Brewster Rockit by Tim Rickard

I think today’s Brewster Rockit by Tim Rickard says it all today.

Top Ways to Promote Your Business – video

Let’s face it there really is nothing new under the sun. However, there is often so much information out there it is hard to absorb all of the information out there. I ran across this video and while it does not say anything new it does give a very good overview of the many options out there to promote your website or blog.

Now that you have looked over the video you have to ask yourself of the ways mentioned which ones are you currently doing or not doing?

Do not try to do all of these options all at the same time, unless you have help and a large cash reserve. Instead I would suggest that you focus on doing one of these steps one at a time. This is because I believe that if you divide your time too much that the results of your efforts will be poor. Better to do one job well and then move on.

How to marketing yourself or company online?

If you are a company or organization how should you be marketing yourself online?

This is a very basic question but I was recently asked this at a party when someone found out that I did this sort of work.  It reminded me that not everyone has been reading hundred of articles or blogs each day gathering knowledge or information about this subject. So here is a back to basic information blog article.

The bare minim that should be done online is a website.  Website does not have to cost an arm or a leg either.  There are many web host providers who provide good service at a reasonable price.  Talk with friends and other companies in doing research before you settle on a single provider.

There are many software packages that provide a good and simple layout for your website and it does not require a lot of extra education to make your website.  However for online shopping you might want to higher a professional.  Just as you would heir an artist to do your company logo you will want to have a real professional to create the look and feel for your company.

With a website up and running the next step is to advertise and promote your website.
Again advertisement does not have to be expensive.  Targeted Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertisement can be one of the most cost effective forms of advertisement on the planet. It allows you to not online choose where your ads will show up but also allow you to cap your costs so that you do not run over budget.

Beyond basic advertisement, there are many ways to promote yourself online.  There are wide verities from blogging to social sites such as Facebook and twitter.  Here their are many, many options and the best news is that most of them are free of change other than your time and energy to use the.

Each of these options does have their pros and cons, so do research each one before you invest your time and energy in using them.  I also suggest that you only focus on one area first, master it and then develop another one.  For example if you decided to start a blog then get it up and running get into a habit of regular posts and then move on a develop your Facebook account.

This is a golden age where a small company can compete with a large world wide company.  The internet has leveled the playing field and allows even the smallest company or organization to reach out and promote themselves to the world.  Success is not an overnight sort of thing, however with time and energy it can be achieved.

Do you want to be successful with Twitter?

Many people have turned their nose up at twitter because they don’t understand how they can use 144 characters to market themselves or their webstie.

I will grant you that Twitter might not be for everyone that is not a reason that you should just turn you back on the possibilities. It is important to learn different ways twitter can be used and you might find that it does work into a marketing campaign.
One of the good points of twitter is that it is easy to use. One of the easiest ways to learning how to effectively use twitter is to sign up and follow other people to see what they are doing. Also by following other with similar interests it helps you to connect with others. This will help attract people to follow you.

Once you start a following you need to Offer Valuable and Interesting Information.  Your Twitter need to catch people’s eye and give them something to think about.  Because Twitter has a strict 140 characters limit the type of information you can provide does tend to be post informative links and statements.  Just make sure that those links and statements are useful and fascinating.

There are also a great number of tools available to help you with Twitter. Ping.fm for example allows people to connect several social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter together.  So that one post will be send out to all the others and acts as a great time saver.

Another useful tool is TweetLater which allows people to schedule your tweets at a later time.  For people with a busy schedule or just going on vacation, this tool can insure that your followers keep getting their information.

By providing good information and using tools so all your time is not taken up, Twitter can be a very useful social network tool.

Corporation bullies – it’s our policy so shut up and enjoy it.

As a follow up to my Macmillan Publishers and Rupert Murdoch blog post of last week I want to talk about corporate bullies.  I am seeing a trend out there which is a very bad trend.

The trend is this…. Big companies are becoming bullies!  These companies are sitting there making rules to squeeze pennies from us and in the best tradition of a mafia boss they are telling use that we have to except these rule weather we like it or not.

In my last article I talked about how Macmillan Publishers wants to set all the prices of their e-book.

I also just read that American Airline is planning to charge passengers on flights more than two hours $8.00 for a simple blanket and pillow.   The companies view on this is:  “We evaluate all aspects of our business, and we have to make sure that decisions like this are prudent and strategic for the long-term success of our company,” spokeswoman Andrea Huguely said

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/bus/stories/DN-aablankets_09bus.ART.State.Edition1.3f62a92.html

In another related Airline issues I ran across a guy who has issues with Delta Airlines in which Delta has stop allowing standby passengers.   What I mean by this is say that you have a ticket for the 12:00 noon flight and you get there hours earlier like they always ask you to do.  Say that there is an earlier flight Delta will not allow you to get onto the earlier flight unless you pay an additional $50.  It doesn’t matter if that earlier flight is totally empty, you can not get on it without paying them.

http://www.frommers.com/community/forum.cfm/tips-tools-deals/air-travel/avoid-delta-airline-cost

While all companies should act to keep themselves in business these guy do not seem to recognize that they need to keep their customers happy.   Read any quote from these guys at no point do they seem to take into account their customers?  Look at the American Airlines quote. “Strategic for the long-term success of our company”.  Really?   What about a strategy to keep your customer coming back again?

Because these airline and other companies are so big they seem to feel that they can dictate EVERYTHING to us and they seem to expect us to just shut up and except everything.

I do not know about you but I hate bullies! Even corporation bullies!  I think that it is time that we speak out and let them know that we are not happy with many of their polices.   The presidents and board of directions are not Gods and if we let them know how we feel and that their policies are going to have a negative impact on how we spend our money with them.

If we don’t tell them how we feel now who know what they will be asking us to pay for next.

We are the customer and we need to let them know how we feel!

Macmillan Publishers: Tell them you will not pay their high price for e-books:
customerservice@mpsvirginia.com

Tell American Airlines that you will not pay $8.00 for a blanket:
https://www.aa.com/contactAA/viewEmailFormAccess.do?eventName=customerRelations&eventName=customerRelations

Question Delta why they charge for standby:
http://www.delta.com/emailus/servlet/EmailUs?cmd=go

Macmillan Publishers and Rupert Murdoch want you to buy their cheese.

It is no secret that I have enjoyed the book “Who Moved My Cheese?” By Spencer Johnson. Back in 1990 when this book came out I was working for Boeing and their management grabbed onto this book and made just about everyone in the company read it.

Never have so many managers read a book and failed to understand its true meaning.

At the time the managers at Boeing were using this book to explain to the lowly employees not to get upset when they changed things it just meant that the cheese had been moved and that we should move with it.   However, later that year when our division failed to win a government contract and we had to shut down and the vice-president looked at me in disbelief because he could not believe that he had to move and take a demotion.

I looked at this sad vice-president and said that the cheese had been moved.

The vice-president looked at me and in all honesty looked at me and said: “But I’m the one who moves the cheese.”

The problem as you can see is that people who are in a position of power tend to think that they control “everything”.  While they do have a great deal of influence I would draw the line and say that there are some things that they do not control.

Recently we just John Sargent, Chief Executive of Macmillan publishing demanded from Amazon.com that they raise the prices of their e-books.  Sadly Amazon.com after a few days did back down and raise their prices.

Even Rupert Murdoch chimed in saying, “We don’t like the Amazon model of $9.99….we think it really devalues books and hurts all the retailers of hardcover books.”

Both John Sargent and Rupert Murdoch seem to believe that they control the market place and that they are the one’s who decide where the cheese is.  The question that I ask you is do they control the market place or does the consumer decided what is the fair market value of an electronic version of a book?

Too often companies try to use old business models in the new internet economy and discover that they either need to change the model or come up with new models to fit with today’s internet marketplace.

Just looking back at a few industries…. When was the last time you bought Kodak Film for your camera?  Are you buying as many compact disks as you use to or are you downloading singles to your MP3 player?

Both the camera industry and the music industry have felt the impact of the internet economy and have or are learning what the new rules are to survive and make a profit. While Kodak was once a powerful company they truly did not control where the cheese of the marketplace was.  The future was digital cameras not in traditional film.

Now we have John Sargent and Rupert Murdoch telling consumers that we will buy our e-books at full list price of $15.95 because that is where they want the cheese to be.  The real question is will us as consumers accept this high price tag for our e-books?

Personally I am going to go look for my cheese else where.  I do not like Macmillan Publishers and Rupert Murdoch cheese I think that it is just a little too rich for my taste. If more people do as I’m going to do and move on looking at other companies for their e-books at a more reasonable price I think that some of these powerful men will have discovered that someone has moved their cheese.

Keywords are…. Well…. Key to your Search Engine Success

When promoting your website or blog keywords are critically important to your success in getting good ranking on Google and other search engines. Not only should you worry about which keywords to focus on but you should also focus on where the keywords are used and placed.

The first place your keywords must be placed in you’re the body of your website. This may sound like a no brainier but I have often have clients give me a list of the keywords that they are going after and when I look at their website those words are not on the page. You must use them to get results from them.

Once you have your keywords in the body of the website the next step is to then place the keywords in other parts of your page. Some people worry about Google and other search engine penalizing them if they use the keywords too many times. These are very old thinking, what the search engines do is not penalizes you, but instead simply ignore any extra keywords over a certain number. The way around this is to place the keywords into different areas (parts of the website code) and get it counted that way.

Other places to place your keywords are the title of you pages. That is the blue bar across the top of the page. When creating your titles for each page be descriptive trying to keep it down to using 5-10 words. Also remove small and filler words such as “the” “and” “or”. Unless your company name is part of your keywords do not put it first, instead place the keywords first and then the company name.

The next area to place keywords in is the META tag description. I know that people say that META are useless, however when they say this they are normally talking about the META tag for keywords. There is more than one META tag! The Meta tag called description is still useful and a keyword rich description shorter than 60 words should be done for each page.

Another location of keywords is in with the ALT attribute of the image tags. Have you ever placed your mouse on a graphic or picture and a little box pops up with a description? This is part of the ALT tag of the HTML code. It is a very rich location for placing keyword.

Beyond placing the keywords into these new areas, where you place your keywords on the body of your text also helps with your ranking in search engines.

You wan to make sure that Include Your Keywords in Headers (H1, H2, H3). This is the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) code which figures out which lines are headline and sub heads. The search engines look at the lines of text which you have made bigger and pay more attention to those words. This means that you should always try to work in a keyword or two into your headlines on your pages.

Finally all the things that I have talked about Title, Meta Tags and so on must be customized for each page. You can not simply cut and paste this information to be the same for each page. Google hates duplicate content and will drop you in the ranking if you have it and that includes this information along with your regular content.

The Ipad my first impressions.

There has been so much hype about this thing could it possibly live up to that hype?  No I do not think so but at the same time I have to wonder about this device.  To put it simply it does seem to be lacking in many areas.

Let’s look at what it is missing:

• No multi-task*
• No USB plug
• No Camera
• No GPS
• No Flash (software)

Who is designed for? Is it going after the netbook market? Or the book reading market?  It’s under powered for the fist one and to expensive for the second one.

Heck it doesn’t even have all the features of the Ipod Touch.

I will have to read more and study the specs more but nothing about this thing says to me “run out and buy it”.

*  multi-task — really apple when will you FIX THIS!!!!!  For a phone I don’t need multi tasking but for something this size it is a must!

If people are buying from another website is that their fault or your fault?

A friend of mine posted an interesting question on one of their blogs:

Q: If people are buying from another website is that their fault or your fault?

I think that most people answer this with a third possibility which is that it’s the “other website’s fault!”

Too often in this day and age we tend to blame others for our failings. This also includes the failure of our websites.   They are more successful because they have lower prices…. They spend more on advertising and so on.

If someone is doing better than you does that really impact you?  Coke and Pepsis might be in an endless fight with each other but does someone else making more sales really impact you? Are they really stealing customers from you or is it just your ego that is being hurt?  Generally speaking there are enough customers to go around for everyone.  Look at how man supermarkets are in your town.  Some how several grocery stores near each other manage to survive even though they are selling the exact same thing.

What might be more important is learn from what your competitor is doing correctly.  Do they offer discounts? Do they do pay-per-click (PPC) advertising?  While you might not be able to match them dollar for dollar you can still watch and learn from them.

In watching your competitors you might also see new niches or customers which they are missing.  By offering a few different things you might each new and exciting customers.  Can you provide more support and service than your competitor?

In answer to the question the answer is not to blame anyone, yourself, your customer or your competitor.  The correct answer is to fix your website and your marketing strategy in order to reach new customers and to bring back your old ones.

Original blog the question came from: http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.ListAll&friendID=484805481

10 Great Free Web Marketing Tools

There are a great number of free tools out there to help you with you websites.  The trick is finding good tools. I have found these tools to be very helpful, I hope that you give them a try.

What can you say except that you need to start with Google which has more tools and things to help a website than you can shake a stick at:

Webmaster Tools:  Many tools here to help
http://www.google.com/webmasters/

Keyword Tool: Use the Keyword Tool to get new keyword idea
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Google Analytics: statistics and other data to make a website successful
https://www.google.com/analytics

What about tools other than the BIG “G”

Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer: I personally like to use several different backlink tools. Because each tool/site does things differently and counts different things one should run results on all theses tools.
http://www.webconfs.com/anchor-text-analysis.php

Another nice backlink checker. http://www.iwebtool.com/backlink_checker

Another great tool http://www.domain-pop.com/

Keywords tips and idea.  Wordtrack has some great pay services, but they also have some good free tools as well. I find their Gtrends tool helpful. http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/gtrends

A nice keyword search that let you Find exactly which competitors are there for your niche keywords http://www.nichewatch.com/

Website traffic calculator. This tells people how much traffic they need to generate to their website if they’re going to meet their revenue goals. http://www.clicksnconversions.com/website-traffic-calculator

Are you promoting a blog then don’t forget to PING people to know when you have a new post: http://pingomatic.com/

If you know of some good tools out there feel free to post your comments.