One of the loves of my life is the martial arts.  One of the things that I love about them is that the lessons that you learn in the dojo can many times be translated into other areas of life.  Lessons such as how to respond when confronted, how to overcome ‘disadvantages’, how to maintain balance, and the need to continue educating oneself to maintain success are all things that when applied to other aspects of life outside the dojo, would do you well.

Here are 4 lessons learned in the dojo that you can apply to your Internet marketing:

1. First To Strike Is Not Always the Winner - In any confrontation, you don’t necessarily have to be the one to strike first to win.  If I am attacked, I can fend off that first strike and then bring what I have to the confrontation.  Most likely, my attacker will not know what that is - they will not know my skills, my experience, what intensity I might respond with, and they will be taken off guard.  The same can be said about Internet marketing.  Obviously at this stage in the game, pretty much anything and everything has been marketed online.  Don’t expect to be the first to strike but don’t expect that to be a barrier to your success either.  What you can bring to the table is going to be unique to you - your skills, your experience, and your desire to succeed.  Bring what you’ve got and do it with an intensity that will not allow for failure and you will be able to take the competition off guard.
2. Size Does Not Matter - At 5′4″ it is safe to assume that most opponents I have/will come up against in martial arts will be bigger than me.  (Especially since martial arts is a male dominated activity.)  However, the fact that they are bigger than me does not auotmatically mean that they will win.  Skill level, speed, agility, experience, and strength will all contribute to the outcome.  As with martial arts, size does not always matter in Internet marketing either.  This is especially important for small businesses and in fact in some ways small businesses have an advantage.  They can move faster to make changes, take advantage of new marketing opportunities, make decisions on the fly, and have more direct control over the marketing messages being put out there.  Today’s Internet marketing environment is optimal for small businesses because there are so many opportunities for marketing that are inexpensive and don’t require a lot of in depth advertising/marketing experience.  So use your small business size to your advantage to compete with the big boys.
3. Stay Balanced Or Land On Your Ass - I learned very early on in my martial arts training that without balance you will have no legs to stand on … or to put it more literally you will be on your ass.  Balance is key to taking a punch as well as delivering one.  You must distribute your weight evenly so that it takes more than one small push to take you down.  This same concepts applies to Internet marketing as well and the added benefit is that you can even have more than 2 legs to keep you balanced.  You must distribute your marketing and not just focus all of your energy in one spot.  If you picture each different marketing medium you get into as a leg, then imagine the balance you could attain if you had a leg in PPC, one in social networking, one in the blogosphere, one in article marketing, and maybe even a toe in some banner advertising.  The idea here is that if one ad stops producing that you still have others that are keeping you going…  that if you are working on your brand recognition, you will be seen in multiple places that your target audience visits… that if you are establishing yourself as an expert in your field, your name will be popping up in different forums, articles, blog comment sections and the like.  Give your marketing balance so you are not knocked on your ass because all your weight was on one leg. 
4. “Learning is like rowing upstream: not to advance is to drop back.”  ~Chinese Proverb  Learning martial arts is an ongoing process.  There will never be a day when I say, I know everything and can learn no more.  The same is true of Internet marketing and in fact, as the Chinese proverb above points out, when you stop learning about Internet marketing is when you start dropping back.  Internet marketing is not a static thing - it is an ever changing and evolving entity.  What works today may not work tomorrow and if you are not continually learning and educating yourself on what’s happening, you will continue to drop back until you are out of the sightline of your customers.  Continue your education and training in Internet Marketing by reading books, subscribing to blogs, attending conferences and expos, asking questions, and by continuing to row upstream.

About the same time I started using Facebook I also joined LinkedIn.  If you read my post, Is Facebook a Time Suck…?, you already know that I am not very impressed with that particular social network’s ability to allow people to … well… network.  On the other hand, LinkedIn has been a much better experience for us.  So I got to thinking …  What is it about LinkedIn that I feel provides us with solid opportunities to get more business, build mutually beneficial business relationships, and increase brand awareness while I feel that Facebook does not?  Well let’s see…

• LinkedIn allows you to send an Introduction to someone so that two people might do business together.  This helps both parties being introduced by bringing 2 businesses together that might not otherwise have made a connection.
   
  Facebook allows you to send someone a teddy bear.
• LinkedIn allows you to share your expertise by answering questions posted by other users.  This can contribute to your brand awareness and establish yourself as an expert willing to help.  It also obviously contributes to the LinkedIn community as a whole by pooling the collective knowledge so that users can get the best answers to their questions.
   
  Facebook allows you to share how you are feeling by adding applications like Dutch Oven (send your friends flatulence of varying sounds), My Personal Weather (display whether you are feeling cloudy or sunny today on your profile), or Care Bears because sharing is caring.
• LinkedIn allows you to recommend people that you have worked with.  This contributes to the entire network’s effectiveness.  Everyone benefits: the person giving the recommendation, the person receiving the recommendation and the person looking for someone in that recommended person’s field.
   
  Facebook allows you to SuperPoke peoplein which you can do any number of actions to them including but not limited to bite, hug, throw a sheep at, embrace in a venus thigh trap, and of course b**ch slap.
• LinkedIn allows you to connect with other peoplewith your same interests through groups.  This allows for great opportunities to network and build partnerships.
   
  Facebook allows you to buy other people through applications such as Owned!

You could easily find 101 people right now that would say that Facebook is a great way to market your business but I would have to say that Facebook is a great way for some to market their business.  The best way to market using Facebook is to develop apps or to create a Facebook page that encourages people to return and spend time there.  Those endeavors can take a large investment in time and money.  I am more of the mind that I would prefer to do that on my own website.  It has been said that Facebook users do not like to leave Facebook.  So if it is going to be difficult to get those users to click from my Facebook page to my website, I would rather focus my marketing on efforts that will lead people to my site directly.  As well, there is a lot of other peripheral noise on Facebook that interferes with doing business and marketing (such as the applications that I mentioned above.)

On the other hand, LinkedIn is all about doing business.  There is a lot less noise that interferes with actual networking getting accomplished.  The atmosphere is professional and everyone is there for the same reason.  This makes it much easier to make meaningful connections and establish yourself and your brand within the network.

As a small business owner my time and budget are both limited.  That being the case I need to make sure that everything I do is going to bring me the best return on investment (whether it is time or money).  So in my book LinkedIn wins over Facebook hands down. 

For all the wonders of Wordpress, it does at times leave a little bit to be desired in the ease of formatting category.  If you want to have your bullet points look a certain way or space your images just so, with a little padding around them, you will have to do a little bit of extra work.  However as I have been looking around the blogoshphere lately, I am seeing what a big difference that little bit extra can make in the appearance of your posts.  If your posts are not well formatted, you can end up with a blog that is too crammed together, doesn’t flow well, with not enough white space to encourage the reader to relax and stay awhile.  So I wanted to share with you guys a few of the things that we do to help our posts have a professional and easy to read look and feel.  (Disclaimer: We use Wordpress so I cannot speak of the effectiveness of these fixes in other blog softwares.)

One of the biggest places I see room for improvment is in the formatting of the images people use in their posts.  Using images in your blog posts is a must.  It adds interest, breaks up the page, and after all a picture is worth a thousand words.  I know a lot of bloggers out there agree with me on this because you can see more and more of them including images.  But what I am also seeing is that many of them just insert the image and call it done.  We have found that the default formatting of the image doesn’t look right and we need to tweak it a little bit to get the look we want.  So here are a couple of things that we do:

Image Spacing

As you can see here when you insert an image into a post there is not enough spacing between the image and the text.  Whether you are aligning your image to the left, right or top doesn’t matter.  If there is not a little padding around it that separates it from the text, it can look crammed.  So in order to give it some room you can use this coding:  style=”margin: 0px 10px 5px 0px”.  There are 4 numbers representing the four sides of margin.  It starts with the top, then right, bottom and left.  So in the example above, there is 0 margin on top, 10 pixels on the right, 5 on the bottom and 0 on the left.  You can adjust the numbers to make the padding around the image match exactly what you want.

For example this could be the html for the above image with the padding added: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/”><img class=”alignnone size-thumbnail wp-image-132 alignleft” style=”float: left; margin: 0px 10px 5px 0px” alt=”Fondling Flickrspace by jurvetson” src=”http://www.marketme.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/pinkbluestrobe-150×150.jpg” width=”150″ height=”150″/>

Image Title/Alt Tag

Another thing that we always make sure to change is the image title or alt tag.  This is what shows up when you float your mouse over the image.  This is a small detail that many bloggers neglect to tend to.  When your readers float their mouse over your image do you want them to see “pinkbluestrobelights” or something more interesting like the actual title given to the image by the photographer?  In the case of the image above, the photographer entitled the image “Fondling Flickrspace”…  Much more interesting than anything I would use to remember which image is which in my images folder.  The alt tag can be used in all sorts of ways: adding keywords, making commentary about an image, adding interest, giving credit for an image, helping software that reads websites for the disabled determine what an image is, etc. 

The latest update to Wordpress makes it really easy to take advantage of the alt tag.  When you upload an image Wordpress will automatically assign the title as whatever name you have given the file.  For example if I named the above image pinkbluestrobelight.jpg when I saved it to my computer, Wordpress would title the image pinkbluestrobelight.  Before you insert the image into the post, change the title to whatever you want to show up when readers mouse over the image.  Voila!  Simple as that.  If you are not using the latest version of Wordpress or would like to use this in other applications you simply need to insert alt=”your title here” into the html of your image.

For example this could be the html for the image above:  href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/”> <img class=”alignnone size-thumbnail wp-image-132 alignleft” style=”float: left;” src=”http://www.marketme.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/pinkbluestrobe-150×150.jpg” alt=”Fondling Flickrspace by jurvetson” width=”150″ height=”150″ />

Image / Text Alignment

Although this fix does not require html, it is something that I feel makes your posts look better.  Many times I see an image inserted at the top of a post and instead of having the text wrap from the top of the image, it will start at the bottom.

When your text doesn’t start until the bottom of the image, the alignment and flow is off.  The gaping white space at the top of your post makes it seem off balance.  There is an easy fix…  Select the image by clicking on it once.  Then click the “align left” button in your post toolbar.   It’s this one: .  This small step can make a big difference in the look of your posts.

In many things that you do in life your success will hinge on your attention to the details.  Whether it is taking a couple minutes to write a personal thank you note to a new client or adding a snippet of code to make your images look better in your blog posts, those things that seem so small make a big difference in how you are perceived by your customers.  Take the extra couple of minutes to sweat the small stuff. 

There are a lot of little things that you can do to spruce up your post and give it a professional look.  What are some that you do?  

Several weeks ago I came across a couple of headlines on Drudge that I thought was a very interesting sign of the times. The first headline read…

Directly to the right was another headline…

If 10 years ago you’d say to someone that the New York Times would be a failure, they’d literally laugh in your face. After all, it’s an established resource with a huge subscriber base reaching all across the country.

But it’s old school. It doesn’t represent how people digest news anymore.

Take the recent earthquake in China as an example. I heard about it on the radio moments after waking up and was interested in finding out more. I could have walked down the end of my driveway and picked up the paper, but that would have been pointless since the newspaper only had yesterday’s breaking news. Instead, I turned to Google News and found 10 sources that not only offered updated information, but I could also see pictures and watch video footage. I knew more about the earthquake in 10 minutes that I ever would reading about it the next day in the newspaper.

Considering all that the internet has to offer, it’s really no wonder we’re seeing businesses, no matter what their size, who aren’t adapting, losing.

So how does this relate to internet marketing and your small business?

Well, is the future of marketing with Google or the NY Times? To me, the headlines on Drudge make it pretty clear. As a small business you have to see this change, understand it and adapt.

Know what Google is and what it wants. Google delivers relevant information quickly and easily. To achieve this, does Google want web pages stuffed with keywords shouting for attention or do they want real, relevant content pertaining to specific subjects?

If you’re focused on stuffing fluff content with keywords to promote higher organic rankings, count on that soon changing. These techniques are the ‘New York Times’ of search.

Instead, learn about search, how it works and where it’s going. A good resource on this subject is Search Engine Watch, http://searchenginewatch.com.

If your time to you is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’
                                                            - Bob Dylan

The lesson to take from this is if you’re not constantly swimming towards new ways to find the eyeballs of your customers, your business is gonna sink like a stone.

If you are a small business owner, your title could most likely also include IT department, marketer, blogger, web designer, financial officer, and HR.  (And those don’t include other titles that you may hold such as husband, wife, father, mother, child…)  With all those titles also come responsibilities and those responsibilities come with their own time requirements.  As a small business owner, one of the hardest things to do can be deciding where your time is best spent.

We have been trying out a lot of different marketing strategies lately.  Each one requires their own special amount of attention and time devoted to them.  We started this blog, we are also social networking using LinkedIn and Facebook, commenting on other blogs, Social Bookmarking using StumbleUpon and Digg, as well as keeping up with all of our other marketing that we have been using previously.  One of the things that we are forced to make decisions on now is which of these marketing strategies is worth our time and which of them are what I like to call a huge time suck.

A time suck is something that devours a lot of your time but that does not give you a lot in return.

In order to weed out the time sucks in my life, one of the questions I have found myself asking is:

Should I spend the next half hour loading applications to my Facebook or working on my next article or blog post?

If I load some of these applications, I could send people kittens, chocolate, lollipops, blow kisses, and send out rays of sunshine.  Which is all very lovely, but at the same time I don’t know how that it is going to further my business.

What I like about Facebook is that I can connect with people all over the world….I can reach out and help other small businesses much like I can with this blog….I can join groups of other like minded people…  I can say, hey this is what I do, what do you do and how can we work together to further both of our businesses?  What I am having difficulty with is how much time it would take me to interact with everyone through these applications that so many people are using.  And when I feel that I just don’t have the time to respond to everyone that sends me a teddy bear, I honestly feel a little guilty.

Now if that same person that sent me a spoonful of sunshine had sent me message that asked me for a tip, or gave me a tip, or asked me a question, or shared a useful website then that would be something.  Then that would be a network of people working together to further everyone’s success.  Then that would not be a time suck.

I am relatively new to Facebook and I know there are a lot of people that say it is a great way to market your business.  I would like to see how many of our readers use Facebook and what your experience with it has been.  So please chime in…  

I wrote the above post over three weeks ago and it has since been stewing in my Drafts.  Why didn’t I post it?  First of all, I was wondering if I had been too quick to judge Facebook.  To make sure I had given it the chance it deserved I was going to devote some time to it and see what came of it.  Secondly, I wanted to make sure that I was not alienating the people that have been sending me tokens through the many applications available.  After considering it further I don’t see this post doing that and I feel that the questions I raise here are valid… and it appears I am not the only one asking them.  This post at Small Business Trends by Deborah Brown addresses the same time-suck issue. 

In her post she states:

Shara Karasic reviews the steps of Creating a Facebook Fan Page for Your Business. Once your page is set up, Shara talks about the importance of providing value on your page to create a need in the fans to return, noting “Keep your fans happy by offering them useful and relevant info, a place where they can connect with other fans, applications they can use, and special updates just for them…

I would recommend this same advice for your website.  So that then raises the question:  would you be better off spending your time putting that effort into your website or your Facebook profile? 

It still seems that it all comes down to that basic question:  Where is your time best spent?

#1.  Be consistent in your message.  A couple of important things to remember before you start using social media is the fact that #1- what you do and say online is forever etched in the servers of time and #2 - it is easily found.  Because of these facts, it is important that you are consistent in your message.  Don’t try to put on different faces for different groups of people.  You cannot be the gentle, caring and benevolent giver of knowledge in one space and the raucous, in your face, every man for himself on MySpace.  Building trust is vital to your brand’s success.  Trust will come with a consistent message from you so be yourself and stick with it.  The real you and your brand may not appeal to everyone but that is okay.  To take a spin off of an old saying… your goal is to appeal to some of the people all of the time.

#2.  Separate business and pleasure.  Those pictures from your trip to Tiajuana, Mexico… might not be a great idea to post those to your MySpace page where your clients will find them.  And don’t think that they won’t look.  Employers, recruiters, potential clients, even your employees will Google you and run your name through social media sites to see what they can find.  If you are going to try and have both a personal and professional presence online it is important that your message and your brand image is consistent -that is that you are who you say you are in both worlds - or that those two worlds will never meet.  If you don’t want your business associates finding the pics of you and the policia in Tiajuana, make your MySpace page viewable to friends only or put them on Shutterfly or Flickr in a password protected album, etc.  Make sure that you take the necessary steps to protect your brand image.

#3.  Learn the culture.  When you first enter into a new social media environment, whether it be blogging or social networking sites, instead of barging in and making your presence known, lurk awhile.  Get a feel for the lay of the land and the way things work.  The best way to learn is to watch the leaders.  They shouldn’t be hard to find - they will have the most followers.  There is a set of rules and social norms in each of the social media communities.  Avoid making major faux pas by watching and learning how to traverse the culture before you start your own participation.  When something comes up that you are not sure how to handle, ask for help.  It is likely that you are not the first person to experience a sticky online situation.  Ask someone you know with more experience, a heavy hitter in the social network, a popular blogger, or even Ms. Biz Manners.

#4.  Be humble.  If you follow all of these tips and still make a social media blunder, be honest about it.  Stand up for all to see and say, “Oops, sorry about that ya’ll.”  When people see that you are open and honest about your mistakes it furthers trust.  Everybody makes mistakes and those that try to hide them are also more likely to be dishonest about other things as well.  If you are building brand awareness through social media, messages that you are sending about your brand should include that you are a trustworthy and reliable business.

Social media is a great way for you to increase brand awareness and establish a presence online.  Just make sure that your presence sends the right message about you and your business.

The very first post that I wrote for MarketMe was Pull Your Customers With Your Online Marketing.  In it I talked about how many of the online marketing strategies, namely social media, in use today are pull marketing strategies.  This means that you are putting yourself, your message, your business out there on the net and your potential customers are able to pull information about you.  Recently UKSmallBusiness left a comment on that post and something that stood out to me was that he referred to branding as push marketing.

My first instinct was, “Yes branding is push marketing.”  But, then as I thought about it I realized that is not entirely true.  When most of us think of ‘branding’ we may think of direct mail, television commercials, or billboard type advertising with a large and in your face branding approach.  However, branding also exists in online pull marketing, it just may not seem as obvious.

As Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger states,

Every online interaction you have, every social networking or bookmarking site that you participate in, every comment that you leave on other blogs, every interview that you do, every decision you make about your own blog, every comment that you leave on a forum, every guest post that you write on another blog - all of these things (and more) add to your own personal brand.

If you are actively participating in social media, you are increasing your brand awareness.  In fact some would say that Social Media Marketing Is Branding.  Historically, increasing brand awareness has probably been one of the hardest things to do for a small business.  Companies like Nike, Coca Cola, and McDonald’s have spent gazillions of dollars to increase their brand awareness to the point where they are recognized all over the world.  This is not a luxury that we as small businesses have.  However, by using social media we can increase our brand awareness to the point that we may be recognized in a smaller, yet more specific, group of people - mainly our target audience within our social networking groups.

So next time you Tweet, comment, post a blog or StumbleUpon someone else’s, remember that you aren’t just contributing to your online community, you are contributing to the image of your brand.

Welcome Freedom800® Freedom To Succeed™ Readers!

It is often easy to think that the technology alone will drive our business. This is wrong and has always been wrong. It will be wrong in the future. The key to successful E-Commerce is not about the E, the Electronic part. The key is the R-Commerce, the relationship on which the commerce is based.

When small business owners look to get established online, their focus is often on the technology. They contemplate which hosting plan will be best for their website, how their going to access their email, how their market and promote on search engines, etc. But what they tend to forget in this process is the importance of the relationship with who it is their selling to.

I’d like to share with a short video by our friend and colleague Terry Brock, who explains how the E-Commerce (the electronics) is great, but it’s really about the R-Commerce (the relationships) that stands the test of time.

Terry Brock is a marketing coach and syndicated columnist who writes about technology, marketing and the Internet weekly in his column Succeeding Today. For more about Terry, you can visit his website at TerryBrock.com.

One piece of advice you will find very frequently when it comes to Internet marketing is to analyze everything - analyze your site, your traffic, your responses, your CTR, your ROI, etc. ad infinitum.  While all of this analysis is important in order to gauge what is going to bring you the most success, it is possible to get analysis paralysis.

Analysis paralysis occurs when you get so caught up in the numbers, data, charts and graphs that instead of using them to make the right decisions, you can’t make any decision at all.  There comes a point where you have to stop analyzing and take action.

When you feel that the numbers are starting to overwhelm you and you don’t know which way to go, take a step back and consider these things:

• What will most enhance the customer’s experience?  One of the things that can get lost in all of the numbers and graphs is the customer experience.  Although what the numbers are showing you are the customers reactions to what you are presenting them, many people forget that human element.  Take a step back from the data and think about the people to get a better grasp of the big picture and make a decision on where to go next.
• What is the worst thing that can happen?  Many times people get analysis paralysis because of fear.  Fear of making the wrong decision will stop people in their tracks.  Many of the changes that come about due to data analysis of your ad campaigns, landing pages and the like are small changes.  It is not likely that by moving a graphic from the top left of your landing page to the top right of the page that your business will go bankrupt.  However, it is possible that you will see enough change that you can optimize your landing page for the best results.  Don’t let fear stand in your way of success.
• Take it one thing at a time.  The sheer volume of information coming at you can give you analysis paralysis before you even get started.  Don’t try to tackle it all at once.  Take one report on one aspect of your marketing and work it start to finish before moving on to the next thing. 

Analysis is a very important aspect of Internet marketing success because it allows you to continually optimize your marketing to get the best results.  That is if you can avoid the analysis paralysis…

Last week we received an email that read “Please review my site www.HotelBookingPro.com. Would appreciate an unbiased honest opinion. Be gentle”. Although I’m not really in the web design consulting business, I have been at this for quite some time now and noticed some things I thought might be of benefit to anyone looking to start a business online.

My first impression, before I even looked at the web site, was that the request is very vague. When asking someone to evaluate your work, whether it’s your business plan, stationary, brochure, logo, website or whatever, make sure you’re specific in asking what it is you’re looking for. If you just drafted a logo for your business, don’t ask “What do you think?”, but rather, “Do you feel this logo represents my business? Why or why not?”. Ask with a purpose. Help the person evaluating know what it is you’re looking. This way the person evaluating can focus in on your goal and give you more constructive feedback.

As I clicked onto the site I immediately began scanning the page to find something that gave me a clear meaning of what the site was about and why I should to be there. Nothing really stood out. This means at least 50% of the site’s traffic is lost because their clicking the back button within a few seconds of landing there. But since I was there to evaluate, I stuck around.

Being a web designer by trade, I tend to see design and code elements on a web page a little differently than what “normal visitors” see. I immediately began to suspect that the design and main task of the hotel search we’re not related. As I took a look at the code, I confirmed my suspicion finding that the search module was powered by http://www.hotelscombined.com. A quick visit there and I find they offer an affiliate program where affiliates can earn commissions either by revenue sharing with the PPC (Pay-Per-Click) ads on the results page or by setting up individual affiliate accounts with hotel booking websites like hotels.com, expedia.com, etc. and getting a portion of the revenue generated from hotel bookings.

So now I have an idea of the business model behind the site. Drive traffic to the site, get them to search for hotels, hope they click on some ads or book a hotel room and cash the commission check. Here’s the problem, it’s an awful business model. I would describe it as trying to catch a fish with your bare hands by diving in the ocean. Why? Because that’s how hard it will be to get quality traffic to the web site. Why would someone use this site over hotelscombined.com, hotels.com, expedia.com or any one of a dozen other travel sites with multi-million dollar marketing budgets?

Focus on how YOU can help people.

My unbiased honest advice is to scratch the affiliate hotel search module in favor of starting your own travel/destination blog. Offer visitors something unique. Start small, with specific hotels and destinations, and then expand to other destinations as things catch on. Use comments and various widgets designed to promote user interaction. Allow visitors to interact.

A travel blog designed around a specific region has the potential to be very successful. All travelers have either been to a destination or not. If they haven’t, they’re usually open to real opinions and local knowledge about their desired destination. If they have, then they often like to share their experiences. Either way, a blog offers something for each one.

You can easily monetize a blog’s content with Google AdSense and earn 100% of the click-through commission instead of just a portion like hotelscombined.com offers. You can also sign up as an affiliate for specific travel booking services like Expedia and Hotels.com and direct readers to these services to get their vacations booked. If the readers have found your blog to be helpful, they’ll have no problem following your link to a service they’ve probably already heard of and trust.

This is savvy marketing in the information age. This is how to succeed in today’s online marketplace.