Internet Marketing for SMBs

Old habits die hard.  In my experience, the hardest habit to break for SMB’s is considering their advertising as placement advertising instead of performance advertising.  Digital marketing is no longer about where you show up, or how often you show up, it’s about how well convert, and how high your return on investment (ROI) is.

Aside from branding exercises, I’m a strong believer that the only metric that counts when measuring the effectiveness of advertising is the ROI.  Oftentimes, this belief is in direct conflict with the mistaken belief of many advertisers that the only place they should be advertising is on Google.

If you were to advertise on Google, Yahoo and Bing, you could potentially reach 99% of the traffic on the web between them (and their associated networks).  While that sounds fantastic at first, let’s take a step back, and recall that advertising on search engines is a pay for performance (pay-per-click) model.  Therefore, that means, you’re not paying the search engines for the ability to appear, you’re paying them to deliver clicks.

Search engines are very good at delivering clicks, and they’re also very good about managing your budget.  Once you’ve used up your budget for clicks, the search engines stop delivering them, and you stop appearing in the sponsored links.  You get nothing for free.  Now, let’s revisit the idea that you have the potential to reach 99% of all web traffic by advertising with the Big 3.  Is that true?  Not really.  It’s only true if you’re willing to spend enough money on advertising, that no matter how many clicks you got on your ads, you’d still have enough budget left to keep your ads running continuously.

I can not even conceive of how large that number would have to be in order to actually capture every impression on the Big 3.

This fact does not make these search engines less valuable as media, but rather it teaches us a very important lesson:  It doesn’t matter how often you show up in the search results or where; what matters is getting those clicks from users who will convert into customers.

So, if we accept that small businesses generally don’t have a big enough budget to show up more than occasionally on major search engines, then we must acknowledge that the fact that Google captures 70% of search traffic is irrelevant when deciding where to advertise, because a SMB will never touch anywhere near all of that traffic.  The relevant factor is what the ROI on your advertising will be.  In limited unscientific tests I have done, I have found that the Big 3 yield very similar conversion rates, and that Yahoo! tends to deliver a slightly better ROI than Google (probably mainly due to the fact that clicks are generally cheaper on Yahoo!).  Therefore, this means that the logical thing for a SMB to do is to advertise across all three search engines, and see which yields the best results.

There is no logical reason to prefer Google as your main advertising channel.

This is where the second tier comes in.  If we’ve seen that Yahoo! and Bing can deliver results as good or better than Google, what about all those other lesser known search engines (most of which have PPC programs)?  The fact of the matter is that they can be just as good a source, if not better, than the Big 3.

Remember that what’s important is your conversion rate and your ROI, so as long as a search engine is delivering you relevant traffic, it should not matter which search engine that is.  Given that the second tier search engines often have ridiculously cheap clicks compared to Google, trying them is definitely worth it for small budget advertisers.  They may not have the traffic Google has, but most SMB’s will never touch a fraction of Google’s total traffic, so that’s irrelevant.

Search Engine Watch had posted some of the better second tier search engines, but my advice remains to test them out and see which ones deliver results.  Again, the clicks from these engines are cheaper, so testing should not put a huge hole in a SMB’s budget.

The bottom line is that most advertisers who say, “I just want to be on Google,” are ego-marketing.  The source of your clicks does not matter.  The content of your site matters. Instead of worrying so much about where visitors are coming from, SMBs should be worrying about optimizing their sites for conversion.  That way, regardless of source, once visitors arrive on the page, they will be more likely to purchase.

Have you used the second-tier for your advertising? What’s been your experience? Let us know in the comments.

I read a lot of blogs.  Too many blogs.  I read so many blogs that I’ve cut out most mainstream media in favour of blogs.  Because I read so many blogs, I am very ruthless about what other information sources I consume.  As a result, until recently, I had a strict “no newsletter” policy.  I tried to keep my inbox pristine.

I’m not alone in this kind of thinking.  Many people have a hard time digesting e-mail newsletters.  it’s one thing to visit someone’s blog daily, it’s another to give them permission to deliver something into your personal inbox.  Besides, what’s the point?  If you have a blog, why would you need a newsletter?  Why can’t you just say everything on your blog?

Before blogs, there were…

Before blogs became one of the biggest forms of publishing on the web, the web was rampant with ezines.  Ezines served a similar purpose to blogs in that they were a medium to convey content, but they had more in common with their offline counterparts. They were more editorialized, often organized around set publishing schedules, and were generally collaborative, as opposed to individual, endeavours.

One of the earliest books I read on freelance copywriting as a business advised leveraging the internet to find clients.  A website was the main focus of the internet marketing campaign, but more important was the newsletter.  The newsletter was a regularly scheduled release of information that would be given away for free to anyone who wanted to sign up for it.

When blogging became all the rage, I decided that blogging combined the best of ezines and newsletters, and could probably replace both media.

I was wrong.

The purpose of a blog

There are any number of reasons to start a blog, but for a small business owner, the primary reasons to start a blog are to create content that will attract visitors to your site, whether through search rankings, or through social channels.  Blogs also help to build trust, and they demonstrate a level of expertise.

The purpose of a newsletter

At first, I thought the purpose of a newsletter was identical to that of a blog.  That’s where I was wrong.

If you create a newsletter with the same goals as a blog, you can probably have a relatively successful newsletter, based on readership and subscriber base.  However, that’s a waste of a newsletter, because a newsletter is first and foremost a prospecting and lead generation tool.

Because of the more personal nature of a newsletter, the reader invites you into his inbox, the relationship between the creator of a newsletter and the creator of a blog is generally much closer.  These are the publisher’s biggest fans, his tribe.

Running a blog and a newsletter

The fine line that needs to be walked of course, is for those who have both blogs and newsletters.  It is easy for the two to become redundant.  After all, to the reader, in the end, what you’re doing is creating free content.

The best way to avoid this is to create each with the knowledge in mind of who the audience is.  A blog’s audience is large and wide. Anyone should be able to stop by your blog, read and browse. The content should appeal to all, and should be written for all.  Meanwhile, subscribers to your newsletter already know who you are, and they like you enough that they’ve decided to let you into their inboxes.  As such, this is a place where you should be writing to a smaller, closer audience, an audience that you should be engaging in a dialogue with.  This is your inner circle, and they should be treated with the respected that that commands.

Oftentimes, I point to Chris Brogan as an example of a guy who does a lot well on the web, and I learned about Chris through his blog.  I became an avid reader, and devoured everything he wrote.  One day, he came straight out on his blog and asked me (okay, everyone) to subscribe to his newsletter if they felt so inclined.  He promised different content, and a different feel.  And y’know what?  Chris delivers in his newsletter.  He gives subscribers to his newsletters unique content, addresses them colloquially and even gives them early heads up on his upcoming projects.  Sometimes he encourages them to share the word, other times he asks that they keep the news their little secret.

If you want an example of how to run a blog and a newsletter properly, visit Chris’ blog, and then subscribe to his newsletter.

Getting the most out of your newsletter

Now that you’ve decided to create a newsletter, and have an idea of how to differentiate it from your blog, how do you actually pull a benefit from it?

First, and foremost, never forget that your number one goal is to provide valuable content.  If your newsletter degenerates into pointless rants, or constant sales pitches, you’ll lose subscribers faster than you sucker in new ones (and yes, if that’s all the content you offer, you are suckering them in).

The next thing to remember about a newsletter is that it is a leads generation tool, as such, there is a certain amount of selling that you should be doing, and that’s okay, because newsletter subscribers, when they subscribe are expecting a certain amount of sales pitch.  People don’t necessarily mind being sold to, as long as they know it’s coming, and it’s something they’re interested in.  So, in addition to your content, sprinkle in some offers, or news about upcoming projects, or products.

Use your newsletter as a prospecting tool.  These are the people most likely to purchase from you, but at the same time, be careful how you position this.  Remember, these people have trusted you with their contact information, and trust is easily lost when you oversell.

The true secret to a great newsletter is managing the balance between offering great value, and earning trust, and also prospecting for leads in a way that’s acceptable and unobtrusive.

Do you have a newsletter?  Do you have a blog?  How do you balance the two?

“Traditional advertising is dying.”

In my line of work, I hear that line a lot.

I work for the Yellow Pages Group of Canada, a company that is associated with one of the most traditional forms of advertising you can think of. I also happen to work on the online side of the business, specifically in relation to online performance marketing products, such as search engine marketing. In other words, the industry that’s killing traditional advertising.

Traditional advertising refers not only to yellow pages directories, but print newspaper advertising, radio broadcast advertising, and some push it as far as broadcast television advertising.

I have seen all the numbers.  I have read all of the reports.  Internet advertising is still a growing business.  In fact the amount of time consumers spend on the internet is still vastly disproportionate to the amount of money businesses are spending online.

That tells me two things:

• First, that if internet advertising is a growing business, and there is a finite amount of marketing dollars in the market, by definition, other forms of advertising will take a hit.
• Second, there’s still a lot of types of advertising out there that businesses are spending money on. And if they’re spending money on it, it means it’s working to some degree.

One of the things I’ve noticed in the past couple of years of working in the industry is that internet marketers seem to have an endless bag of reports and numbers that they can pull from to justify just about every single argument they can make.  The scariest part about these numbers and reports are that most of them are created by groups that have a vested interest in making money online.  What else would we expect them to say?

In defense of the fact that traditional advertising is dying, and that web advertising is gaining ground, someone pointed out to me the other day that after decades of advertising during the Super Bowl, Pepsi decided to instead do a Facebook marketing campaign.

Fair. Pepsi was absent from the Super Bowl. But do you know who did advertise during the Super Bowl for the first time ever? Google.  Google has also been using print and billboard advertising to market its various apps and its Nexus One phone.  They’ve also used billboard advertising to advertise their search engine outside of North America, where they generally tend to have a lower share of the search market.

So, Google, the ultimate symbol of internet advertising does traditional advertising. They must know something, that the other internet marketers don’t…

Yes, traditional advertising will decline, simply because online advertising will continue to grow. However, it will not disappear, and the simple reason is that it’s still effective.  Yes, we spend a lot of our time in front of glowing screens, but we also do a lot of other things during our day that aren’t connected to the internet, and until we abandon them to live our lives entirely virtually, there will be a use for traditional advertising.

Let me put this another way. Internet marketers spend their lives on the internet, so they sometimes forget that other people – normal people – have slightly healthier, more balanced lives.  People read.  People listen to the radio.  People watch TV.  Believe it or not, people flip through phone books.  People drive by billboards on their way to work.  People go to sporting events.  People live outside of the web.

Traditional advertising is still alive because it’s still effective.

Whether we’re talking about actual ad blocking software (Full disclosure, I myself use the Firefox extension AdBlock Plus on my home computer), or we’re talking about a general blindness to display advertising, one thing seems certain, display advertising is not as effective as it once was.  As the general population becomes more web savvy, fewer people are clicking on those whack-a-mole-style banners.

Furthermore, users have gotten used to the constant bombardment of ads, and in order to cope they have developed an immunity.  When you walk by a section of town where every inch of wall space is covered in promotional posters, those posters become a part of the scenery and lose their effectiveness as advertisements.

Bouncing Back

The case against display advertising seemed pretty damning a year ago, but it would appear that things are turning around.  Display advertising appears to be bouncing back, and continuing to grow.  With growth particularly in industries like the automotive industry, display seems poised to re-establish itself as a mainstay in any marketing mix.

There’s no doubt that the economic conditions of the past two years have hurt display advertising, as advertisers seek only the highest ROI marketing. But with a recovering economy, display is once again becoming an option, and with good reason.

Display Advertising Works Differently than Search

Before the rise of search marketing, display advertising was the only way to drive traffic that would convert to a website.  Search, and in particular the more recent advancements led by Google to improve the relevance of search, made conversion to sales the biggest strength of search marketing, and made display look lame in comparison.

However, the strength of display is not in clicks to conversions, but rather in branding and reach.  A comScore report from not too long ago demonstrated that despite a lack of clicks, display advertising can have a significant positive impact on:

• visits to the advertiser’s website
• likelihood of conducting a search for the brand or product
• likelihood of purchasing the brand or product online
• likelihood of purchasing the brand or product in physical retail locations

The reason for this is quite simply that the reach of display ads is typically greater than that of search.  This means that display advertising is best used to create awareness of the brand or product, and to prompt a user to conduct a search query, or otherwise seek more information. Meanwhile, search is best used when that user is closer to the point of purchase.

In other words, the best results are obtained when display is used in conjunction with search.  In marketing circles this is conventional wisdom, but the love affair with search has caused some to lose sight of this.  However, both logic and empirical evidence suggest that a multi-pronged marketing approach is the best way to go.

The evolution of marketing is not about forgoing one form of advertising for another.  The evolution of marketing is about serving the right advertising to the right audience.  Whether it be search, display, banner, or other, it doesn’t matter, as long as it’s relevant to the user.  If advertising is relevant, it will be effective.

Oftentimes, when I talk to people about internet marketing, if they’re listening, they quickly come to a sudden realization.  “It seems like you’re giving away a lot of stuff for free.”

It’s true.  The internet has created a culture of free.  On the web, craftsmen demonstrate how to perform tasks that they would normally charge for.  Accountants and lawyers dole out advice that once upon a time they billed for.  Software makers give away their products.  Writers publish their writing publicly, without even the modest advances that they would get in print.  Artists post their work for all to see, free of charge.

“If you’re giving everything away for free, how do you make any money?”  That’s a question that a lot of people have struggled with on the web.

There seems to be two main approaches to dealing with “free.”  The first is to reject the notion of free altogether.  If you create something of value, you should be compensated for it.  While I agree with that argument, notionally, in the long run, it’s doomed to failure.  The internet has created this culture of free, and like it or not, it’s going to continue.  There will always be a group that’s doing exactly what you’re doing, but for free. That group will get bigger, and if you’re the only guy in the field who’s charging, how good do you think your chances of surviving in the long run are?

The alternative is to embrace “free” and find ways to still make money while doing so.

The Freemium Model

The Freemium model – popularized by Chris Anderson, the founder and editor of Wired magazine – is possibly the most popular business model among web start-ups.  The idea is simple.  You offer a product or service for free, but you also offer a premium version of that same product or service for a fee. On the web, you find feature charts on any website where you can download an application.  The feature chart outlines what features come with the free package, and then shows you the additional features you get when you purchase the basic package.  Then more features you get by buying the Plus package.  Finally, even more features you get purchasing Gold package.

The freenium model has been shown to work when the right balance is struck between what to offer for free, and what to charge for.  If you lock too much up behind a pay wall, then you’ll never get the traffic necessary to start rolling.  If you give too much away, all your resources will be devoted to creating free products, and you’ll be bleeding money.

The Other Kind of Free

The alternative is to offer a substantial amount of content for free, but then to offer a different, but related product for sale.  Content sites will often do this by selling merchandise.  This can also be viewed as the “expert” model, because it often involves creating a reputation for yourself as an expert by giving away advice, and then creating products that you can sell based on the strength of your reputation as an expert.

In order for this free model to work, there are a few key points to recall.

First, recall that “free” is a numbers game.  Never will 100% of your website’s visitors (who mainly come for the free stuff) buy your products.  Instead, the idea is you reach a wide audience with your free content, and a certain percentage of those will be interned in purchasing from you. The goal is to convert as many visitors into paying customers as possible.

Second, remember that even those that aren’t buying from you, are still valuable.  The people who don’t buy, may still lead others to your enterprise. These secondary connections can be more valuable than if the visitor had just purchased from you and gone on his merry way.

Third, despite talking about doing stuff for “free,” recall that what you’re doing is still marketing. You’ll need tight copy that reminds your readers/fans/followers/tribespeople what the benefit is to them of purchasing your product.

Finally, if you’re going to follow this tactic, be sure to make it clear from the outset that you’re going to be selling something.  The most important thing you have is the trust relationship between you and your visitors. Part of trust is transparency and honesty. If you have visitors that are used to getting free stuff and you suddenly hit them with heavy-handed sales pitches out of left field, they’ll annoyed, frustrated, and abandon you.

The “Thank You” economy

As far as I know, Gary Vee is the one who coined the term the “Thank You” economy.  Gary for years has created and hosted a web TV show, 5 days a week, reviewing wines.  He also answers every e-mail he receives, and spends hours every day actively interacting with his hundreds of thousands of twitter followers.  He does all this for no charge.

Gary coined the “Thank You Economy” to explain what he gets out of it.  Gary accepts that what he’s doing is free, and that the vast majority of the people who watch his show, or read his blog, or take advantage of his wine recommendations will never give him any money.  However, there is that portion of his followers, his fans, his tribe, that will thank him for all he’s done, and when he does a paid product, they will thank him by purchasing it.

Gary proved the effectiveness of this method when his first book came out late last year and became a best-seller (Amazon affiliate link) as soon as it went on the market.

Thank you.

Long before I even knew what internet marketing was, I was playing around with websites. I built hobby websites, and built websites for friends. When I was building these websites, frames were still considered “cool” and animated .gifs were “the bomb.”  The web was still young, and while I didn’t know what internet marketing was, I knew the importance of getting traffic to my sites (even if I was using on-page counters to track that traffic).

So, what is a kid playing around with websites to do?  It’s not like I had a marketing budget.  So, I did the logical thing: I found other websites that catered to similar audiences, and I e-mailed them and asked them for links.  Then, I found directories that catered to my audience, and submitted my sites to these directories.  Fast forward quite a few years, and after an aborted legal career, I found myself learning about and working in internet marketing.  Imagine my surprise when I found out that the exact things that I had been doing 10+ years ago, simply because they were the only way I knew how to get traffic, were now called SEO, and firms were charging lots of money for those services.

When I was link building, it wasn’t for the purposes of optimizing for search engines.  Hell, Google didn’t even exist at the time, and Yahoo was more of a directory than a search engine.  I was just building links to get the value that was intrinsic to those links.

I think that’s the reason why I’ve always had such a hard time wrapping my head around the SEO industry. On the one hand, it’s all common sense. On the other hand, the way firms go about doing SEO and link-building makes no sense.

The goal behind link-building in SEO is primarily, and in some cases exclusively, to increase search engine ranking.  What happened to the days when I got those links for my websites, and all I was looking for was the traffic that those links provided. Here’s the thing that seems to get lost in a lot of the SEO shuffle: link building has value in and of itself.

As an example, Leo Babauta, author of the Zen Habits blog, one of the most popular blogs in the world, and one that has turned Leo into a published author has publicly said on numerous occasions that he doesn’t believe in SEO.  He had his site built with proper architecture, but beyond that, he never did any SEO on Zen Habits.  So, how is it that one of the most popular blogs in the world didn’t do any SEO?  Well, here’s the thing, it did – just not for the sake of doing SEO.

Leo, did plenty of link building, but he never called it link building. He went into the blogosphere and commented on hundreds (thousands?) of blogs.  He wrote one guest post a week for a while.  He wrote article after article after article, and got them published on other websites, and all had a link back to his own site.  He also published tons of really great content on his own site, which encouraged others to link to it on their own.

Is any of this sounding familiar?  That’s right, it’s SEO.  Except it’s not.  Leo didn’t go out with the intent to do SEO. He went out with the intent to spread the world about his blog, to make connections and to build authority.  He got tons of traffic from this process that did not come from Google.  It came from other sites.  It just so happened, that this process of building connections and authority is exactly what search engines like Google are looking for in their rankings, and as such, Zen Habits got a lot of SEO juice out of the practice.

What Leo did was not rocket science, in fact, it’s the same thing that I did over a decade ago as a kid just discovering the web (only on a bigger scale with better content).

Your website can benefit from this same link building and inadvertent SEO practice.  All you have to do is follow a relatively simple recipe.

1. Create content that other people will want to link to
2. Create content on other sites that links to your site, such as guest blog posts, ezine article submissions and social media stations
3. Connect with the connectors and the mavens in your industry, and get them to spread the word about your site
4. Get featured in a mainstream publication if you can
5. Feature others on your site – they will at the very least mention the fact that they appeared on your site to their audiences

All of these steps will produce traffic in and of themselves, with the added benefit of also improving your search engine rankings.  What not to do is what a lot of SEO firms have been doing:

1. Submit links to a directory no one actually visits
2. Write articles and submit them to sites no one actually reads

Link-building purely for the sake of SEO is like using twenty dollar bills to insulate your walls.  You may end up achieving your goal, but there are more efficient ways to go about it.

YouTube’s been around for years, and it’s one of the most popular sites on the internet.  Sites like Hulu and Boxee are making American cable companies nervous (in Canada, Hulu’s blocked).  Certainly, the move from broadcasting on the tube, to broadcasting over the web is coming, but we have yet to see any groundbreaking made-for-web content. Last week, Rev3 put out a tongue-in-cheek open letter to Conan O’Brien, encouraging him to move his show to the web.  While the letter was a joke, is that so far off?]

The big question around broadcasting content on the web, however, is what’s the revenue model?  Network television makes its money through advertising – raising the same kind of advertising revenue on the web could prove to be problematic.  Cable networks make money through subscription.  This could be a possibility, but I think we’ll truly see if this is feasible this year if Hulu begins charging for content.

Where does this leave the advertisers?  Advertisers have used 30-second television spots with great success for half a century, but what happens when (not if, when) network television dies?  The logical answer is that advertisers will move these dollars to the web.  Some marketers are touting video as the next generation of advertising on the web.  Some marketers go so far as to imply that video will become the dominant content on the web, replacing text and static images.

This is where I get skeptical.

We have seen a number of success stories of people who have used video for business purposes to great success (the name Gary Vaynerchuk comes to mind, for one).  However, a few examples of success doesn’t mean that video is going to replace all content.

4 Reasons Why Video Won’t Replace Text

1. History Tells Us Otherwise

The web’s great value is that it’s a resource in addition to an entertainment source.  People go to the web to find information. That’s where there’s value for advertisers, because they can find consumers who are looking for answers.  Just as documentaries did not replace books as the way we do research, so too, will videos not become the definitive resource for a person searching for information.

2. People’s attention spans are too short

The web has nurtured an environment of people who have an 8-second attention span.  You might think this is an argument in favour of video, but it’s not.  How often can a person be hooked by the first 8 seconds of a video?  Not often.  Video as a medium needs time to develop, and it can’t easily be scanned.  Text on the other hand is inherently scannable.  I scan tens of thousands of words of text on the internet every day.  I do it because scanning text is easy.  I can’t scan hundreds of hours of video every day.

3. Look at usage patterns

When does a huge portion of web traffic occur?  While people are at work.  People will happily read/scan through multiple articles during spare moments at work, but very few people have the kind of job where stopping and watching a full video is acceptable or feasible.

4. The right way to use video hasn’t been discovered yet

The 30-second commercial spot on television worked because of the nature of the medium.  People had to watch it while they waited for their regular programming to come back.  There is a small trend of companies trying to reproduce this same format on the web.  That simply won’t work work on the web, because no one will actively seek out a commercial.  In fact, people watching television are actively looking for ways to avoid commercials.  What makes these companies think that just because you put them on the web now, people will want to watch them?

A Few of the Right Ways to Use Video

As mentioned earlier, there have been some success stories for using video, and as such, there are some lessons we’ve been able to glean from these about how to use video.

1. Promotional tool. Use video content as yet another avenue to guide people back to your web HQ.  This can be accomplished by posting something of interest on YouTube, and pointing people back to the HQ for more info.  This is about creating valuable content, not selling.

2. Do something different. A lot of people, especially in the world of blogging, are experimenting with video.  Unfortunately, most of them are simply taking the blogposts they would have normally written and reciting them into a webcam.  If your video doesn’t add anything, just write it.  Video allows you to demonstrate and visualize things in a way text doesn’t.  Take advantage of that, or risk creating some of the dullest videos on the web.

3. Add personality. The social web has demonstrated to us all that consumers like it when the brands they buy from have personality.  Video allows consumers to see who they’re buying from.  If you can create video that allows your customers to feel like they know you better, you’ve succeeded.

4. Create a viral hit. The holy grail of internet marketing is going viral.  It costs next to nothing, and all of a sudden everyone and their cat has seen your video and passed it along.  The problem with creating a viral hit is that there’s really no way to predict what will go viral.  The first viral hit of 2010 has been the American Idol rendition of “Pants on the Ground.”  Not sure that was intentional…

Experiment with video and add it to your marketing mix, but make no mistake, it is not a replacement, it is a supplement.

While you’re playing with video, you might also want to check out Get Seen, as recommended by Chris Brogan.  I haven’t looked at this yet, but Chris usually gives good recommendations.

Oh, and don’t expect many videos from me in the near future.  I know my strengths and my weaknesses, and I know that for the sake of anyone reading this, I should stick to writing.

In my previous post, I talked about the importance of having an internet presence, but went on to claim that that presence didn’t need to be a website. Now, I want to explore what some of the options for building that presence are, and discuss them a little more deeply.

To be clear, what I’m talking about here is not just a place where you appear on the web. It’s the hub of your internet presence. You may show up in a number of different places on the web, but what I’m going to be talking is the main place where you want all your traffic to be feeding back towards. It’s what Chris Brogan calls a home base.  I call it a HQ (headquarters).  I’ve also heard it called a hub.  Whatever you call it, it’s the place that all your other online presences should be pointing towards.

If you have multiple presences on the web, I highly recommend picking one of them to be your HQ, and putting your best content there, while the purpose of everything else you do should be to drive traffic to the HQ.  That being said, let’s look at a few different ways to build your HQ.

1. Build a website

Yes, I did predict that websites are going to begin to fall out of favour among SMBs, but for the moment, they’re probably still the most popular choice for SMBs looking to get online.  A good business website is not about having the coolest design on the planet, or having the best flash intro.  It’s about being accessible, clear and leading to conversion.  You can easily spend twenty thousand dollars on a site that will never make a single sale.  That’s why I think that the most important thing about a web design team is not how skilled the graphic designer, but how smart the person who optimizes for conversion is (and if no one’s doing that, then you might as well be throwing away your money).

Design and flash are cool, and can help make a good impression on a new visitor, but unless your site is optimized for conversion, don’t bother.

It’s also worth noting that while the skills necessary to build a mainstream website from scratch are slightly more intricate than when I learned HTML ten years ago, building a professional looking site has never been easier thanks to a variety of do-it-yourself platform based tools.  These are often good cost-effective solutions for an early site, and you can always upgrade later. One example, I’ve heard good things about is Squarespace.  There are many others.

2. Take advantage of a social media presence

3. Use directory profile pages

4. Use Google Local Business Centre

Google Local Business Centre is Google’s big push to get into the local business market.  Traditionally, Google’s been great for national advertisers, but has had a hard time attracting smaller, local advertisers into its fold.  The Local Business Centre might be the answer that Google’s looking for.  Essentially, Google aggregates information from a bunch of different sources and creates listings and pages for every Local Business.  If you never do anything about this, Google will still create this page for you, and will populate it with whatever content its search robots find on the the internet that’s related to you.

Admittedly, that’s slightly alarming in some respects, because you don’t have complete control over your internet presence, and for that reason alone, I don’t think I would rely on Google Local as my business HQ.  However, being aware of it is a good idea, because it can be a powerful tool, and could potentially deliver a lot of traffic.  John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing recently posted this article about Google Local, that’s worth a look if you want to know how to get more out of it.

5. Build a Squidoo Lens

Squidoo is a site started by Seth Godin, one of the leading thinkers on internet marketing.  That fact alone should make you want to consider it.  If, however, you’re not convinced by my endorsement alone, I’ll do my best to describe Squidoo.  On Squidoo, you create a “lens.”  A lens is a kind of page that captures all sorts of different pieces of content and presents it in a chronological, but otherwise, unorganized fashion.  I played around with a Squidoo lens for a little bit, but ended up getting distracted by something shiny.  My aborted attempt, however, shouldn’t discourage you from seeing what the site has to offer.

6. Be a Virtual Shopkeep with an Ebay Store

If you sell goods over the internet, setting up an Ebay storefront might be the only HQ that you need.  The auction super site provides a trusted mechanism by which you can sell your products without going through the trouble of building your own e-commerce site.  It also has built-in traffic generation since people searching for products on Ebay are likely to come across your storefront, or if not, at the very least your products.  If your sole purpose in being online is to sell directly to people through the internet, and not have them ever come into your brick & mortar store, there are worse options.

7. Join the Blogosphere

I was talking to a prominent blogger and marketing consultant a couple of weeks ago, and I asked him about his blog.  It is a bare bones, standard templated blog, and it’s not attached to any “real” website.  As it turns out, this person had had a website built for him, had invested the money in it, but once it was ready, he found that he didn’t like the outcome. It was not adding any value, and it was just burying the one thing people came to him for in the first place: information. So, he scrapped the website, and continued using his blog as his sole internet presence. This tactic seems to work well for professionals in an information industry.  it’s easy to communicate the information through a blog, and you don’t need to worry about listing inventory or hosting galleries of your stock.  A simple blog with an “About” page and a “Contact” page has worked well for many consultants, designers, writers, artists, and could also work well for lawyers, accountants, and other knowledge workers.

Those are just a few of the various possibilities for buildling your internet HQ.  Do you have any to add to the list?  Add to the conversation in the comments.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post asking whether a small business needs a blog, but I realized while writing it that I had jumped ahead of myself. The question I should have first posed was whether a small business needs a website. The answer to that question is no.

Small businesses don’t necessarily need a website, but they do need a web presence. A web presence is simply a foothold on the web that a business can direct its customers to. It serves the function of providing basic information, whether that be about products and services, hours of operation, or even simply contact information.

Ten years ago, the only way to have this kind of presence on the web was to have a website, and that probably meant learning a bit of HTML and getting yourself a Geocities account. A website was a collection of linked together static web pages. When was the last time you heard someone use the term web page? The term has fallen out of use because a page is only a useful term when it is static. Today’s websites have evolved where they’re no longer a collection of individual pages, but a single interactive platform.

Web site design has come a long way since the days of basic HTML and Geocities. You could still create a site using basic HTML and a free web host, but if you expect that to stand side by side with a professionally designed site, you may be kidding yourself. It’s the equivalent of erecting a lemonade stand next to a Starbucks.

As website design capabilities have evolved, though, a curious thing has happened. Websites have become more than what most small businesses need. Most small business don’t need fully interactive sites with integrated CMS, AJAX capabilities, check-out carts, and user review functionality. More importantly, most small businesses can’t afford all those bells and whistles.

That’s why I predict that after several years of consecutive growth, the percentage of SMBs that have a website will now begin to fall. The reason for this is not that SMBs are going to turn away from the web – that would be a huge mistake – but rather because they now have other options for crafting their web presence without investing in a whole website. So, you’ll actually see the percentage of SMBs with a presence on the web continue to rise, all while you see the percentage with websites falling.

There are three reasons why we will soon start to see this trend towards a web presence that is not a website. The first is because SMBs now have alternatives to websites for creating their web presences. Things such as internet directory profile pages (internet yellow pages, yelp, etc.), Google local business center, Facebook fan pages, other social media profiles, blogging platforms, and many other standardized options offer the ability to present the necessary information without all the bells and whistles that SMBs don’t need for the right price: free or just about. The standardized pages look very similar, and offer similar content, to the websites of a few years ago. The difference is they’ve now been commoditized.

The second reason we’ll see a move away from websites is that the web design industry will actually push SMBs away from websites. Web design for SMBs is a high-touch, low-margin business. Because of the availability of cheaper alternatives, the only way for web design firms to justify charging enough to be profitable is to offer customization. However, customization means that the work isn’t scalable, and if it’s not scalable, it isn’t very profitable. Instead, web design firms will prefer to work with bigger customers, who will have deep enough pockets to pay for a truly customized experience, and remove the need for these firms to worry about scalability. As the web design firms focus on the high end, SMBs will naturally look at other forms of web presence.

The final reason we’ll see a shift away from websites is that the new forms of web presence come with a pre-existing method for generating traffic. One of the biggest issues SMBs have with standalone websites is that they pay good money for them, but then once they’re built they need to spend more money to get people to visit the them. The standardized web presences often come pre-packaged with at least one method to be found. Registering with Google Local Business Centre makes you eligible to appear in Google’s local search results. Creating a Facebook fan page allows you to easily attract word of mouth traffic by spreading word through your Facebook friends. Creating a profile with an internet directory means that anyone using that directory will be able to find you.

In my next post, I’ll look a closer look at some of the options for setting up a SMBs web presence.

The marketing process is often depicted as a funnel.  The funnel guides the consumer from the widest part, his awareness of a product, down to the thinnest part, the actual purchase of a product.  The funnel image is a great tool for describing the marketing process. However, for as long as I’ve been exposed to the funnel, I’ve had an issue with it: The sale of a product is not the end of the marketing process.  In fact, it’s a point at which a whole other process kicks off that culminates in either repeat business or referrals.

I struggled with how best to articulate this concept for a while until I stumbled upon Duct Tape Marketing’s blog post, “The Easiest Way to Describe the Marketing Process.”  In that post, John Jantsch explains the process, not as a funnel, but as an hourglass.  This was a “duh” moment for me, and I immediately decided that I needed to start using this imagery (thanks, John!).

The Two Halves of the Hourglass

The reason the hourglass works so well is because it’s basically two funnels, one stacked inverted upon the other.  The top half is the marketing funnel that we all have come to know and love/hate.  It deals with the customer acquisition part of the marketing process.  In the top half of the hourglass, we’re going out to a wide pool of consumers, and slowly guiding them towards the purchase of the product that we’re selling.  The tools to do this are the well-known marketing tools of advertising, PR, demoing, sampling, etc.

The second half of the hourglass is where this whole concept gets interesting.  The traditional funnel model, essentially says that once you’ve made the sale, your marketing job is over.  If you want to make more sales, go back to the top of the funnel.  The hourglass, however, acknowledges that there are better and more efficient ways to make additional sales.  As the consumer (or the grain of sand) passes through the middle of the hourglass he comes out on the other side in a process that aims to keep that customer coming back as a repeat customer and/or or to have that customer refer another customer to your product.

The second half of the hourglass is so important because the repeat customer, or the customer that will evangelize your product is the holy grail of any business.  Having every single sale come through the top half of the hourglass means lots of new customer acquisition, which is expensive, and time consuming.  Every grain of sand going through the top half of the hourglass is a single sale.  If you want another sale, you need another grain of sand.  When you get repeat business and referrals, it means that the first process yields multiple sales.  Every grain of sand through the top half of the hourglass can yield an exponentially larger number of sales. Some businesses do the second half of this process so well, that they can eventually forego the entire first half.  Isn’t that the dream?  When you no longer have to worry about finding new customers, and your customers instead find you, or just keep returning to you?

Expressing the Halves of the Hourglass

John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing expressed the different steps involved in the hourglass process of marketing in his own way, but what follows are the steps as I see them.  In some places, they’re simpler, in others more elaborate.  In the end, we’re expressing the same thing, but using different methods.

Awareness:  The consumer becomes aware of your product or service. At this point, all that’s happened is that he now knows it exists. If you sell purple widgets, this is the point where you need to make people aware the purple widgets exist and are for sale.

Interest:  The customer knows the product exists, and now he’s interested in learning more about it.  This is where you get to educate the consumer as to why he needs a purple widget.

Intent:  The consumer has now done his homework and knows he wants to buy.  At this point, he’s just looking for where to buy it.  The idea here is to make it as painless as possible for the consumer to buy your purple widget.

Purchase/Sale:  The consumer has purchased your purple widget.

Experience:  Now that the consumer has purchased your purple widget, you better be sure the experience he has with it is positive.  This comes down to making sure you can deliver on what was promised.  If you can’t, forget about getting return business.  Bonus points if you can overdeliver on what was promised.

Trust/Identify:  Assuming that the consumer is happy with his purple widget, you now have an opportunity to create a link with him.  You can forge a relationship with this consumer.  Some companies are doing this through loyalty programs, others are experimenting with social media to find new ways to connect with their customers, and the best companies realize that no matter what they do, this is all about delivering top-notch customer service and showing the customer just how much he means to them.

Repeat/Refer:  If you do the above steps correctly, the customer will gladly purchase from you again, and he’ll probably even tell his friends that they should purchase from you as well.  All of a sudden, all of the people he knows are getting their purple widgets from you.

Use Hourglass Marketing

So much emphasis is put on the top funnel in marketing because it’s the hard part.  You have to take non-believers, and get them to buy from you.  The bottom half of the hourglass is easy.  It’s just a matter of delivering on your promises, treating your customers like the valued people they are, and making it easy for them to come back, and to tell their friends how great you are.  Unfortunately, because we’re often so busy focusing on the tough first half, we forget about the second half.  The hourglass as a whole is important, and truly successful businesses know this.

If you want your business to succeed, use the hourglass.

Image courtesy of secubie.