Work.com Small Business Community Blog

Aaron Wall - Search Engine Optimization Expert

Aaron Wall, noted search engine optimization expert and creator of SEO Book, is author of one of the most popular guides on Work.com - Learning Search Engine Optimization - a great basic primer to the topic for businesses who want to be more visible online. It has inspired 46 comments already - if you have something to add or ask about SEO please add your comment!

Learning Search Engine Optimization has been heavily linked to around the web - for example, it has been saved by at least 168 people on del.icio.us and cited on over 41 blogs. And it's currently showing up on page 1 of Google for the term learning search engine optimization - which is no surprise! Congratulations Aaron - great visibility for your guide!

30 Free Ways to Market Your Small Business Site

Carrie Hill has a great list of 30 free ways to market your small business site over at Search Engine Watch.

Carrie, a regular Search Engine Watch columnist and Work.com guide author, is a Certified Search Engine Marketing Expert and Promotion Account Manager for Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc. She is also a small business owner and, along with her husband, operates a painting business in the Vail and Aspen area of Colorado, so she has a good understanding of the obstacles that small business owners face.

Marketing with Social Media

The Wall Street Journal just published an article useful for small businesses trying to learn how to engage their customers online -- Marketing with Social Media -- where they ask Scott Monty, relationship director at marketing company Crayon, to recommend a list of blogs and books for owners and managers at small companies looking to learn more about tapping social media to engage customers online. His picks for what's best to read for learning how to get started in social media and reach out to bloggers include:

• MarketingProfs Daily Fix
• Web Strategy by Jeremiah
• What's Next Blog
• PR Squared's Jedi Training for PR 2.0 Tactics
• www.forimmediaterelease.biz/ - a podcast covering social media, corporate communications and marketing
• The New Influencers: A Marketer's Guide to the New Social Media - by Paul Gillin
• Now Is Gone: A Primer for Executives and Entrepreneurs - by Geoff Livingston with Brian Solis - new media PR practices
• The New Rules of Marketing & PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing and Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly - by David Meerman Scott

Work.com is at SES NYC - Come On By!

We would love to meet you and chat with you if you're at the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York (SES NYC) today. Swing by the Work.com/Business.com booth!

How to Make Your Corporate Blog More Popular

How do you get people to read your corporate blog? First of all, you of course must be providing something of use to your audience, and that probably is not promotion of your own company in every blog post. So sit down and think about what your customers need. For example, if you are a plumber, instead of talking about your speedy service and special promotions all the time, try blogging about useful home maintenance tips, such as how homeowners can keep their pipes healthy or how to use a snake.

But that will cut into our business, you protest. Don't worry. I just had a bathtub clog where the plumber had to insert the snake from an outside pipe and had to snake six times and go thirty feet before he snagged the hairball in the old, rusty pipes. I couldn't have done that myself, but the plumber created a lot of goodwill and trust with me by whispering home remedies to keep the water flowing better and teaching me how to turn off the main water main in case of an overflow. I will certainly call him next time my snaking abilities are challenged!

Important in drawing people to your blog is linking to other useful resources that are not your own. You will be establishing a robust web presence as the resources you link to become aware of you and perhaps may link back one of these days. Keeping abreast of current and popular news for your industry or audience and writing about it will help new people to find you. For example, going back to the plumbing blog, maybe there's some hot news about toilets? joy ninja quotes new media consultant Marshall Kirkpatrick about how to make your business blog more popular. He suggests following TechMeme and writing posts about what's popular, thus joining the conversation.

"The theory is that by responding to popular waves of interest in the online conversation in your chosen industry, you get to be part of the conversation while it's hot."

Consistency is also important. If you're busy running or operating a business, finding time to blog at regular intervals can be difficult, but it really helps build your traffic if visitors can depend on fresh and relevant posts. Blogger Rohit Bhargava has some great tips on finding time to blog when it's not your day job.

Search Engine Marketing & Optimization Round Up

Here's a roundup of helpful internet marketing links from PPC to SEO:

Pay per click (PPC) search marketing:

• Get the top search engine marketing tips for small businesses
• Use negative keywords to lower your search engine marketing costs
• Learn how to write better ad copy for your pay per click campaigns
• Discover lead generation best practices for search engine marketing

Search engine optimization:

• See this top-rated guide to learning SEO
• Read further on optimizing for search engines, and learn about the best tools to determine ranking and identify your competition
• Get tips for creating a site map for spiders and visitors

General search marketing:

• Gain knowledge and defend your company using competitive intelligence for search marketers
• Increase conversion rates with 100 tips for landing page design and testing
• Subscribe to newsletters and read content on your favorite areas of search engine marketing

Recession-Proof Marketing

Working in small businesses, we know we’re heading for tough times ahead. So, let’s ditch the argument of whether we’re in a recession or not, and just get to what we’ll need to know to recession proof our marketing.

1. Measurement is King: More than ever, you’ll have to prove the worth of the budget you’ve fought for, so make sure every dollar spent is accountable to a sale down the line. Search engine marketing is a great example of marketing spending that is completely tied to revenue generated. See these best practices for lead generation using search engine marketing.

2. You Can’t Beat Free: You read blogs, so you know the value of content to readers. You won’t find a better time to start blogging than a time when marketing costs are dwindling. See this guide on marketing your business with a blog. Other low cost or free options are word of mouth, press releases, and additional low cost marketing tips.

3. Lean on the Customers and Prospects You Already Have: Take the time to appreciate the customer list you’ve built. If you haven’t already done so, start an in-house email newsletter to reach out to those customers and prospects from whom you’ve already collected information. Here is one set of tips for increasing the value of email newsletters. This is also a great time to build up your customer testimonials, as people will be putting more consideration into their purchases when money is tight.

Since budgets and customer spending are likely to be tight, now may be the time to pull back from expensive outlays such as tradeshow booths, spending which is not easily measured such as direct mail or TV ads, and new fad expenditures such as social marketing which doesn’t have a proven history of revenue generation.

Monitoring What People are Saying About Your Business, Part II

Justin Palmer of Palmer Web Marketing shares a great tip for brand monitoring in his Work.com guide Low-Budget Internet Based Brand Monitoring:

• Omgili Searches: Do a search for your company or product name on Omgili. Omgili is a search engine that focuses exclusively on forum threads and other customer-generated content. You'll probably be surprised to find how many people are talking about your brand.

Monitoring What People are Saying About Your Business

We've already covered how to find the top blogs in your business niche, but how does a time-pressed entrepreneur track what they are saying? First of all, think beyond blogs - you need to be monitoring anything that people are saying about your business on social media sites, forums, consumer review sites, Twitter, social aggregators, social bookmarking sites, and news sites.

1. Google Alerts: First, make sure you have Google Alerts set up, not just for your business name but for important topics of interest, public-facing employees, competitors, and so on. See this list of what you should be tracking.

2. Feed readers: Make sure you are using a feed reader such as Google Reader to subscribe to relevant blogs and feeds. Set up folders as needed to organize your feeds into topic areas of interest.

3. del.icio.us: Periodically check how many people are bookmarking your site or article by going to del.icio.us/url and searching on your URL. 1002 people have saved Work.com & 155 people have saved Aaron Wall's guide Learning Search Engine Optimization - how does your URL compare? You can see if your site is most popular in a category by visiting the popular page for a specific category - for example, http://del.icio.us/popular/smallbusiness/.

4. Twitter: To monitor how your business is perceived, create a Twitter account and then send "track [your company name]" to Twitter to get text messages whenever your company is mentioned by any of the million Twitter users.

5. Technorati: This is not always so accurate, but it's still useful to get a read of who is linking to you. Try http://www.technorati.com/search/work.com  to see the sites linking to Work.com.

6. Stumbleupon: Go to http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/ to see who has favorited your site - here's Work.com on Stumbleupon for example.

7. Business review sites: Visit local business review sites or consumer reviews such as Yelp, Citysearch,  DexKnows, and My 3 Cents to see what people are saying about your business.

Happy tracking and if you have other great resources please add them in the comments.