How to Listen in the Age of the Customer

Guest Blogger Series Part 2: John Jantsch is a marketing and digital technology coach and award-winning social media publisher. His Duct Tape Marketing Blog was chosen as a Forbes favorite for small business and marketing and is a Harvard Business School featured marketing site.

Listening to the wants and needs of your markets and customers has always been a good idea. Any good salesperson can tell you the benefits of listening - if you do it right the prospect will always reveal how to get the sale.

In today's rapidly shifting business environment listening is one of the key competitive tactics, but the sheer volume of what's being said makes it a more complicated exercise. The days of spending a little time down at the barber shop to measure the pulse of the market are long past.

Today's marketing must also employ a powerful set of digital ears to monitor and engage in the millions of conversations going on simultaneously in every corner of town and every corner of the planet.

By setting up filtering, aggregating and alert technology or services you can gain access to real-time conversations about:

• Your customer's ongoing experience
  
• Any brand/product/CEO mentions
  
• Complaints about competing services
  
• Inaccurate information about your organization
  
• Thoughts and needs of journalists in your industry

The key is to create, either on your own or through a paid service, a dashboard that delivers the conversations surrounding topics of interest right to your inbox or browser as part of your measurement suite of analytics.

Your do it yourself toolbox should include:

• Google alerts - Google Alerts allows you set-up customer searches for any phase and receive email or RSS alerts any time your phrase shows up in online media, blogs, web pages and news.
  
• Search.twitter - For now, monitoring twitter is a separate stream (Google seems to be adding twitter conversations to SERPs) - using the advanced search function allows you set-up very specific searches, even including geographic details. These searches produce RSS feeds and can then be subscribed to.
  
• tweetbeep.com - Similar to Google Alerts, but for twitter. Set-up search phrases and receive notification any time your phrases show up in twitter conversations.
  
• Boardtracker.com - focuses on the most popular bulletin board conversations and can turn up responses that don't show up anywhere else. Some industries still have very heavy bulletin board use.
  
• Backtype.com - Backtype is a search engine of sorts that focuses on blog comments. Blog comments don't often make it into the mainstream search results so this is a way to listen in on this set of content.
• Social Mention - this is a mashup search engine of many of the formats of content such as audio and video - I've found it a very nice way to turn up some mentions that don't occur anywhere else.

Many organizations may find that the ability to listen in digitally is so important or so time consuming that they need to employ a paid service to do it. In addition, these services offer countless ways to filter and analyze the data you collect in far greater ways then you might on your own. The greater level of analysis is a great way to spot trends, find opportunities and measure ROI for your online marketing efforts.

Some popular paid services include:

• Radian6 - Robust set of analytics, relates data in some very cool ways
  
• Trackur - advanced set of tools, well worth the cost
  
• Buzzlogic - focuses on helping you find key influencers driving conversations.
  
• Filtrbox - very easy to use, powerful and low cost

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Author of Duct Tape Marketing - The World's Most Practical
Small Business Marketing Guide - Order Here
John Jantsch | Duct Tape Marketing
916 W 47th Street | Kansas City, MO 64112
866-DUC-TAPE (382-8273)
skype: ducttapemarketing

Thanks, John. That was really important information with great advice and links.

MerchantCircle members also have a few different free options on tracking your online reputation, starting with MerchantCircle360, where you are given a reputation score based on your online activity and exposure. You are also given helpful tips on how to improve your score.

MerchantCircle also shows you where you are listed online and where you aren't - tracking your business reviews for easy viewing. Click here to view.

Stay tuned for Dane Carlson's guest post....

MerchantCircle is Hiring!

To help facilitate and nurture MerchantCircle's significant membership and traffic growth, we're looking for a few good folks to join our small, close-knit team. With over 750,000 members and only 17 employees, there's a lot of room for passionate, energetic, multi-taskers, who want to dabble in several aspects of a still-growing, profitable internet company.

Some of the positions available:

- Web Application Engineer/Search
- Revenue Product Manager
- Community Manager
- Director of Inside Sales
- Director of Business Development

Click here to get the full details on job descriptions.

Sincerely,
Community Relations

Google's Fail Whale Effects on Website Traffic

As if we needed any more indication on the importance of organic search to our ability to drive local traffic, take a look at what today's Google outage meant for our traffic from around 8am PST to about 9am PST.



Interestingly enough, our Chairman and Co-Founder, Ben T. Smith, IV, was speaking at the Orrick Total Access Conference and mentioned a Google network failure as one of his "two big unreasonable worries."

While you can see the dip in traffic above, fortunately our network of over 750K members bypass Google and other search engines and come directly to our site to update their listings and connect with their customers. Also, while Google dominates search, a fair number of merchants and consumers still use Yahoo! and MSN.

As for membership joins, we experienced a drop of about a third. Traffic seems to have stabilized for now, but for one day, one of our Chairman's worst worries was realized. His other big unreasonable worry? A consumer credit market failure....

Sincerely,
Community Relations

P.S. Thanks, Ivan Lanin for the whale!

How To Do Local SEO in Five Minutes (Or So)

We're very excited to kick off our Guest Blogger Series with Andrew Shotland, a consultant and expert on local search optimization and small business marketing.

by Andrew Shotland
http://www.localseoguide.com/

SEO, the art and science of ranking well in search engines, is one of those things that is easy to learn but hard to master, so let’s focus on the easy part. You’ve got a website and it’s not ranking in Google so well for whatever search term you are coveting. So what do you do?

Here are some (hopefully) simple things you can do, or even better tell someone else to do, to get your SEO strategy in gear:

1. Figure Out Your Target Audience
Until you know who you are targeting there is not much point in doing SEO. What words are your potential customers searching with when you want to be found? What are different modes are they in when they are searching? Are they ready to buy? Are they just doing research? Are they big spenders or are they cheapskates?

In general pick terms that match up with your service, that you think will convert well (conversion is a another five minute discussion altogether btw) and that have good search volume. To get an idea of search volume use Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool which can be found here:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Once you come up with your target keyword list…

2. Update Your Page Titles
The page title or “title tag” is perhaps the most important element of SEO. These are the words that appear at the top of your web browser when you are on a page. They are also the words that show up in the blue links in Google.

Put the search terms you are targeting in your page titles. In general keep the titles as brief as possible while at the same time making them appealing to searchers. No easy trick. Put the most important keywords at the beginning of the title. Don’t worry about getting this perfect the first time as these are very easy to change and Google usually reacts to these changes quickly. And if your website developer tells you these are really hard or expensive to change, get a new website developer.

3. Make Each Page Title Unique
It is also important that all of the pages on your site have unique page titles. A quick way to see if you have more than one page with the same title is to do the following search in Google:

site:yoursite.com intitle”the words in the title”

The results of this search will show all of the pages in Google that have these words in the title. Once you identify these problem pages you can update the titles to make them unique.

And make sure you add your city name to the titles as a lot of people search for your service in your city.

It also couldn’t hurt if you added some text to the actual page that uses the keywords you are targeting as well, in both the body of the text and the <h1> tag, which is typically the headline of the page. If you don’t have a page that targets the keywords you are using, add a new page that does.

You also should check the meta descriptions tags of each page to make sure those are unique as well.

4. Add a Few Internal Links
The number of links a page gets from its own site and which pages link to it matters. The home page is the most important on the site and so the pages that are linked to from the home page are also important. Figure out which pages you want to rank the most (and don’t say all of them) and add links from other pages to these pages. Make sure you use relevant keywords in the text of those links. For example if you want to rank the page for “pizza” use the word “pizza” in the text of the links that go to that page. Try not to use the exact same phrases in each link to make it look more “natural”. For example in some of the links use “best pizza” or “man that’s a helluva a pizza”.

5. Add Your Address to Every Page
Ideally every page should have your address and phone number. This is helpful for users but it also reinforces your location to the search engines. If your business has multiple locations then you may want to create a separate page for each location or at least a single page that lists all locations. Make sure you link to these pages from as many pages as possible on the site. It would probably be a good idea to list as many location names as possible on the home page too.

6. Claim Your Profile on Merchant Circle, Google Local Business Center, Yahoo Local, etc.
There are a huge number of yellow pages-like sites that allow you to update your business information for free. These sites get a lot of traffic and tend to rank well. At the least you should go to each one, claim your profile and make sure they are linking to your site. You may be surprised at how much business you can get from these free listings. Here’s a list of a few of them:
http://www.localseoguide.com/how-to-update-your-internet-yellow-pages-listings-for-free/

7. Make a Video
And I am not talking about a multimillion dollar production. Ask your kid to point the camera at you and start talking. Explain your service and try to be charming. Mention your website a lot. Then upload it to YouTube and every other free video site and title the video with your top keywords (e.g. “Best Pizza in Pleasanton”). Make sure your website is linked to from your profile. Then link to these video pages from your site with the keywords in the link text. You will be amazed at how easy it is for these pages to rank for your search terms.

If you want to do something more professional, there are a number of services that can help you including www.spotzer.com, www.mixpo.com, www.spotmaker.com , and www.turnhere.com .

8. Add a Blog To Your Site
A blog is just a simple way to add pages to your website. A good, or even bad, web developer should be able to set up a simple blog for you in a few minutes. If you don’t want it super customized it shouldn’t cost that much. Once it’s up start writing. I am not talking novels or even journalism. I am talking keywords. If you want to rank for “Pizza in Pleasanton” write a blog post called “Pizza in Pleasanton: What’s Cooking Tonight At Joe’s Pizza”. Go to http://blogsearch.google.com/ping and add your blog’s URL to Google’s blogsearch engine. Now everytime you write something on the blog it will instantly be added to Google, and each of those posts has a chance of ranking for the term you are targeting.

9. Make Sure You Don’t Have Any Technical Issues
There are a number of technical issues that could be preventing your site from ranking. An easy way to identify them is to sign up your site to Google Webmaster Tools at http://www.google.com/webmasters/start/. By copying a short line of code to your site you can get an idea of some of the common problems that Google is having with it. Google provides you with some detail about the problem. There is not much you yourself can likely do about these problems, but you can at least show them to your website developer or a SEO guy and ask him/her to figure it out.

10. Get Links
Now none of this stuff will work very well if you don’t have any links to your site. The big search engines look at links from other sites as a sign of quality and trust. So you should spend the remainder of your five minutes thinking about what other sites you think you can get links from. Here are some of the obvious ones:
- Chambers of commerce/local business groups
- Local business directories/Local newspaper site
- Friends who have sites (including your kid’s blog)
- Partners/Vendors

There are hundreds of other ways to get links like writing articles for other sites, sending out press releases, adding your business info to social media sites, making a fool of yourself in public, etc.

It’s important to understand that SEO is not a one-time thing just like running a TV ad campaign is not a one-time thing. It’s a marketing tactic like any other. And as more people use the Web to find local services, SEO could become one of the more important components of your marketing plan. So get familiar with it today so you can master it tomorrow.

Ok so maybe that took more than five minutes but half the battle of marketing is just getting your attention right?

If you have any more questions about SEO or Pleasanton, but not about proctologists, please stop by my blog at http://www.localseoguide.com/ or drop me a line at localseo@localseoguide.com.

MerchantCircle's Guest Blogger Series Continues with John Jantsch in 2 weeks.

MerchantCircle Guest Blogger Series

As technology, the web, and the tools to drive more customers to your business evolve, we’ve compiled a group of experts in various fields to help you navigate the changing field of play. Over the next 3 months (starting in May), be sure to check back at the beginning and middle of each month for a new guest contributor post. We’d like to introduce the first group of contributors:

• Andrew Shotland – Local SEO Guide - I currently provide clients with SEO and SEM consulting services. I specialize in local search engine optimization but I work on all types of sites. Clients include large media and e-commerce companies, Web 2.0ish start-ups and even my local cabinet guy (I got a great deal on custom cabinets).
Previously I was head of product and business development for Insider Pages where I developed a SEO program that attracted over 3 million monthly unique visitors almost solely via SEO. In a past life I was GM of NBC.com.

• John Jantsch – Duct Tape Marketing - John Jantsch is a marketing and digital technology coach, award winning social media publisher and author of "Duct Tape Marketing - The World's Most Practical Small Business Marketing Guide".

He is the creator of the Duct Tape Marketing small business marketing system and Duct Tape Marketing Authorized Coach Network.

His Duct Tape Marketing Blog was chosen as a Forbes favorite for small business and marketing and is a Harvard Business School featured marketing site. His blog was also chosen as "Best Small Business Marketing Blog" in 2004, 2005 and 2006 by the readers of Marketing Sherpa.

• Dane Carlson – Business Opportunities Weblog Network - I own the Business Opportunities Weblog Network, the most popular niche business blog network.

Dane Carlson's Business Opportunities Weblog is the premier blog of ideas and opportunities for small business entrepreneurs and is one of the most widely read business blogs. In over ten thousand posts since 2001, author Dane Carlson has proven the notion that "ideas are cheap," and pushed hundreds of inventors, entrepreneurs and small scale capitalists towards their dream of owning and running their own business.

• Samuel Bornstein – Kean University School of Business - For the past 30 years, Professor Bornstein has been a tenured Professor of Accounting and Taxation, and for the past 32 years a CPA and Consultant in public practice for Bornstein & Song, CPAs & Consultants.

Since 2000, Professor Bornstein has researched the causes and solutions to Small Business Failure and Financial Literacy. His research evolved into a study of Small Business and the Subprime Mortgage Crisis. Prof. Bornstein’s research determined the most effective content for “Specific and Immediate Financial Guidance” as a solution to this crisis. His focus has been to research "Artificial Intelligence" as an effective delivery system for Financial Literacy Education for Small Business, Adults, and K-12.

• Gail Gardner – GrowMap - Gail has been involved in the computer industry since the late 1970s, originally servicing hardware, and as a Project Manager for data processing centers, banks, and retailers.

Since 2003, she has worked exclusively in online marketing, specializing in optimizing blogs and ecommerce sites, pay per click advertising, and Local Search listings.

I hope you will find the guest blog post rewarding and educational.

Sincerely,
Community Relations

The Case for Using Stimulus Dollars to Help Out Small Business Owners

We've just completed research here at MerchantCircle in partnership with Professor Samuel D. Bornstein of Kean University School of Business and Jung I. Song, CPA of Bornstein & Song, CPAs & Consultants. The survey had some startling results that we hope to use to influence legislation that will immediately help small business owners in and around California.

Our study shows that a 2nd Wave of Foreclosures in California will dwarf the subprime crisis and threatens more that 2.1 million jobs from business owners who refinanced their homes to pay for business expenses. You can read our study results and summary here. Our survey and answers from small business owners are below.

As first steps towards getting coverage on the ongoing crisis to help out small business owners, BusinessWeek (click here to read) and KXTV News 10 in Sacramento (click here to see the story) have already used our findings in their stories.

It’s a particularly troubling issue for small business owners that will further extend the economic difficulties in California. We hope to influence California Assembly Speaker Karen Bass and Assembly Member Manuel Perez, who will lead a new Assembly task force charged with maximizing the impact of federal economic stimulus dollars: (SERJ) Stimulus, Economic Recovery, and Jobs Task Force.



















Sincerely,
Community Relations

Introducing MerchantCircle Moderator Joe Williams and Airbrush Gypsy!

In Columbia, VA, Joe Williams started Airbrush Gypsy as a side venture from his full-time job as a truck driver. His hope in 2005 was to someday give up driving trucks for a living to run his new business full-time. Of course, no business becomes successful without a few mistakes along the way.

“When I first started the business, I paid $185 per year to get my company listed on a site called Party Pop,” says Joe. “My Party Pop listing was showing up lower on search engine results than my free MerchantCircle ad, so I canceled my Party Pop account and now I only use MerchantCircle with better search engine results. I have become much more involved in the MerchantCircle community which has also helped my search engine rankings. More people find me on Google now and I get about 25% more customers calling than I had been receiving.”

When Joe first started, Airbrush Gypsy was just a temporary airbrush tattoo business with one family employee. It has since evolved to Airbrush Gypsy Entertainment with more than just airbrush tattoos. Other services now being offered also include airbrush face painting, balloon animals and tie-dye t-shirt classes, with 5 airbrush artists that travel all over the state of Virginia. On many weekends, Airbrush Gypsy Entertainment books up to four events at one time.

“MerchantCircle has really helped in the growth of my business,” says Joe. “Being able to send out invites to my business neighbors has led to real leads and repeat customers. I’m still a little bit away from giving up my full-time job, but a lot closer than I was before MerchantCircle.”

You can also find Joe in the MerchantCircle Forums, where he is one of a handful of merchant moderators. To learn more about how you can find new customers – click here. Visit Airbrush Gypsy Entertainment – Click here.

Thanks Joe! See you in the forums!

Sincerely,
Community Relations