Building Customer Engagement

Customer satisfaction is just the minimum; your goal is to engage your customers. Engaged customers assure a business of sustained and profitable growth. Learn the four emotional building blocks for an engaged customer.

A Leadership Primer

Here is an oldie but goodie: Colin Powell's leadership primer. This is the list of his 18 leadership tips with an brief explanation of how do they apply to business. I believe that revisiting them briefly at the beginning of every day can really make a difference in the way you conduct your small business, ultimately increasing your chances of success.

Best Web Directories

Contrary to search engines, which use automatic programs to find, classify and index web pages, directories are lists of websites compiled by human editors, who evaluate the sites for quality prior to organize them in topic specific categories. Directories offer minimal traffic, since most web users rely on search engines to find relevant pages. However, directories play a big role in search engine placement, by increasing your site's link popularity and link reputation. As you know, links to your site from quality, authoritative sites, like good directories, are given significant weight in search engine algorithms, therefore, listing your site in a few quality directories will help your pages achieve high search engine ranking for relevant search terms. Brian Turner has written a great article that explains why it is important to list your site with quality directories, and offers an extensive list of the Best Web Directories. Listing your site in some of them (many of which are free) will increase your Pagerank and your chances of ranking high for relevant search terms.

Find out who your real customer is

Every day, on my way to work, I listen to this rock station. The two guys running the show regularly endorse some products, among them teddy bears from the Vermont Teddy Bear Company. Now, at first sight, it may seem strange that a radio station that caters mostly to blue collar macho types goes around endorsing teddy bears. If we look deeper, though, it does make sense. Most women love teddy bears, but it's the guys that buy them for them. Sufficient to say that the DJs pitch the bears as "something that will help you get laid" (pretty raunchy, it's true, but very effective)... You can bet that all those truck drivers and contractors listening to the show are snapping up those teddybears as fast as they can get their credit card out of their pocket! The moral of the story is that the end user is not always our only customer. Our real customer is the buyer, the decision maker. If we forget to find out who is really buying our product, and focus our marketing on them, we may very well be barking at the wrong tree.

301 Redirects and SEO

Whenever you change the URL of your pages, or register additional domain names that point to your main site (like when you set up mysite.net and mysite.org to point to mysite.com), you will have to implement some sort of redirection. 301 redirects are the only kind of redirection endorsed by the search engines. I have just written an article on 301 redirects that addresses when to use them, why they are important for search engines and how to implement a 301 redirect. You can read it here: http://www.theinternetdigest.net/archive/301-redirects-seo.html

SEO and Copywriting

A common misconception in internet marketing is to have the expectation that SEO is all we need to be successful online. In reality, you need to do much more. Search engine optimization will give you traffic, but it is ultimately your copywriting that will make the sale. While it is very important to know how to write for the search engines, it is also very important to know how to write for humans, since they will be the ones making the purchase. There are some good resources out there for online copywriting. Some sites I regularly visit are Nick Usborne's Excess Voice (you can subscribe to his free newsletter), and Robert Warren's website (I just posted this copywriting article by him on my website). Another good copywriting resource is Kevin Nunley's website, where you will also find hundreds of bite-sized internet marketing tips across a wide variety of topics.

Branded Email Address

Every time I see a small business using an email address like: business@aol.com or myname@bellsouth.com I think: what a wasted branding opportunity! Email addresses with your ISP domain to the right of the @ look unprofessional. It is very, very easy to have an email address that reads myname@mydomain.com. You don't even need to have a website. Some time ago I wrote an article on how to set up your branded email address. If you are still using your ISP email address, you may want to read it and set up your own branded email address. Good luck!

Character Driven Marketing

"Much of modern marketing practice is superficial and artificial rubbish, motivated entirely by profits with little to no genuine regard for the people these profits are being harvested from. The general public are becoming increasing weary of these false messages and are starting to look for alternatives. The only kind of marketing, though, that truly engages the hearts and minds of your potential customers, and leaves them feeling cared for, satisfied and understood is based on a set of values that are obvious, but all too often forgotten - integrity, honesty and honour. These are the core elements of genuine marketing." Contributed by Tamara Lyster. Read her full article on Character Driven Marketing. Technorati Tags: Marketing, Internet Marketing, Small Business

Welcome to Resouce Box

This is my first post. I have just created this blog to complement my small business internet marketing site . Here is an interesting article about how your website design must project the right image for your business and reinforce your brand.