lizmicik.com

29 Apr 2010

Local business owners beware!

Hold on to your wallets local business owners!

The latest and greatest way to “amass a fortune and build a massive list of people throwing money at you” involves you. And not in a good way.

Many, many new Internet Marketing products are focused on teaching people how to come to your shop and sell you on the idea of using the Internet as a marketing venue. These people will then offer to take care of all those nagging, technical details you don’t have time to master for you…for a flat fee per month.

I have offered the same sort of “do it all for you” sort of service for a very long time. I just removed it from my services pages.

The reason I did that is because this new group of Internet Marketers is going to leave a bad taste in your mouth about that sort of service. How and why?

The one thing all these newly minted Internet Marketing advocates don’t necessarily have, (nor need according to the Gurus who are selling these programs to them) is experience. Not a shred of marketing experience. Not a single technical installation of any Internet based product or service.

The sales letters for all these products are actually touting the fact that all one needs to “rake in thousands of dollars from the local business markets” is their course. Armed with a new stack of jargon and a link to hire people overseas to do the actual work, anyone who plunks down $47, $97 or $2,997 is instantly qualified (by virtue of the power of their credit cards) to tell you how to conduct business online!

I’m very sorry. I will be here if you want to double check whether that fresh-faced evangelist who offered you a “bargain price” to relieve you of all the menial and tedious details of building a business knows the first thing about anything. I’ll also be here if you get a little singed. Just as I have been for the last 12 years.

23 Mar 2010

What RO-RO teaches us about local business

Every year there is a business expo held in Rockton Illinois that showcases the many small, home-based and local businesses in the Rockton/Roscoe area called “RO-RO” for short. This year there were 101 exhibitors (aside from the public sector exhibitors, food vendors, etc.).

I know because I walked the show floor and spoke with someone in every one of those booths. I asked them all a single question, and I must admit I was a more than a little surprised by the answers I got.

I asked each of them this:

Have you claimed your business on Google, Yahoo or Bing?

I went completely up one of the three aisles and halfway down the second before I came across someone who looked at me like I was a little crazy, shrugged and said “of course.”

That was the reaction I was looking for, the one I had thought I would get far, far more often than I did.

At the end of my walk I tallied only 20 businesses that had taken the 30 minutes time to make sure that their business was properly represented in the maps section of a Google search results page. Only a few of those 20 had taken the additional time to go through the same steps on Bing and Yahoo.

Two years ago there was much ado online about the fact that anyone could claim a business listing. Fears were running high that a competitor could claim your business listing and point your address and phone number to his business, or say unflattering things about you in the business description field.

While that hasn’t happened on the wide scale feared, it did happen. It could still happen to any unclaimed business, though fear of hijacking shouldn’t be your only reason for claiming your business. Here are the reasons that really count:

It costs no money to claim your business and make sure no one else can exploit it
It takes only 20-30 minutes on each search engine to do
You then have a complete business profile on the first page of the search results for your business keywords
You can link this listing to your full website (gaining backlinks and directing traffic) to boost it’s search engine ranking as well
You can change your listing at any time to reflect current coupons, special events; anything to enhance your profile

So why haven’t more small, and especially the local businesses, taken advantage of this? That’s not a rhetorical question. I really would like to know what you think the answer is. Where do you think these business people should have found the information they needed to do this two years ago? Where would you suggest I go online to reach the most people and let them know about this? Because they do want to know.

With a few exceptions who were more concerned with letting me know they didn’t need a website, every single business person I spoke to at RO-RO who hadn’t known about claiming their place on the maps said “tell me more!”

I will be publishing a “step-by-step” guide on where to go and how to do this right in April. (If you can’t wait until then, please email me today.) In the meantime, I have a couple of ideas of how I’m going to spread the word, but your comments below on where to go would really be appreciated.

Posted in Inbound marketing, Local marketing, Search optimization | No Comments »

19 Mar 2010

Should a small local business have a website? –No

No, absolutely not every small business needs a website.

At the beginning of March I wrote the first part of this series where I concluded that “yes” every business could benefit from a website (read it here). But we both know that isn’t technically or exactly true.

The gas station or the convenience store on the corner may not see a whole lot of return on their investment in a traditional website. Nor will the barber who is planning on closing his shop when his clients no longer need him to shave their heads into their current bald style.

But…

(and yes it is a huge but)

They do need the Internet. More specifically, there is a class of businesses out there that could benefit more from Internet technology and the way it has changed the ways people shop than any other. Our examples above probably will.

A website geared to mobile devices, or a mobile text marketing plan will become more an more important to the gas station or convenience store owner as “there’s an app for that” spreads. My son is proof.

As a 16 year old, broke high school student, he admitted he almost ran out of gas one night. His friend looked for the best gas price on his iPhone and while they made it to that station, and did save some money, he said they were driving on fumes.

For just a moment imagine you own a gas station and ask yourself these two questions. Isn’t your station a little closer? Shouldn’t you have been on that map?

Getting yourself “on the map” is what you have to do to succeed online. And it’s the very first thing you should do…literally.

Before we talk about setting up a website (or a version that looks good and runs fast on the smartphones)
Before we set up your text messaging campaign reminding people it’s time to get their heads shaved
You have to be on the map so people can find you

I’ll be showing you exactly how you can do that in just a couple of weeks. If you can’t wait, email me today.

Posted in Local marketing | 5 Comments »

01 Mar 2010

Should a small local business have a website? –Yes

Do any of these situations sound familiar?

A small engineering firm that has built its business on word of mouth networking finds out they lost a potentially large client because the buyer searched for companies to invite to bid online.
A local gift shop in the strip mall went out of business after a very disappointing Christmas season.
A local hair salon owner worries because her clientele is getting older faster than she is.
A local realtor spends hundreds of dollars per month on advertising and photos and video tours of his listings that he posts online to his company web page, but there’s a reason his company “can’t” tell him how many people saw it there

Each of the business owners in these situations had heard over and over again that they “should be on the web.” Each of them were told that the Internet would be the answer to all their problems. But even though there are plenty of statistics that prove that the Internet is making huge sales inroads in nearly every industry, these business owners didn’t buy in to that idea.

A website takes computer skills, or the money to hire people with computer skills, that they never wanted to learn or spend. More than that, it takes time that most small business owners don’t have. Even if they do have time, most would rather spend it where they could be reasonable sure they would be adding to their bottom line today. To add insult to injury, it takes even more time or money on an ongoing basis to write new content, or make changes to what’s there or to fix things that mysteriously stop working at the worst possible time.

All of that could and would be dealt with cheerfully if the return on a website investment could be guaranteed. Sadly, it cannot. As the local realtor above could tell you, “if you build it, they will come” is only a Hollywood ending.

Even more sadly, people like this realtor who have tried one or two things on the Internet without enjoying much success are just as likely to conclude that “the Internet doesn’t work” for local businesses, or personal service businesses, or just them, or anyone else for that matter.

Or does it? There is a way that any business can take advantage of the Internet to drive customers to their offline business without knowing all the coding, or paying web developers hundreds of dollars per hour. It will still take time to do, however. Like so many aspects of business, it’s still a two out of three proposition. It will either:

Cost you nothing in money, have a learning curve to start with, and take plenty of time
Cost you money, but no time, to have someone with specialized knowledge and time do it for you
Cost you a little time to learn how to do some things yourself and cost you a little money to pay others with specialized knowledge to complete more complicated bits

“It” is a “new” kind of website. No, not even that. It’s a different platform you can use to build a website. And even that little definition is more technical than it needs to be.

The website that all of the small businesses mentioned above—and many more—could set up and use to promote themselves very simply and inexpensively, is a blog. Once set up it can be very fast and easy to maintain yourself, even if you don’t add to it for months.

More than this whole website is built on a blog platform; my whole business relies on it. I wouldn’t do that if I wasn’t sure of the foundation, flexibility and functionality it gives me. It can do the same for you.

Posted in Local marketing | 4 Comments »

01 Feb 2010

What this blog is for

I’ve been taking a little heat lately for not updating this blog on a timely (read daily) basis.

Until now, however, this blog existed for the sole purpose of showing a potential client what a blog is, what routinely appears in the sidebar, what sorts of things you can include for content, etc.

I set up this blog so people could get a taste of what a blog is and what they can do for their own businesses. I wanted it to look like the same stublet I would deliver to them with my premium set-up service.

But I’ve already gone a couple steps beyond that, so perhaps you’re right and it’s time to just dive in to regular blogging again and start using this space to fill some of my clients’ other needs beyond the launch. Perhaps I should talk more about building traffic over time and balancing SEO and PPC. Or where and how else you can build traffic. Or what to do with it once it’s come to your pages.

LOL, perhaps it’s even time to revisit the “you can do it yourself” streaming video and podcasting advice I went bankrupt trying to promote in 2004. I think the market has finally caught up with that one, though the local area still has not.

What do you think? Should I dive back in? And what would you like to see me cover? I can promise it won’t be a daily deluge, or a pitch fest, but if I do it, it will be for you.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

07 Jan 2010

Blog set up mind map

“Why do you charge money to set up a blog when anyone can go out and do it for free?”

I get asked that question and it’s cousin “why so much?” quite a bit. The problem is, if I try to explain what all is involved after you hit that button and set up that shiny, new, blank Wordpress database, I watch the person’s eyes glaze over and their brain shut down. It can be difficult to remember all the details that go into a blog installation when you do them all the time, but for someone who only knows that they want to have a website where people can read about their products (or maybe buy them right there), trying to keep it all straight can be close to impossible. Here’s a case where a picture can truly say a whole lot more.

Blog set up
I offer a couple of different blog installation packages for clients, but whether you hire me or do it yourself, don’t forget to allot the time and resources to building on that initial content (or the keyword research that should drive it — but that’s a different post) . The “hello world” post isn’t meant to be kept!

Posted in Blog building | 6 Comments »

06 Nov 2009

Should you date yourself?

You may have noticed one thing that sets this blog apart from the majority right away. It wasn’t done as a mistake, though it is something I may change in the future.

Right now, there are no dates on the blog home page to indicate when I’ve posted an item to the blog. I’ve done this to show you how you can use a blog even if you don’t intend to provide a steady stream of new content to your site.

When you set up a blog you gain a lot of functionality on the back-end that makes maintaining your web presence very easy. Every time you do write something to your site, all you need to do is type it in and hit the publish button. Wordpress programming — with a little help from the plugins we use — takes over to keep things neat and organized from that point on.

Without you having to do a thing, here’s what happens in the background:

A permanent spot in your directory (or permalink/single post) url is assigned
The story is published on top of your blog home page as most recent
Internal links between all posts are established/adjusted
Backend links are created within categories, page or post types so you can find and edit this post easily
Navigation links are made, updated and displayed on every page of your blog
Links between the category you select and the post itself are established
Any images, video links, podcasts, or other audio links are automatically sorted to the right directories and stored for you
Links between the post and any image or other asset file are created or adjusted as a the post is moved
A notation on your sitemap is made and the search engine spiders are notified (pinged) that there is fresh copy for them to come index
Your RSS feed is updated and subscribers notified that you have added content

…and so on and so on. It really is true that the blog you see is only the very tip of the iceberg that is all of your blog. It’a slso true that there can be no magic formula that will tell you when it makes sense for you to set up a static website and when it makes sense to set up a semi-static blog. The choice comes down to how much money, time or expertise you have to lavish on your website/blog.

Do you have time to go through and complete each of these tasks manually if you post infrequently? Even if you only made two additions or two deletions to the content of your website each year, chances are good you would overlook one or more of these steps. That’s assuming you worked from a very good checklist that remembered them all for you in the first place.

On the other hand, dates do help. Human readers love fresh changing content as much as the search engine spiders. They want to see that they’re getting the up to date scoop on all the specials in your retail store, or know that you’re up on the latest judicial rulings relevant to the legal case they may want you to handle for them, etc.

I’m going to continue making entries to this blog without dates for a few months. Of course I’ll be watching my stats closely. It will be interesting to see if traffic to this blog does or doesn’t grow at roughly the rate I’ve come to expect using web 2.0 promotion methods. Benchmarking numbers on this point are the one thing I wasn’t able to find, so we’ll just have to grow some ourselves — along with your comments and observations of course.

Posted in Blog building | No Comments »

18 Sep 2009

Page one exposure is what your business needs

How important is it to you that your blog/website rank highly in the search engines? For a few people the answer can honestly be “not at all.” When your blog is used to communicate internally among a closed group of people, you might actually be more concerned with keeping people out than helping them find a way in.

However, for most blogs built for commercial purposes, the ability for prospective customers to find you through the search engines is the whole ball game. If you want to avoid paying the rising PPC advertising costs, or if you want to supplement those ads, you need to do some work optimizing your blog to show up on the first two pages of results.

Sure, if yours is a local business, you may think you can do without all this online hassle. You may still think you’ll find all the customers you can handle if you’ve got a big enough ad in the yellow pages. But you’re only fooling yourself.

The yellow page shoppers have moved online. More than 90% of us turn to the Internet first—even if we’re looking for the closest pizza parlor. 67% of us will go on to buy something offline based on our online research.

Why wouldn’t you want to be the first business they see when they type “nail salons + Rockford” in Google or another search engine? It used to be that there were two ways you could get to that top position. You could buy it through a “pay per click” (PPC) ad, or you could do the “search engine optimization” that would eventually get you to the top of the “natural” unpaid results.

There is a third way to bypass all that expense, and all that time. Ask me what it is.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

03 Aug 2009

Why didn’t I do that? Social media explained

I’m having one of those “smack your forehead” moments.

Michelle McPhearson has written a report I should have written. It’s what I do for my clients and it’s the way I do it. We do it the same because we both have taken our online experiences and melded them with what we learned from the same great teachers (including Ed Dale, Dan Raine and Bob Summerfield-thank you!).

What’s different is that she recognized an opportunity to turn that into an information product that will lead to passive income sales online. That’s another thing I help a lot of my clients do.

So why can’t I seem to do it so well for myself?

I can tell myself it’s because I’m busy down here in the trenches trying to drum up (and finish) the business that’s going to pay the rent this month. And yes, I recognize that as the same sort of excuse I hear from prospective clients who know they should be doing more to market themselves online, but aren’t.

Like all excuses, it sounds good, but doesn’t really get to the heart of what’s holding me back.

Social media marketing is such a natural outgrowth of everything that’s come before that it falls into my “everyone knows this, it’s not special” category. I suspect everyone who’s been working in their profession for a while knows exactly what I’m talking about. All of us tend to take our knowledge and the value of our lifelong experiences for granted this way.

In my case, the basics of what you have to do to attract qualified buyers to your website or blog is not some new secret I just tripped over. It’s something I’ve actually been doing for years. Time has blurred many of the painful lessons it took me to learn what works and what doesn’t, so I have a hard time thinking of it as something valuable that someone else would be willing to pay for.

So I’m once again vowing to treat myself and my life experience with a little more respect. If you’re in my boat, I hope you will too.

And I’m recommending that everyone in earshot get themselves over to http://www.socialmediamyth.com/ and sign up for Michelle’s free and wonderfully valuable and readable report right now. There are no great and profound “secrets” being withheld by greedy gurus to be uncovered in a $97 per month private membership setting, but web 2.0 social marketing does take time and effort. Armed with Michelle’s report you’ll know where to apply that time and effort. If you don’t have the time, you’ll at least know why I do the things I do on your behalf… and why they work.

Tags: Michelle McPhearson, social bookmarking, Social marketing, social networking, social networks
Posted in Social marketing | No Comments »

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