A recent question submitted by a reader is a perfect example of why we started MarketMe.com. 

I am looking to better market my biography site www.jbraggiotti.com  I found your website…Nice name and targeted!  After spending close to 22 years building businesses and working for corp. america. I enjoy helping small businesses grow. 

 

I want to offer my experience developing companies to a targeted audience. Any ideas?

It is the million dollar question… How can I drive targeted traffic to my website?   It is a gigantic part of Internet marketing success - 1/2 the equation.  If you have the answer to this question you are on your way to becoming one of the people that succeed in taking advantage of all that the Internet has to offer you and your business.  If you don’t find the answer you will not succeed and that is why so many of our posts here at MarketMe address this very issue.

In John’s case I recommended that he focus on his strengths.  With 22 years of experience, he most likely has a lot to share and teach others about developing and growing small businesses.  The best way to share that knowledge is through blogs (his own, guest authoring, commenting) and article marketing.  Starting in these 2 areas, John will be able to establish himself as an expert and drive targeted traffic back to his site.

There are many ways to drive traffic to your website as we’ve discussed here before.  But, it is always best to start where you are the strongest and then branch out into the other areas.  In order to do this, you must first be able to look at yourself honestly.  Take stock.  Take a good hard look at yourself and take note of your strengths and your weaknesses.  Your top strengths will determine where to best start your Internet marketing efforts.  If you are an expert at something, share your knowledge through blogging and article marketing.  If you are extremely social and good at networking, hit sites like LinkedIn and Facebook first to get your social networking strategy rolling before tackling other areas. 

Once you get going in the Internet marketing strategies that compliment your strengths (or if you are finding that your particular strengths won’t help you here) ease yourself into others that may not fit you exactly.  Those things that don’t come naturally to you can be strengthened by learning.  Strengthen your skills by educating yourself on blogging, article marketing, writing, social networking, PPC, search engine optimization, etc. so that you can use the tools available to you on the Internet to market yourself and your business.  Only those muscles that are excercised can be strengthened.

So you have taken your Internet marketing to a new level.  You are SEMing, SEOing, facebooking, stumbling, digging, plurking, blogging, commenting.  You have spent hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars optimizing your site.  You have labored for hours producing keyword rich content getting quality backlinks.  You have positioned yourself perfectly in the PPC standings.  Tested your landing page to produce the exact results that you desire.

Here is your chance…  Across the country your perfect potential customer has just sat down at their computer.  They search Google for the exact keyword that you have so diligently optimized your site for.  As they scan the results… it happens…

They see your listing and … CLICK.

They land on your page and are taken in by your use of colors and images.  They are impressed by your knowledge that you have so expertly expressed in your content.  They follow the path you have laid out before them and have arrived on your Contact page.  They spy your toll free number and pick up the phone to dial…

ring… ring… ring…

“No one is available to take your call right now.  Please feel free to ….”  CLICK … DIAL TONE

Awww…  That was close.  You almost had a new customer.

The problem here was that the marketing was done well but failed to go far enough.  When you didn’t answer the phone they went back to the Google search results and clicked on your competition.  (I wonder if they answered the phone?)  Your marketing stopped too soon.  Marketing means showing the customer why they should be doing business with you… from start to finish.  (And if you ask me there is no finish.)  And why should they do business with you if you are not going to be there when they call?  It goes back to developing trust online, people wanting instant gratification, and just good ol’ fashioned customer service.  Your marketing has to take all of these things into consideration and it doesn’t stop just because your potential customer is moving from one marketing tool (your website) to another (your phone system).

If you know anything about us, you know that we have built a very successful business marketing our services using only Internet marketing techniques.  However, our marketing never truly stops on the Internet because if the potential customer picks up the phone to contact us, we are there to answer.  With the increased use of virtual PBX systems many SOHO’s are becoming too reliant on the automated attendant and voicemail.  (Or worse yet a standard answering machine or cell phone voicemail.)  They allow the automated attendant to answer, screen and then send their callers to voicemail.  While an automated attendant and voicemail definitely have their place (professional image, sound bigger, increased efficiency in routing calls, etc.), the feature that they should be taking the most advantage of is the follow-me call forwarding feature.  This feature allows you to forward your calls to you wherever you are.  This way regardless of your location (home office, brick and mortar, out to lunch, on the beach, at the gym, or wherever else you spend your time) when all your hard work and money spent pays off and your potential customer lands on your site, and they like what they see, and they want to contact you to seal the deal, your marketing can continue and you will be there to answer the call.

I am a firm believer in using a virtual PBX for your business.  After all, it is a service that we offer and we use one ourselves for our own business.  However if you are not answering your customer’s calls when they come in on your virtual pbx, or any other phone system that you are using, you are wasting a ton of time and money on all of that marketing.  If the customer is going to take their time to do the search, look over your site, hit the contact page, and pick up the phone to call you - wow you can’t get a much more qualified lead than that and you are flushing it down the drain if you don’t take their call.

I was browsing through a local magazine this weekend and stumbled across an ad for a local chiropractor. It was a half page ad with a series of bulleted, bold words at the top reading “Herniated Disks, Degenerated Discs, Sciatica, Spinal Stenosis, Failed Surgery”. In a different colored font and slightly bigger, “Spinal Decompression at Affordable Cost! Free Consultation!”. I don’t know about you, but I have no idea what Sciatica is. Sometimes my back hurts, but I never say, “Wow, I must be in need of some spinal decompression today”.

Effective marketing speaks the customer’s language. It identifies their problems and offers a solution. A chiropractor primarily treats pain and discomfort. Pain and discomfort is my language. If I’m feeling pain, chances are I don’t know that I have a herniated disk yet.

Don’t let familiar industry-driven terms leak into your advertising. Keep it simple. Seek to speak the language of your customer. Identify the problem as if you were the customer, then present a solution. An ad that sells your service doesn’t help me, but an ad that solves my problem does. Whether your creating a half page ad in a local magazine, a full page ad in a national publication or a pay-per-click campaign, it’s always most important to speak the customer’s language.

Levi Strauss has announced that it is going to go against conventional wisdom and run with a one size fits all product and ad campaign.  They are no longer going to alter the way their jeans fit and the way they are marketed based on the region.  Instead they are keeping the same fit and running the same ad campaign regardless of locale.  There are a number of speculations as to why they are doing this but the Wall Street Journal quotes Levi Strauss CEO John Anderson as saying that “the company is going with both a global fit and global campaign because it believes straight-leg jeans are a global fashion trend, and now is the time to establish the 501 as the obvious option for shoppers around the world.”  Traditional advertising rules state that you should tailor your product and marketing to fit your target market and that the more the audience relates to your message the better your ad campaign will be.  Maybe by using the global fit concept Levi will write some new rules.  It will be interesting to see how it works out for them.  In the meantime, I think it is still better to target your markets with a specific message tailored just for them.

That being said, I am going to imagine that as a small business owner and marketer you know who your target market is.  You may say that your target market is other small businesses, young adults, women, people interested in their health, and the list could go on forever.   There are very few of us that could say that our target market is literally everyone.  So since your product and/or service is not one size fits all, you need to make sure your marketing isn’t either.  The key to making your messages extremely relevant to your audience is to get extremely specific about who they are and what they need.

As I said above, when talking about who your target markets are you may say women or people interested in their health.  That is pretty specific but not specific enough.  Within each of those markets you will find other groups.  For example, if I were running a martial arts studio I could say that my target market would be people interested in martial arts.  But that is way too general and therefore difficult to develop a marketing message around.  Within that group of people are many other markets - you have women that want to lose weight, women that want to learn to defend themselves, men that want learn how to defend their women, men that want to fulfill their Bruce Lee fantasies, children that idolize the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Power Rangers, parents that want their kids to be able to defend themselves against stranger danger, people who simply love the martial arts for it’s beauty, strength and discipline, Mixed Martial Arts fans, Jiu Jitsu lovers, etc, etc.  Now that I have broken down my target market groups I can develop marketing that will be specific to each group…something that will have a relevant message just for them.

While an ad for women interested in learning to defend themselves might include images of seedy looking characters ready to prey on seemingly defenseless women, an ad targeting a pure martial arts enthusiast might include images of Shaolin monks practicing in ancient temples - both would be marketing to people interested in martial arts and both would be marketing my business.

By tailoring your messages to be extremely relevant to each market you hope to capture, you can avoid one size fits all marketing. 

The formula is simple:

• Identify your target audience.   (Ex:  People interested in martial arts.)
• Break it down into specific markets within that audience.  (Ex: Women interested in martial arts.)
• Break those markets down even further into sub markets if possible.  (Ex: Women interested in martial arts as a means to defend themselves.)
• Serve each group advertising that is extremely relevant to them.  (Ex: Ad showing images of seedy characters looking to prey on women with ad copy to match.) 

Your thoughts?

Making visitors to your website feel comfortable and welcome is crucial to online success.  It is much easier for people to click the back button than it is for them to walk out of an actual store or brick and mortar office.  After all, they didn’t spend the time and $5.00/per gallon in gas to get to your website like they would have if they had travelled to your physical location.  The only thing they have invested is the minuscule amount of energy it took to click the mouse a few times - no big deal to back out and pretend they were never there.

The best way to make sure they bail out of your site without ever acting on your call to action (buying something, contacting you, downloading your free report, signing up for a newsletter, etc..) is to annoy the crap out of them.  Here are 5 sure fire ways to do that… 

1. Use Flash Intros - You have about 3 seconds to convince your visitors to stay on your site.  (And that will usually only hold for another 3 seconds unless you can convince them again to stay even longer.)  You can take up that 3 seconds with a fancy flash intro that they can’t get out of and don’t care to see.  The first thing a visitor wants to see is whether the site is relevant to what they are looking for.  Since most flash intros are designed not to convey information, but instead are an attempt to impress the visitor with graphics and music, you can annoy them by using them right when they arrive at your site.  They are like showing commercials in your store.  You have already got the person there, you don’t need to show them another commercial when they walk in the door.  Personally, if I want graphics and music I’ll watch a Disney movie.  I  don’t even like the flash intros that I can get out of easily, but if you must have one you can make it a little less annoying by making sure the “Skip This Intro” button is clearly visible. 
2. Play Music - Nothing is more annoying than a website with music on it.  Oh wait… yes there is… a website with music on it that you can’t turn off.  In the offline world music is used in offices, stores and restaraunts for various reasons - make the customers relaxed, get them in and out quickly, make them want to stay awhile, make the store appeal to a certain demographic, etc.  This does not translate to the online world.  You need to set the tone of your website with your graphics, content and navigation.  Playing music just annoys the crap out of people and drives them away.
3. Clutter Your Landing Page - If you really want to annoy people make sure your landing page is so filled with graphics, ads, and content that their eyes hurt just thinking about trying to find what they are looking for.  When someone lands on your page they need to be able to immediately see that the page is relevant to what they are looking for, feel that they are on a professional site of a professional company and feel comfortable and confident enough to delve deeper into the site.  You want their brain to say, “Ah, this is nice.  I think I will stay awhile.”  Unless of course, you want to annoy the crap out of them… then you want their brain to say, “Aargh!  What the hell is this?  Back! Back!”
    
   The above 3 things you can do to annoy the crap out of your visitors can be done in the first 3 seconds that they land on your page. However, if they make it past those you still have a chance with these. 
4. Hide From Your Visitors- Although people have gotten more comfortable doing business online, they still need to be reassured that there is a real company behind the site.  So if you really want to annoy them, act smarmy and hide.  You can make your contact page difficult to reach by only giving it a small text link in the footer of your page.  Another really irritating thing you could do is not have a toll free number for people to call and only be reachable by email.  This will most likely annoy them enough to make them leave.
5. Keep Things Long and Complicated - If you have not annoyed your visitors enough and they have made it to your sign up/order/action page, don’t fret.  You still have a chance to annoy the crap out of them and make them leave.  Here’s what you do - make them jump through hoops to do business with you.  This means making your order page 4 pages long and require everything from their mother’s maiden name to their shoe size a required field.  The more complicated things are and the more barriers visitors run up against, the less likely they are to follow through with your call to action.  Although they want things simple and uncomplicated, they also want a lot choices when it comes to payment options.  So make sure to only accept 1 major credit card if you really want to annoy them enough to bail out.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of annoying things you can do on your website and these are just a few of them.  What’s your best advice on how to annoy your visitors?

For a small business that has always been brick and mortar only, the transition to the online world can be a difficult one.  A business owner that has always done offline advertising and networking may feel that they are at a disadvantage when it comes to marketing their business online.  However, that is not necessarily the case.  In fact, these business owners may actually have an advantage in that they already know what kind of marketing materials and messages work for their business offline, and they can use those advertising pieces and marketing activities to begin to drive traffic to their online destinations.

To jump start your online social networking, take advantage of the networking opportunities and contacts you already have in the offline world.  Once you have set up your social networking account (my favorite is LinkedIN) search for your friends and colleagues to start building your connections.  I think many times small business owners are unaware of just how many of the professional people that they already know are using social networking.  If you are in any offline professional networking groups such as BNI, LeTip (are they still around?), or Chamber of Commerce make sure you are passing on your online networking contact info along with your name and number.  Include your profile address on your business cards and when exchanging information ask if you can connect with the person online.  (On a side note:  Make sure that when you decide on a username/profile name for your networking sites that it is professional in nature.  Use your name or your business name whenever possible and keep them consistent across social networks so that people begin to recognize you and your brand.)

If you want to drive traffic to your website make sure you are printing your web address on all of your printed marketing materials.  Did I just hear a collective “DUH!”?  I know, I know… that seems like a no-brainer but with as many ads as I come across with no web address on them, I sometimes wonder how no-brainer it really is.  When people visit your website from your printed ads they will usually do so for a number of different reasons.  They may want to learn more about you, they might simply be curious, others might want to see if you are an established and professional company or any combination of the above.  For the people that don’t feel the need to visit your website from your printed ad, you need to give them a reason.  You could do this in any number of ways - create a coupon that can only be retrieved on your website, inspire curiosity or mystery about what they might find there, create a forum where they can connect with other users of your products, run an online contest from your website, offer tools and resources that would be of interest to them…  You know your market better than I do so I’m sure you can come up with some even better ideas for your business.  Also worth a quick read is the article Are You Getting The Most Out Of Your Packaging? by Chris Crum over at Small Business Newz.

What are some things you have found to work well for driving your offline traffic to your online presence?

One of the loves of my life is the martial arts.  One of the things that I love about them is that the lessons that you learn in the dojo can many times be translated into other areas of life.  Lessons such as how to respond when confronted, how to overcome ‘disadvantages’, how to maintain balance, and the need to continue educating oneself to maintain success are all things that when applied to other aspects of life outside the dojo, would do you well.

Here are 4 lessons learned in the dojo that you can apply to your Internet marketing:

1. First To Strike Is Not Always the Winner - In any confrontation, you don’t necessarily have to be the one to strike first to win.  If I am attacked, I can fend off that first strike and then bring what I have to the confrontation.  Most likely, my attacker will not know what that is - they will not know my skills, my experience, what intensity I might respond with, and they will be taken off guard.  The same can be said about Internet marketing.  Obviously at this stage in the game, pretty much anything and everything has been marketed online.  Don’t expect to be the first to strike but don’t expect that to be a barrier to your success either.  What you can bring to the table is going to be unique to you - your skills, your experience, and your desire to succeed.  Bring what you’ve got and do it with an intensity that will not allow for failure and you will be able to take the competition off guard.
2. Size Does Not Matter - At 5′4″ it is safe to assume that most opponents I have/will come up against in martial arts will be bigger than me.  (Especially since martial arts is a male dominated activity.)  However, the fact that they are bigger than me does not auotmatically mean that they will win.  Skill level, speed, agility, experience, and strength will all contribute to the outcome.  As with martial arts, size does not always matter in Internet marketing either.  This is especially important for small businesses and in fact in some ways small businesses have an advantage.  They can move faster to make changes, take advantage of new marketing opportunities, make decisions on the fly, and have more direct control over the marketing messages being put out there.  Today’s Internet marketing environment is optimal for small businesses because there are so many opportunities for marketing that are inexpensive and don’t require a lot of in depth advertising/marketing experience.  So use your small business size to your advantage to compete with the big boys.
3. Stay Balanced Or Land On Your Ass - I learned very early on in my martial arts training that without balance you will have no legs to stand on … or to put it more literally you will be on your ass.  Balance is key to taking a punch as well as delivering one.  You must distribute your weight evenly so that it takes more than one small push to take you down.  This same concepts applies to Internet marketing as well and the added benefit is that you can even have more than 2 legs to keep you balanced.  You must distribute your marketing and not just focus all of your energy in one spot.  If you picture each different marketing medium you get into as a leg, then imagine the balance you could attain if you had a leg in PPC, one in social networking, one in the blogosphere, one in article marketing, and maybe even a toe in some banner advertising.  The idea here is that if one ad stops producing that you still have others that are keeping you going…  that if you are working on your brand recognition, you will be seen in multiple places that your target audience visits… that if you are establishing yourself as an expert in your field, your name will be popping up in different forums, articles, blog comment sections and the like.  Give your marketing balance so you are not knocked on your ass because all your weight was on one leg. 
4. “Learning is like rowing upstream: not to advance is to drop back.”  ~Chinese Proverb  Learning martial arts is an ongoing process.  There will never be a day when I say, I know everything and can learn no more.  The same is true of Internet marketing and in fact, as the Chinese proverb above points out, when you stop learning about Internet marketing is when you start dropping back.  Internet marketing is not a static thing - it is an ever changing and evolving entity.  What works today may not work tomorrow and if you are not continually learning and educating yourself on what’s happening, you will continue to drop back until you are out of the sightline of your customers.  Continue your education and training in Internet Marketing by reading books, subscribing to blogs, attending conferences and expos, asking questions, and by continuing to row upstream.

About the same time I started using Facebook I also joined LinkedIn.  If you read my post, Is Facebook a Time Suck…?, you already know that I am not very impressed with that particular social network’s ability to allow people to … well… network.  On the other hand, LinkedIn has been a much better experience for us.  So I got to thinking …  What is it about LinkedIn that I feel provides us with solid opportunities to get more business, build mutually beneficial business relationships, and increase brand awareness while I feel that Facebook does not?  Well let’s see…

• LinkedIn allows you to send an Introduction to someone so that two people might do business together.  This helps both parties being introduced by bringing 2 businesses together that might not otherwise have made a connection.
   
  Facebook allows you to send someone a teddy bear.
• LinkedIn allows you to share your expertise by answering questions posted by other users.  This can contribute to your brand awareness and establish yourself as an expert willing to help.  It also obviously contributes to the LinkedIn community as a whole by pooling the collective knowledge so that users can get the best answers to their questions.
   
  Facebook allows you to share how you are feeling by adding applications like Dutch Oven (send your friends flatulence of varying sounds), My Personal Weather (display whether you are feeling cloudy or sunny today on your profile), or Care Bears because sharing is caring.
• LinkedIn allows you to recommend people that you have worked with.  This contributes to the entire network’s effectiveness.  Everyone benefits: the person giving the recommendation, the person receiving the recommendation and the person looking for someone in that recommended person’s field.
   
  Facebook allows you to SuperPoke peoplein which you can do any number of actions to them including but not limited to bite, hug, throw a sheep at, embrace in a venus thigh trap, and of course b**ch slap.
• LinkedIn allows you to connect with other peoplewith your same interests through groups.  This allows for great opportunities to network and build partnerships.
   
  Facebook allows you to buy other people through applications such as Owned!

You could easily find 101 people right now that would say that Facebook is a great way to market your business but I would have to say that Facebook is a great way for some to market their business.  The best way to market using Facebook is to develop apps or to create a Facebook page that encourages people to return and spend time there.  Those endeavors can take a large investment in time and money.  I am more of the mind that I would prefer to do that on my own website.  It has been said that Facebook users do not like to leave Facebook.  So if it is going to be difficult to get those users to click from my Facebook page to my website, I would rather focus my marketing on efforts that will lead people to my site directly.  As well, there is a lot of other peripheral noise on Facebook that interferes with doing business and marketing (such as the applications that I mentioned above.)

On the other hand, LinkedIn is all about doing business.  There is a lot less noise that interferes with actual networking getting accomplished.  The atmosphere is professional and everyone is there for the same reason.  This makes it much easier to make meaningful connections and establish yourself and your brand within the network.

As a small business owner my time and budget are both limited.  That being the case I need to make sure that everything I do is going to bring me the best return on investment (whether it is time or money).  So in my book LinkedIn wins over Facebook hands down. 

For all the wonders of Wordpress, it does at times leave a little bit to be desired in the ease of formatting category.  If you want to have your bullet points look a certain way or space your images just so, with a little padding around them, you will have to do a little bit of extra work.  However as I have been looking around the blogoshphere lately, I am seeing what a big difference that little bit extra can make in the appearance of your posts.  If your posts are not well formatted, you can end up with a blog that is too crammed together, doesn’t flow well, with not enough white space to encourage the reader to relax and stay awhile.  So I wanted to share with you guys a few of the things that we do to help our posts have a professional and easy to read look and feel.  (Disclaimer: We use Wordpress so I cannot speak of the effectiveness of these fixes in other blog softwares.)

One of the biggest places I see room for improvment is in the formatting of the images people use in their posts.  Using images in your blog posts is a must.  It adds interest, breaks up the page, and after all a picture is worth a thousand words.  I know a lot of bloggers out there agree with me on this because you can see more and more of them including images.  But what I am also seeing is that many of them just insert the image and call it done.  We have found that the default formatting of the image doesn’t look right and we need to tweak it a little bit to get the look we want.  So here are a couple of things that we do:

Image Spacing

As you can see here when you insert an image into a post there is not enough spacing between the image and the text.  Whether you are aligning your image to the left, right or top doesn’t matter.  If there is not a little padding around it that separates it from the text, it can look crammed.  So in order to give it some room you can use this coding:  style=”margin: 0px 10px 5px 0px”.  There are 4 numbers representing the four sides of margin.  It starts with the top, then right, bottom and left.  So in the example above, there is 0 margin on top, 10 pixels on the right, 5 on the bottom and 0 on the left.  You can adjust the numbers to make the padding around the image match exactly what you want.

For example this could be the html for the above image with the padding added: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/”><img class=”alignnone size-thumbnail wp-image-132 alignleft” style=”float: left; margin: 0px 10px 5px 0px” alt=”Fondling Flickrspace by jurvetson” src=”http://www.marketme.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/pinkbluestrobe-150×150.jpg” width=”150″ height=”150″/>

Image Title/Alt Tag

Another thing that we always make sure to change is the image title or alt tag.  This is what shows up when you float your mouse over the image.  This is a small detail that many bloggers neglect to tend to.  When your readers float their mouse over your image do you want them to see “pinkbluestrobelights” or something more interesting like the actual title given to the image by the photographer?  In the case of the image above, the photographer entitled the image “Fondling Flickrspace”…  Much more interesting than anything I would use to remember which image is which in my images folder.  The alt tag can be used in all sorts of ways: adding keywords, making commentary about an image, adding interest, giving credit for an image, helping software that reads websites for the disabled determine what an image is, etc. 

The latest update to Wordpress makes it really easy to take advantage of the alt tag.  When you upload an image Wordpress will automatically assign the title as whatever name you have given the file.  For example if I named the above image pinkbluestrobelight.jpg when I saved it to my computer, Wordpress would title the image pinkbluestrobelight.  Before you insert the image into the post, change the title to whatever you want to show up when readers mouse over the image.  Voila!  Simple as that.  If you are not using the latest version of Wordpress or would like to use this in other applications you simply need to insert alt=”your title here” into the html of your image.

For example this could be the html for the image above:  href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/”> <img class=”alignnone size-thumbnail wp-image-132 alignleft” style=”float: left;” src=”http://www.marketme.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/pinkbluestrobe-150×150.jpg” alt=”Fondling Flickrspace by jurvetson” width=”150″ height=”150″ />

Image / Text Alignment

Although this fix does not require html, it is something that I feel makes your posts look better.  Many times I see an image inserted at the top of a post and instead of having the text wrap from the top of the image, it will start at the bottom.

When your text doesn’t start until the bottom of the image, the alignment and flow is off.  The gaping white space at the top of your post makes it seem off balance.  There is an easy fix…  Select the image by clicking on it once.  Then click the “align left” button in your post toolbar.   It’s this one: .  This small step can make a big difference in the look of your posts.

In many things that you do in life your success will hinge on your attention to the details.  Whether it is taking a couple minutes to write a personal thank you note to a new client or adding a snippet of code to make your images look better in your blog posts, those things that seem so small make a big difference in how you are perceived by your customers.  Take the extra couple of minutes to sweat the small stuff. 

There are a lot of little things that you can do to spruce up your post and give it a professional look.  What are some that you do?  

Several weeks ago I came across a couple of headlines on Drudge that I thought was a very interesting sign of the times. The first headline read…

Directly to the right was another headline…

If 10 years ago you’d say to someone that the New York Times would be a failure, they’d literally laugh in your face. After all, it’s an established resource with a huge subscriber base reaching all across the country.

But it’s old school. It doesn’t represent how people digest news anymore.

Take the recent earthquake in China as an example. I heard about it on the radio moments after waking up and was interested in finding out more. I could have walked down the end of my driveway and picked up the paper, but that would have been pointless since the newspaper only had yesterday’s breaking news. Instead, I turned to Google News and found 10 sources that not only offered updated information, but I could also see pictures and watch video footage. I knew more about the earthquake in 10 minutes that I ever would reading about it the next day in the newspaper.

Considering all that the internet has to offer, it’s really no wonder we’re seeing businesses, no matter what their size, who aren’t adapting, losing.

So how does this relate to internet marketing and your small business?

Well, is the future of marketing with Google or the NY Times? To me, the headlines on Drudge make it pretty clear. As a small business you have to see this change, understand it and adapt.

Know what Google is and what it wants. Google delivers relevant information quickly and easily. To achieve this, does Google want web pages stuffed with keywords shouting for attention or do they want real, relevant content pertaining to specific subjects?

If you’re focused on stuffing fluff content with keywords to promote higher organic rankings, count on that soon changing. These techniques are the ‘New York Times’ of search.

Instead, learn about search, how it works and where it’s going. A good resource on this subject is Search Engine Watch, http://searchenginewatch.com.

If your time to you is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’
                                                            - Bob Dylan

The lesson to take from this is if you’re not constantly swimming towards new ways to find the eyeballs of your customers, your business is gonna sink like a stone.