For the basics on listing your local small business on Google Places see our earlier video. Below are some of the key points points for tuning up your Google Places page to get great local SEO results.

Get Some Great Reviews

One important point I forgot to mention is this video about Google Places is that you should encourage your favorite to write a positive reviews for your business. Just navigate to your page, click the “Link” link near the top right, copy it and paste in an email to some good folks.

Company / Organization

Use keywords in this field that you think your target audience will use when they are searching. For example: “Acme Corp – Widgets in Asheville.”

Telephone Number

Use a local telephone number, not an “800″ number. This is a local listing.

Categories

Choose the suggested categories that best describe AND also in local listings (Places) on the search results pages.

Additional Details

Here’s where you can really get creative. You can put almost anything about your business that you want to highlight. On our page we used our social media links for the business. If you paste a URL into the second field it will turn the word in the first into a link. For example: Facebook‎: Facebook

Complete Everything

Fill out every part of this form the best of your ability. The more complete your listing the better.

Extra credit…

Coupons

Add a coupon whether it makes sense or not. The coupon link in your listing will help it stand out from the crowd. For example our says: “Free Consultation. Contact us to discuss your marketing needs and we’ll work with you to create a custom marketing plan for your business, for free.”

For examples see our Google Places page for AVL Marketing. Now that we have it tuned up, it’s time to practice what we preach and go get some reviews…

Web design is hard. Years ago web designers had to make some tough choices when it came to typography on websites. You couldn’t just use any font you wanted for headlines or body text because unless the viewers of your site had the same fonts loaded on their machines they would get substitutes. And who knows what that would look like. So you chose from a short list of “web safe” fonts, standard fonts that everyone should have. If you insisted on controlling the fonts you could use graphics instead, but search engines can’t “read” images. Later, new ways of coding web pages (stylesheets) made it possible to use text for search engines and graphics for viewers, but it takes time to load images and fast loading pages are now an important SEO factor. More recently the use of Flash to replace text via some fancy coding solved most of those issues, and kept the text flexible. But now there’s something even better…

Google has created a Font Directory where anyone can access a growing list of fancy fonts. So a designer can code a website and specify any font in Google’s Font Directory and the viewer’s browser will go get that font to display it on the page. The only downside I see right now is that the number of fonts is rather limited, but it seems like a move in the right direction. According to Google “all fonts in the directory are available for use on your website under an open source license and are served by Google servers.” Maybe they can change that policy or also add premium fonts eventually. Or maybe they are just doing this to make indexing the World’s information easier. Surely, no one cares more about “search engine optimization” (SEO) than the big G.

Anyone using the Font Directory yet?

Google Font Directory

Google Font Previewer

At home we have a problem with our neighbor’s yard, Grove Park Inn’s golf course, causing major runoff problems almost every time there is a burst of rain. This particular time I decided to step outside and make a little video with my cheap Flip video camera. It ended up being the lead story on the 6 o’clock news that week. This is how that happened, and how you can use video and social media to get some attention:

1. Capture simple video of something “remarkable”
2. Upload video to a sharing site like Youtube, etc.
3. Write a short blog post about and embed the video on the page
4. Mention it on Twitter, Facebook etc. (There are tools that can tie all these accounts together and make sharing easier.)
5. Get other people to mention it on Twitter, or “retweet” it
6. Get noticed by people with popular blogs (In this case it was Ashvegas)
7. Get noticed by local mainstream media such as the newspaper or TV stations
8. Agree to do the interview when they call, even if it’s inconvenient

I’ll admit that it may be a little harder to promote your business the same way, but not impossible. Surely you have something, at least occasionally, that will be interesting to a lot of people. But you have to put it out there, and give it a promotional nudge if you want people to see it.

If you don’t have a blog for your business, get one now. There are numerous free options and you don’t need technical skills. So there are no excuses. Then get a cheap video camera. We like the Flip product line, but the are other good brands and cameras out there for less than $200. Now, what are you going to video and blog about? We have a mind map about content creation that may help.

Video of newscast at WLOS.com

Post at Ashvegas blog

The backyard Flip video that got the social media ball rolling:

AVL Marketing is an Asheville marketing agency. We can help you tell your story.

[The video above is approximately one hour and contains seven shorter segments of ten minutes or less. Mouse over the video player and use the left and right arrows to skip to certain segments.]

Thanks to my fantastic panelists. (See the panelist bios below.) According to AdvantageWest, the organizer of this event, this discussion was a crowd favorite with the only complaints being that it was too short! The general topics discussed in each segment are outlined below, but I encourage you to watch the entire thing. There are some great stories in here that will likely be relevant to you and your business.  

Part 1

• Introductions
• Business plans for startups (Are they really necessary? Can you raise capital without them? Alternatives?)
• Adapting to changes, modifying the business model

Part 2

• Getting new clients as a startup
• Finding a competitive advantage
• Product development

Part 3

• More product development
• Customer research
• Customer experience
• Product usability and user testing

Part 4

• Setting business priorities
• Hiring and delegating
• Managing teams and remote offices/staff

Part 5

• More business priorities
• Coordination and communication
• More hiring (When do you? Rapid growth and maintaining standards.)
• Staying focused

Part 6

• Outsourcing and “crowdsourcing”
• Interns (“The secret sauce.” Where and how to find interns, and how to manage and compensate them.)

Part 7

• Advisory boards (Advantage of a board. Where and how to find board members. Leverage the experience and connections of others.)

Panelist Bios

Gustavo Kolmel / InterStar Global Logistics
Gustavo Kolmel founded InterStar Global Logistics in 1999 with only a laptop and a small amount savings. In eight years he grew the company from 0 to $25 million, with offices in Europe, Latin America, and the United States, then sold the company in 2008.

Derek and Damien Hoffman / Wall St Cheat Sheet
The Hoffman brothers founded one of the fastest growing financial media sites on the web. The Wall Street Journal recently ranked Wall St. Cheat Sheet as one of the top financial websites. Damien Hoffman is the Editor-in-Chief of Wall St. Cheat Sheet. He has a background including investment banking, two successful start-ups, and he clerked at the Florida Supreme Court. He graduated with honors from Duke University as well as University of Miami School of Law where he was a Dean’s Merit Scholar.

Derek Hoffman is the CEO of Wall St. Cheat Sheet. He has handled media investment and tactical strategy planning for Procter & Gamble and Gillette’s national asset portfolio. He has also worked in private wealth management for Morgan Stanley. Mr. Hoffman graduated early from the University of Michigan’s world class economics department.

Keith Pelczarski / The Motley Fool
Keith Pelczarski has been a Fool all his life, but he went pro in 1996, joining The Motley Fool. During his six years there, he wore many hats: editor, producer, designer, manager, recruiter, and product developer, among others. The Fool grew from 15 employees to 450 then back down to 75 when the dot com bubble burst, so Keith has lots to share on the ups and downs of high-growth startups.

Jack Carrier / DogTagArt.com
Jack, a serial “idea guy” spent the last glory days of the Tech bubble in California partnered with a retired Microsoft Executive working on and with Startups. Since Jack has spent a lot of time on the life side of the work-life balance traveling and volunteering, all the while mentally preparing to start his next business. In 2009 Jack raised private capital and won a “Technology Business Plan” competition which helped to fund Dog Tag Art, a community built around unique Pet Identification, which is growing at about 20% per month.

See Carolina Connect 2010 for more info.

Thursday! Thursday! Thursday! Bryan Freeborn brings the blitz. One day only! Get the blitz “bestowed” upon ye. Special appearance by Go-Go the Gorilla.

He, Bryan, not Go-Go, is a firehouse of ideas, all good, and this is your chance for some free goodness. He offered to buy an Ideation Blitz shirt for me and I turned him down, to my everlasting regret. And I don’t even wear t-shirts. That thing turned out sweet!

May 13 at The Renaissance in downtown Asheville. Come an’ get it!

Oh yes, you want to be at this event. Carolina Connect 2010 is sure to be a great opportunity to network with all sorts of businesspeople in Western North Carolina, and way beyond. Many of the speakers and panelists are coming from all over the country.

I’m moderating a panel in the Entrepreneurial track with some great panelists from local startups, a major media company, and an international corporation that the founder recently sold. The overall theme is still being worked out but we will certainly discuss the “growing pains” with any successful startup, big mistakes to avoid, managing remote teams and outsourcers, leveraging technology, and anything else we can jam into the hour.

At the end of the day there will be a bunch “Critical Conversations” and Bryan and I are hosting one of those. It will certainly be related to modern marketing but we are up for discussing anything. Please let us know your thoughts.

And remember, tickets are only $95 if you register by May 7. After that tickets are $125.

See Carolina Connect 2010 for more info.

Here’s a short video I made for my friend Dan. It’s really easy to add a WordPress blog your LinkedIn profile. As you can see from the video it took me less two minutes to do it, and that’s while I was blabbing about it. If you have a business-to-business enterprise, or if you’re a professional or consultant, a blog is an excellent way to demonstrate your expertise and experience while providing information of real value to your target market. But wait there’s more! Continually producing high quality content also has a massive SEO (search engine optimization) benefit. Your site will show up higher in search rankings if you’re using keywords related to your business. It’s a little more complicated than that, but not much.

If you’re going to do the work of creating great content you should get as much leverage from it as possible by incorporating it into your social media marketing efforts and social networking sites. So take two minutes to integrate your blog with your LinkedIn. Once it’s done, new blog posts will be automatically be added. Now that’s modern marketing. You might be surprised how many people will find your content through your LinkedIn profile.

Let us know if you have any questions.

We want to help as many small business owners as we can with their marketing needs. Many of the people we talk to are not able to afford the comprehensive marketing package we provide for our current customers. The full-service marketing package is ultimately the best value, but, again, not everyone can afford to do that. So, we’re going to break the mold here and try something completely new.

The details are still being worked out, but generally speaking it will be a streamlined service, that will be very affordable, and will allow almost any small business to tap into the power of modern marketing using blogs, email and video (oh yeah, there will be some killer reporting too). These are the essential elements, and the foundation for SEO and social media. Other services will be available on a la carte basis.

Stay tuned to the site for more details in the coming weeks. Or, even better, jump on our email list and we’ll keep you updated.

There are a zillion ways to do this. Here are two that are easy to implement and will be good enough for most of us.

Let’s say you just bought a billboard, or an ad in local newspaper or magazine, and you want to know if this type of advertising will drive traffic to your site where people can learn more about your company, services or products. You could use something like “mycompany.com/newspaper” and track the traffic to that URL. But most people won’t bother typing in the extra stuff, unless there is some special content there or other incentive. Plus it’s hard to remember. Domain forwarding to the rescue!

Probably a better option is to use a special, dedicated domain name for that particular ad. Something like “MyCompanyNC.com” or “GetMyCompany.com.” You get the picture. Just add a simple modifier or possibly use an altogether different but descriptive term (e.g. “SpringfieldPlumbers.com” instead of “JohnsonPlumbing.com”).

Now what? Well, you use domain forwarding or redirecting, call it whatever, and point that thing to a special page, or tracking URL, on your real site. I’m going to outline two different ways to do this that are fairly easy for non-techie types to implement. In fact, you can even combine the two if you want, but that might get tricky.

Option 1

Tracking a Domain Redirect with a Landing Page with Google Analytics

1. Register the new domain that will be in your ad.
2. If you don’t already have it, install Google Analytics on your main site.
3. Create a landing page on your real site: “mycompany.com/landingpage.html” (Name it whatever you want, but make sure the Google Analytics tracking code is added to this page.)
4. Go back to registrar you used to register the new domain. Edit the “host record” settings to redirect it to the landing page you just created on the real site.
5. Use the new domain in your print, billboard, etc. ad.
6. Check Google Analytics for results: Content > Landing Pages

Option 2 (This assumes your site is running WordPress. High five if it is.)

Tracking a Domain Redirect with WordPress and the Redirection Plugin

1. Register the new domain that will be in your ad.
2. Install the Redirection plugin for WordPress.
3. Create a fake tracking URL for your real site and add the redirect using the plugin: “mycompany.com/billboard” (Name it whatever you want, but make sure you the exact same URL in the next step.)
4. Go back to registrar you used to register the new domain. Edit the “host record” settings to redirect it to  a fake tracking URL for your real site: “mycompany.com/billboard”
5. Use the new domain in your print, billboard, etc. ad.
6. Check WordPress admin panel for results: Log in > Tools > Redirection

How easy is that? Questions? We’re here to help.

This video is a quick insider’s look into how Kip Kay uses microphones, soft boxes for lighting, video cameras, reflectors (even how to make your own), and a lot more to produce videos or “movies” for the Make Magazine Weekend Project series. For editing Kip uses Adobe Premier Pro CS4, some spendy Windows hardware, and some other desirable gear.