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April 8, 2011
A few personal notes before I get onto the link love goodness this week.
1. Sorry for the lack of posts lately. I switched to a new web hosting company and that was kind of a hectic time-consuming process. Hopefully things will be a little more reliable with the new host, but we’ll see what happens.
2. My online shop is doing a special fundraiser for homeless animals. If you enjoy this blog and want to do me a favor please please tell your friends about my fundraiser (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and/or order one of our fundraising items. We’ve designed keychain bottle openers and magnets featuring super cute original illustrations and 100% of the money goes to homeless animals. These items are only $6.50 and there’s no shipping charge! Probably cheaper than your average lunch out. So please please help us support this great cause.
3. I’m de-stashing some craft supplies I’ve amassed over the years and the prices are CHEAP. Help me out with my spring cleaning efforts? All items ship for free within the US. If you’re outside the US and want something let me know and I can check into how much shipping will be.
Now onto some linky goodness…
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October 15, 2010
Every day I check out the 100s of subscriptions in my RSS feed about marketing, PR, advertising, branding, social media, and a host of other topics of interest to small businesses that sell online. Most of what gets posted isn’t earth shattering but I reserve Fridays for the best reads of the week. So here you have it, the most valuable things I read in the business blogosphere this week:
This content is copyrighted. See my content sharing policy here.
October 8, 2010
Every day I check out the 100s of subscriptions in my RSS feed about marketing, PR, advertising, branding, social media, and a host of other topics of interest to small businesses that sell online. Most of what gets posted isn’t earth shattering but I reserve Fridays for the best reads of the week. So here you have it, the most valuable things I read in the business blogosphere this week:
This content is copyrighted. See my content sharing policy here.
October 1, 2010
Every day I check out the 100s of subscriptions in my RSS feed about marketing, PR, advertising, branding, social media, and a host of other topics of interest to small businesses that sell online. Most of what gets posted isn’t earth shattering but I reserve Fridays for the best reads of the week. So here you have it, the most valuable things I read in the business blogosphere this week:
Earlier this week I wrote a post about features you might want in an ecommerce system. A few readers asked me to suggest systems that do all of this. First, you may not need a system that does ALL of those things, check out my list and see which features your business needs. Second, I can’t personally vouch for any ecomm systems out there because I use a custom built system. My background is in writing web applications, so for me it was easiest to just create a system that had the exact features I wanted. Writing my own system also means I can tweak it forever to make it do what I want as I get new ideas. This isn’t a practical solution for most people, so here are two resources to check out: Practical Ecommerce’s Directory of Shopping Carts and their shopping cart reviews.
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September 16, 2010
On a forum I read, a fellow indie biz blogger said blogging is not that great for SEO. She said this in the context of asking small business owners WHY they blog. It’s an important question to think about, but the answer certainly can be SEO. The truth is a blog can be great for SEO, it depends on how you use it. So today’s post is about how to make your blog part of your SEO strategy.
1. Research
To really make your blog great for SEO, you’re going to want to do some keyword research. Let’s imagine I sell stationery, and I do a lot of business with wedding invitations. The first thing I want to do is hit up Google’s keyword tool and plug in “wedding invitations”. When I do this I immediately get two awesome things: ideas for blog posts AND keywords people in the market for wedding invitations use when they are shopping. Some of the phrases I get are:
- wedding invitation wording
- beach wedding invitations
- wedding invitation designs
I got lots of others, but we’ll just go with those 3 for now. They make for great blog post ideas and they are keywords we want to capture to attract customers from the web.
2. Come Up With a Plan
Now that I have ideas for phrases I want to optimize for, and ideas for posts, I want to come up with an editorial calendar for my blog that will incorporate those keywords. I also want to think about how I’ll promote my posts so I can get as much mileage from them as possible.
Let’s say I decide I’ll do one post called “Wedding Invitation Wording: 10 Great Examples from Traditional to Humorous” Then I write a post sharing examples of wedding invitation wording. My next course of action would be to find a few places to get links to this post. Maybe I’ll see if people are looking for ideas for wedding invite wording on Yahoo Answers or a message board about weddings. Hopefully I’ve networked with other people in the business like wedding photographers or florists and maybe they have blogs too. I can ask them to link my post in one of their posts.
I’ll want to plan posts around each of the phrases I want to optimize for just like I’ve described above. Maybe I’d write a post about “Beach Wedding Invitations and 5 Other Must Haves for the Perfect Beach Wedding” or “Wedding Invitations Design Inspiration Boards” and then I’d post some inspiration boards I used when designing my invitations. This gives customers eye candy, a look behind the scenes AND optimizes for my keywords. Again, I’ll want to work on getting links to my posts so I can get as much use from them as possible.
3. Balance
Blogs can be powerful SEO vehicles, and you’ll want to work target key phrases into your posts, but make sure your posts don’t come off as too calculated. If your post is clearly written for search bots and has no personality, search engines might find you, but people won’t want to read what you wrote. Not every single post has to be about SEO, but some of them certainly should be.
Every time you update your blog, you’re creating another page for search engines to index and more reasons for them to send traffic to your website. So every time you post to your blog, you’re essentially buying a ticket to the search engine lottery. Even if each ticket isn’t a million dollar winner, a ticket that scores you a dollar here and five dollars there eventually adds up to a pretty big win.
4. Maintain
Stick to a blogging schedule, even if it’s just two or three posts per week. This will give existing fans a reason to check your blog regularly and continue to create new fodder for the search engines.
Use a tool like WordPress so you can install your blog ON YOUR OWN DOMAIN. This is important because it makes your domain more credible with search engines and also helps keep prospective customers on your website. (Using a hosted solution like Blogger or Tumblr is okay, but you’re doing SEO work for a domain you don’t own or control, which is less than ideal.)
Make sure the blogging software you use is SEO compliant. This means your blog uses url names, h1 tags and title tags that incorporate your blog post name. Also be sure to link to your own posts when appropriate, doing this still counts as “links” as far as search engines are concerned.
Still confused by SEO? Here’s a beginner’s guide that explains the basics.
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August 13, 2010
Every day I check out the 100s of subscriptions in my RSS feed about marketing, PR, advertising, branding, social media, and a host of other topics of interest to small businesses that sell online. Most of what gets posted isn’t earth shattering but I reserve Fridays for the best reads of the week. So here you have it, the most valuable things I read in the business blogosphere this week:
This content is copyrighted. See my content sharing policy here.
August 6, 2010
Every day I check out the 100s of subscriptions in my RSS feed about marketing, PR, advertising, branding, social media, and a host of other topics of interest to small businesses that sell online. Most of what gets posted isn’t earth shattering but I reserve Fridays for the best reads of the week. So here you have it, the most valuable things I read in the business blogosphere this week:
This content is copyrighted. See my content sharing policy here.
July 9, 2010
Every day I check out the 100s of subscriptions in my RSS feed about marketing, PR, advertising, branding, social media, and a host of other topics of interest to small businesses that sell online. Most of what gets posted isn’t earth shattering but I reserve Fridays for the best reads of the week. So here you have it, the most valuable things I read in the business blogosphere this week:
This content is copyrighted. See my content sharing policy here.
June 18, 2010
Every day I check out the 100s of subscriptions in my RSS feed about marketing, PR, advertising, branding, social media, and a host of other topics of interest to small businesses that sell online. Most of what gets posted isn’t earth shattering but I reserve Fridays for the best reads of the week. So here you have it, the most valuable things I read in the business blogosphere this week:
This content is copyrighted. See my content sharing policy here.
March 25, 2010
One of the biggest mistakes I see smaller businesses making online is that they often don’t understand who their target market is. As a result they don’t actually market to them. Developing a successful small business means having a very clear understanding of who your target audience is. You might be saying “duh” right now but consider these questions:
Does your media list mostly contain indie blogs?
Do your Facebook statuses say “Just found a new source for fabrics on ebay.” and “Trying to figure out how to use Quickbooks for small business”?
Do you blog mainly about going to trade shows and how to put in a perfect dart?
If you’re guilty of these faux pas, you probably aren’t marketing to your target audience and you may not even understand who your target audience is. Don’t get me wrong, it’s okay to pitch indie blogs. There’s nothing wrong with giving customers a little behind the scenes peak at your day to day life. The problem is that’s all some small businesses do. Unless you sell supplies, most of your potential customers probably aren’t small business owners or artisans. They’re people who admire unique products, but can’t necessarily produce them on their own, and aren’t even terribly interested in how you do your magic. They just enjoy the end result.
So here are four places you can change your ways immediately and start marketing to potential customers instead of, well, yourself.
1. Blog
Blog about things that are interesting to your customers. If you sell dog leashes, blog about cute dog videos from Youtube. If you sell cosmetics, blog about how to achieve the perfect smokey eye.
2. Social Media
Stop spending all day on Etsy’s self-promotion forums. Stop tweeting about new Ebay seller policies, troubles with your merchant account and CPSIA all day. Start Tweeting and Facebooking about stuff your customers will find interesting, amusing or informative. If you want to socialize with fellow artisans or small business owners create TWO social media accounts, one for customers and one for peers.
3. Advertising
This is a biggie. There is a giant world of advertising to be had out there. There are niche publications for nearly everything. So stop spending all your ad dollars on publications mainly read by other artisans and business owners (again, unless you sell supplies or services for business owners or something). It’s okay to do a little marketing to that audience, but make sure the bulk of your ad dollars are being spent on publications that reach potential customers and not just your peers.
Check out sites like Blogads, explore Google Adwords and Adbrite. Think about who your target customers are and what publications they read and what websites they visit. Speaking of which…
4. Media List
Make sure your media list contains press relevant to your brand. A press list for a jewelry company should be different than a press list for a company that mainly designs housewares. Make sure you’re thinking about niche audiences that might like your products. A company that makes jewelry out of circuit boards should be pitching to geek publications. A company that makes pendants featuring different dog breeds should be pitching to pet publications.
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