SEO, Social Media and Branding are buzzwords you’ll hear a lot about in the context of marketing your business. There’s tons of writing on these topics but today I’d like to share a few recent blog posts on these topics that I think are pretty good.

Branding: a hot branding buzzword is story telling. The idea is that telling a story about your brand makes it more relate-able and appealing. Adweek published a lofty and pithy article on this topic, but I actually think the post by Dosh Dosh on this subject is a little easier to digest and relate to for the small business owner. Read either or both but then give some thought to ways that you can leverage the story behind your brand to give your marketing a push.

Social Media: This is the bandwagon everyone wants to jump on and volumes have been written on the topic by internet marketing bloggers. This post from Search Engine Guide really hits the nail on the head though. Before you log into your Digg account again, have a look at this article.

SEO: There’s tons of reading material on there on how to get your website search engine optimized and there are many factors that go into SEO. While this article doesn’t cover them all, it does a nice job on a quick overview of some of the highlights that are involved with SEO.

Read any amazing online marketing articles lately?  Let us know about them.

The long tail is a buzz word you’ll hear a lot about these days if you are paying attention to internet marketing. What exactly is it referring to and what does it mean for you?

The long tail refers to a key phrase that is relevant to your products or services with low search volume. It probably also has low advertiser competition in search marketing and low search engine optimization competition. For example, let’s say you sell baby clothing. Tons of people sell baby clothing which is bad news for you. It’ll be damn near impossible to get your website to come up first when people search baby clothing on Google. It will also cost you a pretty penny to get up top on Adwords results for “baby clothing”.

This is just as well, it’s a very generic term and you don’t need it to work for you. Instead, you focus on the long tail. Let’s say you sell baby clothing with bicycles on it. Your key phrases might be “bicycle onesie” or “bicycle baby clothing”. Parents who are cycling enthusiasts who want to outfit their kids with bike clothes are more likely to use this phrase to search, and they are more likely to want your products.

The good news is that there are very few pages on the net with those phrases in their title tag or URL (you can search the following in Google to find this out allintitle:bicycle baby clothing or allinurl:bicycle baby clothing). You can probably get this phrase for very little money if you do an Adwords campaign for it. What’s even better, if you create a page on your site with these phrases in the title, H1 tags, url and body content, your page has a good chance of coming up first when people search for bicycle baby clothing. (You make your chances even better if you get a cycling blog to post about your product line, since inbound links give you search engine optimization points.)

How do you go about determining the long tail for your website?

First, do a keyword analysis on your website using Google’s Keyword tool. See which phrases the tool finds on your site that have low advertiser competition, those are usually a good starting point.

After you find those phrases do a check to see how many other sites have those low competition phrases in their title tags and URLs (use the allintitle and allinurl attributes to figure this out on Google).

Once you’ve identified your list of low competition phrases, make sure pages on your site are well optimized for those phrases. This means you have them in your title tag, your URL, your H1 tag and in the body of your page. If at all possible, get a site that’s relevant to what you’re selling to link to your pages. Inbound links boost your page’s credibility and increase its chances of ranking higher in searches.

As you add new products and services continue with this process so that you can optimize for all of your offerings. The long tail won’t bring you scads of traffic over night, but the idea is that it will bring you some very well targeted traffic that is likely to convert. This is actually better than scads of traffic any way. One visitor that buys what you’re selling is better than 1000 visitors who don’t.

Working with what you’d call a “preferred partner” is a great way to drastically increase your brand’s exposure for no cost. It’s a form of cross-promotion companies can engage in with a carefully selected partner or partners. An easy way to implement this type of partnership is through an exclusive link exchange. This means you and your partner agree to provide prominent placement on each other’s websites, promoting one another’s businesses.

This concept is similar to a link exchange. The difference is that while some companies have link exchange pages loaded with sites, a preferred partner link is more integrated into your overall site, and your partner does the same for you.

You’ll commonly see this kind of advertising on sites owned by companies with more than one website. For example, the Palmer Cash website gives prominent placement to American Hips, an underwear company owned by the t-shirt label. While it certainly makes sense to promote your own businesses this way, the same type of promotion can be used by companies who share a customer demographic, and sell non-competing products. For example, if you sell bicycles but do not sell helmets or bike jerseys, you could choose a preferred partner company that does sell these things. Your site navigation could include a link to your partner’s site encouraging customers to get bike accessories from your partner. Your partner, who sells accessories but not bikes, could provide you with a link incorporated into their site navigation. The benefit here is that you are both marketing to bike enthusiasts, and this cross-promotion activity makes it easier for you to share customers.

Two of the biggest considerations for selecting a preferred partner are:
1. Do you and your preferred partner have a similar audience? Do you both have customers interested in what the other is selling. The more similarly appealing your product lines are to a customer demographic, the better chance you have of this type of marketing working for you.

2. Do you have a similarly sized audience? A company getting 1000 website visitors each day should not choose a preferred partner getting 100 visitors daily. It’s important to form a relationship that’s going to be mutually and equally beneficial.

This type of marketing can be great, but tread with caution before committing to a long term partnership. When developing this type of a relationship with a partner consider a trial period before you commit to anything ongoing. We recommend you agree to exchange links for 30 days at first, and then evaluate the success of the match up before moving forward.

Some other ways preferred partners can promote each other:
- Print ads
- Email newsletters
- Sweepstakes
- Printed promotional materials
- Word of mouth (This works especially well for service based companies,For e because they frequently talk to their customers. For example, if you provide web design services but not marketing, partnering with an online marketer and mentioning each other to your clients is a great way to build your business.)