.
White Hat Approach: Just don’t do it! There is no reason for it.
Pages with large quantities of links meant to increase the number of inbound links to a website. But these links mean nothing. Google ranks you much higher is your inbound links are coming from authoritative websites. You need to build relationships with other bloggers or webmasters and have them want to link to your content because it is something they want to read or use.
White Hat Approach: In the old days, inbound links were not measured as they are now. This was a loophole in the system. Now the inbound links are measured by how authoritative those other sites are. Find bloggers or other websites that have a lot of visitors, update their content often, and are ranked high in Google themselves. These are the inbound links that mean something.
The link farms need content for the websites, so they basically “steal” it from other websites and have it automatically inserted into theirs. Search engines like frequently updated websites, but this is not the way to do it. It is not only unethical, it is in violation of copyright laws.
White Hat Approach: News feeds are ok, but all content on your site should be created for your site, not taken from others. Create a plan that allows you to update your blog or website pages at least once or twice per week. Answer comments every day. Get a rhythm going and you will see how successful it can be to draw in new visitors and return visitors. Every blog post is a post forever and can be found by Google at any time.
Create a website that deserves to be ranked highly and add fabulous content regularly. Be ethical in your practices. Create relationships with your website community. It is much easier to work with search engines than against them!
100 Alaska small business websites graded for today’s online marketing standards.
Ten years ago, companies could get away with a simple web site.
But now, most companies are marketing online. Now, websites that would have been fine in 2000 are completely lost behind the competition. To be found requires much more than a domain name with a billboard-style ad. And our study reveals that many Alaskan businesses do not know how to keep up with the trend. In the full report, we’ll give you a step-by-step explanation of the results, along with advice on how to upgrade your Internet Marketing strategy.
1. On a scale of 1 – 100, the average score of the websites was 39 with a median of 26.
2. Alexa ranks websites by the traffic that gets to the site. 61 from our sample scored 0.
3. Only 10 had a blog but only 8 of those had more than one article.
4. Sixteen of the sites were not indexed by Google at all.
5. Most websites were written for High School and Secondary readers.
6. Basic page descriptions were missing on 38 sites.
7. Basic headings on pages were missing on 59 sites.
8. Alternative text were found on images on only 19 sites .
9. 53 had domains that will expire in one year or less.
10. 79 had 10 inbound links or less.
11. Only 3 have Twitter accounts.
12. Only 11 had RSS feed capability.
13. Only 20 had a conversion form somewhere on the website.
First things first – anyone who tells you they have the latest algorithms from Google’s search engine program – is lying to you. Search engine programming is one of the most closely guarded secrets in the world. Only a handful of coders know anything about the changes that are made on a daily basis. The rest of us have to sit back and watch.
But there are some recent trends in search engine optimization that have taken websites from the 3rd position to the number 1 slot. Just to give an idea of what that means and why we care, look at the difference in the click-through percentage (the percentage of people who click on a search result) of the first four websites on the search engine results page (SERP):
| Front Page Position | Click-through Percentage |
| 1st | 89.00% |
| 2nd | 33.00% |
| 4th | 17.00% |
From ftp://ftp.research.microsoft.com/pub/tr/TR-2007
This means that almost 90% of people click on the link that comes first on the results page, almost 3X the number who click on the second. Simply put: every difference matters.
Tip 1: Search engine optimization is fair
The most exciting thing about search engine optimization is that it is finally starting to make sense. Back-link spamming, keyword stuffing, metadata manipulation are all great examples. Each of these practices was an unfair way to give a website an edge. Each of these practices no longer works and may even cause Google to blacklist your website. So, we need to stick to making a web site appealing to search engines for the right reasons. Create fabulous content!
Tip 2: Understand the Goal of a Good Search Engine
The easiest way to know what to expect from companies, such as Google, in the next few years is to look at what they want to provide. Search engines provide a product, just like any company. But instead of providing goods, they provide information.
The more useful the user finds that information, the better. Search engines want their users to say, “Aha! This site is exactly what I was looking for! I will definitely use that search engine next time!” As a web site, you want anyone who lands on your page to say the same thing, because the more people you satisfy, the more search engines will like you.
Tip 3: Translate Your Service From the Real World to the Internet
The thing business owners have difficulty understanding is that their product changes when it goes online. Let’s take a company that sells hand lotion. In the store, an owner will attempt to attract people who are interested in buying hand lotion. This makes sense because there are only so many company representatives in the store to answer questions and guide customers to their preferred scents, weights, etc.
Online, businesses need to worry about helping everyone who types in the same keywords. These people may want to buy hand lotion, but then again, they may want to know the history of hand lotion, or how to purchase hand lotion in India. The higher percentage of these random customers the web site services, the higher the site will place on the SERP.
