how to market small business online – Page 4

December 12, 2011December 13, 2011

How to Build a Squidoo Lens

Squidoo provides so many options for small business marketing that it is important to have a design plan in place before you start building Squidoo lenses. When designing your Squidoo lenses you also need to keep in mind the benefits provided by the Squidoo platform.

Setting up Your Squidoo Lens

When you first create a Squidoo lens you need to specify:

lens description (what the lens is about)
the lens name (which will form part of the URL: e.g. http://www.squidoo.com/improve-personal-productivity)
the topic area for your lens (choose from the drop-down list)
the content rating (choose from drop-down list, e.g. ‘G-rated’)
the tags (keywords) for your lens (list with comma separating each tag)
some ‘quickpick’ modules (these can be deleted or added to with ease once your lens is set up).

Your lens description can be changed at any time. However, your Squidoo lens name (URL) is fixed. It is important to do some keyword research before creating a lens so that you can incorporate your target keyword in the lens title and name (URL) and also include other related keywords in your list of tags.

Principles for Squidoo lens design

As mentioned in my discussion of the benefits of Squidoo, one of the key appeals of the Squidoo platform is the easy-to-use lens/webpage builder. Squidoo provides numerous modules for you to draw on so it is important to be clear about your design principles from the outset.

I have previously identified 7 key principles for lens design which I will summarize here:

Determine the purpose for your Squidoo lens (What are you trying to achieve?)
Create a concept plan (How can you best present your information to achieve your purpose?)
Create a lens design to implement your concept (Which modules will you need to best present your concept?)
Expand your keyword research to include search terms that are related to the primary keyword for your Squidoo lens
Produce original content to add to your lens (What information [in what format] will you add to your Squidoo lens?)
Locate images or photos (Will you use a paid service or a free source such as Pixabay)
Review, refine, link & promote (How will you improve and promote your Squidoo lens?).

Adding modules for your Squidoo lens design

When you are in edit mode for your Squidoo lens, you will be able to see the ‘Add Module” option in the top area of the right-hand column of your lens. You will see an image like the one below that gives you the option of choosing from the modules that are ‘popular’, ‘profitable’ or ‘favourites’ ;

The ones displayed above are ‘favorites’ as I have clicked on that menu option. To have access to the full set of modules, you can click on the “Browse all modules’ link at the bottom of the “Add Module” area. This will give you an alphabetical listing of all modules as displayed below:

In the image above, you can see displayed all the modules that begin with the letter ‘S”, as I clicked on that letter in the alphabetical listing at the top.

If you click on “categories’ in the left-hand menu, you will see groupings of modules under headings such as ‘writing’, ‘selling stuff’, ‘news and feeds’ and ‘widgets’. Click around and find out what modules are listed under these categories. You can then use the + button to add one or more of the modules to your lens design.

Some key Squidoo design tips

The “text’ module is a core Squidoo module as you can use it to add text, images and any html (such as hyperlinks or bulleted lists). Some key resources if you want to add HTML are:

You should add a guestbook module if you want to encourage visitors to leave comments and thus build up web traffic to your site. This module includes settings to control who can comment and whether or not you want to moderate comments before Squidoo publishes them.

Squidoo, through its modular design of lenses (websites), gives you a very wide range of options for your small business marketing but you need to keep the design principles in mind when developing your lenses.

December 11, 2011December 12, 2011

7 Great Reasons to Use Squidoo for Small Business Marketing

Squidoo is a unique free hosting platform that gives a real boost to small business marketing. Its uniqueness flows from its easy-to-use features, strong social network, inherent marketing design, search capacity and flexibility. There is so much a small business owner can do on this social networking platform that it is difficult to encapsulate it all in one post. So I have decided to use the “sevens’ blogging approach that I introduced in my previous blog post.

It is difficult nowadays to get anything of quality that is free. Squidoo is a clear exception to this statement. Its features are state-of-the-art as it is subject to continuous improvement and refinement. The benefits for small business marketing are immense and can easily be undervalued if you have not experienced Squidoo.

In this introductory blog post, I want to outline seven (7) great reasons to use Squidoo for small business marketing and, in the process, cover the benefits and features of this marketing platform:

1. Squidoo offers free web hosting and easy-to-use webpage builder

Squidoo enables you to design web pages (called lenses) that it hosts on its own social network platform. The lenses can be on any topic (apart from some explicit exclusions put in place to prevent spam and poor quality web pages).

The easy-to-use webpage builder involves a series of modules which you can piece together to create a professional looking website. Squidoo has a wide range of modules that you can pick from to suit your focus or purpose.

The other key advantage of Squidoo is that you can make as many Squidoo lenses (websites) as you want. I have developed over 100 Squidoo lenses on a wide range of topics.

2. Squidoo provides a multimedia platform for small business marketing

Squidoo enables you to embed your YouTube videos (or those of other people) in your Squidoo lenses. You can display images from Flickr or use a special module (‘photo gallery’) to create a slideshow of your own images.

You can also add podcasts which are streamed on your Squidoo lens via Yahoo Audio Player. The way you mix and match the modules is limited only by your imagination. The key is to design lenses to match your purpose in undertaking small business marketing.

3. Squidoo offers many ways to market your small business

Squidoo provides a very easy way to present multiple aspects of your small business thus helping you to leverage your small business marketing. Here are some possible types of Squidoo lenses you could develop:

tell the story of your business origins and development with illustrations in the form of photos, diagrams and/or videos
create Squidoo lenses about the area your business is located in – attractions in the area, signifcant history, natural features or community activities
feature some of your products or services
provide educational information relevant to your niche
highlight your staff, their interests and their qualifications/skills (the personal touch)

4. Squidoo is a search engine in its own right

Squidoo has more than 2.5 Million lenses and generates its own traffic through its internal search results. Your Squidoo lenses can be featured in these results and accordingly be indexed by Google, Yahoo and Bing.

There are a range of minimum requirements to meet for your lenses to be featured, otherwise they are considered ‘Work-in-Progess’ lenses. So the advantage of building Squidoo lenses for small business marketing is not only to gain external web traffic through other search engines but also internal traffic through Squidoo’s own search engine capability.

Squidoo has algoriths like Google to rank lenses for the purpose of displaying them in their search engine results and for creating lists that highlight exceptional lenses.

5. Squidoo is a very strong social network

Squidoo places a very high value on its social network and continuously explores new ways to engage community members.

Squidoo has developed a range of community roles designed to build community and encourage member interaction. Squidoo has roles related to tutoring new members, running contests and quality control. Community organisers work within Squidoo and in the broader Internet community to communicate the benefits, features and values of Squidoo. One of Squidoo’s core values is creating the opportunity for its members to contribute to charity through the advertising revenue generated from their own lenses.

Squidoo also has a way of rewarding people who create quality lenses and manifest the values of the site. One of the ways Squidoo does this is by identifying ‘Giant Squids’ who have created 50 or more excellent lenses. For example, so far I have achieved the award of Giant Squid100 – created 100 excellent lenses as judged by Squidoo. This award gives you greater visibility on Squidoo and in other search engine results.

6. Squidoo was designed by, and for, Internet marketers

One of the key creators and owners of Squidoo is Seth Godin who is considered the world’s leading business blogger. He has also published in excess of 10 New York Bestsellers on Internet Marketing and related topics.

Squidoo embodies Seth’s Internet marketing principles and is continuously adapted and refined to meet new trends in online marketing, search engine algoriths and social media.

7. Squidoo has a special relationship with Google

Quality lenses appear high on Google’s search engine results. Google values Squidoo’s emphasis on original content, frequent updating and quality control.

Seth Godin was, at one stage, a strategic adviser to Google in relation to its development options. Google, however, still expects Squidoo to control spam and maintain quality which it does through a range of mechanisms.

Squidoo provides multiple avenues for small business marketing and enables small business owners to develop their brand, their personal profiles and to build their customer base while enhancing their personal creativity.

December 9, 2011

Blogging Hints: Sets and Sevens

Blogging hints help you to establish and maintain your blogging frequency. The idea of writing in ‘sets’ or ‘sevens’ is designed to help you build and maintain momentum. Daily blogging, for example, is very much about gaining momentum.

The concept behind these two approaches is to plan ahead so that you can write a number of blog posts about the one topic area. You decide in advance the sub-topics, so that you do not waste time trying to think up subjects for your blog posts when you should be writing.

Let’s have a quick look at both these approaches and see how they differ and what benefits accrue from using these blogging hints.

Blogging hint 1 : Blogging in sets

The idea here is that you write a series of blog posts sequentially around a single theme. So you identify in advance the sub-themes (or let them evolve as you write). Then you write about each sub-theme in turn so you end up with a ‘set’ of blog posts covering a central theme. The sub-themes could be any number but usually they range from three to six.

The benefits of the ‘sets’ blogging hint:

you can plan a series of blog posts in advance so that you can develop some momentum
you can make the most of your thinking and research around a particular topic and thus save time
you can create a critical mass of content around a theme which may result in higher search engine rankings for the relevant search terms
you can readily cross-reference to the related posts thus creating valuable internal links
you can provide your reader with digestible pieces of information about a topic (rather than trying to cover the sub-themes superficially in one single post)
you can write some posts in advance to assist you to maintain your daily blog publishing schedule
you can provide your mailing list with a coherent set of posts on a single theme.

An example of the ‘sets’ approach is my set of four (4) posts around the theme of ‘Webmaster Tools‘.

Blogging hint 2 : Blogging in sevens

The concept in this blogging hint is that you first identify and write about seven (7) aspects of a single topic, e.g. the seven benefits of blogging daily, the seven reasons to have a blog, the seven ways to promote your blog. The first blog post canvasses each of the seven aspects briefly to introduce the issues and to act as a ‘teaser’ to encourage the reader to explore further. Then you write about each of the seven aspects in separate blog posts.

This blogging hint requires sound knowledge about a topic area but it enables you to focus on each aspect in turn and to tease out more fully the implications of that aspect of the main theme of the blog posts.

The benefits of the ‘sevens’ blogging hint:

the ‘sevens’ approach to blogging generates the same benefits as those listed for the ‘sets’ approach
you typically create more posts on a single theme (eight in total) than with the ‘sets’ approach
the individual blog posts are linked via the introductory post as this explains how they are related
readers tend to relate to things that involve the number ‘seven’ (some deep psychological reasons)
you have clarity at the start, as a writer, about the relationship each post has to the initial main post and this assists your writing.

These two blogging hints, ‘sets’ and ‘sevens’, have a lot in common in that they help you, as a writer, gain and sustain momentum in your blogging and make it easier to increase your blogging frequency.

[Photo credit: Thee Ducks by mape_s]

December 9, 2011

How to Develop the Habit of Daily Blogging

Over the past 30 days I have been blogging daily (with the odd exception due to work/travel commitments). To blog daily takes a concerted effort and systematic planning. However, the benefits of daily blogging are well worth the effort. Persistence pays in small business marketing.

It is possible to work up to a daily schedule by gradually improving your current blogging schedule. Alternatively, you can aim for a daily blogging schedule with some advanced planning then adjust your technique as you go.

Whatever approach you use, think about how you are going to achieve your blogging goal and develop some strategies to make it easier for yourself.

Strategies to achieve your daily blogging goal

These strategies are based on my own experience and underpin my daily blogging routine:

Take time out to do a brainstorm of topics relevant to the theme of your blog. If you can’t come up with 20 or more topics then you might have to rethink the focus of your blog
Add to your brainstorming list on a daily basis (I use ‘Notepad” or my phone’s ‘notes’ application for this)
Plan the night before what your topic will be for the next day – you will be surprised how busy your sub-conscious mind becomes overnight so you wake up with a potential post
Give blogging a priority over web surfing or processing your emails (unless work-based urgent ones are involved)
Undertake focused reading – blogs, articles or e-books to stimulate your thinking
Watch videos or participate in web conferences in moderation – beware of the trap of an obsession with learning at the expense of doing (blogging)
Listen to podcasts when doing other things such as walking or house cleaning (your iPod comes in handy here)
Write whenever and wherever you can, even if it is only notes on a topic, e.g. while riding on a train or ferry or while flying to a destination (I wrote this blog post and the previous one while flying from Brisbane to Townsville – a two hour trip. The photo above was taken from my Townsville hotel room looking across to Magnetic Island as I keyed up what I wrote on the plane trip. The photo was taken from the 17th Floor with the 8 MP Camera in my Samsung Galaxy S II Smart Phone.)
Use a technique that enables you to capture your ideas on a topic at different times of the day – you could write notes on paper, on your smart phone or on your computer (use your preferred mode that helps to increase your productivity)
Match your blog post to your available time or access to your computer. If you have limited time on a particular day, don’t choose a topic that requires in-depth research. Choose something that you can write off the top of your head if time is limited
Develop a schedule for writing. Identify an ideal time that matches your body clock and creative energy flow (e.g. if you are a morning person write in the early morning)
If daily blogging is currently beyond your capacity, aim to increase the current frequency of your blogging to an achievable level, e.g. from monthly to weekly, from weekly to twice weekly. The existence of a new goal will help you increase your blogging frequency. You have to be realistic if you have limited capacity because of work/family commitments, writing difficulties or limited knowledge
If you see a stimulating email or link to a great blog post that is relevant to your focus, store it in a readily accessible folder so that you can use it later as a catalyst for a blog post
Store your resource material (e-books, podcasts, videos, checklists, images) in accessble folders under topic headings related to your focus
If you have responded to a query from someone on your mailing list, convert your response to a blog post
Actively focus on improving your productivity online
Try to get ahead of the daily schedule by writing a couple of posts in one sitting – this will give you a bit of breathing space when you need it and, if your have a WordPress blog, you can set the publish date for sometime in the future
Where possible, encourage a guest blogger to make occasional contributions – as you become established you may want to open the guest blogging option to a number of people as my friends have done at SquidLog.net
Above all else, don’t beat up on yourself if you don’t achieve your blogging target. Persist but don’t punish yourself. Review why you missed your target, adopt corrective strategies or amend your goal if it is unrealistic.
If at first you don’t succeed … try, try again (This is my 3rd attempt to create a daily blogging schedule).

Daily blogging can enhance your authority in your niche and build web traffic and sales, but it requires focus, discipline and sound techniques to develop and maintain the momentum.

December 8, 2011December 8, 2011

How Often Should You Blog?

The question of the desired frequency of blogging often comes up in the context of small business marketing. In my experience, the more often I create blog posts, the more visitors I receive and the more income I earn.

Google values currency of information and will give more weight in search results to a site that is regularly updated. This, in turn, leads to more traffic and more sales.

The fundamental challenge, then, is to find a topic that is (1) relevant to your business, ((2) incites your interest and passion and (3) taps into your knowledge base. If you don’t have the requisite knowledge base when you start, you can always build your knowledge as you go, provided you have the interest and passion (which sustain you during the tough times).

While blogging at least weekly is considered a minimum frequency, the more successful bloggers argue the case for daily blogging.

Benefits of daily blogging

There are a number of significant benefits that arise from daily blogging. They relate to your recognised expertise and visibility, your productivity and satisfaction of customer needs for information. Here are some benefits of daily blogging that I have identified to date:

You establish your credibility and demonstrate your depth of expertise
You make your mark and stand out from other bloggers because so few bloggers are able to, or willing to, commit to daily blogging
You increase the opportunity for potential customers to find your blog because of the wide range of search terms (keywords) you will invariably cover while blogging with such frequency
You give your readers a reason to re-visit your blog – because they know that you will have fresh material on a regular basis
Blogging becomes easier the more you blog – a universal rule about writing
You develop a momentum that feeds off itself – like any habit it builds energy and commitment
The more you write the more topics come to mind – I find that for every blog post I do, I get two or three more ideas for other posts
Once you start daily blogging your conscious mind is constantly on the alert for relevant topics that you can write about – you start to see things that you overlooked before
Blogging provides a real foundation for small business marketing online as it generates content to share on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Squidoo.

Daily blogging brings its own rewards – not the least of which is that you are creating valuable online real estate by generating current, original content on a regular basis.