Do you know what helps you to keep going and to remain convinced that you will win in the end?  You need examples of other people doing it.  That is a big shot in the arm.  The story that Tiger Woods has won his 1st tournament in 2 years is the epitome of someone coming through it all to get back into winning ways. He had enough money never to need to work again but he had a massive weight driving down on him, one that must have told him again and again that it may all be over.  He didn't listen. 

You just need to keep on keeping on.  Find your passion in life and do it to the max and don't listen to anyone that may deny you your success especially the worst opponent of all.  Your own inner opponent, that nagging voice from inside you that fires those arrows of doubt at you all day.  Tiger had them and ignored them so you must to.

A cliche maybe but all the best cliches continue to be used because they can tell things the way they are.  For the small business owner that knows this cartoon no doubt there will be a rolling of eyes and the exasperated under the breath comment – "what do I have to buy now to modernise my business ?".  Well let me say this, if you are expecting to find that you need to buy something to play catch up with the way things are going in the business marketing world then you are wide of the mark.  Buying new shiney objects is not the answer. In fact buying probably the biggest shiney object of them all – a website – is in many ways the single most dangerous distraction of all. Hands up those business owners that believed that getting a website was the machine gun you needed to kill off your competition.

You see today's equivalent of the medieval machine gun is not really a thing.  It is a mind-set and that mind-set allows you to define a winning strategy.  Only when your mind set is in place and you have the strategy defined do you need to think about the tools necessary to do the job – website included.

So what is this mind-set you need to develop?  You need to strive to build relationships with your prospects, not sell to them and become the main authority figure in your market. By becoming the authority in your niche you will be the obvious choice for new and future sales. I want to back this up with a huge observation on the way technology is changing the way marketing has to work. Mobile devices like smart phones are in the process of changing the way we all go about our lives and the intimate relationship that people have with these devices means that marketing now has to become 1 to 1.  To get that direct connection with people on their smart phones requires that you stand out from the crowd, that you have credentials that blow your competition out of the water, that you touch the person in a deeper way that allow you to become part of their personalised mobile world.  To get to that level of trust will also require that you gain the trust of that persons social network or at least stand up to scrutiny when that person looks for other networks that do know you. 

Do you not see that the old adage "build it and they will come" is totally dead.  Build a website and sit and wait is futile. Building a website and marketing it on Google is a common approach but even this tried and tested approach is becoming questionable as a longer term strategy.  Success online going forward will not be achieved by buying the next shiney object tactic it will require you to possibly reinvent your whole way you do business. 

Don't get me wrong about one thing though.  Small businesses online need to behave like big businesses in the sense that they market effectively, build efficient sales funnels online and ooze professionalism.  And the most important thing they need is strategy.  Whilst strategy is a favourite buzz word of the big software corporations like IBM and SAP and this word has sold countless billions of dollars of probably unnecessary software and products it is key to everything that all businesses owners much be about today. 

Mixing together strategic clarity with the minimal of software to implement it will put you in good stead.  Make sure your supplier understands how to work pragmatically with you and if the word strategy arises in the conversation – be wary that you are not getting lead down the path like that found on Cloudpanic.com.

Looking back at our statement above we are now interested in the "Get qualified traffic looking for what you are offering" bit and how that is done with Google.  Briefly Google works by you typing in a search phrase and it returning what it considers to be the most closely targeted sites for that phrase.  For your business you need to find out those keyword phrases that people are typing in when they want to purchase your product or service or whilst they are researching the topic prior to purchase.

Having spoken to many business owners about this subject the most common misconception is that they themselves already know what these keywords are.  Sure if you sell a specific product called "X" then it is likely that people will be searching for "X" online when they want to buy.  However if "X" is a type of hover lawn mower that works really well on wet grass then people may well be searching in that area rather than with the actual product keyword.  The moral of the search engine story is that the customer defines your market and what search terms are used and not the business owner.

To look at this point from a slightly different angle that is very important; people searching for lawn mowers that work with wet grass are in "research mode" so if you sell such a lawn mower you really need to make sure you are offering them suitable educational information at this point before you competitors so that you are in the customers mind when they finally look to buy.  If your website offers objective and helpful information on the subject you become the authority to the buyer so they will either jump to your sales page from there or when they type in more detailed information related to trying to find one to buy and they see your site they will already be pre-disposed to buy from you.

It must be understood that the keywords you are looking to unearth are those that convert into sales either directly or indirectly via your online sales process.  Ranking really well for keywords that generate lots of traffic but result in little or no sales is a pointless exercise.  The next time a business owner you speak to says they are #1 on google for a keyword ask them how much money that actually makes them.  They may be barking up the wrong tree.

So now that you understand the importance of identifying the right keywords how do you go about doing it.  Unfortunately there is no "push this button" answer to this however there is a process that you can follow that will lead you to the answer eventually.  For most businesses this process is something you really should consider outsourcing to a suitably qualified supplier however if you are starting off with zero or very small budget you can get there yourself but be prepared to spend quite a bit of time in a quite step learning curve.

The next post will show you the basic principles and tools you can use to progress getting your site ranking for the right keywords.

Being an employee on in my case at that time a freelance contractor may have few parallels with running your own business.  In fact the most common cause of failure of people starting out in business after being employees is down to the massive differences between the two and failing to adapt.  However being able to deliver on project commitments is fundamental to running your own business.  A very common observation with small business owners especially new ones that venture onto the internet trail is that their landscape is littered with half finished projects.  Half finished blogs lie dead, ignored by their intended audience.  e-books lie on your hard drive, purchased but unread.   The list goes on.

Do you know the secret to the success of most I.T. projects and hence a lot of small business start ups.  It is good project management and having that framework in place to ensure that you HAVE to deliver what you are supposed to deliver.  If you are struggling to start or finish important components in your business plan or are overwhelmed with the quantity of work necessary I strongly suggest you employ the services of an experienced mentor.  You will be amazed how powerful it is to have another person to help define and clarify what you are actually doing in your business.  If you agree to do a piece of work by a specific time and you are held accountable by someone else, you are much more likely to complete it and move your business on.

I run a one on one coaching membership site that can help you beat this big business killer.  Call me on the number on my blog for a free starter chat.

From a technical viewpoint it is not difficult to see how a website can integrate with a social site like Facebook.  The Facebook like button is becoming fairly ubiquitous on blogs and shop sites alike.  What puzzles owners and I’ll have to admit myself until recently as a so called expert is how actual conversations can occur between the two systems.  It is becoming increasingly obvious that Google is paying more attention to these conversations and is taking them as a degree of measurement of website relevance.  If people are talking about you and interacting with your site then you could see your site rise in the rankings because of it.

So what is a conversation?  To help explain this let me give you an example of a powerful conversation that will boost your business in a big way.  How this is implemented is a subject for another post.

1) You write a blog post or put up an article on your site.

2) The content includes an offer to get some really worthwhile report or maybe another video.

3) In order to get this item the visitor has to comment on that post or comment on facebook.

4) Once the blog comment is submitted the system picks up the comment and publishes it to the website which obviously boosts social activity on the site but also the system pushes the users information to your autoresponder list.

5) The visitor then double opts in to your autoresponder to get the information and is now on your list.

6) The visitor receives the information and is somehow inspired to pass the link to get it to others whom go through the same process.

What is the key result here?  People tend not to comment on your posts but if you incentivise them they will.  Therefore you social signal increases.  By intercepting this commenting function to get people onto your list you are also building up the biggest asset you business could have – targeted prospects.  If this could go viral then that is powerful.

I am looking at how this can be implemented

I read an interesting story today http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8390630/Thinktank-FTSE-100-have-predictably-failed-to-embrace-social-properly.html which for me makes two very key points.  Small business with the right online strategy using a combination of state of the art website and e-commerce technology with social media tools and tactics can begin to encroach on the big players.  This should give small business owners the confidence they need to push on and not sit on their hands.  But more importantly it raises the issue that must be addressed.  Social media is not just another way of pumping out your “buy this now” message.  Customers are now empowered to discuss your business and your products and whether to buy from you or not.  Unless you know how to get involved in this discussion yourself you will be left out in the cold and this can be a big problem as social media progresses.

Do not just put up a Facebook page without thinking about what your social engagement strategy will be.  How will  you take part in the “big conversation” and boost your customer’s confidence in you?  How will you nurture this good will and channel it to your product pages ? This is a new skill and you need to begin learning it now.  If you need to understand more about joined up marketing online in 2011 visit our corporate site >> social media marketing

But there is more danger ahead.

The internet is continuing to level the playing field so that David can take on Goliath with a chance of making headway.  Because of this at face value opportunity online looks more bountiful than ever.  Yes one can wake up one day nursing a hangover from that last night out with your work buddies with your P45 in your lager soaked wallet, and by the end of that day be in business with your own fledgling internet business.

Most employees and I used to be one so I’ve been there, are singularly unprepared for what awaits them in business.  Walking naked into a snow storm is certainly not recommend, but with a background in fulfilling someone Else’s business ambitions and with little or no education in running a business themselves, it is not surprising that frost bite and intensive care awaits most of us.

I use the term education with reservation.  Sure one needs to be educated in such things as getting traffic to a website or building a prospect funnel with an autoresponder but these are tactics.  When I first started out online I spent tons of money on courses and ebooks and coaching which gave me the illusion of progressing my business.  I even bought the same ebook twice because I’d forgotten I’d already bought it a few months earlier and never actually read it.  At that time I didn’t really know what my business was supposed to look like and I was making the fatal ex-employee mistake of going into learning mode.  The good thing about being an employee is that someone is paying you to learn, but when you are on your own nobody pays you for anything unless you sell something.

Did you realise that it is estimated that more than 90% of people online that start a business end up selling absolutely nothing.  That is a very scary statistic but I’m afraid it is probably not surprising.

Most business owners totally underestimate the sheer quantity of different types of work required to run a modern day internet business – you are the website designer (if you are on a budget and there is only you then you are going to have to learn to be a website designer), the copy writer, the after sales support, the marketing manager, the autoresponder engineer, the article writer, the blog post writer, the twitter administrator, the Facebook page developer … I could go on.  No wonder people burn out without ever getting to critical mass on anything.

But it is worse.  Not only do you need to do all these tactics that don’t actually directly make you any money, you are fighting aspects of your own personality that are sabotaging your efforts.  You’ll be procrastinating over certain business activities, maybe because you just don’t want to do them or worse still that you don’t believe they will actually work.  You are your own boss right ?  So you can cherry pick what you want to do.  You’ll never actually finish a project before seeing and jumping onto some shiny new opportunity or magic bullet promising to give you a short cut to success.  You’ll buy the latest $497 course from one of the “gurus” convinced that this is the missing piece but it probably won’t be.

The internet is great but it blinds people to the most basic of truths.  You need to design a real business as you would any other off line traditional business.  Don’t create a product unless there is a market for it. Don’t over-engineer the product or solution, just get it going.  Don’t hide behind you computer reading books telling yourself that when you are completely educated in business you’ll go and sell something.  Identify the most important actions to take in your business right now and do them, and don’t wander off into the periphery.  As soon as you can outsource the stuff that you cannot and should not be doing yourself.  Until then spend as little time on those things as possible, just do the thing that will move you towards you goal and make you money.

All easy to say isn’t it.  Well the answer to everything in business is find what works and systemise it.  So find your market, find what they want and give it to them.  Be sure to offer lots of free and useful advice and even free samples of your products.  Get yourself out there and make yourself known.  Don’t be like everyone else, have your extra feature that none of your competitors has.  It might be your background that makes you more believable, it might be your infectious online personality that comes across on YouTube videos.

For anything you do always have the prize in mind.  See the picture of the end result you want in your mind and also be sure that everything you do is actively progressing you towards it.

Whatever the nature of your online business, you must get targeted & converting traffic to your website.  The internet landscape one can exploit to gain access to this traffic is getting ever more complex and the competition in each and every niche is growing daily.   With social media currently the darling of the internet marketing community,  it is still the case that older strategies remain highly important parts of any serious online marketing approach.  Google remains the biggest game in town, even if Facebook is attracting more visits.  The principles of search engine marketing are more soundly understood.

The days of spammy keyword stuffed pages ranking sites on page 1 are way behind us.  Today to rank well on Google in niches with any sort of competition requires a mult part strategy.   It is currently the case that Google demands a) good content and sound on-site architecture b) a solid backlink profile and c) evidence of natural activity where by people use the site in a fruitful way.   Looking at b) primarily in this piece, incoming links are still highly effective in ranking a website and individual web pages on Google and the other search engines.

Google has however become wise to a lot of older ways of building huge backlink numbers to site,  such as link farms and link directories and arguably reciprocal linking is no longer worth the effort (except of course if you get converting traffic via that link).   However link building is still highly effective but one has to be more sophisticated and careful.  I use the word careful because even with stories abound of thousands of Google employees looking out for abuse of the system Google is simply a software algorithm and is not all knowing,  however it can detect evidence or footprints of explicit link building strategies and punish if you are not careful.  The reality is that to compete in most niches today requires that you systemise your link building strategies and so a number of tools must be bought to bear.

RSS is a raw feed of a website’s content that can be syndicated and published for consumption elsewhere e.g. in RSS readers or Facebook notes pages.  Also in recent times RSS has been touted as being a good SEO tool but how should it be used effectively in SEO, without shooting oneself in the foot.  Whilst Google can index and present RSS feed URLs in the results page the same rules still apply to RSS feed pages as any other web content that in order to rank them you’ll need to build backlinks and get some click through activity from users.  If you look at the average RSS page online it is not the epitome of a good landing page that will convert,  so investing precious time in RSS needs to be focused elsewhere.

In my experience and this is only my opinion based on what my business observes with my customers results is RSS is best used in 2 ways.  1) to ensure that Google discovers, indexes and registers links on webpages that are backlinks to your primary money sites/pages 2) to create links to these pages so solidifying the position of these webpages in the index.  Remember if a page with a link to your site is dumped by Google from its index, that backlink is lost.

The strategy I am talking about here is sometimes called ‘Promoting the promoters’ and it should form the basis of any professional link building strategy.  In part 2 of this series I’ll give some patterns of use for RSS and how it can boost your link building activities.