This nifty and amazing tablet is running Android OS 2.2 but will release with Honeycomb and Android 3.0.  Dual cameras and enhanced Video Display functions, this product is definitely in touch with tomorrow.  Seems like alot of the new releases are in phones and tablets.  Much media anticipation for this technology to revolutionize the mobile world and hurt sales of PC's

A very nifty device from the corporate cell phone maker. Makes me think back to the Bill Gates keynote a few years back with MSFT Table. If they would have thought tablet, instead of table. What is more important is how your small business marketing is affected by the growth of personal devices vs. the PC. What do you think of this Blackberry Device?

CHECK out this nifty little phone from Vizio, the TV Manufacturing company.   No idea when it will be released or what carriers will offer it.  Looks like a private label design.

So as Facebook is expanding its presence in the web, the question now becomes, which is more important.  Where will you find your next customer.

In the 4rth quarter of 2010, a presumed 50K small biz internet marketers and MLM home based businesses were kicked off google adsense.  Many videos have been created by those of the industries who were completely crushed by the inability to buy traffic and sell some affiliate program or MLM idea.  Forced to, many turned to Facebook, and they are glad they did.

Some of what seems to be reverberating on the web today is that Facebook is alot cheaper.  You can target ads much more in a social manner then with google.  You can create fanpages that connect the advetisement message alot stronger.  Gain leads and a social connection that may last for alot longer then a simple adsense ad.  And so much more.

IN 2010 we learned a few things about studying these two platforms.

What we found was that Google Adwords has far more competition between advertisers than Facebook Ads. On the low end of Google’s price spectrum for our targeted keywords, we were able to get 7000 impressions in a day at a $1.6CPM. Compare that to Facebook, and we were able to get targeted traffic at equal volume for under $.15CPM – that’s less than 1/10^th the CPM on Google!   FACEBOOK WINS!


Facebook bounce rate was a bit lower!  That would be a good thing.

• Separate your ads to target males and females separately: men and women will almost always click at different patterns.
• Tighten your age groups: instead of targeting all males or all females, narrow it down to 4 or 5 years apart max. Different ages require varying ad copy as well.

If you have never tried using either platform, it might be easier to get started with Facebook.  The big downside with facebook is the approval for your ad.  Alot of what we sent for review got kicked back.  And sometimes you dont have a clear idea of what the problem is.  Two quick facebook advertising secrets:

1) Create a new account ONLY for the advertising.  If there is a slight problem with things, they won't freeze your personal or business fan pages etc.  Get an associate to open a personal account to help you with that.
2)  Create and Mobilize the fan page, and use FBML to create the landing page and "squeeze page" at facebook.  Your ads will be more likely to be approved (wonder why) and you can get a fan at the same time.  Think the process through!

If you would like more information, give us a call or contact our friends at www.FindLocalUSA.com for more information

There are many options for having your business listed in local directories.   If you happen to have a popular spot, chances are that users with mobile phones have already started "checking in" and creating reviews of places.

Start by searching for your business.  If it is already listed in a listing and has reviews, see when they were posted.  And if they were positive.  CLAIM your listing and get to work to fix the issues that came through in the negative review

Something that isn't discussed much is how the dominant search engine, google may be using google checkout to quantify merchants.  Meaning, if your an online vendor you should seriously consider using google checkout.  It may help your local and overal rankings.

A few other things to consider?

Getting reviews isn’t enough – businesses have to keep getting them.  One of the traps that lots of companies fall into is getting a lot of reviews (ethically or not) and then getting bored with it.  There are lots of companies that get many reviews over the course of a month or so and then none in subsequent months.
2 bad things happen as a result: 1) decreasing ranking assistance (we have seen a few instances where regularity of reviews seems to be more important in rankings than absolute number); 2) reviews look spammy to potential customers.

Business Blogs: a corporate tool for communicating with customers or employees to share knowledge and expertise.
Business blogs are sweeping the business community. Blogs are an excellent method to share a company's expertise, build additional web traffic, and connect with potential customers..
What does Blogging Provide to Small Business?

• Blog software is easy to use. Simply write your thoughts, link to resources, and publish to your blog, all at the push of a few buttons. Blog software companies such as: Movable Type, Blogger.com and Typepad all offer easy blogging tools to get started.

• Blogging is a low-cost alternative to having a web presence. For small business owners without the time to learn web html or the money to hire a designer/developer, blogging offers an inexpensive method to get your company's name out on the Internet.

• Updating the weblog is a much quicker process than contacting a web designer with changes or doing the coding and uploading yourself.

• Business blogs provide your small business with a chance to share your expertise and knowledge with a larger audience. A powerful benefit for consultants and knowledge workers.

Our preferred and recommended blog platform is BLOGGER by Google.  Its free, its fully customizable, it can optimize for mobile in one click through draft.google.com.  This website is powered by blogger.  It costs 8 dollars a year to keep it up.  How much does it cost to run your website?  Talk to use or our partners at www.FindLocalUSA.com  for information on how to use blogger in your business.

Wordpress is a fine alternative and most companies that need advanced CMS capabilities would want to look at that option, but most businesses do not need those options.  They need a customer blog that can be updated from a cell phone like ours!

Many times, you get emails or phone calls at your business from someone claiming to give you more customers through the internet etc.  Basically, most companies are doing different versions of the items below.

What the professionals basically will do for you, explained in steps.
 
SEO Onsite,

Companies will sign your site up and verify with Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, and Bing Webmaster Center - This is an important step that will become necessary later.

 Let Google Analytics run for two weeks before doing any SEO - This allows analytics to collect data and provides you with a baseline. I recommend you screen capture the relevant pages so you can show your client how your work has positively affected their site.

Evaluate the visual design of your client's site - If the site drives people away, no amount of SEO efforts will help. If the site looks terrible, find well designed sites in your client's niche.

Check compatibility between browsers - Visit your client's site using Mozilla Firefox 2.x and Internet Explorer 6 and 7 and Safari 3.x. Remember to do this on both a Mac and a PC. You want to make sure your client's website renders correctly and won't drive away users.

Create a new e-mail address specific to the site you are working on - Use this address for all e-mails pertaining to your project. This is especially important for link building.

Look at your HTML code and optimize all of the SEO related tags - If you are unsure what these are, reread the Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Optimization. Here are a few things to keep in mind:

                + Primary objective should be accomplishable from the homepage
                + Keyword in title tag (unique for each page, include keywords)
                + Keyword in H1 on each page
                + Keyword in text
                + Optimize URL architecture (www.website.com/birds/eagle instead of www.website.com/allanimals/?type=bird&species=eagle). Use 301 redirects if you rename pages
                + Information architecture - as few clicks as possible
                + On relevant images include keywords in alt tags and in filenames
                + Nofollow appropriate links

Decide if you need a meta description - Modern search engines are great at scanning the text of websites and displacing applicable snippets based on user queries. You need to decide if you want to rely on the algorithm or create your own description. I suggest making your own meta description for your homepage and letting the engines figure out the rest. Remember the purpose of making your description is to convince potential customers to click on your link in the SERPs. Make it convincing and use your keywords.

Add company address and phone number - Be sure to do this on every page. The search engines are smart enough to detect address and phone number formats. This data is essential to local search. I recommend adding the the following formatted data (example is for an American company) to the footer of all of your client's pages:

Company Name
1111 11th Pl NE
City, State Zip
(555) 555-5555


Add a robots.txt - This is important for a couple reasons. First, it allows you to specify exactly what pages major search engines can crawl. Second, including a robots.txt makes tracking search engines easier because they always download the file before navigating your client's site. This characteristic differentiates the SEs from normal human visitors.

Offsite

Add your client's business and website to the major search engine's local listings - This is paramount as local search is likely to drive the majority of your traffic. These are the most important places to submit:

                + Yahoo Local
                + Google Local
                + Bing Local
                + Ask City
                + CitySearch (data on this site feeds Ask.com and Bing)
                + Yelp (data on this site feeds Bing and Yahoo)

 
Add your client's website to industry specific directories - To find the relevant directories, use the list of link sources you created earlier. Also, you can try searching for “(your client's local city name) business directory” and “(your client's industry) directory.” For example, I would search “Issaquah business directory” and “preschool directory.” Be sure to record which directories you add your client's site to and the usernames and passwords you use. You should use the e-mail address you created earlier for directory registrations. You should also make sure to use
Try to get the links your competition already has gotten - Use the list of link sources you generated from Yahoo Site Explorer and try to acquire links from those sources. This may be as simple as submitting a form or as cumbersome as e-mailing webmasters to find out their link addition policies. Always try to get your keywords in your link anchor text.

Get more links - Scour the internet and find other sites that might want to link to your client's site (site:website.com "submit a link"). Remember the importance of the source of your links and the anchor text used. 100,000 links from spammy sites with bad anchor text will help you less than a single link with excellent keyword anchor text from a super authoritative site. A good place to start is to use the Juicy Link Finder. You should also consider your local chamber of commerce, local networking groups, and local complimentary businesses. Search engines like to see local links pointing at locally targeted websites.

Decide if utilizing social media sites is advantageous - Is your client in an industry that could actively participate in social media? If so, be sure not to be spammy and to only contribute quality and appropriate content. It is much more expensive to fix a ruined online reputation for a business than it is for a standard user. You may also want to consider adding your client's business to professional networks such as Linkedin.

Create and submit sitemaps - Create a sitemap. Then login into Google Webmaster Central and Bing Search Webmaster Tools and submit it.

Check Box Optimize your client's site from Google's side - Login to Google Webmaster Tools and click on the tools menu. You will want to set the correct geographical target and preferred domain.  In addition, you must also decide if you want to enable image search. It may drive you traffic but the traffic will unlikely be useful.

Track and Improve

Track progress - I recommend taking a monthly screenshot of all of the following SERPs. A screenshot is an easy way to gather a lot of information. The image files contain data on when they were taken so they are easy to organize. I recommend you do this for the following:

                + Google Local SERP
                + Google Main SERP
                + Google Webmaster Tools
                + Bing Maps SERP
                + Bing Local SERP
                + Bing Search Webmaster Central
                + Yahoo Local SERP
                + Yahoo Main SERP
                + Yahoo Site Explorer

Create and maintain a spreadsheet of your rankings - This gives you a resource to prove to your client that your work is necessary. Be sure to keep it updated monthly so that you are always aware of how you rank.

In summary, a full service company should give you a great rate for not only optimizaing your existing site, but doing external work to link back to your site etc.  One other item, is article writing.  Many firms also provide this service.  Sometimes, if your serious about your marketing online, you might be using 2 firms to attack two different marketing angles.  Remember, press releases online also help!

For more answer and a free phone consultation, please call on our friends at www.FindLocalUSA.com