TopRank Internet Marketing News

One of the most common forms of online marketing for small businesses is to have a website. The problem is, with today’s increasingly social and mobile web, a web site just isn’t enough. To help website owners take full advantage of the most important online marketing opportunities, here are 3 things small businesses can do to attract and engage new customers.

1. Content Publishing & Marketing: Consumers are interacting with multiple content sources before purchase and businesses that provide useful information beyond product features and benefits can attract more traffic and referrals.

When companies see the publicity of viral videos like Evian roller babies for consumers or BtoB successes like Cisco’s The Future of Shopping, they often get the urge to jump in to the video marketing game themselves. But where to start?

We get asked this kind of question a lot at TopRank and the ideal situation from a marketing performance perspective is when the company understands what they want to achieve through video marketing.  It’s essential to start with a position statement like: Company 123 wants to achieve X goal and thinks Y video marketing tactic makes the most sense because of Z research and observations.

Have you ever noticed how young children figure out a maze? At first they may struggle going through each path only to realize that they can’t get through. By then, the paper may be filled up with messy crayon or pencil marks that make it virtually impossible to find the right way. Then as they get just a little older, you might see them look at the end point. They may even start at the finish line and work backwards to the beginning of the maze. It’s creative problem solving at its finest.

Many small business owners have had their websites up and running for a long time.  More recently though, small business owners are starting to revisit their websites and ask, “What has my website done for my business lately?”  For many the answer is “not much” and that’s because they really haven’t done much to keep it up over the years.

Times have changed and if small business owners aren’t tending to their website garden, weeds will take over and it won’t be much use to their business and driving new customers.  Below are a few ideas I picked up at the MIMA Summit which, if implemented, can help small business owners start to see a solid ROI on their web marketing efforts.

Optimizing social media for search engines, presents a tremendous opportunity to grow social networks and build traffic to content that allows visitors to consumer, engage and share. TopRank Online Marketing has been “practicing what we preach” in the area of social media optimization and before that, blog SEO and social news/bookmarking for about 5 years or so.

Below is a PowerPoint presentation offering Social SEO guidelines, planning tips, case studies and practical SEO information for Blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube.

We hope you find it useful: