Archive for January, 2009

Will Your Business Work Or Not ?

Youngentrepreneur.com just released a great article discussing
5 sure-fire ways to know if your business will work.

1. You Love It
2. There Is Money To Be Made
3. You Can Do All The Important Aspects Of The Business Yourself
4. You Can Bootstrap It Yourself
5. YOu have customers lined up

The article has an added bonus of explaining the author’s theory on leveraging pay per click on a site to bring in large amounts of revenue.

Under #3. You Can Do All The Important Aspects Of The Business Yourself I found this to be interesting:

I have a number of friends who are starting online businesses and don’t know anything about programming, web design, servers, content writing, search engine optimization, or link building. They think they can just outsource everything.

I help small and large businesses with some aspect of web development everyday, this is where the most money is wasted. A quick post on guru.com or ifreelance a low ball bid from India and the Ukraine and your site is up. There are plenty of advantages to these sites and vendors from India and elsewhere. But it is all in how you use them. If you don’t have a deep understanding of what you want along with a good sense of web usability your site goes off course rather fast. That understanding is necessary to take advantage of those potential  cost savings.

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Free SEO Tools

While full access to SEOmoz.org requires a monthly fee they offer quite a few free resources to help you understand the fundamentals of search optimization. Whether you work with a professional or go it alone - you may find something useful for your scrappy upstart.

SEOmoz free tools include:

• Linkscape - an inlink search engine
• Trifecta - which measures metrics to estimate the relative popularity and importance of Page, Blog or Domain (Page Strength).
• Term Target - which helps determine how targeted a particular page is for a specified keyword.
• SEOmoz Firefox Toolbar - Lets you add an SEOmoz tool to your toolbar.
• Term Extractor Tool -  analyzes the content of a given page and extracts the terms that appear to be targeted at search engines.
• Crawl Test - Helps diagnose search engine crawling issues on your website
• GeoTargeting Detection - Discover how well your website is targeted to country specific search engines.
• SEO Toolbox - A collection of FREE Tools that will give you quick answers and aid in daily SEO activities.
• Popular Searches- Aggregates and archives popular searches from various sources.

Their free guides skew to beginners and include:

• The Internet Marketing Handbook
• The Web Devloper’s SEO cheat sheet
• The Beginner’s Checklist for Small Business SEO (Local Search)
• The Beginner’s Checklist for Learning SEO
• The SEO Industry Survey Results

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Small Business Tax Tips

Good post over at InfusionSoft:

Featuring links to some useful “Last Minute Tax Tips” For Small Businesses.

For those of you running your small business from your home, Score.com recommends to:

• Use your home office exclusively for business. The IRS won’t let you take a deduction for your kitchen, just because you use the kitchen table as your desk. You must have a separate room or partitioned area that’s devoted to business use.
• List your home address as your principal place of business, even if part of your business, like a warehouse, is outside your home. Make sure you have a desk, filing cabinet and separate phone line for your business.
• Store your merchandise or supplies on your property — in a detached shed, spare closet or your garage — instead of renting a warehouse. You’ll save on rental costs and get a tax break for the space you use.

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mixergy.com offers tactical interviews

I plan to continue to give Scrappy Upstarts REAL how-to info on all things small business and the web.

Andrew Warner’s blog at http://blog.mixergy.com/ is a great example.

Andrew does audio interviews with people instrumental in building web businesses.

They tend to focus on specific tactics small businesses can take. That to me is more important than the constant 30,000 foot level coverage we hear about “social media”, “twitter” etc.

His most recent interview with Chris Winfield who is the Co-Founder and President of 10e20, a search and social media marketing firm, offers some real how-tos for social media and your small business.

Thanks Andrew and Chris for actually giving real information not pontification.
Listen to the whole interview here. And more at mixergy.com

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Google Search data reveals a lot about 2009

There is a lot you can learn from digging into aggregate query data. Google knows a great deal about us as Bill Tancer’s book, “Click” revealed.It can also has the potential to be used as a yard stick for the future.

So using Google Insights Steve Rubel from AdAge was able to crunch some data and spot three internet trends (US only).

• We’re growing comfortable with social networks. Not surprisingly, social-network-related searches grew 178% in 2008. Historically the top searches in the category have reflected privacy concerns and last year was no different. The top keywords included “hide friends” (No. 7) and “hide comments” (No. 8). However, search volume on these keywords actually declined last year. This, perhaps, is the biggest indicator that as a nation we’re becoming more comfortable living on social networks.
• Blogging may be making a comeback. Searches related to blogging resources and services posted 64% growth in 2004. Then they basically flat-lined the next three years. However, in 2008 they climbed 24%. It’s highly likely that both the growth in 2004 and 2008 was fueled by elections. But my gut is that something deeper is going on here. Perhaps some see blogs as a powerful personal branding tool that can help them weather the recession. Searches for the keywords “personal brand” are also up significantly.
• The recession drove consumers to shop online. Perhaps surprisingly, shopping-related searches grew 50% year-over-year in the fourth quarter. Of course, between 2004 and 2007, search volume typically reached the same apex in December. But this year was different. Consumers were also looking for deals. Coupon-related searches grew 61% in fourth quarter. If consumers continue to find deals online, then the trend could stick.

Full article here.

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Using SEO in Your Blog

Your small business blog needs to constantly be refined for maximum pull through. There are certain topics your blog can cover, and even certain keywords you can use to attract more people to your blog. The trick is in knowing which keywords to use and how to make the most of them. This process is commonly known on the internet as SEO, or Search Engine Marketing. It might sound complicated, but all you do is research keywords relevant to your industry, add them to your blog titles and topics, and the traffic will generate itself.

How do I know what words to use?

That’s the easy part. First, you have to think like a consumer. What would they search for? If you have a real estate business in the Atlanta area, for example, you would focus on what a person would look up if they wanted to find homes in Atlanta. If you can’t think of them on your own, there are keyword search sites where you can find the most popular phrases and keywords based on your subject. Using words like ‘Atlanta real estate’ or ‘Atlanta homes for sale’, for example, would be much more relevant to consumers than choosing phrases like ‘real estate for sale in Atlanta’ or ‘homes Atlanta for sale’, and so on.

Ok, I’ve got my keywords. Now what?

Now, you create a blog, or add to the one you have. Give it an SEO-friendly title, and make sure each post title is relevant, as well. Then, in your content, take the keywords you’ve found and use them 5-10 times, depending on the length of the blog. Just remember, with SEO, less is really more, so don’t overstuff it. That will actually have an adverse effect on your website, because it’s bad practice and frowned upon by search engines.

Having a blog is going to be a big part of your success in today’s online market. Making sure that blog is seen by optimizing it with SEO practices will only help to drive traffic to your website. Even in a slow economy, people are still buying, so you need to make sure you’re doing everything you can to get them to buy from you. One of those crucial elements is using SEO in your blog. For more information, the SEOBook offers detailed insight.

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Peter Schiff has a time machine.

I am convinced after watching this.

I love that he was yelled at for predicting EXACTLY what we are seeing.

Thanks to Brian Jones for originally posting this.

More importantly, see Peter talking about 2009 last month, he was still getting yelled at!

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