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by Jennifer Laycock

A few weeks ago I wrote a handful of articles on how to develop a proper social media strategy by developing goals, breaking those goals into supportive goals and matching goals to appropriate tactics. Those three articles outline the foundation that needs to be laid for any good social media plan, but your job doesn’t stop there. In fact, if you want to do things properly, your job is just getting started.

First, let’s quickly recap what your process would look like if you were to map it out based solely on those three articles. For each of your primary goals, the process might look a little something like this:

You would have started with your primary goal, broken it down into supportive goals, matched those goals to appropriate tactics and determined which social media outlets best allowed you to implement those tactics. After a few weeks or months, you’d sit down and ask yourself if you’d met your primary goal.

There’s really nothing wrong with going about the process this way, but there is a better way. What you need to do is understand the area between the outlets and success…that grey area where things can go right or wrong and you can be completely oblivious.

Understanding Micro Goals

Within that grey area is where our micro goals are going to live. These goals will sound familiar to most of you, because they’re actually the types of “goals” that get kicked around by people who know very little about social media strategy. Things like number of Facebook followers or number of RSS subscribers. Things that on the surface are almost worthless, but when combined with a solid strategy actually become crucial to the long term success of your campaigns.

Micro-goals are basically the various numbers you can tally up from your involvement in different social media outlets. They can easily be tracked and tallied over time and they give you a concrete gauge of your interactions with consumers and how those interactions are changing over time.

Establishing Micro Goals

You’ll need to have worked your way through your strategy to the point of selecting your social media tools before you’ll be ready to establish your micro goals. For the most part, there are universal micro goals that will need to be tracked across the board for all companies. These will serve as the starting points to help you realize what you should be tracking.


You’ll also need to have a solid understanding of your goals and supportive goals so you can fine tune your micro goals to your specific needs. For example, everyone will want to track the number of RSS and Email subscribers to their blog, but only some companies will need to track the number of PDF downloads or the number of leads generated from the blog.

Here are a few examples of specialized micro goals that might be tied to specific campaign goals:

If you are using Facebook to drive people to events or sales, RSVPs will become an important part of you campaign and an essential micro goal to track. If you’re using Flickr to build up press relations with bloggers and mainstream media, tracking the number of times your Creative Commons licensed photos are used will be important to track.

Sit down with your team, talk through your strategy and examine the list of actions consumers can take on each of the social media platforms you plan to utilize. Then add these to your list. Your finished product should give you quite a hefty list of things to track over the course of your campaign.

The Next Steps

Now that you understand what micro-goals are and how to establish them, you’re ready to learn how to put them to work to improve the performance of your campaigns. In my next post, I’ll talk about how to use these newly defined micro-goals to fine tune your social media efforts as you’re moving forward with your campaigns.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

Go to Source

by Stoney deGeyter

Note: Recently I’ve gotten some ribbing from friends and colleagues about my exceedingly numerous multi-part posts. In order to wean myself off my favorite form of not-having-to-think-about-what-I’m-going-to-write-about-next, I’ve combined all 12 parts of this series into a single post. Enjoy!

Part 1: Guilty of Crimes No One Committed

A lot of people subscribe to the “Guilt by Association” theory in online marketing. This theory suggests that you are who you associate with. I agree there is some definite truth to this mindset, but, like a lot of things, it can also be taken to a paranoid extreme. This fear leads some people into a paralysis that ultimately hinders their online marketing efforts rather than helping them.

“Guilt by Association” extremists work hard to keep themselves squeaky clean. They tread extra carefully with who they associate with in an effort to ensure that they are never found guilty of crimes they haven’t committed. In order to stay “pure”, they avoid having online relationships with some who they believe may have broken some rule at some point that, likely, nobody even cares about.

Part 2: Google’s Guidelines Don’t Rule the Web

With Google controlling so much market share, many business owners and online marketers are scared of doing anything that might seemingly violate Google’s Guidelines. We know Google looks at both positive and negative attributes, including your associations, when developing your overall trust profile. But we often do ourselves a disservice when we let Google’s Guidelines dictate everything we do on the web – even in areas that don’t have any specific connection to Google.

There is nothing wrong with keeping a clean profile and ensuring you don’t do anything that violates the search engine guidelines. There is also nothing wrong with making sure you associate your online profile with people you know will help you and not hurt you. But there comes a point where it borders on paranoia, at best, and counter-productive, at worst.

Part 3: You Have No Control Over Who Associates with You

One of the problems with worrying too much over your online profile is that you have little to no control over who associates themselves with you. Anybody can link to you, anybody can scrape your content, anybody can share your post with their friends, and anybody can retweet you. If you’re unhappy about who’s doing any of these things, your sole recourse is to contact them, ask them to stop, and then cross your fingers.

Google (and the other search engines) know this. They knew it back when they made links a part of their algorithms. They knew it when people started scraping and duplicating your content. And they know it now in an age of RTs, Likes, Mixxes, Stumbles, and whatever else we do with content we like.

Google will not hold you responsible if someone promotes you and then goes off and violates Google’s Guidelines.

Part 4: You are Responsible for Who You Associate With

If there is one constant in the world of online promotion, social media profiles, and search engine rankings, it is that you do have some responsibility for who you choose to associate with. In the real world, it is often said that you can tell a lot about a person by the friends they have. If you’re associating with thieves, liars, spammers, and cheats, you don’t have to be a thief, liar, spammer, or a cheat to get the reputation of one (or as an enabler of one). Either way, your associations affect you.

Part 5: You Are Not Responsible for the Entire History of Who You Associate With

There is some truth, both in real life and on the web, that you can learn a lot about a person by who they associate with. But it is also true that you cannot not be held accountable for the actions of every person you’ve shaken hands with.

In the social sphere of the web, retweeting or liking someone’s single message is not an endorsement of every tweet, post, thought, or blog they ever published. Even the worst offenders do something right! Making note of the positive doesn’t suddenly hang all their negative around your neck as if you’ve endorsed it all.

Parts 6-10: yada yada yada

Part 11: Everyone’s Got Some (Negative) History

No matter how squeaky clean you want to keep your social media profile, the only way to stay squeaky clean is to not associate yourself with anyone. The only person who does not have something negative in their profile is likely the person who has no profile whatsoever.

Or you can check the complete historical profile of every person before you RT, Stumble, Like, or whatever. Of course, even with those who pass the test, what guarantees do you have that they won’t do something shady in the future? Not only do you have to check the historical profile before you connect with them, you have to keep checking back to make sure you still want to be connected with them.

Part 12: We Are All Violators

Sooner or later, whether you like it or not, you’re going to violate some guidelines somewhere, including Google’s. It’s inevitable. Which is why we can’t live and breathe by every guideline that Google puts out.

Keep in mind, those who try hard to stay violation-free are often those that violate guidelines the most. They just hide it better.

And the search engines likely know this too.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

Go to Source

by Mike Moran

I recently got this question and stared at it. Long and hard. There were so many things wrong with the question that I didn’t know where to start. But since this is a blog post, don’t fear. I’ve figured out where to start by now. I hope when you are at the end of the post that you know where to start, too. Duplicate content is a subject that everyone asks
about, but I find that few people truly understand what it is or what search engines do with it, much less the answer to how to avoid the duplicate content penalty.

The first reason that I started staring at the question was because of how it was worded. Here is an excerpt from that e-mail:

We want to start put lots of content in our blog and hope those articles we put will show up in search result (and we can catch long-tailed keyword search). It looks like it is quicker to establish content partners and just use other people’s content. Will the content still show up in the search result if it is exactly the same as the content in another website? If not, how much percentage difference should we have? 80% the same?

Gee, the whole approach is so wrong. Taking other people’s content and trying to change it just enough to fool the search engines—where do we start?

Image via Wikipedia

First, I’ll try to answer the questions. SEO gurus describe this situation as the “duplicate content penalty,” but the phrase is somewhat of a misnomer, because the search engines are not really penalizing your site—they are just showing content that they believe is unique (by removing duplicates). So, if your content is substantially the same as another page on the Web, Google and the other engines won’t show them all—they’ll just show one version, or they’ll show one ranked substantially higher than another that is somewhat different, but too similar to show close together in the results. This makes sense, because searchers don’t want a page full of search results that all have similar pages in them.

Fine, you might say. How do I make sure that mine is the one that is shown? The best answer is to make your content original, because if someone else rips it off, the search engines will probably show yours. They try to show the one that was posted first or the one from the best site, so because the rip-off sites steal so much content, the search engines detect properly (most of the time) whose content it is. If they get it wrong, you can assert your rights under the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA) with Google or Bing (or whatever engine you are struggling with). Likewise, if you are the one pasting content from other sites, Google will probably know not to show your version and the real owners can assert their DCMA rights against you. (Most countries outside the U.S. afford you similar protection for your copyrighted material.)

To get to the burning question, no one knows how high a percentage you need for your pages to be hidden in the results, but some search gurus claim it is as little as 30% of the copy on the page. Having said that, I think it is the wrong question.to be asking.

Your goal shouldn’t be to grab other people’s content and post it for your own benefit. If that content is protected by copyright, then what you are doing is illegal if you haven’t received permission from the copyright owner. Second, your site is likely to become an eclectic mess of opinions and writing styles from people who aren’t you. In your haste to create lots of content, you probably aren’t creating very good content. Your branding and your expertise should be out front—you do that by creating original content that shows off what you know and explains why people should buy from you. It might sound harder at first, but it works a lot better in the end because you’ll get the search rankings and the search traffic you crave, but also the customers, too. You see, getting search rankings isn’t your end game. Even if you manage to fool search engines with your purloined content, you are unlikely to win customers that way.

So, if you are trying to do something at low cost, go ahead and hire people to write your content. But don’t just accept whatever they crank out–that is cheap but not usually very effective, Instead, make sure that they are writing content that shows off what you know. Give them some of the ideas and inspect everything they do to ensure that it meets your quality standards as well as your brand message. It might sound hard to do, but I have found that it’s easier in the long run because you don’t have to undo any content that shows you badly, and because good content can work for a very long time.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

Go to Source

by Mike Fleming

So, you’ve come to realize that there’s a whole Display Network out there through Google AdWords that, if utilized correctly, will take your online business to new heights. But, you’ve also realized that’s a big “if utilized correctly.” You may have been burned by the Display Network before (formerly called the Content Network). Maybe you just jumped right into AdWords because you knew you wanted more traffic for your site. You heard how easy it was to get it by whipping up a few keywords that were relevant to what you were offering and by writing a few ads to entice the searchers to your site. Then, since you were never taught that the Search and Display networks operate by completely different rules, you went ahead and turned them both on and started getting more traffic.

Man, getting traffic can be so easy…. and dangerous to your bottom line. The truth is, there is an art and science to getting traffic just like any other vocation. It takes skill and knowledge to be successful. So, when it comes to utilizing the Display Network, you need to gather the knowledge that is going to enable you to use the tool correctly to accomplish your goals.

Here we go…

Keywords

Google reads keywords within a Display Network ad group differently than a Search Network ad group. On the Search Network, your chosen keywords are matched to queries that users perform within search engines. On the Display Network, Google determines one theme from all of the keywords added to your ad group. Then, it matches that theme with the themes of specific pages in it’s Display Network and your ad is eligible to appear on that page.

For example, let’s say I’ve added the following keywords to my ad group -

acoustic guitar lessons

easy guitar lessons

free guitar lessons

guitar lessons

guitar solo lesson

online guitar lessons

rock guitar lessons

There really can be no mistake about what the theme of this ad group is…guitar lessons. Well, Google has a bunch of domains and pages in it’s Display Network that it’s determined also has that same theme, like this one….

Therefore, your ad and those pages are matches and you are now eligible to enter the auction for those the specific ad spots available on those pages.

Now, just like you should be testing and optimizing the keywords you use in the Search Network, you should do the same with your keyword themes in the Display Network. Which keyword theme will perform better for my marketing goals, “guitar lessons” or “guitar tabs?” Only one way to find out. Test.

You may even use a group of keywords that describes a keyword theme you’re going for. So, instead of explicitly using your root keyword “guitar lessons” in all of your keyword choices, you could come up with a list of keywords like the following…

strings

capo

acoustic

electric

tune

les paul

gibson

rock

tabs

guitar

So, here we just played some word association with what we’re offering to feed the Google algorithm monster some words to chew on to come up with a theme. They will determine the sites that match and then you will determine if the sites are a good match for you. It’s kind of like you are the giver and Google is the taker in the old game show $25,000 Pyramid…

Just like you keep keywords that perform well and eliminate keywords that don’t perform well in your Search Network campaign, so you do the same with these ad group keyword themes. These themes act like hunters to go out and find sites that will accomplish your marketing goals.

Here are some rules to remember when choosing your ad group keywords:

1. Match types don’t matter (except negative). Google is simply looking for a theme.

2. Up to 50 keywords are analyzed. Even 50 is too many if you ask me. You are looking to communicate a specific theme of the websites you’d like to try your ads on. This should not take many keywords to communicate this theme.

3. Negative keywords matter. If there are words on pages that signal that your desired audience is not reading this page, then you can add them as negatives. So, if you sell guitars but not classical guitars, you may want to add “classical” as a negative keyword.

4. Volume of keywords doesn’t matter.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

Go to Source

by Jennifer Laycock

Every now and then Search Engine Guide’s Associate Editor Stoney deGeyter finds himself on the phone with a potential client trying to talk them into putting their conversation on hold and giving me a call. Why? Because they’re in a position where they need to focus on both social media and search engine optimization to build a successful site, but they only have the budget to do one at a time…and at this time, they need to put search engine optimization on hold and focus on social media.

As much as Stoney enjoys working with companies to make sure their sites are search engine friendly and their content is fully optimized, the truth is his services are not always going to deliver the best bang for their buck. There are times when it simply makes more sense to focus on social media. In fact, making the right choice of where to start your marketing efforts can be essential to generating the additional revenue needed to invest in BOTH Social Media and SEO. (sound familiar? You must have been here Tuesday…)

If you’re in the position of trying to figure out where to start, here are three key ways to decide social media is your best starting point. (On Tuesday, we looked at when it’s best to begin with Search Engine Optimization.)

Clue #1 When You are Launching a Brand New Web Site

If your business is new to the web or you’re just getting ready to launch a new site, social media may be the best place for you to start. Brand new sites often take time to achieve rankings because they lack the age, the content and the links that are important parts of search engine algorithms. These three things take time to gather, but social media is a highly effective way to speed up the process.

At its core, social media is about building and expanding the conversation around a particular product, service or company. A natural byproduct of this exposure is links, often highly relevant ones. These links lay an important foundation for later search engine optimization efforts. At the same time, the ability to analyze the value of social media related traffic and the topics that drive the highest levels of conversation and conversion factor heavily into the long term content strategy required for good search engine optimization.

Clue #2 When Your Product or Service is an Impulse Buy

Maybe you are one of those companies that has been blessed with an amazing product that’s both affordable and extraordinarily unique. You sell the kind of product people see and say “I want that!.” Generally, these products are cheap enough to qualify as an impulse buy (think kid trends like SillyBandz or adult temptations like Salted Caramel Chocolate Cupcakes in a Jar) but sometimes they’re just plain jealousy-inducing cool (think any product by Apple.)

These are the products that we buy because we want them, not because we need them. These are the perfect types of products for the social media world. Especially if they’re new. Millions upon millions of Internet users take to blogs, Facebook, Twitter and hundreds of other sites to share their daily lives. This includes talking about the things they love and the things they want.

If this is the type of product you sell, chances are high you’ll be better served by a word of mouth driven social media campaign than by making it easier for people to find your product. This is a great clue you should prioritize social media.

Clue #3 When You Sell Something People Don’t Even Know They Want

Sometimes your biggest battle is simply getting people to notice you. If you’re breaking new ground by targeting a new niche or introducing a new product or service that’s never been offered before, social media is where you need to start.

Let’s say you are introducing a completely new piece of core cardio exercise equipment like nothing else on the market. You’re going to be faced with the type of challenges that make social media an essential first step in your online marketing campaign. You’ll need to build awareness of the product (to drive search activity later), educate about the product (to drive purchase activity later) and gain exposure for the product (to drive word of mouth.)

Consumers can’t search for the product they don’t know exists. Social media allows you to get your product in front of you target audience by relying on existing conversation channels populated by your product’s target audience.

It’s a Chicken or the Egg Argument, but it Depends on Your Goal

If I had my way, every company would have the ability to fully invest in both social media and search engine optimization. (They’d have budget for PPC, conversion analysis and analytics to boot!) That’s not the reality of business though, so we’ve got to find the best way to work with what we have.

Much like the chicken or the egg argument, it depends on your ultimately goal. If your primary goal is to eat and eat now, the egg is your best bet. It’s fast, it’s easy, it’s tasty and it’s good for you. If your primary goal is to make sure several people can eat for awhile, then the chicken is the better bet. It will regularly produce small amounts of food to keep you going while you seek out other sources of nourishment.

Search and social can work in the same way. Both are important, but both have to be viewed in the context of their potential. As yourself what the primary goals of your online marketing campaign are for the next six months and then reconsider the points made here. More often than not, either search or social will rise to the top as an important priority. Invest your funds there and establish a solid base for moving forward.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

Go to Source

by Stoney deGeyter

Keyword research is a funny thing. You can gain a lot of knowledge about what words people use when searching on the engines, but it tells very little about what a person wants when they search using a particular keyword or phrase. The intent behind the search is the missing component, and I don’t know of any keyword tools that get far enough inside the searcher’s heads to know what exactly the searcher’s intent is.

Many people, when performing keyword research, look primarily at the search volume of a phrase and whether the phrase appears relevant to what they do or sell. On that analysis alone keywords are chosen or rejected.

Search volume isn’t always the best way to choose keywords.

A targeted phrase isn’t always as it appears

A lot of phrases can change meaning significantly just by changing word order or the addition or removal of a qualifier. Lets say you sell a brand of underwear called Awesome Underwear. Well, if a keyword phrase is “awesome underwear suck,” clearly that is not a phrase you want to target or use on your website. Or perhaps you see searches for “awesome underwear wedgies.” In most cases this would be caused by people searching for information on how Awesome Underwear causes wedgies, a major complaint spreading like diarrhea throughout the internet.

On the other hand, what appears to be a negative phrase for one company can actually be a positive for another. Perhaps there is a company called Bad Ass Undies that’s known for creating underwear that actually prevent wedgies, even in the toughest of boy’s locker rooms. In this case, searches for “bad ass undies wedgies” is performed by people looking for more info on how the undies work and if, alas, they truly can stand the wedgie test. If you’re optimizing the website for Bad Ass Undies, “wedgies” a word you definitely want to target.

As I said earlier, sometimes changing the word order can have a profound effect on whether a keyword phrase is a viable one or not. A good example of this is is “wedding planning” vs. “planning wedding”. Some may be looking for a person to manage their wedding while others may be looking for tips on how to plan a wedding themselves.

Finally, there is always the case where a phrase changes meaning without changing word order but by changing the inflection used in the searchers mind.

This happened to me the other day as I was looking for a headset for my phone. I saw a box on the shelf that read “cordless telephone headset.” My first thought was, “oh, look, a cordless headset.” But alas, it was merely a headset for a cordless phone. Two very different things but both use the same words in the same order.

Before deciding to optimize your site for “cordless telephone headset” you need to determine what it is people are looking for. Get this wrong and your visitors will quickly leave.

The best tool I’ve seen for determining visitor intent is Google. Do a search for your phrase and look at the results. If the majority of the results are cordless headsets then you have to assume this is what people mean when they type in that phrase. When people land on your site using that phrase, these are the products you need to display. If you show corded headsets for cordless phones instead, you’re going to have higher bounce rates.

Understanding your visitors intent with keywords doesn’t always boil down to the obvious. This is a good check for all of your keywords. Sometimes there are other industries you may not be aware of that are using the same terminology. A quick check in the search results can be quite telling as what your keywords actually mean.

This post was inspired from The Princess Bride themed presentation I gave in early 2010 at SEMpdx’s Searchfest titled Inconceivable Content: The Dread Pirate Robert’s Guide to Creating Swashbuckling Content, Pillaging the Search Engines, and Commandeering a Treasure Trove of Conversions. If you enjoyed this post you also might enjoy other posts inspired from the same. Search for “inconceivable content” on this blog to find them all.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

Go to Source

by Jennifer Laycock

Every now and then I find myself on the phone with a potential client trying to talk them into putting our conversation on hold and giving my Search Engine Guide’s Associate Editor Stoney deGeyter a call. Why? Because they’re in a position where they need to focus on both search engine optimization and social media to build a successful site, but they only have the budget to do one at a time…and at this time, they need to put social media on hold and focus on search engine optimization.

As much as I enjoy working with companies to build sustainable social media strategies, the truth is my services are not always going to deliver the best bang for their buck. There are times when it simply makes more sense to focus on search engine optimization. In fact, making the right choice of where to start your marketing efforts can be essential to generating the additional revenue needed to invest in BOTH Social Media and SEO.

If you’re in the position of trying to figure out where to start, here are three key ways to decide search engine optimization is your best starting point. (On Thursday, we’ll take a look at when it’s best to begin with Social Media.)

Clue #1 When You Have an Established Web Site, but No Traffic

Let’s say you’ve been doing business online for several years. You have an established web site and you’ve been using it successfully to generate leads or drive sales. You have a nice amount of traffic and fairly good conversion rates. You’ve just reached a point where you’d like to increase business and your existing efforts aren’t cutting the mustard.

This is a good time to bring in a search engine optimization expert. A good SEO will be able to sort through your analytics and match what they find to solid keyword research in order to determine the most effective way to get your product in front of potential customers who may be looking for it. They can build off the foundation of age and credibility you’ve established to seek out new clients and get your site in front of more targeted searchers.

When this is the case, investing your money in search engine optimization to pick up the customers who are actually looking for (but failing to find) your product or services, makes the most sense.

Clue #2 When Your Product or Service has a Research Based Sales Process

There are some products people fall in love with at first sight. We call these “impulse buys.” There are other products that require a fairly lengthy research process before a purchase is made. These are the types of products that align perfectly with search engine optimization.

If you sell a product that costs more than $25 and that has competition from other similar products, you likely fall into the realm of research based sales. This means people will start with broad searches (i.e. portable dvd player), move on to information gathering purchases (i.e. best portable dvd player under $100) and finally search with a specific product in mind (Phillips PET741B/37.) For these types of products, it’s absolutely essential to make sure your site is properly optimized. If you’re not connecting with these customers at multiple points during the research process, you’re highly unlikely to connect with them when it comes time for them to buy.

Clue #3 When You Sell Something People Already Want

If you’re spending tons of money on offline advertising (billboards, radio, tv, print, etc…) but your site isn’t properly optimized, you’re making a huge mistake.  In fact, if you sell any product that’s already well established and popular, but you aren’t getting the type of traffic and sales you’d hoped for, it’s probably a good idea to focus on SEOing your web site before you do anything else.

A quick trip to a free keyword research tool can be very revealing when it comes to this clue. If legions of consumers are searching for the very thing you’re selling…search engine optimization should be your first stop in the world of online marketing. If it’s not, you’re simply leaving customers sitting on the table for your nearest competitor with a marketing budget to scoop up.

The Best Internet Marketing Campaigns are Integrated

In an ideal world, every company would have the budget to invest in a truly integrated online marketing campaign. They would be focusing on search engine optimization, analytics, paid search, social media and online reputation management. The teams for each of these specialties would be working in tandem to test, refine and launch the most effective campaigns possible.

Since this isn’t always possible, it’s important to focus your funds in the area that delivers the strongest and fastest reward. This will often enable a company to increase sales and profits enough to justify investing in the next item on their marketing list. Ideally, this cycle continues until you’ve got a strong marketing presence in all areas of the web. Until then, invest those first funds wisely.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

Go to Source

by Stoney deGeyter

No matter where you go in life, you’re sure to find people who seem to make it their life’s joy to make you angry. They probably don’t even realize what they are doing… it just comes naturally. Two conflicting personalities at work.

I find it fun to think of people who you can’t stand the most, then think of their spouses, friends, or children who love and support them, and probably don’t have the faintest clue that you think they are an ass.

I remember the first time I met my ex-wife, she found me rude and annoying. I was teaching a card game to a group of kids after church and she came up to talk to one of the girls, the daughter of her best friend. Here I was trying to herd cats, so to speak, and I finally got everybody to listen to the rules when she interrupts not once, but twice.

So I stopped talking and (politely) waited for her to finish her conversation before resuming my discourse of the rules of “idiot”. According to her, however, I was the idiot. She interpreted my silence as a glare that said “how dare you interrupt me!”

She stayed well clear of me for some time after that. But, it wasn’t long until she was around me enough to see the charm and wit hidden underneath the “rude” behavior demeanor I portrayed. For a while at least.

There is no doubt that I could have reacted differently during that interaction. The same is likely true of most people that we find irritating. Most of the time it’s minor personality flaws that just don’t allow us to see eye to eye.

Life dishes these people out to us through business, related friendships, social events, on the beach, and even church. In your personal life you have some control over who you interact with. Not so much in business.

In his book High Maintenance Relationships, Les Parrot discusses several types of people that have personalities that tend to get under our skin:

Critics who constantly complain or give unwanted advice.
Martyrs who are forever the victim and wracked with self-pity.
Wet blankets who are pessimistic and habitually negative.
Steamrollers who are blindly insensitive to others.
Gossips who spread rumors and leak secrets.
Control freaks who are unable to let go and let things be.
Back-stabbers who are two-faced.
Green-eyed monsters who seethe with envy.
Volcanoes who build steam and are always ready to erupt.
Sponges who are always needy and never give anything back.
Competitors who always keep track of tit-for-tat.

Many books have been written about how to deal with or prevent hostile work environments. The book, The No Asshole Rule talks about having a completely asshole-free work environment. It talks about how to deal with these people, and the solution generally comes down to firing them.

But what this and other books often overlook is how not to be one of these 11 types of people. We can learn how to be better managers, better communicators, better leaders, better workers and whatever else. We can read books on how to create a more productive work environment, how to reward your employees or make your co-workers feel special.

But often the best advice for any manager boils down to one thing:

Don’t be that guy!

I can see myself in any number of these personality types, and I’m sure many of my friends and colleagues do to. So, what can I do? Recognize which tendencies I have, and make a deliberate effort to act contrary to my nature.

This is crucial for anyone looking to get ahead in business, whether you’re an employee, manager, or business owner. Continuing with any of these 11 personality traits simply makes people not want to work with or for you.

The more you temper your personality to be the type of person that people want to be around, the better success you’ll have in your relationships and life and business in general.

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by Stone Reuning

Consumers scour the Internet to research products before
making a purchase. Today’s shoppers want information before they buy. Those retailers
providing the information shoppers seek in a unique manner can enjoy significant
advantages over other retailers competing for a shopper’s purchase. And now with Google’s MayDay Update wreaking havoc on long-tail rankings for some ecommerce stores, the time is right for getting your product descriptions ramped up.

Here’s why you’ll want to make sure each of your products has unique descriptions.

Your product pages can gain organic search engine visibility 

There’s much to be said for having your products show up on the first page of
Google or Yahoo. Organic search engine listings can bring valuable traffic
directly to your product pages without the per-click cost of paid search. You
can reach way beyond existing marketing campaigns to a whole new set of
consumers who may have never heard of you or thought to shop on your site
otherwise.

But search engines don’t like duplicate content. They work hard to return
useful results to searchers – and that means filtering out all the “me too” web
pages containing the same content.

This puts you at a severe disadvantage if you’re using the standard supplied
copy for product descriptions – the same as every other retailer. Search engines
are likely to favor the manufacturer’s web site or a retailer that has added
elements to customize its product page, while filtering out all the other sites
showing the standard copy. Including yours.

Sometimes customizing your product descriptions is all that’s needed to help
your product pages show up in searches naturally. Just be aware of important
keywords for each product – retain the keywords used in the original content and
ensure other possible keywords are also addressed in the new copy. That way your
product pages will not only enjoy the likelihood of ranking above those of other
retailers for the same keywords in the generic product descriptions, but they
can show up for a larger set of search terms, too.

Just one thing. Keep in mind that in order for your product descriptions to
help with search engine visibility, the architecture of your product pages must
support indexing of that content. Be sure to ask an SEO expert for a structural assessment when you’re looking at your product pages.

Shoppers who land on your product pages are more likely to buy   

Let’s face it. Most manufacturer-supplied product descriptions are pretty
bland. Well-written product descriptions can help increase the shopper’s
propensity to purchase from you. Studies have shown that consumers are reluctant
to buy from sites that don’t include enough information to answer all their
questions. Your unique product descriptions can offer more details than
competing sites, alleviating any concerns or unanswered questions the shopper
would face elsewhere.

Even if you offer commodity products that normally compete on price, you can
create perceived value with the information you provide. While some consumers
may still use your site for research and then shop elsewhere to find the lowest
price, you’ll find that others assign a premium value to your web site,
appreciating that they can research and buy at the same online store.

In addition, creating complete, unique descriptions for each of your products
can also go a long way toward boosting credibility. Consumers are more likely to
trust a web site that has invested in well-written, thorough product
information.

Your online store builds more valuable brand equity 

You sell products provided by a lot of different manufacturers. Each vendor
has its own format for the descriptions it provides, leaving your product pages
a patchwork of different copy styles, occasional grammatical mishaps and
generally very boring, incomplete information.

When you invest in unique descriptions for all the products you sell, you can
match the tone to your own store brand. Customers experience a seamless voice
from your home page through category landing pages right down to each product.
You’ll be more likely to build rapport with customers, which can create a point
of differentiation for your store and support greater shopper loyalty.

Yes, it does take a significant investment to provide compelling product
descriptions. But with the payoff of greater search engine visibility, higher
conversions and enhanced brand equity, rewriting manufacturer product
descriptions is well worth the investment. The retailers that recognize this are
the ones creating a long-term advantage online.

Why not make your store the place to research and buy the products
you sell, rather than just another choice among hundreds? 

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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by Mike Moran

If you are old (like me), then you might be doing certain things the way you always have, without realizing that times have changed. The old ways don’t necessarily continue to work. All this was brought to mind when I read a recent story about how State Farm Insurance followed the old procedures, which didn’t work out for them when they were handling a case of a dog tragically killed by a car.

Image via Wikipedia

As the story goes, Canadian law holds a pet owner responsible for damage caused by the pet, so State Farm sent the pet owners a bill for $1700 to cover the damage to the car that struck and killed their dog.

At a certain level, this makes sense. After all, anytime someone is at fault in an accident, the insurance company needs to make them pay. Failing to do so raises everyone’s insurance rates. But in this situation, the public relations damage of a heartless insurance company going after the dog’s grief-stricken owners seemed right out of central casting. And social media message boards and bloggers soon jumped in, and State Farm is there. But not looking like a good neighbor.

If you’re feeling a bit smug as you read this, wipe that look off your face. State Farm has a generally positive image inside and outside social media. Many insurance companies would have done the exact same thing, and many other businesses have policies in place that employees adhere to without considering the extenuating circumstances. Maybe yours does, too.

So this isn’t a story about State Farm. It’s a story about you. Do your employees know how to operate in public? It’s likely that the poor claims adjusters whose quick decision started this imbroglio didn’t even consider that they are working in the public eye. I am confident that they didn’t consider what people would think. They were just following procedures and sending a private letter to someone.

We all need to remember that everything we do in the age of social media can be publicized without our permission, and that the reaction to what we do forms a new kind of pressure of public opinion that none of us are accustomed to.

Some small business owners have told me that they are too small for anyone to make a stink over what they do, but that’s just whistling past the graveyard. True, your public relations mess wouldn’t get picked up by the New York Times, but does that matter? Social media makes it easy for your customers to hear all about it, even if mainstream media never mentions it.

No matter how large or small your business, your employees need to understand that everything they do now is in public, whether they want it to be or not. Every seemingly private communication can become public at any moment. Do you want your employees shackled to a set of procedures in those situations, or do you want them deputized to act in the best interests of the company? Or do you at least want them to think about the public relations implications of their actions and ask for advice before blindly acting in accordance with procedure?

Your public relations day in hell is coming if you don’t.

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