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.)

If you’re a small business owner, the concept of branding may be a somewhat nebulous thing. You might have your marketing strictly focused on your bottom line. Big companies care about this too, but their way of going about achieving their goals is a little different. They don’t expect to trace every sale back to the highway billboard sign you drive by every day, nor do they expect that the first time you see it you’ll make a purchase. The goal is to get their brand on your brain so that when you are in the market to buy what they’re selling, you’ll think of them.

What does this have to do with the small business owner? Last week I wrote a post about how to maximize your cost-per-click spending. While I am all for this highly traceable form of marketing, I am firmly against companies relying on it entirely. Cost-per-click marketing needs to be supplemented with branding efforts so that your company’s name can become familiar to your target demographic. This familiarity will bring your target demographic to shop with you rather than bothering to explore the web for your competitors. This type of marketing is what makes t-shirt companies like Palmer Cash and Noisebot premier destinations for t-shirt lovers. These two t-shirt companies have their names plastered all over pop culture websites like Perez Hilton and Cute Overload. Can consumers find better or cheaper t-shirts elsewhere? Probably. They choose these companies because they know them.

To maximize the effect of your branding campaign, be sure to really analyze your target customer demographic. Who buys from you and why? How can you reach these people in large numbers and in a cost effective manner? The more accurately you target your audience, the better your results will be.

A great way to research targeted branding opportunities is Google’s placement targeted ads. Two things I like to try are keyword suggestions and URL suggestions. Let’s say I want to run ads for a independent music record label. The first thing I might try is searching for the keyword phrase “indie rock.” This search will give me a list of URLs I can advertise on where this topic is discussed. I might also do a search for popular indie music website pitchforkmedia.com to see what URLs Google suggests that are similar to that site. My searches will yield a list of websites I can market my record label on that are visited by my target audience. Google accepts both impression-based bids and cost-per-click bids for these types of campaigns, so you can experiment to see what works for your needs.

If a branding campaign is too pricey for your budget, consider a co-branding venture with other companies that share your target customer demographic. A great example of this is ishopindie.com. This site enables small boutiques and artisans to all contribute to one large ad budget, and this budget advertises ishopindie.com. The companies contributing to the site’s budget all benefit from the marketing efforts because everyone who discovers ishopindie.com through its branding campaigns discovers the site’s member companies. When visitors to ishopindie.com have to buy birthday gifts or want to treat themselves, ishopindie.com comes to mind and the site’s member companies reap the benefits.

The small business owner is strapped not only for cash but also for time. Running your small business often forces you to wear a lot of hats: sales person, customer service department,accountant, etc. It’s easy for marketing to take a back seat when it comes to your time. There are only so many hours in the day. The beauty of cross-promotion is not only that it saves you money and hooks you up with customers you might not reach otherwise, it also saves you time.

When you plan your cross-promotion activities with a partner think about all the steps involved with making the campaign a success for everyone involved. Maybe you’re co-sponsoring a sweepstakes with another company. While it’s fine for each of you to just tell your own customers about this promotion, you’ll both benefit a lot more if you and your partner make an effort to tell the whole world.

Now, telling the world is quite an undertaking so your first order of business is to decide exactly how you’re going to get the word out about your campaign. Are there bloggers who might write about this sweepstakes? Are there places you could advertise the sweepstakes, either in print or online? Can you use social media to spread the word about your sweepstakes (message boards, Myspace, StumbleUpon, etc)? Identify all the ways you can get your campaign exposed to potential customers and then make a list of who is doing what.

Maybe your partner has stellar banner design skills and can design ads to promote the sweepstakes. Maybe you’ve got in an with a popular blogger who might mention your campaign to her readers. Maybe you’ve just got a really good media list you regularly correspond with when you’ve got a promotion going on. The idea is to pool your resources, time and skills with another company to get your mutually beneficial campaign seen by your audience.

Whatever you and your marketing partner decide you’re bringing to the table make sure you clearly define roles and responsibilities and stick to them. Establish time lines for activities to take place. If you’ve promised to tell 100 bloggers about your promotion make sure you follow through and get it done by the date you promised to do it. When it comes to cross-promotion you and your partner or partners are counting on one another to ensure mutual success. Failure to deliver on promises you make hurts your campaign, your business, your partner(s) and your credibility — not to mention your karma.

It’s also important to make sure you and your partner or partners have evenly distributed the tasks involved with promoting your campaign. There’s no better excuse for slacking off than feeling like you’ve been given an unfair share of the work to do.

Lastly, make sure you and your cross-promotion partners check in when tasks are completed. Let each other know when that ad arrives at the magazine for press or that blog editor promises you a write up. Keeping each other on track means keeping your campaign on track and enjoying terrific results.

While I think today’s article on the Small Business Branding blog was well-intentioned, it unfortunately overlooked the importance of great landing pages. To be honest, Google doesn’t do the best job of educating its users on the importance of landing pages either, so it’s not surprising that their importance hasn’t been given it’s due in other conversations about search marketing. Before you go beating your head against a wall and wind up paying for help with Adwords, let’s explore how to effectively use landing pages to make your pay-per-click marketing more cost-effective and better in general.

Google Adwords pay-per-click advertising (or PPC advertising as you may see it called) is the most widely used search by both advertisers and consumers, so to make it work for you it’s really important to get what makes Google Adwords tick. Adwords’ goal is to show its users the most relevant ads possible. The idea is that if they do this, the most clicks will take place and Google will make the most money. Your goal is to convince the Google robots that your page is relevant to the keywords you want to have people search to find you. When you manage to do this, Google Adwords rewards you by offering you a cheaper pay-per-click price than your competitors and a better placement for your ads.

So how exactly do you go about convincing the robots to love you and getting these cheap clicks? By writing landing pages that make use of the keywords you want used. Here’s a step-by-step to creating the best landing pages for your campaigns.

1. Do your homework
Let’s say I wanted run an Adwords campaign to get people to read this post. My first step would actually be to do a little research with Google’s keyword tool. I’d want to know how people were searching Google to learn about using Adwords effectively. I’d identify keywords such as “adwords advertising” and “internet marketing” and “pay per click”.

2. Write keyword-rich copy
Once I’d made a list of words people commonly search to get the information in my article, I’d start writing. (Google’s keyword tool will tell you how often people search for the keywords you’re interested in. It will also tell you how sought-after the words are by other advertisers.) As I write, I need to keep my list of keywords in mind and be sure to make liberal use of them in my copy. When the Adwords robots scan my page they’ll be checking to see if the keywords I put in my campaign are on my landing page and if so, how often they appear. The better job I do of using my targeted keywords, the more likely I am to be offered a lower cost-per-click price and better ad placement.

3. Set up the landing page
Adwords likes URLs that are related to your keywords. If I wanted to use this blog post as a landing page I’d make a URL for it that went something like http://brandtorrent.com/adwords_secrets/.

4. Create smart ad campaign copy
At this point a lot of the hard stuff is done. Keywords have been selected and a juicy landing page has been written and created. The only challenge left is writing ad copy that makes people want to click. So think about the people you want clicking on your ad. What is it that you have to offer that will interest them the most? Can you boast about low prices, free shipping, and/or unique selection? Whatever you’ve got to excite your audience, that’s what goes into the ad campaign copy. You’re actually better off developing a couple of versions of your ad copy so you can do what’s called A/B testing. What this means is Adwords will run both ads for you and you’ll see which version is getting a better click-through-rate. This enables you to really maximize the success of your campaign.

5. Monitor and Adjust
Search engine marketing is a tricky science, so no matter how smartly you’ve crafted your landing page and your ad copy, you’ll need to keep an eye on performance and make adjustments as you go along.

I realize some marketers might think sharing this type of information with the small business owner is counterproductive. Why not keep ‘em in the dark and lead them down a semi-sabotaging path so they’ve got to turn to a pro for help? I am not saying hiring a search engine marketing professional doesn’t have its time and place. Developing a great Adwords campaign requires writing skills and time and effort. If you haven’t got the time or writing resources for DIY marketing, by all means, hire help. Search marketers not only understand these tricks of the trade, they’ve got loads of experience working with them. My goal here is to empower the little guy to make a go of this on his or her own. Because let’s face it, no matter how great pro marketers are, they’re just not always in the budget.

P.S. For extra credit, check out “Eight Keyword Research Mistakes That Are Costing You Money” from Search Engine land and “Pay Per Click Mistakes Newbies Make” from Pay Per Click Journal.

Ever notice how when you shop on a site like Amazon and you express interest in one book, Amazon suggests you buy a similar book along with it and offers you a price break for doing so? This “better together” type of promotion can be leveraged by two or more companies selling complementary products.

How it works:

1. Find a cross-promotion partner you want to work with. If you sell bicycles, partner up with a company that sells helmets or cycling jerseys. If you sell footwear, maybe you’d want to work with a company that sells handbags.

2. Provide your cross-promotion partner a coupon code for your business and have your partner provide one to you.

3. When your customers check out, offer them a coupon for your partner’s business and have your partner do the same for their customers.

As always, we recommend that you use a unique coupon code for each cross-promotion campaign so that you can track the success of your efforts. Even if you don’t see an immediate boost in sales from your cross-promotion efforts, this type of marketing still gets your company name in front of potential customers who may come to you in the future, coupon in hand or not.

We’ve recently noticed the proliferation of businesses on Brand Torrent that sell food based products so today’s post is about how to market edible items online. To begin with, you have to recognize the challenges of selling edibles online so that you can develop strategies to overcome them.

Challenge #1: Immediacy. When people get a craving for a chocolate bar they want it now, they do not want to wait a week and have it mailed to them. This means that for a lot of food items it makes more sense to market the product as a gift rather than as a food. People buy gifts online all the time so billing your gourmet tea or truffles as gifts makes it much more reasonable to wait for their arrival. This means you should go the extra mile with offering attractive packaging and even gift wrap.

Challenge #2: The lack of taste-o-vision. Food has to be experienced, it has to be sampled, there’s no way you can impress upon a website visitor how delicious your sauces, cookies or coffee is by description. Don’t get me wrong, description is extremely important, but what’s even more important is getting people to try your product so they can see for themselves that it is, in fact, delicious.

To make this happen my first suggestion is that you sell sample sized versions of your products on your website. If your product is that great your customer will be back for more. The other way to get samples out there is cross-promotion of course! Trade samples of your product with other retailers and get them to give your products to their customers. (You can do the same for them.) This is a great way to get your product into the hands and mouths of more prospective customers than you’d ever reach alone.

Challenge #3: Exciting the other senses. Ever notice how watching Food Network makes you hungry? Those bright red juicy tomatoes and the onions sizzling and turning golden in the pan. I’m starting to get a little hungry just thinking about it. To get your customer excited about your product you’re going to need killer product descriptions, descriptions that make their mouths water. You’re also going to need amazing product pictures. You’ll not only want clear, sharp, bright, well-lit pictures of your own products, you may want to stage them to make them even more appealing. If you’re selling honey apple flavored tea don’t just shoot the tea bags, create an entire still life of lush red apples and a jar of premium honey. You’ve only got words and pictures to get customers excited about your product so use them to your advantage.

My final thought on selling food online is that I strongly recommend you put an ingredients list some place easy to find it. People have all kinds of allergies and dietary restrictions so its important to know if your tea contains milk fat or if your hot sauce contains beef tallow. Personally, I enjoy buying certain types of non-perishables online but nothing sends me running faster than a site that doesn’t supply an ingredients list.

Got great tips for getting your edibles to sell online? What’s worked for you?

In my last post I talked a bit about the importance of tracking the success of your marketing campaigns. I mainly talked about how cookies can be used to help track conversions. Today I’m going to tell you about some more strategies you can employ to track the success of an individual marketing effort.

Analytics Programs: Analytics software such as Google Analytics (which is free), Web Trends or Omniture SiteCatalyst can help you figure out where your site traffic is coming from and what it’s doing once it arrives on your site. These programs are highly effective for measuring the success of an online marketing campaign. Especially savvy marketers often create individual landing pages for each marketing campaign. This means you can check the traffic on that one page and get an instant view of how much traffic your campaign generated. These landing pages also allow you to tailor copy to match your campaign.

Landing Pages: Landing pages on your website are not only helpful for tracking online marketing campaigns, they can be used to track just about any kind of campaign you run. Lets say you run a radio spot and you want to know how much traffic your radio spot generated for your site. Rather than announcing your company website during the commercial, you’d announce the landing page URL you set up for the spot. That way you’d know visitors coming to your site through this page found you from the radio ad. You could also cookie visitors coming in this way so that when they make purchases you’ll be able to track the conversions.

Dedicated Phone Lines: If you frequently deal with customers by phone, having dedicated phone lines for each of your marketing campaigns is an easy way to find out how the customer found you. You can have a special number for your ad in the local paper and another one for your radio commercial. Be sure that you’ve got a system in place to record the number of calls and sales you get from each phone line.

Coupon Codes: Coupon codes serve as double duty marketing tools. They not only give customers incentive to shop with you, they give you information about how the customer found you. Providing a special coupon code for each of your marketing campaigns means that when customers buy you’ll know how they discovered you.

If all else fails, ask. It’s low tech and not always the most automated approach but it never hurts to ask customers how they found out about you. This can be a drop down box on your website check out form or a question that’s asked when customers call or come into your store. You might also find out that word is being spread about your company from a source you didn’t even know about.

Whatever tactic you use to track your success, make sure you have plans to store and analyze this data. You’ll want to know what happened with each of your marketing campaigns so you can decide which ones to try again and which ones to ditch for the future.

In the age of internet marketing it’s easy to overlook more traditional mediums like good old fashioned mail. For many types of business this might make sense but before you rule it out for your own business take a closer look at how to leverage a direct mail campaign and some benefits of doing so.

Direct mail campaigns allow you to create marketing materials beyond subject line and copy. You can design an entire 3 dimensional object to put in your target audience’s hands and the choices you make can have a huge impact. Your direct mail piece can be in an attention grabbing color, it can contain product samples or promotional items. In short, it affords you the opportunity to make a much larger impact than digital communication can offer.

Below are examples of a few cases where direct mail campaigns made a lot of sense:

1. A skincare company I’ve done marketing for in the past designed a campaign to promote a new line of roll-on fragrances. Since this sort of thing can’t be sampled through the internet, the company sent out perfume samples to every customer who purchased from them in the last 6 months. In the sample packages the company included a coupon for 10% off any purchase of the new roll-on fragrances. The benefits of the coupon were two-fold. To begin with, it gave customers a money saving incentive to purchase if they enjoyed the samples. The other advantage of the coupon is that it allowed for tracking the success of the campaign. The coupon code that went out in the direct mail piece was only given to those customers so when orders came in with that coupon code, the skincare company knew they were getting sales from the direct mail campaign.

2. An interior design firm that catered to home owners with properties worth over 1 million dollars designed a campaign to entice new home owners to use their services. The firm made a favorable introduction with new home buyers by mailing them a “housewarming” direct mail piece. The firm put together gift baskets containing pens with their web address and phone number, brochures of past jobs they’d done and fresh baked cookies from a local bakery. To offset the costs of this direct mail piece the firm also included a value-pak type coupon pack for local vendors such as restaurants and dry cleaners. Each vendor participating in the welcome pack contributed to the expense of printing the coupons and mailing the packages. (Note that this case includes not only a smart use of direct mail marketing, but also employs the power of cross-promotion to offset the cost of the direct mail campaign!)

The costs for direct mail can certainly add up quickly so it’s a strategy that you’ll want to use sparingly most of the time. That said, for a big impact campaign or the promotion of a product that needs to be sample, direct mail can be a powerful tool for attracting new customers or wooing existing ones.

Editor’s note: Thanks, ReviewPage.com, for telling your visitors about Brand Torrent.