Website marketing is a complex practice, but it’s one that’s crucial to master in order to get the most out of the website you’ve invested so much time and effort into building.  So as you go about improving your web marketing skills, keep an eye out for the following mistakes.  They’re quite common to new website owners, but can easily be avoided if you know what to watch out for.

Mistake #1 – Making Decisions Based on Gut Feeling

There’s no doubt that building and promoting a website is a complicated process.  At every step of the process, you’ve got to make decisions that influence how successful your website will be – from the colors you choose to highlight specific features on your site to the words you select to promote new products.  However, one of the biggest mistakes you can make when marketing your website is to make these decisions based on “gut feeling” instead of solid data.

To get this all-important data, you need to install a program like Google Analytics and actually pay attention to what it has to say.  Data from this program can, for example, tell you which of your pages are the most popular and which traffic sources result in the highest conversions.  Using this valuable information to guide your decisions will ultimately be more effective than simply guessing at which changes will make the biggest difference in your website’s bottom line.

Mistake #2 – Not Split Testing Your Promotions

Another important way to use data to drive decisions on your website is with split testing – the process of comparing site element variants against one another in order to conclusively determine which version is more effective.

As an example, say you’re launching a new promotion and want to determine if a banner reading, “Buy Now and Get Free Shipping” or one that proclaims, “Buy Now and Get 20% Off” will result in more clicks through to your advertisement.  Using a split test program, you don’t have to guess at which one will result in the most sales – you can actually run the two side-by-side to figure out which type of promotion your customers will respond best to.

The data generated from your split test campaigns can be extremely valuable in informing both your current and future promotions, but you’ll miss out on all of these benefits if you make decisions based on gut feeling alone!

Mistake #3 – Ignoring the Importance of Long Term Goals

Once you’ve started using Google Analytics (or a related website data-tracking program) and split testing software to generate the web data needed to make informed decisions about site-wide changes, use these capabilities in order to set up measurable, long term goals.

Suppose you want your website to make more sales.  That’s a great start, but how exactly will you quantify this?  Exactly how many sales do you want to make each year?  Which traffic sources do you want to account for these sales?  What specific profit margins are you hoping to achieve?

By knowing exactly what you want to accomplish, you’ll be better able to align your actions in order to bring about your desired results.  Simply deciding to “increase sales” doesn’t give you much to go off of, but if you say that you’d like to increase sales from Facebook traffic by 50% within the next six months, you’ll be better able to come up with a concrete strategy for achieving these objectives, as well as put the necessary benchmarks in place to ensure your progress is on track.

Mistake #4 – Not Targeting Appropriate Keywords

Too many business owners put up web pages without a thought in the world for the keywords they’re targeting.  But given the potential free traffic that can be achieved by targeting the right keywords and optimizing your pages well enough to get ranked highly in the SERPs, failing to target the appropriate keywords puts these site owners at a major disadvantage.

So what does the “right” keyword look like?  Your specific results may vary based on the scope of your business and the amount of effort you’re willing to put into getting your site ranked.  But be aware that no matter how great your new website is, chances are you aren’t going to be able to get it ranked well in the Google SERPs for highly competitive keyword phrases like “lose weight” or “make money online” without years and years of effort.

Instead, target locally-oriented keywords (for example, “best Chicago pizza”) or long-tail keywords (ie – “lose weight with ab exercises”), both of which will be less competitive and more likely to result in high SERP rankings.

Mistake #5 – Failing to Optimize Your Pages

Once you’ve chosen a set of keywords to target, don’t just hope and pray that Google will pick up your site and rank it on these specific SERPs.  Instead, optimize your pages smartly, in a way that Google and the other search engines will understand.

A few of the steps you should take include:

• Integrating your target keyword into your meta tags, headline tag and body content
• Including your target keyword in your page URL
• Building back links to your page that use your target keyword as the anchor text

For more information on the specific steps you should take, check out our tutorial on “Essential On-Page SEO Techniques.”

Mistake #6 – Ignoring Your Social Presence

The level of activity you maintain on popular social networking sites – including Facebook, Google+ and Twitter – has never been more important than now.  While it used to be that these sites simply represented a good opportunity to get your marketing messages in front of prospective customers, it’s now widely acknowledged that “social shares” of your website’s content could improve your SERPs rankings.

According to Neil Patel, founder of web analytics giant KISSmetrics:

“Based on [statements by Google and Bing], you can assume that social media plays a role in influencing the search engine results by giving preference based on the authority of the author and the number of times a piece of content is shared on social networking sites.”

When you pair this understanding with the recent launch of Google’s Search Plus Your World (which has had a similarly major impact on social injections into the traditional SERPs), one thing is clear.  Your social presence matters more than ever, making it imperative that you invest time in building and maintaining your presence on the top social networking sites.

Mistake #7 – Expecting Overnight Results

Yes, your website looks great and the information it provides is top-notch compared to your competitors.  But just because a website is good doesn’t mean that it will be subject to a flood of frenzied traffic the second it opens its doors.

Instead, be aware that website traffic takes time to build (unless you go the PPC route and begin buying traffic right off the bat).  The search engines need time to index your content and decide where it should fall in the SERPs, and your prospective customers need time to find your site and identify it as a better alternative to others on the market.

Don’t lose sleep if your website only gets a handful of visitors at first, but don’t sit back on your laurels either.  Invest time in promoting your website effectively and, before you know it, you should have the flood of excited customers you’ve been hoping for.

Image: csulb gal

In a perfect world, the content you write and post to your website and business blog would be considered sacred.  After all, you’re the one who wrote it – why would anyone else feel free to help themselves and plagiarize your hard work for their own websites?

Unfortunately, this mindset is all too rare in the digital world, where content theft is a rampant problem plaguing many websites.  In some cases, the unauthorized sharing of digital content occurs simply because site owners are not familiar with copyright policy, which automatically grants full copyright authority to the content creator.  When you consider how many times you’ve simply pulled a picture from another site to use in your personal documents, it’s easy to see how pervasive this mindset has become.

But in other cases, content theft occurs due to more nefarious purposes.  There are websites out there that profit by “scraping” content from well-intentioned blogs and posting it to their own pages, where they generate revenue through advertising dollars.  In these cases, no attempt is made to provide attribution to the original author – the content is simply stolen and used “as is” on other websites.

As you might expect, seeing your content stolen and used in this manner can be quite frustrating for the business owners who have invested time and energy into generating their own content.

But what can you – as a single business owner treading water amidst a sea of scam artists – do to protect your content and ensure that your copyrighted materials aren’t used unlawfully?  Or, to look at the problem from another angle, is it even worth your time and energy to go after these spammers?

We’ll address the second concern later on in this article, but for now, let’s look at the process by which content scrapers are caught and prosecuted.  Clearly, the first step towards bringing these scam artists to justice is to find out if and when content theft is occurring on your website.  After all, if you don’t know that content theft is occurring, how can you stop the situation from happening?

The easiest way to determine if your content is being stolen is to use a tool like CopyScape, which compares the content on your website to the text found on other sites and highlights matches based on similar words.  If you decide to make content theft prevention a part of your website strategy, visit the CopyScape site about a week following the launch of each new post on your site and enter the post’s link into the site’s search tool to uncover matches.

Keep in mind that the company’s free tool isn’t 100% accurate, so you may also find it helpful to take advantage of their premium scans, which allow you to compare blocks of copy from your site across even more websites for a small fee.  Or, if you’d rather take a “hands off” approach to the monitoring process, take a look at the company’s scanning service, which will automatically check the content on your site for matches across the internet.

Hopefully, when you run these searches, no scraped results will turn up, meaning that your content hasn’t been stolen and you’re free to go about your business.  But what if you do find matching results that indicate your posts and articles have been scraped?

If you decide to go after the websites using your content improperly, the first step is to send a polite email to the site owner asking that your content either be removed or credited properly with a link back to your site.  Remember, most people online aren’t familiar with digital copyright law, so these site owners may be unaware that they’re using your content inappropriately.  Before you jump to conclusions about whether or not your content has been maliciously appropriated, give the site owner in question a chance to rectify the situation.

To find the site owner’s contact information, visit his or her main site – most websites these days have a “Contact Us” page which will give you the necessary details.  If you aren’t able to find the webmaster’s contact info on the site itself, conduct a DNS lookup, which should give you the email address stored on file with the domain’s registrar.

In your initial email to the site owner, be polite, but firm, informing him or her exactly what content has been used inappropriately and what resolution you would like to see.  If you would like the site owner to remove the content altogether, be clear about your expectations.  Or, if you’re comfortable leaving the content “as is” with an attribution link, specify a date by which the link should be added.

In many cases, this initial contact will be enough to bring about the resolution you’re looking for.  However, if the website owner fails to get back to you – or worse, adamantly refuses to remove the plagiarized content – it’s up to you to decide whether or not to take further legal action.

The next step in the process of resolving copyright disputes involves sending the site owner a DCMA notice, which details your claims to the content’s ownership in accordance with digital copyright laws.  This notice can be sent directly to the site owner or to the website’s hosting provider if you aren’t able to get a response from the webmaster.  In many cases where content has been maliciously stolen, web hosting providers may be more helpful than the site owners themselves, as these providers don’t usually like the idea of having scraped content hosted on their servers.

If, after taking all of these steps, you still aren’t able to come to a resolution, you’ll need to contract the services of an intellectual property lawyer to take the case further.  Copyright cases like these can result in major judgments in your favor, but be aware that getting there isn’t a cheap process.  Even though default judgments against copyright infringers can be claimed for hundreds of thousands of dollars, be aware that it may cost $50,000 or more in legal fees to prosecute a content scraper.

When you see your content being copied, it’s up to you to determine how far you want to take these proceedings.  In many cases, the time and cost associated with pursuing legal recourse may not be worth it for your business.  As frustrating as it may be, it’s sometimes a smarter choice to let copied content go un-avenged in order to prevent your legal battles from overwhelming other aspects of your growing business.

However, another thing to keep in mind is that having your content scraped may not have any negative consequences for your business in the first place.

As a business owner, the value you provide to your customers comes from your unique products and service offerings – not just the original content you provide on your company website or blog.  As long as you continue to provide exceptional value for your customers, they’ll keep coming back to your site, regardless of where else your content may be duplicated online.

Image: s_falkow

Back in November, we told you about Google’s latest personalized search features and how you could use these social integrations in traditional search engine results pages (SERPs) to build your audience and drive additional traffic to your site. Since then, Google has dramatically expanded the reach of its personalized search results with the launch of Search plus Your World, which adds Google+ pages, posts, and pictures to search results. Let’s take a closer look at Search plus Your World — and whether it changes the marketing recommendations we made in our previous post.

According to Google, “Search has always brought you information from across the web. Now, search gets better by including photos, posts, and more from you and your friends. When signed in with Google+, you’ll find personal results and profiles of people you know or follow. You can even expand your world by discovering people related to your search.”

The new tool essentially displays results in three ways:

• In your recommended results — If you enter the name of someone who has a profile on the Google+ social-networking site into Google’s search bar, a link to that person’s profile will appear as part of your recommended results. Here, blogger Corbett Barr’s Google+ profile appears if you search his name in Google:
  
• As an enhanced search result — Entering certain queries into Google will turn up “personal results,” which appear above the traditional top 10 results. Click on the Personal Results link to pull up any images, places, posts, or articles tagged by contacts in your Google+ circles that relate specifically to your search term.

• As a recommended related person or page — When you type specific phrases into Google, people or pages that the search engine deems to be related (according to the information shared inside Google+) may display to the right-hand side of the traditional search results, as seen with the generic query for “music” below:

As a website owner, each of these possibilities should be intriguing to you. For example, say you’re trying to break into a competitive SERP, such as the one that appears for the keywords “lose weight” or “make money online.” You could spend years — and thousands of dollars — trying to get your site to creep up the traditional rankings. Or you could simply ask a prospect to include you as in their circles on Google+, which could be enough to get your site recognized right away.

Obviously, there are some limitations to Search plus Your World. In order to have any of these personalized results appear, your readers need to have and be signed in to their Google+ profiles, which aren’t nearly universal at this time. And, even if your customers are on Google+, you’ll need them to add you to their circles in order to have your content appear as a personalized result in most cases.

However, there’s no doubt that a system that gives you this many opportunities to break into the traditional SERPs has potential. To get the most out of Search plus Your World, follow these steps:

Step 1: Build and maintain an active presence on Google+.

Yes, it’s frustrating to have yet another social-networking site on which you’re expected to maintain a public profile for your business. However, given the tremendous potential of content shared on Google+ to find its way into the traditional SERPs, we believe that this one is worth the extra effort.

Fortunately, setting up a profile on Google+ is easy, although you are currently unable to build profiles under your business name (Google recently changed its sign-up process to include the manual review of established pseudonym accounts). To sign up, simply log on to plus.google.com with your Google account. Once you’re in, you’ll be able to add people to your social circles and fill out profile information that will help Google associate you with specific search queries.

That said, don’t just set up your profile and stop in once a month. The people who stand to benefit the most from Search plus Your World are those with the largest networks of followers. To attract these followers, you need to post authoritative content to your profile regularly, so that you’ll be recognized as an expert in your field and, thus, worthy of following.

Step 2: Encourage people to follow you on Google+.

Beyond posting regularly to your Google+ profile, encourage readers on your website to follow you on the social network. A few of the places you’ll want to consider doing this:

• At the end of every blog post (potentially through the use of a social sharing tool)
• On your “About Me” page
• In your profiles on other social-networking sites
• In any email marketing communications
• On any mobile marketing tools you use

Again, the people with the largest social networks on Google+ and the highest perceived authority in the eyes of Google (as based on profile activity and recognition) stand the greatest chance of being recognized as a “personal result” or “related page” on Google search results pages.

Step 3: Follow Google’s established procedures to increase your chances of getting noticed.

Google offers a number of ways you can communicate directly with the search engine to tell Google where you feel your content should be shared. For example, in order to appear as a “related page,” Google allows you to set up a Google+ page and tag it with relevant keywords and search phrases. Then, as you become more active with Google+ by posting about your tagged keywords and sharing relevant content, you’ll increase the odds of Google sharing your page as a related option in the SERPs.Going through all of the effort to build, maintain, and promote a Google+ profile may seem like a lot of extra work, but taking the time to do so could result in some major benefits in terms of how visible you and your website are in the natural SERPs.

According to P.J. Fusco in Search Engine Watch, “Google search has historically been about finding the best results for the many. Google Search plus Your World is about finding the best results for you. Now, ‘you’ are the enterprise. That is to say, each individual [who] uses Google+ represents a new opportunity to have digital content produced by or about your enterprise discovered and shared among immeasurable circles of friends.”

Think of the work involved in building your Google+ following as an opportunity to be seen more frequently in the SERPs, and you’ll quickly see why these efforts could be as important as traditional SEO in 2012 and the future of personalized search.

Image: meaneame comunicacions

We all know how frustrating it can be to read an article online and get interrupted by a pop-up banner asking us to buy something or join a new email list. But the fact that this archaic form of advertising continues to exist must mean that it’s effective, right? So, how do you decide whether to use pop-up banners on your website? Let’s take a look at some of the options and how they’re used, as well as a few steps for determining their effectiveness.

How Pop-Up Banners Work

Contrary to popular belief, pop-up banners are not one-size-fits-all solutions. Different types of pop-up banners serve different purposes, any one of which may be a good fit for your website. The options include standard pop-over banners (which launch on top of open web content, completely obscuring what’s beneath), lightbox-style banners (which appear over the top of a page while graying out the background content) and pop-under banners (which are deployed behind an open web page).

Pop-up banners can meet different goals: You might use one to display an email newsletter opt-in form more prominently, or to encourage visitors to purchase specific products, or to offer a free gift in exchange for a certain action (or some other combination of desired behaviors). And, although some banners launch immediately after a visitor lands on a website, others can be triggered only by new visitors, by readers who spend a set amount of time on a particular page, or by a reader’s attempt to leave that page.

What Web Users Think About Pop-Ups

As you might expect from your own web browsing, opinions on pop-up advertisements range from easy acceptance to pure hatred. Consider these two opposing views expressed in an article on Think Traffic, which asked readers to share their opinions on pop-up banners:

“Pop-ups immediately cause me to leave the website. It doesn’t matter if the content is amazing, I will click away because of the complete disrespect the website owner has for his visitors.” —Jeremiah

“I don’t mind pop-ups. Most people don’t hate pop-ups; they are simply impatient. If you like what a blogger has to say, you might just want to subscribe, and a pop-up is a great tool to do this with. If you don’t want to sign up, patiently wait a few seconds and click on the ‘X.’” —Ryan Biddulph

Despite the varying viewpoints, pop-up advertisements are widely used today. But can we determine conclusively whether these advertisements are effective? After all, if they aren’t resulting in a concrete increase in sales and subscribers for some users, there’s no reason to even think about incorporating them into your own site.

Weighing Increased Sales vs. Disenfranchised Users

One case study on the effectiveness of pop-up banners comes to us from Steve Aitchinson of the A-List Blogger Club. According to his tutorial on the subject, “By spending 15 minutes to produce the pop-up, my subscriber rate jumps nearly 400 percent overnight. I went from 6 to 10 subscribers per day to 25 to 40 subscribers per day.”

Another interesting example of the impact of pop-up advertisements on subscriber rates comes from Mary Jaksch of the Goodlife ZEN blog, as profiled by Barrie Davenport on the A-List Blog Marketing site: “The experiment ran for 22 days. Phase number one ran for four days, where I collected AWeber sign-ups without the pop-up. In phase number two, I set up a premium plugin, called PopUp Domination on my blog, and let it run for five days. Then it was into phase 3 without the pop-up, and finally I reactivated the pop-up.”Clearly, pop-up advertisements have the potential either to dramatically increase sales and opt-ins or to completely disenfranchise your readers — and everything in between these two extremes. The only way you’ll know for sure how pop-ups will impact your website is to conduct your own test.

Testing Pop-Ups on Your Website

To test the efficacy of pop up advertisements on your site, follow these steps:

Step 1: Determine what your pop-up advertising goal is. Will you use your pop-up banners to encourage email list opt-ins, to promote sales, or to request that readers take some other type of action? No matter what type of pop-up you use, you’ll want to have specific, measurable goals to gauge the success of your advertising campaign. For example, if you decide to run a pop-up advertising campaign to increase your number of email subscribers, you’ll want to set specific targets for the number of sign-ups you aim to accrue, as well as the number of complaints that would indicate a failed test.

Step 2: Find the necessary tools to run your pop-up advertising test. Adding a pop-up advertising test to boost your number of email subscribers is the easiest type of test to start with, as most email-management providers offer lightbox-style opt-in forms that you can easily add to your website. However, if you want to pursue a different type of pop-up advertising test, you may need to look for a third-party script to provide this functionality. Pippity and PopUp Domination are two of the best-known programs that offer the capabilities you’ll need.

Step 3: Run your advertising test. Once you’ve set up your pop-up test, be sure to let it run for at least two weeks, if not longer. If you only run your experiment for a day or two, you aren’t getting a large enough set of data to draw any conclusions about how well your pop-up performs. To understand why, consider how much your daily traffic fluctuates over time. Maybe you experience a few days when your site ranks lower on search engine results pages or receives a spike in traffic due to a recent guest post or promotion. Running your pop-up advertising test during either of these anomalies will prevent you from gathering adequate, meaningful test data.

Step 4: Evaluate your pop-up banner test results. Once your data collection period ends, examine your results to see if you’ve met the goals you set for yourself in Step 1. If so, and it appears that pop-up banners are a good fit for your site, consider split testing different pop-up variants in order to find the most effective combination of images and text. On the other hand, if your pop-up test failed to meet your expectations, you have at least a couple of options: If you saw no change in your site’s metrics as a result of your pop-up banners, either take them down or try an entirely different type of pop-up. If you saw some improvement (and didn’t receive enough complaints to warrant taking the pop-up down), try tweaking your pop-up banner slightly to improve its performance using any of the different variables described above.

Have you used pop-up banners on your site? Please share your thoughts and experiences with us in the Comments section below.

Image: Thomas Hawk

Our latest Sites We Love winner is East Coast CPR Training. Carolann Hosey, owner of the family-run company, graciously took time out of her busy schedule to chat with Intuit Websites about how she runs a successful business.

Intuit Websites: What inspired you to start East Coast CPR Training?

Hosey: I started the business because my family and I have a passion for teaching CPR and first aid to the community. I was finally able to combine my love of health care with my dream of starting my own business, and I had the perfect opportunity to do so. Starting your own business is a very frightening thought: The setup costs, overhead, marketing expenses, etc., can become very pricey. But I have the support of my entire family, and there is nothing else I could ask for.

What sets your company apart from its competitors?

East Coast CPR Training is family owned and operated, so right from the start customers will get the personal attention they deserve. I wanted to start a business that focused on “lay rescuers,” or people who are not medical professionals. Almost everyone I talk to says they should — or they want to — learn CPR, but do not know where to look for a class, do not think they would be good at it, or have other barriers that prevent them from taking the first step to learning. I want everyone to know that there are very few reasons why you can’t learn CPR. We will come to your home or place of business to teach, seven days a week, and will work with your schedule to make sure you learn these precious skills. All of our instructors have health-care experience and bring real life scenarios into the classroom. Most students are scared to learn CPR, but our instructors have lost count of how many times we’ve performed it in real life. We will make sure our students are not afraid of learning.

What is your favorite part of running your own business?

My favorite part of running my own business is the hard work that goes into the entire process, from marketing materials to finding customers, to seeing the looks on their faces while they enjoy learning these life-saving skills. I enjoy coming up with new ideas to make customers happy and different ways we can engage different audiences to learn CPR and first aid. The skills our students learn can be implemented into every aspect of their lives, from being prepared for family emergencies to emergencies at work.

What lessons did you learn along the way that might help new businesses?

I’ve learned to take my time and fully research products and services before I purchase them for my business. Many companies I have encountered offer a 30-day money-back guarantee. I can spend less time hoping I am making the right choice and more time deciding if a product is right for me by trying it out first-hand. I am not afraid to call a company and ask for my money back if it is not a good fit for me or my business. I have been trying different CRM products for four months and have yet to find the right one for me. I also bought products from eBay and Craigslist to help save money for other expenses, such as marketing materials. I plan to replace these used products with new products as soon as possible, but I am able to save about 50 percent until that happens. If these products are kept in good condition, they can usually be resold again to make it easier to buy new items.

How do you use social media to promote your business and engage with customers?

I plan to use Facebook for Business to promote East Coast CPR Training and to give potential students a way to easily visit our website to register for classes and buy products. I plan on hiring someone to create custom advertising for the Facebook page to further engage customers. I also plan on offering specials and discounts through Facebook and Twitter. I plan to make a video of students learning CPR and post it on YouTube. This video will help prospective students understand how easy and fun it is to learn CPR and first aid. Our company is also on LinkedIn, which makes it easy to promote the business to professional groups who would benefit from learning CPR.

What can we look forward to seeing from your business in the near future?

I plan to sell products and services on our website once I can get the capital to do so. I also plan to offer some service programs for first-aid supplies and AEDs (automated external defibrillators). Advertising on social-networking sites and using mass-marketing techniques will help us do this.

Is there anything else you’d like to share?

Intuit has made it very easy for me to create and update our website. I am trying out the StoreFront feature, and this will make selling products and services easier. I looked at other website services, and none compared to what Intuit has to offer. Anytime I have an issue, I call Intuit and I am greeted by a very friendly customer-service representative that knows exactly how to solve my problem.

We recently talked about how building a business blog can help you to increase brand recognition, forge stronger customer relationships, and ultimately boost sales. However, running an effective blog isn’t just about installing a blogging platform and making a few token posts. If you want your business blog to be successful, you need to set up a publishing calendar.

A publishing calendar dictates what you’ll post and when, as well as how you’ll manage the other ongoing tasks associated with running a blog, such as promoting its content and engaging with followers.

An effective publishing calendar addresses the following issues:

• When posts on your blog will go live
• Who is responsible for each scheduled post
• How and when you will respond to comments on your blog
• How you will promote your blog posts

Let’s look at each of these tasks in more detail.

Step 1:  Schedule content ahead of time.

The first — and most important — task in creating a publishing calendar is to determine your desired content and schedule. Effective bloggers don’t just throw together a new article whenever the mood strikes. If you want to maintain a thriving, growing audience, you need to have a plan for what types of content and how often you’ll post.

In our previous post on business blogging, we talked about three major types of content to consider sharing:

• “Fresh” or newsworthy content (articles that offer a timely reaction to an industry news story or current event)
• Evergreen content (how-to and advice-filled articles that will be useful to readers no matter when they’re posted)
• Personal content (posts that reveal more about your personal life and opinions)

First, choose a rough ratio for your post types. Your ideal balance may vary depending on what industry you’re in, but a good place to start is 50 percent newsworthy content, 35 percent evergreen content, and 15 percent personal content. You don’t have to adhere to your target ratio religiously, but having a rough idea of how many articles you’ll need from each content category will help you to ensure that your posts are always valuable and interesting to your readers.

Next, determine how frequently you’ll post to your business blog. In order to build an audience, you’ll need to post regularly. If your last post is weeks out of date, readers will quickly grow bored and stop paying attention to your site — exactly the opposite effect of what you’re trying to achieve.

You don’t have to post daily in order to build an engaged audience, but you should aim to post new content at least once a week. If you can manage it, posting 2 to 3 times a week is even better in terms of creating the perception that your blog is active, interesting, and worthy of repeat visits. Posting daily enhances this effect even further, but be wary of investing too much time in your business blog at the expense of other aspects of your company.

Next, brainstorm at least 2 to 3 months’ worth of topics — and make a list. If you have the time, consider preparing some of these posts in advance, so you can easily launch them when you’re pressed for time. Even if you are unable to stockpile future articles, simply having a list of pre-approved topics will help get you motivated on days when you’d rather do anything but write for your blog.

Step 2: Manage authors and publishing rights.

When building your publishing calendar, consider is who will be responsible for launching each of the blog posts you scheduled in Step 1. Obviously, if you’re the only one writing, you can skip this section altogether, because you won’t need to worry about approving drafts or scheduling posts from multiple writers. However, if multiple employees share the responsibility of writing posts and publishing to your business blog, you’ll want to establish a procedure for managing multiple authors and publishing rights.

In general, if several people write for your blog, it’s easiest to have one person retain final authority for reviewing all article submissions and setting them up to go live. Depending on the blog platform you’re using, you should be able to give multiple authors the rights to load posts to the site, but not to publish them for public viewing.

Once the posts are loaded, the one person with editing rights can review and approve posts to publish to the site. By setting this approval system up in advance as part of your blog publishing calendar, you’ll minimize confusion and ensure that posts are published according to the schedule you established in Step 1.

Step 3: Review and respond to blog comments.

When you set up your business blog, you’ll need to decide whether or not to enable readers to leave comments on your posts. Although enabling comments ultimately creates a little more work, turning on this feature makes your blog seem more interactive and engaging to readers.

If you turn comments on, be sure to assign the following responsibilities as part of your publishing calendar:

• Manually approving comments
• Weeding out spam messages
• Replying to comments left by readers on your posts

Approving comments and deleting spam messages can be done quickly and shouldn’t require more than 10 to 15 minutes per day. Replying to comments left on your site, on the other hand, can take quite a bit of time. To minimize your total time investment, consider replying to only those comments that are left within a day or two of the post going live.

Step 4: Promote each new post.

The final element that your publishing calendar should cover is how and when you’ll promote each new post that goes live on your site. When you launch your blog, your initial readership may be quite small, making it vitally important that you get out there and spread the word.

New blog posts can be promoted in numerous places. Choose the ones that are right for your industry and schedule time to do them into your publishing calendar:

• Social media sites (including Facebook, Twitter, and Google+)
• Industry forums and message boards
• Social bookmarking sites (including Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, and others)
• Blog carousels
• Press release directories

By taking the time to assign each of these responsibilities and create a system for tracking task completion, you’ll ensure that your business blog becomes the thriving community portal it should be.

Image: Amanda Rudkin

In the internet marketing world, a joint venture refers to two or more business owners who team up to offer complementary products or services to each other’s customers and share the profits based on a predetermined arrangement.

If that sounds complicated, don’t worry. This example should help to clear things up:

Suppose you own an online store that sells dog-training products. In order to grow your customer base, you approach several obedience schools in your area and offer a trade: If they promote your website in their classes, you’ll offer their customers an exclusive discount and advertise their businesses in your email newsletter. The result is more customers for you and more exposure for the schools — a win-win situation for everyone involved.

This is the beauty of the joint venture.  As long as you carefully design your promotions to protect the interests of all parties, you can establish partnerships that enable everyone involved to grow their businesses. However, as you might expect, any type of arrangement that involves financial risk shared by multiple people should be entered into cautiously.

Here’s how to set up a successful joint venture:

Step 1: Identify potential partners.

If you think that a joint venture might be useful for growing your business, the first step you need to take is to identify potential partners. Weigh your options thoughtfully. Your partners can make the difference between a successful venture and a money-losing one.

Look for partners whose products or services complement your own without competing directly. In the example above, if the seller of dog-training products had approached a business that sold similar items, everyone would stand to lose. There’s no incentive for customers to switch retailers without merchants undercutting one another. Instead, choose partners who offer something new and exciting to your customers. (Think about how business decisions will affect your loyal buyers — and you’ll rarely go wrong.) Approach businesses that are established enough to extend your promotion to a large audience. Partnering with someone who’s just starting out is unlikely to result in a successful promotion.

Step 2: Brainstorm ideas for promotions.

When you approach the potential partners identified in Step 1, do so with a particular promotion in mind. Getting down to business right off the bat will help prevent the back-and-forth that can occur among already busy business owners and stop a deal from going forward.

What types of promotions should you propose? Here are a few common types of joint ventures to get your creative juices flowing:

• Mutual discounts. Business owners elect to offer each other’s customers a similar discount on purchases.
• Exclusive products. You give another business owner’s customers an exclusive product or discount in exchange for promotion to expand the size of your customer base and increase brand recognition.
• Newsletter subscriptions. You offer a free product to another business’s customer base in exchange for newsletter sign-ups. This can be an effective way to increase sales in the long run.

Be creative with this step. You don’t need to stick to these ideas. You know your business better than anyone else, which means that only you know what the most valuable thing you can bring to a joint venture.

However, be fair, too. The best joint ventures allow all parties to profit equally, so think about your proposed promotion in terms of win-win scenarios. Don’t attempt to strong-arm other businesses into agreeing to unfavorable terms that benefit only you. Even if you’re able to take advantage of one merchant, word will get out about your business practices, and you’ll find that your opportunities to participate in future joint ventures will be severely limited.

Step 3: Contact potential partners.

Armed with your list of potential partners and an idea about what type of promotion you’d like to pursue, it’s time to approach people. When you do, keep these things in mind:

• Be respectful. Not all business owners have the time to participate in joint ventures, or they may simply not be interested in participating in one. Remain polite in all communications, because you never know when one of these failed contacts will come back to you to revisit a potential deal in the future.
• Build a relationship first. Most business owners want to do business with people who they already know and trust. So, depending on the size of your joint venture, you may find it helpful to build up your relationships with potential partners before you propose a large-scale cross-promotional effort.
• Clearly state the benefits of your proposal. Most people want to know what’s in it for them when discussing potential joint ventures. Make sure that your introductory message clearly outlines the benefit to both parties.  Let your potential partner know not just how he or she will benefit, but also all the action you plan to take to make the promotion a success.

Step 4: Clearly define your terms.

In an ideal world, every potential partner you contact will agree to go forward with your promotion. But once you have approval from these business owners, don’t just leap forward and start running the deal. Instead, take the time to protect your financial and legal interests by establishing the terms of your joint venture with proper documentation.

Depending on the size and scope of your promotion, it may make sense to seek legal counsel to review the terms of your joint venture before moving forward. This is especially true if you’ll be relying on your partner to distribute funds generated from the joint venture to you. Remember that anyone can seem trustworthy online, so if you’re working with a partner you’ve never met face to face, you owe it to yourself to put the appropriate legal protections in place.

Step 5: Promote your joint venture.

Once you’ve laid the groundwork, it’s time to start promoting your joint venture. Do your best to make it as successful as possible. The better your promotion turns out to be, the more likely it is that other business owners will want to work with you on this type of deal in the future, enabling you to expand your customer base even faster than you thought possible!

Image: baggyjumper

With more than 800 million users worldwide, Facebook is here to stay. That means building a presence for your business website on this global social network almost mandatory. However, if you have yet to venture very far into the world of social media, understanding how to build and maintain your brand’s presence on these user-oriented sites can prove challenging.

Let’s discuss how you can harness the power of Facebook to promote your business effectively and ethically, using the widespread appeal of fan pages. Here’s what you need to know:

Step 1: Assess your industry’s social-networking participation.

The first step to building an effective Facebook fan page is to assess what your social-networking goals are. Facebook counts people of every age, race, gender, industry, and so on among its members, but they don’t all use the site in the same way.

For example, a teenager — whose entire life has been captured digitally — may use Facebook to play online games and to engage with friends and family members by sharing personal pictures and frequent status updates. Meanwhile, a mother of a growing family may use the site to update far-flung relatives about her children and to pick up coupon codes and freebies from brands she likes. Thus, if your business targets teenagers, you’ll want to set up and market your Facebook fan page in a significantly different way than you would to cater to the mom in our example. Your goals should differ, too.

In addition, you may find a significant variance among industries in terms of user engagement on social-networking sites. If you sell farm supplies, for example, you might find that online participation is high on industry-specific forums and message boards, but that users in this industry don’t typically turn to Facebook to connect with brands or retailers.

Really, the only way to determine how engaged your visitors are with your Facebook page (and, consequently, how much you should invest in developing it) is to test it out. Every business should have at least a basic fan page. Start by visiting https://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php and adding the minimum amount of information necessary for your chosen page type. You can build your page out later to include more features, as appropriate.

Run your page for a month or two — and collect data. Be sure to consider both your Facebook Insights data and the number of visitors your business website receives as a percentage of your overall traffic (as determined through the creation of an Advanced Segment targeting Facebook traffic within your Google Analytics account). If you see interest in your fan page, consider expanding it to make it more engaging for your community. If not, simply leave it alone.

Alternatively, if you don’t want to wait to generate data, you can also determine whether or not a built-out Facebook fan page makes sense for your business by examining what your competitors are doing. Check up on your closest competition: If you see that most of your rivals have invested in fully customized fan pages, chances are it will be a worthwhile effort for your business, too.

Step 2: Set specific, measurable goals.

If your analysis from Step 1 concludes that there is interest in Facebook fan pages within your industry, the next step to making your page as effective as possible is to set measurable goals that help you determine whether or not your social-networking efforts are creating a positive ROI for your business.

Although the goals most relevant to your business will vary, consider any of the following options:

• [X] Number of fan page “likes” — When users visit your fan page, they’ll have the option of “liking” your brand. If a user clicks this button, updates from your page will appear in their news feeds, making it a potentially powerful way to increase your brand awareness. However, note that more “likes” doesn’t automatically correlate to more sales, so be cautious of focusing all your efforts on simply increasing this number.
• [X] Number of website visitors — As mentioned above, you can track the number of visitors who arrive on your website from Facebook, which is, by and large, the purpose behind setting up a fan page in the first place. Consider setting a goal to obtain a certain number of website visitors and to have that number increase over time.
• [X] Sales resulting from Facebook traffic — Of course, just because you’re getting more visitors from Facebook doesn’t mean that these people are buying anything on your site! To track how many Facebook visitors result in sales, you can either deploy Facebook-specific coupon codes that allow you to track which purchases originated on Facebook or set up Goals tracking within Google Analytics. When paired with the Facebook traffic Advanced Segment described earlier, this will allow you to pinpoint conversions from Facebook visitors, as well as determine how this revenue is changing over time.

Remember: The initial goals you set up should merely be a starting point for your Facebook fan page marketing campaign. As you get more involved with the site, you’ll begin to better understand its potential for your business, so be sure to take the time to periodically re-evaluate the goals you’ve set up for yourself to determine if they should be tweaked or expanded based on your results.

Step 3: Be active with your Facebook fan page.

Now that you have a better understanding of what your Facebook fan page should be like and how you can ensure that it’s performing as well as it could be, it’s time to get active!

The thing about Facebook — and other social-networking websites — is that they aren’t “set it and forget it” activities. Social media sites rely on constant participation, so your followers won’t be impressed if you simply create your fan page and then never check back to interact with these potential customers.

For best results, it’s a good idea to check in to your Facebook fan page at least once a day (or more often if you run a popular company in a highly engaged industry). When you check in, take the time to post a status update and respond to any followers who have asked you questions or commented on your fan page. Your status updates don’t need to be long. For instance, you could mention a product that you’ve recently started carrying, a promotion you’re running, or even your comments on a juicy bit of news in your industry.

Keep in mind, though, that your fan page shouldn’t be composed entirely of marketing messages. Social-networking participants are extremely sensitive to being “over sold,” so take the time to include messages that provide value to your followers without any ulterior, commercial motives. With continued effort and a focus on creating an active, dynamic environment for your followers, there’s no doubt that you’ll start to see a positive impact on your business’s bottom line from your social-networking promotions.

Image: GOIABA

“Quality is more important than quantity.” It’s a simple rule that Johnny Earle takes pride in following — and has used to build his popular Johnny Cupcakes brand. What started as a joke in 2000, when Earle was just 19 years old, has evolved into a multimillion-dollar company that today also employs his parents, his sister, his neighbor, and his close friends.

Earle, who ranked at the top of BusinessWeek’s “Best Entrepreneurs 25 and Under” list in 2008, says he constantly strives to improve people’s “Johnny Cupcakes experience.” When he isn’t thinking of new ways to impress customers, he travels the country to talk about how the brand came to be and where he intends to take it. Although his business methods may be a bit unconventional, Earle seems to know what he’s doing and continues to grow his empire.

In his lecture series, Earle shares how he turned a gag into a business with no business plan, investors, or loans. “I thought it would be funny to make a couple random shirts that said ‘Johnny Cupcakes’ on them,” he explains on his website, adding that wearing the T-shirt to work caused quite a stir. “Not only did everyone I work with want [one], but most of the customers wanted one as well!”

Earle also conveys the importance of branding, small-business management, product development, and marketing. Here are a few of his key points:

• Choose quality over quantity. Earle says he had opportunities to sell his products through other chain retail stores and expand faster than he did. Instead, he opted to grow Johnny Cupcakes slowly and to keep the brand distinct by focusing on giving customers the best possible experience. He created a brand that his customer base could trust without having to work at it.
• Make customers the top priority. “A happy customer is a loyal customer,” Earle says. Whether an offering is product- or service-based, a distinct and positive experience is what determines whether or not a customer comes back.
• Invest in your idea. Don’t get down on yourself if you initially spend more than you earn. “You have to spend an arm and a leg to make more arms and legs,” he says.
• Offer exclusivity. Johnny often will make certain items available only in stores, and most of the time he sells limited-edition items. This gives customers something they can’t find anywhere else and makes them feel special.
• Think creatively. Constantly ask yourself why a customer should choose to walk through your door rather than that of a competitor. Thinking outside the box not only will help you stay ahead of the pack, but also give you a break from the daily grind and allow your imagination to wander, Earle says. Go ahead, reinvent the wheel.

Image courtesy johnnycupcakes.com

Let’s say you’re building your company’s new website and use Google Images to find the perfect picture for your home page — the one image that somehow manages to simultaneously capture both the spirit and personality of your business in a single, beautiful frame. You save the picture to your hard drive and upload it to your site. After all, you found the picture on the internet. That means it’s free, right?!

In fact, this isn’t the case. And if you aren’t careful about the way you manage the rights of the images you use on your website, in your social-networking campaigns, and as a part of all your other marketing campaigns, you could find yourself liable for legal damages resulting from the misuse of copyrighted material.

How can you protect yourself and ensure that the images you’re using are legit? First, let’s look at some background information on how images and other creative works are protected, and then we’ll explore different options for appropriately sourcing graphics for your website and marketing materials.

Essentially, all creative content is presumed to be copyrighted upon creation, according to the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works and the U.S. Copyright Act. In other words, if you take a picture, write a blog post, or create any other type of content, it is automatically copyrighted and protected under these statutes. You don’t need to file a permit to claim copyright status, and you don’t need to explicitly state that you own the copyright license to your content. It is, simply, your protected content from the moment of creation.

The reason these statutes exist is to protect the financial interests of the people who have created the content in the first place. Although it may not seem like a big deal to swipe an image file from Google Images or any other website you come across, professional photographers often rely on the income generated through the sale of these images to pay their own bills. And, as you’re basically stealing their income, they have the right to go after you in the courts to seek financial damages.

For your sake, it’s important to understand the terminology surrounding stock imagery, and the particular legal rights each of these terms convey. Here are a few words you may hear surrounding the use of images online:

• Royalty-free — Although many people presume that this phrase implies that an image may be used free of charge, it actually means that the image may be used without paying a separate fee each time you use it (in accordance with the terms of its stated license). For example, if you purchase a royalty-free image through a stock image provider such as Getty Images or iStockphoto (see below), you may use the image as often as you like after paying the initial license fee.
• Rights-managed — If you’re simply looking for stock photography to fill out your website, you won’t likely need to worry about rights-managed images. But for awareness’ sake, know that rights-managed images specify the exact terms of use allowed at the time of purchase and can include restrictions on where the image may be used (both geographically and in specific types of media), how often it may be used, the length of time for which the license is valid, and so on.
• Creative Commons — The Creative Commons license is a relatively new creation that allows artists and photographers to specify the exact terms under which their content may be used. Images released under the Creative Commons license aren’t necessarily free, although some publishers specify that images may be used freely as long as proper attribution is given.

In all cases, the images you use from these sources are governed by “licenses” that specify the specific rights you have to each image and the ways in which you may use it. No matter what type of image you use, it is your responsibility to ensure that you’re using the image in accordance with the license type you’ve purchased — otherwise, you expose yourself to possible legal action.

When sourcing images, be sure to ask yourself the following questions to be sure you’re satisfying all necessary image licensing requirements:

• Am I using this image for personal or commercial use? Many images can be used freely for personal purposes (e.g., wedding announcements, holiday letters, etc.), but nearly all business-related activities online (including social-networking profiles, email newsletters, and so on) are classified as “commercial use.”
• Am I using this image in accordance with its stated license? Specific licenses may restrict when and where an image may be used, whether or not it may be modified, and how attribution must be given. If there are any elements of an image license you don’t understand, seek legal counsel to be sure you’re using the image appropriately.
• Have all necessary releases been granted for this image? If the image you’re using features a model or product that isn’t public domain, be sure all parties have involved have signed releases to transfer all rights to the original copyright holder. Even if you’ve purchased an image license from a legitimate source, you could still open yourself up to legal action if the models or product owners involved haven’t signed off.

If this all sounds intimidating, don’t worry. Although it’s important to understand image rights and the legal repercussions that may result from misusing graphics, sourcing images for your website is usually simple and straightforward. Here are a few websites you can use to find legitimately sourced images for your business pages:

iStockphoto – One of the most widely-used sources of royalty-free stock images, iStockphoto offers clearly defined standard and extended licenses for use in a wide variety of scenarios.  Most website design usages will fall under the terms of the standard license, which offers a guarantee that all images meet applicable copyright guidelines for a very modest fee.

Stock.Xchng — Owned by HAAP Media, a subsidiary of Getty Images, Stock.Xchng is “the leading free stock photo site” online today. Although all images found on the site may be used without paying a fee, the company still enforces some restrictions on how and where they may be used. Be careful to check the specific license terms before using images from this site, and be aware that the popularity of the site means that the image you’ve chosen has likely been used frequently on other websites already.

Creative Commons on Flickr — You’re probably already familiar with Flickr, as it’s one of the largest photo-sharing websites online. However, you may not be aware that many of the users that have uploaded photos to this site also make them available for commercial use under the terms of the Creative Commons license. Check out the Creative Commons directory on Flickr to learn more about the specific types of photo licenses offered and to find thousands of free images that can be used on your website (with proper attribution, of course).

Using resources like these to source images for your website can take much of the hassle out of navigating image license rights and attribution requirements. It also protects your business’s legal and financial interests, while ensuring that artists around the world are properly compensated for the work they produce.

Image: s_falkow