Dr. Ralph Wilson is one of the pioneers in Internet marketing. Here’s a video he recently made with Jim Sterne and Bryan Eisenberg on continuous improvement for small businesses. This is a great video for any small business owner, but there are two things I’d like to point out about it. First, the video:

• First bullet point: He’s using YouTube as a marketing tool. Here, Dr. Wilson demonstrates how YouTube can be used to market your business with a professional quality video that targets your niche customer. You can do that too!
• Second bullet point: Dr. Wilson, Sterne, and Eisenberg all point out that continuous improvement for small businesses boils down to one thing - do the most important thing first. The bottom line is, you are growing your web business for your site visitors. What can you do to make it better for them? That’s what you should be doing.

In order for continuous improvement to work, you’ve got to set aside some time to evaluate and analyze your business. Time alone. It can be 15 minutes, 30 minutes, or 1 hour, but you’ve got to put it on your schedule. I like what Jim Sterne said about making a list of the things you did in the last two things and pay someone $10 per hour to do those things that are taking up your time and that anyone can do. Pay them minimum wage, whatever. But clean your plate for the really important things.

One question that often pops up regarding e-mail marketing is, When is the best time to send out the e-mails? It’s a good questions and there really is no right answer. But I like the way Constant Contact gave it a whirl.

There are two legitimate ways you can find out when the best time is to send your e-mail communications. First, you can ask your list members by creating a survey. Put the survey in your e-mail. You can also add that one question to your opt-in form to get a feel for what new subscribers would prefer.

The second way to find out the best time, and this may even be a better way, is to test it. Send out your newsletter twice in one week. Split your list in half and send it to one half of the list at one time and the other half at another time. See which one gets more opens. Be careful, though, because if you send your newsletter during, immediately before, or immediately after a major holiday then your results may be skewed. If you write a newsletter on hunting tips, for instance, and you send out an issue of your newsletter on the day that hunting season opens then you can expect your open rate that day to be low, so don’t rely on that. Pick your days carefully.

That said, keep your audience in mind. If you are marketing to other businesses then you want to send your e-mail at a time when they will read it. The same goes for consumers. You don’t want to send your newsletter that deals with business fashion trends on a Sunday morning when your target audience is least likely to read it.

I like Matt McGee’s take on the local real estate blog. But I’d just like to add that not all local blogs need to be real estate oriented. The real estate field is naturally oriented toward local community blogging, but that doesn’t mean that it’s the only industry that this type of blogging will work for. I think it could work for just about any local business that wants to maintain a community-oriented feel.

For instance, doctors and lawyers - why not? Can you picture your local pediatrician discussing family health and the local community through his blog? I can.

Or what about the local personal injury lawyer filling his blog with local accident reports and information about the surrounding community.

Real estate agents can discuss the local real estate market and community amenities, which interest people moving into the area, but other professionals can discuss community oriented topics in other ways. When it comes to local blogging, it helps to know your strengths, what you have to offer your local readers, and how best to approach the topic so that it benefits you, your potential customers, and the community overall.

Kalena Jordan, who I thought was on top of things pretty well, has discovered that Google now crawls Flash. Of course, those of us who have been keeping up have known about this for at least a month.

This is indeed good news, but there are still boundaries you should give your design team with regard to Flash files. The primary boundary is don’t build an index page that is entirely made of Flash. It will be a disaster for your website. And while we’re busy making rules, don’t build any page on your website that consists solely of Flash.

Google may be able to crawl Flash, but this crawl is a limited crawl. Text and links in Flash are now crawlable, but the images are still to be treated like any other image and since Flash is primarily image oriented, that leaves a lot of real estate that will go uncrawled. Essentially, if you have one line of text and a link in your Flash file, which takes up your entire page, then all Google will see is this:

This is one line of text (here’s the link)

The other search engines won’t even see that, which means that your search engine marketing will be limited to Google. I think, for most small businesses, it’s a bad practice to get into to rely on just one search engine for traffic - even if it is Google with its lion’s share of searchers. You can still get good qualified traffic from Yahoo! and MSN, and, yes, even AOL and Ask. So don’t count them out.

If you are going to use Flash in your website then use a Flash video surrounded by text for better optimization or put Flash in your header and have a completely textual web page well-designed with graphic enhancements just as you’ve got right now. Until Google figures out how to crawl images, text is still the crown on the king of content. The old principles of web design still apply.

Think again! I’ve been saying it for quite awhile, but found this great presentation over the weekend that confirms that fact. Brought to you by the folks over at Universal McCann who have been researching Social Media since 2006, you’ll find some great insights in this research. Some of my favorite highlights:

- 36% of online users think more positively about companies that have blogs
- 73% have read a blog
- 45% have started a blog
And - a whopping 83% have viewed a video online!

Check out the presentation at Slideshare (if you register for a free account, you can download the entire presentation as a PDF file).

Caroline
Small Business Mavericks
Back to the Blog

You hear it all the time: Keywords and links, keywords and links, keywords and links. Is that really what it’s all about?

Well, let’s just say that managing your keywords is just a part of the territory. Building and managing links, too, is a part of running an online business, but there are some links that you have no control over. You can’t always manage the anchor text people use to link to you, or what page they link to either. But you can guide your link building efforts in some ways.

For local small businesses, the game is a little different than it is Internet-only businesses. If you sell widgets online then you need to show up in the SERPs for widget as much as you can and try to capture those long-term phrases as well. Locally, it may not be as important to rank well for the generic and long-term keyword phrases. You just need to rank well for them along with your geographic place names and search terms. And that’s easier to do.

Let’s say that “widget” returns 1 million results. Most of those results will be for website that represent businesses based all over the world. But if you narrow your search to “widget Minnesota” then you’ll cut down on the number of results. Let’s say it comes to 350,000. Narrow it further still to “widget st. paul minnesota” and you could narrow those results to less than 100,000. But what do you do with that.

In most cases, you not only should pay attention to the keyword phrases you use, but try to capture each phrase for all the relevant variations of your geographic search terms (i.e. st. paul minnesota, st. paul minn, etc.). You even want to try to capture zip codes, counties, townships, and even individual neighborhoods if possible.

So you can see how local SEO is a bit different than typical SEO. The principles are the same, but going about how to achieve them a little different.

OK, this title isn’t as good as 7 Reasons You Are Going To Fail At Blogging, but I think you’ll get the idea. Carl Ocab gives the 7 reasons why bloggers fail:

1. Their spell checker sucks
2. They have an irregular blogging schedule
3. Their blog is generic
4. They write for search engines
5. They give no link love
6. They don’t market the blog
7. They’re not committed

I concur with all of these. But even if you do all of these things, your blog can fail simply because you haven’t given it a plan or defined success. A blog doesn’t have to make you money directly. If it drives traffic to your website and people make purchases there based on your content then it’s doing its lead generation job. That’s money, isn’t it?

Seriously, Carl’s list of 7 can kill your blogging. Spell things correctly and post every day. Don’t just write about anything and everything. Even within your niche. Stay focused. One other mistake new bloggers make is stuffing blog posts with keywords thinking the search engines will love them. They may, but your visitors won’t. Write for humans, but consider the SEO. And don’t be afraid to link out. That’s where a significant amount of my traffic comes from. If you don’t commit yourself to your blog then your blog won’t commit itself to you. Get out there and let people know about it!

If you’re a Google AdWords user then you’ll definitely want to know that Google has changed a few things about how it analyzes quality score.

Specifically, these are the changes:

• Calculated at the time of a search query
• Not marked ‘inactive for search’
• Replacing ‘minimum bid’ for ‘first page bid’

I like what Andy Beal has to say: These changes are intended to bring in more revenue for Google. But if it also results in more revenue for advertisers, it’s a good thing. Right?

I’m willing to accept that calculating quality score at the moment a search query is made will result in more accuracy. How would I know? But I’m not sure the other two changes will benefit advertisers much.

The ‘inactive for search’ message for your keywords was intended to help advertisers by not showing ads based on those keywords because they weren’t going to help you much. If that was the case then why are those ads going to be shown now? Will that increase untargeted clicks? If so then it will eat into your ROI. It means advertisers will have to take more responsibility in choosing the proper keywords.

Changing ‘minimum bid’ to ‘first page bid’, however, is a bit more clandestine. This is an attempt to increase bids. If you know that your minimum bid to be approved by Google is .50 and you have a small budget then you are likely to spend .50 or a little more, but not much more. But if you are blind regarding the minimum bid and you know that it will cost you at least $1.00 to get on page 1 for your keyword, what are you going to do? Psychologically, most people will try to bid well enough to get on page 1, but not necessarily high enough to capture No. 1. As more people compete for page 1 listings, a bidding war ensues. It won’t be long before that $1.00 minimum turns into $2.00. But what if you’re satisfied with a page 2 listing? You’re in trouble.

I think it won’t be long before small businesses trying to nudge their way into pay per click advertising will have to use a provider other than Google. They’re quickly going by way of eBay and creating policies to help the big spenders by cutting out the smaller competition.

SEO-News posted today an article that recommends the 32 most important SEO tools. Quite frankly, some of them aren’t so important. There is disagreement among SEOs as to which of them are the most important. I’ve narrowed the list down to what most SEOs would consider the absolute essential SEO do’s and don’ts:

1. Make sure your site is not under construction or incomplete with little or no unique content.

If your site is under construction or is incomplete then visitors who see it may decide not to come back. Get your site finished and upload it all at once.

2. When your site is ready, submit it to Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK.com. Consider also submitting to other search engines but most of them are powered by these four leading search engines. Also submit your site to reputable high PR web directories, open directories, yellow pages and social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us, furl, etc.

The search engines will crawl your site anyway so submitting to them is not as important as it used to be. But I’d do it anyway just to ensure a quick crawl because if wait then it might be awhile before your site is crawled. Definitely submit your site to directories, online yellow pages, and social bookmarking sites.

5. Create unique and rich content sites. Avoid duplicate content. Do not create multiple pages, sub-domains, domains, mirror sites or sites with different domain names but the same content.

Bottom line: No duplicate content. But let’s cover what that is and is not. If you publish an article that you distribute through article directories, that’s not duplicate content. Publish it first on your website. If you publish an article that was on someone else’s website and isn’t an article distributed through article directories then that is duplicate content. It’s OK to set up a subdomain if it has original content, but not if it has duplicate content.

6. Check your keywords and make sure they are relevant and actually are contained in your site. Avoid keyword stuffing.

Good keyword management is key.

8. Make your TITLE and ALT tags descriptive, simple and keyword rich. Avoid irrelevant and repeated keywords.

Absolutely essential: Make them relevant.

12. Optimize pages with Headings (H1, H2, H3..) containing your site’s primary keywords.

These tags are some of the most important elements on your pages. Use them wisely.

13. Validate your CSS and HTML. Check for errors and broken links.

Broken links will hurt you. Be sure you have no broken links and the code is clean.

14. If your site contains dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), make sure you use SEO friendly URLs. Search engine spiders have difficulty indexing dynamic pages.

If you use an open source CMS like Joomla or Drupal then you definitely want to make sure your URLs are good search engine friendly URLs.

15. Maximum links per page must be fewer than 100. Avoid the risk of being flagged as a link farm by search engines.

If Google thinks you are a link farm they will kill you. Actually, they’ll kill your site.

19. Use a Robots.txt file to manage and control search engine spiders that index your site. You can allow and disallow spiders and choose directories you want to be crawled and indexed. With bad bots or spam bots you need to modify your HTACCESS file to properly and effectively manage bots or spiders. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html to learn more about the Robots.txt file.

The robots.txt file can be an effective way to close off spiders to pages that don’t need to be crawled, secure pages, etc.

20. Do not attempt to present different content to search engines than what you show to your site visitors.

This is one of the most important things for any website. Never show a different page to a search engine spider that your human visitors will not see.

21. Avoid dirty tricks and exploiting loop holes to improve search engine ranking.

Follow approved tactics and you’ll do well.

22. Avoid links to bad neighborhoods such as web spammer, link farm, phishing, hacker, crack, gambling, porn and scam sites. Linking to them will greatly affect your search engine rankings.

Deadly. Very deadly.

23. Do not attempt to join in link schemes, excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging and link exchange web rings.

If you have sites that link back and forth to each other then make sure that they are relevant. You don’t want Google to discount your links because they aren’t relevant.

25. Do not use hidden text and links. Show the search engines what you show to your vistors. It will greatly affect your site’s reputation.

Didn’t we say that already? No hidden links or pages.

27. Make your site useful and informative.

This is the most important thing from a user’s perspective. If you want visitors to return again and again then you’ve got to make your site useful.

28. Improve your link building. Link to high PR websites. Quality of relevant links is far more important than quantity. Links will greatly improve your site’s visibility, popularity and ranking. Search engines consider links as votes to your site.

Key phrase here - quality is better than quantity.

29. Check your page link structure. Every page should be reachable by a single static text link.

Bad site navigation and architecture issues will hurt your search engine rankings.

There are other SEO tips that are important, but these are the absolute essentials. Keep it clean, deal honestly, and don’t try to trick the search engines.

Every now and then I come across a website concept that is so cool it makes you wonder why no one else has thought of it. LeadVine is such a website.

LeadVine’s tagline says it all: The community is your sales force. And that about sums it up.

LeadVine allows you to set a price for a lead that you are looking for. It can be anything - a buyer, a seller, a real estate agent, a lawyer, a product, an antique thingamajig, a meeting with a celebrity even. Whatever you are looking for, LeadVine can help you get it through networking. You ask for what you want and if someone in the community has access to it and will accept your offer then you can have it. Here’s a sampling of some of the items and the prices being offered on LeadVine:

• Credit Card Processing Leads - $50
• Dental office in need of technology assistance - $750
• HR professional working for major cruise line - $200
• Someone wants to appear on HGTV and have house remodeled by famous designer David Bromstad - $250
• Allergy sufferers - $50
• Looking for large land owners,logging companies,tree farms,or govt,agencies interested in brush piling service - $500
• Investors for real estate development - $50,000
• Companies searching for real estate - $5,000

This is a new start up so it isn’t perfect, but LeadVine looks to be a good resource for anyone searching for something that they’d difficulty getting by other means.

One section of the website, titled Connectors, is a place for people who are well connected and know a lot of people. They make themselves available to others to help them get what they want. LeadVine users can view Connectors’ profiles, see their photos, and connect with them through LinkedIn or through LeadVine itself.

My suggestion for improving the Connector part of the site would be to allow users and Connectors to connect through other networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter expand the connection capabilities through more social sites as well. The next phase of Web 2.0 seems to be mashups where social sites interconnect with a variety of other social sites and by adding this feature in multiple directions, LeadVine itself could grow faster and reach out to a more diverse user base. For marketing, I’d suggest sending a press release out to PRWeb and to Mashable; with its thousands of interactive readers all geared toward social media, its the perfect place to announce LeadVine and gain a wider following.

So what are the top 10 ways to use LeadVine? According to its marketing content, here are the top 10 ways to make LeadVine pay:

1. Make easy money by saying two words: “How’s business?” or “How’s work?”
2. Form strategic alliances / partners
3. Earn referral fees for positions your company is trying to fill
4. Use LeadVine to find qualified candidates and save up to 50% - 75% on recruiting fees
5. Search for hard to find antiques, cars, art, etc.
6. Meet well connected people
7. Have people mention your company to influential people in the industry
8. Make international connections
9. Search for hard to find information
10. Get access to places that you could never get into

And I highly recommend it. Check out LeadVine for yourself.