Creating exciting new content that will help maximize search rankings, increase visits and grow your business can be a challenge, especially for small businesses. Here are some tried and true strategies for helping you create new content online that will create your brand, improve search and inform your customers.

#1 Start a blog already! Okay, you’ve heard me say it over and over again, that’s because it works. 100% of our clients who have a blog are glad they did. It solidifies their understanding of their brand, explaining who you are and what you do helps that message to remain clear for you and your team. It’s informative for your customers. One of my clients, Columbia Gorge Winery Cathedral Ridge Winery, just celebrated the one year anniversary of their blog and it has become a great source of information about upcoming Winemaker Dinners and Events, food and wine pairing recipes and new wine releases. It helps with page rank because it’s fresh content. It’s fun. In the words of Starsky in the Starsky & Hutch movie-DO IT! DO IT RIGHT NOW!

#2 Ask for product and service reviews-I have a client who sells trailer hitches and bike rike hitches. They use content online to teach people how to properly use their hitches, but they also use it to get product reviews which they share at the product level (great way to improve conversion).

#3 Use content as a way to be helpful-Content online doesn’t always have to be about selling or promotion. Hitchsource.com used their site to explain how to replace the glass on your iPhone. Nothing to do with hitches, but enormously helpful information for their customers and friends.

#4 Be an authority in your industry-Avery created a direct mail guide that gave great information and resources for creating direct mail, it was a great help to their customers and it was included in the dma.org website.

#5 Create synergy between your business and your passion-My neighbor and talented Columbia Gorge photographer, Vlado (Photovlado.com) focuses on Wedding and Portrait Photography, but he is a skilled Windsurfer and does sport photography mostly for fun. He includes some great wind sport shots on his website, fun for him and his visitors.

#6 Use content to make your site sticky-We are at the tail end of a massive redesign for our hood river real estate client. We are using personalized content, such as a message board, to do lists and email alerts when the status of a property changes (price changes, sold, etc) to encourage customers to use the site for searching for properties. Every real estate site has an RMLS, but they’ve used content to streamline the process and provide information only available from their site. (Site launches next month, we’ll keep you posted on results!)

#7 Do a podcast-This recommendation is meant to inspire. We are launching our first podcast next week. We’ll keep you posted on this effort as well.

The key is to use content as a way to keep you innovating and communicating with your customer and the benefits are limitless. Happy content developing!

The best way to start participating in local search is with the search engine’s own tools, Google Local and Yahoo Local Search. Sign up for an account today, complete your company information, Google and Yahoo (and other engines) will verify that you’re the business owner and your local search reach will go live. But don’t stop there. Go local with your business relationships when possible. Only a small percentage of my business is local, but it’s a great way to raise awareness about your business, potentially do some bartering for products and services and network with local businesses in a more powerful way.

I’ve had a local (award-winning) winery as a customer for 4 years (Award Winning Winery, Cathedral Ridge Winery). They are great people with such love and passion for their jobs it’s hard not to get excited about the product and how we promote it. I take a percentage of my fees in wine, this allows me to understand all of the wine, how we promote it and to truly be an evangelist for the product.

We’re creating a site for a local Icelandic Horse Ranch and the owners also own a mercantile called Red Feather. They carry beautiful furniture, clothing, lamps, etc. We do a percentage of our project in trade (yes I have a gorgeous slate lamp and a lovely new pair of boots) but more importantly I spend time learning about their philosophies and how their business objectives for the mercantile and the ranch merge to create a powerful brand.

We’re doing some search marketing and optimization for a neighbor who is a Czechoslovakian photographer. Hood River Wedding and Portrait photographer, Vlado Skelnar, creates amazing, artistic photography. We’re swapping senior and family portraits for search and direct mail advice and this has allowed me to learn about his style and product so I can promote the business on and offline.

Recently I was looking for a new hosting company, someone local with time in the industry and a great reputation. I queried my friends at SEMPDX (our local search engine marketing organization) and one of my colleagues, Search Commander Scott Hendison, owns a hosting company, PDXTC Hosting. We’re very happily using their services now.

Invest in local business, even if it’s only a small part of your business. Don’t miss an opportunity to create understanding and awareness of your business by sharing who you are with other business owners, either through networking or bartering. Sure it’s a global economy, but it’s a lot of fun to foster business relationships locally, you don’t just grow your business, you share a handshake and a smile (and maybe a bottle of Reserve Pinot Noir;)

1 Submission is easy-Just follow simple instructions on the site

2 Submission is free-A YouTube account and submission is free

3 Universal Search-As universal search expands and takes more positions on Google and other engines, video and image placement will be important to maintaining natural search placement

4 It’s a great branding tool-Even if you don’t think your product lends itself to a video, get creative, It can help people have a great association with your brand if done well

5 It’s a great reputation management tool-When a Dell laptop went up in flames at a conference, the company used video to help be involved and manage the incident and the pr outcome

6 It’s a great way to announce a new product-Use video to grow awareness about a new product or new features of an existing product

7 It’s a great team building exercise-Getting your team involved in a video project can be great team building as well as helping create a cohesive image of your brand internally

8 It’s quantifiable-You can track views and traffic to assess how the medium is helping to grow awareness about your business or product

9 It helps create evangelists for your product-What better way to create a following than to engage your market with video and let them spread the word for you

10 It’s fun-If you’re a small business it allows you to do a commercial you couldn’t afford on a network. If you’re big business, it allows you to be a lot more friendly and intimate than you would on a television commercial.

So sit with your team, brainstorm some ideas, create a video and try a YouTube submission to help spice up your online marketing plans for the year.

It’s About the Audience

Whether starting a new site or adding new social media features to an existing media venue, you must think hard about your audience. The user is at the core of every social media site. Assess the following issues:

Who’s your audience? Spend time defining your target market. Think in terms of the these factors:

Demographics. What attributes describe your market, such as household income, geography, age, education, profession, or household composition?

Psychographics. What other traits does your audience have? Are there special interests that influence their actions? These can be work-related, such IT, or hobby-related, such as knitting.

Behavior. How do users’ online actions reveal their interests? Do they use specific products or content? Do they read whitepapers or watch videos?

How do you want to the audience to participate? Make it easy for users to contribute and share, in addition to providing site capabilities that are intuitive to use. For example, rating content or uploading photographs often takes less effort for users than expressing themselves in words.

What’s the benefit of participating, both passively and actively, for users? The reader is thinking, “What’s in it for me?” Is it being part of a community, getting feedback, having a public forum, earning respect, being heard, or some other reason?
Allow participants to give you feedback about site functionality. This is particularly important during early stages of site development, when your participants can tell you what they want and need from your site as well as complain about what doesn’t work.

Points to Consider When Adding Social Media

Create a strong process for site moderation with well thought out and established guidelines for what’s acceptable. ITtoolbox’s George Krautzel points out that this must be done subtlety; it doesn’t mean becoming an obvious presence on your site.

Have a willingness to fail publicly, because social media requires a level of transparency. For some companies, this can be difficult to accept. Transparency is important to understanding what works and how you got to your current offering.

Understand the speed of change involved. Every day brings new changes and challenges as your site evolves. This can be difficult for some offline media companies to comprehend.

Commit to making it succeed. Social media isn’t “build it and they will come” functionality. It takes ongoing work to nurture and keep the community expanding and evolving.

Recognize that building a social media site is an iterative process. It requires continually testing new ways to improve the site. According to Spiceworks’s Jay Hallberg, it often takes three attempts to get a piece of functionality to work properly for the community.
Different Revenue Models

Social media provides publishers with a variety of revenue models, including:

Advertising. Despite publisher concerns, social media, especially for niche or B2B (define) markets, provides well-developed niche opportunities that can evolve into a variety of offerings. Among the advertising opportunities: banners, sponsorships, lead generation, and behavioral targeting that can be sold directly or through third parties.

Subscriptions. Subscriptions can be offered in a number of ways. For example, they can be used for additional functionality, as with LinkedIn, or they can blur the line between print and online, as with the site for “Engineering News-Record.”

Other forms of revenue. Given social media’s evolving state and the strong online advertising market, many companies haven’t fully explored such options as revenue shares or affiliate-type sales, research sales, and data sales (without revealing personal information). (For other content revenue generation ideas, see “Develop Supplemental Content Revenue Streams.”)
Measuring Social Media’s Impact

Many marketers continue to use older metrics to assess a campaign’s impact. In part, this is because they like having metrics that are consistent across campaigns and that they understand. But other, less traditional metrics are also important. Among the salient factors to consider:

Pageviews. While this is an established indicator, it can put your social media efforts into perspective. For example, McGraw-Hill’s Dora Chomiak pointed to a roughly two- to three-fold increase in pageviews per session from the newer social media sections of the publisher’s site. For an advertising-driven site, this translates directly to the bottom line.

User involvement. This can be measured in terms of time on site as well as activity. For example, how many comments or photographs are added each day, week, or month? Has user time on your site increased due to involvement with these sections?

Advertiser interaction. Does the site enable advertisers to participate in a dialogue with their consumers? For media entities concerned about advertisers that receive negative customer feedback, it’s important to put this in perspective since the conversation is already happening. And these newer formats enable them to address these issues head on (albeit in a public forum). Note: this can also be useful for editorial team members who, until this point, may have only had a one-way communication with readers.

Revenues. As always, assessing revenues and positive cash flow are critical components of any campaign.

Costs. It’s important to track costs associated with these efforts. Remember to consider expenses broadly, because it may touch a number of your organization’s areas.
While adding social media to your site can be a difficult decision, the most important step is starting. Social media features aren’t a quick fix for a boring site. But many online marketers have found they’re great tools for expanding reach, building involvement, learning from visitors, and, yes, even bringing in new revenues.

5) Quantifiable nature of the business. If you are gaining awareness, increasing visits, improving conversion and growing sales, you’re succeeding. Search can be the most quantifiable of all marketing efforts if done properly.

4) You don’t step in the same river twice. Search marketing is a swiftly moving, ever changing discipline. I don’t know how you could ever get bored as a search marketer.

3) Interesting history. I watched 28 up the other day, a documentary about the interviews of a handful of people on their 7th, 14th, 21st and 28th birthdays. I would love to see some research body do this for search marketing. How can you predict where it will go? It’s driven by part legacy, part innovation, part perspective and part sheer will.

2) Relative newness of the discipline. Traditional marketing and advertising have tried and true practices and standards. Search marketing is finally becoming standardized, but as new strategies emerge we are challenged to work them into the search marketing mix.

1) The people. Search marketers are by nature, exciting, innovative, interesting creatures. They are the first to share their new findings and the last to disparage. They are some of my favorite people on the planet.

Thank you to the following:

My children, Marcus & Taylor for putting up with my travel, my crazy schedule, having to share my home office with your music room before we had a real office and for accompanying me to California many times to go to Disneyland;)
Dallas & Roxanne for helping make the family schedule work
My parents and family for helping me through the good times and the bad times, I love you
My friends for their support (and martinis)
The nay sayers for teaching me the value of perseverance
Dave Edwards for great business advice
My co-workers for their faith that we were working towards something special
Avery Dennison for the opportunity to work with such a fantastic company
Print and Mail Center for exploring the unknown together
Cathedral Ridge Winery for coming back;)
EZkem Lab Services for being a great collaborator
Vineyardview for teaching me that I love search marketing and I hate running a B & B;)
Copper West Properties for your patience and faith
Swaddlekeeper for the cutest product ever
Hitchsource for your innovation
Monster.com for making me your PR person and hooking me up
Kiplinger Magazine, Glamour Magazine and The Oregonian for the great articles
SEMPO for creating a standard for the industry
SEMPDX for creating a local membership of search marketers, for making me an Advisory Board member, for the trip to Chicago, for the speaking gig at SearchFest, to your board members (Todd, Ben, Scott, all) for their great mentoring and mostly for being such a great group of professionals

I am grateful. Here’s to another 10 years!

* Have a site map-it helps the engines and your visitors
* Do your keyword research so you’re using words your visitors use
* Create a global navigation system that is always present for your user so they can easily find content
* Each page should have an objective, create content for that purpose
* Visually impactful images are an important element of designing your site, but use text to display keyword rich content and links
* Create unique keyword rich title tags and alt+image tags that describe that page
* Create internal cross-links that helps guide your visitors through your site
* Ask yourself the question-”Have I told people what I’d like them to do on my site?”
* Update your content, create a content management system so you can easily change content or implement a blog
* Test your site, pretend you’re a user and experience your site as a visitor

Before you take the next step in your search marketing campaign, make sure you’ve reviewed this checklist with your design team, developers and customers.

When broaching a topic this wide, it’s easy to get caught up in over simplifying or over whelming. Summit Projects Executive Account Manager Rob McCreedy presented great information and case studies from their Nike sites and gave some helpful guidelines for understanding Website Usability.

My focus was creating framework for good Search Engine Optimization and how Natural Search can help grow your business. The hardest part about these short meetings is providing value. We could spend a week on Keyword Research alone (1 of 15 slides in a 20 minute presentation). It’s always the hope that these educational meeting lay the groundwork for understanding that Web Marketing and Search Marketing are complex disciplines and that investing in your success as a business owner is worth your time. This takes a great deal of insight and responsibility from the business owner.

The two biggest issues I see with business owners struggling to make the decision to grow their online marketing channel (especially small to mid-size business) are:

ISSUE
1) The desire to spend precious little time or budget on online marketing, then having unrealistic expectations regarding results.

SOLUTION
As a business owner, create an expectation for your marketing agency for ROI. Research the potential for growth for your company online, determine your ability to garner more of the market place, define parameters for potential growth and make decisions about investing in search marketing, web development and other online marketing strategies.

ISSUE
2) The expectation that you can pay an agency for a project, walk away and return to great results.

Get involved with your agency and collaborate through the entire project. As a write this, I think about a project we’re working on now. The business owner (I’ll share more about the project upon completion;) has been involved, not just with creating project parameters, but with design, content development and user experience. It’s not an easy process to say the least, but the potential for success of the project increases dramatically with your involvement as a business owner. No one knows your business better than you.

Kudos to those who attended this (or any) meeting exploring Growing Your Online Marketing Channel, and dare to take the next step and create an actionable strategy for growing your business online. If you think you need more education, attend SEMPDX meetings, attend local Community Education courses, read articles on the topic (ClickZ or SearchEngineLand) or reach out to an agency who has provided results for their clients.

#3 Landing Page Optimization Recommendation
Choose 2 strong product or service benefits to test

Testing to improve your landing pages and improve conversion can be a daunting thing. What do I test? Where do I start? It’s like trying to make a cake without the recipe. Most companies get together with staff and then guess what their customers need to see to make a purchasing decision. Understanding what compels your customers to go from a click to a conversion is one of the most important aspects of improving your website performance. Take 2 strong product or service benefits and test them against each other. Test the content in the headline and in the body copy. You can use Google Website Optimizer to execute the test. Other than very expensive focus groups, this is the best way to discover what is most important to your potential customers and what they need to see to compel them to complete the sales cycle. You may be surprised at what you learn!

How to start:
*Choose your top 2 converting landing pages
*Choose 2 things to test (headline, body content, image, etc.)
*Implement test
*Track results
*Launch your new landing pages with the best converting site elements

#3 Landing Page Optimization Recommendation
Choose 2 strong product or service benefits to test

Stay tuned in the next couple of weeks for #2 and #1!

Try it and send me a comment about your progress!

In the wise words of my best friend, “Why wouldn’t ya?”. If you have reasons you think would prohibit you from starting a blog, leave me a comment and I’ll see if we can dispel your fear.

Top 10 Reasons & Strategies for Starting a Blog:

1.
Reason
It is the easiest way to publish content.

Strategy
Use WordPress to host your blog (or blogger, or typepad) Inexpensive or free tools.

2.
Reason
Its the easiest way to communicate one on one with your customers.

Strategy
Create a mission statement for your blog so you have a purpose.

3.
Reason
If youre content is good, your content will go viral.

Strategy
Get involved with your online community so its easier to make your content viral

4
Reason
Its great to be known in your online community as an expert.

Strategy
Spend time on other blogs within your online community so youre known for being a respectful, contributing member.

5
Reason
It’s a great way to understand your customers’ needs.

Strategy
Read all comments and incorporate feedback into your business goals.

6
Reason
It’s a great link development strategy.

Strategy
Create an interesting, entertaining or funny blog that will generate buzz for your blog (and brand).

7
Reason
It’s a smart way to get your team involved in your brand.

Strategy
Have a regular post where other authors can contribute. (SEOmoz does Whiteboard Friday, great video content that I watch religeously).

8
Reason
It’s a great way to syndicate your content.

Strategy
Optimize and publicize your content with Feedburner (use the email subscriptions widget for folks who aren’t comfortable with RSS readers).

9
Reason
It’s a great way to grow your house list.

Strategy
Once visitors have signed up for your blog, ask them if they’d like to receive other content (newsletters, white papers, etc). Just be sure you do it at the right time and after you’ve created value for them.

10
Reason
It’s a lot of fun!

Strategy
Have fun and be creative when you’re writing your blog posts, your enthusiasm and love for your brand will be contagious;)

Speaking of enthusiasm and love for blogging, read this great post 17 Habits of Highly Popular Bloggers.