Google+ for Business: How Google’s Social Network Changes Everything

by author, Chris Brogan

“The Complete Business Guide to Google Plus, Today’s Hottest New Social Network!”

Every week, millions more people sign up for Google+: Suddenly, it’s today’s hottest new social network. Google+ for Business reveals why Google+ offers business opportunities available nowhere else – and helps you grab those opportunities now, before your competitors do. Top social media professional speaker and business advisor Chris Brogan shows how to get great results fast, without wasting time – and without wasting a dime. Brogan guides you through using Google+ for promotion, customer service, community building, referrals, collaboration, and a whole lot more. You won’t just master innovative new tools like Circles and Hangouts: You’ll use them to generate more customers and more cash!

• Make the right first moves after you’ve signed up for Google+
• Take advantage of links between Google+ and Google search
• Define the best Google+ strategy and tactics for your business
• Create a business page that attracts new paying customers
• Integrate Google+ into your current online/digital strategies
• Learn how your customers are using Google+–and give them what they’re looking for
• Use Circles to organize your contacts and interactions more effectively
• Create Google+ posts that draw attention and spark conversations
• Master warm selling on Google+
• Build a simple, low-cost content strategy around Google+
• Grow your audience and share others’ valuable content
• Discover new ways to derive even more value from Google+

About the Author

Chris Brogan is a New York Times bestselling author and professional speaker, as well as president of Human Business Works. He has been involved with social networks since the bulletin board services of the 1980s and started blogging in 1998, when it was called journaling. Chris cofounded the international unconference experience, PodCamp, which teaches media making and its value to people all over the world. He keynotes at many major corporate events, as well as several technology and web culture events.

Our Opinion

You probably already have a twitter page and a Facebook Business Page; now go and get yourself a Google+ for Business Page. Learn it all the easy way from a guy who knows exactly what he is talking about – learn it from Chris Brogan and his book, Google+ for Business: How Google’s Social Network Changes Everything.

Keyword Research for Business

by author James Constable

Keyword research should lie not only at the heart of your online marketing strategy, but your business strategy as a whole. Searchers looking online for the products and services you sell are the same potential customers you are trying to target offline, and by better understanding the keywords they enter into search engines the better you can understand their wants and needs.

Topics Include

• Using keyword research as a factor in determining market segments
• Discovering which markets are growing, which demographics are looking for different products and relevant information
• Developing superior products and business strategies to create a competitive advantage based on insights from keyword research

About the Author

James Constable likes to look at his client’s campaign from a strategic viewpoint in order to provide them with the most benefit for their business. He is not only interested in designing link building campaigns to best improve SERP rankings, but also the strategy behind keyword selection to send the most qualified traffic and sales to a website.

James is from the UK, where he gained a background and degree in International Business and it is this interest, along with his enthusiasm for the Internet, which drives himm to get the best overall results for the campaigns he manages.

Our Opinion

“Many people believe they can guess which keywords their potential customers are typing into Google, and as will become clear when you read James Constable’s book Keyword Research for Business: A How-To Guide, that is simply not true.

If you have a website and have not carried out thorough keyword research based upon modern SEO principles as laid out in James’ book, then you are missing out on potentially the biggest source of new business there is – organic search engine listings.

If you have a website, you should read this book.”

Our Opinion

Many of our customers ask us for a ‘manual’ for their new WordPress website. Well here it is… WordPress 3 Complete will answer your questions and have you blogging in no time.

WordPress 3 Complete – Book Description

by author, April Hodge Silver

Using the WordPress Content Management System, you can create a beautiful, dynamic, and amazing website. WordPress is a flexible and powerful tool that’s ideal for creating both blog and non-blog websites. You can customize the features, incorporate your own design, and even write your own plugins with ease. Its versatility and ease of use have attracted a large, enthusiastic, and helpful community of users.

WordPress 3 Complete will teach you everything you need to know both to get started with WordPress and also to unlock its massive hidden powers. This book will give you a rapid and straightforward introduction to the rich and powerful features of WordPress and will also get you up and running with WordPress quickly and painlessly. It will help you learn everything WordPress has to offer, from the ground up, so that you can build your own complete website.

WordPress 3 Complete begins from scratch, starting with how to install WordPress, all the way to the most advanced topics such as creating your own themes, writing plugins, and including custom post types in your website.

Starting with downloading and installing the core WordPress software, you will take a detailed look at WordPress settings and also choose the settings that will work best for your website or blog. After that, the book will teach you all about content management functionality for your site – from posts and pages to categories and tags, all the way to links, media, menus, images, galleries, and more. Finally, you’ll learn how to create your own themes and plugins to enhance the overall functionality of your website.

Once you’re done with WordPress 3 Complete, you’ll be an expert in everything WordPress, from content management through technical steps such as backing up your site.

This is a comprehensive, step-by-step guide on how to set up, customize, and enhance your blog or website using WordPress.

Our Opinion of “50 Ways to Make Google Love Your Website”

“If you have a small business website and are not doing as well in Google as you would like to, 50 Ways to Make Google Love Your Website by Steve Johnston and Liam McGee is one of those a ‘must read’ books. Stop listening to hearsay and out-dated nonsense about Google listings and get the facts from 2 experts who know their stuff… and make Google love your website!”

About “50 Ways to Make Google Love Your Website”

The definitive step-by-step guide on how to maximise your Google ranking…

Google is now a dominant force on the Internet, guiding millions of searches and online purchases every day. Understanding how it works and how to make the most of it is therefore essential to anyone building or running a website, whether for business or as a hobby. This easy-to-follow guide explains not only how Google actually sifts the billions of pages of information its index contains, but shows you how you can improve the performance of your own website in Google’s search results, giving specific and detailed instructions about the sort of priority issues you need to address.

50 Ways to Make Google Love Your Website will teach you how to:

• Use Google to help you understand how people search for the sort of things you are offering
• Create a website that your customers will quickly find in Google
• Make your website irresistible to links from other sites
• Help Google understand what your site is about
• Think like Google and win more traffic

From the Back Cover

Google is now a dominant force on the Internet, guiding millions of searches and online purchases every day. Understanding how it works and how to make the most of it is therefore essential to anyone building or running a website, whether for business or as a hobby. This easy-to-follow guide explains not only how Google actually sifts the billions of pages of information its index contains, but shows you how you can improve the performance of your own website in Google’s search results, giving specific and detailed instructions about the sort of priority issues you need to address.

50 Ways to Make Google Love Your Website will teach you how to:

• Use Google to help you understand how people search for the sort of things you are offering
• Create a website that your customers will quickly find in Google
• Make your website irresistible to links from other sites
• Help Google understand what your site is about
•  Think like Google and win more traffic

‘Read this book again and again. It will help you win on Google.’ ~ Simon Murdoch, Internet Investor and former MD of Amazon UK

‘This book is a must read.’ ~ Adrian Land, Director of SEO, Hotels.com

‘Whenever we work with Steve and his team, our visits from Google just grow and grow.’ ~ Lelia Ferro, Editor 4beauty, Channel4.com

‘If you sell online, you need this book. It’s not just for big business.’ ~ Paul Hines, Dettagli menswear retailer

About the Authors

Steve Johnston has spent all of the third millennium fascinated by Google and its role in business. Now a recognised expert in Google’s search engine he spends most his time advising major brands and aspiring entrepreneurs how to make more of the opportunity it presents. Steve’s pre-web career was as a retailer and he graduated first in his class at the business school of hard knocks. He is married with three teenage children and lives near Bath in Somerset.

Liam McGee is a Cambridge educated scientist, and a web-accessibility, usability and search optimisation specialist. He has been marking up HTML since 1995. In his free time he is an ‘invited expert’ and occasional editor at the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative. He is married and lives in Frome in Somerset.

50 Ways to Make Google Love Your Website is available from Amazon as a paperback and for Kindle…

This is a very brief overview of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Please note, SEO is not and never will be a ‘quick fix’, it is about being methodical in a very specific and logical way to build truly sustainable results.

It is not and never will be about ‘tricking’ search engines into promoting a page on anything other than its own genuine merit. Search engine optimisation done correctly is an effective replacement for pay-per-click advertising – the reverse is simply not true unless you have endless reserves of money.

Every 6 months our friends over at seomoz.org compile the aggregated opinions of dozens of the world’s best and brightest search marketers about search engine optimisation. Below are some of their findings for 2011. Read their whole report here >>Search Engine Ranking Factors.

Broad Overview of Google’s 2011 Algorithm

Source: http://www.seomoz.org

What this means for Search Engine Optimisation (very simplified):

1. Good backlinks to individual pages account for 21% of Google position
2. Good backlinks to domain account for 21% of Google position
3. Proper on-page keyword use accounts for 15% of Google position
4. Proper domain level keyword use accounts for 11% of Google position
5. On-page social factors (i.e. Facebook, Twitter etc.) account for 7% of Google position

These 5 factors together account for approximately 75% of the reason why one page lists well in Google while another one doesn’t.

Conclusion

To list well in Google a web page needs:

1. Backlinks to it
2. Be part of a domain that has backlinks to it
3. Have optimised page content
4. Be part of a well-structured and well-organised domain
5. Make it easy for visitors to share the page content via social media sites and encourage them to do so

Search Engine Optimisation is a Moving Target

Search engine optimisation is like always aiming at a moving target. These factors are all relative to the performance of other web pages competing for the same keyword, so if for example all the competing pages have no backlinks, the one with the best on-page factors is likely to be listed best. Conversely, if the competing pages all have poor on-page keyword use then the one with the best backlinks is likely to be listed best.

How to Decimate Your Competition with Search Engine Optimisation

Perform these steps in this order:

1. Build a domain structure which complies with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines
2. Build a page structure which complies with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines
3. Write unique, informative, readable, high quality, keyword rich page content which complies with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines for each and every page
4. Add social media connectivity to all relevant pages
5. Continually build high quality backlinks to each and every relevant page with the aim of having more and better backlinks than all of the competing pages
6. Continually write new, high-quality content (see 3 above)
7. Continually engage with social media users to indirectly encourage content sharing

Other Search Engine Optimisation Resources

To find out more about search engine optimisation, read the following:

• Google’s Webmaster Guidelines
• Vaughn’s Google Ranking Factors – SEO Checklist
• Our blog posts about search engine optimisation

Zero to 100,000: Social Media Tips and Tricks for Small Businesses

by Sarah-Jayne Gratton and Dean Anthony Gratton

YOUR COMPLETE PLAN FOR FINDING 100,000 NEW FRIENDS, SUPPORTERS, AND CUSTOMERS!

Close your eyes. Now, envision 100,000 people who are passionate about you, your business, and your brand! We’re talking about people who buy your stuff, and then tell their friends how incredibly great you are—without being paid to do it. People who follow your every move, look to you for guidance, and can’t wait to hear what you’re up to next.

Your 100,000 people. Your two football stadiums full of cheering fans. They’re out there, looking for you. Here’s your easy, low-cost social media plan for finding them…connecting with them…giving them what they want—so they can make you stunningly, incredibly successful!

10 STEPS TO YOUR 100,000
(with all the details, examples, and expert advice you’ll ever need)

1. Listen first, engage second
2. Craft your most authentic voice
3. Find and attract influencers
4. Don’t be a narcissist (you know what we mean)
5. Build community that lasts
6. Freshen up your brand
7. Become an electrifying “social conductor”
8. Promote across platforms
9. Be the fittest, be the survivor
10. Measure your (ever-growing) success

I work in digital media publishing, yet I’ve struggled, like most of the business world, to understand how to make social media work for me. Sarah-Jayne and Dean tackled the challenge with an energy that has to be seen to be believed. These two are now my #1 source of information and have provided simple and effective strategies that have helped me to monetize social media.”
~ Vince Holton, Publisher, Incisor.TV

“A fantastic, timely, and enjoyable book with serious appeal. Great work from beginning to end. I can’t recommend it enough.”
~ 2morrowKnight, Huffington Post

“Zero to 100,000: Social Media Tips and Tricks for Small Businesses makes it so easy to understand the way to successfully take your business into the ‘real world’ of social media! It both entertained and educated me. I would recommend this book to my friends, business associates, and to educational institutions. Brilliantly done!”
~ Debra Cincioni, @MomsofAmerica on Twitter

“From building a bigger presence for yourself or your business, this book gets you in on the ground floor, lays the foundation, and helps you get a jump start on becoming a social media success. And the advice is real, not just from Sarah-Jayne and Dean, who are awesome, but from several other success stories they explain in the book. In a word, this book is useful.”
~ Jason Falls, CEO of Social Media Explorer and author of No Bullshit Social Media: The All-Business, No-Hype Guide to Social Media Marketing

“Leveraging social media is vital for businesses of all sizes, but it is a quirky and nuanced world where getting it wrong can have disastrous consequences. @GrattonGirl is one of the people I see in the social space who really understands the art of communicating with her audience. If you want to know how to connect with the crowd effectively through social media, I can think of no one better to hold your hand on that journey than Sarah-Jayne and Dean Gratton.”
~ Kate Russell, Technology Reporter, BBC Website and App Reviewer

About the Authors

Sarah-Jayne Gratton is an author, television presenter, and former theatre performer. She is European correspondent for the television show You Are the Supermodel, where she hosts a weekly segment on personal branding.

A former actress, Sarah-Jayne is an influential social media persona, speaker, and writer, regularly featured in Social Media Today and other publications including In-Spire Lifestyle Magazine (in-spirelsmagazine.co.uk) and blogcritics.org. She was nominated for a Shorty Award in social media and is one of “Twitter’s Top 75 Badass Women” (bitrebels.com). She is also listed in the Top 50 of The Sunday Times “Social List.”

Sarah-Jayne studied at Cardiff University, where she received a Bachelor of Arts in Educational Psychology and later a Doctorate in Psychology.You can find out more about Sarah-Jayne at sarahjaynegratton.com and can follow her on Twitter (@grattongirl).

Dr. Dean Anthony Gratton is a bestselling author and columnist.

Dean has worked extensively within the wireless telecommunications R&D industry and has an accomplished career in software engineering. He has enjoyed a variety of roles and responsibilities in addition to being an Editor of the Specification of the Bluetooth System: Profiles, v1.1 (the original specification). He has participated in defining the initial Bluetooth Personal Area Networking profile and was active in the Near Field Communication (NFC) technology and marketing committees. His wireless research work has been patented.

Dean has developed, architected, and led teams across several new product developments for mobile phones, DigitalTV, broadband, Femtocells, Bluetooth,Wi-Fi, ZigBee, NFC, and Private Mobile Radio.

Dean is a columnist for Incisor.TV, where he has written a number of contentious articles sharing his thoughts and challenges on industry news, opinions, and gossip. He continues to make an authoritative published and vocal presence within the wireless telecommunications industry.

Dean holds a B.Sc. (Hons.) in Psychology and a Doctorate in Telecommunications. You can contact Dean at books@deangratton.com and follow him on Twitter (@grattonboy) to enjoy his witty shenanigans and his social media and technologyrelated tweets. Dean is an influential social media persona and was listed in the 50 “Top Dogs” of Twitter (bullsandbeavers.com).You can also read more about his work at deananthonygratton.com.

This time of year is a great time to take stock of your marketing efforts and review them.

It is a great time to work out what worked well, what didn’t work, what needs improving and what new marketing methods to use over the coming year.

Creating a marketing plan for the coming year will keep you focused and help you to acheive your goals, rather than constantly being dragged off in all sorts of different directions as a result of countless knee jerk reactions to perceived problems.

Free Marketing Plan Downloads

There are loads of great resources available to help you with your marketing plan for 2012; one of our favourite resource providers are our friends over at Brighter Marketing. They offer a number of free marketing tools for you to download and use including:

• Marketing Strategy Template – An actual real life marketing strategy with headings and content for a larger business
• Marketing Plan Template – Simple marketing plan template with headings to get you started and give you the impetus to write your marketing plan
• Marketing Plan Examples – An actual real life marketing plan with headings and content for a smaller business
• Business Proposal Template - A great template to give you a head start when it comes to developing a winning proposal

So once you’re done with Christmas dinner, opened all the presents and are thoroughly bored with the idea of another re-run  of ‘The Wizard of Oz’ on TV, get yourself over to Brighter Marketing, download their 100% free marketing tools and get planning your marketing for 2012.

Merry Christmas to all our customers, suppliers, followers, contributors and blog readers, past present and future – and here’s to your future success in the coming year.

Google Plus is social media’s new kid on the block. It is Google’s answer to Facebook Business Pages. If you run a small business and have an online presence, you need to look at Google Plus.

A new social network! Here′s your user′s guide to Google+

Google Plus is Google′s new social network and from day one it has had the social media world abuzz with excitement. Early fans claim it′s easier to use than Facebook and Twitter and has a wealth of creative new features. If you want to learn how to navigate this new social neighborhood, take along Google Plus For Dummies as your guide. Early Google+ adopter and social media consultant Jesse Stay shows you how to get started, create a profile, set up privacy settings, chat, post, control who sees what, and much more.

• Explains how to join Google Plus, protect your information, and make the most of this new social network
• Explores cool new features, such as Circles, which allows you to drag and drop friends into different circles
• Covers creating a profile, finding friends, adding people to Circles, chatting with others in Hangouts, importing photos, controlling who sees what, and more
• Conveys helpful information in the clear, friendly, easy–to–follow language that has defined the Dummies series for two decades

Confidently enter the exciting new Google Plus social neighborhood with Google+ For Dummies.

From the Back Cover

If you run a small business and need to attract new customers you will have already realised that getting your small business found online is now vital to your future survival.

Gone are the days when most small businesses could find new customers by advertising in their local newspaper and Yellow Pages; because of the internet, neither method works very well any more.

But getting your small business found online is a lot like asking your potential customers to find a needle in a haystack. To illustrate my point, if you go to Google and type what your business does into the search box, you will see a page that looks something like the image below. (Click on the image to enlarge it.)

click image to enlarge

You can see from the image above that for our chosen keyword of small business marketing there are some 959 million competing pages and that we are number 3 in the organic (unpaid) listings. In other words 959,000,000 pages in Google’s index are competing for the term small business marketing and we are number 3 of 959,000,000. Now you may be thinking, “well if they can do it, how hard can it be? “, but please bear in mind that we are search engine optimisation experts and it has taken us 2 years to get to this position.

Granted your business may be in a market which isn’t as competitive as the one we are in, but even in a market with low competition you will be competing again thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of other web pages.

So how can you go about getting your small business found online? Here are some of the things you could be doing:

1. Optimising your website for search engines – especially Google. To do this, first read Google’s Webmaster Guidelines (the Bible of web design), and then employ an SEO expert. (Note: Most web designers who work with small businesses know little or nothing about SEO and what they think they know is usually at least 10 years out-of-date and just plain wrong.)
2. Encouraging your website visitors to share your web pages with others using sharing buttons like the ones at the bottom of this page. Get whoever wrote your website to add these buttons, (unless you have hundreds of pages written using old-fashioned software this is a very quick and simple thing for them to do).
3. Writing at least one new blog post every week and publishing it on your own website. (Do this yourself.)
4. Listing your website in free online directories, the most important of which is DMOZ. (Do this yourself too, but read the instructions very carefully first.)
5. Systematically building backlinks to your web pages on a constant and ongoing basis. You can either do this yourself, or pay an SEO expert, or a virtual PA to do it for you.
6. Not building reciprocal links – they will usually do you more harm than good.
7. Creating a Facebook Business Page and/or a Twitter profile and embarking on social networking.
8. Reading a good book about getting your small business found online.
9. Reading our blog every week; it is full of tips about getting your small business found online.
10. Contacting us to arrange a free consultation to talk about your needs in more detail.

We got on the first page of Google using these very methods and you can too. Getting your small business found online is not some mystical art or hocus pocus nonsense, it is about doing some research, formulating a plan, following that plan and learning and adapting along the way.

Oh, and one final point; if anyone tells you that the only cost effective way of getting your small business found online is to buy Google AdWords, I can personally guarantee that they don’t have a clue what they are talking about and you should totally ignore everything they say about it.

Today, good online marketing help is something most small businesses need, so if you’re one of them you are not alone.

In my experience many small businesses are getting very little, very poor, inaccurate, misleading, or worst of all, no online marketing help at all. More often than not, this is because the people they turn to for help and advice are rarely up-to-speed with their knowledge of the latest online marketing techniques.

Experts… Really?

In my experience those people (including some very well known organisations) usually offer ‘help’ that is at best several years out-of-date. And that kind of  ’help’ will often cause more harm than good to your online marketing efforts.

Everything we do here at Small Business Marketing is designed to change that by offering top quality, current, up-to-date online marketing help for small businesses  wherever they may be on the planet – and today is no exception.

Today I have something really amazing for you.  It will really help with your online marketing and remove the need for you to rely on so-called ‘experts’ whose knowledge is well and truly past its sell-by-date…

…but more on that shortly.

Earlier this week, author David Amerland approached me and asked if I would like to help promote his book, Online Marketing Help. Normally I am not at all keen to promote anything where I am asked to do so by the vendor, but this is clearly very different and it really stood out for me as something I must get involved with. So, after a fascinating discussion with David, I happily agreed to his request.

His book, Online Marketing Help is an Amazon top 100 best-seller and deals with all manner of ways for small businesses to market themselves and their products and services online. This is a perfect fit for what we do here at Small Business Marketing and will really help you with understanding the minefield that is marketing a small business on the internet.

David explains in simple, easy-to-understand terms how to use the power of sites like Twitter, Facebook and MySpace to promote your business online without the need for big budgets, or expensive PR gurus.

About the Book

Online Marketing Help is packed full of 165 pages of no-nonsense, current and genuinely helpful information about online marketing for small business owners including:

• The Real-Time Web Explained
• Facebook for Business
• Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of Facebook
• How to get your YouTube video to do well in the search engines
• Search Engine Optimisation
• Social Media Marketing
• and a whole lot more

About the Author

David himself is an accomplished (and published) author, journalist and editor. He championed the no-DRM (Digital Rights Management) movement and was a vocal supporter of increased interactivity and seamless multi-media embedding in digital downloads.

He cut his teeth in the ELan pages of The European (newspaper) and joined the tide of misfits trawling the writing waves of the world when Robert Maxwell’s publishing empire crumbled towards the end of the last century.

He has since been involved in writing, publishing and web development, launching a series of companies which have explored each frontier.

He was actively involved with the John Lewis Partnership between 1995 and 2002 and has since used the experience gained there to help guide corporations from leading Greek printing companies to international food importers.

In short, this guy knows his stuff and writes it in a way that is very easy to understand and use.

Online Marketing Help: Our Very Special Offer

As you will remember, I mentioned earlier that I have something really amazing for you today, so here it is. As you already know, Online Marketing Help is available from Amazon, but before you rush to the bottom of the page to click the Amazon ‘buy’ button, check this out…

Amazon UK price £14.99 (paperback)

Amazon UK price £7.15 (Kindle eBook)

David Amerland’s own website price $9.99 (PDF download)

Small Business Marketing price $3.50 (PDF download)

So to get your own copy of Online Marketing Help for just $3.50 and be reading it in minutes, just click the link below, share this post with your friends and get your 65% off discount code for Online Marketing Help, direct from David’s own website.

Use this link to buy ‘Online Marketing Help’ for just $3.50

Click here to buy Online Marketing Help for just $3.50

Unlock your 65% discount code with a "Send":

or you could click the link below to buy ‘Online Marketing Help’ for £14.99 from Amazon.