Three Ways Social Media Helps SEO

Search Engine Land has three ways Social Media helps SEO and they are:

1) Getting quality, relevant inbound links – The best thing about this is that the majority (if not all) of the links that come from a social media marketing campaign are natural links; they’re not reciprocated, bought, or solicited

2) Using social media websites for reputation management – Lots of social media sites, especially the more popular ones, rank very well within the search engines. This can be both a positive and negative thing when it comes to managing your reputation.

3) Ranking pages on social media websites – If you’re launching a brand new site and you know it’s going to be awhile before it ranks, you might want to consider uploading some videos to YouTube or creating a MySpace profile and building a few good links to it. I’m not saying it’s better to have these pages rank than your own site, but it’s definitely better than not having anything ranked.

Social Media and SEO from Mashable

A few months ago there was a great article from Mashable on “Social Media and SEO“. Below is a partial exceprt:

From a marketing standpoint, you can look at the benefits of SEO and social media two different ways:

First, implementing a social media marketing program without optimizing content is leaving money on the table. Useful social content (blog, video, images, audio) that cannot be discovered via search is a lost opportunity to reach an audience that is looking.

For example, the popular blog about student loans and college financing from Wells Fargo identifies 29 keywords in its Keyword Meta Tag and doesn’t rank in Google’s first page for 26 of them. Those that do rank are variations of the blog’s name.

While there is a generous amount of cross linking within posts, a basic blog template optimization effort leveraging keywords and other minor adjustments could improve search traffic for this site substantially – without any compromise in content quality or user experience.

Social interactions and media sharing amongst social network participants create the kind of content that can improve a brand’s visibility within search results through profiles, videos, blog posts, or other media. A good example is Stormhoek wines’ first page Google rankings including blogs, Facebook and Twitter.

On the flip side, implementing SEO programs without leveraging the content distribution and linking benefits of social web participation makes link building for SEO an uphill battle. The nature of the social web encourages participation: sharing, voting, commenting & linking. Popular social content gets exposure, traffic and can result in a substantial number of relevant inbound links.

Bottom line? Content + Links = Search Engine Success!

Some Final Thoughts on Proper Use of Social Media on Your SEO Strategy

Remember, putting in various keywords in your social media profiles and other content won’t really help you reach your goals. To get the best results you should research the best practices of social media campaigns are being done today. Here are the things that other smart companies are doing these days in their Social Media and SEO activities:

1. Identify the specific audience you are trying to reach
2. Set specific goals and objectives that can be measured
3. Plan a strategy for reaching those goals with the intended audience
4. Decide on the mix of tactics that will support and execute the game plan
5. Measure and identify what events and outcomes from your activites

It did, however, get me thinking about how the Internet changed as it got mainstreamed, to the point where it’s not as friendly to introverts as it used to be.

The Early Conceit/Delusion of Content Meritocracy

In its beginnings as a consumer medium, when the Internet was starting to really get hot — I’m thinking early- to -mid-90s, when the first graphical Web browser, Mosaic, came out (1993), as did Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital (1995) — there was this notion the Net would be a pure, disintermediated meritocracy, where good content would rise to the top, and the creators of good content would be recognized and gain currency (prestige, influence) on that basis.

For someone who tends towards introversion, the written word, and extreme laziness, this was a golden opportunity — just push out good content, and your genius would be recognized, with no need to hustle, market, or pitch. (This was my personal interpretation of things at the time, and it looks incredibly naïve now, just like those infomercials for making millions on the Internet by putting up a Web site. But I don’t think my naïveté was so incredibly far from the norm, especially when there still weren’t that many people online.)

We know how accurate that vision turned out to be. (It still applies a little bit, as long as your content involves cats.)

The Marketers Arrive

I finally buried and staked that particular delusion in 2004, with the arrival of Digg, where we saw that good links didn’t stand a chance against okay links that were supported by extrovert-friendly promotional strategies, like building networks of Digg friends for link logrolling (i.e. “digg my link and I’ll digg yours”), tailoring your content to be Digg-friendly (e.g. short articles, small words, lots of lists), going out and actually promoting your content, and other ways of gaming the system.

Basically, what we consider to be part of the online marketer’s standard toolkit these days.

It’s Not Really the Marketers’ Fault

Despite my trolltastic headline blaming “marketers” (see: Tailoring your content), the need to do marketing and promotion for your content wasn’t caused by marketers, it was simply a need that they came to fill. With the competition for attention that came about with the democratization of the Net, it was inevitable.

And we keep seeing mini-cycles with each new product and platform that comes out: people discover it, use it, it gets popular, and then people have to dig into the bag of tricks in order to stand out. Look at the blogosphere and Twitter, where first movers of quality were able to get noticed and rewards (including book deals), whereas now net.fame is increasingly the province of previously-established celebrity and brands.

Of course, this isn’t to say that the Internet isn’t dead for introverts, just that they can’t expect the world to beat a path to their door just because they put up a good piece of content. (Which was a conceit in the first place, however much I might pine for it.) So if you have something you truly want to be seen (which makes you something less than a true introvert, anyways), you have champions who are extroverts, be an extrovert yourself, or at least be able to fake it in certain contexts.

It is the way of the world, just like there aren’t any ugly pop stars anymore (save for a few with, shall we say, non-traditional good looks). Although it is interesting to watch the outliers, those systems that are still almost totally meritocratic — say, something like the MacArthur Fellows Program (the Genius Grant folks), which features a totally opaque nomination and selection process. Can you imagine the cluster-chaos that would ensue if it featured open nominations? The mind reels.

Was the Internet ever a content meritocracy? Do introverts have to stop acting like introverts to get noticed online? Leave a comment.

Along with traditional entrepreneurs, in this economic climate there have been a bumper crop of unintentional entrepreneurs — people who, through circumstance, have found themselves on their own, and are using this as an opportunity to unleash their talents and create their own businesses. (I, myself, kind of fit into this category, although I don’t really think of myself as an entrepreneur — maybe it’s a mental block.)

The DC event (well, actually in Rockville, Maryland, at the Johns Hopkins University Montgomery County Campus, a site that’s hosted several social media-related events we’ve written up here) was the penultimate stop in the 5-city tour, so you can see a lot of material and coverage from the other cities at the Unintentional Entrepreneur site. Which is a good thing, because I got to the event kind of late (I blame traffic). Again, though, we can fall back on the crowdsourced note-taking via the Twitter hashtag #uedc.

I snuck into the room just as Shannon Nash was finishing up her talk on accounting, tax and legal advice for small businesses (including answering the ever-popular question, “What structure should I use: Sole proprietor, LLC, S-Corp, C-Corp, Hybrid, Partnership?”). The room was pretty full, and everyone was paying close attention:

(I took this photo, though you can see others at the Unintentional Entrepreneur Flickr set.)

Next, NetSol’s own Shashi talked about the benefits and how-to’s of establishing a presence for your business online. I have to admit I’ve heard Shashi give variations of this presentation a bunch of times, so I perhaps didn’t pay as close attention as I should have. Fortunately, the Twitter feed comes to the rescue: He covered the key points to picking a domain name for your business (keep it easy to remember and easy to spell), exhorted people to set up Facebook fan pages (if potato chips can have fan pages, you can too), and to explore other presences that could be useful (like Etsy.com for crafters and artisans.)

The last presenter was Bob London, on Marketing Your Small Business. He led off with a cloud of previously-submitted questions, and in rapid-fire fashion:

* Advocated using info from Dunn & Bradstreet to help vet potential clients.

* Said that social media was primarily a listening tool, not a revenue generator.

* Burst a few bubbles by saying that an 80:20 ratio of doing “actual work” vs. marketing and feeding the pipeline was way too high, and that the actual effort for marketing was 30-40%

* Advocated using GeniusRocket for creative

* Suggested that the pendulum may be swinging back on the effectiveness direct mail, since we get less of it now, and get more spam in e-mail.

For the rest of his presentation, he covered how for companies that aren’t Coca Cola, IBM, or GEICO (with huge marketing and advertising budgets), the best branding you can have is a solid product and customer service you can get behind. Also, instead of the elevator pitch, he advocated getting your prospective client’s “elevator rant” — their primary complaint and challenge (as they see it).

Also, he covered a few guerilla marketing techniques (like timing a newsletter to piggyback on bigger events); advocated “cloud marketing” (pushing your message out through multiple channels to create ubiquity); the value of opt-in newsletters to nurture and maintain relationships; and the best sales pitch is asking for reactions, ideas, and feedback, combined with doing your homework and getting the proper context.

In summary, the event (well, the parts I was able to catch) was well-received by an audience that ran the gamut from prospective startups to serial entrepreneurs, covering a variety of businesses. I know I’ll be delving into the hashtags and other resources to fill what I missed.

Were you at the workshop (or one of the previous ones)? Leave a comment and let us know what you thought.

* Airline transparency pays off: This BBC News article (link via… everywhere, it’s been making the rounds) tells the story of vacationers returning from the island of Menorca (off the Spanish coast, in the Mediterranean), who faced an eight-hour delay because a mechanical problem popped up, requiring an engineer to be flown in from England.

After the flight crew made the groan-worthy announcement, a qualified (and eligible) engineer stepped up, fixed the problem in about a half hour, the flight took off, and Bob’s your uncle (as the Brits might say).

This is, admittedly, an improbable event, though I will use it as an example (okay, a wildly extreme corner case) of corporate transparency paying dividends to all involved. As airline passengers, we feel powerless enough as it is (beaten down through security, our fate in the hands of the people in the cockpit), so getting any bit of true (even truthy) information is usually enough to help quell incipient passenger insurrections — or at least make us feel a little better, like we’re all on the same side.

Of course, navigating this can be tricky business — we don’t want to be condescended to; we need to be told enough detail to be useful, but not enough to lead a layperson to a wrong conclusion. This may sound a little paternalistic, but there’s still a role for expertise and experience as it intersects with honesty and empathy on the way to not just transparency, but useful transparency.

* Yet Another Article about food trucks using Twitter. Only instead of taco trucks in LA, this one is about every other kind of food truck — only it’s in New York, so it’s a completely different story.

Folks, I know it’s Twitter, and it caters to technically-savvy hip urbanites and all, but let’s not get overexcited. Granted, using Twitter and mobile devices means it’s more convenient, flexible, targeted, etc, but ultimately (as the article notes), it’s just an updated version of when the coffee cart lady (she happened to be a lady) used to ring her bell as she made the rounds in the office building where I used to work, or when the ice cream truck goes around playing Turkey in the Straw (or In da Club, or whatever ice cream trucks play these days.)

Sure, it scales a lot better (that is, it’s a whole lot less annoying, you can include more territory, plus it’s completely user opt-in), and you can hear it from your enclosed, air-conditioned cubicle, but let’s not lose perspective here.

* How Free is Free? Lastly for right now, we’re in the middle of a bit of sturm und drang as to the limits of free as a business model. I, along with many others no doubt, are still percolating on this. There are many aspects, as well as many aphorisms to regurgitate, so consider this  a teaser for an item later this week. (Sneak peek: The acronym “TANSTAAFL” will most likely make an appearance.)

Have you had a run-in with a Twitter food truck? Do you have “Turkey in the Straw” stuck in your head now? Is the airline transparency story a useful example or a one-off fairy tale (or both)? Please leave a comment.

True, this is nothing really new about personal branding. There are experts on it, books about it and passionate detractors. However, with sites like Twitter and Facebook creating very valuable property if you can get your name and/or your company name to extend your personal brand, it is more important all the time. Most people don’t know who the heck you are but they can through techniques like Personal Branding and establishing yourself as a Thought Leader in your area of expertise. Jay lays out a nice and simple 10 point plan to accomplish this and own your “personal brand” and the space you plan to occupy.

10 Simple Rules to Effective Personal Branding

1.) Be Your own Brand Manager (develop your brand marketing plan, how are you going to promote, set specific measurable goals)

2.) Determine your USP (what makes you distinctive, how can you enhance your unique skills)

3.) Follow Your Passion (where do you like to hangout, what do you

4.) Listen to everyone else

5.) Embrace Your Inner Author (Create Unique Content)

6.) Build Your New (Set a goal to make a few quality connections, give to get ask about them, Ask about them)

7.) Volunteer to Shine (Develop new skills, enhance skill through freelance opportunities)

8.) Innovate to Lead

9.) Be Entrepreneurial – Entrepreneur is a verb

10.) Speak Up! – Go to Toastmasters, Presentation Zen

I think that no matter how you feel about the term “Personal Branding” you can’t deny that with all the content and bombardment of information we receive every minute of the day it is harder and harder to be recognized. Jay is convinced that this will become even more critical in participating in Web 2010 and he is probably right on target.

What are your thoughts and feelings on “Personal Branding”?

I know there are experts out there, dectractors and people learning this approach and I want to hear from you all. Leave a comment on whether you think this will be important now, next year and beyond.

Photo Credit: Digital Mommy

Overnight something wholly amazing happened.
They opened their email box one morning a month into the passively pushed campaign and found they had, honest to Bob, over 7,000 submissions requesting to be a part of the campaign. Emails poured in from all over the nation taking part in the submission. We all clamored to the marketers’ desk to see this with our own eyes. An email box so overloaded with requests it called to mind the commercial of the new business that puts its store online and the orders just keep going up, and up, and up. Just like the emails that continued to pour in.

From joy to panic.
Some thought it was spam. Some were excited at the potential of something they did being that “viral”. Some freaked out at how they were going to service all of the requests with a limited supply.

With one of their web team helping, I started looking through some of the emails to see if we could detect signs of spamming. We couldn’t find any that were that obvious. The submission forms were filled out were each unique, accurate, and different, that the only thing that kept the curiosity of it being spam was the frequency of how these came in. It was roughly twenty emails a minute with each second a part from each other.

The Google Search is strong with this one.
So there we sat, debating on what to do, and I thought “Google will have the answer”. I threw the name of the campaign between some quotes in Google’s search box and hit send. My screen, and Google’s Search results, were maxed out with Freebie Sites, sites that do nothing but list where to find, and how to get, free stuff online, listing the “Free Gift” that came with campaign and how to get it.

I figured, “if it’s already this deep into Google…where else could it be”. I turned m search to the tools of Social Media. The links started popping up on Twitter with a link back to the directions on how to get the “Free Gift”. It was in different spots all throughout Social Media.

In a very short time, less then ten hours, the “Free Gift” had spread like wild fire. It was time for some damage control.

From excitement to frustration
From there, I created a timeline of when the first Freebie Site listed the campaign, which linked off of it, when other posts picked it up, and cross referenced it with when the emails came in and how often they spiked. Yeah, I know, I’m a geek. My wife reminds me constantly. Sure enough, the spike in email requests coincided with each time the campaign appeared on a Freebie Site.

This wasn’t spam after all, but an army of people who collectively thought the “Free Gift” was worth their time to blog about the “Free Gift” and share how sign up for it. They rallied their own troops, got the message out, and took action on it. This was truly an example of the kind of Viral Marketing companies’ dream of!

Yet notice nothing in that last paragraph talks about the connection with the campaign, the belief in the goal, sharing the message of the campaign over the free gift, or any positive remarks about the non-profit’s effort?

With learning that submissions were still flooding in, we closed down the submission request box. I sent emails to the Freebie Sites letting them know what the intention of the campaign was and how we hoped they update their info. Some did and thanked us. Some ignored us. I sent a few emails to those who submitted letting them know what happened. Some did and thanked us. Some got frustrated and said that they did what the website said and they wanted their “Free Gift” anyway. Some ignored us.

The moral of the story, kids.
This outcome was not what they expected, or intended, when they created their marketing campaign. They just wanted to add a little value for being a part of it. Those online saw the value not in supporting the campaign, but just filling out whatever they needed to get the free item they wanted.

Rather than give a long, lengthy explanation, here are the top five things the non-profit quickly learned:

1. Be proactive on learning the reason once you find a negative reaction to your campaign.a. You could have unintentionally created it. If you sit back and blame the people doing the very thing you asked them to, but for a different reason than you intended…you get nowhere.
2. Accept the mistake, learn from it, and work with it instead of running away from it.a. It’s safe to say, that on the next campaign this will be something that will be brought up and avoided.
3. Don’t give into our initial fear.a. Fear can cause you to assume your first reaction is the best one. Sometimes that’s not the case. Imagine what would happen if they thought they were spammed instead of doing the research?
4. Find out what worked, what didn’t, and, depending on your outcome, how you can either duplicate that later on or never let it happen again.Clearly the free gift had value to people. Is there something that they could leverage in this?
5. When people ask for your free gift that does not mean they are interested in you.a. Free gifts are great. They little items, that shouldn’t break the bank, that if well done should spark conversation or curiosity. They should not be a crutch to get people interested in you or your company.

I say, give “Free Gift” away, but don’t let the value of the gift be greater than the message. There are some really big marketing lessons in this that came to light. What, life lessons, have you learned from you marketing experiences?

Until next time, stay wicked.

If you liked it, please Tweet it.

…in a good way. His post “Backwards Work” stuck with me for a solid day, because he’s absolutely right. You’ve got to know the rules to break them, and you need to know what you want your end result to be before you start swinging for the fences. As Chris said, “know what it is you’re shooting at before you draw back.”

So without rehashing everything Chris wrote (its damned fine blog post on its own so go read it), I want to talk about the one thing that will help secure success…excitement in marketing your own company.

Excitement in your company period. Because, if you aren’t excited about your own business…no one else is going to be!

If you really want a good example of what passion and excitement for your product, brand, service or what it is that got you to start your own business, you’ll be hard pressed to find a better example than Gary Vaynerchuk. When I’m getting frustrated in what it is I do for a living, I go to YouTube and check out his talk from Web 2.0 Expo NY from September 2008 on “Building Personal Brand Within the Social Media Landscape,” and I get pumped all over again.

Now calm down, Sparky. I’m not telling you to go out and be Gary, but you can take a few things away from that talk that will help you. Gary’s passion for the things he loves (like wine, personal brand, and the New York Jets) is empowering. He loves what he does, and it pays off in spades? Take a lesson from that, and apply it to your own business. Whether it’s plumbing, coffee, design, legal work, the medical field, or, hell, even turning? paperclips into life size replicas of the entire 1969 winning Super Bowl team. In his talk Gary says, “if you love it you will win,” and that’s something I’ve always believed in.

Whatever it is…you started a business for a reason right? I mean, you didn’t start a business because one day you woke up and said, “I’m really good at (insert your whatever it is you want to do here), but I really don’t care about it…maybe I should go into business for myself doing that.” No. Something inspired you to shuffle off the 9-5 coil and strike out on your own. Now I’m saying this, and I am making the assumption you didn’t have a large bank roll behind you. I’m assuming you stepped out into the cold dark unknown of self employment, looked at the horizon, and smiled like a Cheshire cat. I’m assuming you looked out at whatever it is you wanted to tackle as the boss of a new business and said to yourself, “I can do this… and I want to for the rest of my life.”

You’re going to fail sometimes, but it’s that excitement for whatever it is you’ve decided to get yourself into that pulls you through to the next achievement. If you don’t have that, go back to the 9-5’er, lick your wounds, figure out what went wrong, and let someone else worry about where the monies coming from for a while.

If you’re on the fence about whether you’re excited about what you do or wherther the shine has worn off… pick a side and go there. It’s going to suck at times. It’s going to be exhausting at others. There are going to be days where you look at your loved one, friend, employee, or business partner and think, “What the hell did I get myself into?” The answer to that question is the very same thing: “I love what I do for a living!”

Chris Brogan wrote in his post: “Someone had to hunt the first mammoth. Oh, and that poor bastard died a bloody death.”

Bring me that mammoth and my rock. I’m ready to go down swinging. I’m willing to put in the hours, the time, and the effort to move forward regardless of the obstacle. I’m ready to get called crazy, loud, determined, passionate, and…a success. I am going to fail, and I look forward to it so I can get back up, dust myself off, and attack whatever knocked me down in a different direction.

I am a Small Business owner, and I’m excited to wake up every day and say that.

In Gary Vaynerchuks’s talk. he says, “if you love it you will win.” That’s something I’ve always believed in and something that, even before hearing Gary say it, has been the key to all of my successes.

Until next time…stay wicked.

* Photo courtesy of istockphoto.com

Well fear not Terry, and all of you trying to have your business take flight. This post is for you.

I talked about being frugal, but smart, with your marketing pieces. Most people I’ve come across that have started a business don’t have a huge cash resource to pull from and need to be a little creative, and yes…cheap, about what they spend their marketing dollars, and time, on. Their focus tends not to be what their marketing pieces will bring them, but how much it will cost them now. It’s a reasonable thought process, because the world is a very scary place when you’re wondering? where the next customer will come from.

I also asked you “to not think with the wallet you have now, but the wallet you want once your business is established”. What I mean by that is ask yourself, with each marketing venture you go into, ‘will this bring me closer to the next client/customer’. What you’re looking for is a financial reward for investing into your own company. In business, that’s called ROI (Return on Investment). It’s really simple; you want the amount of money you gain from this endeavor to be equal to or greater than the amount you spent on it. Common sense, right?

But what if you’re not putting ANY money into your own company, should you expect a return? Something for nothing?

When I started out, just like a lot of small business start-ups, I spent a lot of time thinking “People will pay the premium price I am asking for my service even though I haven’t invested in promoting my company, because they will understand that I’m just starting out.” Or my favorite, “They’ll take me seriously with the business card/brochure/flyer I just printed it out on my home computer and printer, because they understand starting a business is expensive.” I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Now back to how you can market your business on a shoestring budget, because that’s what this post is all about. The reality is simple. The tools you need to accomplish this goal are all ready a few keystrokes away.

Starting out, you don’t need a huge brand icon like the golden arches or a yellow sea shell. See, I don’t have to say the names of the companies and you know what I’m talking about. Keep in mind, as we go on, that what I’m suggesting is only a temporary solution until you’ve gotten a few sales down the road and can hire a designer.

For now, a clean, clear font is good for you. Go with something that’s not on everyone’s home computer. I beg you, for the love of your future marketing dollars, do not use Comic Sans as a font. You are not a comic strip artist (and even if you were I’d stay away from it) and you want your business to be taken seriously…unless you’re a professional clown or children’s entertainer, then have at it.

Websites like overnightprints.com or vistaprints.com can get your business cards printed efficiently and look like you paid a lot more then the often “Free 250” offers they run, but you need someone that has a bit of design sense to put something together for you if you want something that’s more than just text. And please, I beg you, see…I really care I’m begging you twice, stay away from the overdone backgrounds they offer for free. If I see one more purple lotus flower on an attorney’s card or badly gradient beach scene on a roofer’s card…I’m going to go nuts. It’s going to happen. Be close by me when it does; it will be hysterical for everyone else. Choose a simple, tasteful (just because it has the name of a fruit doesn’t mean it’s tasteful…lime green just hurts the eyes) solid color background and an opposite colored font. You can’t go wrong with black text on a white card.

Add a little gloss on the front for some style, but leave the back blank and clean so you, or a client, can put notes on the back. Put all of your pertinent information on your business card. You never know what medium people feel comfortable reaching out to you on.

While you’re at it, these sites are great for brochures, post cards, and a world of other things that would cost you an arm and a leg by going to a big printer. But before you start going after those things, remember a simple rule, because everyone has one…doesn’t mean you need one.

If you want fun and funky right out of the gate with a great brand, and you want to be cheap, go to your local colleges. Most of them have design classes where students in those classes are looking for opportunities to cut their teeth on your project for the experience. If you have the time, since you’re being smart and planning ahead, you can make your business the next class project where you’ll have tons of choices as the students put together design pieces that would not only get your business a great look, but a good grade for the student at the same time. What you will need to do, and this is just polite, is give that student, or students if they work in a group, credit for the work. This does two things: gives the student a source of credible experience and provides you with a potential designer who will do more work for you down the road on something they all ready care about.

Now for the item that might seem self serving, but isn’t. Your website.

Domain names (that’s your www.yourbusinesshere.com) can run you anywhere from $9.99 on up. The cost isn’t important, because you can often get one free with your hosting package, but the name you choose is. Your first domain should be some clear version of your company’s name. The first domain you use shouldn’t be too cute or clever. Again, save that for when you have a few sales under your belt. For now, focus on one of the things that will stay with your brand.

Sites like freewebsitetemplates.com can give you ready to go websites, but, like using one of the pre-done backgrounds for your business card, you run the risk of several people having the same look as you. Since this is just a temporary fix, please pick one that is, like your business card, clean and easy to view. People will understand expanding and evolving from a small clean design to a larger more eye appealing design, but since we’re starting with what you’ll need at first…I beg you, for now the third time (I must really care that you do well), to choose a design that accurately represents the image of how you want your company to be perceived. Just because you like sports or race cars doesn’t mean your future clients will. Explaining, and yes I came across this once or twice before, “I went this route because these are the colors of my favorite racecar driver and the black and white is for the checkered flag.” [This is an incomplete sentence. Explaining blahblahblah does what?] Needless to say this business had absolutely nothing to do with cars, races, flags, or…you get my drift.

As for hosting your website, choose a plan that truly will work for you. If you aren’t going to be selling things online for a while, the basic package is good. If you’re expecting a lot of visitors to your site right away…go with something that will give you a little more room. To save yourself some upfront coin, start out on the month-to-month plan, but remember to pay your bill.

Doing the math on this, using the suggestions above, you can accomplish everything for under $300. It will cost you just a little time. That, coupled with the freeness of social media networks like LinkedIn and a laundry list of other online networks, means you can start getting out there quickly and inexpensively.

There are tons of other options for accomplishing the things I listed above. Local copy or office supply shops are starting to offer inexpensive business card printing. There are some hosting options that offer design services as part of the package. All in all, if you do the homework, you can find that the cost of your start up items can be returned back to you in your first few sales.

Before I leave you, I want you to keep a few things in mind as you’re creating these pieces:

• It may look cool and amazing because you worked on it, but if someone handed you this business card or website…would you buy from them or take them seriously?
   
• This is a temporary fix. I strongly suggest once you start saving for a marketing pieces to be designed by an experienced designer or design company.
   
• Be a fan of your own marketing materials. If you take the time and care about the end result…it will show and yield results.

Remember, this is your company you’re getting these pieces for. You wouldn’t send your kid to school in your neighbor’s oversized clothes. Don’t send your company out looking uncared for.

Till next time…stay wicked.

It depends on the age of your business.

(1)    STARTUPS — If you are a startup, uncertainty about the future is your biggest financing challenge.  Your business is unproven and you don’t have a track record yet.  Emotionally it may feel much riskier as a startup entrepreneur to seek funding, because you don’t know what the future holds.  How do you predict sales? How fast will your business be able to grow?  Are your expense predictions realistic?

You know what they say about a startup seeking money:  divide your sales projections by half and double your expense projections.   It always takes longer and costs more to get a new business off the ground.  And I’ve found that to be true when I started my own business and in many startups I see.

The problem is that because the future is uncertain, too many startups underestimate their capital needs.  Then they give up just before the dawn, because it looks darkest then.  And that’s a shame.

Startups need to get creative about alternative financing sources. Common sources of funding for a startup:

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Does spending a lot of money guarantee you are going to be successful?  No, but spending it smartly does help.  I’ll get into that in a few.

Does spending very little money guarantee you are going to be successful?   It’s more than likely to ensure…you’ll get the type of client that’s looking to make the same decision about your product/service/widget as you did on your marketing pieces.  “I want the biggest bang for the least amount of money”.

I was recently talking with Steve Fisher about the upcoming “Rock Star Entrepreneurs and Your Business: a Webinar Event” and my frustration with some past clients I had.  Keep in mind; these are clients who thought that by investing very little in their own business…their success was guaranteed because people would just “want” their product/service/widget.

As if the magic Small Business Fairy was going to bless their frugalness with a line of clients stretching a mile long, a phone that magically rings every five minutes with people saying “yes” before the elevator pitch is done, and a website that has to have its bandwidth updated daily to handle the flood of internet savvy customers that magically found their website without the use of a search engine, business card, advertisement, or word of mouth marketing efforts.

Sorry to disappoint you, but that little pixie of small business goodness doesn’t exist.  Trust me I’ve been looking and I assure you when I find that winged temptress with the strategically placed golden horse shoe I will quickly pin that fictional character of business down and sell tickets to let it discontentedly bless new entrepreneurs who want to take the cheap way out.

There are things you will need, right out of the gate, which will help you.  In later posts I’ll go into each in greater detail, but to start a good brand name and identity that will resonate with your clients, a business card with your brand and company information on it, and a website with key information that will visually engage your prospects/clients.  Think of a networking event or coffee shop corkboard where you’ve seen a business card or flyer of a company that blatantly did not invest much into their business.  You have two companies side by side that offer the exact same services.  Without knowing a thing about their actual performance you have thirty seconds to make a decision on which company you will go with. Company A has a business card with a strong visual presence, their messaging and information is clear, and the quality of the card alone shows the business invested in itself.  Company B printed their business card on their home computer in black and white, the edges are perforated, and their information doesn’t clearly identify what the company is about.  Which would you choose to take with you?

Be smart with the time and money you invest in establishing your marketing pieces.  You can find some very talented designer/marketer starting their own consulting business and accomplish visually, and at a reasonable cost, what major companies pay thousands of dollars to marketing/design firms to accomplish.  You should look at the money you spend on marketing your company as, you guessed it, an investment in the way you, and your company, will be perceived.  Done right, your marketing materials should speak about your company without you even having to be in the room.  Your marketing materials should resonate the type of attitude, style, experience, and care that your customers will come to expect of your company and services.

I’m not asking you to break the bank, but what I am asking you to do is to not think with the wallet you have now, but the wallet you want once your business is established.

I’m also going to ask you to invest some time in your business, and yourself, and attend the “Rock Star Entrepreneurs and Your Business: a Webinar Event”.  This FREE, live webcast has an all-star line-up of entrepreneurs who will talk about some of the pains that small businesses will face in the areas of finance and marketing.

In the end, the money you invest into your company will come back to you through your clients.

As all ways, stay wicked.