We’ve had a lot of good posts here on Net Profit Marketing’s blog but sometimes these great posts fall off the first page. Starting with this posts, a couple of times a year we’re going to do a “Best of” blog that highlights some posts that you really need to read. This one focuses on posts that are especially important for small businesses as most of our clients are small businesses.

Read through the posts and let us know what you think. As always, we look forward to your comments.

What is the Purpose of Your Website?
If you don’t know the purpose of your website, your visitors probably don’t either. You need to have a very clear purpose to your website and a very clear direction on what you want your visitors to do. It has to be more clear than just providing information.

What is SEO?
You’ve heard about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) but you’re not quite sure what it is or how it works. This post will take you through the basics of SEO and what it can do for you. This is where you get on the first page of Google.

Why You Need Google Analytics & Webmaster Tools
Do you know how many people visited your site last month, what search engine or website referred them, what keywords they searched for to find your website, and what page they arrived on? Do you know what Google thinks about your website? Google Analytics & Webmaster Tools can answer all of this for you.

Get More Traffic From Local Search Results
Would you like more traffic to your website from local search results? People are searching for your product every day online and Google Places (formerly Google Local Business Center) makes it easy for you to get more local search results.

Let me know what you think of the posts and of us posting the best of every 6 months or so.

Jared Pomranky

Related posts:

1. Why You Need Google Analytics & Webmaster Tools
2. SEO Client Becomes a Google Favorite Place!
3. What is SEO?

As of 2008, Google had indexed over a trillion sites. Since then they have continued indexing more and more websites each day. There’s not an exact number right now but it’s safe to say that the Internet is enormous. When considering the vast number of pages, how are you going to stand out? It’s no longer a viable option to always go after generic search terms in order to get the most traffic. Unless you have large capital reserves that you’re going to pour into a very expensive ongoing internet marketing and SEO campaign for years, you need to find your Online Niche.

Your goal is to be a big fish in a small smaller pond, which usually equates to being on the first page of Google for some relevant search terms. Most people don’t look past the first page of Google with some estimates putting it at 90%. If you’re not on the first page of Google, you’re missing out on traffic. It’s much better to get 50% of 500 searches a month as opposed to getting 1% of 1,000 searches a month. Also, as you’re building your niche for your site, you’re also optimizing it for the general search terms in the long run. An optimized page for the term “Detroit Michigan Mortgage Lender” also includes the more general search terms “Michigan Mortgage Lender” and “Mortgage Lender”. My favorite online niches to build for clients are: Geographic, product/service specific, and marketing specific.

Build a Geographic Niche

While not for every business, a geographic niche is always a good way to weed out the competition. For most locations, there are strong local search numbers and optimizing your site for these local niches will give you a significant amount of traffic and leads. Some easy ways to build your local niche are to include geographic search terms on your website, build a Google Places profile (as well as Bing and Yahoo), and add your website to local search directories.

Build a Product or Service Niche

This is a great way to make your company stand out for your specialties. While you may product widgets, maybe you can brand yourself as being the best provider of widgets for small businesses or identifying a difference in your widget compared to others. In essence you’re marketing your product as more unique than just being a widget. I like branding products for small business or for solving a certain problem.

Build a Marketing Specific Niche

Your market may be saturated on Google, which leaves your website out for awhile but what about other avenues? Can you brand yourself socially through other online avenues? If you have a LinkedIn account and search for your name on Google, what comes up in the top 10? Unless you’re a online social guru, LinkedIn always comes up in the top 10. It’s the same with other social sites like Facebook or twitter. These sites also give you the ability to connect more with your potential clients, which is an extra added bonus. Ranking for keywords through secondary sites and connecting through a different method than other companies will help your company stand out, effectively creating your marketing niche.

While you can pick just one of these and run with it, I prefer to utilize all 3 or at least 2 of these methods. As you build yourself more of a niche, you become more of a standard for that area. You will get more search results, more traffic to your site, more leads, and ultimately more profit.

Jared Pomranky

Related posts:

1. Get More Traffic From Local Search Results

I’m going to assume that you have been able to sign-up for Zoho CRM and that you can reasonably manage through setting your default values in the “Setup” menu of Zoho. Also, for those of you that don’t know anything about Zoho CRM, view a previous post Zoho CRM for Lead Management. This guide is to give you a quick run-down of the major lead types and flow of one type of lead to another.

Zoho is broken up into 3 main categories for Lead Management: Leads, Potentials, Contacts/Accounts.

Leads

These are not existing customers. These are leads that come in from your website, by phone, referral or other marketing that are not qualified. This is where you can set your lead status, create notes on when you talked to them and details of the conversation, attach files and emails, and create tasks for follow-up or other activities. This is also where you can reassign leads to other sales people or mark a lead as dead if it’s not going anywhere. When you have a reasonable expectation that this lead can become a customer, you will “Convert” the lead to a Potential by clicking on the Convert button.

Potentials

Once you convert a Lead to a Potential (or add one in right away as a Potential), you have to set the stage of the sales process that you’re at: Prospecting, Qualification, Needs Analysis, Value Proposition, etc. By selecting the stage, a percentage is assigned to the potential that represents the probability that the sale will close and you will convert the potential into a customer. I have found the Stages to be reasonable for what I do but you can always change the stages and assign different percentages to each. You also set the Expected Revenue and the Close Month of the sale. This helps to forecast revenue using the percentage to close and the revenue. Once you close the potential, you Convert them to a Contact.

Contacts/Accounts

Accounts are your customers at a company level (i.e. Acme, Corp). Contacts are the employees that you talk to within that company. You can have many Contacts per company, which is nice for consolidating data and allowing for multiple salespeople to have their own Contacts at the same company. You won’t create a lead from your Contacts because they’re already customers but when you’re working a sale with the Contact, you can create a Potential and assign that Contact to the Potential (right on the Create Potential form).

Zoho CRM Tips

I have a couple of quick tips that you can use to make your Zoho CRM experience a little better.

• On each view (Leads, Potentials, Contacts, etc.) you can click on the “View” drop-down to select or customize a different view. This is then set as default so you can easily change it to show something like all of your open leads only.
• You can add custom fields and add/change values in drop-downs for every field. Go to the Setup menu item and select the type you want to edit.
• You can create a web-to-lead form to automatically add leads from your website and through their API (Application Programming Interface), you can integrate it into your existing contact forms, which we have used with great success.
• With the Professional edition, you can create Workflow rules that automatically assign a lead to a sales person based on a set of rules.
• You can always assign a lead or other type to another sales person by going to that lead and clicking on edit Owner.

Jared Pomranky

Related posts:

1. Lead Management With Zoho CRM
2. Small Business Online Marketing

Zoho CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is one of the best kept secrets for small businesses. I talk to many businesses that have heard of CRM solutions like Sugar CRM or Salesforce but Zoho is growing quickly with quality products priced well below the market (or many times free). Zoho’s name originates off of a play off the term SOHO (Small Office Home Office) and that is the market they serve best.

The challenge with clients has been how to manage leads at a company that has 50 or less employees. There are many solutions available but most of them are cost prohibitive or offer services that are far too complicated for the average small business. What Zoho CRM offers is a clean layout with an easy to use interface. It’s intuitive and it’s not overly complicated. That doesn’t mean, however, that it’s not powerful and feature rich. The basic layout of Zoho CRM is that you have leads that come in, those leads get converted to potentials when they’re qualified, and those potentials get converted to customers. Once they’re a customer, you can have a company account for the company and contacts listed for each account. The account/contacts relationship is great for existing clients and contacts.

Easy Lead Management for Business

If that sounds a little complicated for you, let’s step back. The main value added piece in Zoho CRM for your business is the lead management. You get a lead in and you manage tasks, notes, and contact information for that lead. If you do nothing else, this will greatly enhance your lead and sales process.

My favorite part about Zoho CRM is the automation. We have created a custom component that will allow any leads or forms on your website to automatically add the lead into Zoho. You will still receive an email from the contact form but all you have to do is login to Zoho to manage that lead, add notes, and create tasks for follow-up. It’s easy and it’s all centralized. Just think about the following:

• You don’t have to keep all of your lead emails in your inbox
• You can get rid of the sticky notes and pages detailing lead notes
• You can access your lead information from any computer
• You can assign leads to other salespeople
• You will have a centralized location to keep your contact data

Pretty compelling reasons to try it out. It’s free for up to 3 users and only $12/user after that! Very reasonable.

Jared Pomranky

Related posts:

1. Zoho CRM Quick Start Guide

We’re happy to announce that one of our clients, Display Group (a Detroit Corporate and Special Events Rental Company), has become a Google Favorite Place! What does this mean? It means that they are part of less than 1% of businesses in the U.S. to receive this distinction. That’s out of over 28,000,000 businesses! Businesses were selected for the popularity of their listing including how many times someone clicked on the listing and searched for it. You can view Display Group’s Google Places listing and view the Google Favorite Places FAQ.

While we would love to take all of the credit for Display Group’s success on Google Places, we have to admit that their great products and service to clients is the main reason they are a favorite place. We just helped people find them.

If you’re not on Google Places yet or you want to get more leads from it, read Google Places and Local Search Traffic.

Jared

Related posts:

1. Best Posts for Small Businesses
2. Get More Traffic From Local Search Results

Wikepedia defines SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as:

The process of improving ranking in search engine results

That’s a pretty simple definition but it’s very accurate. What I’m sure you’re asking, however, is what is that process? What’s involved with SEO? How do you SEO a website? The following is a quick dive into SEO and how it relates to your small business. There are essentially 3 categories to Search Engine Optimizing a website. We like to define those as Keyword Research, Web Site Optimization, and Link Building.

Keyword Research

This is the first part to optimizing your website, which most companies overlook. Research needs to be completed to find out what keywords are relevant to your company, which keywords have the highest search values, and what niche keywords with low competition and good search volume can be found. Researching keywords is done with various tools including Google AdWords keyword research tool. This tool in addition to others can be used to compile all of your keywords. There is then the arduous task of reviewing all keywords, finding related keywords, and deciding on the final keywords to focus on.

Web Site Optimization

Once you have your keywords, you can start to optimize your website. There are many aspects to optimizing your website and while not one activity will by itself significantly increase your rankings, the combination of all activities can create a dramatic effect. One thing to remember with optimization is that too much of a good thing can be bad. If you partake in “keyword stuffing” or putting as many keywords as you can into title tags, keywords, content, and everywhere else, Google and other search engines will know about it. Below is a sample of SEO activities:

Title Tag and Description Tags

The title displays at the top of your browser window but is also displayed on search engine results along with the description tag. This helps with optimization and click through rates on search engine results.

Heading Tags

These are the headings of your content and labeling them with the correct tags are critical in telling search engines the main subject of the content

Content Optimization

Adding keywords to your content (in reasonable amounts) can help increase your rankings

Search Engine Sitemap and Robots.txt

Search engine only files that tell them where to find your content and pages.

Internal Links

Proper internal ranking with proper anchor text can significantly increase the ranking of secondary pages

Optimized Navigation

Like internal links, this can significantly increase your ranking of secondary pages

URL Design

Adding keywords in the URL of your pages like naming a page /seo-services/ instead of page4.html will help make it relevant

Link Building

Once your site is optimized, it’s time to tell Google how popular it is. We do this through building “backlinks” to your site. Backlinks are links from other sites to your site and the more good links you have, the higher you will rank. We take care to create the best links back to your site. There are various ways to create backlinks like blog commenting, soliciting relevant websites, and web 2.0 links.

I would also add in that you need to be able to measure your results. Check out my post talking about Google Analytics & Webmaster Tools to see how you can do that.

View our Detroit SEO Services

Related posts:

1. Detroit Business SEO
2. Why You Need Google Analytics & Webmaster Tools
3. How to Effectively Use LinkedIn for Business

It’s finally time for your business to seriously consider Google Apps Premier Edition. For those of you that haven’t researched it, Google Apps is a low-cost, reliable, and secure messaging and collaboration solution. The main feature is the Google Apps mail that utilizes the Gmail interface and seamlessly integrates with Outlook and all mobile devices. Benefits of using Google Apps for your small business are:

• Lower your cost of ownership with messaging solutions. Google Apps is only $50/year per user. Forget about needing an IT guy to consistently manage your servers.
• Retain emails easier with 25GB of email storage per user
• Reliable access with Google’s reliable 99.9% up-time SLA
• Share information easier with their document solutions instead of emailing back and forth
• Feel safer as your email is hosted on Google’s reliable and redundant data centers
• Access your email anywhere with Gmail’s award winning interface, integration with any email program, and access with mobile devices.

The biggest reason I hear of people staying with Microsoft Exchange as an email host is that it integrates your calendar and contacts and makes these easy to share with others. Add to that the ability to administer users and most people don’t want to switch. Google Apps integrates email, calendar, and contacts and gives you the ability to share those with anyone in your company. You can also delegate users and administer all aspects of access and sharing for your employees.

My favorite parts of Google Apps for Small Businesses are:

• Gmail interface for email makes it easy to search and manage email as a primary email program or a secondary online interface to a primary email program like Microsoft Outlook.
• Contacts that synch with everything online and mobile devices
• A fully featured calendar that flat out beats Outlook’s online calendar and provides all of the functionality of the desktop calendar.
• Ability to open up and share any type of document such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, etc.
• A great new product, Google Drawings, that replaces desktop solutions like Viseo
• Constant innovation in products with a focus on reliability and the user experience

All in all Google Apps in an excellent solution for your small business. I have implemented it at different companies that swear by it now. Just recently Net Profit Marketing became a reseller of Google Apps Premier edition as well so we can migrate your company to Google Apps and support you after the move.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Jared Pomranky

Related posts:

1. Google Apps Migration
2. Lead Management With Zoho CRM
]]> http://www.netprofitmarketing.com/small-business/why-you-need-google-apps-premier-edition/feed/ 0 http://www.netprofitmarketing.com/small-business/web-purpose-goals/ http://www.netprofitmarketing.com/small-business/web-purpose-goals/#comments Thu, 29 Apr 2010 20:15:56 +0000 Jared Pomranky http://www.netprofitmarketing.com/?p=361
• Best Posts for Small Businesses
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What is the purpose of your website? Really think about this. If you’re like a lot of small businesses, you haven’t really thought about it. You got a website because everyone said you needed a website but you’re not really sure what it does. Better yet, do your customers know what the purpose of your website is? If you’re answering “to provide them with information” or some other nebulous answer, read on.

I was having lunch with a business coach, Tip Quilter, yesterday and we were, among other things, talking about why people have a website. Tip said it best when he explained that everything in business and success comes down to the “what” and we started to relate it to websites. What is the goal of your website? What do you want visitors to your website to do? What should your website accomplish?

Website Goals

You need to have a goal for your website and give it purpose. If you’re website is simply out there to “provide information”, you have a large amount of lost opportunity. Examples of good goals for your website are:

• Get customers to purchase online products from our store
• Drive customers to our contact form to contact us for sales
• Get visitors to download our free report
• Get visitors to sign-up for our newsletter

Measurable Results

Do you notice that each one of those goals provides a measurable result? I can track how many people sign-up for my newsletter to get discounts on services by clicking on my subscribe page compared to the number of visitors. I can also track how many people contact us and how many online sales we get.

How Do I Accomplish my Website Goals?

• Create a clean, light-weight design that doesn’t overwhelm your visitors
• Have a Call to Action – If you’re not going to ask them to sign-up for your newsletter or buy a product, who will?
• Create a visual design that will draw a visitors eyes to what you want them to see
• Design an easy navigation system focused on driving customers to the place you want them to go

Your website should be an extension of your business and should help accomplish the goals of your business. If your website is currently not doing that, you need to invest in a redesign and new online strategy.

Jared Pomranky

Related posts:

1. Best Posts for Small Businesses
]]> http://www.netprofitmarketing.com/small-business/web-purpose-goals/feed/ 0 http://www.netprofitmarketing.com/web-content/easy-effective-content-creation/ http://www.netprofitmarketing.com/web-content/easy-effective-content-creation/#comments Wed, 14 Apr 2010 16:31:50 +0000 Jared Pomranky http://www.netprofitmarketing.com/?p=187
• Content Creation
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I work with many small business owners and the one common thread from business to business is that they are busy! You focus on your core business, delegate what you can but there still ends up being tasks that you just can’t seem to have someone else do for you. One of these tasks is content creation. Content creation? Yes, I’m talking about blog posts, website content, reports, articles, marketing material. Anything where you have to come up with copy for any medium.

If you’re like most business owners you carve out a little time, create a brain dump on paper, review it a little bit, then call it good and get it published. I know for my own content creation once I’m done with a blog post or article, I don’t really like going back to the beginning to review, rewrite, and create multiple drafts to get to a concise final draft. In this way content suffers because for all intents and purposes, it’s not professionally written.

You have a better option! We have professional writers that work with our company for any copy you might need. We specialize in blog posts, articles, and website content creation or rewriting but we have writers with experience doing most anything. The advantages are that you get professionally written content that not only is an easy read but it’s captivating and focused. How does the writer know what to write about? Read on…

You provide the writer with topics, the medium (i.e. website, article, blog), provide them with 5 bullet points on each topic, provide any other references you think might help out, and the writer goes to work! Not only do they create the 100% original content but they do the research. They take your bullet points and ideas, fill the subjects in with additional research, then create your content. You then get to review the content, provide feedback, and receive the final drafts.

There is a better way to create content that doesn’t need to take all of your time. Professional content not only keeps your visitors and clients reading but it will lead to more sales. I’m always amazed at the content that the professional writers and ghost writers created. This is another part of your business that you can delegate so you can continue working ON your business instead of working IN it.

Jared Pomranky

Related posts:

1. Content Creation
]]> http://www.netprofitmarketing.com/web-content/easy-effective-content-creation/feed/ 1 http://www.netprofitmarketing.com/seo/traffic-local-search-results/ http://www.netprofitmarketing.com/seo/traffic-local-search-results/#comments Tue, 30 Mar 2010 19:16:37 +0000 Jared Pomranky http://www.netprofitmarketing.com/?p=206
• Best Posts for Small Businesses
• SEO Client Becomes a Google Favorite Place!
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Note: Google Local Business Center is now called Google Places

I’m going to get you on the first page of Google and I’m not going to charge your for it. No, this isn’t some scam, it’s in use every day in every city around the world. Check out this screen shot of a search completed in Detroit Michigan for “Detroit bar”. Notice the part I highlighted in green? This is Google local search results.



For most small businesses getting more local search results will make a huge impact. How then, with millions of websites and people searching from all over the globe, do you stand out in your city or metro region? Google makes it easy with Google Local Business Center.



More people search locally on Google than anywhere else. Show them coupons, add videos and photos, and even post real-time updates.

That sounds great to me but how do you get everything setup and how do you optimize it for the best search results? Keep reading…

Sign-up

Sign-up is pretty easy. You just need a Google account (free to sign-up) and visit Google Local Business Center to click on the Sign-up button. Fill out your contact information keeping in mind the following tips (note: some of the items below will be added:

Business Name

Your business name is an important part of getting people to click on your listing and also getting ranked for certain keywords. You don’t want to stuff your name full of keywords but giving a secondary title to your company can help. An example from the search above is to take “The Town Pump Tavern”. Instead of their current name, they could modify it to get better results by using “Town Pump Tavern – Detroit Bar”. Not only does this help with keywords but it also helps searchers to quickly identify it as a Detroit bar.

Note: For your business name, you may see negative effects of adding in a geographic location if you’re not in that geographic location. If I try adding in “Detroit” to a company when I live in New York, I probably won’t be listed in the Detroit search results.

Address-City-State

You must enter your physical address. The address is important in letting Google know where to serve your company information up on local search results.

Email address

Use a general email address that can be listed publicly. Don’t use a personal email address.

Website

Use your main website that you want customers going to.

Description

This is where you sell your company and is a good place to put keywords. Your goal here is not to create a list of keywords. You need to create a captivating sales text that will make people want to visit your establishment while adding in keywords. You only have 200 characters so give it some impact with the main points you want visitors to get. Take the fluff out and get to the point.

Categories

These are the most important part of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your Local Business Directory listing. You must select at least one Google suggested category then you can enter in up to 4 more by taking one of the suggestions or adding in a custom category. I suggest trying to find a suggested category but not accepting something that just doesn’t quite fit. Make sure you maximize the categories by adding all five.

This is where you want your main keywords that will drive traffic to your listing. “Bar & Grill” was selected for a category for the Town Pump Tavern, which is an excellent category. Google showed a search volume of 33,000 for February 2010 on “Detroit Bar”, which far outweighs all of the other bar related search terms in Detroit. Having “Bar & Grill” as one of the categories and being located in Detroit gets this bar shown in local listings for the search term “Detroit bar”.

Note: Do not add geographic terms like “Detroit” into your categories. Google has caught onto this trick and won’t list your listing as high as it would be without the geographic term.

After you have added these you can click on next (view the completed Town Pump Tavern listing I’m using as an example below)



Make sure you fill out everything in the listing as Google will mark it 100% and give preferential listing to companies that have complete listings. Part of that is adding photos.

Photos

Add photos that sell your establishment. Google is picky on the dimensions so if you upload a photo and you don’t automatically see the preview, it’s because it’s not the correct dimension. The thumbnails are listed at 60px tall by 90px wide (think HD) so you can upload anything that adheres to those dimensions. Most of my pictures ended up being 300px tall by 450px wide. Also, although it’s a pain, Google doesn’t allow you to reorder your images. To reorder your images you need to delete them all and re-upload them.

Details

Details provide extra information to your customers like “Parking: Available” or Payment Accepted. Payments are selected by checking what you accept. Other details are added with free-form text. Also, if you notice the green text in the Town Pump Tavern listing at the bottom of the details section, Google Local Business Center also pull in information from other sites or trusted information sites for your details section. In this example, information was pulled in from 10best.com, metromix.com, and added by the business owner.

Reviews

Visitors to your listing are able to leave a review for you much like any review service. Additionally reviews from other sites and blogs that mention your business are pulled in and listed by Google. While you can’t moderate comments, you can mitigate your risk from bad comments by first of all having a good business but second by going to the review section. In the review section any user can click thumbs up or thumbs down for any review on whether it’s helpful. Also for truly belligerent reviews, they can be flagged. Good reviews and excited customers will always over power a couple of bad reviews.

Confirming Your Listing

Before your listing goes live Google needs to verify it. They do this one of two ways. By calling the phone number you provided and giving you a PIN number (instantaneous) or by sending you a postcard with the PIN to the listed address which takes a couple of weeks. You then enter the PIN in for confirmation and Google gets you up and running in search results within 30 days, although I’ve found it to be a couple of weeks.

Summary

Well, that’s it. I’ve shown you how to get on the first page of Google for free using Google Local Business Center. Besides a little time spent on creating your listing and a little keyword research, there’s no investment on your side. When creating your listing, think about it from your customers perspective of what they would be searching for and what they would want to see. Don’t fall into the trap of just trying to optimize your listing for keywords by stuffing them everywhere. Google and your customers will see through it.

Let me know if I can help you with anything.

Jared Pomranky

Related posts:

1. Best Posts for Small Businesses
2. SEO Client Becomes a Google Favorite Place!
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