It continues to baffle me why any small business wouldn't use the internet as an essential sales, marketing and customer relations tool. Establishing and maintaining a web presence is incredibly cheap and easy these days. And web advertising is much more powerful than most traditional print or broadcast advertising in that it enables the business owner to engage customers in a two-way conversation and gain valuable feedback on their products and services.

Exact Target also reported that email subscription via text messaging is the fastest growing list-building tactic among marketers. The company predicts that mobile capture - enabling consumers to subscribe to emails via their mobile phones - will increase 500%, more than any other growth tactic in 2009.Marketers also expect the practice of enabling subscribers to share email content with their social networks is expected to increase more than 348% in 2009.

ORM is the process of following online references to a brand, company, person or service while having a plan in place to deal with any negative feedback. You can think of it as a three-step process, although they may not always occur in this order:

In the first part of this series, I provided an overview of Online Reputation Management (ORM) and why it's an important activity to adopt in your business and professional life. This post will outline some of the free tools available for monitoring your online reputation.

How to Embed Video in Email Newsletters

How to funnel website visitors into leads and customers and track the entire process.

You've refined your keywords, optimized your bids, and written AdWords text ads that pull in tons of targeted clicks, but after looking at your Google Analytics reports, you realize that your landing page has a bounce rate of 91%. Which means that 91% of the users coming to your site are quickly glancing around and leaving, deciding immediately that this site isn't for them. One of the easiest, low-tech ways to make users stick around and look at your products or services is to catch their attention with an engaging headline.Recent research suggests that users decide to stay or leave your site in 8 seconds or less -- in that short amount of time, headlines are the one piece of copy that users will actually read. Here are five tips for writing headlines that will draw in user attention.

This simple plugin lets you optimize your landing pages (as posts or pages) using the Google Website Optimizer without needing to edit the HTML code of the theme.

SEO success - traditionally measured by target keyword rankings and traffic - should be measured by ROI instead

Great tips and tricks regarding lesser known Google Analytics features!

Last year I did a large post over-viewing most useful Google Analytics tips and today I am presenting them as well as adding a number of more important hacks to compile one mega-post on Google Analytics tips and tricks:

Today at Searchology, Google has launched a search results enhancement called "rich snippets" that uses meta data from web pages (from microformats such as hCard, hCalendar, and RDF) to display additional details (both content and meaning) about pages in the results. This initial launch supports reviews (with sites such as Yelp) and people (with sites such as LinkedIn). They will be adding more sites and categories over time.

Incorporating video into emails - a simple enough concept that wasn't even possible two years ago - improves click-through rates by 2-3 times, according to a recent Forrester report.

Start with goals for well defined outcomes

Measuring the effect of SEO for Public Relations benefits should start with well defined outcomes. To get a good handle on SEO effectiveness, it's important to match the purpose for the effort with specific metrics. For example, if improving brand visibility is a goal, then documenting brand mentions in connection with news & PR content at regular intervals can demonstrate the effect of content promotion and link building.

Great list of items you need to address when deciding on processes to manage web analytics in your company. My best advice is to find someone to dedicate an hour a day to your web analytics.

It's not that bad, I swear! 27 easy little steps that will take you from the day the boss pokes her head into your office and says "Hey, I think we need analytics" to the night you get Employee of the Year for leading a company-wide turnaround.

Can businesses today really create sustainable revenue and long-term profit around regularly publishing professional-quality online video, and keep their production costs well below the standards of broadcast-quality? Yes, if they're willing to be what I call "videoratis" - a video professional and publicist skilled at more than one job that relates to their business and their online community.

Companies invest thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of dollars per month into improving their natural search engine visibility. At times, certain influences or perspectives occasionally evolve to work directly against the efforts of the professional SEO consultant. Here I'll describe three scenarios and hopefully help companies avoid the unfortunate expense of sabotaging their own SEO investment.

The first thing clients say to me when requesting SEO is invariably centered around rankings. "I want to be position so and so, for such and such a keyword." And I am certain that this is a situation familiar to many of you providing SEO services. However, search isn't always about ranking. And rankings aren't an overnight success story - they take time to achieve. In the meantime there need to be other indicators of success. There are a range of metrics possible to use to act as such indicators, many of which are key to gauging small business SEM success. Ranking high for "xyz" may deliver huge volume of visitors, but not sales. On the other hand, capturing niche rankings for "uvwxyz" and "abcdefg" may deliver less traffic, but actually better sales, not to mention may be easier to achieve in a shorter lead time.

Search engine optimization has changed dramatically over the past few years. The shift is from one of web page optimization and link hounding to content and engagement optimization. In short, search engine optimization and social media are now undeniably intertwined. It has become extremely difficult to achieve any measure of success for important keyword phrases without the use of social media.

Think local. Depending upon who you listen to, somewhere between 20% and 40% of all searches have a local component-a place name, or some other inferred geographic qualifier. So, what's your catchment area, what are the towns, villages, locations, urban areas, landmarks, counties, states, and even countries that you're looking to serve? Add those to your list too

The study found that local search - the practice of using online search tools to find local businesses, products, or services - grew 58% in 2008, reaching an annual total of 15.7 billion searches. By comparison, overall core US web searches grew at a much smaller rate of 21% year-over-year, nearing 137 billion searches by the end of 2008.