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What Are Your Goals for 2009?

Tuesday, December 30th, 2008

Well, by far the biggest year in Internet Marketing is drawing to a close.  How did you do this year? Did you surpass your goals? Did you have any goals? Did your business do well online? Did you see growth? ROI? Has your business taken a ‘new direction’ when it comes to your online marketing?

If I helped your business grow in 2008, I can’t wait to make it even bigger in 2009.  If not, that’s ok too.  I hope that this blog has shown you ways to create new revenue streams and programming shortcuts that will take your business to a new level.

Now, what are you going to do in 2009? Add video or perhaps a blog? Start a link building campaign? Did you just test the SEO surface waters and realize the potential?  The economy isn’t going to stay in the dumps forever, are you positioning your company to be way ahead of the bigger players in your industry when money once again flourishes?

Have you looked at your 2008 data and researched what worked and what didn’t? Where can you apply Pareto’s Law to reduce and refine?  What areas of your business can be trimmed and/or removed?  Should you expand or simply reroute?

What new marketing ideas do you have in store for 2009?  Giveaways? Video? PPC? New domains and websites? Expansion into new areas? Leveraging your newfound Internet traffic for better vendor pricing?  Will you pursue an affiliate program? Can other local businesses help yours grow? Can you join a group that will promote your business? Could you hold an event that will get you media exposure? Can you advertise in local papers or websites cheaply? Will social networking be a part of your plan?

And of course, money. What are your goals for next year? How about monthly? Can you compare to the past and forecast? How much can you make? How much can you save? How much will you have to put into untapped (and potentially lucrative) revenue streams?

And lastly, what would you like to be forecasting for 2010? If this were December 30, 2009, what would you like to be thinking about? What goals will you be setting then?

Make it happen.

Posted in Marketing, SEO, small business, trending | 1 Response »

You Can Now Modify Google’s Organic Results

Friday, November 21st, 2008

Today Google released a new tool called SearchWiki, which allows users to modify the organic results they see for some phrases. The users, when logged in, can now ‘vote up’ or ‘vote down’ results when they do a search on the popular search engine’s website.

How will this affect SEO?

Personally I think it’ll have a bigger effect on very large and high-volume websites such as travel sites, news sites, etc. Smaller-trafficked websites probably won’t see much of a change IMO.

Look at it this way. If you are creating quality content for your customers, and you are doing it all honestly, not spamming, not keyword stuffing, not cloaking, etc, you’ll probably be fine. People will come to your website, see what they were looking for, and have no reason to vote you down.

If, on the other hand, you’re running an affiliate poker or viagra website, be prepared to see your rankings tumble for these custom users. That is, unless you’re providing quality content. Have I mentioned quality content yet?

Keep in mind that at this time, Google is not using these modifications for their ‘normal’ search that John Doe off the street would use. This only changes the results if you are logged into your Google account, and you do a search. Voting up your favorite websites won’t affect the overall organic results (at this time, according to G), so don’t waste time voting up your own website to the top of every possible keyword. You’ll just have skewed results that you can then fool yourself into believing are really organic.

While some people are saying this will have a major impact on search overall, I don’t see it happening yet. Now, will Google at some point take this data and use it towards their algorithm? Very possible. We’ll have to wait and see.

Posted in Google updates, content, site ranking, trending | No Responses »

Growing Trend: Teacher/Class Websites

Thursday, October 2nd, 2008

I’ve noticed a new trend this year now that school is in full swing. I’ve got a whole houseful of kids, and all of them generate a nice stack of paper each friday in their “Friday folder”. And I’ve noticed a common theme: teacher websites.

Teachers are starting to pull away from the generic .edu website (or k12.state.us) and create their own class websites thanks to some third party websites like TeacherWeb and ClassJump – and they’re getting some pretty crappy URLs as a result.  For example, here’s my son’s teacher’s page.  (Check out that URL – which shows up on every newsletter she sends home.)  In total, there are about 8 teachers at the boys’ school that have their “own websites”.  There are around 45 teachers total in the school.

While the concept of websites for your kid is great in elementary, once they start going to middle school and have upwards of 8-9 teachers, then what?

Several years back, I wrote a totally custom CMS for a local parent’s club.  They could admin it from the back end, they could add events, change colors, all that jazz.  I then decided it was nice enough to package and sell to other parent’s clubs, and I did so successfully.  I bundled the CMS with a hosting plan to make more money.  But I ran out of excitement for the project and it’s lapsed.  Looks like I was a few years ahead of the curve.  Now they’re all doing it.  Maybe I should gear that baby back up.

This trend is going to continue.  Next year I’ll bet half of the teachers in our local elementary school will have sites.

Are you cashing in on this trend?

I see a lot of things these two example sites could offer to increase their visibility and usage. Why doesn’t TeacherWeb offer a ‘free’ domain when a teacher signs up?  They could park the domain on this URL and then link back to themselves, thus increasing their backlinks.  If they don’t want to do that, why not a shorter URL for teachers via Mod Rewrite?  Don’t they realize how silly these links look when printed on paper?

Another idea – why not offer RSS?  Or an email list that teachers could blast when something special is coming up?

There are a lot of areas for someone with a really good plan to swoop in and kick butt in this area.

Posted in Marketing, local marketing, trending | No Responses »

The Bad Economy is Good for Your Business

Thursday, July 31st, 2008

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, this ‘bad economy’ is a great time for your business to grow.  The down times are causing people to scale back on necessities, and the government is hoping that their new stimulus package will help some small businesses continue to operate.

As part of the stimulus package, the government has also increased the amount that a business can expense (section 179).  This one-year exception means that if you buy business stuff (a van, a computer, some new software) you can write off a larger chunk of that up front, which will help come time that Uncle Sam visits you again in April.

I’m not a tax expert, so do some research on the section 179 details.

This is a great time for small businesses to get their fannies in gear in relation to online presence.  I’m not going to rehash what I said earlier, but man what an opportunity!  Cut back on those Yellow Pages ads and push that money into your Internet plans.  You won’t be sorry.

Posted in local marketing, money, small business, trending | No Responses »

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