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An excellent post about localized search engine optimization and all the ways your small business can target local search. The items are prioritized so you know which to focus on first.

It is my hope that this study will help small business owners confused by Local Search, or those strapped for time, to prioritize their marketing efforts.

Chris Andersons book "Free" - some inspirational thoughts on business strategies.

Anderson's book gives you some inspirational thoughts on successful business strategies. In my case I preferred to listen to the audio book. Here it is available for free as ebook and audio book versions.

Member-Regulated Marketplace for Trusted Business Professionals

Why online presence

Why Seo?

If you run an ecommerce site or have clients that do so, this is a great resource for analyzing and configuring your landing pages based on the motivation of the customer.

Today I want to look at motivation from a different angle. I want you to choose a landing page that is top priority for you to optimize. For example, your most profitable product with the highest abandonment rate. I want to get you thinking about which customer motivations are most likely to match your business, your products, your typical customer and your landing page presentation.

Barry makes two great points in this post you should look at if you are looking to develop a web strategy for your business.. He makes two great points that are very important for businesses to realize when crafting a social media or community building strategy. If you can engage an audience around your brand by providing them content where and how they want it - you will succeed online and see real conversions - whether it is leads or sales.

With more and more people flocking to social media sites, it is important that your audience can engage with your brand through as many channels as possible.

Great tips on using twitter for social media marketing

Follow these ten basic strategies for improving your marketing effort on Twitter and you will notice a big difference in how much traffic Twitter can bring to your business. Marketing on Twitter is not difficult, but there are some basic rules that you need to follow if you want to be successful in such an endeavor. Whether you are selling a product or a service, or just trying to gain attention for your web presence, Twitter is an advantageous way to attract interest in who you are and what your company is all about.

Discussing Web Strategies to help you become more findable and engaging online

This is an AMAZING digest of internet marketing posts from 2008 covering SEO, Social Media tools and strategy, twitter, facebook, friendfeed, blogging etc. This is a must read for any internet marketer from beginner to advanced.

Here's how this works: In the Internet Marketing Best Posts "series," I take posts that are typically timeless - they're not confined to a specific event or news occurrence - they're valuable for the long haul in terms of Internet Marketing and creative strategy. Hopefully, you'll see that these posts are still relevant in a few years down the road. These posts range from beginner to advanced with a greater emphasis on the more intermediate posts. I'd argue that if you're starting your Internet Marketing business with not much know-how, you should check out the 2007 posts; in fact, most may still find them relevant regardless of the skill level.

I had the opportunity to do a podcast with Avinash to discuss some areas where marketers are doing things right and wrong but all of them are simple but extremely powerful uses of web analytics to make their websites and businesses better on the web. We also took some live Twitter questions as we were doing the podcast. But stop reading this and start listening to Avinash - its 25 minutes long but positively electric!

For years the Public Relations industry has ironically one of the worst reputations -esp since they are hired to look after the reputations of their own clients. Things only got worse as some brands got punk'd; the introduction of self-publishing tools that allowed anyone to connect to each other using social technologies, causing a shift in power. We've already talked to death about the risks and the changes that are happening to this industry, yet I'm hoping to elevate the viewpoint out of the gutter and focus on the larger opportunities -and risks at the industry level.

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.

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.

Great tips on budgeting time for your online reputation management

Monitoring your business' social media presence is incredibly important. You need to respond to people talking about your brand and understand how people view your company. However, a common concern is that it takes up too much time.

When considering the tools of social media and how they relate to your business communications needs, it's important to think about two parts of the equation: possibility + function. These tools open up new ways to communicate, which is great. It also means that you have to consider what the functional goal of that communication means to your need.

Great points to focus on conversion rates rather than traffic.

The most important point every online business needs to know is this: Conversions (how many people take the desired action - whether that is completing a purchase, gaining potential leads, or increasing a subscriber base) are more important by far than increasing traffic.

With communities in the driver seat over product, a shift will happen as communities can define the spec of future products and therefore multiple brands will bid for their business. As a result, we should expect the agency model to flip over, where PR agencies start to represent communities of customers -rather than brands.

Do you wonder why your affiliate marketing business has not taken off? The answer is really simple. The days of selling are over and days of teaching are here.

What does this say about SMB's and social media? This piece says, that SMB's are: "Still feeling their way into social media..." Interesting. What's your take?

This is probably a good reason why everyone displaced from a marketing or PR job is now a social media expert :) because they're trying to help SMB's learn how to make this work for themselves. We're seeing great results with businesses we work with but those all take a "long term approach" and realize that seeing results takes a "cultural shift" not a new set of tools.