BroadVision Marketing Blog

Keyword research. Words that cause the bravest business person to shudder. You, the client, want to know how your inbound marketing agency is going to get you on the first page of Google and you read somewhere that keyword research is the key. And you are right. But finding the right keywords can be difficult. The first hurtle both you and your agency need to work on is defining your target market. While that can be easy if you only sell pizza, it gets much more difficult if you are selling a complex menu to various groups of diners at different times of day. Where to begin?

Is Google+ worth the time that small businesses would need to set it up and be active on it? Much of what I read said that this was the perfect time to get involved. Given the changes this social media platform experienced mid-May 2013, it is a good idea to go see what Google+ is all about and how your business can get in on the ground floor of what might be a golden opportunity before you dismiss it.

Just the analytics

The network now has 190 million people visiting plus.google.com each month, as well as 390 million logged-in Google account holders using its features monthly in at least one Google product. It has one of the world’s most powerful data centers at its disposal. A major drawback in the past was has been that men made up 64.18% of the users with women only accounting for 27.87%. With 41 new features Google Plus is now morphing into something that makes greater use of what Google does best—anticipate the needs of its users, show them relevant news and information, and help them manage massive amounts of data. My bet is that more women are going to start using Google+ in the future since several of those new features are Pinterest-like in nature.

Christopher Null has this to say in his May 2013 article Does Google+ matter for small businesses?

For small business owners, you can be forgiven if you find Google+ to be a confusing waste of time, but it still makes sense to create a Page for your company and keep it reasonably up to date with at least one post every week or two. Why? Because even if Google+ doesn't do anything for overall SEO, it’s at least one more place that helps with your overall visibility on the web.

If you have ever sat in front of a blank computer screen with a blog deadline hanging over your head like Poe’s raven while you think to yourself “never more” will I have a coherent thought let along some good blog post ideas, guess what—You are not alone. Some people can just write from their encyclopedic knowledge base concerning their field. They know their target market, the market’s pain points and how to help. But the rest of us need to do some serious work first and there is no shame in that.

(NOTE--This article is not a sales article masquerading as an informational one.) Your business is brand new and you want to find out about how to track your leads or what that even means. Don’t try to find an answer on the internet. Yes, I hope you found this article on the internet, but mostly all you will find when you search for “lead tracking” will be businesses selling software. And, of course, theirs is the best since sliced bread. However, how can you find out which software you need if you can’t figure out what lead tracking entails? Maybe you won’t need all the bells and whistles. Maybe you need a deluxe version.

Let’s face it the world is getting more and more visual. Art, photographs, movies, television, blogs, blogs with pictures, blogs that are nothing but pictures, video, Facebook enlarging its pictures, even Twitter adding pictures, smart phones that can take pictures so a person doesn’t need an actual camera, Pinterest, and we must not forget our eyes seeing all that is around us. In fact, 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text. (Sources: 3M Corporation and Zabisco).

Here’s an easy question for you. Which do most people do more—read or watch television. That was simple to answer. So why would you only invest your time writing blogs? Why not also make a 2 to 4 minute video about that same subject and have more clicks, referrals and clients? Oh, you say it’s too hard or too expensive? Think of this. You have been watching television your whole life. You probably know more about how to make a video than you think you do. As for too expensive, you can spend as little or as much as your budget allows. The result will be the same--you will have videos on the internet. While you probably won’t have a video go viral, your customers will learn about you and think of you as someone who can help them solve their problem.

I really enjoy using Twitter as a platform for social media inbound marketing; but I know that many business owners, especially baby boomers, don't. So I began looking for a way to help you write the perfect tweet. I found a perfect one that was similar to those ghastly sentence diagrams we had in school. The writer is Garry Moran, the head of social media in North American for SAP, a German software multinational that is one of the biggest companies in the world. I was impressed. Next I found an article that was totally opposed to the blueprint idea. My person opinion is that using a blueprint like Moran suggests is a good place to start if you are a Twitter novice, but afterwards you want to being to vary what you tweet and see what works for you using analytics.

So you believe if you blog it, they will come? You need to wake up from that field of dreams. In reality even the best blog in the world won’t bring readers lining the highway to your site. All the experts that say write the best content to get recognized on Google are pulling the wool over your eyes. If you don’t get your work out where it can be found, it won’t be. How do you do that? I’m glad you asked.

I have a one-word internet marketing tip for all you business people, bloggers and website owners—syndication. While it means sharing your content with more people, the whole point of syndication is to move clients to your site by moving your site closer to Page 1 of Google.

Why does inbound marketing work? Why are people attracted to whitepapers, blogs, webinars, posts and tweets like a bee to a flower? Why do we look for internet marketing tips? The proof that inbound marketing works is the fact that you are here on the internet.  You found this blog and so many more things that perhaps you have even forgotten what you started searching for. In the old days people would get lost in encyclopedias the same way when an article indicated more on a piece of the subject could be found elsewhere. There are some special things about us that are the core reasons why we and many other people love internet marketing tips about inbound marketing.

Ask a Realtor what’s one of the most important factors in selling a house and all of them would have “Location, Location, Location” as a factor. When we apply that same question to internet marketing I’m convinced all internet marketers would say “Content, Content, Content.” Although there are many tools available to make your content available online, the most important tool is blogs. So, what is a blog? None better than Wikipedia to answer the question. “A blog (a portmanteau of the term web log)^[1] is a discussion or information site published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete entries ("posts") typically displayed in reverse chronological order so the most recent post appears first.” Now that you know what a blog is, did you know that according to current estimates there are over 133 million blog readers in the US alone! In other words, if you are not blogging, you are missing a big chunk of readers.