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

Google Maps, Yahoo Local, Yelp, City Search and a host of other resources are offering small business new opportunities to market on the Web to local customers. A new trend in business sometimes called ROBO (research online and buy offline) is changing the nature of shopping and marketing in these competive times. The information below explains how small business can utilize these services (often for free) to showcase their products and services and succeed in a tough marketplace.

Google launched a pilot program where they sent out 100,000 of these window decals to the most popular local businesses listed on their web site. The stickers contain a QR code (short for "Quick Response") so passersby can snap a quick photo of the code and visit the Google Local listing for that company.  There they can find business information and aggregated reviews.

This helps people learn more about the businesses they walk by every day.  They might find a copy shop or a café, and be able to see what others think about the place before they buy.  Or, they could save information about a location for later, or share with a friend, by sharing the local search link that comes up in their phone's browser.
Google QR Code Result
Google Local result for QR code.

What does this mean for small businesses?  It means people will be looking up your company more and more on their phones.  Here are two excellent ways to ensure they get the best information they can about you:

   1. Sign up for and update your Google Local Business Center listings to add custom information to your local search listings, including local coupons.  Use this also to analyze who is searching for your business and where they are located, to aid in your marketing efforts.
   2. Make sure your web site is mobile-optimized.  The best way to do this is to have your web development firm build a mobile stylesheet for your web site.  With a mobile stylesheet, people visiting your site via their phone's browser will see all of the text and images optimized for the small browser.  Mobile web sites are specifically designed to present relevant, location- and time-sensitive information to people seeking you via their phones.

If you need any help with this, check out our friends at FindLocalUSA.com for more information

Local search is the use of specialized Internet search engines that allow users to submit geographically constrained searches against a structured database of local business listings. Typical local search queries include not only information about "what" the site visitor is searching for (such as keywords, a business category, or the name of a consumer product) but also "where" information, such as a street address, city name, postal code

Most business owners today are too involved in the activities of managing employees and the business to do the proper marketing.  Our partners at Find Local USA www.FindLocalUSA.com  will help manage this for you.  Once you've setup a free phone consultation, they will help you with all the steps they will take you through and show you results!

Our local online advertising services (also known as SEM) include a combination of SEO, PPC, and local business listing optimization. Our business style is 100% transparent, and we operate in our clients' best interest. There is nothing proprietary or secretive about our search marketing service. All work, domain names, websites, ppc accounts and the data contained within, is owned by our clients... not us! We set up our clients for long term success, and we accomplish this by NOT creating a "hostage taking" relationship. That's why we don't require our clients to enter into a long-term commitment or contract. We want our customers to be with us because we produce excellent results for them, not because a piece of paper says they have to be. This philosophy is what makes us stand out from other local internet marketing companies

Here is the link to post your local business on BING / Yahoo

https://ssl.bing.com/listings/ListingCenter.aspx

Bing says that results should offer a "visually organized experience," which brings to mind marketers' must-haves: calls to action. The company says quality result pages should be assembled in an order "that moves searchers from idea to action."

Additionally, Bing emphasizes the need for results to offer interaction tools, have social recommendations and cater to device intelligence for geographically relevant results.

Marketers may be pleased to learn that the search engine will be increasing the visibility of sites that follow these golden rules of content. Starting today, the company is operating with new mobile updates to enhance on-the-go and local search results.

Bing will also help consumers find brands their Facebook friends Like with a new social feature that expands the number of sites in search results that will include social data. Bing will also launch a new image search that makes it easier for consumers to find photos they want to see.

Here is a good start for the small business owner looking to get in to the Local Search market early. it’s smart to consider each opportunity as part of your search marketing strategy.

Theoretically most listings means more coverage in each "niche" website "serving its own userbase" as well as the indexing that occurs with Google and Bing over those sites.

Some of the top listings for your local business are featured below. Remember to search your business first on each service. it may be listed, and you can then claim it!

Local.com is a local search engine that offers a variety of advertising options on the site, but also offers simple & free listings for local businesses. If your business isn’t already listed on Local.com, you can add it here. While you’re on that page, you can read about Local.com’s premium listing service

Insider Pages is owned by the same company that owns CitySearch, but the two are separate sites. Like many other sites, Insider Pages combines local listings with user-generated reviews. As with the other local search sites, your first step is to see if your business is already in the Insider Pages’ database. If not you can "add a new business" through the links provided

Yelp.com is an important local directory with a strong userbase that regularly posts business reviews and has conversations about their favorite (and least-favorite) local businesses.

CitySearch.com a long-running local portal, city guide, and business directory. As a small business owner, you should make sure your business is listed — and listed correctly — in CitySearch. Start by searching for your business. If it’s there, click through to your profile page.

UniversalBusinessListing.org
UBL is a data management service that helps local business owners submit and manage their information. It costs $30/year. At the moment, it’s the best way to get your listing included in the important Acxiom database. (Acxiom doesn’t offer self-serve listings for local businesses.)

Localeze is another of the major data providers to the primary search engines. Localeze has positioned itself as more than just a business listings source, though, via the addition of various content management-type services and tools. These help the local business owner make sure that his/her business data is optimized for inclusion in local search engines and directories. Localeze says it distributes business content/listings to 85 partners.

Finally, Infogroup
Formerly known as InfoUSA, this is one of the major aggregators that compiles databases on businesses and households in the U.S. and Canada, getting information from white and yellow pages, business records, real estate records, newspapers, and more. In 2010, Infogroup also began offering self-serve business listing submissions and management via its ExpressUpdateUSA.com web site.

With all this growth with Twitter around the world, how can it help your business?  A few observations to help you think about a strategy for small business tweeting.


1)  be VERY brief.  140 characters, that's all you get.  So be precise in your tweets.  Do them often, make them relevant and use your mobile device if warranted.

2)  Search for others on twitter that may be interested in what you have to offer.  Follow them.  Get inspired by their tweets.  If your in the fitness arena as a personal trainer, tweet about your workouts and observations.  Carry conversations with those that have a passion for things that you do as well

3)  Do not use widgets or technology that automatically syndicate to your facebook profile or fanpage.  That is annoying.  You can use services like selecttweets and #fb to syndicate selectively.  In other words, don't publish everything on twitter elsewhere.  Make sure the twitter conversation is relevant.  (more on auto syndication later)

4)  Services such at bit.ly will allow you to shorten URL's from links your citing.  NOW this is important.  In our case, this very posting will be shorted " by google" in our case right back to this site.  And why is this important?  Twitter USERS are 500% more likely to click your links then they do if they are on facebook.  My research suggests that most of facebook runs as a closed environment.  They seem to wants users to STAY in facebook, when infact, that strategy ultimately killed America ONLINE.  Anyone remember that voice " You Got Mail" ?

5) Finally, integration of your local strategy with twitter is important.  But non of this is if you don't have followers.  We will explain how to find more of those in other postings.

If you would like more information on what Business Video Fast can provide or would like a phone consultation, please give us a call.  Or text us.  The number is on our "about us" page.

Dominate Page 1 in Google rankings using these quick tips to make your video stand out!

1)  You must create a high quality video.  Make it short.  Be sure you have high quality audio!  We can help you produce such

2)  Make it relevant to your customers.  Asking existing customers what they like most about your product or service.  And if relevant, offer tips on using your product.

3)  When uploading to youtube, use your city or area name in the title of the video followed by the generic word for your product/service.  "Los Angeles Plumber" etc

Sometimes, it might be best to shoot video and take audio separate.  If you wanted to show a time lapse video of your home improvement business, still photos can show the progress over days in seconds.. and your voice could be narrating the job and talking about the excitement in doing what you love to do as a service.

Showing passion is very important.  Where possible, show the human element.  How much pride does your employees take when baking the fresh bread.  etc.

Behind the scenes footage of what you do can peak the curiosity of others on the web.  You might end up with a client from all the above.  Good luck and let us know if you  have any questions.  Leave a comment below if you want to find out more information.  We offer a free phone consultation.