Regardless of the type of business you have, your presence needs to be online. You now know that you need your SEO to be up to par and whenever anyone searches for you on Google, you must be one of the first page results. You also should know by now that you cannot in any way shape or form pay Google to have this done, so now you must solely rely on keywords to get you where you want to be. But where do you start?

Well, in any good online marketing plan your website first must be excellent. That goes without saying because it acts as your homebase, and a functional, well thought out page will make or break your whole initiative. But then what?

Well there’s Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, You Tube, just to start and a dozen other places that your business probably fits into. Get yourself a Facebook fan page first. It’s an easy enough service to set up that you can plug in your information and start a small Facebook ad campaign to amass some people to “Like” your product. Simply update a status everyday to remain relevant, and as a bare minimum.

And/Or go to Twitter. Twitter is NOT a place for you to advertise. It is a place for you to connect with your customers or clients and build relationships. Think of it as a sophisticated customer service center. It’s a place where you can monitor what’s being said about your company or industry. Interact… do NOT send automated messages.

LinkedIn is for your professional base. Create a company page – add a career page tab onto your career profile to enhance it and add videos of corporate culture, or to talk about your employees doing excellent work. The key to LinkedIn is joining and participating in groups.

YouTube is an excellent place to post your videos – especially if you have any kind of How-To’s involved in what you do. YouTube needs to be broadcast to other platforms though, so make sure your presence is already set up and functioning elsewhere.

So your website might be the first place to go, but you must follow up everywhere else. And make sure to search out those niche sites that will be oh so important to you!

The buzzword for viral marketing and “word of mouth” is common and popular among web 2.0. Using social media, you can create brand awareness towards your brand identity, and increase your product sales through viral marketing. Here are some tips and tricks on how to go viral.

1. E-mail Marketing – E-mail marketing can go viral too. Just look at the loads of e-mail memes and chains that get passed around from inbox to inbox. You can use this to your advantage by manipulating your e-mail newsletters to make it easier to go viral. Make sure you include share links in your newsletter to make it easier for people to spread and share. Adding links to your other web presences will also help tie everything together and get more traffic to your business. Make sure you cross your t’s and dot your i’s by in turn, promoting your e-mail newsletter on your website, facebook, twitter, etc.
2. Host Contests – This can be done in many ways. Two of the common platforms are through blogging and Twitter. You can create your own Twitter hashtag to track the contest tweets and watch your tweets go viral as people find out about the offer and retweet. The key is to have an exciting product or offer to giveaway that people will actually want. You can combine both twitter and blogging by linking to the blog giveaway post and promoting it through twitter. Many companies find influential bloggers that have high social networking potential to host their products through a giveaway.
3. Appeal to Emotions – Your message has to stand out and appeal to the emotions. This is the number one way to create a good viral marketing message. Equal parts psychology and marketing strategy, the message has to stand out in people’s minds. Your message will not go viral unless it stops people in their tracks, and is powerful enough to make people want to share it. Your message needs to have a strong emotional connection with the reader. One way to do this is to create a public service announcement or tie it in to a charity or cause. Make people want to care, and make them realize they do care.

Understanding the psyches of consumers and potential consumers to spark viral marketing takes thorough market research, the ability to carve out a demographic and niche, and the willingness to try new things.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an internet marketing strategy that helps your website rankings on search engines. With search engine optimization, you can manipulate your web design content by using keywords or phrases that search engine spiders can find. This will allow your website to rank higher on search engines and thus drive more traffic to your page, positioning your website and business among the top rank of searches.

Keywords
Placing keywords and phrases into your website is one of the main strategies of SEO. A good tool to figure out proper keywords is theGoogle Adwords Keyword Tool. This tool gives you data on monthly search volumes per keyword variations to give you an idea of the best keyword to use. Make sure to place your keyword frequently throughout your website or web article. At least ten times per 500 word article is a good basic amount for search engine optimization.

Meta Tags
Meta tags exist within the html of a website and provides a meta description and meta keywords hidden within the html tag of your website. Search engine crawlers can see this information and optimize your website based on your description and keywords. This can help your SEO by giving information about the content of your website that search engine spiders and crawlers can find.

Text Links
If your website has image links, flash or javascript navigation, be sure to add text links within your website for search engines. Text links, and text in general, are how search engine spiders find your site. Deep links are hypertext links that link to a specific page of a website, rather than the main page itself. Deep links from a high ranking site are sure to help your SEO.

Fresh Content
It’s important to keep your website fresh with content, keeping your website relevant to search engines. A great way to offer fresh content is by starting a blog on your website. This provides a simple way to update your website, as well as provide keywords for SEO. Quality and unique content is important for search engine optimization so it might be a good idea to hire a copywriter or SEO specialist. Contact Tempo Creative for your internet marketing and SEO needs and we can help get the job done.

Since the 50s, with the image of the modern day house wife, women have been seen at the forefront of major shopping decisions in consumer spending, particularly with groceries, beauty products, and clothing. They balance the household income, pay the bills, and influence their husbands on what to purchase. Considering their purchasing power, targeting women in your marketing plan is a smart idea that could provide monetary rewards!

Mommy Bloggers

Times have changed since the 50s, but women are still spending. Enter: Mommy Bloggers. Typically a stay at home mom, this vast genre of blogging has a wide reaching community of women who help provide for their family. Many mommy bloggers host giveaways sponsored by companies for readers to win free products. It’s also a great way to promote an Etsy shop if you have one.

Career-driven Women

More women attend college than men and are starting up business ventures. Even mommy bloggers are thinking outside the box by looking for ways to earn money at home. Entrepreneurial women are everywhere, and they have a lot of clout. Women like relationships and connections. They like dialogue and conversations. Use this to your advantage by getting your small business, brand, or product in sponsorship programs. Get involved with the community or donate to specific causes. This involvement will be more valuable to women and differentiate you from the competition.

Women are not a minority. They make up at least half of the world’s population and thinking of ways to market to them will give small business owners a smart advantage.

It’s that time of the year to review our successes and missteps in business – and what a humdinger of a year it was. While post-holiday slump sets in and everyone settles into 2009, take a few minutes and list your business resolutions – your own road map to a successful new year.

Ask yourself:

• Did my marketing plan get me where I wanted to be in 2008? Evaluate your tactical marketing plan for hits and misses. Use the hits as a jumping off point for creating a new, evolved 2009 plan. In a year where competition for consumers’ attention will be fiercer than ever, your plan should include new and updated creative to ensure you rise above the fray. Don’t back away from your goals of growth in a recession economy, but do take cautious measures to be sure your messaging is exactly on target – you can’t afford misses.

• What challenges are my clients going to meet? Few industries are immune to today’s economic struggle. Anticipate what your customers are going to find most valuable from you and focus on building that aspect of your business. It’s a perfect time to introduce new timely and relevant offers on your web site.

• Where can I trim my budget and where should I maintain? It’s more important that ever to win and keep your clients’ trust. You don’t have to undergo an entire redesign of your web presence to reassure your consumers that your business is healthy and thriving. The simple addition of personalized communications, such as a weekly blog, gives you a vehicle to speak directly and with authority to your target market about topics that have immediate impact in their organizations. Likewise, a Virtual Spokesperson — full-motion video representative whom you designate to deliver a spoken message — adds a personal touch without demanding a complete site overhaul.

Trends in online business, Internet marketing and email marketing are constantly shifting. Stay alert to the latest and you’ll be keyed in on how the competition is spending their marketing dollars. Those businesses that maintain their integrity and poise will emerge as leaders in 2009.

No doubt, it’s a lot easier to create an online business than it is to build a bricks-and-mortar storefront. No building inspections, remodels, fixtures, signage or utility bills with your web biz. No months of planning and waiting and budgeting. You can hatch an idea one Friday night and be in business by Monday morning on the web!

Let’s look a little closer at this. What do these steps in real-life business building do for your operation?

Building Inspections
Bricks-and-Mortar: Your architecture is sound, safe and reliable, and meets the highest standards.
Web:  Your web site is coded correctly to ensure reliability, up-to-date techniques, and online security standards are met for payment gateways.

Remodels
Bricks-and-Mortar: Your storefront is lively, interesting and current to attract customers who want to shop somewhere that understands their “vibe.”
Web: Your online business is attractive, well-written, always fresh, and cleanly designed; clients and visitors feel confident that you know your stuff.

Fixtures
Bricks-and-Mortar: Your business space is uncluttered and organization makes it easy to find the product they need.
Web: You minimize gizmos and distractions; your website is easy to navigate.

Signage
Bricks-and-Mortar: Signage is quickly spotted, easy to read, and portrays a powerful message.
Web: Your site is coded and written—optimized—for search engines so potential customers find you with ease.

Utility Bills
Bricks-and-Mortar: You can’t avoid these, but you can make your building efficient and take advantage of the bonuses of being a “green” business.
Web: Reliability and service are critical to keeping your business running 24-7. Ensure you have the best hosting service available.

Careful planning, attention to details, and keeping your customers needs in mind are key to success!

When you walk into a retail business, whether you are grocery shopping, shoe shopping, or buying furniture, what’s the thing that will make you walk out declaring “I’m never going there again!”

How about being ignored? A successful business knows that it needs to make an effort to win over every single person who takes the time and effort to seek them out and pay a visit. Think of all the places you go where you expect to encounter a greeting within seconds of entering the door. Even Wal-Mart is blind to the fact you arrived to buy just a gallon of milk instead of an HDTV, and adds that extra touch of greeting you and helping you with a shopping cart.

Video Spokesperson is your door greeter and the small effort that can make your website memorable. Especially for a site that is promoting a service or product, a Video Spokesperson offers that touch of human interaction, delivered by a professional who inspires trust and expertise. Isn’t that who you want holding open your door to potential customers?

When placed to immediately launch upon arrival to your website, Video Spokesperson is a fixed advertisement that delivers your message to every single visitor, at a cost of fractions what you’ll pay for a traditional print ad or a web banner on someone else’s website. You can use a Video Spokesperson to talk about a recent recognition you’ve received, or inform about special pricing or deals.

A knowledgeable voice, a smile, a warm greeting – while the web is a medium that promotes anonymity, people still respond to the human touch.

Before you know your competition – know your customers. What do your existing customers value most about your business? Identify the top three drivers that motivate customers to choose you. Then look at how your competitors meet those demands.

It’s not just what “they” are doing, but what they are doing well. You may not like the competition’s web site. You can definitely come up with a better design, better content, but can you beat them on search engine rankings? Are they utilizing pay-per-click strategies to draw a targeted market? Determine what works for them, and if you have a comparable plan for online marketing.

How does your competition respond to the market? You know what’s going on in your business arena. Take a look at the key issues in your world and check out the rival’s response. Every website needs to be fluid and ready to react to current trends in your industry. Be a leader.

Evaluate your own success – why is it working? Some strategies are keepers – before you ditch what you have for what you think is working for your competition, be sure to give yourself credit for what you’ve done right. Above all, you want to make sure you are producing happy clients, listening, and learning every step of the way.

Finally, keep an open mind. Reacting to the market, responding to a tough competitor or upping the stakes in the online battle for visitor-share doesn’t have to mean a huge investment in a website redesign. If you are on a tight budget – and who isn’t these days – you may want to make smaller, incremental improvements while investing in a plan to drive targeted traffic to your site, bypassing the competition.

There are very few businesses today that do not maintain some kind of web presence and most are doing everything they can to increase that presence as best they can.  Whether through SEO, PPC, or other methods the goal is to drive as much qualified traffic as possible to your website. But, what do you do once you get the traffic to the site. This is where well defined conversions play an important role.

When you plan your website or website upgrade you should think about what points of conversion you are looking for from visitors to the page.  In other words, once you get them there – what do you want them to do.  If its a simple sales site where a visitor can purchase and item and have it shipped or just download it, then an obvious point of conversion would be the completion of the sales transaction.  However, these sites would be short sighted to only utilize this one action as a conversion goal. A satisfied client is likely to return for future purchases, but life can be very distracting. If only you had an email list for newsletters or sign-up list for special offers. Then you send periodic emails or updates to clients to make them aware of happenings with your site such as sales or new products etc…  These types of sign-ups are excellent conversion goals with almost as much value as a purchase. Many visitors will visit a site several times before actually commiting to a purchase. These other points of conversion on your webpage will help encourage this process while gathering important information about your marketplace.

There are many types of conversions that can be of benefit to different businesses.  Here are few that may be of use to your business:

• Newsletter Sign-Ups
• Creation of  a User Profile
• Filling out a Contact Form
• Registering for a Course or Seminar (free or paid)
• Purchasing a Product or Service
• Request a Quote
• Forward Info From Your Site to a Friend
• Tagging Content To a Social Bookmarking Site (Digg, Delicious, Reddit etc…)
• Posting Comments to your Blog
• Downloading Coupons
• Clicking on Ad Sense Content

These are just some possible points of conversion. They are many more that can be very useful to doing business on the web. Think about what would help grow your online business and see if you can implement additional point of conversions to your page to help accomplish those goals.

A friend recently gifted me an item that I mistakenly called “antique.” It’s properly termed “vintage,” and indeed, that one word makes all the difference. You can never be too up on what’s out. Antique is a relic; vintage – that’s hip. Tip #1: Clever marketers keep abreast of the language, the presentation style and minute-by-minute evolution of what – or who – is popular.

Recently, when reviewing a body of ads purchased by a client for “good will”, I was struck by the way the client’s business was slapped into these publications without apparent regard to appropriateness. “But we need to reach the locals, and be supportive of the community.” But you also are paying precious marketing dollars for your ad. Don’t consider it charity. Consider it marketing. Place an ad in the senior citizens’ activity newsletter if you must, but be cognizant of the reader. If you sell running shoes, don’t run an ad that says, “Hey, we sell sneakers in downtown Akron.” Say “10% off all phone orders and free gift shipping in December!” Tip #2: Don’t dismiss the potential of any audience. Adapt.

Just as the words, “But we need to have this in the left-hand navigation” are leaving my mouth, data is coming in that says, web visitors don’t really read the menus. They scan – this we’ve known for years now – and even more surprisingly, they click. And click, and click. That vital piece of information isn’t right there on the menu bar? Not to worry. The trend is to embed the most important information in links within the body text. This enable the search engines to scour the site, from link to link, more effectively cataloging the references of key words that your potential audience will type into a search engine. Tip #3: You can never know much about web marketing; be alert to the data.