Top 5 Reasons Why Small Businesses Should Blog

Social media is in the news everywhere you turn. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Gowalla, Foursquare and other gazillions of social media platforms are everywhere for marketers and users alike; and there is no sign of slowing down. All of these platforms are praised to be the "holy grail" of content marketing, the "key" to unlocking skyhigh ROI and the whole universe's attention on you.

But one prominent and time-proven marketing strategy which is the core foundation of using social media tools is missing from all these hyped news. It is a strategy that can potentially lower your marketing expenses so much and give you 600% or higher ROI. So what is that strategy?

Blogging.

Blogging is not dead. In fact, it is pretty much alive and thriving. Just because marketers aren't talking about blogging as much as social media now doesn't mean it is an abandoned strategy. Not at all. It is in fact, the most effective marketing strategy you can do without having to understand a bit about search engine optimization, search engine marketing and whatnot. Not only that, blogging is the cornerstone and the pillar of social media. Why? Because blogging gives you contents to share with your audience, and let your audience connect with you on deeper level. Blogging allows you to have more room to express your knowledge and everything you want to say without the limitation of 160 characters.

So why should a small business have a blog? That's what this article is all about. In fact, the following are top 5 reasons why a small business should and must have a blog.

#1 - Getting Non-Search-Engine Traffic

Now now... you must be wondering why we say this. Perhaps you have heard all about how Google loves new, fresh and relevant contents and how important it is to have awesome contents on your website to gain good ranking. And we bet you 10 quids that you have read about how well you can rank for long-tail keywords through blogging. And here we are, saying that blogging can get traffic not reliant on Google and other search engines. What's with that!?

No, we are not turning our backs to search engine traffics. And everything you currently know about how blogging can help with search engine ranking is absolutely correct too. In fact, you are likely to gain thousands of visitors from accumulated traffic of long-tail keywords as well as medium-tail keywords.

We share high quality contents on social media. And we cannot possibly be sharing other people's contents all the time, giving them all the love from social media traffics while you do all the hardwork, isn't? You share your own contents onto social media. High quality contents, of course. And what does it give you? Social media traffic; and if your content is good and worthy of sharing, viral effect which ultimately leads to more traffic.

This social media traffic will give you more than scores of visitors. It gives you very high quality backlinks to help in search engine ranking. It gives you social proof when people begin to share your contents with their friends. Most importantly, it gives you a traffic source non-reliant on search engines.

#2 - Building Credibility

You are an expert at wine and your knowledge in wine storage is unparalleled. You have a business about wine storage, and none on the Earth is wiser than you about the subject matter. This you and your immediate social circle know. Your existing clients know. But how do you let your prospects know about your expertise? Blogging is the answer.

Blogging lets you write about diverse range of topics relating to your subject matter and business. If you own a swimming pool business, talk about why one type of pool is better than the other. If you own wine storage business, talk about controlling humidity level in the wine cellar to best preserve the wine. The possibilities are endless.

By blogging about issues, questions, difficulties, know-hows and comparisons relating to your business and field of expertise, your future clients can immediately see you in the new light, a true expert they can trust and rely on. It is ultimately better than any sales talk or pitches, because blogging gives you credibility.

#3 - Connect With Your Market

Blogs have one features that allow you to communicate with your market directly: comments. Granted, social media channels also let you have two-way communication with your audience too. But as blogs give way more room to write about everything you know about your field of expertise, it also creates opportunities to start conversations about a particular topic you blog about. Such discussions will let you have deeper connection with your audience, and understand them more. In turn, it will let you have more quality information without spending thousands of dollars on market research studies.

Not only that, people who regularly visit your blogs and participate in discussions in comments are, in a way, your brand champions. Through them, you will gain more referrals and indirect business. Through them, you will be able to build loyal base of fans which means a great deal in both offline marketing and social media.

#4 - Staying Up To Date

Blogging should be done with a regular schedule, such as 2 times a week or so. If you are blogging regularly, then you are forced to stay up to date with your subject matter. You will constantly be finding out and exploring more about your business, and during this process you will learn a great deal about your field.

Additionally, through regular blogging, in time you will find yourself able to communicate better with your customers and prospects, since you gain deeper understanding about your subject matter as well as all the questions your customers have.

#5 - Personalizing The Face Of Your Company

People like to buy from people, not faceless companies. Companies tend to spend millions of dollars to give connectable branding experience with their customers. Guess what? A blog can be the inexpensive "holy grail" to achieve the same effect. By using blogging as part of your branding campaign, you will give a new personable face to your brand and a "voice" for your customers to connect with.

Written by Samuel Faith, social media marketing expert.

The Geisheker Group marketing firm
"We don't help you compete, we help you dominate"
http://www.geisheker.com
(920) 471-1638
Twitter: http://twitter.com/geisheker 
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/geisheker    

Top 5 Biggest Mistakes Businesses Make In Social Media Marketing

By the reckoning of Internet years, social media has been around for quite sometimes. Now everybody is familiar with it and already using it. Every marketers have turned into “social media gurus” and preaching about it, and every businesses are already on the bandwagon.

For companies, every actions they take affect the bottomline. Every kinds of investment – time, money, human resources – they make must have a justifiable ROI. This is the very core of a business with healthy cashflow. With social media marketing, it seems that core concept of getting real results that ultimately contribute to ROI is elusive. To many companies, social media marketing is like a treasure hunt – a hunt without a proper map and preparation.

Given the low (or almost non-existent) entry barrier to social media, companies will immediately jump on the bandwagon, setup a couple of accounts, and begin to wander down the journey without an actual battle plan. Then three months later, they will call it a waste of time and become inactive on social media channels. When someone mentioned to them about social media or they stumble upon some news about how awesome social media is for businesses, then they will get excited and get back onto social media, only to lose interest after awhile again. This vicious cycle will repeat itself until something more shiny comes along.

However, social media is inherently different from traditional marketing. Plus it is relatively new to business world as a viable marketing channel, so it is not a surprising thing that not every companies get it right. Mistakes are bound to happen, but lessons will be learnt. Here are top 5 biggest mistakes most businesses make in social media marketing, and how you can avoid them.

#1 – Broadcasting Rather Than Engaging

Traditional advertising and marketing media allows businesses to broadcast messages to a wide range of audience. There is no viable mean for the targeted audience to communicate back, nor a real way to measure the impact and influence of the advertising message.

Marketers have been using these one-way marketing channels for decades and already internalized the habits and strategies from using such channels. And they carried over those habits and strategies to social media, treating it the same as other traditional media they are so used to. This is where the problem begins.

Unlike traditional media, social media allows a true two-way communication. This allows bonds between brands and people to form, use emotions and relationships for non-intrusive marketing, and effectively filter out every other marketing noises people are exposed to on daily basis.

But, rather than utilising this amazing two-way communication channel, marketers keep pushing messages, ads, and press releases down the throat of its audience. They treat social media as yet another broadcasting channel. And they wonder why nobody interacts with them.

This is very wrong approach. If you really want to use social media to its full potential, treat it in the same way as real world socializing and networking parties. You don't expect to get a positive return and full attention when you keep shouting about your company's new product launch or recite news headlines to a room full of people from your market. Likewise in social media, instead of broadcasting your messages, start conversations or join one. Add value to it. Keep building a community around conversations in your social media channels. This is how you buy ultimate attention from people in your target market, without spending millions of dollars.

#2 – Ignoring/Deleting Negative Comments

Let's face it. We all want people to love us. Heck, if we can get love perfume or magic from Aphrodite, we would get and use it on ourselves. People are social creatures, and it is not a surprising thing.

But then, the reality is that we cannot please everybody. Our companies cannot please every consumers in the market. Mistakes are bound to happen. Maybe it is an oversight from customer service department. Maybe your customer is upset because a product she/he wants is out of stock. Regardless of the case, negativity from your market is something you cannot avoid. It is inevitable, even to the best of the bests like Soutwest Airlines.

Many amateur social media marketers tend to police negative comments, or they just simply ignore them and secretly hoping it would go away. If you are one of them, stop everything you are doing and read on. You might be damaging your brand beyond repair.

People comment or tweet about negative things because they want your response and attention. They are not just bad-mouthing about you because they have all the time in the world. Ignore them, and you are validating to them and the world (yes, the world because social media is very public and what gets on the Internet stays on the Internet). By policing and deleting them, you are showing you aren't sincere enough and people will start to wonder what else you have to hide.

In fact, negative comments are a chance to win more confident from your customers. Treat them with care, and see if you can help them somehow or fix their problems. Sometimes, the issue might be beyond your capability. But then, simply reaching out will make a difference and most often than not turn the negative into a positive one.

#3 – Obsessing Over Numbers

Many social media marketers tend to measure their success of a social media campaign with how many followers, “Likes”, fans or friends they have gained. While this is not a wrong approach, these numbers only represent one dimension and aspect among everything that indicates a successful social media marketing campaign.

Numbers don't count (no pun intended) for everything, but true engagement is. According to statistics from a PageLever study, only 3 to 7.5 percent of your Facebook fans actually see your posts. Facebook statistics show that an average user has about 130 friends, and connected to 80 pages, events and groups. Imagine there are 3 updates a day from each of these, then there are total of 600+ updates an average Facebook user is exposed to on daily basis. When you break it down to these numbers, you will realize that numbers in your social media profiles don't actually have that much impact.

The real impact comes from true engagement with your audience. Keep on creating and joining conversations, and creating great contents that provide so much values for your fans and followers. The more interactivity that occurs around the contents you created and conversations you participate in, the better it is.

#4 – Pushing, Not Pulling

Imagine you are having a great conversation with someone you just met in a bar. She/he is really friendly, and you really enjoy the company you are having. This is followed up by a few phone calls and great chats. Then when all is well, your new friend starts to sell you gym membership or insurance plan or (insert anything you hate being sold to here). That “friend” would get rather pushy and calls you multiple times a day to corner you into buying whatever she/he is selling. You would totally love it, right? Right?

If you don't (chances are, you won't), then why would you adopt the same strategies on social media marketing for your company? Unfortunately, this is where most businesses that use social media so well fail. After social media generates a highly qualified prospects, businesses will dump down those leads into traditional sales funnel and process. The problem is, people totally hate to be sold, but love to buy.

Building a relationship is utterly important in social media marketing. And just like in the real world, we will have to work hard to build relationships with our market and develop trust. But then, if you are really overwhelmed by all these online relationship building stuffs, you can immediately kill it by pushing “BUY THIS NOW” messages down the throat of your fans and followers. This will annoy the heck out of your audience and you will begin to lose followers.

Instead of using traditional push-strategy in sales, what you can do is to provide valuable advice and contents around your offerings, and give a clear call to actions so that your audience knows what to do when they are in need of your products and services. If you have been helpful to them in particular issues relating to your offerings, chances are that they will remember you when they want to buy.

#5 – No Battle Plan

This should be, in fact, #1 mistake most businesses commit in their social media marketing. Because of non-existent barrier to entry, most businesses will happily jump onto social media bandwagon without any solid plan nor strategy. They just create accounts (since they are free!) and start posting “stuffs” online.

Without a clear plan and objectives to achieve, there is nothing to measure. Without anything to measure, you are just going to waste your time typing and posting “stuffs” on your social media channels. And those “stuffs” might not even be what your audience is looking for.

Before you jump into social media marketing, determine the strategies you are going to employ. Think about the direction you want to take for your social media efforts. Also determine key performance indicators to effectively measure your social media campaign's performance. Even if you cannot determine how it will directly contribute to your ROI, you should be able to measure at least the brand exposure and outreach based on social media influence, how many people are talking about you, and fans engagement.

Written by Samuel Faith, social media marketing expert.

The Geisheker Group marketing firm
"We don't help you compete, we help you dominate"
http://www.geisheker.com
(920) 471-1638
Twitter: http://twitter.com/geisheker 
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/geisheker    

5 Critical Facebook Marketing Tips

So you want to do marketing on the Facebook. Social media marketing has been a blazing hot topic among business owners and marketers. Facebook, among all available social media platforms, happens to be the behemoth commanding most attention and hype. Sure, it works so well to market a business on Facebook, if done right. If not, your business will be just another noise to your customers amidst everything else demanding their attention.

Facebook has been used and abused. The same goes to other social media channels as well. What a lot of businesses are doing is setting up automated feeds on Facebook, and posting news after news. Worse still, they will release contests after contests in the hope to gain more fans and in turn, gain potential leads. There are numerous more “wrong” approaches to marketing on Facebook and social media in general. But we are not here to talk about things that don't work.

The problem with such approaches lie entirely in one thing, - just one thing that can topple all your grand social media strategies - “being social”.

Fortunately, it is easy to rectify this issue and effectively turn your Facebook marketing strategy to bring you more leads, gain highly targeted exposure, and outstretch your brand awareness to the point where prime-time TV advertisers would lust after.

Followings are the top 5 tips to successfully market your business using Facebook. Internalize them, use them, and you will find success on Facebook in no time.

#1 – Never Post and Ditch

This seems to be an issue with many businesses on Facebook. Imagine this scenario: you see a brand page on Facebook posted something about a new product, or a question, or some interesting facts. Intrigued, you commented there. Eager to see what their response is, you check your Facebook again 2 hours later. Nothing. Okay... so they are busy. You check again 6 hours later. You see comments from other people, but no response from the brand yet. 24 hours have passed, the situation doesn't change. Sounds familiar?

If this sounds familiar, you well know how frustrating it is. It is just like a friend comes and talks to you, and when you chat back, your friend simply ignores you. This is exactly how it looks like (although on the Web) on Facebook.

Get involved in the conversation. Be it on something you posted in your page, or something your fans posted. You don't have to spend 6 hours a day lurking in Facebook to do this. Depending on the fans activity and interaction with your page, set aside about 30 minutes a day to respond to your fans. This is where “true engagement” will happen, and it is not one way but back and forth.

#2 – Use Facebook Ads

If you are wondering why would you spend your hard-earned dollars on ads when you can do marketing on Facebook for free, then you haven't really explored how awesome Facebook ads are.

First of all, the level of targeting you can get from Facebook ads is astonishing. It is very detailed, and very thorough. Targeting options are just limitless on Facebook. Do you want to advertise to 25 ~ 35 years old single ladies working in PR industry in Toronto area? You can do it. Do you want to advertise solely to Lady Gaga fans? It probably takes 4 clicks for that.

Then what about the cost? After all, it's all about the cost, isn't? For such level of targeting options at your finger tips, the Facebook ads are surprisingly inexpensive. And yes, we are saying it is “inexpensive” for businesses of all sizes, not just for those that can spend $10 millions a month on advertising budget.

So how do you really use Facebook ads? The possibilities are a lot. You can create the ads to direct potential fans to your brand page on Facebook. You can also use the ads to drive people to specific landing pages on your website too. If you have contests or Facebook-apps, then you can definitely use the ads to direct traffic there as well.

One really good thing is that by using Facebook ads, marketers can test how different demographics groups will respond. You can test your marketing messages, product offers, different versions of landing pages, and such using Facebook ads. Go on, try it. You will love it.

#3 – Put Videos In Your Secret Arsenal

Audiences on different social media platforms favor different types of contents. On Twitter, it is all about casual conversational tweets, interesting retweets and links. On Facebook, the favored content by many users is mainly videos and images. Between the two of them, videos seem to be a winner, not just by your fans but also by the newsfeed algorithm.

You see, whenever a fan watches a video from your page, his/her friends will see it in their activity feed. When a non-fan watches your video, she/he will see a button in the top left corner suggesting she/he to “Like” your Facebook page. This is one way to gain new fans to your page.

The only catch here is to use Video Tab inside your Facebook page and upload the video file there, not on YouTube and posting a link back in your page. If you would like to make use of this feature but also establish a presence on YouTube, the only workaround would be to upload your video to both Facebook page Video Tab and YouTube.

#4 – Encourage Word-of-Mouth Advocacy

Sharing is within the very core fabric of humanity. When people love something, they share it with their social circles. When people come to hate a particular product or brand, they will also share about it zealously to prevent friends and loved ones they care about from experiencing the same.

Social media platforms are built upon the very same principles of sharing. People share about their lives, adventures, daily encounters, experiences and anything else they want to.

On Facebook, you want to your fans to talk about you in positive light. Share about your brand and page to their friends and be your brand advocates. Then you will have to encourage them doing exactly that.

One proven way to do this is by creating contests and promotions that reward your fans for inviting their friends and spreading the word. There are apps that let you do that, such as the one from Wildfire. You can use the app to create contests, track, monitor and reward your fans that invite their friends into your contest.

#5 – Use Facebook as Lead Generation Machine

When you are gaining loyal fans left and right on Facebook, and getting hot & heavy with interactions among your fans, you will definitely wonder what's next. With an established Facebook page, you can do so much more than to post links about your products and increasing brand awareness.

One of them is to capture your fans as highly qualified leads. To do this, we are going to combine good old email marketing with Facebook.

All you have to do is to put up an email opt-in box using various lead-capture systems – newsletter signup, product giveaway, surveys, and so on. Every major email marketing providers such as Aweber and Mailchimp have Facebook apps you can make use of. To get best results from this, you can use the email opt-in apps together with different lead-capture systems mentioned above. This way, you can split test the results from each campaign.

Bonus #6 – What Gets Measured Gets Improved

This saying might be cliché but it's a truth. If you don't track, then you won't know where you are when it comes to fan engagement, interactivity, brand awareness, influence and so on. When you don't know where you are, then you will not know whether your activities are gaining positive returns or simply wasting your time.

First, determine your key performance indicators for your social media activities. They should be about what you want to achieve and proper indicators of your success. Don't use vague objectives, but rather set measurable and quantifiable goals.

Facebook provides analytical information about your page in Insights section, but it is nowhere near enough nor sufficiently detailed. Fortunately, there are different analytical tools you can use to monitor your social media activities, including Facebook. Web applications such as SproutSocial and others can be really useful when you need detailed break-down of things such as click activity, new Likes/Subscribes, conversation rates and fans engagement.


Written by Samuel Faith, social media marketing expert.

The Geisheker Group marketing firm
"We don't help you compete, we help you dominate"
http://www.geisheker.com
(920) 471-1638
Twitter: http://twitter.com/geisheker 
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/geisheker    

Kickstarter business idea funding source

Hello everyone,


I just learned of a cool website that helps people get funding for their business ideas. The website is kickstarter.com.


Kickstarter is said to be the world's largest platform for funding creative projects. So, if you are seeking funding for your new business idea, make sure to check out Kickstarter.com.


To your business success!

Peter Geisheker, CEO
The Geisheker Group marketing firm
"We don't help you compete, we help you dominate"
http://www.geisheker.com
(920) 471-1638
Twitter: http://twitter.com/geisheker 
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/geisheker   

Best Marketing Strategy

Everybody wants to know how to out-market their competitors. The way to do it is to prove that you are special and different. If you are exactly the same as your competitors, why should people do business with you? 


People do not want more "me too" companies. People want different and better. People want entertainment value. People want a cool user experience. If everybody else makes a natural wood colored baseball bat, make yours bright red or bright blue. Give your business a personality. Give your customers a fun experience. Be crazy. BE DIFFERENT! 


The more ways you can make your business stand out as being different, special and fun, the more success you will have. I promise!


To your business success!

Peter Geisheker, CEO
The Geisheker Group marketing firm
"We don't help you compete, we help you dominate"
http://www.geisheker.com
(920) 471-1638
Twitter: http://twitter.com/geisheker 
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/geisheker   

How to use LinkedIn to market your business

Business development is a vital and continuous process, which determines the level of success and a business' lifespan. Particularly, service or client oriented business has greater need of development programs and marketing strategy to help it exhibit a robust and sustainable growth. In this regard, social media has become a leading source of clientele development for such organizations. Particularly, LinkedIn - the leading professional networking site leads the market with regards to B2B relationships. The primary reason behind this is the vibrant niche market of the targeted audience of over 135 million active professional users.

However, despite this greater utility, very few people actually have an idea of effectively using LinkedIn for the purpose of business and clientele development. The following practical 5 methods can be quite helpful in effective social networking for the sake of business development.

Profile Development and Impression Management

A vibrant LinkedIn marketing campaign starts with strong profile building. A comprehensive but concise introduction about 'what you do and offer' can be the first milestone. No matter how qualified you are, incomplete information can not develop a professional image of you as a service provider. Your profile page needs a little investment of your time and dedicated efforts. Learning from the market and active players can help a lot in professional image building campaign that ultimately rewards the business.

Recommendations

As you know, clients turn towards a reliable option in terms of service provision. Hence, the profiles and services that get higher recommendations are quite more successful in getting new clients. In this regard, never underestimate the magic that recommendations can play. Ask your existing clients, professional partners and other stakeholders with a valid business relationship with you, to recommend you on LinkedIn. Social media marketing strategy is all about taking care of little and small steps that could click and provide quality results.

Networking Approach

Once you have a good profile page, you need to reach out the market and potential clients on LinkedIn. Here, your approach towards networking plays a very important role in determining the level of success your marketing strategy may have. In this regard, the following 2 steps have been quite rewarding and have been extensively utilized by businesses and successful social media managers.

*) Reach out people in your own industry, who need the services that you offer. Additionally, take a deep look on your professional network and then look into their network. This simple network connection chain can prove out to be a service value chain resultantly.

*) Look at the groups and find people from related industries, who could either give you the business or refer your services to somebody else.

LinkedIn has a paid private messaging service called InMail. Each InMail credit costs $10 or comes at a cheaper cost when you subscribe for premium accounts, and thus the chances to receive intrusive direct marketing mails or spams have been eliminated. Because of premium value each InMail carries, LinkedIn members take it seriously when they receive an InMail, and response rates are very high. LinkedIn even guarantees that if you don't receive a reply within a week, they will refund the InMail credit.

Groups

Groups are also one of the powerful tools in the LinkedIn marketing strategy. Develop your own group and invite people to join it for sharing valuable information and seek solutions for their problems. Additionally, join effective highly active LinkedIn groups and participate in activities. The life is all about give and take, because you will have to give some feedback to others if you want to receive it for you.

Q&A

LinkedIn question and answer feature enables you to connect with active audience at the social network, who could be impressed with valid and to the point answers to their questions, and this is the most important factor that can make your marketing strategy more effective and successful.

In short, comprehensive understanding of LinkedIn network and then effective utilization of available features can help you a lot in building your business with LinkedIn.


To your business success!

Peter Geisheker, CEO
The Geisheker Group marketing firm
"We don't help you compete, we help you dominate"
http://www.geisheker.com
(920) 471-1638
Twitter: http://twitter.com/geisheker 
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/geisheker   

Squidoo lens marketing

Squidoo is a free platform that should definitely be utilized by any business as one aspect of their various internet marketing strategies. This web 2.0 site gets a lot of love from Google, and the pages created on the site ("lenses") rank easily and very quickly in Google – often as soon as a few hours.

If you have never used Squidoo before, you will be pleasantly surprised when you discover how extremely simple it is to create and publish your first Squidoo Lens. For those who have no HTML knowledge or have never built a webpage, a lens can be created in a few short steps without any technical skills.

One of the most important aspects to creating a lens is to choose an attractive headline which will be your "URL" on the web. This headline must contain your desired keywords; it cannot be changed once it is created. Local business names are a great choice and can rank very easily, with little competition.

Once the title/headline is created, it is a simple matter to add content by adding what are called "modules". You simple select these, and reorder them any way that you like by dragging and dropping them. For a business, inserting a few text modules, a video module, links, RSS Feed and a guest book at the end are the best choices. Text modules allow you to set out details about your business, including a short introduction, a summary of what you do and the products or services you offer.

Videos are heavily viewed by visitors, and if you have a short video about your business, this can definitely attract visitors. The link module can assist in directing visitors to your lens back to your website. RSS Feeds allows your visitors to "subscribe" to your lens and more importantly, allows you to submit your lensmaster RSS to RSS directories. The guestbook at the end is an excellent way to receive feedback from your visitors and allows you to interact with them.
Once your lens has been built, you should revisit it at least once every few weeks and try to update the content to keep it "fresh". Traffic to your lens is not going to explode immediately, you will need to do some work in the background with some marketing strategies such as backlinking or outsource that work if you are not sure what to do. Some of the background work involves posting to free ad blogs with your targeted keyword (linking back to your lens), and commenting on various blogs in your niche that have a "Commentluv Plugin".

Once your lens has been published, the next step is to check to see if you are indexed in Google. Of course, you should wait about one day before you try, but here are the steps. First, go to your lens and copy the URL onto your clipboard. Next, go to Google.com and in the search box, you will type site:yourlensurl (here it says "your lens url", paste in the url). If you see your Squidoo lens in the searches returned, you have already been indexed. If you cannot find it, then you have not yet been indexed.

Squidoo works hard to keep all of the lenses listed in their directory completely spam free. This is why it is very important to provide some good information when you create your lens. If you are planning to simply throw up a lens that is just an ad "in disguise", then it won't be accepted by Squidoo. This is how they ensure that they remain an authority site on the internet, and it is also why Google loves their content.

While you may see some lenses that you would consider "spam", they certainly do not last long on the site. Lenses are regularly reviewed by visitors and staff alike, and if your lens is not up to snuff, you will receive an email notifying you that your lens will be deleted if you do not make immediate changes.

As far as marketing strategies go, Squidoo is here to stay. Due to the fact that the lenses receive such high rankings in Google and get you to page one on Google, they have become and remain an extremely popular way to get people a lot of high quality and more importantly, free and natural traffic. The starting point is to make sure you have a good set of keywords to work with, and then to develop your content and ideas from those.


To your business success!


Peter Geisheker, CEO
The Geisheker Group marketing firm
"We don't help you compete, we help you dominate"
http://www.geisheker.com
(920) 471-1638
Twitter: http://twitter.com/geisheker 
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/geisheker   

Funny Dog Joke

I know, I know. This post has nothing to do with marketing. But this joke is so funny I had to share it. Also, I do not know who the author of the joke is so I apologize in advance for not giving the author proper credit.


Enjoy!


****************



A guy is driving around the back woods of Montana and he sees a sign in front of a broken down shanty-style house: 'Talking Dog For Sale 'He rings the bell and the owner appears and tells him the dog is in the backyard.. 


The guy goes into the backyard and sees a nice looking Labrador retriever sitting there. 


'You talk?' he asks. 


'Yep,' the Lab replies. 


After the guy recovers from the shock of hearing a dog talk, he says 'So, what's your story?' 


The Lab looks up and says, 'Well, I discovered that I could talk when I was pretty young. I wanted to help the government, so I told the CIA. 


In no time at all they had me jetting from country to country, sitting in rooms with spies and world leaders, because no one figured a dog would be eavesdropping.' 


'I was one of their most valuable spies for eight years running... 


But the jetting around really tired me out, and I knew I wasn't getting any younger so I decided to settle down. I signed up for a job at the airport to do some undercover security, wandering near suspicious characters and listening in.
I uncovered some incredible dealings and was awarded a batch of medals.' 


'I got married, had a mess of puppies, and now I'm just retired.' 


The guy is amazed. He goes back in and asks the owner what he wants for the dog. 


'Ten dollars,' the guy says.


'Ten dollars? This dog is amazing! Why on earth are you selling him so cheap?' 


'Because he's a Bullshitter. He's never been out of the yard' 





***********************


Peter Geisheker, CEO
The Geisheker Group marketing firm
"We don't help you compete, we help you dominate"
http://www.geisheker.com
(920) 471-1638
Twitter: http://twitter.com/geisheker 
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Believability in Advertising

One of the big problems I see in advertising is the believability factor. When I see an advertisement, email, or sales letter that sounds too good to be true, I instantly ignore it. There is so much snake oil being sold in the world today, especially on the Internet, that when I see big claims made for anything, I ignore them as being more junk.


For example, today I received an email with the subject line saying, "How to double your business." My instant response was,"yeah sure, BS" and I hit the delete key. Then I received another email with the subject line saying, "FREE CHEAT SHEET: My 10 Most Important Business Insights This Decade." My response was, "yeah right, if you are such a business genius, why are you sending out spam email like this?" Delete.


Many marketers seem to thing that for their advertising to get the attention of people, they have to make huge claims about this being the best thing since the invention of the Internet and that it will change the world. The problem with that is, NOBODY BELIEVES YOU! People are becoming so desensitized to big claims that they ignore them.


So, as a marketer what do you do? Well, first of all, stop saying what you have is the best the world has ever seen. It's not. And even if it was, people would not believe you. Everybody says what they are selling is the best, so their is no believability.


The second thing you can do is tone it down a bit. Saying you can increase a company's manufacturing output by 6% over 10 months is far more believable than saying you will increase a company's manufacturing output by 50% in a week. The first claim sounds like it could possibly be real. The second claim sounds too good to be true, so it will in all likelyhood be ignored.


To your success!

Peter Geisheker, CEO
The Geisheker Group marketing firm
"We don't help you compete, we help you dominate"
http://www.geisheker.com
(920) 471-1638
Twitter: http://twitter.com/geisheker 
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/geisheker  

How to use Groupon to Market Your Business

There is so much competition on the internet these days that it is very hard to find a way to market yourself so that you stand out from the crowd. Groupon is a relatively new concept that can definitely help you with your advertising efforts, and bring you a large amount of new customers in the process.

If you don't know how Groupon works, here is a brief synopsis. First, they require you to deeply discount your product or service. They then offer this to their list of subscribers for one day. If a set amount of people purchase your coupon, they get your deal. Groupon then takes their cut and sends you the rest. If the set number is not reached no one gets the deal, and you have to pay nothing.

There are some important things you should do to maximize profits when using Groupon as part of your marketing strategies:

- First, figure out whether using Groupon is a good fit for your business. Their main demographic is young, college educated, single, employed, and female. If your product is geared toward this group, then you should do well. On the other hand, if you are looking to attract older men, then you should probably look to market elsewhere.

- Figure out what your discount should be. Look at Groupon to research what other companies are offering. Most people set a discount of 50% or more. For best results, use a single product instead of a blanket discount for all your products.

- Get in touch with Groupon to have them help you set up your campaign. They have experts who know what works, and you can let them know how many sales you can handle, etc. This is very important, because if you are a small business you may not be able to handle a huge amount of sales.

- Prepare your company to handle the extra business that your Groupon campaign will generate. You may need to hire some extra personnel to handle certain tasks in the days following the Groupon daily deal, such as telephone answering or order fulfillment.

- Do your best to convert your new customers into a loyal base that will buy from you again and again. Be sure to capture their emails so that you can send them periodic deals and new product updates. Ask them if they would be willing to write reviews of your product on internet review sites to boost sales even more.

- Make sure your business can withstand the initial hit you will take from providing the initial deep discount on Groupon. Be ready to lose money initially, but know that you should recoup any losses by gaining loyal customers, and possibly through up sells, depending on your product or service.

Groupon can be a great way to gain new customers, and following the above marketing strategies should help you figure out the best way to use their service. Once again, do not go into a Groupon campaign without being fully prepared for the rush of business you will get, and be sure to do everything you can to turn those people into repeat customers. 


To your success!

Peter Geisheker, CEO
The Geisheker Group marketing firm
"We don't help you compete, we help you dominate"
http://www.geisheker.com
(920) 471-1638
Twitter: http://twitter.com/geisheker 
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/geisheker