Marketing

You can spend all the money in the world on advertising and marketing. However, if you don’t put the energy into seeing your own business as you want others to see it, how can they?

Do these thoughts sound familiar:

• “I don’t have time to post on Facebook, let alone create a blog post.”
• “My website looks sloppy and unprofessional.”
• “I don’t know what to write for my blog. I suck at writing.”
• “I need more work.”
• “I can’t keep track of everything I need to do.”
• “I’m too old to start messing around with social media.”
• “I’m so busy that I don’t know where to start my day.”

Read these again. Think about what you are saying to yourself about your business. And if you say it often, who else is starting to think these same things about you and your business?

Are you too unorganized to be trustworthy? Are you a terrible writer? Do you really want more work, OR do you want more money and fun projects? Are you lacking so much confidence that maybe you should not be hired?

I’m writing this because these are many of the things I hear on a regular basis. Oddly enough, the folks who say this over and over to me are the same ones who attract these exact problems. I’m a huge believer that you get what you give, especially in business. So how can you change these ideas and look at your business with a fresh perspective?

Write Out and Review Your Excuses

1. First, write out your excuses, one by one. Then go through them. Is there a consistent tone or problem? What feeling are you receiving by reading these: hopefulness and problem solving actions or hopelessness and defeat?
2. Second, pretend you are a business coach. What would you say to yourself for each excuse?

Create New Thought Patterns

Next, create new patterns and ways of looking at your business. For instance, if you are constantly saying you despise technology and you can’t stand your computer, turn it around to focus on the things you like about technology and your computer (and ignore those others). Or, if you regularly say that it is hard to get a good client, then change that by focusing on the clients who are easy to work with and make you excited to come to work.

Putting this new positive energy into your business will not only help how you see your business, but will change how you speak about your business to others. In doing so, positive changes can be made towards your business goals.

How many times have you received a new solicitation asking you to:

• join a group?
• buy a discounted advertisement?
• join a network and create a profile on a new site?
• invest in smarter search engine optimization (SEO) for your website, etc?

And how many times have you been asked to ACT NOW to receive an incredible deal or you will miss out forever?

Small business owners face making many new decisions every day. And many of these involve marketing choices. Some decisions are easy. Others require careful thought and analysis and can become overwhelming. Making a smart decision can be a difficult task, especially when:

• you are busy running a business
• there is money and time at risk

As a small business owner you know that making wise marketing decisions can possibly make or break your business. Instead of using guess work to determine the best approach to valid investments, you can use simple tools to streamline your decision making process.

I wrote the Make Smart Marketing Decisions and Grow Your Small Business eBook to share proven tips on how to make smart marketing decisions, feel confident in making those decisions, and turn your decisions into a stress-free process. In this eBook we will cover how to:

• Classify Marketing Decisions
• Gather Details For a Specific Marketing Tactic
• Evaluate Details Relevant to Your Marketing Tactic
• Assign Value and Examine Budgets
• Make Your Decision
• Manage Your Decision
• Monitor Your Decision

To receive your free copy of Make Smart Marketing Decisions and Grow Your Small Business eBook, click here to sign up.

Logo Design

Tahoe Golf Tech contact me because they needed a logo and professional brand. After brainstorming, I created a simple logo that can be small, large, embroidered, and used in most mediums.

Branding

Once the logo was complete, I completed their branding, bringing it through in their business card, flyer, Twitter, and Facebook fan page.

Want to get 5 million people to come to your website? Per cartoonist and web designer, Matthew Inman, here's how:

If you have a blog on your content management website, you will have the option to enable or disable commenting. For bloggers who plan to blog at least once a week, commenting provides an interface to interact with your viewers. However, some small business owners are noticing the malicious nature of spammers and are receiving more spam than actual comments. In this case, disabling commenting may be a better option, especially if blogging is done less than once a month.

To help you decide, here is a rundown of the pros and cons of allowing commenting on your website:

PROS:

• If you are an active blogger, the comment system can open your blog up to interacting with your users and readers, sometimes allowing valuable feedback on your posts.
• Comments discussions on your posts can often lead to increased traffic on your site.
• Trackbacks and Pingbacks are comment links from other blogs. Allowing these types of comments can help create a network of links to and from related blogs around the internet.

CONS:

• Spammers love the comment system. By allowing comments on your blog, you open your site up to the exploitation of spammers.
• In order to rid yourself of SPAM comments, you will need to regularly moderate the comments on your blog, and you must learn to be proficient at spotting SPAM and removing it.
• Comments on your blog are likely to take up your time, even if you don’t get large amounts of SPAM.

Making your decision:

When deciding whether or not to allow commenting on your blog posts, the most important decision to ask yourself is “Do I plan on blogging regularly, and will my posts benefit from the potential feedback of my readers?” If the answer is yes, it is probably worthwhile to enable comments on your blog. If your answer is no, and you only plan on using your site’s blog to post periodic updates about your company, or other “read-only” posts, you can save yourself a lot of time and trouble by disabling comments on your site.

As always, if you have any questions or concerns about comments on your site, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Many businesses and organizations create Facebook Fan Pages not knowing that it can become an amazing marketing tool. They simply sign up, assuming that it is just the thing to do today, next to filing a fictitious business name and ordering business cards. After floundering around in the Facebook waters wondering what to post, when to post, and how to gain followers, a page may start to gain popularity simply by the amount of customers it has. However, simply having a sea of followers does not mean you are using Facebook to its fullest potential for your marketing growth.

According to 5 Ways to Improve Your Facebook News Feed Exposure by Brian Carter, "photos often get from 5 to 20 times as much interaction as any other type of Facebook post [statuses, links or videos]." As the VP of Marketing for Infinigraph writes in his article, there are ways to maximize your posts through unique imagery and inspired requests for engagement, as well as other suggestions.

If you are an administrator of a Facebook Fan Page and are looking for ways to increase your feed exposure, check out 5 Ways to Improve Your Facebook News Feed Exposure for some healthy insights.

Creating a video for your business can help you effectively demonstrate your product or service to your clients. A well-produced video can:

• give potential clients a virtual introduction to you
• provide answers to frequently asked questions
• inform existing customers of features they may be unaware of
• provide an easy way for friends and fans to share your information on their social networks

Additionally, a well-produced video will show potential clients that you are concerned with quality.

So what are the steps towards creating a video that can enhance your business? 5 Tips to creating Stellar Videos by Rob Toledo highlights some essential elements that should be considered, including planning, image selection, determining call to actions and more. If you are interested in producing a quality video for your business, be sure to read through these great video marketing tips.

There are only 3.5 months left in 2012, and only about 10 weeks until Thanksgiving (also known to us Truckee/Tahoe-folk as the beginning of the Winter tourist season). If you have holiday products you will be promoting, or if you are in a service-based industry and need help learning how to even out the slow times, now is the time to be marketing.

Unless you have a background in marketing, most business owners need a helping hand. Some common questions I am asked are:

• Where should I advertise and how often?
• How many times a month should I blog and what keywords should I use?
• Should I send out Holiday cards or postcards?
• How often should I send out a newsletter and what type of articles should I include?
• Should I join the Chamber of Commerce and, if so, what do I do afterwards?
• How do I hit my sales numbers during the holidays?

From large, detailed marketing plans to small, one page plans, I have helped guide many businesses to their goals. If you just need a little help getting things rolling and want to jump-start your business, shoot me an email. If you want to get started, here are some things that you can brainstorm:

• Who is your target market for your main business?
• What product or service do you want to really promote in the next 3 months or year?
• What are your goals for your business in the next 3 months or year?
• What is your budget and how much time do you have to put into your own marketing efforts per week and per month?

Make a list of all of the places you are currently advertising and people you are marketing to, list how much these cost (money & time) and write down the return on investment you are getting, per item. See where this list takes you and let's make a plan to help you obtain your goals.

When job hunting, it can be challenging to get your resume seen and heard by the human resources department. Let's face it: you know your Microsoft Word 2008 Word doc standard-looking, black and white resume, typed in a Times font, doesn't really stand out among the hundreds of applications these HR folks are sifting through. So instead of being over-qualified but under-recognized, make your resume stand out.

One of my clients, Jeff Brunings, did just that. With experience as the head of many marketing departments, he knows how far branding can take a product (and in this case, himself). He asked for a branded resume and, after playing with some ideas, we developed a new brand for him in the style of Indiana Jones; he is a jewel in the rough and he can take a company to undocumented heights. Here is what Jeff said about his new resume:

It's amazing! You rocked it! I love it!!

Below is his stunning new resume. What do you think?

Google recently launched its Penguin update algorithm that "is aimed at decreasing search engine rankings of websites that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines" [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Penguin]. What this means is that Google is trying to remove those websites that have over-indulged in search engine optimization and schmarmy keyword techniques that appear in your Google results even though you are not really searching for them. What this also means is that if you are a website owner and have taken your SEO over the top, you will be wanting to be sure that you are abiding by the Google Penguin recommendations so that your site is not blacklisted.

If you are concerned with maintaining your ranking and visibility on Google, review these general guidelines for site owners:

1. First, don't panic. Google changes their algorithms all the time. And please do not start deleting a bunch of content.
2. Remove the over-keyword phrases in title or Htags, such as "great cookbook, cookbook recipes, greatest cook" and replace it with something like "Great cookbook recipes"
3. Go to Google webmaster tools to read through their recommendations and checklist for site owners.
4. Read more about what Google Penguin is and isn't. Here are some more resources:
   1. Search Engine Roundtable discussion
   2. Multiple posts from SEOmoz
   3. Post on Search Engine Land
   4. Top 10 tips on SEO news

   Again, Google regularly changes their algorithms so there is no reason to panic. However, if you have been overdoing it on your site, you will want to take certain precautions to be sure that the new Penguin updates do not negatively affect you.