Small Business Search Marketing

Here’s my roundup of the best search/marketing posts I found and read during August. If you’re new to this blog, this is a monthly feature that began way back in 2007. You can find earlier “Best Of”s for each month in the Link Roundups category archive. I never include my own posts in these end-of-month recaps. Read the full article

It’s been a week … well, nine days to be exact … since the launch of Facebook Places.

Are you using it? Do you know anyone who is?

In many cases, the survival of a new product, tool, web site, or whatever, depends on how much adoption comes from the early adopter crowd: tech lovers, web geeks, social media fanatics, and so forth. (Twitter is only recently gaining in general adoption because the early adopters have stuck with it for years despite so-called competition from the likes of Pownce, Plurk, and many others.) But, in my experience, the typical early adopters aren’t bothering with Facebook Places. In fact, neither are a lot of regular users. Read the full article

Quick piece of news from eMarketer a couple days ago: The number of companies using blogs for marketing purposes is on the rise. eMarketer says about 1/3rd of U.S. companies have blogs right now, but as many as 43% could be blogging in just two years. Read the full article

Most articles on SEO and marketing blogs are all about answers. This one’s all about questions — seven questions that all small business owners should be asking about their online marketing strategies, tactics, and results. If I missed an important question or two, help me make this article better by adding it in the comments. Read the full article

For those of you who are new SBSM readers & subscribers, here’s a list of noteworthy posts you probably missed from one year ago. I try to put together a post like this each month to introduce new readers to old content that might be worth reading. Read the full article

You’ve heard this before:

Connect with people who have influence.

That’s one of the basics of online marketing. To grow your brand, sales, revenues, reach, etc., you need to reach and connect with people who have influence. But where are these people? You can scour blogs for them. You can scour YouTube for them. Or Digg, Facebook, Flickr, and forums.

That’s a lot of work. And according to a recent ExactTarget study, you may only need to look in one place: Twitter. Read the full article

One of the most common tactics in link building is to look for sites that link to your competitors and try to get the same sites to link to you. The effectiveness of this varies from site to site and industry to industry, but it’s one of the things you do early on when building links.

In local SEO, if citations are the equivalent of links, how about doing the same thing? How about looking for your competitor’s citations and trying to get the same ones? Read the full article