As all my clients know, one of the services we provide as part of our Footprint Bundle is a dedicated Media Consultant. What this means is that you basically have an employee at your disposal to handle any Internet Marketing or Advertising issues. If a company is trying to sell you SEO or PPC Internet Marketing, we’ll sit in on that meeting (or even take the meeting for you) and give you our feedback as to whether it makes sense for your business in our opinion. We’re fair about it too. We often recommend other services. Our only goal with this process is to make sure that our business partners are informed when they make an advertising or marketing decision.

So last week one of my clients calls me up and tells me about an internet marketing company that called him. He received a call from a lady with Net Biz claiming that for $300 a month he would be on the first page of Google 24/7 in the sponsored links for an ultra competitive keyword phrase. He asked me to call her and get more details before he signed up. Perfect scenario for me. This is another reason why I love what I do. I’m about to learn something. I’m going to learn 1 of 2 things; either I’m going to call this company and they are offering a great service that no one knows about (which I can now recommend to other clients of mine who are not competitors with this client) or this is a service that is not what it seems and I’ll strongly recommend that my client not do business with these guys. My guess is the latter but hey, you never know so I always keep an open mind.

So I call Lori from Net Biz (http://www.netbiz.com) and inform her that I’m business partners with the individual that she spoke to earlier and I need to understand what this service is so we can make an informed decision. She tells me that for $300 a month she’ll give me 1st page placement for the keyword ‘Pest Control’ in the Austin market 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for the entire month.

Now, I come from a company that managed millions of dollars in Google Adwords campaigns on a monthly basis and I saw customers spending upwards of $5000 monthly in this same category and they were not showing up “24/7″ so I know something is very fishy here. I ask her how is this possible considering bidding for this exact key word phrase often reaches $9 per click on the high? Lori hates this question (there’s a good chance she hates me too). She’s irritated that I’m asking questions and quickly calls her manager over to get on the phone. The manager proceeds to tell me that NetBiz has an exclusive deal with Google that allows them to essentially sell one fixed sponsored links listing per key word phrase, per market, that will show up 24/7 for the entire month. Hrrmm….is that even possible? For a second, I’m wondering if this little company in Portland, OR has found (or negotiated) the holy grail in PPC advertising with Google. That self doubt lasted about .8 seconds until the manager proceeded to use fear tactics to close me. He said:

‘Well sir, I don’t have any more time to answer these questions you have. You see, in our exclusive deal with Google, we can only list one company per key word phrase and we’ve got to find someone today. I don’t care whether you do it or not but I’ll promise you one thing, somebody will buy this by the end of the day. It’s either going to be you or your competitor. So is this something you can commit to today?

Well now there’s zero doubt in my head that this whole thing was a scam. The best analogy I can give you is that if I somehow found a way to sell you an iPhone that you could use on any provider’s network, for $25, that would be the easiest sale ever right? If I had a limited supply the first thing I would do is call the people closest to me and offer them that deal, then I’d open it up to my extended network, then the public. One thing is for sure, I would be sold out…and quickly at that. I definitely wouldn’t have to sell this to strangers and use scare tactics like; ‘well sir, I only have 15 iPhones left and I really don’t care who buys them but I know I won’t have them by tomorrow’. No way. If I had a deal that sweet, you’d have to know me or have done business with me before for me to hook you up. The general public wouldn’t ever even get a chance to tell me no. Because $25 for an iPhone that works on any network is exactly that; a hookup. Just like paying a flat fee to be listed 24/7 in an industry where other companies are paying thousands of dollars a month and not getting that exposure, is a hookup.

So now I know that this isn’t legit but I still want something more concrete to take back to my client. I tell the manager (I believe is name was Damon) thanks for answering my questions and ask to be transferred back to Lori. I tell Lori that I’m ready to sign up today but that I need to see everything we just talked about in writing. She again, is irritated and summons her manager but this time she is talking to him with me in ear shot. After sharing my request with her manager, she tells me that the contract is ‘Locked” and doesn’t get “Released” until I pay for the service. I respectfully tell her that without any expectations in writing, there is no way we can do business. She again summons Damon over and after some back and forth, he agrees to “Unlock” the Terms and Conditions. She quickly emails me a copy. I’m paraphrasing (If you’d like to read the T’s & C”s yourself here it is) but the document essentially says that they will guarantee you 1st page results. The document does not say which key words you’re getting and it says that if it ever gets too expensive, they have the right of taking you down and/or offering you the right to stay up at a higher price. In other words, they could put me on the first page results for any low volume keyword phrase and as long as I showed up on the 1st page, they would technically be honoring the contract. I even researched this a little further and found a few horror stories claiming this exactly (If you’d like these examples email me and I’ll them to you ). So as you can imagine, I called my client up and told him my recommendation is to not do business with this company and I explained why.

I’m sharing this story for two reasons; 1) I’m proud of the service we offer and the fact that we save our clients time and money and 2) The best way to start any business relationship is with proper expectations. If someone is selling you ‘pie in the sky’ or something that sounds too good to be true. It almost always is. I would love to buy an iPhone for my mom (who’s a Verizon customer) for $25 but there’s not too many of those flying around (at least not yet).

Having worked closely with many small businesses here in Austin for the past few years, I’ve been privileged enough to work with a lot of really smart business people who are the absolute experts in what they do. The common denominators for the most successful of people are exactly what you’d think they’d be; hard work, integrity (loads of it), discipline and the ability to adapt their business to be successful. I’ve learned a great deal from these business owners and I’ve done my best to try to help them position themselves to continue to be successful as customers’ change their behavior in how they go about buying the goods and services they need.

So for my first post on this blog, I’m going to identify 10 tips that can help any small business owner position his/her business for success today and for the future. These are all free tips/suggestions that will might require a little time but are well worth it when you consider what’s at stake; 60% of your potential customers are now going online to look for your business and that number is only going to go up.

10. Quit fighting the internet – This may sound funny to those in the technical realm but it’s WAY more common than you think. I have sat in countless meeting with very successful & intelligent men and women who claim that ‘all my business is from referrals’, which is 100% percent accurate, and therefore, they ‘don’t need the internet’. The flaw in this thinking however, is that best way to get more referrals is to have more customers to refer people to you. As long as you’re ‘not sold’ on the internet, you’re leaving money on the table. Plain and simple. Now your next point may be ‘I’ve been in business x years’ or ‘I’ve accomplished x’ without ever having a web site. Once again, while that’s true, you’ve never lived or owned a business on the cusp of a such dramatic changes in consumer behavior. While you’re holding out on the internet, your competitors are positioning themselves to capture some of your current/future customers, almost like the famous land grabs in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. Like those individuals with the foresight to take advantage of the opportunity in front of them, those who position themselves online within each industry, will reap the rewards.

9. Establish online goals - Sit down, whether it’s for 30 seconds or 3 hours, and decide how the internet can help your business. Figure out some realistic goals (i.e. I’d like to get 3 customers from the internet in the next 6 months or I’d like to show up on the first page of Google in my area, or even I want my business to show up if someone searches my business name) and then work backwards from there. Don’t focus so much on how you’re gonna get there (we’ll get to that later). Just establishing some clear online goals puts you one step ahead of most small  businesses.

8. Get a domain name and matching email addresses for everyone in your company – This is very cheap ($10/yr) and just about any domain registrar can help you with both of these. My personal recommendation is to host your domain through GoDaddy.com and then use Google Apps to host your email (see the link to Google Apps on the right). It can be a little bit technical but that’s OK. It’s good to step outside of your comfort zone and learn something new. If you try doing this and get stuck however, send me an email and I’ll help you with this. Another thing I see a lot of is business owners with a nice looking web site but they’re still using their yahoo, or hotmail account to communicate with their customers. Take the time to setup a professional email address for your people and you’ll convey a more professional image to your customers and to your employees.

7. Answer your own phone – Either you, the business owner, need to answer the phone or you need to make sure whoever is answering the phone cares and is competent enough to sell your services or products. All your efforts to generate phone calls from the internet will go down the tubes if you fail to do this. To illustrate; a couple of months ago, I was looking for a mechanic shop that could replace a part in my truck that had gone out. I called a buddy of mine and he recommended a mechanic shop to do the work.  So I call this shop that I won’t name, and the phone is answered by a teenage sounding individual who was of no help and put me on hold for 3 minutes when I asked him for directions. Safe to say, I ended taking my truck to another place that I found online, where the owner answered and knew exactly what my problem was before I could even finish telling him my story. This guy said my part was on back order but that he’d call a few shops to see if they had it.  Five minutes later I get a call telling me he’s going to pick it up and I can drop my truck off anytime. He did a great job and even though I paid a little more than I would have else where, it was worth it. More importantly, he has a customer for life who will tell everyone about what a great job he did (The name of that shop is Zimmer Auto Repair and the owner’s name is Blaine). There are key points to this story; 1) the reason people love small businesses is that the people there care and ultimately need the business and 2) If you’re a small business and you have a lackadaisical or even poor communicating person answering the phone, you’re giving your customers one more reason to call Break Check, Wal-Mart, Olive Garden or whatever the chain du jour is for your industry. In other words, your biggest conduit to obtain more customers and make your business more successful is being hindered and there’s not a web site or search engine that’s going to fix it.

6. Do as much as you can without spending a dime - this is probably somewhat of a self inflicting wound considering my livelihood is based on getting business owners to pay for my services but this article is titled “10 online tips for small businesses”, not “Please be my customer” unfortunately (that’s a good idea for the next blog though). But seriously, there are so many free services that are great starting points for any business owner looking to grow their business. Number one, in my opinion is to setup your business on the Google business center. While it’s going to take work to get you to show up on page 1 for competitive key words, having your business listed makes it easy for people to search your business name and see pictures, your location, your phone number and even get directions. Best of all, its free. The biggest mistake I’ve seen business owners make with the internet is that they treat it like a yellow page ad, ‘I’ll just throw some money at this pay-per-click campaign, and then I’ll see a return’. While that may work sometimes, the customers who’ve had the most success, have realistic expectations, always start small and grow the business’s online footprint from there. (Never, Never, ever, EVER do a pay per click campaign if you don’t have a web site or if you’re web site isn’t ready for traffic. NEVER. You might as well give your money to charity). If you don’t see the results you want the silver lining will definitely be that you’re now more educated and in a much better position to evaluate what you’re going to do or who you’re going to hire to help you get the results you want.

5. Build a web site that does your business justice – Here’s my rule of thumb for any business owner who wants to increase business; Do a Google Search for the keywords that you think your customers are using to find your business (ie. ‘Body Shop Austin, tx’ or ‘Roofer Westlake’ or Plumber 78731). Click on all the web sites that are on the first page for those results and look at them carefully. That’s your competition. Some will look great, some not so great. Look at theses sites and objectively compare them to your site. Ask yourself, if my site made it the front page of the keywords I’m targeting, where would it rank with these sites? Your goal shouldn’t be to have the snazziest web site but it your site should be a site that gives people some insight to your business. If you’re marketing yourself within a luxury industry, your web site should speak to that. If you’re product is visual in nature, there should be lots of pictures. Your web site should be a quick look into your business for your potential customers.

4. Content, Content, Content – In past years there have been a lot of companies that sold search engine optimization services to get you to the top of Google and they guaranteed results for a pretty penny. Sometimes those services succeeded in doing that, often they didn’t. Often these companies were using shortcuts to get their clients ranked higher but as time went by, search engines got smarter (as they always will) and many of these sites who used these shortcuts, are the same sites who were penalized or worse; blacklisted. Just Google ‘SEO Scam’  to see what I’m talking about. What has stood the test of time and will only continue to do so is quality content that is relative to your customers and lot’s of it. The higher quality, the better. Search engines are for-profit companies and the only way Google, Yahoo or Bing make a dime is if consumers like the results they see when they search for whatever it is their looking for. Because of this search engines have every incentive to reward entrepreneurs  who provide lots of pictures of their products/services, have video of their work (perhaps even a commercial) and a blog that adds value to their customers (much like this one !)). The biggest misconception is that you need someone to help you with this or pay an exorbitant amount of money. This is 2010. You either have or know someone who has a digital camera and or digital video recorder. Blogs are free to setup at WordPress.com. Photobucket is one of many sites that will host your pictures for you. Setting up these things for your site is simple and easy and there are dozens of blogs that can tell you, in detail exactly how to do it. Sure if you run a huge enterprise, you probably don’t want to be posting pictures on your site that you took with your camera phone but if you’re just starting out, something is better than nothing.  The key for you to take away here is that content is king and will continue to be an even bigger factor as the search engines continue to devise ways to reward the highest quality and most up to date web sites.

3. Educate yourself - A huge obstacle for many business owners is getting them to realize they don’t necessarily need to know how to write HTML code, but if they can educate themselves enough to understand what questions to ask, they’ll be in a great position to grow their business online. Take a look at some of the links on the right. Take time to educate yourself and learn about the online media world and the changes taking place in it. Spotting a trend ahead of your competitors can be a huge advantage in a competitive industry like Roofing or Landscaping.  One of my clients who’s in the pest control business, is by no means a Technical Guru but he’s constantly reading articles, trying to understand how technology can help his business. When he get’s an idea he’ll call me to get my take on it and I give him my opinion. He’s very successful and I have no reason to believe he won’t continue to because he get’s IT: the IT being that they way consumers are making purchasing decisions has changed for good and it’s an ongoing thing that will constantly continue to change and if you don’t change with it, you’ll hinder or even worse, go out of business. The sooner you start educating yourself (and continue to do so), the more competitive you’ll be in your industry and if the time ever comes to hire a professional to help you, you’ll know what questions to ask and what to look for in a quality SEO/Internet Marketing/Web Design company.

2. Leverage Social Media – When I tell my clients to sign up for a twitter or facebook account. They almost always make a face and say something along the lines of ; ‘my kids use facebook’ or ‘I don’t want to be one of those people telling people every detail about my day, people don’t care about that’. Therein lies a huge misconception about social media; that it’s only for tweens who are complaining about their teacher or for people who feel they need an audience at every moment. Social media is relevant for many reasons but the biggest reason is that search engines know how popular these social media sites are for people in general so now they’re moving facebook and twitter results up higher in the rankings. So to paint the picture let’s say you have a twitter account for your roofing company. Now I’m not going to try to convince you that people are looking for roofers in mass hordes on twitter but where this would benefit you is let’s say you put out a tweet that went something like this: “Hail storm in Austin 78732 last night. We’ll be in that zip doing roof estimates tomorrow. We’re locally owned roofing company www.site.com”.  Now while doing something like that sounds about as fun as running nails down a chalkboard to most of my clients, the benefit here is now if your potential customer is looking for a roofer and happens to Google ‘Roofer Austin’ or ‘Roofing estimate 78732′ there’s a good chance that your tweet (that took you all of 30 seconds to type) will show up in the search results which could lead to them clicking on your account and then your site. Also, just having a twitter/facebook/linkedin account linking back to your site and being updated on a regular basis will send a message to Google that your site is relevant and your actively putting content on the internet about your business…which will help your SEO because remember, content is king.

1. Be selective if you’re going to pay anyone to help you do anything – While this is a mantra I live by in all phases of my life, this is especially true in the world of online media because often there are no tangible results. When you pay Ford $25,000.00, you get a truck. When you pay your SEO guy (hopefully not $25k), your product exists only in cyberspace. So when you’re thinking about doing business, ask for references and case studies proving this person can back up what they say. One rule of thumb; if someone is guaranteeing top placement on search engines, proceed with caution. Most qualified web professionals will tell you that the most you can guarantee is adherence to best practices and white hat SEO techniques. Commonly(but not always), if you do those two things, you’ll net results. So anyone guaranteeing placement is treading in a gray area. I’d liken it to these gambling gurus who sell you their ‘pick’ of who’s gonna win any given sporting event so that you can bet their pick and cash in on the winner. While those guys are more knowledgeable than the average fan and can give you some insight, there’s no possible way to guarantee a victory because at the end of the day, they don’t have control over the outcome. The same is true with SEO, at the end of the day we don’t control the Google Algorithm so there is never a way to guarantee an outcome, only best practices. One thing I will say is there are a lot of start ups in this industry (myself being one of them) and if you have the budget to spend big $$, I say go with some of the bigger more expensive guys.  If you’re going with an up and coming company a) make sure your not spending top dollar for a less experienced service (ask for a discount or better yet, barter) and b) make sure you set clear expectations and deliverables (i.e. 20 leads, 1st page placement, Google quality score of 55, etc.) written down in a contract so you can hold them accountable. It’s great to support the little man and local business but you have to protect your interests first and foremost.