Building Your Online Marketing Ecosystem Part II: Start The Conversation

By John Joyce on March 2, 2010 - Comments 1

Previously, I discussed building the foundation for your online marketing ecosystem by crafting your core message and consistently communicating it to your target audience by using the many online tools available to small business owners today.  But what are those tools?

Click Image to View Interactive Online Marketing Ecosystem

Several weeks ago, Chris Brogan wrote about using mind mapping to collect his thoughts and organize information for blog posts, speeches, etc.  I did some research and found a product called MindMeister that has allowed me to create a graphical representation of the online marketing universe.  Since there are so many communication tools/services/platforms available, I’ve decided to break it down into bite size pieces starting with the easiest and most cost effective way for you to begin promoting your business online.

Blogging

The most powerful tool in your “let’s get found online” arsenal is a blog.  The top six blog platforms are listed in the graphic above with the most popular being WordPress.  ( I use WordPress for my blog and also as the Content Management System for my website)  I think WordPress is the best platform simply because of the seemingly endless supply of useful plug-ins and widgets that extend its functionality.  But, regardless of the platform, the most important advice I can offer is to make sure you choose a self-hosted solution. (see my post from Friday for more details)  And, finally, here are six reasons why your business needs a blog:

• Boost your organic rank (by consistently reiterating your core message and keywords)
• Position yourself and/or your business as THE subject matter expert(s) which increases your “authority” with the search engines.
• Start conversations with prospects, customers and peers by posting thought provoking advice, stories and anecdotes.  Believe it or not, blogging is very much a two way street.
• Firmly establish and manage your online reputation by consistently sharing useful information with the very people who are searching for you online.
• Your site visitors can choose to subscribe to your blog and receive the information in a way that suits them best – via email, straight RSS feed, or within their favorite feed reader.
• The only cost you incur with blogging is time.

Start the Conversation + Maintain Consistent, Quality Content = Acquired Authority and Trust

Is Bing Better for Local Search than Google?

By John Joyce on January 11, 2010 - Comments 0

I was reviewing analytic data for my website last night and was surprised to see that a visitor had arrived at my site by searching on “internet marketing consultant” from Bing.  The search term is obviously relevant to my business but it’s a fairly broad and competitive search term for which I don’t show up on the first page in general search engines.  When I followed the search link and scrolled to the bottom of the page, I noticed the local search result:

Bing automatically served this result based on the geographic location of the searcher.  This is really very intuitive since local search has become a large percentage of total activity on the big three search engines.

I would have to visit http://maps.google.com to get a similar result from Google and if I were to start at the main Google search bar, http://www.google.com, I would have to use the “long tail” search phrase, online marketing business near shirley, ma, to finally get the following result:

It’s very frustrating that Google Maps and Google Search are two separate entities and there isn’t a way to configure the presentation of results.  Using Bing, I can choose “all results” or “local results” from the left menu pane.  At the very least, Google needs to add “Local” to the list of options like video, news, etc.

Will Bing Twitter Help Your Small Business?

By John Joyce on October 22, 2009 - Comments 0

First, Microsoft surprised us when they released bing and it was actually a useful alternative search engine.  Now, they’ve surprised again by beating Google to the “Twitter Integration Party”.  Instead of being sequestered to the Twittersphere, small business tweeters will now gain exposure to the 80% of internet users who don’t use Twitter.

Ping and FriendFeed allow you to distribute your “microcontent” across all social networks and, now, Bing (and, yes eventually Google) will index not only the text of the tweet, but the link content as well.  I’m not sure if there will be an adjustment required by users based on how the information will be presented but there didn’t seem to be an issue when Google added images and video to their search engine.

This is pretty powerful stuff for a small business owner and should allow them to expand their online presence without significant effort.