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doublelinx:

I pride myself in being a bit of a contrarian.

When the ‘masses’ start taking to an idea in large numbers, I start to get suspicious. More and more people are accepting search engine optimization (SEO) as a way of life in business. The phrase is thrown around with reckless abandon amongst business people and there are literally thousands of new articles about the topic emerging on the market every single day (this article being one of them).

But, what difference is SEO really going to make to your business? What kind of results has SEO produced for other businesses? How well does it work for small to medium-sized business?

Well, I decided to find out.

The Biggest Market Ever

The Internet is the biggest market of consumers there ever was.

There are currently two billion Internet users around the world and that number is projected to jump to 2.7 billion by 2015. That’s more people than any other media source and makes up 40% of the world’s population.

That’s a figure that could make even the most self-restrained marketer salivate. All you need is to get the attention 0.000001% of this market and you’re on a major gravy train, right? Well, not exactly. The perils of working in market that big far outweigh the benefits.

There are approximately 634 million websites on the Internet – 51 million of which were added in 2012 alone. How do you stand out with so much competition?

That’s where SEO comes in…

Don’t operate in a vacuum

If your business doesn’t have a website, it doesn’t exist. In 2013, if your business website isn’t search engine optimized, it doesn’t matter either way.

The first thing most people do before they buy anything, even if it’s offline, is search the Internet. Approximately 89% of consumers look to websites like Google, Bing and Yahoo before making a buying decision. Search engines are the number one source of traffic, beating social media by 300%. For these reasons businesses work very hard to make friends with the likes of Google.

But, it’s not enough to be ranked on Google, if you want to have any kind of impact you’ll need to be on the first page because, and although as much as 61% of people look for products online, only 25% ever go beyond the first page of results.

Give The People What They Want

There are two main reasons people use the internet: To check their emails and to get information.

Although email marketing and search engine optimization is linked, the former is a huge field of study in its own right. SEO is more concerned with the second reason – giving people the information that they’re looking for.

Most of your customers go on the Internet to search for information on a certain topic, which is related to your product or service. They aren’t looking for your business, they aren’t even necessarily looking for products and services like the one you offer. However, if you can be the one to give them the information they’re looking for you’ve instantly proven yourself knowledgeable and reliable, which can be a doorway to a very profitable long-term relationship.

To answer the original question I posed in this article – yes, it really is that important. A good SEO marketing plan can mean the difference between a massive business success and operating with a vacuum.  

Need help with your SEO marketing plan? Try a few SEO services on Doublelinx.

vaultcareers:

LinkedIn recently turned 10 years old. And the Mountain View, Calif.-based social network has much to celebrate.

Founded in 2003, LinkedIn now has 225 million users worldwide, and its share price has nearly doubled since the firm’s 2011 IPO. Meanwhile, other highly anticipated social media IPOs have fared rather poorly. Facebook’s shares have fallen 40 percent since going public last year, and Zynga’s shares have fallen nearly 70 percent since going public at the end of 2011.

Perhaps most important, LinkedIn has transformed itself from a simple professional networking site into the world’s most powerful online recruiting tool, which nearly every major U.S. corporation uses and which has more or less spelled the death of the online job board.

Last year, perennial job board leader Monster Worldwide announced that it was looking for a buyer. That followed on the heels of Monster’s poor attempt to get into the social recruiting game. In 2011, Monster unveiled BeKnown, a Facebook app that was supposed to compete with LinkedIn and other social media recruiting tools, but instead, by most accounts, has been a complete failure.

Today, LinkedIn, which earns 57 percent of its revenues from its recruiting tools, doesn’t seem to be receiving much competition in the recruiting space from Facebook or Twitter, either. In fact, recent research shows that Twitter and Facebook are losing, not gaining ground.

More

doublelinx:

Video marketing can be intimidating for even the most hardened entrepreneur.

But for all the potential headaches it may present, the results can be phenomenal. Like in the case of the Dollar Shave Club.

The Dollar Shave Club is a business that delivers good quality affordable razor blades to its customers via the post– nothing spectacular right?

And yet one hour after they posted a particular video, the website crashed. In just 48 hours, they were recruiting family, friends and anyone they could pay to help them package 12,000 orders.

The video in question showed the company’s founder, Michael Dublin, making a few jokes and telling a few people to buy his razors. The video, launched in March 2012, has now been watched over 10 million times and launched the Dollar Shave Club into massive success virtually overnight.

I’m not telling you this for the sake of it. There are certain lessons hidden in the Dollar Shave Club story that can help anyone thinking about launching into video marketing.

Lesson One – “That’s showbiz, baby!”

The Dollar Shave Club video that went viral was, in essence, a comedy skit.

The people who watched and shared the now infamous video weren’t searching for affordable shaving solutions. They weren’t interested in how good the service was. They didn’t crave the convenience of having their shaving equipment sent in the mail.

They simply wanted to be entertained.

In the 21^st century everyone’s an entertainment junkie and that’s something you should always consider when making any form of video marketing you do for your business. Whether it’s a simple message from the executive, a how-to video or an elaborate online commercial – your customers want to be entertained. In fact, they demand it.

Of course, there are many different ways of being entertaining (comedy-skit versus documentary-style) but the point here is that if you want to get more bank for video marketing efforts, always give your customers some ‘pizzazz.’

Lesson Two – It’s a social, social world…

Your customers love to share information about their lives and their experiences that they think their friends will enjoy. Think about any email message you forwarded or any page that you’ve liked on Facebook. What you’re essentially doing there is saying “I think this awesome and I think you’ll enjoy it too.” What’s my Point?

The Dollar Shave Club video spread as fast as it did because of this same principle. When you make videos for your website (thinking of the potential of going viral) you need to keep in mind if the video is giving anything of value to your customer. It could be, like the Dollar Shave Club, entertainment value, or it could be valuable information they didn’t know (like in how-to videos), or it could even be a sense of becoming part of a community (like the Apple versus PC ads).

For most people it’s become virtually second nature to share everything they think is really great. Make your videos great too!

Lesson Three – The Power of video

There are certain things that are just expressed better in the form of video. Pictures, articles, social media simply can’t communicate a brand as succinctly and clearly as video can. When people watched the Dollar Shave Club video they didn’t just see what the product (razors) could do for them, they saw the businesses personality and identity which made it easier to buy into their brand.

When making videos for marketing purposes always remember to consistently represent your brand in how you choose to communicate with your customer and what you choose to say.

Get started today

Dollar Shave Club is an excellent example of the power of video marketing. This one video helped a little company with a weird business model become a household name. Imagine what it could do for your business.

Need help with your Video marketing? I’m sure one of our vendors can help you with that.

horizonfunding:

Photo credit to 401(K) 2013 at Flickr

A study by the SBA loans clarity on the links between race and the ability of small business owner to obtain small business funding. The study suggests that African American and Hispanic entrepreneurs are less likely to be given loans and rely more heavily on their personal funds when starting a business. As stated in this article in Bloomberg Businessweek, “On average owners and company insiders put up 56 percent of initial capital, with external debt and equity making up the rest. At white-owned businesses, which started with double the capital on average, internal funds made up only 39 percent.”

African American and Hispanic business owners with good credit still balked from applying for funding and loans for fear of being rejected, and the study indicates that even after controlling for credit score they were less likely to have loans approved. Women as well as minorities were less likely to apply for funding according to the study, with female small business owners seeking funding 
being approved at more or less the same percentage as men. 

Tell us about your experience as a small business owner, has race or gender affected your experience?

horizonfunding:

Image taken from this marketing pilgrim article

According to AT&T over half of all small business owners are married to their mobile technology. This includes Iphones, tablets and Blackberries and other Smartphones. This is important not only based off the obvious takeaway that new technology loans a huge boost in productivity to small businesses but also should dictate how you promote and present the online presence of your small business.

Things you should do as a small business owner to fully take advantage of this revelation are:

1) Make sure that your site appears as you want it to when viewed on a smart device. The layout of a site that appears normal when viewed on a desktop may become jumbled when accessed from a mobile device.

2) Consider developing an app to present your product and streamline it for your client base. Anything that can enhance the user experience over a tablet in particular can loan a large and otherwise untapped boost of interest in your business.