I first heard the noise during the brief pause between commercials. I was sitting at home watching TV. Tom and the kids had gone to watch my son’s soccer game, and this was a rare chance for me to enjoy some weekend alone time. What I heard would change that. It was the sound of water dripping under the sink. I instantly pictured water seeping into my wood floors, warping them, molding them, ruining them.

When this woman — let’s call her "Sally" — gets to her computer and opens Google, what keywords is she going to enter? She might type in "emergency plumber," "weekend plumber," or "water leak help."

If you are a plumber, are you interested in hearing from her? Do you work weekends? Do you maintain a fleet of trucks around the city? If so, these are keyword phrases that will compliment your business strategy very well. How would you have know to target these keywords if you didn’t know her story?

The Source for Search Keywords

I have a lot of respect for people who create search engine keyword lists. They sit with you for an hour or so, asking questions about your business and your customers. Then, they go away for a day or two, returning with a list of hundreds or thousands of keyword phrases, prioritized by potential value to your business. It’s a beautiful thing to see.

Unfortunately, this is what they usually have to work with:

Sally is a 44-year-old female living in an upper-middle-class ZIP code in suburban Dallas. Her family income is between $150,000 and $200,000 per year. She is married. She has three children between 12 and 18 years of age. Her home is 15 years old and has three bathrooms, five sinks, and a sprinkler system.

Based on this, can you predict what is Sally going to type into Google at any given moment? It’s hard to say without knowing her story.

Segmenting Misses Opportunities

I’ve been thinking about remodeling our master bathroom. We’ve lived in this house a long time and it’s time we started updating it. Mary down the street just finished hers and said I should look for a plumber that can work with the new materials used in modern bathrooms. Apparently it was a problem for her.

This is the same Sally. Same income. Same ZIP code. Same house. But she is going to search very differently, and remodel projects are probably going to be very desirable to a plumbing business. While terms like "bathroom remodel" may be very competitive, a search professional may find valuable terms that focus on bathroom materials such as "plumbing for tile counters," or "toilets on wooden floors."

Same person, different approach.

Naturally, such insights will also affect the content you choose for your site. Your search professional should be able to help you prioritize content based on your customer commentaries.

The Power of the Customer Commentary

The four sentences that I began this post with contain a power that demographics alone can’t deliver.

First, the "story" is written from the point of view of the prospect – the potential visitor to your Web site. This means that it is written using the vocabulary of the customer, not the vocabulary of the business or industry. Sally would rarely say something like, "I suspected the elbow pipe was leaking around the seal and my wood floors were being ruined."

Second, it tells us exactly why she is searching for a plumber, giving us more potential keywords to investigate. In the hands of a talented search professional, phrases like "emergency plumbing," "after hours plumber," and "how to shut off water" could be parlayed into hundreds of otherwise overlooked opportunities.

Third, it highlights the importance of Google Maps and the "seven pack." Because Sally can feel her wood floors rotting, proximity is going to be a key motivator in her selection of a solution. In most searches, the map is a convenience to the searcher. In Sally’s situation it is crucial to be in that list of seven.

Aren’t these stories too specific to be helpful?

You may feel that these stories are too specific, and that you would be missing a great many searches by focusing on a few specific customer commentaries. If you are the only plumber in your area, you may not need such detail. Chances are, you are not. Furthermore, your competition is learning every day how to make the search engines work in their favor.

Neither of these stories omits the broader keyword phrases that you would be interested in. However, your ability to specifically target those customers who fit your strategic advantages will ensure that you stay one step ahead of your competition.

If you’re going to be depending on search engines for leads and sales in 2010, you need to help your search term research along. Write the stories of your best visitors in their words and find those valuable search terms that everyone else is missing.

Brian Massey is The Conversion Scientist™ and he has the lab coat to prove it. Brian develops visitor personas for businesses of all sizes so that they can focus their marketing dollars in the places that will deliver the leads and sales that help them grow.

All opinions expressed in guest blog postings are those of the specific post’s author, and may or may not reflect those of Brian Combs or ionadas local.

Now comes the final step — keeping those shoppers on your site long enough to turn them into buyers.

Strong website content can help you get the best return on your online branding investment. You must stop visitors in their tracks within their first few seconds on your site to still that mouse hand. Exciting copy, vivid images, and easily navigated pages are all crucial to viewer retention — they’re the online equivalent of a TV announcer yelling, “Don’t touch that dial!”

How do you grab your new friends’ attention within those first few critical seconds?

Well, if you’ve taken your SEO seriously up to this point, then you already have one big advantage — keywords and key phrases. If your prospects are using these terms in their searches, then you can already guess what kind of verbiage pushes their buttons. Use those terms, by all means, but use them sensibly. Larding your text with keywords, with no concern for flow or eloquence, may enhance your search results, but the resulting clumsiness in the writing may cancel out any gain. Drawing more visitors to a poorly written website isn’t likely to boost business.

Even when the writing is perfect, watch out for other little slip-ups that can lessen your website’s overall impact. Consider the humble hyperlink, for instance. Links are great for guiding your reader to the next stage of the sale — and links written in detailed, targeted language can improve your Google-readiness. But drop a compelling link into the first sentence of your Home page copy, and you can forget about your visitors reading anything below that link — they’ve already been whisked away to another page. Don’t upstage yourself.

Finally, make sure your written message is consistent across all your online media. Your website, your tweets, your LinkedIn profile — everything you do online should form one congruent, powerful statement about what your company stands for. Once you get all your marketing tools supporting each other, you’ll be able to truly leverage the awesome power of the Internet for future business success.

William Reynolds is a freelance copywriter based in Austin, Texas who specializes in web content, print-marketing copy, radio/TV commercial scripts, and ghostwritten articles for corporate clients nationwide. His writing samples and other information can be viewed at ReynoldsWriting.com.

All opinions expressed in guest blog postings are those of the specific post’s author, and may or may not reflect those of Brian Combs or ionadas local.

Why Track Time?

Small businesses cannot afford to waste time on projects that are not bringing in the appropriate ROI, but how can managers know which projects to focus on and which ones to drop? Since the cost of labor is often a major factor in total project cost, tracking employee time to tasks and projects provides a much-needed window into profitability. Suppose you have a client who gives you a lot of business. You might think that this is a client you need to keep, but time data could reveal that you spend twice as much customer service time on this client. They are not profitable at all, but you would never know it unless you had your employees tracking time by task and project.

Provide Focus to Your Limited Staff

Small businesses are often understaffed, and can face the danger of getting buried in necessary but burdensome overhead and administrative work. Whether you are tracking general employee time for payroll or tracking with more detail for profitability insight, you cannot afford to waste employee time on manual timesheets, double entry or other dated processes. There is affordable technology out there that can lift this burden, allowing you to focus time and energy where they belong – on your strategic goals.

Curt Finch is the CEO of Journyx, which has solutions for project management and execution.

All opinions expressed in guest blog postings are those of the specific post’s author, and may or may not reflect those of Brian Combs or ionadas local.

Action #1: Find Hoover’s D&B landing page used as the example in the “Lessons Learned from Five Internet Marketing Experts”

One of the five panelists in this session, Peter Poulin, Executive Vice President of Marketing at Hoover’s Inc. shared with the audience the various iterations of their strategy as they tested design elements, layouts and calls to action on their site. One interesting discovery was that there was a higher conversion rate when they used an image of a blonde woman versus a brunette. It was easy to tell that this stirred up some debate at the various tables because it received a lot of buzz on Twitter. It certainly gives new meaning to “blondes have more fun.”

I intend to find the example landing page he used during his presentation to see the design they ultimately settled on. If I can get a copy of the presentation, that would be a bonus!

Action #2: Download Brian Masey’s presentation “Killing Brad Pitt: Why Buyers Fail to Take Action on Your Web site”

Brian Masey with Conversion Sciences, delivered one of my favorite presentations of the day focusing on the various personas that come to your site. He categorized four different types of buyers:

• Competitive (highly logical but quick to make decisions) – respond well to Ratings, Guarantees, Newness, Brand, Appeal to Others
• Methodical (also highly logical but take time to make decisions) – respond to Case Studies, Process, Samples, Standards, Competing Solutions
• Spontaneous (highly emotional and quick to make decisions) – respond to Color, Ease-of-use, Size, Price, Return Policy, Delivery, Discounts
• Humanist (also highly emotional but take time to make decisions) – respond to Testimonials, Credibility, Company, Reviews, Trustworthiness

A copy of his presentation can be found on Slideshare and I will spend more time gleaning information from it.

Action #3: Another action for us from Brian Masey’s ‘Killing Brad Pitt’ presentation is to incorporate additional calls to action on our site. Here are some examples he gave:

• Add to cart
• Checkout
• Subscribe
• Trial signup
• Sample request
• Contact form
• Download
• Tell a friend
• Read an article
• View the video

I’d like to incorporate four to five of these appropriately throughout our site.

Action #4: Implement landing pages for our events and partner pages.

At the end of their presentations, a handful of the speakers provided links to a specific landing page on their sits. I actually viewed every single one of them and I think I even signed up for anything and everything on their sites, which made me instantly aware of the effectiveness of these pages. This is exactly what I want visitors to our site to do. What a valuable lesson. Check out a couple of examples:

• Brian Massey’s (Conversion Scientist) landing page for Innotech attendees
• Giovanni Gallucci’s (Social Media Ninja) landing page for his speaker evaluation

We’ve already started in this and we’re launching personalized landing pages for key partners this week.

Action #5: Devote 15 minutes, 3 times a day to social media such as Twitter, FaceBook and LinkedIn and use the tools to streamline and automate what I can.

From his presentation “Top 10 Extreme Social Media Promotion Hacks”, Giovanni Gallucci the, ‘Social Media Ninja’ suggested not 10 but 40 social media tips including using the following tools to streamline your social media activities:

• Twitterfeed
• Tweetadder
• Ping.fm
• Twitter Mutality (Google it)

Although we have Twitter and Facebook pages, I am formalizing social media activities as part of my daily schedule and marketing routine.

For EXTRA CREDIT and a chance to be inspired to build social media policies for our company, download and review Intel’s Social Media Guidelines.

Bryan G. Rhoads, Sr. Digital Strategist, Intel Social Media Center of Excellence delivered “Tying it all together: integrating your business and brand into social conversations” about his experience being part of the team that developed, and continues to develop, a social media strategy at Intel. The Social Media Center they created is remarkable but with me being a trainer, I was most excited about the educational programs they built to provide “Digital IQ” training for their employees. Very impressive.

Overall, this was a day well spent at Innotech’s eMarketing Summit. There was a great deal of valuable and actionable information presented, which made it clearer than ever that you should have your website working for you. It is absolutely critical that it not only provide information, it should be optimized to draw traffic, capture information and when possible bring customers or clients into the sales process. Then it makes sense to use social media to extend the reach and capabilities of the site.

Looking forward to next year and of course, seeing the results of what I learned from last week.

Vickie S. Evans is a former New York personal assistant turned applications instructor with twelve years of classroom training experience and six years experience working as a professional assistant. She is a Microsoft Certified Trainer and holds two additional certifications as a Microsoft Office Specialist Master Instructor (Office 2003) and Microsoft Certified Application Specialist (Office 2007). Through her company RedCape, Vickie and her staff provide superhero professionals with just-in-time, desk side technology coaching and solutions through virtual collaboration.

All opinions expressed in guest blog postings are those of the specific post’s author, and may or may not reflect those of Brian Combs or ionadas local.

If you’re proud of doing everything, you see it as a way to be scrappy, keeping more dollars for yourself. If you hate it, you think you simply can’t afford to hire someone to take the load off. In both cases, you may be failing to see the forest for the trees.

People start businesses for any number of reasons, but two of the main ones are 1) to do something you love and 2) to make money. Are you achieving your goals? Let’s see:

Do something you love
If you’re a computer whiz, you might open an IT company so you can set up networks and fix computers—work you’re happy to do all day long. But if you’re doing your own admin and bookkeeping, then you’re spending a certain number of hours every day or week away from the IT tasks that you actually enjoy! When you do tasks you don’t enjoy, you diminish your overall satisfaction and increase chances of burnout.

Make money
Ultimately, we’re all trying to earn a living. Let’s say you’re a CPA billing at $175/hr. If you work 8 hrs/day, you have the potential to earn $1,400/day. If you’re doing your own business support, tasks that cost substantially less than $175 per hour, you are not maximizing your earning potential. In fact, you are literally wasting your time.

Makes sense but you’re not sure where to start? First: Figure out the 3–5 most critical tasks that you perform in your business. They’re critical because you’re the only one who knows how to do them or you do them best, or those tasks bring in the most revenue.

Once you’ve identified those tasks, your goal must be to stop doing everything else! (Really.) In Eat That Frog, author Brian Tracy tells the true story of Cynthia. She identified her 3 most critical functions and got her boss’ buy-in to focus only on those tasks (and to eliminate or delegate the rest). He also agreed that if she doubled revenue, he would double her salary. In just 30 days, Cynthia increased her productivity so much by focusing on those 3 tasks that she did indeed double revenues and doubled her salary. On top of it, she actually reduced her daily workday from 12 hours down to 8!

You may still be thinking that you can’t afford to delegate or outsource the rest of your company’s functions. Any time you perform business support functions, you take time away from doing work you can bill or else generating leads and making sales. If your time is worth more than, say, $18/hr, you will make a profit by outsourcing your admin. It’s that simple.

Just imagine what you could achieve if you got to focus on the reasons you started your business in the first place! You would be happier and more successful, and you would make more money. Who can argue with that?

Abigail Mahnke is president of The Outsource Resource , a one-stop-shopping agency for small businesses in Austin, TX, providing a range of business support services that enable companies to stay focused on their revenue and growth, while ensuring that their other critical functions take place. These services include administrative assistance, bookkeeping/QuickBooks, marketing/social media, graphic design, project management, organization and more. She’ll be speaking in more depth on this topic on Friday, 11/6 at the Taking It to the Next Level business conference. You can also visit her booth on Tuesday, 11/10 at the Austin Open 4 Business Conference.

All opinions expressed in guest blog postings are those of the specific post’s author, and may or may not reflect those of Brian Combs or ionadas local.

One of my long-time newsletter subscribers recently emailed me and asked:

What if you own a dry cleaning business in Madison, Wisconsin?

Or you’re a real estate agent in Ontario, Canada?

Or you operate a bakery in Marrakech, Morocco?

If you own a local business and you want to attract customers who are in your neighborhood or city, can article marketing still work for you?

My answer = Yes!

Many of my article marketing clients at IWantMoreProspects.com own businesses that have local clients and customers. They use article marketing to increase their web presence, bolster their website rankings in the search engines, establish themselves as an expert in their niche, and also to generate more targeted traffic to their website.

So, although you may not be looking for national or international attention, you can still benefit from a targeted article submission campaign. Now, when I say “targeted traffic”, I mean that the people who are visiting your website are the type of prospects who might be truly interested in your business. They are not just random passers-by.

How can you get targeted traffic for your local business using article marketing?

To be sure that the traffic you receive is targeted, write about your area of expertise and in your resource box (that’s the author bio that sits below your article) specify the location of your business. This would tell the reader that you only work with people in that location.

Also, if appropriate you could write some articles that specifically deal with your industry in your location. For example, if you are a Real Estate agent in Ontario, Canada, there may be some unique aspects of buying or selling a house that are specific to Ontario.

Here’s one article idea: “10 Upcoming Neighborhoods in Ontario, Canada That You Should Consider Buying a House In”

Then the article would have to deliver on the promise that the title makes. Please resist the urge to mention your location in the title and then write an article that offers generalized info. If you mention your location in the title, you need to provide specific info about that location.

What You Must Remember When You Are Trying to Get Local Attention Using Article Marketing

The main thing to remember is that while we talk about a “global audience”, every one of us who is doing article marketing wants to attract a certain type of person–the type of person who is most likely to be interested in our business.

I don’t know of any website owner who wants every Tom, Dick and Harriet coming to his or her site.

Whether you have a local business or an Internet business that operates worldwide, you still have a target market, and you need to write your articles with that specific group in mind.

So, don’t let the “global exposure” idea intimidate or mislead you. When done correctly, article marketing generates targeted traffic.

You can get traffic that is targeted to your specific location (if that is what you’re going for).

You can get traffic that is targeted to your industry.

You can get traffic that is targeted to people with very specific needs.

You can get traffic that is targeted to people with specific interests.

So start writing articles for your local business. If you’re stuck, grab my Instant Article Writing Templates at StartWritingArticlesFaster.com

Article Marketing Expert Eric Gruber uses the power of articles to create online opportunities for small business owners who want more publicity, prospects and profits. Now, you can get his instant article writing templates that will help you write your articles in 30 minutes or less. Get 3 of his favorite article writing templates for free at TryMyFreeArticleTemplates.com.

All opinions expressed in guest blog postings are those of the specific post’s author, and may or may not reflect those of Brian Combs or ionadas local.

If you have set up your web marketing capabilities, you can simply tweet on Twitter and send an email blast through your email marketing service.

Let’s look at an example:

Imagine you own a local fabric store and you have just received a much larger shipment of cotton plaids than you expected. Where will you store the inventory? (And we’re not even talking inventory carrying costs.)

Instead you tweet in 97 characters (leaving you 140 more characters to add your website URL, etc.):

Large shipment of cotton plaids with no place to store. Come in today for 50% off these fabrics.

Then you send out a somewhat longer email message explaining your predicament with the same offer. And how have you gotten the email addresses to which to send out this message?

You’ve gotten the email addresses through an email opt-in system on your website in which you offer, for example, a 10% off coupon if the person gives you his/her email address. And the email marketing software system you use stores the addresses in a database, helps you format your email message so that it more easily gets through spam filters, sends out the message for you, and keeps track of open rates.

Of course, if you’re lucky enough to have a website for which you can easily make changes, you’ll also post the announcement in large type on your home page. Anyone clicking through to your website after seeing the tweet or getting the email message will be reminded of why he or she is visiting the site.

By using your website and email marketing system and by sending tweets on Twitter, you can easily make special offers that help you out and make your customers happy.

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller on Twitter) has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is an Internet business consultant whose company website is www.MillerMosaicLLC.com. If you liked this article, you’re going to love her free report on “The Top 3 Internet Marketing Elements” – download the report now from www.WeTeachWebMarketing.com.

All opinions expressed in guest blog postings are those of the specific post’s author, and may or may not reflect those of Brian Combs or ionadas local.