Inspiring business cards to inspire your next web site design
August 28, 2008 | 2 Comments
Today I came across some creative business card ideas that could provide you with some inspiration to help you dream up a new logo, business card, marketing campaign, or even a new web site design.
Feast your eyes on this Creativebits.org post on cool business card designs.
The best designs tie the central ‘cool design’ to their business, product or service (rather than just being cool). Think of this as delivering your message. Being cool just for the sake of being cool won’t usually win you business but being relevant and memorable will. For example, the card with the teeth imprint or dental floss are both relevant for a dentist and they’re both easy to remember. That’s what you’re shooting for in all of your marketing material - whether it’s your business card or web site.
Design your next web site with your goal being focused on delivering your message in a relevant, memorable way. If you do this there’s a very good chance it will be cool as well.
Another benefit of approaching your design with the message in mind is that it will help keep you from getting side tracked by the many things that derail design projects like getting hung up on specific layout, color, or typography. Does the font the dentist chose what makes the card memorable? No. Neither is the color. Both are important design elements but shouldn’t overshadow your design focus as they often do.
Design your message.
Acknowledgments
Hat tip to Crowdspring.com and their Twitter microblog post (called a tweet) that brought the link on cool business cards from Creativebits.org to my attention.
Episode 13 Where in the world is Julian
June 10, 2008 | Leave a Comment
In episode 13 I say “Hi!” to viewers who have been with us for our first 12 episodes and “Hola” to our new YouTube viewers.
First, I will catch you up on what I have been doing and then…
I figured I’d name our show since I’m in it for the long haul:
Local Knowledge. That’s the name! The World’s First Video Podcast dedicated to Local Internet Marketing.
…and finally I discuss how our next sessions will cover the topic of web design for small business (on a shoestring budget of course).
Julian Seery Gude
ed, Local Na8ion
www.localna8ion.com
Get listed in local online directories in one easy step
May 29, 2008 | 1 Comment
In my last post Cast a wide net with local online directories I discussed the benefits of listing your business in as many legitimate local online directories and guides as possible. It’s all about being found when it counts: when people are looking for you or looking to buy what you have, an area where local online directories like YellowPages.com really shine. Here’s the kicker, getting listed in major local online directories also improves your organic local search engine rankings by raising your page rank on search engines like Google.
These are powerful advantages that you need to employ in any local small business online marketing plan.
I wrapped up my post by mentioning that there are tools and services available in the market today to get your business listed in the multitude of online directories in one easy step. Most of the solutions in this arena are in the $200 to $300 range and I believe that this represents a very fair value given the amount of time it takes to enter/correct these listings yourself.
That got me thinking that it would be great if there was a non-profit organization that standardized these listing practices and helped both the directory companies AND the small business owner get their information listed both “accurately” and “everywhere” for FREE.
While that nirvana HAS NOT been fully realized yet there is a good effort underway that could get us there and it’s damn close to free.
Users of UniversalBusinessListing.org pay only $30 to get listed in over 25 local online directories and guides. Further, business users can keep their records fresh in those same directories for only $18 per year. The money, time savings, and practicality of this tool just blow me away.
Here’s my impartial testimonial. Before I found UniversalBusinessListing.org I planned to start my own service doing much the same thing and beat my competitors on price…by a lot. Because of UBL I’ve scrapped that plan. I now include UBL in all the work I do with clients, and starting today I’m bundling it in with my new product The Percolator, without raising my prices. The reason I’m using UBL now is the same reason you should. Saving loads of time and money. For me, I can replace hours of work in developing and maintaining automated robots to place client listings (OR doing it manually just like you would) or I can give UBL thirty bucks. There’s a tough choice. 
Here are the basics of what you get with UniversalBusinessListing.org
- You input your business information once at UBL’s site and get listed in 25 or more major local online directories/city guides
- You pay a $30 fee
- You pay an annual $18 fee to renew your listing in the same online directories
- UBL provides you with confirmation of your listing in the directories with a url pointing to your listing
- UBL lets you update your information at any time
- UBL allows you to include additional ‘enhanced’ information in your listings such as pictures, directions, logo, etc.
- UBL now includes the ability to get listed on online mobile directories and phones through their new partnership with MobileGates.
For a great interview about UniversalBusinessListing.org with co-founder Chris Travers, head on over to the Local Biz Bits blog penned by fellow online small business marketing Pro, Larry Sullivan.
Julian, ed Local Na8ion
Cast a wide net with local online directories
May 27, 2008 | 4 Comments
Whether you’re just starting your local web marketing or you’ve been at it for a while, there are some fundamentals that you must address.
The first is being found online when people go looking for what you sell. This is the first part of your “findability.” The second part of findability is for another post but to sum it up, it’s about saying and giving the buyer the relevant information they need to complete their search and ultimately select you as the provider of the solution or product they seek. The two together, being found by buyers, and saying the right thing to them at the right time, are your findability. Findability with your web site is what produces sales. When you think of online outreach I champion a targeted niche approach, when it comes to people seeking you out it’s better to think in terms of casting a wide net.
The main tool you should employ for being found, is Local Search Engine Optimization. The goal is to get your business listed higher in the natural, or so called organic search engine rankings. The vast majority of your efforts should be spent on Local SEO because that’s how the vast majority of consumers find you online.
The other way of increasing your local online findability has to do with appearing in myriad online directories and guides. While these products are used far less than search engines to locate providers of products and services they still represent an important market of buyers for you and shouldn’t be ignored.
These local online directories and guides include web sites like YellowPages.com, entertainment focused directories like CitySearch, newer local directories with a social media slant like Yelp, or specialty directories that cater to your industry or niche (like a restaurant or hotel getting listed in Zagat or Trip Advisor).
Surprisingly, getting listed in these online directories and guides does more than just the obvious step of getting you in said online directory. It also improves your organic local search engine optimization!
First, getting your business listed in the online directories lets people find you in searches. That part is as simple as it sounds. If you’re not in the directory you can’t be found. So the goal is to get listed. Second, all of these directories have the potential to link back to your main web site. That is if you’re in the directory and you bother to edit your listing to include your url. When you do, BINGO, it allows buyers to click on the link for your web site and find out more about you. Congratulations, you’ve just used an online directory listing to increase your chance of a sale.
Third, the link from major sites like YellowPages.com, Yelp.com and others also creates a link that raises the link popularity of your web site on search engines. Link popularity remains one of the most significant ways that search engines like Google and Yahoo! rank the importance of your web site, and therefore it’s relevance and position in search results. The more links from legitimate and highly ranked web sites, the more impact the link will have on your search engine rankings. Guess what the search engines think of big sites like Yelp.com, CitySearch, and Superpages.com? Right, they’re legitimate trusted sources of information on the web and due to that their legitimacy it high.
None of the benefits I’ve cited require you to purchase an ad of any kind. All you need is the free listing in order to be found and for the online directory and guide to provide you with the SEO “Google Juice” to drive your own web site’s natural search engine rankings higher.
It stands to reason then that your goal is to get listed in as many major and legitimate online directories and guides as you can. True. The problem is how much time it takes to set up your listings. This shouldn’t stop you from getting your listings set up.
Today, there are better ways to get your business listed in local online directories and guides and I’ll cover that in my next post!
Julian, ed Local Na8ion
Episode 12: Win new customers using local online Newspaper ads
April 27, 2008 | 4 Comments
The allure of local online newspapers
If you are wondering if an online news site is a good bet for your ad dollars I am going to save you a lot of money by sharing some money-saving secrets with you. Done the right way an ad on your local Newspaper web site can be effective but there are some major pitfalls that you need to know or else you will get burned - your ad dollars that is.
On April 9th, 2008 Borrell Research, a well known firm that collects and sells their research primarily to newspaper companies reported that NEWSPAPER-OWNED WEB SITES EARN MORE REVENUE THAN ALL LOCAL MEDIA COMPANIES COMBINED (capturing 26.9 percent of the market). The underlying message your local newspaper web site hopes you hear in this news is that their web site is the best vehicle to advertise on to attract new local business.
I spent five and a half years on the online advertising side of the nation’s second largest newspaper publisher where we had over forty online web sites. One of my jobs was to build their online ad operations where we used sophisticated ad targeting software to deliver over a billion ads per month across our network of sites. You really get to know what works and what doesn’t work when you’re running hundreds of ad campaigns at a time across a diverse set of web sites spanning small towns to major cities.
Reach
Does your product or service appeal to the majority of your local population? If so, it’s hard to beat the broad reach of an online newspaper. You can really blanket a large segment of the population in your market, reach multiple ethnicities, age groups, and other demographics. If you answered no, then stop reading and start researching targeted online marketing methods like e-mail or blog marketing where you can dial up direct response and niche audiences with comparable ease.
Targeting
As I mention above, a newspaper web site’s real strength lies in its broad reach. The problem with that reach is that it’s out of reach of your marketing budget. Even a week long ad campaign on a local news web site that’s big enough to demand attention could run you $10,000 or more. The answer to this is to use targeting. Targeted ads do cost more but they’re still way more efficient than an untargeted ad and almost always a lot less money in the long run. Using targeting does mean that you’re no longer going to reach as BIG of an audience but that’s OK - leave that to Circuit City who has the bucks for it. You can still reach a very diverse and large audience, and one that uses the online newspaper for local buying information.
First, get rid of all those out-of-towners that can’t buy from you
Local Na8ion is all about local online marketing which means that you’re likely the type of business that gets all, or the vast majority of your business from people who live or work in your town or city.
Newsflash: Local Newspapers aren’t as Local as you think!
Here’s a big secret that is true of local online newspapers: up to 50% of the viewers are from outside the main area served by the paper’s web site. Big city newspaper web sites typically have larger out-of-town web readership whereas small towns tend to have less out of town readership (expect 70-80% of your small town paper web site to be local viewers). This means there is a tremendous amount of built-in waste for any ad you run on a local newspaper web site. No sense washing your visiting Uncle’s car with your garden hose if he just has to drive home on a dirt road.
Think of it this way, if you sell exclusively to people in your town or city only $50 to $80 of every $100 you spend in your local online newspaper advertising will be seen by people who can actually buy your product.
Let’s talk about specific targeting methods to address this
The best way to beat these poor odds is to ask your local online newspaper for your ad to be geo-targeted. Geo-targeting banner ads doesn’t cost any more than other forms of ad targeting (e.g appearing on just the Real Estate section). Geo-targeting is highly efficient because your ads only get shown to locals that visit your local newspaper site. In this case, less is more! There are two kinds of geo-targeting: IP based geo-targeting and user-registration based geo-targeting. Typically only major web publishers like Yahoo! offer the latter and most newspaper web site will offer you IP based geo-targeting. Ask which version of targeting your local newspaper web site offers and chose user-registration based geo-targeting if it is available as it is more accurate. But don’t fret that the more common IP based geo-targeting is less accurate, it’s still miles ahead of delivering un-targeted ads to people who won’t be interested in them.
Here are some other tactics to target your ad or run effective banner ads on your local online newspaper web site
- ask if your newspaper has any fixed monthly sponsorships where you pay a monthly set dollar amount (e.g. $500 a month). These sponsorships can be a good value in high traffic areas of your local newspaper (even without geo-targeting) if you’re looking to reach a big audience. Hint, local news sites get most of their traffic on sports and news. Ask to see a traffic report by section of the online newspaper (e.g. sports, business, travel, news, etc.) to get the specifics.
- buy a small ROS campaign (run-of-site) to test which areas of your local newspaper site actually perform for your business. Review the click-through rates of each section (the newspaper should give you an ad report free of charge) and then buy a geotargeted banner ad campaign on that section. Better yet, buy a geo-targeted fixed sponsorship where you pay a set monthly amount on that section.
- See if your local newspaper sells text link ads as they often perform better for direct response ads then banner ads do. Conversely, text ads DON’T work well for branding efforts (no logo or imagery to visually communicate your image, or an emotion that you’re trying to tap into). If they sell text links, buy them geo-targeted.
- Don’t worry about designing your banner ad, most newspapers will make your banner ad for your as part of their service.
- Ask your newspaper rep what e-mail sponsorships they offer. Because newspapers typically have strong trusted brands people don’t mind giving them their email address. Better yet, many consumers opt in to receive ’special offers’ from newspaper partners (that’s you if you buy an email sponsorship). That means you can send out a tailored offer to your market and ride along on the coattails of your local newspaper’s brand. Like Martha Stewart says “It’s a good thing.”
If this sounds all together crazy, you’d be mostly right. Online newspaper advertising makes more sense for larger regional companies with bigger ad budgets or national advertisers with a local footprint. As a small business you can do much better with performance based methods of attracting new visitors to your web site like optimizing your site to increase your natural or organic search engine rankings. Buy ads on the major search engines with paid search engine marketing (SEM).
If you want a free method to brand your business use blog marketing, it’s the best branding tool around and it only costs your business the time you put into it. That can add up to a lot of time but if you’re smart you’ll read about “The best kept secret for quickly creating new content for your blog and web site.” The specific content you put on your blog attracts people with very specific like interests - that’s the kind of efficient targeting and branding you want! Just don’t forget to put all your location information on your site or you’ll get visitors from areas you may not be able to sell too!
Lastly, if you have a small town, neighborhood, or community newspaper web site that competes with the ‘big’ newspaper in town they can occasionally present very good advertising options at substantially reduced rates. Give these a try to test effectiveness with a small ad buy.
Episode 11: Local Search Engine Optimization in Three Easy Steps
April 4, 2008 | 5 Comments
Want to appear towards the top of local search engine rankings on Google and Yahoo! when a buyer searches online in your city for your product or service? Sure you do - it is free search engine marketing after all.
Today in Episode 11 on Local Na8ion (run time 9:57) we feature a video lesson on three quick and easy steps to optimize your web site for local search engines. Using non-technical methods, we will demonstrate three ways to hardwire your web site to increase local sales with something called a title tag, and adding your address to your web site footer (the bottom of your site).
Our three Local SEO tips can be implemented on your WordPress site in less than 10 minutes, even if you don’t know a lick of HTML.
Want some good tips optimizing your title tag? These recommendations from Google will come in pretty handy.
Don’t have an easy-to-update WordPress web site and blog? Why on earth not! Well, in the mean time, here’s a link to the old not-so-easy way to change the title tag on your web site. You would use the same method to update your footer of your index.html file to put your physical street address in your web site footer.
Want to save yourself time and headaches and upgrade to WordPress for less than $100 a year
Upgrade to WordPress today and you’ll save yourself a lot of headaches and avoid the technical mumbo jumbo that old web sites require you to learn. WordPress is a tremendous platform to build your local online sales on. Here’s how you can get started with Wordpress for less than $100 year.
Julian, editor Local Na8ion
Where you are is where it’s at
Finding your next star employee with Local Internet Marketing
March 29, 2008 | 1 Comment
The difference between a local consumer and a local job seeker is the product they’re researching online.
Finding good employees is one of the biggest challenges any company faces and just like selling your products and services locally you have to position your company to attract new employees.
That’s why your local online marketing plan needs to include your job candidate. There’s a term in the recruiting industry to describe the majority of candidates - passive candidates. Because they’re not looking for jobs they’re tough to find - and even harder to woo away.
When Shannon isn’t helping me with Local Na8ion she’s VP Interactive at the largest recruitment marketing ad agency in the U.S.. Shannon’s pet peeve is when companies spend millions on a new consumer campaign and fail to include the job candidate in the process. Your current and prospective customers that you’re trying to reach with your marketing are also candidates that could be your next best hire. Think about it, many of us choose or reject the companies we consider for employment based solely on how we experience that companies brand or product.
You just have to make small adjustments to your marketing strategy to include job candidates. Make yourself a careers page. When you run online or print ads include a link to your careers page and make sure there’s a careers link right on your home page. That way your consumer or B2B marketing gets people thinking of you as a preferred employer, not just a product or service. Check out this interview of Shannon on using social media for recruiting on Bill Vick’s XtremeRecruiting.org. Use examples of Shannon’s career’s web site projects for Discover, BofA, and Fedex as illustrations of the content you want to include on your small business careers web site.
Top Ten reasons Wordpress for Small Business beats the pants off the rest
March 28, 2008 | 7 Comments
I’ve talked a lot about Wordpress but I haven’t explained why it’s better than all the typical offerings pitched to small companies (products from Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google, YellowPages.com, CitySearch, and others). Today I’ll do that in just 200 words. To accomplish my goal I’ll just hit the highlights and leave further explanation for later posts.
- It’s the tool the Pros use and there is good reason for that
- Offers you tremendous SEO out-of-the-box - this means FREE search engine marketing
- Easy to write and publish new content with no need for technical knowledge
- It can be a web site, a blog or both
- People like me all over the world are showing you how to use it - for free
- For less than $100 a year you can get an equivalent web site and blog for what you’d pay a designer or programmer $2-$5K for
- It’s really free, (called open source) only pay for web hosting
- Infinite design and feature customization
- Access to Wordpress community of contributors numbering over 10,000 to assist with design, programming, training or consulting (size of community drives competitive pricing)
- Geek stuff under the hood helping you without you needing to know Geek
Episode 10: Hosting your Wordpress Small Business Web Site on Midphase and using Auto-Install
March 26, 2008 | 3 Comments
In our session today, Episode 10 (run time 9:54) we cover how to get your small business web site and blog hosted and activated with our recommended web host MidPhase using a method called auto-install (also called a one-click install). In our next video how-to session we’ll cover how to select a FREE or Pro Wordpress design for less than $100.
You may want to watch my previous posts on this topic where I have covered the reason why we recommend Wordpress for your small business web site and blog. We also covered how to select a Wordpress host which includes a useful web resource where you can read independent reviews on Wordpress hosts.
By clicking on my link to MidPhase and then entering my discount code “GOTAPEX-ROX-01″ (no quotes) during the order process you’ll get three months of free hosting plus your domain name FREE for life. Make sure your MidPhase order confirmation page reflects the discount. The package should come out to less than $72 in total hosting costs for the year (12 months) at which time you’ll renew for the next year. Disclaimer: I receive a small commission if you sign up with MidPhase that helps me defray the cost of delivering Local Na8ion. Even if I wasn’t paid this fee we’d still recommend MidPhase because we’ve used them and they’ve lived up to their marketing claims.
I also mention in my video today that you should pick up a copy of Wordpress For Dummies by Lisa Sabin-Wilson. It’s the perfect desk reference and self-paced study guide to help you learn Wordpress. Grab a copy of WordPress For Dummies today
Let’s recap why we recommend Wordpress for small businesses in the first place.
From my Jan. 28, 2008 post “We Recommend Wordpress for Small Business”
“It’s FREE, easy to use and update, has more built-in Local SEO Goodness than any comparable product, and you can use it to power your regular web site, not just a blog.”
and
“Did we mention that Wordpress has an active community of over 10,000 contributors? They’re busy year-round making new theme designs that you can use on your site (most are free to use) along with adding specialty features and functionality (called plug-ins in Wordpress) that do everything from power a job board, help you run a newspaper, or make the SEO goodness in Wordpress even better.”
I hope you enjoy today’s video and as always, let me know your questions and comments.
Julian Seery Gude
editor Local Na8ion
Where you are is where it’s at
Oh no, not another story on social media for small business
March 25, 2008 | 4 Comments
I know you are probably ready for a new topic other than social media for small business but I want to give you an important quick heads-up and link (hat tip to Ramon Ray over at smallBiztechnology.com for linking to this). I thought of just adding this as an addendum to my last video Podcast on social media but it’s too important to be that easily missed. What’s special about this article is its broad perspective. It gives you a picture of social media and blogs over the last two years, making it a worthy primer on the topic.
One of the points I made in my series is that aspects of social media (like blogs) have been over hyped. That’s resulted in people tuning them out - especially companies that look to more proven and mainstream ways to advertise and market their business.
Here’s an excerpt
“Monday 9:30 a.m. It’s time for a frank talk. And no, it can’t wait. We know, we know: Most of you are sick to death of blogs. Don’t even want to hear about these millions of online journals that link together into a vast network. And yes, there’s plenty out there not to like. Self-obsession, politics of hate, and the same hunger for fame that has people lining up to trade punches on The Jerry Springer Show. Name just about anything that’s sick in our society today, and it’s on parade in the blogs. On lots of them, even the writing stinks.
Go ahead and bellyache about blogs. But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they’re simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they’re going to shake up just about every business—including yours.”
Here’s the full article called “Social Media Will Change Your Business“
Julian Seery Gude
editor, Local Na8ion
Where you are is where it’s at
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