small business marketing online – Page 3

December 18, 2011

Squidoo is a Search Engine!: Implications for Small Business Marketing

Squidoo is a search engine in its own right with other 2.5 Million lenses focused on key topic areas. Even experienced lensmasters tend to forget this aspect of Squidoo.

As Squidoo grows so does its data base of information. So if you are searching for information on specific topics, you will increasingly find quality, focused information by searching Squidoo.

In fact, one of the reasons that Squidoo exists is to improve search engine results. Often you find that websites that gravitate to the top of the search engines are those that have cleverly manipulated the search engines’ algoriths, including automatic generation of backlinks. You have probably found that you are often disappointed by the information that is first displayed by a search engine.

Squidoo was designed to provide webpages that are windows (lenses) to relevant information on a topic. The concept of the lens is that it is not an end in itself but points to other relevant resources. The lens is intended as a mutimedia index to rich information resources about a topic.

Squidoo is intent on maintaining the quality of lenses and has many mechanisms in place to reward quality and remove spam-type web pages. This is one of the reasons Squidoo has banned certain topic areas that tend to be predominantly spam attractors.

Implications of the Squidoo search engine for small business marketing

The primary implication is that in addition to web traffic via other search engines, your Squidoo lenses can attract traffic from within Squidoo itself, from other Squidoo lensmasters. This not only serves to build exposure to your small business but increases the value of your website with other search engines such as Google.

Squidoo insists on original content and has even created an Originality Pact. One of Squidoo’s endearing features is the constant encouragement to develop your personal creativity and to stand out from the crowd, to show that you have something unique to offer (your Unique Selling Proposition – USP?). As the Squidoo editors explain:

Squidoo is an opportunity for you to share your point of view, your take on a specific topic. That’s why lenses are called lenses — they snap your point of view in to focus.

There are many Squidoo lensmasters who demonstrate by their creativity and commitment that they are able to produce quality lenses providing real value to readers – they pride themselves in the quality that they produce. Squidoo recognises these Lensmasters as Giant Squids, people who have achieved excellence in at least 50 lenses. The Giant Squid status tends to attract more interest and more traffic to your website and I have found that it gives you a real standing with Google and the broader Internet marketing community.

In the Originality Pact, the Squidoo editors encourage you to stretch yourself, create quality lenses and to brand yourself as a person of substance who consistently offers readers real value:

This is an agreement to create, craft, build, bake, innovate, write, opine, talk, storytell, review, recommend, and stand out from the crowd. That’s the magic of Squidoo.

So a key implication for your small business marketing on Squidoo is that you brand yourself by the quality (or poverty) of your Squidoo lenses – your lenses will be found through the Squidoo search engine, so how do you want to be seen?

December 17, 2011

The Many Ways to Market Your Small Business on Squidoo

Squidoo, as a multimedia platform, offers many ways to engage in small business marketing. You are really only limited by your imagination so it is well worthwhile visiting Squidoo to see how other lensmasters market their small businesses.

You can build Squidoo lenses that focus on various aspects of your business and at the same time provide useful information to the visitors to your lens. A starting point could be to build a lens that highlights your own profile and then move on to telling the story of your business, sharing information about your staff and then creating a lens that highlights your range of products or services. You could then create a series of lenses that takes each product or service that you offer and provides more detailed information about them, including related articles and blog posts that educate the reader (potential buyer). I’ll discuss some of these options in the following paragraphs.

Build your personal brand on Squidoo

The first way to build your personal brand on Squidoo is to make use of your Profile page to provide an insight into your brand with links across to your small business website and some background about your business. If your lenses are primarily related to some aspect of your business (including its location), you can really take advantage of the fact that Squidoo lists your lenses on your profile page. Many people make the mistake of having lenses on very diverse topics and this tends to dilute the effect of the lens listing on their profile page. Since the link to your profile page is provided on each lens (and other areas of Squidoo), it is important that this page provides clear personal branding if you are going to use Squidoo for small business marketing.

One of the other important ways to establish your personal brand is to build a Squidoo lens about yourself. This provides a great opportunity to use the multimedia features of Squidoo to highlight your background (builds your credibility), your interests (shows you are a real person) and the nature of your business (links you as an interesting person to your own small business).

Here’s an example of how I have developed my personal branding on a Squidoo lens:

Who is Ron Passfield?

Build a Squidoo lens to introduce your small business and your staff

Well this really opens up the field for you in terms of what you can present. You can mention what your business offers in terms of products and services and explain the structure of your business. You can also display your staff and decribe their interests and qualifications.

Some small business owners create videos of interviews with their staff and then upload them to YouTube. If you did this you could then display the videos via the YouTube Module on your small business Squidoo lens.

By way of illustration, I have provided a link below to one of my lenses that introduces my human resource consulting business. You can see here how I have used a number of different modules to introduce my small business and staff:

the Photo Gallery Module to highlight individual human resource consultants engaged in our business (see image below which can highlight people on a rotating basis)
RSS Module to provide the feed from our small business blog
Text Modules to highlight particular services we provide (includes images where appropriate)
Blackbox Modules to act as labels to introduce new topics (you have a range of color choices, not just black).

I have also attempted to use the corporate colors throughout this Squidoo lens by using CSS styling (an advanced feature of Squidoo). You can see my small business lens here:

Merit Solutions Australia

The following image illustrates the Photo Gallery Module:

Promote individual products or services on Squidoo lenses

There are a number of strategies you can use to build lenses that display your products or services. One strategy I have used, for example, is to highlight a number of services related to a niche or category. In my human resource management lens I have done this by listing the training courses we run in one module. To achieve this, I have used the Link List Module as illustrated below:

Another option for displaying products or services is to take a single offering and develop a Squidoo lens around this. You could include news about the product (changes, new releases), a history of the evolution of the product and a list of related products that you offer. You could also add summaries of articles on the topic of the product with links to the full article (published on your website or blog). In this way ou can build up an information and education resource for potential buyers and encourage readers to explore your own website. You can also avoid your Squidoo lens being treated as ‘overly commercial‘.

Tell the story of your small business on a Squidoo lens

Here’s an opportunity to be really engaging. You could talk about how your business started and the fluctuations you have experienced. You could give readers an insight into how your products are made or how you deliver your services. The personal touch goes a long way to capturing readers’ interest.

Make sure that your Squidoo lens contains original content so don’t just copy off your website or blog. Think about how your ‘story’ could illustrate why you are different to your competition. You could include testimonials and examples of people enjoying your products or services. When you have finished, ask yourself, “Have I added anything of value here for my readers?”

Develop Squidoo lenses about the city where your small business is located

You could extend this approach to include the area you service and the local attractions. Chef Keem has developed this type of Squidoo lens for Goldwasser Real Estate who market Shady Hollow in Austin, Texas. You could do well to study the principles behind this Squidoo lens design:

If you look closely at the Shady Hollow lens, you will see that Chef Keem has provided a history of Shady Hollow, created a photo gallery of Shady Hollow homes and identified some landmarks (Community Center & Schools). In addition, he has embedded a YouTube video in the lens in which he interviews the owners of Goldwasser Real Estate as a form of introduction to the Shady Hollow neighbourhood.

So you can make the most of the multimedia platform provided by Squidoo for small business marketing, if you take the time to be original and creative in the presentation of the different aspects of your business,

December 14, 2011December 14, 2011

Video Marketing on Squidoo

Squidoo offers a number of ways to use video marketing for the marketing a small business. Essentially, Squidoo provides two modules that enable you to stream videos within Squidoo lenses.

These modules enable you to identify a video from a video hosting site and embed it in your Squidoo lens. You can use a video of your own from one of these sites or use someone else’s video to illustrate an idea on your lens.

The two main modules for video marketing on Squidoo are (1) the YouTube Module and (2) the Video Module. There is also a video voting module but this serves another purpose.

The YouTube Module on Squidoo

The YouTube Module gives you a lot of flexibility in displaying and streaming YouTube Videos. You can display a single video or multiple videos (up to 10). The way you choose the YouTube videos is up to you. You can use an automated process where you specify a keyword (tag) and YouTube will display the specified number of videos associated with that keyword. The advantage of this approach is that the displayed videos are automatically updated by YouTube.

Another choice is to use the “Let me pick option’ in combination with the “Help me find a video’ link (at the bottom of the module in edit mode). In this option, you again specify a keyword (tag) but you can make a choice from the list of videos displayed by YouTube. You have more control this way but you have to update the list manually.

Alternatively, you can choose to display the videos of a particular person (yourself or someone else) by specifying the desired YouTube ‘Username’.

The YouTube Module in edit mode is displayed below (“Let me pick’ option):

Your video will be shown as a full image for streaming as shown in the screenshot below (notice the hyperlinks at the bottom of the image):

Where you choose multiple YouTube videos to display, one video will be shown in full display and the others are shown as thumbnail images as below:

The Video Module on Squidoo

The Video Module enables you to stream a single video from anyone of a number of video hosting sites, including YouTube. You need to give your module a title and sub-title and a description (optional, but useful to increase your chances of being found on the search engines). Then you post the video link from the relevant video site and click ‘Save”. If you don’t know the URL of the video, you can click on one of the buttons for the video sites listed in the menu across the top of the edit box. The video hosting sites supported by Squidoo, in addition to YouTube, are:

Vimeo
Revver
Howcast
Anboom
Godtube
Metacafe
MySpace
Veoh
Yahoo Movies
5min
Amazon

You can see the Video Module in edit mode displayed below:

The resultant video (from Vimeo in this example) is displayed as a streaming video for playing directly within the Squidoo lens as shown in the screenshot below (taken from a video module in a lens):

Squidoo makes it easy to use video marketing for the marketing of a small business and gives you a range of video hosting sites to draw on for your own videos or those of other contributors.

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.