ProBlogger Community Consultation Review

Not long ago we decided to participate in ProBlogger’s Community Consultation whereby hundreds of ProBlogger readers had the opportunity to critique Marketme.com and offer their advice to make our blog better. Brandi and I felt that putting ourselves out there and inviting feedback would be the best way to gauge our progress thus far and whether or not we were on the right track.

We received over 10,000 words of advice and suggestions on what we could do to make Marketme.com a better blog for our readers. Although we appreciated every individual’s time and effort to comment, we felt that collectively the suggestions that were made over and over again were the suggestions that we really wanted to focus on.

Here are the top 5 changes that were suggested and what we did to correct them:

(more…)

Now Is Gone, But It’s Not Too Late: New Media & Your Small Business

I have been reading a lot of books lately about new media.  A couple that I have reviewed here at MarketMe include Naked Conversations by Scoble/Israel and Meatball Sundae by Seth Godin.  My latest read was Now Is Gone by Geoff Livingston.  As I said, most of my reading lately has been about new media so I was not entirely optimistic that Now Is Gone was going to impart knowledge that I had not already gained elsewhere.

I was wrong to feel that way.  As Livingston states in his book,

“There are many books that cover the actual day-to-day marketing activities in the social media world.  Instead, this book will discuss the general strategic principles and major aspects of social network marketing, providing executives a primer to begin their effort.” 

The hype and buzz around new media has created a stampede of authors, experts, and gurus to tout the wonderful ways that you can use new media to market your business.  However, while telling their readers how to do it, many don’t pause to ask their readers to consider if they should.  This is one of the things that I feel is extremely helpful about Now Is Gone.

Livingston suggests that there are 5 things to consider when deciding whether or not new media is right for your business.

(more…)

Helping Your Customers Help You

In a recent post by Jeremy Schoemaker, Customer Support On The Internet, he discusses why he believes customer support on the Internet is not important. This is in sharp contrast to what Brandi recently posted, Are You Playing Hide And Seek With Your Customers?. To summarize Jeremy’s post, he believes customer service and customer support are two different things. Customer service deals with documentation, tutorials, quick responses to billing issues and an easy return policy, while customer support deals with more technical aspects like installing software and product usage. He uses examples such as Amazon, Google and eBay as Internet-based companies that are extremely successful, offer excellent customer service, but virtually no customer support. This leads me to question… are these companies playing hide and seek from their customers or have they developed a system that tends to be more successful in an online marketplace?

(more…)

Driving Traffic To The Pod Depot

We recently received this question from a reader:

“I need help marketing my website http://www.thepoddepot.com.  I know that I have great content, but nobody is visiting.  Can you help me or give me suggestions?”

In further conversation with the Mifty, the owner of the site, he said that people are interacting well with the site once they get there, but he is not getting enough visitors.  He would like to reach more people and drive more traffic.

This is a common problem for many small businesses and/or online start ups.  They have a valuable service to offer and a great site but they just can’t seem to drive the traffic.  A couple of years ago our advice would probably have been to bid as high as you can on your PayPerClick ads for your keywords and the traffic will come.  The bad news is that it is not that simple anymore.  The good news is that it is not that simple anymore.

(more…)

Are You Playing Hide And Seek With Your Customers?

Don’t hide from your online customers. Yes, one of the advantages of having a website for your business, whether your business is solely on the Internet or if you are a brick and mortar, is that it can do a lot of work for you. It can answer questions for you, increase your exposure, project a certain image, take your orders, earn you money with advertising, sign up your subscribers, inform your customers, etc, etc. But that does not mean that you can hide from your web visitors.

Too many times I see small businesses/online businesses that expect their web sites to do all the work. They make their contact information difficult to find, limit the ways they can be contacted, and/or make it difficult or unattractive for people to contact them. (Big companies are sometimes guilty of this as well. I tried to call Norton just a couple of days ago for a problem that I was having with their software and they wanted to charge me $10.00 to speak to someone.) When you use these kinds of strategies to discourage people from contacting your company you:

(more…)

Networking: New Tools - Same Rules

Familiar to most small business owners are organizations like The Chamber of Commerce, Toastmasters, and the like.  These organizations are opportunities for small businesses to network.  They have been around for years and so have the concepts of networking.  John Jantsch over at Duct Tape Marketing brings up a great point about networking in today’s online world.  The place may have changed but the game is the same.

“With all of the hoopla these days about networking online I can’t help but wonder why people get so confused about how to approach these new tools. See, networking is networking, only the tools that you can employ have changed.”

For many of us that are unsure how to use social networking this is a great way to look at it.  All the familiar rules of networking apply, we just have to apply them in a virtual world.

(more…)

Make Small Appear Big

As small business owners, we know that we can do what we do just as well (or better) as our bigger competition.  Unfortunately, there are a lot of people (potential customers) that don’t know or believe that.  That is until we show them.  So in order to get that opportunity to show our customers how well we can serve them, we sometimes have to appear bigger than we are to get our foot in the door.  Here are 4 ways to help you make small appear big.

(more…)

Insert Extremely Compelling Title Here

Coming up with titles for my articles and blog posts is something that I struggle with.  And because I struggle with it, I sometimes don’t spend the time and attention on them that they truly deserve.  And they do deserve a lot of attention.  After all, a brilliantly written article or blog post will never get read if the title does not inspire anyone to do so.  So I decided that I am going to make an effort to come up with more compelling titles and give my titles the respect they deserve. 

I already knew some of the tried and true techniques for writing effective titles such as:

• Have your keywords in the first 3 words of the title.  This will help your article rank well for those keywords. 
• Use a number such as ”7 Steps” or “3 Tips”.  The idea behind this is that it gets the reader feeling that they have time to quickly scan the 7 items.
• Use power words such as “Amazing”, ”Incredible”, “Outrageous”.  These are strong words that evoke emotion and get people clicking to read more.
• Ask a question.  This piques your readers curiosity and sends them looking for the answer.

(more…)

Copyright © 2009 Telecentrex, LLC. All rights reserved.