JD

A: What if I told you that there was a surefire way to make your website standout and POP . . . would that be of interest to you? And what if I further told you that this method is inexpensive, easily accomplished, and even so, has a 50 times greater chance of landing you on a Page 1 search result?

I thought that would grab your attention.

What is the secret ingredient, that magic potion, you ask? The answer is – video.

It turns out that of all the things you can do on your website to engage viewers, create more page views, and get higher search engine rankings, adding video just may be the best. As I said, Forrester Research did a test and found that when search results are blended (that is, they include text, video, images, news, etc.) videos that are search engine optimized (more on that in a moment) give you a 50 times greater chance of ending up on the all-important first page of a search result.

Now that is what I call standing out from the crowd.

But here’s the catch: You can’t just add a video to your site and expect a great search engine result for that page. The video must be search engine optimized, that is, it must contain key words in the file names, captions, and so on. That same Forrester blog indicated that less than 20% of all online marketers search engine optimize their video.

That offers a tremendous opportunity for you.

So I spoke with Benjamin Wayne, the CEO of the great video website Fliqz. Fliqz offers affordable, branded video solutions – everything from video hosting, and SEO tools to search engine submission. He explained that offering video content on your small business site actually serves three functions:

1. It helps attract new customers by virtue of the SEO factor
2. It engages them, and
3. It helps convert them into paying customers

But again, just adding video to your site is insufficient. According to Wayne, if you want your video to be picked up and analyzed properly by Google and the other search engines, you must not only add SEO keywords to it, but you must actually “submit the video to Google using XML tools.” Fliqz helps with that too, giving you an easy way to submit your video’s URL.

Maybe you are thinking that it is enough to put your video on YouTube and embed the YouTube player and URL into your site. According to Mr. Wayne, that too is insufficient. “The traffic and the rankings will be applied to YouTube and not your site,” he says. So the best practice is to add your video to your site and submit your URL and keywords to the search engines.

And don’t make the mistake of thinking that you have to create an expensive video for this to work. In this YouTube era, people are used to watching videos that are less than perfect. Of course yours must be professional and add to your brand, but that does not mean they must cost a fortune or take forever to create.

The second advantage of video is that it engages your audience. When you have video on your homepage, 50% to 80% of your visitors will click that first. So video becomes a very effective tool for reducing your “bounce rate” – the amount of people who come to your site, take a quick look, decide it’s not what they are looking for, and surf on.

And the final thing video can do for you is to help increase your conversion rate – that is, the number of people who visit and then end up buying something. According to Benjamin Wayne, by using video instead of just text as part of your call to action, your conversion rate can be increased multi-fold.

He gave me the example of a rental property website that decided to vastly increase its use of video: It offered guided tours of each of their properties, and then near the end of each video, up would pop a link that said “Rent me now!” As a result, both the site’s traffic and conversion rates increased dramatically.

Web 2.0: It’s not just for the big boys any more.

Today’s Tip: Another very good business book that I recently received and read is The Diamond Cutter: The Buddha on Strategies for Managing Your Business and Your Life by Gehse Roach. Roach explains how his years as a Buddhist monk and the principles he learned helped him build a multi-million dollar diamond business. It is a compelling book – for not only how to be an ethical and highly successful entrepreneur, but how those principles can change your life, your business, and the world.

Consider these facts:

• Of all consumer purchases, women either buy or influence the purchase 83 percent of the time.
• Women account for 92 percent of all vacation choices.
• Women are responsible for 94 percent of all home furnishings purchases.
• Of all new bank accounts, women make the choice 89 percent of the time.
• For car purchases, women choose 60 percent of the time.
• In the consumer electronics realm, women purchase 51 percent of all items.
• Women make 80 percent of all healthcare decisions.

According to Tom Peters, in his masterful work, Re-imagine!, “the real story is the 10.1 million women-owned businesses in the United States alone. These enterprises employ 27.5 million of us. (In other words: one out of every four American workers.) In fact, women-owned businesses employ more workers inside the U.S.A. than the ‘fabled’ Fortune 500 employ worldwide.”

Moreover, female-run and female-owned businesses now account for over $3.6 trillion in annual sales. Now that’s significant economic power.

Not Taken Seriously

Yet, for all this power, women (as a group) are not being taken seriously enough by many companies. For many businesses, marketing to women is just considered another niche, and not given the primacy that such a market ought to command. Intelligent marketers know that this underserved market represents an enormous opportunity, if approached correctly.

In the seminal work, EVEolution, author Faith Popcorn addresses the discernible fact that women and men are different, that marketing to women requires a very different approach. As she writes, “Women want a brand to extend into their lives in as many ways as possible. They want a brand to speak to their heads and their hearts. To understand them. To recognize their needs, values, standards, and dreams.”

Continuing, she adds, “And what women don’t want is just as important as what they do. They don’t want to do business with an organization, a company, or a brand that condescends to them. That inconveniences them. That makes them wait, argue, or defend themselves.”

In many ways, therefore, marketing to women requires much more sensitivity, but, if you get it right, you will establish a highly loyal and devoted client base—one that is naturally more inclined than men to boast of your products, services, and offerings.

Continue Reading

The apparel, accessories and home furnishings retailer teamed up with Acuity Mobile last broaden its presence through mobile web as well as texting.

“By providing this customer experience, we hope to communicate with our customers in a targeted and relevant way,” said Dmitri Siegel, managing director of Urban Outfitters Direct, in a statement.

About 88 percent of U.S. consumers use mobile phones with text capabilities, according to the Mobile Marketing Association. But of those consumers, less than 24 percent opt to receive messages from a company via text. And while advertisers have been hesitant to reach out to consumers via mobile phone, the rising number of mobile marketing advertisers could soon turn this fear into profit.

As many have discovered, the key toward a successful text ad campaign is urgency – and one way to create such urgency is through offers or coupons. Just 18 percent of consumers who opt for company texts receive these now, though such coupons received a 7 to 14 percent redemption rate – much higher than the 1 percent rate of traditional couponing, said Margaret Donnelly, vice president of business devleopment and marketing of mobile messaging company Jittergram, to Inc.

“We’ve already seen local restaurants send the day’s specials to nearby lunch patrons,” said Kim Bayne, author of Marketing Without Wires, to Entrepreneur. “The cost is fairly low, and it can be done from a PC, without involving a pricey service provider.”

Acuity Mobile will also oversee the launch of the Urban Outfitters mobile site and m-commerce suite – both of which could reach 64 percent of U.S. mobile phones users. Such secondary Web sites have become a major focus of mobile marketing advertisers, as most mobile phones cannot display business Web sites utilizing more than basic HTML.

With more than 144 stores worldwide, Urban Outfitters may be more of a major retailers. But, as entrepreneurship experts have long explained, small business owners are also capable of using -and affording – mobile marketing.

The first steps can be as simple as updating your profile on online business locators like Google Maps, or figuring out how to make your business Web site more mobile friendly. John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing discloses that he uses a service called MoFuse.

Small business owners, have you used mobile marketing yet? Share your experiences in the comments.

Amy

A: Advertising more right now makes intuitive sense to me, but does it make actual real business sense?  Maybe, but maybe not.

Intuitively, one thing that is clear right now is that people are looking for a bargain;  customer loyalty is a bit of any oxymoron as customers are generally more interested in saving money than patronizing their favorite businesses. As such,  advertising can put your business in front of these potential customers.  That is my intuitive take.

But a really interesting new book calls into question that very premise (which is actually also the premise of the question above) as well as other sacred cows of conventional business wisdom.  The book is called Duck and (Re)Cover by Steven S. Little (Note: Steve is an associate of mine as this book is published by John Wiley & Sons, who also publishes my Small Business Bible).

In the book, Little points out that this piece of conventional wisdom – that advertising more in a recession leads to increased sales growth – is essentially an urban myth.

The book explains that if you Google the terms “recession” “advertising” “study” and “sales growth” – you end up with millions of pages that essentially say something like “The results of a study indicate that businesses that maintained or increased their advertising expenditures during the 1981-1982 recession averaged significantly higher sales growth.”

The book notes that the study is then cited ad-nauseum by anyone who wants to get you to advertise more right now, for example:

• The radio station that cites the report to explain why people need to advertise on its station now more than ever
• The PR firm, saying that marketing with them in a downturn is critical
• The freelance copywriter who is looking for clients

So Little decided to find out what this study actually says. It turns out that all of these sites are talking about the “McGraw Hill Research Laboratory of Advertising Performance Report #5262.” Little discovered that what report #5262 actually says and what the millions of sites citing it think it says are not nearly the same thing.

In fact, Little found that report #5262 expressly states that there is no “causality” between advertising in a recession and sales growth, that the study only looked at public companies, that these companies had sales more than $1 billion a year, and that the study took place in 1985.

So, as Little concludes, the McGraw-Hill study and its ‘advertise more’ conclusion only tangentially relates to you if you own “a relatively large industrial company with a business-to-business advertising bent” and you think a study that is more than 20 years old can help you in the 21st century (P.11).

Little’s point, and the point of the book, is that you need to examine closely your business beliefs, especially those relating to how to deal with “the choppy waters of a recession.” Yes, advertising more may make sense for you, but if it does, it is not because of some old study that is oft misquoted, it is because that is what your business today, properly analyzed, requires.

And that is what this book does. It helps business owners analyze the state of their business accurately and then it prescribes various ways to see and seize the opportunities that are out there. It is, as the subtitle suggests, “the embattled business owner’s guide to survival and growth.”

As Little told me last week, “in a time like this, opportunities will become available – but you have to get yourself ready for them. That is what the book is designed do” The trick, he says, is not to over-compensate, or do nothing, or to do what you have always done (because the market has changed now) but to use logic to make smart choices.
This is a really good book. I say check it out.

Today’s tip: Another piece of conventional wisdom given to small business owners is to ‘get a board of advisors.’ But where do you find them? Where do you find business mentors, other business owners, entrepreneurs to commiserate with, etc.?

Here’s a resource you may not know about: PartnerUp.com is a great site that offers entrepreneurs the chance to meet and partner up with other entrepreneurs, find mentors, network, and more.

With e-retailers expected to buy less holiday season merchandise this year because of the economic downturn, they need to sharpen their strategies in coordinating pricing promotions with available inventory, says Paula Rosenblum, managing director at research and advisory firm Retail Systems Research LLC.

“Plan a pricing strategy, plan your inventory strategy, and make sure the two are in synch,” Rosenblum says.

She adds that retailers this year, worried about overbuying merchandise in an off economic year, may experience unusually high levels of inventory out-of-stock. If that turns out to be the case, it will be even more important for retailers to take several steps to increase gross margins on merchandise sales to help compensate for the loss of revenue, Rosenblum says.

Retailers working with lean inventory levels should take a harder at free-shipping offers and how they’ll affect product sales, for instance, and work with merchandise suppliers to apply the steepest promotional price discounts to products that will be available in the highest volume.

“Work with merchandise vendors to figure out what your sacrificial lambs will be and how you can work together to maximize order fill rates,” Rosenblum advises retailers. She adds that arranging for some suppliers to ship heavily promoted products directly to customers could be a good option for maximizing both order fill rates and gross margins.

“We know there’s a lot retailers cannot plan, and we don’t know what the economy is going to really look like,” Rosenblum says. “But we can plan for all kinds of contingencies. A retailer winner will do that now to have a better holiday season.”

http://www.internetretailer.com/dailyNews.asp?id=30433

(Part 2 of 2)

Mike

A: Last week, I wrote about how critical it is today to have, not just an online presence, but a professional, robust, powerful Internet presence; how you need to embrace social networking, and  how your website is as “important today as a business card was in the last century” (Rod Kurtz, Inc. Magazine)

This week, I would like to drill down a little bit into maybe my favorite e-marketing tool – e-mail marketing. There are all sorts of ways to use email to grow your business, but for my money, the bread-and-butter, best ways are e-newsletters, and actual emails.

But don’t just take my word for it. When it comes to email marketing, there may be no more knowledgeable a source than Gail Goodman, the dynamic CEO of Constant Contact, one of the top email marketing companies in the world.

Goodman started running Constant Contact in 1999 and has since grown it into a business with more than 250,000 customers. She was named the Best Entrepreneur in the 2007 Stevie Awards for Women in Business, and her company came in at Number 16 on Entrepreneur Magazine’s Top 50 fastest-growing women-led companies.

So when I recently spoke with Goodman about why email marketing is so effective, she was, not surprisingly, a source of great ideas. To start with, she says, the essential power of email marketing is that it “facilitates repeat sales and word of mouth referrals while also keeping you visible. It is also very affordable and stretches your marketing dollar.”

Think about it. People forward emails. That is a form of word-of-mouth advertising. The same is true for e-newsletters. As such, email marketing both helps with customer retention as well as customer acquisition. And that it takes little more than some sweat equity makes it quite attractive in this economy.

Goodman says that today, e-mail becomes even more important since it allows you to forge a connection with customers, and that can make the difference between someone being a one-shot and a repeat customer.

For maximum effectiveness, Goodman advises that your email correspondence be all about them, not you. Of course you can and should use email to announce a sale or some other special, but to be truly successful, the savvy email marketer will use email to connect with their customers.

Says Goodman, “Don’t use email or e-newsletters to always ask for an order, instead, use it to help your customers. If you own a restaurant, for example, send out a recipe or a coupon.” The important thing, she notes, is that you use your email to stay in, well, if constant contact, then at least regular contact.

This leads to her other important point, namely, that not only must you get permission (”It is not like direct mail where you can just send mail to anyone”), but that in fact “permission is perishable.”

When someone opts-in for your e-newsletter or otherwise gives you their e-mail address, Goodman says that “it is, of course, not permission for daily emails, and it is also not permission to wait a year. Use that permission wisely.”

If you do that, if you create and grow a list of customers and their e-mail addresses, and then use that list to stay in touch by making your correspondence about them, and thereby forge a connection with them, then you will be well on your way to becoming a master e-marketer.

Today’s Tip: One of my favorite business shows is MSNBC’s Your Business, on Sunday mornings (and not because I am an occasional guest.) The show is full of great ideas, insights, and real world strategies. Aside from hosting the show, the multi-talented host JJ Ramberg is also small business owner herself. It is fun to watch and I always learn something new. Steve says check it out.

(Part 1 of 2)

Mike

A: I couldn’t agree with you more. Did you know that more than half of all small businesses in this country do not even have a website? (Maybe the only thing worse than no website is having a bad one, since instead of leaving no impression, you leave a bad one instead.)

Not having a great website, not having a robust Internet presence, and not marketing and selling online constitutes business malpractice in the 21^st Century.

Beefing up your online presence is like getting in shape. What you must do today is flex your digital muscles.

Here’s how:

1. Build website muscles. As I said, the only thing worse than no website is having a bad one.

We all know what those look like, don’t we? It’s the site where the homepage scrolls on for about five minutes, where the graphics are jarring and ugly, it has too much copy and slow loading graphics, and it says “© 2004″ at the bottom. In short, the bad site looks like, not only did your teenage daughter build it for you, but no one has attended to it in several years.

What a mistake.

To me, there are two exceptionally great things about the Internet, from a small business perspective:

• It allows you access to markets you otherwise could never reach, and
• It allows you to look every bit a big and professional as the Big Boys.

So where do you get that great website? There are no shortage of online options.

Example: Last week, my brother (who is no Webhead) had to build a site for one of his marketing clients. So he surfed over to Microsoft Office Live (Microsoft is a company I do some work with, btw), and built his client an elegant, great looking site – for free.  With a simple point and click graphic interface, and pre-loaded templates, here is but one way that anyone can get and grow online easily and affordably.

The important thing is that you take advantage of such tools. Beefing up your Web muscles will make your business less wimpy.

2. Find some “workout” partners: Going to the gym is a social activity, and in that vein, the more friends who support your efforts to get in digital shape, the better you will do.

The Web is a social medium, so it behooves you to take advantage of everything that it offers. Doing so will help you create advocates, find new customers, locate strategic partners, and drive increased sales.

There are several ways to do this:

Get social: It’s not called “social media” for no reason. Sites like Facebook and Twitter enable you to connect with other small business owners and potential customers.

I have a pal in San Francisco who has created many significant and lucrative business deals via LinkedIn. He will have some project he is working on and will need to tap some business for sales or partnering or whatever. He has found that he almost always is able to get to the right person in those companies through his LinkedIn connections.

Be Web 2.0 friendly: This era of the Internet, the Web 2.0 era, is distinguished by interactivity; people want to do more than just read about your business on your site. They expect to some level of interaction. So that is what you must give them.

That means different things, from forums and videos to blogs, comments, and podcasts. Making and posting a video, for example, explaining who you are and what you do is not difficult.

Help people find you: Your site also needs to be search engine optimized (SEO). SEO will allow your site to be found by people who share your interests, who are looking for what it is you sell. Having keywords sprinkled throughout your site will, like Jerry Maguire, help them help you.

The point is, the more professional, social, and interactive your site, the more you will be able to grow your business, easily and affordably, and thus allow you to get in Webtastic shape.

(Next week – using email to grow your business)

Today’s Tip: Warrilow and Co. is looking for the next Small Business Marketer of the Year. If you or someone you know has created a marketing campaign that created superior results, you could win an all-expenses paid trip to Las Vegas, and, even better, inclusion in various social networking sites. Apply here.

By the end of November, Blue Nile, De Beers, and Tiffany’s – some of the industry’s Goliaths – had all reported sales declines with the economic downturn to blame. As a result, while most other retailers reduced their yearly forecasts, others have experimented with new marketing campaigns that play with customers’ heartstrings:

Stuller

Along with its Red Box Diamond brand, this Louisiana-based manufacturer and distributor is also supplying its own marketing campaign that reminds the customer of Diamond Moments – a birthday, an anniversary, a milestone – in which its jewelry would serve as a meaningful gift.

“We want to create demand,” said Stanley Zale, vice president of diamonds, to National Jeweler. “We want to create markets. We’re not waiting for someone to do it.”

Until December 31, Stuller is also encouraging customers to submit their own Diamond Moments story, for a chance to win a pair of diamond stud earrings. Claudia Evans Stuller, the company’s business development director, has also appeared on home makeover show Designing Spaces to promote the campaign and contest.

JCPenney

“Diamonds have always been a girl’s best friend, but men don’t always remember how much women enjoy receiving diamond jewelry for the holidays,” said Beryl Raff, executive vice president of fine jewelry, in a statement. As a hard-hitting reminder, the retailer launched BewareoftheDoghouse.com.

Its main feature is a four-minute video, telling the story of a man banished from his home after he gave his wife a dual-bag vacuum cleaner as a gift. He ends up in the "doghouse," where men like himself repent after such thoughtless gift-giving. In its cliffhanger ending, the camera pans in on a diamond necklace.

With such sentiment in mind, women visiting the Web site can also warn their significant others that they deserve a “Doghouse” lesson. Luckily for such men, women can also note through these e-mail notifications a way out: one of six JCPenney diamond gifts they’d prefer to receive.

Bailey’s Fine Jewelry

Since August, Bailey’s Fine Jewelry have scattered its trademark black-and-white striped gift boxes with red bows in the North Carolina towns of its three stores: Raleigh, Greenville, and Rocky Mount. As an attached note indicates, anyone who stumbles across them gets “finders keepers” on the jewelry gift tucked inside.

Trey Bailey, director of operations, thought that such gifts – with values ranging from $20 to $100 – would help generate more business. If anything else, the campaign has proven to generate buzz quickly. Cecilia Upchurch, the first to find a Bailey’s gift, told the story of how she found a box to her friends, church members, and family through its Web site, according to The News and Observer.

Governments, businesses, and individuals are all on the green train, but there is a new worry on the horizon: will people eventually tire of being told what to do in order to save the planet?

There is a curve when it comes to marketing of any product or idea. First, the idea starts small, then gains momentum. Eventually the idea has the support of thousands of people, but then a funny thing happens: all of a sudden, everyone gets tired of hearing the same old message.

It Ain’t Easy Being Green

This has happened time and again in marketing, but the problem with consumers and so- called eco-fatigue is that the very life of the planet depends on people continuing to live greener – and supporting businesses that conduct business in a greener manner.

In other words, no one can become eco-fatigued enough that they actually fall asleep, or the result may be a permanent coma.

So how does a business go about helping others, and the business itself, to avoid eco- fatigue? Well, first of all businesses need to be leaders in the area of green living. Businesses need to show people, through example, that their impact on the environment is important to them.

They can do so by using recycled and recyclable packaging with the recycle symbol on it. Refusing to use too many supplies – and making sure those supplies are eco-friendly – will also send the message that your business cares about the environment.

Use A Light Touch

And that is really what avoiding eco-fatigue is about; staying away from the point where people begin to feel as though they are being bullied into inconvenient behaviors in order to circumvent a catastrophe at some point in the distant future.

The campaign surrounding green living has traditionally centered around fear and guilt, and people just can’t take that kind of treatment for long (just look at how effective it is on your teenager!).

Sooner or later they rebel, and it usually happens in a big way; while they may have done little things before to help out, now they do nothing because they are just tired of being pushed into it.

The way to avoid this problem lies in the way we state what green living is all about. It is surprising how little of the ‘living green’ campaign focuses on how smart green living actually is; it is not just about the environment, it is about the bottom line.

Turning off lights, using less water and driving less means a far less outlay of cash. It is just more convenient to do paperless paper work; much easier to send messages wirelessly, and much easier to keep records.

In order to avoid eco-fatigue, then, it is important both to lead and to emphasize the positive. Doing so will be good for your business – and good for the planet.

In fact, tens of thousands of items of clothing, both new and used, are traded on eBay every week. Though there are other specialist clothing auction sites available, none of them can guarantee anything like as many potential customers. Whether you represent a clothing company or are a private individual wanting to make some money out of old garments which no longer fit, eBay will often be your best bet. Along with all those customers, however, comes all that competition. How can you make your item stand out? How can you make a potential customer feel as if he or she can reach out and touch it?

I am continually amazed to see items of clothing advertised on eBay without accompanying pictures. Such items hardly ever sell. Why would they? Unless you’re selling a designer piece which everybody in your market niche is familiar with (in which case you should be promoting it as much as possible in order to encourage high bidding), people will be buying blind. Customers need to be able to imagine how they or their loved ones will look in the clothes they buy. The clothes must be presented clearly, in a good light. If an item has unusual features at the front and back, it may be wise to include several pictures. You can compound your pictures into a single image if you want to avoid paying extra fees. Consider whether the item looks best in a static pose or when moving – for instance, a full skirt should be drawn outward so that the customer can see how much fabric it contains, and giving the impression that it’s swinging outward helps the customer to imagine how it will look when she’s walking around in it.

It’s important to portray items of clothing in the right setting. Designer wear often looks best in a plain studio photograph, because that’s how it is intended to be seen. Fashionable urban wear can look good shot against the backdrop of a busy street or a window view of a city. Practical outdoor wear might be best photographed in your garden. This helps customers to think about the image which the clothing can give them, even if they don’t intend it to be worn in those environments.

Finally, when you have described the color and style of your garment, don’t forget about the texture. Texture is an important factor in many people’s purchasing choices. Make sure you identify the fabric accurately and any special features (such as whether it is crushed or pleated). Close-up photos can be used to highlight attractive details.

Properly packaged, your eBay item can seem every bit as appealing as a beautiful piece of clothing on the catwalk or in a high street store.