Which is a comment I have learned to be absolutely true.

As I see it now, Twitter is a social media platform that provides opportunity for real business growth, understanding, learning, and networking. In social media realm Twitter is like the infamous lunch date tactic all we young executive types use(d) when we were expanding our careers, working 80 hours a week, but still wanted to meet someone worthwhile, without blowing a whole evening and serious $$ on someone who was not quite right. Twitter gives everyone the opportunity to sample ideas, musings and knowledge of others, not only in your same area of expertise, but in areas of expertise where you have great interest, but lack knowledge.

There are some great Twitter help aides out there, that assist in getting the most out of Twitter data. Some of the Twitter tools I am now using include: TweetBeep, created by my biz partner Michael Jensen. TweetBeep allows you to save keywords and keyword phrases, then the TweetBeep service will email you tweets containing your keywords at predetermined times. Imagine putting in some important keywords for your business and receiving the resulting tweets with those keywords every morning. You can easily see emerging trends, and pick up other related keywords that should probably be considered in your SEO keyword strategies. It is a marvelous SEO tool.

I have also been using TweetGrid. This is a web based tool/system, which allows the selection of 6 topic keywords, and then streams all tweets containing these keywords. If you want to learn about a topic quickly, pick a keyword you are interested in and watch the data fly by. This is also a great way to find and engage Twitter users directly who have similar interests, and perhaps strike up a relationship for future work together, or at least someone we can bounce ideas off. It is an excellent tool to leverage Twitter.

For folks on the go, there are many amazing Twitter tools that provide the benefits of Twitter on the road. I personally use Tweetie on my iPhone to tweet, but there are many others, including: Twittelator, Twitterrific which offers all of Twitter’s functionality and TwitterFon, which is a free, but very basic iPhone Twitter client.

Some other cool Twitter tools for the iPhone include Fastweet, which allows for quick reading of many tweets. GeoTweeter which adds GPS coordinates to your tweets, GPSed, lets you share maps of your travels to Twitter and Twitter Trend which gives you a snapshot of what topics are really hot on twitter for the last 24 hours. Very cool.

I know many of those that use SoloSEO are small business owners, and are working diligently to get their online business screaming. We can see how much work is being done through the use of the SoloSEO SEO tools. Please also consider using Twitter to bolster your online exposure, and knowledge about your online market, it will make a difference.

Just a quick note on some Twitter rules of engagement (suggestions really). When someone “follows” you on Twitter, it is a good idea to follow them back. How many followers you have is a big deal to many. It doesn’t indicate exactly if you are a good Tweeple, but does show how popular you are on Twitter. Following people who show interest in you makes good sense, as many will have something in them you will be interested in. I have learned this tidbit over time, and am now in the process of ditching those I follow that don’t follow me, and following my followers. Its just good Karma. Also, on Fridays there is a custom of recommending good Twitter users others should follow. You simply list the user’s usernames with a hashtag (def. a keyword with # at the beginning of the word, which allows organization a group of tweets) of #FollowFriday somewhere in your tweet. For example, I tweeting earlier today the following:

#followfriday @brucecarlson @tamar @mattlaclear @chrisbennett @mdjensen @wisekaren @LoriLeavitEvans. Great folks, great follows.

Which essentially tells those that read my tweet that I recommending these 7 users as worthy to follow.

Those are just a few things on Twitter. The best way to learn and love Twitter is to just jump in and get going. Sign up for Twitter here. At anytime, if you have a questions about how to use Twitter, just tweet about it, and you will find just how helpful and responsive the Twitter Nation can be. Hope to see (follow) you soon.

Finally, we would sure appreciate a follow once you get up and running. @mdjensen & @aaronstewart

Twitter graphic above provided by AddDesign

However, in my experience in working with large clients, I have learned much about them. When I was younger, I used to get quite frustrated with the sometimes arduous process to get anything approved, or to get policies changed, in order to make it possible for clients to use our services and technologies. But over the years I have learned to be patient, as we have seen that once the required changes have been made, and the contracts signed, there is nothing more satisfying than the stability a large client can provide to small business cash flows, and A/R collections. We currently spend more way more energy running around attempting to collect from small clients, than we ever had to spend waiting for a large client to put everything in place for us. So to all small businesses out there thinking about servicing large clients, go for it. It may take years to get a contract in place, but once it is there, it is a very comfortable place to be. In one example, one of our current Fortune 500 clients took almost 5 years of discussions before we actually got the business, but we have now been working with them for over 3 years, and just renewed our contract for 3 more. It is very, very nice in these economic times to have a contract in place with a sound, stable client.

So how do you land these large clients? Is it an art? Are there any tricks? I have thought about these questions quite a bit over the years. There are no tricks per se, but here are some steps we have found to be very helpful.

1. Before approaching a client, learn everything you can about the company, their history, the current management team, read all the latest news articles. I love to look over their stock price, and history. Many working within the company will watch the stock closely, as it has much to do with how their salaries, bonuses, 401K and retirement will be calculated. Whatever you can do to increase your knowledge about them, and what they do and are about, the better off you are going to be once the discussions begin. With every phone call, I have found the opportunity to ask them about some aspect of their company, or mentioned something I have learned, or I congratulate or commiserate with them on their stock price. Once they know you really know about their company, you have made an impression that is invaluable.

2. Don’t be afraid to follow up. There are many demands on employees at large firms, they are required to attend all kinds of meetings, produce reports, and they do not have as much control over their time as small business folks do. The polite, squeaky wheel does eventually get the grease in this case. We try to follow up at least once a week during the courting period. That is a lot of contact when it takes years to finally get in place, but again, think of the long-term prize, and keep your expectations realistic on the amount of time required to get the deal done.

3. Make sure your product is not only great, but it is a near perfect fit with what they are doing. Do not call and fish to see if they just may possibly have needs for some form of what you could possibly do for them if they had time to listen and share what their needs are… (annoying run on sentence used purposefully) There have been many times we have pitched our product or service, which fit well with what the potential client was doing, but while talking to them we realized we could offer other products and services that might be even better based on their immediate needs. We would then approach them later with a new proposal that is not only more comprehensive, but excites them more because of their current needs. This is a great way to get the ball rolling more quickly.

4. Don’t be afraid to ask for referrals, even during the negotiating process. One of our current largest clients was actually a referral from a client we were in negotiations with. Those you are speaking with know others in other companies in their line of work. They went to school together, attend conferences together, might be in local organizations together, and they will know if your services might prove helpful at another firm. A referral from a person of stature in a large company, to their counterpart in another firm is golden. We literally started working with the referral company the same week the referral was made. It was a fabulous surprise.

5. Take the time to travel and see those you are talking to. As small business folks, we don’t always have the working capital to fly all over the world on a whim, but maybe consider taking a family trip to a city where you have a potential client. Michael and I were in a city for SoloSEO business, and since we were going to be in the area anyway, we just called up a potential client we had been working with in another opportunity and said “hey we are going to be in the area, and were wondering if we could come by and meet with you?” They were very accommodating, and we actually got to meet with entire executive group. We had a great discussion, demoed some stuff, and moved the discussion along more in a hour, than we had been able to do over the previous 12 months.

6. When all else fails, invite them to golf. Oh laugh if you must (and my wife will ), but there has been many times when I have tried and tried unsuccessfully to get someone on the phone or to answer an email. But eventually I will call, when someone tries to give me the brush off, or if I have to leave a VM, I will say “well, I have a tee-time today at 2:00, and have had an opening, just wanted to see if _______ wanted to join us.” I am either put on hold and put through, or I get a call back in less than 5 minutes. Great thing about golf, I then have 4+ hours with the person I needed to talk with. And, never, never, never allow them win, that’s terrible. If they beat you straight up, fine, but if you can take it to them, then you will earn their respect. Once you trounce a CEO, President, VP or anyone else on the golf course, you have their attention, respect, and they will take your calls from then on, guaranteed.

7. Probably the most important, just be yourself. You are good enough, just as you, to hang with anyone, no matter how big the company is in your sights. Your products and services are (hopefully) excellent, and you will do a good job for them, and make their company more competitive or efficient. As long as you can focus on this, the whole process is easier to exist through. I have no doubt that what we have to offer the companies we approach can help them be better at what they do. If they choose to use us, they will see amazing results, and they will be grateful they decided to work with us. If they choose not to go with us, it is their choice and their loss. Chances are we will work a deal with their competitor, and the original company will eventually learn how good things could have been.

8. Once you have landed the big client, keep them by providing customer service they have never experienced in-house. We try to respond to any request or comment from our Fortune 500 clients as soon as they come in. We will tell them instantly what we are doing to address the concern, and how long it will take to get it done. When someone works in a large company they are used to their request taking days, and sometimes weeks to be addressed. So they are happy when things are dealt with more quickly, but we don’t allow ourselves to become complacent because their expectations are way low. We respond as quickly as we possibly can, even though we don’t really have to in order to keep them happy.

9. When contracts eventually come due, and it is time to negotiate, realize these companies are going to do all they can to keep the price as low as possible, or to lower the price. They have budgets, supervisors, and stocks holders they have to be concerned with. We like to have at least three possible pricing options for them, with varying levels of products and service we can offer at these varying price points. The client can then choose what is best for their needs. In all the packages we can be profitable, and we have addressed the concerns our clients have. If we are doing our jobs right, we usually know what these concerns will be, by listening during time we spend working with them.

Working with large clients is challenging, it is demanding, but it is incredibly interesting, and most of all it is very enjoyable. I consider the people I work with at these firms to be great friends, I enjoy their phone calls, visits, and solving their challenges for them. We have gained quite a bit of business by current clients just asking if there is anything we could do to help them solve a new problem. In many cases we have, and it has developed into a new product or service we can then offer in the marketplace.

So get out there and land a big client(s), it can be done, and when it is done, it will be well worth all the effort.

As far as my initial reaction to Twitter, at first I fought it, and it has taken me quite a bit of time to warm up to the idea. I am still a newbie, with only 49 followers and 205 updates, but I have been following people for just over 8 months, so I do know some stuff. My initial reaction… It is a part of social media that doesn’t take up that much time, and there is just enough interaction to make it interesting, without being annoying. Best of all, you can just say on the sidelines and watch the whole thing if you want. I like the idea of requiring users to say something relevant in only 140 characters. One thing I have found to be most interesting is I tend to read items those I follow read and recommend. About 2 years a go I got into reading blogs everyday. I would set aside an hour a day to just read blogs. Business, SEO, technology and health blogs were my favorites. As updates would occur to these blogs throughout the day, I would click over and get caught up. But as many of us know, the information distributed through blogs these days just keeps coming, and there are more and more really good blogs out there all the time. Eventually it got to a point where I couldn’t keep up, and now I will maybe get to read the blogs once or twice a week now, and usually I just skim and look for a headline that catches my attention. My RSS feed is quite a lonely fella these days, and is basically ignored.

However, with Twitter, when someone I respect and follow recommends something to read, I will take the time to read it. It they give me a couple of bad articles in a row, I just quit following them, and the bad recommendations go away too. It has made choosing where I spend my time reading much more effective and beneficial then going out and just searching the various blog sites on my own.

Twitter in business has proven to be very successful, with many good case studies. Comcast and Zappos both use Twitter to interact with clients, address complaints or comments broadcasted over the Twitter network. With Twitter the public can actually see the interaction taking place, which I think bolsters both sides. Because it is a public setting, customers complaints and comments carry more weight, and companies have more incentive to take notice of these individuals. Additionally, much goodwill can be earned when companies publicly address these concerns, and solve the issues within the public forum. It is potentially a great result for both parties. Additionally, Twitter has been used to increase sales. Dell Outlet has used Twitter to broadcast sales items and great deals on their products at their online store. Dell recently published a tweet which stated they had been able to sell $1 million worth of products using Twitter.

So how can we approach Twitter as small business owners, and brand builders. One thing which if common in any media, we must remember we are our brand in many ways. We need to show our personalities and just let it go. I enjoy following those on Twitter who are fun, who share insights to not only their business, but also into themselves a little bit. I like reading how others struggle with the everyday life items, it makes them human, and frankly more likable. So I would suggest discussing business and your work goals, but also let them see who you are, you may not know it, but others will find that kind of honesty and willingness to share very I don’t like doing it, I am sure many of you won’t. There is just something that feels fundamentally wrong about throwing myself out into cyberspace, and not being totally sure where it will land, or who will read it. I had to deal with the same feelings when we started this blog a while back. Just as a final note. For those on Twitter currently, who are attempting to create or build your personal or business brand. I would suggest leaving the F-bombs and foul language out of your tweets. I know there is Freedom of Speech in this country, and I know everyone is free to spread whatever they want, but we as potential clients are also free to choose where we buy, and what we read, and I for one am not going to read or buy from a person who can’t spend the brain power to come up with a few better words than the sludge some sling up there in the tweets. Here is a link to an online Thesaurus, please take a minute to come up with a few less offensive words before your next foray.

So far Twitter has been an interesting experiment. Twitter is far less annoying than Facebook, and has proven to have some benefits I did not expect. It doesn’t take much time, and finding and following good people on Twitter can actually be quite beneficial. Throw in the opportunity to interact with clients, and perhaps increase sales, and I would say Twitter and small business can be good partners for a long time to come.

Sign up today at Twitter’s Sign Up page, and give it a try. You can follow my musings (tweets) at www.twitter.com/aaronstewart.

So now that the big 3 are all going to “honor” this new tag, how do we implement the “Canonical Tag”?

Step 1: Identify what the permalink URL is for the page. You need to figure out the one URL that you want used when search engines (and people too) look for and list that page.

Step 2: Now you need to figure out how you are going to dynamically call that URL from each page including when the page is pulled up from different search parameters or what not.

Step 3: Once you know how to get the URL, place the following tag inside the <HEAD> tag with the canonical URL:

<link rel="canonical"
href="http://www.mysite.com/mydir/mypage.html">

If you have any questions about this, please leave a comment!

With more than 29 reports available, as well as unlimited custom reports, all your analytics data is just a button away. Change the date to see any date range, and there’s an easy Today report that any Analytics addict will love. Why Google doesn’t have a button for that is beyond me…

You can download Analytics App for $5.99 from the iTunes AppStore.

For any subscribers to the SoloSEO.com tools with an iPhone or iPod Touch, email us with your username (info at soloseo dot com) and we’ll give you a free promo code for Analytics App!

Attending an SEO conference is a great way to get a jumpstart on learning SEO because you force yourself to learn because you made the effort (and spent the money) to attend. It’s not too late to register for SMX West (aff) and catch a last minute flight.

SMX West is not only great for beginners too, they have a lot of intermediate and even advanced sessions, I always learn something new every time I go.

Unfortunately Aaron and I are going to be missing SMX West this time, but maybe you can go and take some notes for us? Actually that’s another cool thing, if you don’t mind reading a bunch, is all the livebloggers that cover these conferences give you free access to the content of the sessions. You’re better off attending if you really want to get the full picture and absorb it all, but its an alternative if you can’t make the trip out there.

If you can’t make it to SMX West, I’d recommend PubCon Las Vegas in the late Fall, it is the first SEO conference I went to and I’ve enjoyed every conference since.

I’ll be speaking at SMX Analytics on March 31-April 1 in Toronto (yep, Canada), so if you’re headed that way we’d love to meet you!

For any company seriously deciding to leverage employees or a 3rd party vendor to write fake customer reviews (hi Belkin), I would rethink your decision. There’s really no substitute for real, authentic customer reviews.

Even the SoloSEO blog had some nominations, four in fact! Here are the four that were nominated:

SEO Category:

Learn SEO Basics: Long Tail Keywords

7 Steps to Get Your New Site Indexed in 24 hours

LOL Funny Category:

LinkedIn Wants Me to Accept or Deny Jesus?

What the Customer Actually Wanted

Even though we didn’t make it as finalists, we’re glad to be recognized as providing a source of great SEO material, and some laughs as well!

Now that the SEMMYS nominations have been reduced to 3-6 per category by a set of judges, it’s a great time to absorb that material and maybe find some new blogs to start reading as well.

Anyway, so Facebook became a major distraction, a major pain, and basically sucked. Every Facebook email that came in, all the requests, it was a joke, so I shut it down. I have been very happy about it since. I now listen to others talk about their Facebook page, and what’s going on there, and I say to myself “losers.” (My wife and her sisters aren’t going to be happy about that comment, but it had to be said) Spending time on a personal Facebook profile, is just flushing good time down the crapper. I don’t want to be that personal online with many people, if anybody. I don’t have time for it, and it does me more harm than good.

All that being said, I think using Facebook to set up a business profile is a pretty great way to go. While I don’t like talking about myself personally online, talking about our business, our products, our services, and providing another opportunity for potential clients to find us makes perfect sense. Facebook gives companies another opportunity to get their brand out there, to interact with current and potential clients. Companies facing online reputation management challenges can use Facebook to potentially take one of the spots on the SERPS, because Facebook pages and profiles are now indexed. Anytime you can take a spot on the first page of the SERPS with any keywords about your business, it is worth the effort and leaves one less place where a naysayer can take a negative shot at your firm.

I would suggest keeping the business Facebook page very clean, stay away from joining all those ridiculous groups, don’t align your company with anything controversial, or questionable, don’t even join The Office group. We actually have a client that hates the show, so you never know. I would not add flair or any of that other clutter, just keep it simple and professional as possible. Too much noise, which is frequent on Facebook pages, can distract from the true purpose of conveying the company vision and message. Also, there are many Facebook addicts that will love the fact they can find you where they spend much of their time, and if they are impressed with what they see, this will drive new traffic to your actual site.

So in short, Facebook for personal use is a colossal waste of time in my personal, yet humble opinion. Facebook for business, an excellent way to go, if it is done professionally and the focus of the profile remains squarely on your business.

As an example, the good folks who provide our bandwidth have lost quite a bit of money lately. It is mostly due to some Internet based companies going under. Many of these site owners were provided Internet bandwidth at almost no cost for the first few years, because they couldn’t afford the monthly fees normally charged up front. However, there was an agreement in place to raise the monthly fees over time, when hopefully the site owners could afford it. Unfortunately it didn’t really work out, and many, if not most of these clients never could pay the rising fees, and they just abandoned their sites and moved on. These site owners are now pretty upset at our vendors, and feel like they got tricked into having a site in the first place. Now I ask, how could our vendor know these individuals, who couldn’t afford to pay to start, would not be able to pay later? It is impossible to predict, and it would have been unfair if these economically challenged citizens didn’t have the same opportunities others who could afford the services were enjoying. Just as a note, I must say I love this vendor’s facilities, they are simply gorgeous. All decked out with the finest leather and fixtures. It is really an amazing place. You should see the entrance, breathtaking. And wow, they take care of their management team, every one of them has a BMW leased for them by the company. What a great idea. It would be a pretty sweet life to work there. All that being said, SoloSEO doesn’t want them to fail. Too many other companies might have to find services elsewhere, and that would be a bit difficult. Or worse yet, what if some other competitor heard of our vendor’s financial troubles, and just came along and offered to buy this vendor’s assets and accounts for pennies on the dollar? That would be a shame. Anyway, we must not let this happen.

Another one of our struggling vendors provides our servers for us, and they build them right here in the good USA. Now while the quality of their servers isn’t the best, and their features are a little behind the times, and their servers are a little more expensive than ones made by foreign owned firms, it really isn’t their fault they are bankrupt. We have learned that the contract our vendor has in place with the union factory workers is almost 100% higher than the agreements the same unions have with foreign owned, US-based server manufactures. How can we expect our vendor to compete fairly in such a hostile marketplace? It isn’t fair, they need more money to make another go of it, and be hopefully be profitable this time. Now we aren’t dumb, we are requiring this company come up with a plan to repay us. We hope it works, and we hope we will get your money back eventually. One the other hand, the bandwidth guys are free to use the money for us anyway they want, they just need to promise they will pay us back eventually. They were essentially forced to give away bandwidth to these failed clients in the first place by some of our managers, so we have to cut them some slack. And, just so our vendors know, if more funding is needed in the future, we will be able to take our more loans our people’s names, and also the rest of their retirement funds to help you, we are sure they will understand.

Now, unfortunately our employees have no choice as to how much or when we take their cash, and it doesn’t matter if they disagree with us, we are a team. And as a team of managers, we have decided we are going to do this, and believe us, it is in all your best interest in the long term.

Oh, oh, oh, I almost forgot… Some great news, we did work something pretty cool out with our failing, borrowing vendors. If any of our employees need a little financial help from time to time, they will be able to borrow some money from our vendors!!! For this service, they will need to pay some interest on the money they borrow to the vendor. Then the vendor will have more revenue to help them pay us off. Don’t worry about it. Just think of it this way, the loans we are taking out in your names to fund all this, you won’t even have to pay all the way off. No these loans are so large, that they will need to be passed on from generation to generation. So your kids and grandkids will be paying the bulk of all this money, not you!! Brilliant huh?

Now I know there will be some of our smarter people who will think this is a terrible plan. They will ask why they should be forced to pay for another firm’s mistakes. Then they will be angered when they figure out they are now going to pay interest on money forcibly taken from them and given to the vendor in the first place. But come on, can’t everyone in the room see the wisdom in the plan?

I hope anyone reading this knows that is a moronic plan, and this is essentially going on right now to all of us, just substitute Congress for SoloSEO management, Citigroup and AIG for the bandwidth suppliers, GMC, Ford and Chrysler for the server manufacturer, and all of the American tax payers as SoloSEO people. We are getting screwed.

I love this country, I just hope the guys in Washington (especially the new guys coming up) start thinking their decisions all the way through. I am terrified for small businesses in this country right now, and I hope the future proves to be brighter than it is today. I hope we all face this financial storm and pass through safely to the other side, but forgive me if I don’t give Washington any credit for any sort of turn around, they will have had nothing to do with it, it will be hard working, inspired small business owners who make it happen.

I guess that is why it doesn’t say “In Government We Trust” on our currency, because the governments create the problems, and someone else has to clean them up.