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Choosing Domain Names For International Business

Written on July 27, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object

If you’re choosing domain names for your business with the intention of going global, then you have quite a lot to think about. You might want to incorporate keywords in your domain name — but how do you handle this across multiple different languages? Or you might choose an invented new word to be your domain — but how do you check if that will work in international markets. A few simple checks prevent lots of pain!



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How Good B2B Marketers Cheat

Written on July 26, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: chat, searchengineguide

by Mike Moran

If you have a business-to-business (B2B) Web site, you’re probably tired of all the trite advice you see out there from experts who are clearly speaking to those in the business-to-consumer (B2C) industry. I mean, each time you read these opinions about what you should do, do you find yourself asking, “How is that realistic in my B2B business?” And you might be wondering where the really smart B2B marketers look for their new ideas. And the answer is…those crazy B2C Web sites. Let me explain why.

No matter that all of your customers are businesses themselves, each person you sell to is also a consumer, and they spend far more of their time online being a consumer shopper than a business shopper. What that means is that every time they come to your site, they bring all the sensibilities of a consumer to your business interaction. They expect you to be just as easy as Amazon.com—being a B2B company doesn’t change what they expect.

Image by dailyinvention via Flickr

So, when you are trying to figure out how to improve your B2B experience, look to B2C for your inspiration, because they probably got there first. Which of these things wouldn’t improve your Web site?

• Providing customers the choice of buying online or offline
• Making products easy to return
• Providing chat or phone support for those unable to understand your Web site

Now, not all of these things are affordable for you, but you might be able to do something better than you are doing now. Don’t believe me that your customers want what they get as consumers? Take a look at the history of B2B experiences:

• It wasn’t long ago that most B2B companies did not accept credit cards, requiring credit checks and paper billing at the end of each month.
• B2B sites didn’t offer any form of sign-in or other means of personalization, but now several do.
• B2B sites never posted ratings and reviews, but now a number of them do.

If you expect that B2B user experiences will remain wholly unaffected by B2C experience improvements, you haven’t been paying attention to what’s been happening. Your cheapest market research on what’s next in your business might be to look at businesses that you aren’t in.

Just a note to regular readers. I am disappearing for the next few weeks for my annual August vacation, but I will see you in September.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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How Good B2B Marketers Cheat

Get Back To Where Your Listings Once Belonged

Written on June 3, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object, book

This is a story about how much can be lost by mis-categorizing your business.
We received a complaint from an Oregon art supply store that they were being incorrectly compared to an irrelevant business. The so-called competitor, called Hair’s Where It’s At, was also categorized as an art supply store on AmIVisible.
Our initial assumption was that [...]



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Get Back To Where Your Listings Once Belonged

5 Ways to Connect Facebook with Your Business Life

Written on May 31, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Advertising, book

I’m a big fan of Facebook and as a matter of fact, I spend more time on Facebook than LinkedIn, Twitter or even GMail. One reason is that fundamentally, Facebook Apps make the social network the dashboard for my life on the web. And with Open Graph, Facebook will follow me everywhere I go, especially in the business world.

For example, I love utilizing more business oriented social networks like LinkedIn, it seems to be much more efficient to bring LinkedIn to me on FB, or bring the business into my dashboard (ie. Profile) as I’m connected with many more individuals on Facebook than LinkedIn. If anything, integrating my business tools as apps in Facebook also help me get better acquainted with my business colleagues.

Last week I was on a business trip and had dinner with clients. We talked about our families, sports and more general topics than just business primarily because we are all connected on Facebook. They know I’m a stand up guy with a baby, an NFL fan and enjoy running my great business. Likewise, I know more about them, so the end result was a new level of trust than can be built by pure business connections alone.

So, if you consider Facebook not just a social networking site but something that can help you promote your business, network with customers, communicate with business contacts and collaborate with coworkers, well then you are right. As proof, here are six business networking tools and apps that I suggest you utilize to integrate business into Facebook, and vice versa.

1. Professional Profile - This app lets you leverage your Facebook friends into business connections by consolidating professional information into one place. It allows you to create a tab on your profile for all of your professional contacts, information, and activities. This app is useful for separating your business and personal contacts.

2. Networked Blogs app - This business app allows you to promote your blog on Facebook as well as to discover new blogs. It shows up on your profile or in your boxes tab displaying your blog and any of the blogs that you like to read, including business-related blogs. The app also lets you import your blog feed to your profile or fan page, read news and vote articles you like.

3. My LinkedIn Profile - Although not officially affiliated with LinkedIn, this app connects your LinkedIn and Facebook accounts, allowing you to display your LinkedIn User profile or company profile on Facebook.

4. Tag Biz Business Network - This is useful for business networking purposes in the sense that it does the networking for you, hence saving you time while expanding your business network. Tag Biz automates the relationship networking and referral process by putting a custom business keyword tag cloud on your Facebook profile and on the Facebook profiles of your friends in your business network. TagBiz also adds your business to the Tag Biz business directory which has over 7000 listed businesses. You’d also get a Tag Biz customizable business card and signature line for all your Facebook messages and wall  postings when you install this app.

5. Working It - At first you might think that this Facebook app is good only for thanking friends or for giving props to people in your business network. But it can also be useful app for job search by letting you share your education, work experience and skills, and search over 5 million jobs and internships. The app also lets you build relationships with coworkers and network with professional contacts.

Do you use Facebook as a business connector? And if so, please recommend apps in the comments below.

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5 Ways to Connect Facebook with Your Business Life

Choosing the web address for a new website

Written on May 17, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: marketing, searchengineguide, seo

by Stone Reuning

Our online marketing clients often ask us to help
select domain names when setting up a new website. Indeed, there is an argument
that the domain name may impact search engine rankings for the site. But we
also think this decision deserves a lot of attention to how it will impact
the website’s user experience, from the impression it creates when it’s first
noticed to how easily it’s remembered. I’ll share with you a few of the things
we tell clients here.

There are several things to consider when
selecting a web address. Also called a URL or domain name, your web address
should meet these following criteria.

Easy to
remember - This includes the order of the words as well as the words
themselves. (Was that davisroberts.com or robertdavis.com?) If possible, it
should be descriptive of your business, so it helps explain what visitors
should expect.

Easy to
spell - Avoid words that people commonly have trouble spelling. It’ll save
you misery when you’re trying to give your URL over the phone and help avoid
typos in any press coverage you get, too.

Contains
keywords (your industry, location, etc.) - While it’s sometimes debated
whether there are any optimization benefits, all things equal, it may help. Use
hyphens to separate the words so the search engines can recognize the separate
words (seo-advantage.com
versus seoadvantage.com).
But make sure you buy both versions, so you can redirect any people who enter
your URL without the hyphens.

Brief -
What’s a good length? Well, that depends. Don’t sacrifice the other criteria
just to have a short URL - your initials, for example, are not going to carry a
lot of benefit unless your business is very famous (GM.com, for example). But
don’t make your web address so long and full of keywords that people will
confuse the order or leave out words if they’re trying to enter it directly.
Consider that it should also look good on your business cards, brochures and
other marketing materials.

The web address you choose will be influenced by
your business name and situation. If your company is well known or its name already
meets some of the criteria above, you’ll be best off simply using your
business-name.com or businessname.com. After all, that’s your brand, and you
want to build it to the max. Another thing to keep in mind is that you can
purchase multiple domain names that you think people may try to type in to find
you and then point them all at your main address.

Some final
advice: Get impressions from a few people before you settle on your web
address. You never know what a set of new eyes can pick up that you might have
missed. We wouldn’t have these hilarious URLs to poke fun at if the owners had
done that: Experts Exchange: www.expersexchange.com; IP Anywhere:
www.ipanywhere.com; Speed of Art; www.speedofart.com…you get the idea!

See examples and other things to consider in these
informative articles by other authors:

NewEntrepreneur.com:
Choosing a Website Address

rona123
at HubPages.com: How to Choose a Domain Name

TheSiteWizard.com:
Tips on Choosing a Domain Name

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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Choosing the web address for a new website

Google`s Living Stories: the Final Nail in the Coffin for Paper Media?

Written on March 8, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: chat

Google has earned the wrath of publishers before. You d be upset at Google too if it looked like the search giant was going to put you out of business — or at least force you to seriously rethink your business model. Living Stories one of Google s more recent endeavors presents news in a whole new way…with repercussions likely to be felt at every big newspaper….

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Google`s Living Stories: the Final Nail in the Coffin for Paper Media?

Keyword Difficulty vs. Size of Domain

Written on March 3, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: chat

You might wonder when it comes to competitive keywords does Google prefer ranking big domains This question can be answered by taking a close detailed look at the relationship between keyword difficulty and the size of the domain. The result of this study is important because it will lead us to a deeper understanding of the behavior of Google s ranking algorithm when it comes to ranking competitive keywords in relation to both small and large domains ….

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Google Gives a Thumbs-up to Reputation Management

Written on October 16, 2009 by admin

Filed Under: book, marketing, seo

It’s a good day for reputation management consultants everywhere–we just got Google’s official endorsement!

Yep, Google has come off the fence and wholeheartedly endorsed the creation of positive web content to try and outrank anything negative. In the Google post, the search engine does an admirable job of creating a primer for Google Reputation Management which includes this endorsement of creating positive web pages:

Instead, you can try to reduce its visibility in the search results by proactively publishing useful, positive information about yourself or your business. If you can get stuff that you want people to see to outperform the stuff you don’t want them to see, you’ll be able to reduce the amount of harm that that negative or embarrassing content can do to your reputation.
(emphasis Google’s)

Of course, this isn’t ground breaking in any way–Google also offers advice for SEO, although just as basic–but it’s nice to see Google giving the green light to online reputation management campaigns. I wonder how much of the impetus for this post came from all of the content removal requests Google gets each day.

PS. Once you’ve read Google’s reputation management advice, you can check out my Google reputation management tips here and don’t forget I have tons of this stuff in my book Radically Transparent!

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Google Gives a Thumbs-up to Reputation Management

3 Things I Learned About Business On My Summer Vacation

Written on August 13, 2009 by admin

Filed Under: Object, seo

…and how it relates to your business and your SEO.
As I write this, I’m on vacation in the Russian River Valley of Sonoma County, CA.  While this won’t be 100% organic SEO as is usually the topic, I’ll try my best to tie some of my vacation experiences to the SEO world, and to business [...]



….

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3 Things I Learned About Business On My Summer Vacation

How To Claim Your Google Maps Listing

Written on June 29, 2009 by admin

Filed Under: searchengineguide

by Miriam Ellis

A few day ago, a business owner told me about a rather complex problem with his Google Maps business listing and asked me what to do about it. My explanation was pretty long, starting with the need to claim his listing and ending with a warning that fixing errors in Google Maps isn’t always simple.

It took several paragraphs of detailed text to cover what I felt the business owner needed to do and he came back to me with a, “That’s great, but how do I claim my listing?” Sometimes, I get ahead of myself when I’m answering questions and in this case, I forgot for a moment that such a huge number of the business listings that make up Google’s local index are still unclaimed. Let’s get down to basics with this article. If you’ve been mystified by the verification process, read on!

Why Do You Need To Claim Your Google Maps Listing?

Important Reason #1 - Just as you keep careful tabs on the content you have published on your website about your business, you need to be in control of what content Google is publishing about your business. You may discover that Google has errors or blank spots in their data about you. The way for you to correct this is to let Google know you own the business, which I’ll describe how to do, so that you can officially edit the content of your business listing. Claiming your listing gives you improved control over how you are being represented by Google.

Important Reason #2 - Just like the rest of the web, Google’s local index is plagued with spammers and crooks. Unclaimed business listings are at risk of competitive hijacking. If you haven’t claimed your business listing, malicious parties can step in and alter its content for their own benefit - not yours. This has been an acute problem in Google Maps and your best defense is to lock down your listing by claiming it.

How To Claim Your Google Maps Listing

Step one is to go to Google Maps and do a search for your business. Let’s imagine we own K-Mart in San Mateo, California. So, we do a search for k-mart san mateo ca.
Unless your business is brand new, chances are it will have been indexed by Google already. So, all we have to do is click the More info link next to the business title, as shown:

This brings up the big popup to the right of the business listing. Click the Edit link, as shown:

This will bring up a second popup, this time a smaller one. In this popup, we see the question, Are you the owner? Claim your business:

Click that link and you will be taken to Google’s Local Business Center login page. If you already have a Google account of some kind, such as for gmail or Adwords, you can use your pre-existent login information to get into the Local Business Center. If you do not already have a Google account of some kind, you will need to create one at this point. Once you have logged in, you will be shown the business you want to claim.

Look carefully at all of the data in the listing! Are the address and phone number correct? Are the categories the business is listed in accurate? Are there additional details you could include, such as hours of operation, languages spoken or forms of payment accepted? Make sure the description of your business is as thorough and accurate as possible.

Once you have edited the data so that it is the best possible representation of your business, the Local Business Center asks you whether you would like to verify your changes to the listing by either phone or postcard. A phone call is the fastest way to go, but sometimes, the phone call doesn’t work because of weaknesses in Google’s phone system and you have to select the postcard route. In this case, Google will send you a small postcard containing a pin number that you need to phone in with when you receive it.

And that’s how you claim your Google Local Business Center listing.

Despite the fact that Google has given major prominence to their local search results in the Universal SERPs, they have done very little to alert business owners to the need to verify ownership of the listings. No one, that I know of, has calculated what percentage of the listings in Google’s local index are unclaimed, but pretty much everyone agrees the number is staggering. So, don’t feel badly if you didn’t realize you needed to take control of your listing. You’ve got the information you need to do it now.

Once you’ve got this initial, and utterly vital, task completed, you can work towards starting to win reviews from your happy customers and encourage citations from relevant websites. But that’s a subject for another post!

Check out our small business news site.

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How To Claim Your Google Maps Listing