Google Launches Site Search for Businesses

admin    Google     Businesses., Google, Launches, Search, Site

The service lets businesses build customized search pages for their Web sites

Google Inc. today launched its Custom Search Business Edition, a fee-based service that lets businesses build search pages for their own Web sites.

The Custom Search Business Edition uses Google’s free Custom Search Engine, which allows users to search within a specified group of Web sites.

The new service enables visitors to a company’s Web site to search within that site on a customized search page, Google said. Businesses can customize the search page with their own logos and colors and can include Web sites and Web pages that are not contained on their sites. Google announced the service on its official Google blog.

“For a fee, the Business Edition enables customers to enjoy technical support (e-mail and/or phone), customization of search results using XML API, a tailored look and feel, optional Google branding — and no ads next to the search results,” Google said on its site.

For Web sites of up to 5,000 pages, the Custom Search Business Edition costs $100 per year. The fee for Web sites that have as many as 50,000 pages is $500 per year.

The service provides an option for businesses that want to bring Google’s search technology into their organization without paying for more-expensive products. The company already sells the Google Search Appliance, starting at $30,000 for 500,000 documents, which indexes material in file servers, content management systems, databases and other sources. It also offers the Mini Search Appliance, starting at $1,995 for 50,000 documents.

Information from the IDG News Service and Computer world was included in this report.

Top 5 Myspace Marketing Tips for Businesses on a Budget

admin    mySpace     Budget, Businesses., Marketing, mySpace, Tips

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand we live in a social networking world.

Businesses of all sizes have quickly caught on to the importance of having a presence at websites like MySpace and Facebook for a number of reasons.  From the sheer volume of traffic these sites attract to the demographic diversity of their users, smart marketing professionals consider social networking a significant part of their branding efforts.

Contrary to popular belief, having a substantial presence at a site like MySpace, for example, doesn’t necessarily require a substantial budget. As a matter of fact, there are a number of easy-to-follow marketing tips businesses can follow to have a commanding MySpace presence, for pennies on the dollar.

1.  Create a MySpace Layout that showcases your business.

A clean and attractive MySpace layout that includes your company name and a description of your products and services is essential in marketing yourself to the MySpace crowd.

When you consider that one of the most popularly searched phrases on the Internet today is “MySpace Layouts”, you’ll understand just how important this tip is.  Aside from the popularity of social networking itself, the second fastest growing trend is customization, or the art of being able to decorate your profile with cool layouts, backgrounds, pictures, graphics and video and music applications that convey your likes and dislikes and, in essence, your overall personality to the friends who visit your page.

It’s no different if you’re a business.  Posting a layout to your MySpace page, one that clearly conveys who you are and what you do, speaks volumes to the people visiting your profile – people who may very well become your customers.

Look online to find websites that offer custom layouts and incorporate your company’s information and graphics into the elements of your layout design, including backgrounds, extended network banners and boxes within the layout such as contact tables.  Whatever you do, keep it simple. Cluttered and confusing layouts lose their branding effectiveness.

2.  Add MySpace friends who fit the demographic profile of your customers.

MySpace has a nifty feature that allows you to browse for friends by age, gender and relationship status.  Use this tool to locate friend prospects that fit the demographic profile of your target customers and reach out to those prospects with friend requests.  When you add friends who you believe will be most interested in learning of and receiving information about your products and services, you increase your chances of gaining new customers through targeted marketing.

Be sure to communicate important company news such as discounts and special deals or the launch of new products and services to your MySpace friends as often as you can, in a reasonable manner.  Keep in mind MySpace has safeguards in place to prevent spamming.

3.  Work your MySpace profile.

Having a MySpace profile that features your business is one thing, “working” that profile so it works for your business is something completely different.

Assign someone within your company to manage your profile on a daily basis.  It’s important that they add friends, post comments, post bulletins, write blog articles and send and receive messages. Don’t assume that by creating a MySpace profile, millions of people will find you.  The art of social networking is just that – networking socially within a site like MySpace by reaching out, making friends and interacting with those friends as often as possible.

Also, aside from foul language or inappropriate content, don’t be afraid to allow people to post public comments about your organization on your MySpace page.  A big draw for social networking is the ability to be real, to speak your mind and say how you feel.  If you allow only positive comments about your business to be posted, you lose credibility.  But if you allow people to speak their minds, you gain credibility while learning a lot about your customers – and your business – in the process.

4.  Let your MySpace friends become your own marketing army.

Certain MySpace customization websites like SpaceGravy.com (http://www.SpaceGravy.com) for example, now offer a service where they will create layouts and other designs, such as backgrounds, extended network banners, contact tables, graphics, glitter graphics and flash widgets, that feature a particular business, product or service (in this case, up-and-coming bands).  These designs, showcased prominently throughout SpaceGravy.com, are available for free download to any MySpace, MyYearBook, Xanga, Friendster or Virb user. 

Not only do participating bands get excellent marketing exposure at SpaceGravy.com, they get excellent marketing exposure from the various social networking users who customize their profiles with the band’s layouts.  Aside from bands, virtually any type of small or large business can take advantage of this service.

Bottom line – by offering free MySpace designs that feature your business, your MySpace friends, and MySpace users in general, become your very own marketing army.

5.  Use MySpace Ads.

MySpace Ads, similar to Google AdSense, allows you to promote your business by targeting your advertising to MySpace users for a fraction of the cost of traditional online advertising.

MySpace Ads is an online advertising program available through MySpace that allows you to create ads featuring your business, target those ads to a specific group of MySpace users you choose based on demographics information, spend only the money you want based on your budget, and then closely monitor the performance of your campaign with detailed reporting provided through your MySpace Ads account.

Depending on the size and specifications, you can use your own ads or use MySpace’s pre-made ad templates and you never pay more than the budget you originally determine at the outset of the campaign, according to the company.

Businesses on a budget should consider MySpace Ads as an affordable online advertising alternative.

SEO For Small Businesses

admin    SEO     Businesses., Small

It seems like times are always tough for small businesses, but no time is worse than during a recession. During a recession, many businesses try to cut back on as much as possible, but when does cutting back start to hurt the company? One of the places this question is most often applied is to the question of SEO. Should a small business pay for SEO when money is tight?

Unfortunately, many small businesses axe their advertising budget first. While this can be a good place to save a little bit of money, if businesses completely cut their advertising, they will not be able to attract new clients. Without new clients, there’s little they can do to make more money. While word of mouth may help somewhat, it’s not as effective as a marketing blitz.

While web marketing is cheaper than doing offline marketing, there are still costs involved. However, you may get a much higher return on your investment since you’re able to more deeply analyze how well your marketing is doing. Since websites allow users to track where their traffic comes from, it’s easier to identify and cut any online marketing that is not working. To this end, small businesses should not immediately cut their SEO budget when times get tight.

Some small businesses may not have even invested in SEO yet, and these businesses may be asking why they should spend the money. However, those small business owners may not recognize just how great a return they can get on their SEO. A huge return on investment is everything in a recession, and doing SEO is ranked as one of the top ROI solutions.

By selecting specific keywords and phrases, you’re very specifically targeting your audience. While ads in magazines may get a lot of attention, you never really know if your target audience is viewing the ad or if it is being viewed by someone who will never purchase your product. SEO, however, makes certain your website is being viewed by those who are looking for what you offer. It brings in more than just quantity; it brings in quality visitors and provides them with information about your website right away.

When it comes to dealing with SEO, small businesses have a few choices. They can either handle the SEO themselves or they can hire a professional SEO company. The first is obviously the most budget-friendly; however, if you and your employees don’t understand the basics of doing SEO, you may end up wasting your time. Fortunately, you can learn the basics of SEO fairly quickly.

Paying a company to do SEO, especially if the company is thorough and completely redesigns your website from the ground up to be fully optimized, may be out of your price range. Many small businesses simply can’t afford this. However, having an expert in SEO look at your pages can be helpful. Outsourcing only part of the SEO process can be helpful. For example, you may want to hire a professional SEO writer to create content for your website after you determine the keywords yourself.

10 Ways Blogging Can Help Denver Businesses

admin    Google's Nexus One     Blogging, Businesses., Denver, Help, Ways

- Increase visibility for your company

- Highlight success stories and relevant case studies

By now, everyone has heard the term “blog” somewhere, and it’s more than likely that almost everyone has read a blog at some point in the last few years. Blogging is fast becoming an integral part of many companies’ online marketing initiatives and web presence. Clearly, blogs aren’t just for tech nerds, obsessive political fanatics, and hippie teenagers anymore.

But how many of us know how blogging works and why it’s become so popular with online marketers? More importantly, how many of us actually understand how to use a blog to boost business online? Surprisingly, very few of us. This article will explore how to do just that by providing ten reasons you need to start blogging (if you haven’t already).

Within the online space, many marketers are conscious of the impact a blog can make on an online business. In fact, “Blogging in the Enterprise,” a study conducted by GuideWireGroup for iUpload, indicates that as many as 89 percent of companies currently blog or plan to start in the near future. The study also found that a much higher percentage of small businesses were blogging. Currently, almost sixty percent of the corporate blogosphere is composed of companies with 100 employees or less. So why are so many companies blogging?

The answer is simple yet profound. Blogs are a multi-dimensional communication channel that can be utilized for a variety of purposes. Whether you need to draw traffic to your site, get customer feedback, generate awareness, communicate with customers or those within your own organization, blogs are a quick, easy, and effective way to create an online presence without knowing even a single line of code. So, if you have a keyboard, a mouse, and an internet connection, you’re ready to start publishing your own blog. But before you begin typing away, consider which of the above goals you’ll use your blog to achieve. The company I work for, Denver-based Fusionbox, is one such company. Using a blog platform onsite, we’ve been able to create a place where employees can post content related to the services we offer, including web design, web development, and search engine marketing. Clients, both current and potential, can visit this section of the site to catch up on news, upcoming events and trends, or just read some of the articles we’ve written about the online marketing space.

So consider the following: Not only do blogs allow you to publish and distribute fresh content on as frequent a basis as you like, but also remember that Google and other search engines grant high value to blog content due to the frequent updates, links and networks, and archival nature of the blog platform itself. Thanks to the Google algorithm, this makes blogs a valuable tool for search engine optimization and improved organic search positioning.

As you’ve seen, blogs are the perfect channel for sustained communication with your customer base; they present a friendly, informal voice that visitors come to know and trust. So now that you’ve identified the purpose(s) of your blog, you can begin to create and publish content designed to further that ambition.

One of the most popular reasons companies (and especially small businesses) are blogging is to increase visibility. Use your blog to present information about your company and what you’ve got to offer that your competitors don’t.

Along the same lines, reach out to your customer base by placing your content where you know they’ll spend their time online. Research where they go and what they’re looking for, then position your content as the information destination. This will allow you to enrich clients’ understanding of your business. In addition, by updating your blog frequently (best practices show that you should add content at least three times a week, if not daily) you’ll begin to build a relationship with interested readers.

Perhaps the most important advantage of using a blog is that it allows you to generate awareness about an upcoming event or product release. Like a press release, your blog will act as a source of news and notify readers of changes you think they need to be aware of. The inherent ability of blogs to connect readers to you and each other is an excellent place to start building networks, and oftentimes you’ll be able to gain insight on upcoming trends through these connections.

On the other hand, your blog is an invaluable source of all types of feedback. Because nearly all blog platforms allow readers to post comments on your content, you can test new ideas and let customers tell your directly about their experience with your product or company. Similarly, blogs are a perfect tool to present success stories and relevant case studies to readers.

A blog is essentially the perfect tool for internal knowledge and project management. It acts as a public domain where anyone involved in the company can share their experiences or update co-workers on the status of a project.

As mentioned before, blogs are the ideal tool to create online content and then build connections around this content. The more readers that come to see what thoughts you’ve got to offer, the more incoming links you’ll gain as they link to your content. In this way, blogs also function as a tool for search engine optimization, and once you’ve built a community around your content, you’ll position yourself as an industry thought leader and nexus of change. Just make sure that the content you’ve got to offer is unique, engaging, and relevant.

As blogs continue to become the most efficient channel for businesses to communicate with a Web 2.0 audiences, it’s critical that you and your company begin blogging to either catch up with the competition or distance yourself from it. As we’ve seen, blogging is becoming an integral aspect of online marketing initiatives and web presence. So blog away!

PPC Advertising for Small Businesses. is it Logical?

admin    PPC     Advertising, Businesses., Logical, Small

PPC Management for Small Businesses. Is it Logical?

PPC, or Pay Per Click Advertising is the number one way to increase the relevant traffic to your website. If you are interested in running a PPC Advertising Campaign there are a few things you should know and take into consideration before jumping right into it.

Do you have knowledge of PPC sources? Have you been wondering how to get your ads to appear on the searched on Google, Yahoo, Live and others? The sites you conduct your searches on, each sell their own version of PPC Advertising. Google is to date, the number one search engine providing over eighty percent of all online pay per click advertising. Googles program is called Adwords. Yahoo, MSN, and others have their own versions, each of which you can sign up for on their respective pages by searching for “online pay per click advertising”. This takes a small to medium amount of time to sign up and get your company ready to begin a campaign.

Do you know what keywords to use? Once you have signed up for a PPC Provider, you now need to start setting up which keywords you want your ads to appear for. This is NOT as simple as you may think. You can always put as many keywords in as you can think of, but remember that quantity is not equal to quality. You need to do extensive research on each keyword to find out:

Ø How much the keyword is searched for
Ø How often the keywords is used in an exact match
Ø Where geographically the keywords are searched
Ø What people do once they click a link relevant to the keyword

After researching your keywords you need to concentrate on writing your ads. This is the most important part of your campaign. You want your ads to stand out from the rest without blending in. Remember though, that your ads MUST be relevant to what you are trying to sell or you will be paying for clicks from people who don’t need your product or services. This is a major drawback from using too many irrelevant keywords.

Running the Campaign. Running a successful PPC Campaign requires DAILY maintenance. This is the part that most people disregard when attempting to run an advertising campaign. You need to constantly monitor:

Ø How many times each keyword is searched for
Ø How many times someone clicks on each keyword
Ø The % of each click per display (CTR, click through rate)
Ø How much you are paying for each click
Ø What place is your ad coming up? Top of first page? Pages 1-3?
Ø Would you get a better CTR by paying more per click, but using less keywords?

What I have discussed so far are just the basics of running a PPC Campaign. There are many more technical and detailed and very time intensive processes in running a very productive and cost efficient PPC Campaign. Can you run one by yourself? Yes. Is it worth it? Probably not. The problem here is that most PPC Management companies charge amounts ranging from 500 to 2000 a month, with setup fees ranging from 1000 to 4000 dollars, they are designed to work for large fortune 500 companies or companies with advertising budgets of tens of thousands of dollars a month. If you’re a company with an advertising budget of two, three, or four hundred dollars a month what should you do? Well, you can always use my tips written in this article and try it out for yourself, or you can search for the very few PPC Management companies that are certified by the Ad Providers like Google, MSN, Yahoo which also cater to small businesses.

If you don’t feel like searching around, we recommend using Versatility Marketing Group. Their information can be found at MyPPCManagement.com. Just a hint, their PPC Management plans have no setup fees and range between $99 – $199 a month with plans in between. They built the company up with the small business and franchise clients in mind. Give them a call and you won’t be disappointed.