Announcing the Launch of the Main Street Marketing Community

by Adam Kreitman

Own a small to mid size local business and are frustrated, overwhelmed or confused when it comes to marketing your business online?

I’ve just co-founded a new organization with my friends, and online marketing experts Bob and Josh Sommers, called the Main Street Marketing Community.

We created MSMC to be a trusted source of information for marketing your local business in the online world – whether you want to do it yourself or hire someone to do it for you.

We’ll be adding a ton of content over the coming weeks and months to the website including blog posts, a glossary of online marketing terms, how-to videos and more. And this information will be provided in plain English – no techno-babble allowed!

We’ll also have a forum where you can share your experiences with other business owners in the same boat as you as well as get your questions answered by our team of experts who volunteer their time to help.

On a local level, we’ve started scheduling Java Gyms (in Hawaii and St. Louis with more locations coming soon), which are free, 60 minute informal meeting held by local experts at a coffee shop (putting the “Java” in Java Gym).  Each Java Gym focuses on one specific online marketing strategy that you can put to use for your business to generate traffic, leads and sales on the Internet. They are also all meat – no sales pitches or solicitations of any kind are allowed.

I’ve got two scheduled in the next few weeks in St. Louis. One on local search marketing and one on pay per click advertising. Attendance is free, but spots are limited so if you want to attend, be sure to reserve your spot. Here’s a link to the St. Louis Java Gym calendar where you can find the details on these events.

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Upgrading WordPress – Can It Get Much Easier Than This?

by Adam Kreitman

WordPress is an incredibly powerful tool not just for blogging, but for building entire business websites.

And not only is it powerful, but it’s super simple to use. That’s one of the main reasons I recommend many of my clients use WordPress for their business’ websites. You just don’t have to be a techie, or hire one, to use WordPress.

To illustrate my point, I created a short video on upgrading to a new version of WordPress. WordPress released their version 3.0 today. This is a major upgrade to the software. It contains tons of new features, over 1200 bug fixes and much more.

Yet, for such a major release, you’ll be amazed at how quick and easy the whole upgrade process is. In fact, the video is about 2:30 minutes long, but it only takes that long because I talk a lot. As far as the actual upgrade process, if you blink, you might miss it.

You can either watch it below or go to my other website, WordPressForBusiness.org to watch it there and get a little more background information in the post How To Quickly and Easily Upgrade to WordPress 3.0.

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Tag Your Local Business Listing in Google

by Adam Kreitman

If you own a locally focused business, this is a big deal.

When you perform a search that indicates you’re looking for a local service provider (ie. accountant, pizza, florist, etc.), Google displays a map of your area along with anywhere from 1 to 7 local businesses who provide that service (usually it’s 7). This map gets prime real estate at the top of the search engine results page.

Having your business listed by that map can be a very big deal and generate a ton of leads for your local business. And, if you are listed by that map, the more you can do to draw attention to your business’ listing than your competitors, the better.

Claiming your business’ local business listing is free (if you haven’t done that yet, stop reading and go claim it here now: http://google.com/places! What’s also important to note about local business listings is that you can’t pay to rank on the first page of results.

However, in an effort to monetize the local business listings, Google recently rolled out a feature called Tags. What tags do is place a yellow marker by your local business listing that allow you to highlight some aspect of your business. Things you can highlight with a tag include:

  • Your website
  • Coupons
  • Photos or videos of your business
  • Link to your menu/reservations page

Here’s a screen capture for the search term “Houston massage” where you can see a couple of the local business listings have tags highlighting coupons…

Notice how those listings and their offers stand out from the crowd?

Here are the key things you should understand about tags:

  1. It costs $25 per month to add a tag to your local business listings.
  2. Tags DO NOT affect your rankings in the local business results.
  3. You can stop running them anytime you want.
  4. Right now, tags are only available in California, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Texas, Washington, and Washington D.C.

And most importantly…

5. Because this is so new, not many local businesses know about tags or are taking advantage of them. This presents a very nice opportunity for those who do to really make your business stand out from the competition and generate some more leads.

So if you own a local business and live in one of the areas where tags are available, I recommend adding a tag to your local business listing before your competitors catch on. And if they’re not in your area, they’ll be there soon so take advantage of them when they arrive.

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A “Negative” Suggestion for Facebook PPC

by Adam Kreitman

One of the most effective targeting tools available in Google AdWords is the negative keyword.

A negative keyword is a word or phrase that, when it appears in a searcher’s search query, you don’t want your Google ads to appear.

For example, if you’re bidding on the keyword “shoes” but you don’t sell ballet shoes, adding the term “ballet” as a negative keyword will prevent your ads from being shown for the term “ballet shoes.”

Negative keywords help you more precisely target your ads to your ideal prospects. (Adding a number of negative keywords to a campaign is also one of the most effective ways to give your clickthrough rate a nice boost.)

Facebook PPC has no such equivalent. I’d like to suggest that Facebook add a similar functionality to their pay per click program to help Facebook marketers more precisely target the groups they want.

Here are a few examples of how this could be helpful:

I’m in the planning stages of a campaign right now. Though I can’t give too much away, it would be very helpful if, geographically, I could target people in the U.S. except for those who live in Hawaii. (You can easily do this in Google.) To do this now in Facebook, I’d have to set up a campaign and individually add the other 49 states to it. It’s doable, but it would be a pain in the ass.

Another example is suppose you want to target women, but have discovered that the group of women you’re targeting are generally not fans of Oprah. Wouldn’t it be nice to add Oprah-likers as a negative demographic in your Facebook PPC campaign?

What do you think? Are there situations where you can see this being helpful? If so, please share your ideas in the comment section below…

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Google AdWords and Dog Walking Robots

by Adam Kreitman

I did an interview for RecognizedExpert.com today, a website dedicated to internet marketing for professionals.

The subject was Google AdWords and we talked about:

  • Which businesses (and business goals) AdWords works well for and which it doesn’t work well for
  • What is Quality Score and why it’s so essential to an effective AdWords campaign
  • What goes into a great landing page
  • How to find the right keywords for your campaign
  • The most exciting recent developments/features in Google AdWords
  • Important tips for local businesses to help them use AdWords effectively

We also talked about dog walking robots.

To find out what dog walking robots have to do with AdWords, listen to the Google AdWords interview here.

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WordPress for Business: 5 Essential Plugins for Your WordPress Site

by Adam Kreitman

A plugin is a piece of software that can extend the out of the box functionality of WordPress to do just about anything you could want a website to do. Among the things plugins can do include beefing up the search engine optimization power of your site, cutting down on spam, giving site security a boost, adding social media capabilities to your site and more.

With over 9000 plugins to choose from on WordPress.org, there’s no shortage of choices out there. The question becomes which are the essential plugins you need for your business’ WordPress site. As a shortcut to get you started, here are 5 plugins I install on pretty much every WordPress site I set up.

1. Google XML Sitemaps

A sitemap is a document which has information about all the pages on a website and how they all link together. Sitemaps are important for search engine optimization purposes because they help Google and the other search engines index your site better. This plugin takes all the work out of creating a sitemap. It automatically creates one every time you update your site with new content and then will notify the major search engines that there’s new content for them to index.

2. All In One SEO Pack

With pretty much any business website, you’re going to want it to rank as highly as possible in the search engines so your prospects will find your site before your competitors. The plugin will take care of a lot of the optimization required for your website right out of the box. Simply install the All In One SEO Pack and it automatically starts working to make the search engines love your website. For those of you who may be more advanced in the ways of SEO, you can make changes and tweak settings in the plugin to suit your purposes. (There are some themes, like the Thesis Theme for WordPress, that have SEO functionality already built in which makes this plugin redundant).

3. Contact Form 7

Many business sites will have a form so visitors can submit questions, comments, request additional information, etc. However, it usually requires a bit of programming know-how to get that form on your site. Not with WordPress and Contact Form 7. With this plugin, creating a form and putting it on your site is a breeze. It has a drag and drop interface you can use to add fields such as name, email address, etc. to build your form. Once you have the form set up the way you want it you get a very simple code that you can cut and paste onto the page of your site where you want the form to go. That’s all there is to it – no programming involved.

4. Google Analytics for WordPress

When you have a website, it’s critical to get data about site visitors – how they found your site, what they do when they get to your site, etc. Google Analytics is a free program that lets you collect data about site visitors and run reports that will give you more information about your site then you’ll know what to do with. This plugin makes setting up Google Analytics on your WordPress site a snap. All you need to do after installing the plugin is enter your Analytics account ID and you’re done. From that point forward all current and future pages on your site will automatically have the Analytics code on them so you can collect the data you need about site visits.

5. WordPress Mobile Edition

The number of people using smartphones like the iPhone, Android, etc. is exploding. And a lot of those people are using their phones to browse the web. If your website is not mobile browser friendly, you could very well be losing out on some business. With WordPress Mobile Edition, that won’t be an issue. This plugin will determine if someone is coming to your site using a mobile browser and if they are will give your WordPress site a mobile-friendly interface making it easy to navigate with a phone.

Check my new site for more information about using WordPress for business purposes.

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A Big Disadvantage of Facebook PPC?

by Adam Kreitman

There’s a trend I’ve noticed in the Facebook PPC campaigns I’ve managed and has been noted by others using Facebook PPC as well.

That trend is that performance of your ads in Facebook tends to fade fairly quickly.

This makes sense when you think about it.

As you market to a particular demographic with a particular ad (or set of ads), the people you’re targeting grow weary of that ad after seeing it a few times. At that point they’ve either clicked on it or not and your clickthrough rate tails off.

At that point you either have to target a new demographic or make some fairly significant changes to your ads to get interest back up.

What this means for those setting up and managing campaigns in Facebook is that Facebook PPC requires a lot of attention and close monitoring.

Compare that to Google AdWords where when you find the right keyword/ad combination(s), it’s possible to leave things on autopilot for a while and not have to worry about it. Not to say the performance will stay strong forever, but campaigns certainly seem to have more staying power in AdWords.

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How Facebook’s Made Me a Hypocrite

by Adam Kreitman

So, like, have you heard the news?

Last week, Facebook made some big announcements. To say they have huge implications around the web would be a serious understatement.

Here are the basics of what Facebook’s done:

The “Become a Fan” button that let you show your support of companies, products, organizations, teams, etc. on Facebook has been replaced with a “Like” button. No big deal there.

But at the same time Facebook has made it very easy for websites to include “Like” buttons on their sites so you don’t even have to be on Facebook now to “Like” something. You can “Like” products, companies, movies, events, news stories and more all from many of your favorite websites and even add a comment there that will then be automatically posted to your FB wall.

By enabling websites to easily integrate Facebook into their sites, all of a sudden Facebook users don’t have to go to Facebook anymore. Facebook now comes to you.

Since the announcement last week it’s estimated that 500,000 websites have already added the Facebook “Like” code. These include sites like The New York Times, CNN, NHL.com, Levi’s, Yelp, iMDB, Mashable, and Kiva.org.

But there’s more than to it than just having a “Like” button on the site for you to click on. The code can also let site owners show the profile pictures of Facebook users who like their site, a particular story, a product, etc.

So when I visit Mashable now, I see pictures of my friends and the other 171,989 people who like Mashable.

Think about that for a second. From a marketer’s perspective nothing is more powerful than social proof from your friends. If I’m surfing iMBD looking at different movies and I see my friends’ pictures pop up in the sidebar because they “Like” a certain movie, you think I’m going to take note? Absolutely!

On the Levi’s site (an ecommerce site) it will even show you let you know who among your friends have birthdays coming up just in case you want to buy them a present while you’re browsing.

The marketing implications of this are huge and I don’t think many people have quite wrapped their heads around the possibilities here.

But wait, there’s more!

You know your Facebook Profile – the thing you filled out when you first signed up for Facebook that lists your hometown, high school, favorite movies, interests, hobbies, etc.? You probably haven’t touched it since you first signed up for Facebook.

Well, your “Likes” will soon be added to your profile page. And the information on your profile page allows marketers to run highly targeted Facebook PPC ads that show up while you’re on Facebook that are based upon all your profile information.

(If you’ve ever wondered how the ads on Facebook know you’re getting married, when your birthday is, what college you went to, etc., it’s because of the information you entered in your profile.)

Well now every time you “Like” something, you provide additional real-time information that marketers can use to target ads based upon your demographic info – including your “Likes.”

As Internet marketing guru Ed Dale (from Thirty Day Challenge fame) wrote recently, this is a marketer’s “wet dream.”

After these changes were announced another Internet expert declared Facebook has “won the web.”

I’m not ready to go that far, but the implications of the new Facebook “Like” feature are tremendous. And as a marketer, I’m downright giddy about the possibilities this opens up.

However, as an individual Facebook user I’ve got a completely different view of all this. I’m a fairly private person and like to keep my personal life, well, personal. The privacy issues raised by these recent changes have me concerned.

I’m interested to see how this all plays out in the coming weeks and months but there is one thing I’m sure about. For now, I will not be clicking the “Like” button much anytime soon. There may be some business and marketing related news items, products, etc. that I think will be worth a “Like.” I have no problem sharing professional related things.

But I’m not going to be “Liking” any movies, books, pairs of pants, political news stories, etc. It’s just too personal and I don’t trust that the information is going to stay private where it will only be available for my friends to see.

And that’s why I’m a hypocrite.

Because the marketer in me is drooling at the chance to run Facebook PPC ads that can target people by their “Likes.” I hope lots of people “Like” lots of things so I can run highly targeted campaigns for myself and my clients.

But the individual Facebook user in me is quite wary of what Facebook has done here and I personally don’t plan on jumping on the “Like” bandwagon anytime soon.

What are your thoughts on the new changes to Facebook? Have you started using the  “Like” button? Are you concerned about the privacy issues surrounding the changes Facebook has made?

Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.

Oh, and I hope it’s not being too hypocritical to ask you to click the “Like” button below if you enjoyed this article. But only if you’re comfortable with doing so! ;)

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The 4 Ingredients For Effective Search Engine Optimization

by Adam Kreitman

Wondering how to get your small business’ website ranked on the first page of Google?

Here’s the thing. Despite what you might hear, there’s no magical shortcut, surefire formula and certainly no guarantees to claiming your spot on the first page.

But, when it comes to effective and ethical (ie. not doing scammy things that may get you ranked on the first page quickly, but may ultimately get you banned from Google) search engine optimization (SEO) there are 4 main ingredients that give you the best chance of success.

1. Know Your Keywords

You have to know the actual search terms prospects are typing into the search engines when looking for your product or service. You simply can’t guess here.

At a bare minimum, head over the the free (and pretty awesome) Google AdWords Keyword Tool to so some basic keyword research.

Find 1-2 keywords to focus on first. These keywords should be selected using the information you get from your keyword research as well as your knowledge of your prospects and customers.

The ideal keywords are those with high levels of traffic, low levels of competition and indicate the searcher is in buying mode (ie. “need a st. louis plumber” vs. “plumber” or “buy a Sony KLV26S400A LCD TV” vs. “LCD TVs”).

2. Content

Content can take the form of videos, blog posts, photos, articles, podcasts, etc. The more quality, original content you have on your site, the better. Also, try to build your content around the keywords you’ve identified as the ideal ones for your business.

You can outsource the content creation if you’d like, but it’s better if it comes from you. It may not matter as much for SEO (as long as the content you’re getting from freelancers is truly original work) but it makes a big difference to prospects. When you can inject your personality and knowledge about your business/industry/problems your prospects face into the content you create, that’s going to make a much bigger impression on a prospect than outsourced material.

Frequently adding quality, original content to your site makes Google very happy. And when you’re trying to get on the first page, you want to do whatever you can to make Google happy.

3. Links

Along with content, getting links on other websites that point to yours is key to getting a first page ranking. While the number of links is important, I’d recommend focusing on the quality of the links. Getting links from sites related to yours means much more than a bunch of generic links from unrelated sites.

For example, if you’re a dog groomer in St. Louis, your best links will come from sites related to dog care as well as local St. Louis focused sites. Those will carry much more weight than a link from a site about lasers or celebrity gossip.

How do you get links? The best way is to create great content. When you do this people will naturally want to link to your site to share it with others.

You can also create your own links from external sites to your own site by commenting on blogs, posting on message boards, creating Web2.0 sites (Squidoo, HubPages, WordPress.com, Scribd and countless others) that link back to your main site, article marketing and more.

4. Time

Unless you are in a niche with very little competition (which is getting harder and harder to find), it will take time to get to the top of the search engines. It could take days, weeks, months or years to get your website to the first page of Google and you may not even get there at all.

But selecting the right keywords, focusing on content and links and giving the process some time to work will give you the greatest odds for success.

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Google Ads That Can Stalk Your Prospects Online

by Adam Kreitman

Google introduced an interesting new feature in AdWords the other day.

It’s called “Remarketing” and it allows advertisers to stalk have their ads follow prospects around the web.

Here’s how it works:

Say a prospect comes to my website and visits the page on my site promoting my article marketing service. They’re interested, but not quite ready to act.

So they move onto other sites and that’s the end of it right? Well, not anymore.

Using remarketing, I could have text or banner ads promoting my article marketing service placed on other websites that prospect visits after mine that display Google ads.

Pretty cool stuff.

Your website gets traffic every day from people who are interested in what you have to offer, but for whatever reason, aren’t ready to contact you or buy anything at that moment. And once they leave, they’ll likely never come back. With remarketing, you now have the ability to reach those people with targeted ads that appear on other websites they visit after leaving yours.

It’s a really great way to reach an audience – visitors to your website who leave without taking any action – that you had no way of reaching before the launch of remarketing.

To learn more about remarketing, here’s the official announcement on the Inside AdWords blog.

What do you think about remarketing? Is it a great tool for advertisers or too Big Brother-ish for your liking? Post your thoughts in the comment section below…

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