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30 Ingredients for Your Ragu Marketing Plan

Have you ever wished you could just pay someone 10% of your sales per year to feed you all the clients and/or customers you need to thrive? Yeah, me, too. But wishes like that only come true in our dreams. Real people, running real businesses, for real profits, have to have a real branding, marketing, and advertising plan to get there. And such a real, living BMA plan needs to be robusto, like Ragu Tomato Sauce, meaning, it all has to be in there, Ma.

What all makes a sellable marketing sauce?

Generally, a firm’s marketing budget should always include the following categories:

  • Advertising
  • Alumni programs
  • Attendance at industry, trade or professional association meetings
  • Charitable contributions
  • Client entertainment and gifts
  • Club dues and expenses (e.g., for whatever clubs allow interacting with targeted prospects)
  • Collateral materials
  • Continuing education seminars
  • CRM system or client database
  • Digital marketing
  • Directory listings
  • Events and seminars
  • Graphic design and branding costs
  • Internet directory referral fees
  • Mailings and communications (e.g., newsletters, invitations, announcements, alerts and holiday cards)
  • Marketing-related training
  • Market research and client surveys
  • Marketing staff professional development
  • Memberships in industry, trade or professional organizations
  • Networking activities (e.g., dues, membership, and travel)
  • Proposals and pitches
  • Public and media relations
  • Retreats
  • Social marketing
  • Tickets and sponsorships
  • Web site design and maintenance

While many people say, “The whole world uses the Internet now like the old world used the Yellow Pages then,” and while having a platform-responsive website that looks great on a laptop, a tablet, and a smart cellphone is maximally important, social-digital marketing is still not the only thing to think about in your marketing plan.

Take a moment and think about what all these things are, which of them you are doing, how much of each you are doing, what objective results are you expecting from each of them, and how you are tracking where each of your marketing components are taking you, and how effectively each is getting you where you want to be.

Come back to the next post and we will pick at these things a little more.

[reminder]How much marketing can you do yourself and still run your business and sell and deliver all at the same time?[/reminder]

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See Your Branding, Marketing, and Advertising As Part of Your Living Business Plan

Have you ever found your self up to your belt buckle in alligators and remembered that all you really wanted to do at the time was just drain the swamp? Are you so busy trying to brand, market, and advertise to perfection that you have no time to actually provide goods and services profitably enough to maintain the rest of your life? Yeah, me, too.

Usually, such situations almost always result from failing to keep the end in mind almost all the time. So, let’s at least begin with the end in mind. And that end is money. There are more great quotes about money, than at which one can shake a stick. A good one is best understood by reading the entire lyrics to the song, Money (Makes the World Go Around).

Money is the scorecard of business. Money measures gross earnings, costs of goods sold, net income, general administrative and overhead, gross profits, EBITDA, and owners’ discretionary earnings (or what most people refer to as “income”). Money is the common exchange medium for the property component of life’s precious resources.

So, as you begin fashioning your branding, marketing, and advertising plan you have to first understand your score card target of your living business plan, which is money and more specifically the end product of almost all entrepreneurs, the entrepreneur’s discretionary income. How much “money” will it take to make your cash register of life go “Cha-ching!”?

A little data may help you decide. From 1967 to 2014, U.S. median household income has trended up from $45,000 to $54,000 or so. And most people are satisfied with that status, being fat and happy enough living in the middle.

Lawyers earned an average annual salary of $136,260 in 2015, which is substantially more than any other occupation on U.S. News’ list of Best Social Service Jobs. Paralegals make much less than half that. In 2015, paralegals earned an average salary of $52,390. So let’s assume for the sake of choosing an example, we are fashioning a BMA Business Action Plan for a lawyer wanting to make $136,260 and pay one paralegal $52,390 as part of his 53% expense ratio.

This means our targeted gross income from attorney’s fees collected will be $289,914.89, or so. Let’s assume the lawyer graduated law school in 1990, which means (s)he will have to bill (really, collect; but that’s another thing to worry about) the $300 average hourly rate for lawyers with 25 years of experience. This means the lawyer has to collect for about 966.382966666666667 hours, or so. Let’s round that up by the 5% effective collections rate of law firms to come to the understanding that a lawyer with 25 years of experience wanting to net $136,260 annual income must gross $289,914 a year needs to bill about 1,000 hours per year.

Established, medium and large firms spend about 3-4% of their billings on marketing. Smaller, growing law firms spend about the average of 10% for all small businesses on their marketing. Therefore,, we need to perceive a BMA plan that will generate $300,000 in billings for about $30,000 a year.

$30,000!

Besser! Have you lost your mind?!? No one spends 10% of their gross revenue on branding, marketing, and advertising. Well, many solo practitioners and small (2-5 lawyers) firms do. They may not realize it but they do.

To get a grip on how much it really costs to branding, market, and advertise a small business, in this case a law firm, start off by reading this old article from the ABA Law Practice folks. The data is just a little dated, but the theory is still fairly current and it applies to almost all small businesses providing goods and services.

So, go read the reference article and come back to the next post to begin working with the end in mind, developing a BMA plan that will result in $300,000 a year in annual collections.

[reminder]What’s your BMA plan? And, more importantly, if your BMA plan doesn’t work, then what is your plan B?[/reminder]

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Who Should Brand, Market, and Advertise Your Business?

Have you ever felt completely disintegrated in your branding, marketing, and advertising efforts; wondering what the heck you are doing vs. what you should be doing vs. who else you should get to do it for you vs. how you and them should be doing it; such that you then make the worst choice of all, which is to do nothing but depend on letting God work it out for you? Yeah, me, too. I know how you feel. I’ve often felt that same way. But, let me tell you what I found out.

Having a better business action plan for branding, marketing, and advertising leads to much better preparation and practice of that plan for persistently promoting your practically perfect performance of not only that plan, but also the rest of your business.

Confused? I was, too. But, thank me, I’m doing much better now.

First, you have to understand the difference between branding, marketing, and advertising and how each fit into your branding-marketing-advertising (BMA) plan.

Second, you have to understand the difference between being the entrepreneur, the manager, and the technician in your enterprise and let each of those three people living schizophrenically inside you have their say and do their work respectively on and in your business.

Third, you have to perceive your BMA plan as your entrepreneurial self, manage your BMA plan (naturally) as your manager self, and do the actually work of your BMA plan as your technician self.

Go get a copy of The E-Myth Revisited and E-Myth Mastery by Michael Gerber, zip through them over the weekend, and come back this coming Monday ready to get to work on a Better Business BMA Action Plan.

[reminder]How should you brand, market, and advertise your business?[/reminder]

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Yes! We Can!

Have you ever thought the home page of your big, beautiful, awesome, professionally designed, horribly expensive website is an overgrown thicket of inconsequential stuff that does nothing but vacuum money from your bank account, dust up your clients’ view of your business, and never delivers prospects to your sales funnel? Yeah, me, too. But then I learned to treat my website like a legal brief; the key word there being, “brief.”

Briefs should be short, sweet, well-organized, easily navigable, and to the point. Take a look at these 16 examples of brief website home pages from Hubspot! They are all good. They are all effective. They are all brief. They are short, at least “above the fold.” Uncluttered. They all resonate with their target audience and compellingly state their value proposition and only one value proposition.

And, finally, they all state that “single-topic” value proposition front and center in very few words how you can use whatever they are selling to join a crowd of similarly situated others and make your life better.

None of them talk at length about how many years of experience their company has. None of them discuss everything their owners have ever done and every award they have received. None of them provide you with much, much more information than you can easily digest in 5 seconds. None of them give you more choices to delve deeper in their website than you can pick from one look at the page and pushing on button.

And, being good cultural branders, most of them are doing as many of the steps of cultural branding as they can on one page.

An, they are doing it effectively using good layout, CTA (call to action) placement, whitespace, colors, fonts, and other supporting elements.

These things can be done by yourself with just a little education, training, and experience; just a little bit of coaching from a business advisor with education, training, and experience in website design, implementation, optimization, and usage; and just a little bit of help from a website service company that is geared toward using easy, inexpensive tools to provide business owners with easy, inexpensive websites.

Among all the other things I do, I run a business company consulting company, which is not only affiliated with, but also uses such a website service called hibu.

[reminder]How can we help you create and use your website better?[/reminder]

 

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Can You Culturally Brand With Your Website?

We can help you solve your online cultural marketing puzzle.
We can help you solve your online cultural marketing puzzle.

Don’t you wish you could just get one consistent line of advice about how best to market in the digital world that you could then learn, understand, master, and use like Ron Popiel’s Rotisserie Oven (“Just set it and forget it!”) Yeah, me, too. But, that is not going to happen.

This is the real life of marketing in the modern world. People are fickle. They are fickle about what they want. They are fickle about how they figure out what they want. The majority of them now use online search to do it, but online searchers are  fickle, from moment to moment, about how they find and use your website. And do not even get me started about how Google and the rest of the search engines change their algorithms faster, but with a frequency that seems much more often, than the average couple’s sexual encounter. But I digress.

We are discussing in this series of posts cultural branding and today we are wondering if you can culturally brand on your website. If we look at the websites of the cultural branding examples discussed in Holt’s literature (see the prior posts for details), we see some cultural branding going on in some of them.

The best example is Dove soap. http://Dove.com It’s “Real Beauty” campaign is right there, front and center on the home page. You see that real, but very pleasant looking woman and you want to read what she has to say. Your click the “Read more” and get drawn into the issue, wanting to read more. You click the big circle to find out people’s answers to their survey of “beauty bias.” When you are done, if you are looking for a comforting, caring, friend who “gets you, really gets you” and loves you for all you both are and are not, you can’t wait to go out and pull a bar of the grocery store shelf on aisle 7, halfway down on the right, just are eye level.

For Chipotle, http://chipotle.com, you have to hit the “Food with integrity” button on their top menu, but then you are sucked into Chipotle’s commitment to cook up a better world with every burrito they wrap or bowl they fill. They love their pigs right up to the point they kill them …. But I digress. They even link you out at the bottom of their long culture page to their self-produced comedy series, Farmed and Dangerous. I couldn’t get the first episode to run on my MacBook Pro and gave up after looking at a black box in the middle of my screen for two minutes. Nonetheless, Chipotle has cultural branding there.

Axe, http://www.axe.com/us/en/home.html has much better cultural branding than does Old Spice, https://oldspice.com/en . Compare the two and you will see the obvious differences. Panera, https://www.panerabread.com/en-us/home.html, has it’s 100% clean food success front and center on the first page of its active and interest-grabbing slider.

But, no one, NO ONE, does cultural branding than Starbuck’s, https://www.starbucks.com. Like the others, they make you click their top menu’s “Responsibility” button to find it, but when you do, you are immersed in a multi-media extravaganza about Starbuck’s egalitarian bonding with everyone, while disparaging no one.

There are a ton of examples of both good and bad cultural marketing on websites. But almost all of them are professionally produced with really HUUUUUGE financial budgets behind them. Which brings us to the question driving this post, “Can you culturally brand using your website?”

The answer is definitely, yes, but you have to use your own POWER and proceed only with every resource you have in order to do it. You have to invest at least some of each of your life’s precious resources of self, time, effort, energy, emotion, intellect, property, and people to ring the bell with your website. Websites are, however, the major marketing media used by small businesses and you have to leverage your resources to make yours work for you effectively and efficiently.

Come back tomorrow and we will talk more about how.

[reminder]How much of your resources are you investing in online marketing?[/reminder]

 

 

 

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Use All 5 Steps of Cultural Branding to Build a Better Ranking Website

 

Do you want your website to deliver you a super-engaged community that will then buy and use and return to buy and use more of whatever product or service you are selling? Yeah, me, too. Alas, however, before you can enjoy the benefits of such a relationship, you must invest some of all your resources of self, time, effort, energy, emotion, intellect, property, and people in online cultural branding to create and sustain that relationship.

Cultural branding did not just spring up last week, month, or even year. One of the early writers about it is Douglas Holt, who wrote How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding. Holt, a former Harvard Business School professor who wisely gave up academia for lucre, founded the Cultural Strategy Group. http://culturalbranding.org. His friends at HBS apparently still love him, however, because they published his work another time as a Big Idea section titled Branding in the Age of Social Media. https://hbr.org/2016/03/branding-in-the-age-of-social-media.

Cultural branding requires you to innovatively leapfrog the conventions of your workspace and champion ideologies that are meaningful to your largest sphere of prospective customers. This requires a shift from mindshare branding, through purpose branding, and to cultural branding.

If you’ve ever marketed anything in the past, then you familiar with mindshare branding, whether you call it that or not. Mindshare branding uses psychological associations to convince prospects whatever you are selling will enhance their benefits, emotions, and personality. Purpose branding, mindsharing in the present third millennia, actively espouses the values or ideals prospective customers share.

Cultural branding requires less obvious selling and more subtle, but also more active, support of a targeted pre-existing cultural segment of society’s values and ideals using a strategic combination of traditional media platforms and current social media tools. The targeted subsegment is one that is working on leapfrogging the larger society’s orthodoxy, which creates a cultural opportunity that a marketer can then champion purposefully, truthfully, effectively, and efficiently. Cultural branding requires actually figuring out what culture you want to serve and then actually joining and serving that culture.

Finding, joining, and serving a culture takes # steps:

  • Mapping the cultural orthodoxy
  • Locating the cultural opportunity
  • Targeting the crowdculture
  • Diffusing the new ideology
  • Innovating continually, using cultural flashpoints.

In his HBR article, Holt explained each of these five steps and describes how Chipotle scored 80% over the test of time:

  • Chipotle leapfrogged the cultural orthodoxy that “BigFood’s” commercially processed and refined foods were good for us,;
  • located the cultural opportunity being pushed by Whole Foodies, Trader Joe’s fanatics, Jamie Oliver home-cuisinartists, and others that they wanted healthier food such as organics, non-organic, but unprocessed, and farm-to-table fruits and vegetables;
  • Researched, recognized, and joined the grassroots subculture (crowdculture) advocating these ideas;
  • Diffused the subcultures idea in an entertaining, educational, and enthusing way using some short, animated movies tied in to a good social media presence and traditional media platforms; but
  • Chipotle spun out in the end, however, when it didn’t continue along the culturebranding path by picking inconsequential issues to support, picking consequential issues such as non-GMO foods, but failing to walk that walk, and then suffering through its E.coli problems.

Holt’s article mentions other brands that have exploited subcultural shifts, such as:

  • Axe (men’s grooming products exploiting the “lad” fad)
  • Dove (led the body-positive crowd with a campaign for “real beauty”)
  • Old Spice (used Isaiah Mustafa to let women believe they could improve their men with Old Spice deodorants and colognes).

So, apparently, Holt’s recognized and pointed out for us cultural branding. The question remains, how do we in small business, who cannot afford much in the way of professionally produced videos run first on traditional media and then seeded over social media, use cultural branding most effectively and efficiently to run, grow, and sell our businesses better?

Come back next time and we will discuss more about that.

[reminder]How does your website compare and contrast with the websites of the companies mentioned in Holt’s article discussed in this post? Look and see and then come back read the next post in this series.[/reminder]

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3 Reasons Most Business Websites Suck at Branding

 

Have you ever wondered why that spiffy new, professionally crafted website you spent a few grand developing to show yours is a “serious business” sits all alone on the web, unvisited, unfriended, unshared, untweeted? Yeah, me, too. Rereading a long series of articles written by some “people who ought to know” about marketing in the age of social media may, however, clue us all in on an answer to this dilemma.

  1. Most business websites’ owners are too tight-assed to use the word suck on their websites when it’s really appropriate. People, especially serious business owners, seek to be universally loved and understood as serious, professional, prim, proper, and absolutely neither common, crass, nor, heaven forbid, vulgar. Being so, they for darned sure aren’t willing to let their hair down long enough to really relate with real people who are quite comfortable saying something, like your perfectly coifed website, sucks when it really sucks.
  2. Most business websites’ owners try to create a culture around themselves instead of trying to serve a culture that is coalescing around a topic bordering their businesses’ workspaces. Coca-Cola made this mistake with its Coca-Cola Journey digital magazine. Under Armour apparently didn’t when it took over where Nike left off and began UA’s “I Will What I Want” program by addressing issues of concern to UA workout clothing wearers somewhat more rowdily and randily by letting the public it was seeking lead the discussion
  3. Most business website content is designed to sell instead of enlighten, educate, entertain, and enthuse those viewing the website.

So, what can you do to do better than your dull, boring competitors?

First, do the opposite of these things.

Second, do the opposite of these things in a way that doesn’t overtly look like you are trying to do the opposite of those things.

Third, come back next time and we will learn some details of cultural branding.

[reminder]Would you stay on your website more than three seconds after you first see it?[/reminder]

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3 Issues for Crafting Defecting Customer Recapture Strategies

Recapturing lost customers is like recooping lost sheep. We can help you save departing customers.

Picking up where we left off discussing Kumar and his associates’ research on recapturing lost customers, let’s look at their three main questions of interest. When you are crafting a recapture strategy, you must consider the following:

How likely is a given customer to come back?

Trying to regain every lost customer can sap your marketing resources. It’s better to be more efficient and effective by focusing on people whose prior behavior suggests they can be more easily convinced to return. Has the departing customer referred others and never complained or only had complaints that were satisfactorily resolved? These are your best bets. Has this customer canceled because of price alone? If so, that customer is more likely to come back than one who left because of poor service. If a departing customer claims your prices are just as bad as your service, don’t bother knocking on their door again. Such types are the least likely of all to return.

How long will a reacquired customer stay, and how much will he or she spend?

You should consider the returning lifetime value of each lost customer. This is usually based on that customers average historical spend multiplied out over the number of years you expect the reacquired customer to stay. You’d probably be surprised to find someone who departs will be more loyal their second time around. In fact, recaptured customers generally stay recaptured longer, and customers who defect because of price and come back for a better deal stay the longest of all. This shows the important upside of win-back strategies.

Which people should get which saving offers?

You should consider the specifics of each customer in relation to your historical experience with others. Don’t use one-size-fits-all “new-deal” incentives. Who gets what recapture offer varies based on your company’s specific facts and circumstances and the reasons the customer left and is willing to consider returning.

 

You will have to study your customers to work strategically when bringing back your own lost customers. Simply identifying those who are the most likely to sign up again, rather than appealing to every defector, can increase your win-back rates. Considering each lost customer’s average lifetime value can drive how big an offer to make to get them back.

 

A lot of this data can also be used to develop initial customer acquisition strategies, but that is a topic for another day.

 

[reminder]What do you know about your own new customer prospects and lost customers and have you thought of hiring us to help you learn more?[/reminder]

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3 Great Things for Crafting Defecting Customer Recapture Strategies

Recapturing lost customers is like recooping lost sheep. We can help you save departing customers.

Have you ever had a customer leave you and just said to yourself, “Big deal, so what, and who cares? New customers are a dime a dozen.” Yeah, me, too – long ago. But let me tell you why we’re both wrong and why we should almost always work hard but be selective about keeping defecting customers.

First, it usually costs more to acquire a new customer than it does to recapture a departing one. Second, departing customers tell exponential numbers of friends why you stink, but those whom you tempt back into your fold tell even more people what a deal they conned you out of, most of whom will be new customers. Third, who needs a third reason? The first two are more than enough, but there are more discussed below.

But, how do you get defectors to rejoin your tribe? And how hard should you work and how much bling should you toss at them to get them back? Like most things common business owners take for granted, however, there is a good deal of science behind winning back lost customers.

Some folks who appear to know a lot about this stuff are V. Kumar, a professor at Georgia State University; Yashoda Bhagwat, a doctoral student there; and Xi (Alan) Zhang, another doctoral student there, who studied the issue for seven years and published an article in the Journal of Marketing in 2015, which got a lot of press including an article in the Harvard Business Journal. Regaining “Lost” Customers: The Predictive Power of First-Lifetime Behavior, the Reason for Defection, and the Nature of the Win-Back Offer. Journal of Marketing: July 2015, Vol. 79, No. 4, pp. 34-55, (http://journals.ama.org/doi/10.1509/jm.14.0107) discussed in the Harvard Business Journal, March 2016 pp. 22-23 (https://hbr.org/2016/03/winning-back-lost-customers).

The upshot of Kumar and Co’s research is reacquiring customers who leave may help businesses not only regain their lost profits but also usurp profits from competitors. Nonetheless, not all lost customers are worth the investment in reacquisition and not all of them will remain profitable if reacquired. These guys studied (1) the lost customers’ first-lifetime experiences and behaviors, (2) the reason for defection, and (3) the nature of the win-back offer made to lost customers are all related to the likelihood of their reacquisition, their second-lifetime duration, and their second-lifetime profitability per month. Their study shows that the stronger the first-lifetime relationship with the firm, the more likely a customer is to accept the win-back offer.

Come back tomorrow and find out some answers to vital questions you need to consider when crafting your own “customer saving strategy.”

[reminder]Do you even care about recooping your lost sheep and recouping their profits?[/reminder]

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10 + 1 Things An SEO Expert Should Be Doing For Your Website

Do you ever wish you had even an inkling about what search engine optimization is and how you can use it to make your website get you more business? Yeah, me, too. Today’s guest post by my recently acquired Baltimore friend, Adam Singer, should give you a leg up on this topic. So, sit back, relax, pop open a nice beverage and enjoy ….

How to Use Your Website to Generate Leads and Customers:

There are three steps do use your website to generate leads and customers:

  1. Get Found
  2. Offer Content of Value in exchange for an opt-in
  3. Deliver value and continue delivering value

This article will focus on step 1: How to get found online.  In other words, how to get Google to deliver traffic to your website.

For the sake of this article, I am going to divide the three tasks into 11  parts (10 + 1).  For a really great overview of how to do SEO I recommend the free ebooks on Moz.com (https://moz.com/learn/seo).

  1. Website Analytics

What cannot be measured, cannot be managed or improved (adaptation of a quote from Peter Drucker, Management Guru https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Drucker)

You cannot understand or begin to optimize your website for search results until you have a way to measure how much traffic and/or authority your website has.  Google offers a free product call Google Analytics to measure traffic and lots of other stuff for your website.  You can get it http://analytics.google.com .  If you are not very technical, you’ll probably need some help adding the code to your site.  You should be able to find someone to do this for you on http://fiverr.com for about $5.

Google analytics will show you how much traffic goes to your site, but it won’t show how your website compares with the websites of other companies offering similar services.  I recommend http://Moz.com or http://Spyfu.com for tools to understand how your website compares to your competitors.  Both Moz and Spyfu have free and paid versions of their products.  I have used the free and paid versions of both companies and can say that the free versions have value, but the paid versions are well worth the investment.

However, if you are not planning to spend at least 2 hours or more of work on your SEO per month, you are probably better off staying with the free version and using the difference to hire someone to do the work for you. In other words, don’t pay for the software if you’re not planning to spend the time to use it and follow the recommendations it generates.  Stay with Google Analytics.

  1. Keyword Research

“Keywords” are the terms people type into Google when they want to find the services you are offering.  There are lots of ways to research these terms.  My favorite free way is here: https://moz.com/products/pro/keyword-explorer.  It is the Moz keyword explorer.  You type in the word(s) you think describe your business.  Moz will respond with a long list of terms people are using on Google to find business like yours.  The list will also include an estimate of how many times each term is entered into Google per month.

You’ll want to choose somewhere between 10 and 1,000 keyword terms.  I know that’s a big range, but it really depends on how much time/money have to put into this project.  If you have less than 10, you’re not focused enough.  If you have more than 1,000 you will need to put a lot of work into making use of those all of those terms.

  1. Competitor Analysis

No need to reinvent the wheel.  You should have a good working understanding of what terms your competition is targeting.  Spyfu (http://spyfu.com) enables you to have some understanding of what keywords are delivering traffic to your competition and what factors may be contributing to their success in ranking for those terms (usually backlinks; see #10)

  1. On Page Website Optimization

Once you know what keywords are most important for your business you will need to make sure that they are present in pages on your website.  They should appear in the title https://blog.insideview.com/2010/08/19/what-is-a-title-tag/, meta description https://moz.com/learn/seo/meta-description , url https://kb.iu.edu/d/adnz, header tags http://pearanalytics.com/blog/2014/how-to-write-a-header-tag-h1-for-seo/, and body (regular text) of your website.  There is a hyperlink to each of these terms to give your more information about each of these things.

  1. Social Media Integration

Company pages on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ are free.  To set them up you will need 2 good images (one for your profile, one for your cover).  Once you have those it should take about 15 minutes to setup each page.   It’s good for SEO, and it’s a way for you to share helpful content online.  I also recommend using paid boosts and other promotions on Facebook.  You can often get a lot of exposure on Facebook for just $10 or $15.

  1. Blog

If you have a business, you know more about something than your clients do.  Maybe you know more about how to use your product, why to use your product.  Whatever it is, use your knowledge to help people before, during, and after they purchase from you.  Your blog is a great place to do this.  Teach people and they will share your information and help you get more business.

  1. Press Releases

Have an eye out for what is newsworthy in your business: a new hire, an important new project, new development in your company.  Share your news with the media outlets in your area and your industry.  This encourages traffic to your site and invites links from important media websites in your area.

  1. Article Submission

Share useful information on other people’s websites.  This improves your reputation and increases links to your website.

  1. Directory Submission

Google uses information from many, many, many other websites to get information about your website and your business.   Directories are places on the web that store and organize large amounts of information about businesses and organizations.  Your area chamber of commerce is an example of this, but there are many many more (thousands? Millions? Lots!) .  There are services from http://yext.com and http://moz.com that help with these submitting your information to these directories.  You can do it yourself, but it can be very time consuming.  You can check how well you are listed in directories by submitting your business information on my website here:  http://www.ajsingerstudios.com/free-seo-tool

This will also generate links that will enable you to update your information on 70+ of the most important directories.

  1. Quality Link Building

Create good content that helps people and is valuable to them for its own sake. Share it on social media.  Make real connections to with real people who have the same goals as you and similar clients.  Encourage and invite them to mention your articles on their website.

Historically, Google has considered has given preference to websites that are referenced by other websites (allow me to explain).  You may have heard of the term “link” or “hyperlink” (I’ll call them links here).  Links are most often in bright blue, though they can be any color.  When you click on a link on webpage, you will be taken to a different webpage.  A link from someone else’s website to your website is called a “backlink”.  Generally speaking, a site with more backlinks is more authoritative than one with less backlinks.  In other words, if lots of websites are sending their visitors to your website (through links), Google is likely interpret this to mean that lots of websites think well of your website.

HOWEVER, not all links are equal and some can be harmful to your website’s rank on Google.  Google is VERY touchy about what it calls “web spam”.  “Web spam” is when websites try to get authority they don’t deserve.  Often this comes from getting links from websites that were setup only for the purpose of linking to other websites.  It sounds confusing, and it is.  Suffice it to say, spend your time creating good content they helps people and is valuable to them for its own sake, share it on social media, and make real connections to with real people who have the same mission and you will not have to worry about link spam.

  1. Monthly Report

As stated in the beginning, if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.  For SEO, the main key performance indicator is “organic traffic”.  Organic traffic means how many people came to your website because they found it through a search on Google or similar search engine.  Google Analytics, Moz, and Spyfu will all generate reports on your website traffic.  Google Analytics is probably the best for this, and it’s free.

In addition to “organic traffic”, you will probably also want to know how your ranks are getting better or worse for your targeted keywords.  Moz and Spyfu are pretty much the only options when it comes to knowing how you rank for particular keywords.  Google Analytics has pretty much stopped sharing this information and running Google searches on these terms can be inaccurate and incredibly time consuming.   The searches are inaccurate because Google constantly tries to deliver personalized search results that reflect your location and past searches.  So the ranks you see on your device may be different than the results your consumers see.

One Last Thing

If you do nothing else but this, I think it will make a big difference in your site’s success online: Go to https://www.google.com/business/ and fill out your information.  Then ask satisfied customers to Google your business name and leave a review.  It makes a BIG difference.  Good Luck!

About Me

Adam Singer is the CEO of Ability SEO Inc. (http://www.abilityseo.com)  Most clients working with Ability SEO see an increase in web traffic of 400% or more in the first 12 months of service. Adam has been online since the 1980s and has been running his own web/SEO companies since 2011.  You can follow his blog at AbilitySEO.com and download a free eBook 25 Website Must Haves (http://www.ajsingerstudios.com/25-things-every-new-websites-must-have) Follow him on twitter @AbilitySEO.