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In today’s episode of Local Knowledge I talk with viewers about how access to technology for small to medium sized businesses is creating big change fast in local online marketing. I cover easy-to-update websites and low cost online video to how Smartphones like the iPhone 3GS should be in the pockets of businesses like yours right NOW. Access to high quality low cost tools to make websites and online video offer companies with small budgets the chance to participate in marketing that used to just be for those with deep pockets. This is truly the age of The David’s triumphing over the Goliath’s. Here’s the link I mention in my video about the local CBS Television affiliate in Miami who used an iPhone 3GS to shoot, edit and upload his story to his station that broadcast it over the air.

Access means Big Change Fast | Episode 18 Local Knowledge Small Business Web Design, Local Internet Marketing, Local SEO, Online Video, Training | LOCAL Na8ion West Palm Beach, FL -

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If you don’t already have an easy-to-update website for your business check out this video.

Update your website for more leads | Episode 17 Local Knowledge Small Business Web Design, Local Internet Marketing, Local SEO, Online Video, Training | LOCAL Na8ion West Palm Beach, FL -

The economy is forcing many of us in small business to re-focus our efforts in marketing. Having returned perhaps for the first time in years after successfully growing our business by word-of-mouth and the occasional advertisement here and there, we find the landscape vastly changed. We’re not in the shape we once were.

I’d like to suggest that getting your marketing into ‘game shape’ for your small business is all about renewing your information, focus, and action.

Please permit me to use a parallel example for just a moment.

Whether you Golf or not you know who Tiger Woods is. He recently returned to Golf from a much ballyhooed eight month layoff due to a knee injury. He opted to return in a match play event, a format of golf that he’s particularly celebrated in. Tiger was ousted by a much weaker player in the second round of the event despite the fact that he’s won many events after injuries and long layoffs. I was interested to learn about Tiger’s mental state before the match from Wall Street Journal reporter John Paul Newport.

“One can only speculate, of course, but I’m drawn to a comment he made on his Web site the week before the Accenture. He said he was “full-bore” with his practice sessions and faced no restrictions, but didn’t yet have his “golf stamina” back” – John Paul Newport of Wall Street Journal ‘Tiger’s Search for Golf Stamina‘

As small business owners we have much we can take away from this parallel to apply to our own marketing efforts. If we’ve been out of the game we need to study, practice, and most importantly do. For Tiger, that’s a Golf tournament. For small business owners like us it means we need to get marketing.

We can start but cutting out old ineffective advertising, re-evaluate our current marketing message for efficacy, and find the best crop of current tools and methods to reach our customers.

The final stage of doing is typically the most difficult for all of us. It’s when we must face our fear of the unknown and fear of failure. In the past, marketing and advertising has done much to validate this fear because of the high cost of experimenting with different advertising methods. Ads cost a lot of money. Figuring out which ads work and which ones don’t isn’t exactly an easy thing to do when cash and credit is as tight as it is right now.

Today we have many reasons for hope.

No More Gatekeepers

The Internet has removed the gatekeepers to your customers. The gatekeepers of old included media like Newspapers, Yellow Pages, Direct Mail, Radio, TV and others that you had to pay ridiculous amounts of money to in order to reach (or communicate) with your customer. All without any guaranty of performance.

Contrast that with today when you can employ a free online self-publishing tool like WordPress for your small business website, optimize it for local searches (local search engine optimization), and install free services from Google like their analytics package to monitor your visitor’s behavior. These tools are accessible to any small business with a little study and practice.

Even if you pay an expert like us to re-design your website and optimize it for Local SEO that’s only a one-time investment. Even compared to one month’s worth of traditional advertising like Yellow Pages it’s a bargain.

Using free Google tools like Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer you can even mimic a large ad agency and do sophisticated a/b testing on offers to see which offer performs better. Three years ago A/B testing could have cost you five to ten thousand dollars.

Other ways to directly connect with your customer for free

Today, individuals, businesses of all sizes, and even stars like Lance Armstrong and Britney Spears are using social media like Twitter to directly connect with friends, audiences and yes, even buyers. Consumers have realized through blogs that we are no longer reliant on mainstream media for our information or our business. Businesses have cottoned on to blog marketing for its positive impact on both search engine optimization and branding.  Once you have a direct connection with your customer you can build a real relationship in any manner of ways.

If you spend time studying, practicing and doing Internet marketing you’ll soon realize new customers can be found on a shoestring budget. You’ll have to roll up your sleeves if you want to tap into the biggest savings, but that’s better than the past when you had no choice at all.

Once you’ve dialed in your best marketing message you’ll continue to find new efficiencies, insights, and nuances not apparent to you before. The field will open up. You’ll be in game shape. And you won’t be dropping two grand every time you sneeze while you’re trying to figure it out.

Welcome back, it’s good to have you back in the game.

Get your small business marketing in game shape Small Business Web Design, Local Internet Marketing, Local SEO, Online Video, Training | LOCAL Na8ion West Palm Beach, FL -

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Today on Local Knowledge I discuss four main topics, including:

• Batch your work using time, tools & technology
• Edit a WordPress post or page (see LocalNa8ion.com for full video)
• Update your site once per month to maintain reader/viewer interest and improve your search engine results
• Promote other content on the web to save your own time when blogging or creating web content

Looking for the link for 100+ WordPress Video Tutorials?

Here’s SpeckyBoy.com’s post 100+ WordPress Video Tutorials, from Basic to Advanced

How to edit WordPress Posts & Pages

Now, here’s that videoTutorial by iThemes.com and ScreenTutorial.com on how to edit WordPress posts and pages.

Thanks for watching Local Knowledge, the world’s first video podcast dedicated to Local Internet Marketing

Julian Seery Gude, ed

LocalNa8ion.com

Where you are is where it’s at

You can do it all with the Internet | Episode 14 Local Knowledge Small Business Web Design, Local Internet Marketing, Local SEO, Online Video, Training | LOCAL Na8ion West Palm Beach, FL -

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

Get listed in local online directories in one easy step Small Business Web Design, Local Internet Marketing, Local SEO, Online Video, Training | LOCAL Na8ion West Palm Beach, FL -

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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.

Win new customers using local online Newspaper ads | Episode 12 Local Knowledge Small Business Web Design, Local Internet Marketing, Local SEO, Online Video, Training | LOCAL Na8ion West Palm Beach, FL -

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

Local Search Engine Optimization in Three Easy Steps | Episode 11 Local Knowledge Small Business Web Design, Local Internet Marketing, Local SEO, Online Video, Training | LOCAL Na8ion West Palm Beach, FL -

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

Top Ten reasons WordPress for Small Business beats the pants off the rest Small Business Web Design, Local Internet Marketing, Local SEO, Online Video, Training | LOCAL Na8ion West Palm Beach, FL -

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We will give you three simple-to-implement tips that can rocket your site to the top of Google’s local search results. In episode 8 of Local Na8ion’s video podcast (run time 12 min) we detail how we used these exact methods to move Linda’s Cleaning Service – a house cleaning service in Wellington Florida – from page four of Google Local search results to page one. This didn’t take months, it took days.

We discuss

1. Using your city name in your URL (your web site address)
2. Putting your location information on your web site
3. Adding your business to Google’s Local Business Directory

Yes, you can do all of these things in 28 minutes, even if you’re not a techie!

Subscribe via iTunes or our regular RSS subscription!

Corrections: apologies on our typo on slide 6 of the presentation (your NOT you’re – Yes we know the difference!). Would have taken 2 hours in video processing time to fix. Also, Linda has been in business since 2002 – not the two years I reported. Damn, I’m getting old.

Background: Linda’s Cleaning Service is my mother-in-law Linda’s local small business in Wellington Florida. Since Linda’s daughter Shannon (my beautiful wife and partner in crime here at Local Na8ion) and I are both web marketers it’s no surprise that we work on her site for free – and yes – Linda sends her cleaners to our house once in a while for free as well. Will market for cleaning!

Julian, editor Local Na8ion – where you are is where it’s at

Episode 8: 28 minutes to better Google Local search results Small Business Web Design, Local Internet Marketing, Local SEO, Online Video, Training | LOCAL Na8ion West Palm Beach, FL -

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Epsiode 7 (8:58) In this session we tackle (gasp) PLANNING. Not only that, we try to make it fun. Really! When it comes to a marketing plan, it’s best to think like Steven Covey of 7-habits fame – “begin with the end in mind.” Having a solid plan will greatly increase your chances of success and our simple plan takes just three easy steps: research, act and measure. This is part II in our Real Life series featuring my friend’s new local business FloridaFireFitness.com.

Watch the video below or download a copy for your iPod Video.

Any business can use our plan to hit the ground running while not wasting time you don’t have or making your marketing plan unnecessarily complicated. Enjoy the show and please let us know what you think!

You can download our free spreadsheet file template (.xls) featured in our video Podcast to use for your own business marketing plan by following this link.

Background

We started the series with part I on SuperBowl Sunday with the video Podcast Applying our three-phase local online marketing program where we outlined how we’ll follow the progress of FloridaFireFitness.com as we implement Local Na8ion’s three-phase online marketing method (create, publish, connect). Following our three phase method we will create relevant local content, publish it on the Internet using state-of-the-art online publishing methods, and finish by connecting with local buyers using the most effective online marketing techniques – everything from local search marketing to blog marketing.

My friend Ed and his partner are Fire Fighters by day in Palm Beach County Florida and on their time off they help people stay fit, strength train, run a faster mile, or you know… how to muscle a 280 pound man on to a stretcher for emergency transit to the Hospital. They have a practical and unique personal fitness approach that can work for young and old and the beginner to the advanced.

Episode 7: A simple marketing plan Small Business Web Design, Local Internet Marketing, Local SEO, Online Video, Training | LOCAL Na8ion West Palm Beach, FL -