We’ve all heard of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and PPC (Pay Per Click) by now. These tools help you track the progress of your online campaigns in real-time so you can make tweaks to fully tune your marketing budget and maximize your dollar. Before you start implementing the below efforts, use www.websitegrader.com to analyze your website rankings in comparison to your competitors. After you’ve implemented some of the tools below, you can evaluate and track how much progress you’ve made with your SEO efforts.

The following tools and factors are helpful in determining the relevancy of your website:

SEO tools for your website

• SEO Quake - This toolbar allows you to track key site metrics in your SEO campaign.
• Alexa Rank – This tool measures your overall internet ranking, rankings are in ascending order.
• Google Adwords Keyword Tool – This tool allows you to do some basic keyword research to discover which keywords should be on your site.
• Page Rank Tool - Use this tool to check your Google Page Rank for any given URL.

Other factors to help optimize your website

• Quality Content - one of the most important factors in any SEO campaign is quality content. But, it’s only quality if you use keywords that relate to your site. Keyword density tool checks your content to make sure it flows and is natural.
• Number of indexed pages - The more pages you create with valuable content, the more your site will expand and gain authority. Search engines value high indexed pages with high quality content.
• Meta Tags - These are very important in on-site optimization. Use a meta tag generator to easily create meta tags for your website. Be sure to avoid duplicated meta tags on the website, as you can be penalized by Google.

The Top 10 SEO Websites

Below is a list of valuable SEO resources you should consider when entering the SEO world. Each provides quality tips and tricks that can help you jump start your marketing campaign and maximize your advertising dollar.

10. HighRankings.com - These professional SEO consultants will provide you with search marketing goals, and give you many unique strategies to increase your traffic and rank.

9.) SEOBlackHat.com - A hot SEO blog that provides genuinely useful tips and helpful information, all free of charge.

8.) Seroundtable.com - Provides readers with Search Engine Marketing forum topics from all over the net in one place; a great source for opinions, and advice.

7.) SearchEngineJournal - Another blog that offers SEO tips from a unique perspective, while also providing useful statistics or polls (such as John McCain’s site stats vs. Barack Obama’s).

6.) SEOChat.com - Provides various tutorials and tips to enhance your SEO campaign.

5.) MattCutts.com - Some of the best Google-specific advice you can get, –from a guy who works there!

4.) SubmitExpress.com - Trained professional SEO consultants, prepared to work until you’re fully satisfied with your site’s optimization.

3.) SearchEngineLand.com - More than you ever wanted to know about Google and SEO - a real look behind the scenes!

2.) SEOBook.com - One of most well known SEO resources online. Aaron Hall runs SEO Book which is free, and provides some of the best SEO resources online.

1.) SEOmoz.org - This site has modeled and marketed itself as “The Web’s Best SEO Resources” and they have yet to be proven wrong!

Other tools to improve and benchmark your online efforts

Google AdWords and Yahoo SM advertising are probably the two largest Internet advertising competitors. Both are a pay-per-click advertising service that can help you reach your customers that are searching for your keywords.

Google AdWords works on a bidding scale for placement on the search engine results page for Google. You are charged on a per click basis based on whatever keyword you’re targeting; thus the term “pay-per-click advertising.” Google AdWords has a cloaked bidding system and a higher potential for click through rankings being dropped.

Yahoo Ads are similar except the bidding process is a bit different and not as confidential, which is beneficial when bidding on keywords.

Yahoo is more user-friendly for beginning users with the ability to see all the bidding prices on your keywords.  Google does not provide this bidding information and so you never really know how much you will pay for each bid. You can set a maximum bid which stands as a ceiling for how much you’re willing to pay.  Google AdWords also offers consistent reports that provide user friendly data on your advertising campaign. Google holds the advantage over Yahoo for its competent data distribution, while Yahoo has an advantage for their unique and ultimately helpful bidding system. The coin toss lands in favor of Google however, nine times out of ten, for their rising popularity, despite Yahoo’s higher payout potential.

I define core marketing strength as being tactics that you enjoy doing, are good at and what you naturally gravitate towards.

For example, my core marketing strength is writing.  I love writing, I can do it pretty quickly and easily and I have lots of ideas of things I can write about (around my business services and products).

I enjoy speaking and I’ve done lots of it, but it causes me some angst and it’s not something I absolutely thrive on doing.

Networking (especially in-person) is definitely not something I really like, am comfortable with or really want to do!  I’ll do it, I have done it - especially in my corporate life, but it isn’t something I get hopped up about doing!  I’m much better one-on-one with people.

So guess what?  I’ve built my marketing framework around writing. I chose marketing tactics that involved writing - like submitting articles, having a blog, doing guest blogs, writing ebooks and so on.

Once that got going and was humming along consistently, I started adding some marketing tactics that include networking and speaking.

But the key thing is that I built my marketing framework around something I enjoyed, could do fast and with not tons of effort.  This ensured that I took action with my marketing right away and that I enjoyed it.  We all know that we will do something we enjoy, but procrastinate endlessly if it’s something we feel not that great at, don’t enjoy or it seems too difficult.

Once you figure out what your core marketing strength is, you can build a marketing framework that encompasses 3 or 4 tactics based on your strength.  From there you can add additional strategies from your core area and/or add some from the other two areas.

Marketing can be fun - so help make it enjoyable by choosing marketing tactics that you actually like doing!

I would love to hear what your core marketing strength is and which marketing tactics you’re using based on that strength.

The near-trillion dollar bailout of United States financial institutions by the government has been called a “savior” by both the media and elected officials. It has been focus of discussion in this year’s presidential election, and will be in the year’s to come. But who really stands to gain from the bailout? The following businesses should see glimmers of hope thanks to the money being poured back into their industries.

Investment Banks

Obviously, the number one business that will benefit from the 700 billion dollar bailout is the investment bank. Institutional investment banks are essentially receiving mouth-to-mouth at a time when they are dead on the operating table. The cash infusion into these businesses will allow them to continue to support businesses throughout the world with their investments. In recent news many investment banks are folding during this financial crisis. On September 15th, Merrill Lynch was acquired by Bank of America in a $50 billion dollar deal. In the largest banking failure in history, Washington Mutual (WaMu) was recently purchased by JPMorgan Chase for $1.9 Billion dollars. Also, Wachovia is looking to be purchased by either Wells Fargo or Citigroup Inc sometime this week. The two companies are currently working with the U.S. government to settle their bids on the Wachovia Securities.

Consumer Banks

Nothing kills a bank’s marketing campaign more than…not having any money! The flow of cash back into the top tier financial institutions of this country will increase lending on down the line. In addition, the perceived stability will help maintain consumer deposits and small home and business loans.

Auto Dealers

Again, until things stabilize, nobody is lending much money to anyone. Few industries feel the negative impact of this fact more than the consumer auto industry. It is the ability to hand out a large number of relatively small loans that drives every car dealer from Alaska to Florida – and without it, the future looks bleak.

Retailers

Although most Americans probably don’t understand the direct link between the bailout and their personal finances, the association of bailout-to-consumer confidence is a strong one. By passing a measure to bail out the country’s leading financial institutions, the U.S. government is saying, in effect, that everything is going to be “OK” and that shopping for consumer goods is acceptable behavior. Stores like Target and Banana Republic should reap the benefits of this inference. The holiday season will be the perfect measurement of consumer’s willingness to spend.

Internet Businesses

Stock analysts will tell you that the strongest stocks are those that maintain their value during a down economy. Through these recent dark times, the Internet sector has been one of the few areas of the business world that has seen a steady flow of investments. It stands to reason then, that when things begin to move forward post-bailout, the Internet economy will continue to grow.

The tourism industry

The weak dollar and an uncertain economic climate have really hurt the travel industry. The bailout, while not providing a quick-fix for the travel business, should at least give people the breathing room required for them to consider domestic and international travel. (NOTE: falling gas prices have already helped this industry see small trickles of renewal in the past several weeks).

Although the bailout plan has now been approved by the Senate, Congress and President Bush, things are far from rosy in the United States. In order to develop stability and confidence moving forward, changes must be made to the way we do business. Expect loan officers to be more stringent, and many institutions to become more conservative in the years that follow. De-regulation and free-spending have gotten us into this problem – and only more careful planning will see us through to another day.

There are 8 components that will help you make the most of your follow-up marketing strategies and ensure they are as effective as possible. Over the next few blogs I will talk about these components in detail.

Pay attention to these different components because they will help you to systematize your follow-up activities so that you can find the time to do them - quickly and easily.

Follow up needs to be timely

Always follow-up sooner rather than later. For every day you wait, you lessen the impact of the follow-up communication.

For follow-up strategies such as acknowledging referrals, testimonials, new acquaintances, new business and so on, do your best to follow up in one or two days.

Obviously, for follow-up activities that are centered around specific dates (birthdays, end of promotion, workshop sign-up, program enrollment) the follow up needs to occur on the actual day. It doesn’t do much for your credibility to send out Christmas cards in February!

Follow up needs to be frequent

We already talked about people needing to hear your message a certain number of times before they’ll notice or act upon it. That’s why for your follow-up to have any effect, it needs to be frequent.

The frequency and amount of follow-up needed depends on the reason and method for your follow-up. For example, if you are following up regarding an upcoming teleseminar, you may be contacting your list a total of 5 times over the two weeks leading up to and including the date of the teleseminar.

Or if you’re following up after someone has downloaded your free giveaway, you may have 20 follow-up emails in your autoresponder sequence that go out over a six month period to them.

Don’t be afraid of following up too frequently. And remember to always provide a way for them to remove themselves from the conversation (virtual or other) you’ve started with them.

The Internet is still a work in progress, but most would agree that the handful of companies below made it what it is today. Review and discuss amongst yourselves!

1. America Online – Three little words started it all…You’ve got mail. AOL was the first true web-based email provider used on a grand scale, and also home to more content than any other web destination for the last few years of the 20th century. Time has not been kind to AOL (and neither has Time Warner for that matter!) but it will always remain one of the hallmark companies of the web’s infancy.
2. Yahoo! – Still chugging along over ten years after its birth, Yahoo! changed the way people found information online. The Yahoo! search engine was capable of bringing people to their destination quicker and more efficiently than anything else preceding it.



3. Google – The biggest, baddest web-based company on the block. Google is the 800 pound gorilla for a reason - their search technology reigns supreme and their targeted pay-per-click advertising mechanism has been a veritable license to print money for the past five years. Always looking for the next big thing, Google would appear to be riding high for the foreseeable future.
4. MySpace- The social pioneers showed the world the power of music, friendship and Tila Tequila. Purchased by Rupert Murdoch and Fox several years ago, MySpace continues to bring millions of young people and adults into its “circle of friends” every day, but the jury is still out as to how to monetize all the loyal users in any significant way.
5. Amazon – Changing the face of the web is one thing, but when you change the way people shop, that is truly something to behold. People thought Jeff Bezos was crazy when he said he wanted to sell every book on the planet (and more) but now Amazon has become a part of every reader’s (and shopper’s) life.



6. eBay – Everybody loves a garage sale or flea market, but until eBay came along, nobody had ever believed that the concept would fly online. Hundreds of millions of auctions later, eBay is the only game in town when it comes to bidding for new and used products in a completely user-defined environment. Together with Amazon, eBay created a community that held people accountable for the way they behaved online – another refreshing concept.
7. Facebook – A more mature version of MySpace, Facebook has hooked up millions of friends, relatives and co-workers using its sublime combination of updates, photos and groups. Like MySpace, Facebook is looking to capitalize on the loyalty of its users (and their data) but there is no denying their position as one of the biggest players on the web’s stage.
8. Mozilla – It takes a lot of guts to take on Microsoft, but Mozilla has managed to do it and build a tremendously loyal following in the process. The company’s Firefox browser is currently on its third version, and with each edition, gains more fans and followers who want something more out of their browser. Other companies have gone head to head with Microsoft, but few have done so as successfully as Mozilla.



9. Apple – While not a true Internet company, this list would be incomplete without mention of the folks who took the entire music industry and moved it online – saving the record label’s collective tails 99 cents at a time. Apple made the web a destination for music that people are actually willing to pay to own.
10. Napster – They let the peer-to-peer genie out of the bottle and created a whole heap of trouble in the process. Wherever you stand on the issue of file sharing and piracy, there is no denying that Sean Fanning and Napster were true web revolutionaries.

Customers just aren’t biting like they were this time last year. This means businesses need to stretch their precious marketing dollars further than ever.

Here are five affordable ways to reach new customers and convert new sales…even if your marketing budget is a little smaller than it used to be.

#1: Refer a friend programs

Why not let your existing customers handle your marketing for you? Create a refer-a-friend program to leverage the people who know and love your business the most. Referral programs are easy - simply send out an email or postcard to your existing customer base and let them know about the promotion. Offer these existing customers a reward for telling other people about your new business. And make sure that these new customers get a nice carrot-and-stick as well. Special discounts or promotional items are both proven-successful methods for generating excitement around a referral program.

And don’t forget to make the process as easy as possible. If you are kick-starting the program via email, include copy or an image that can be easily forwarded on to other people. Most importantly, don’t forget to track the campaign using an offer code in order to see how well it performed.

#2: A viral campaign

Many companies, large and small, are getting tremendous mileage out of their viral marketing campaigns. There are several approaches to take here, but most involve creating a humorous video and submitting it to YouTube or a compelling article or site page and getting it up in the rankings at Digg or other social networking sites. These types of viral marketing will establish your brand as hip, funny and web-savvy, all while spreading the word about your products and services in a highly inexpensive manner.

#3: An email newsletter campaign

You’ve got your customers’ email addresses…now use them! Create a rich email marketing campaign filled with relevant content and compelling offers, then send it out monthly. Always keep the content fresh and remember to develop solid subject lines for the emails so that open rates will be high. Make the newsletters interactive – ask for users to submit their questions, comments or stories for upcoming issues, and offer exclusive prizes and goodies to those who submit the best user-generated content.

#4: Public relations

In today’s buzz-driven society, public relations is king (or queen). Investing a few thousand dollars in a PR agency can pay huge dividends down the road. No matter what you are selling, PR firms know exactly how to create excitement around your business. If, for example, you are selling designer T-shirts, a PR firm can get your products in the spotlight at a celebrity charity auction. If you sell widgets, they can find a magazine that is looking for a cover story about the world’s hottest widget-makers. There’s no limit to what great public relations can do for your business.

#5: Organic search

Search engine optimization is currently one of the most cost-effective ways to reach your target audience online. By hiring SEO professionals to restructure your site and develop keyword –friendly content, you can boost your rankings on Google, Yahoo! and other major search engines. Imagine coming up at the top of page ONE is your chosen area of focus! For an affordable cost, SEO professionals can help your business reach out to the people who are searching for your products and services right now.

The world is full of wealthy men, but how many of them truly impact every aspect of our daily lives? The following ten individuals all have the ability to change the way we live, work and think about our world.

1 & 2) Larry Page and Sergey Brin

The founders of Google have built their Yahoo-smashing search engine into a growing empire that shows no signs of slowing down. Page and Brin have an amazing knack for making good decisions and as a result have been able to move into the online advertising market, television and other markets, all while seeing their stock continue to rise. They are two genuine innovators residing at the top of our list.

It seems as humans, we have a predilection for judging others. Have you noticed yourself as the judge? When someone wears their hair in dreadlocks, you make an assumption about them. When we pass by a homeless person, we make a judgment that they are somehow not worthy. While we feel compassion, we place judgment on them for allowing themselves to reach that point.

We are judges in everything we do. Our children must measure up. Our spouses, our careers, our homes, our neighbors, our friends - all compared to that of others, and always against the measuring up that happens in our mind. Everything is compared and contrasted with everything, compelling us to constantly seek more. Or worse, we stop seeking because we fear we’ll never measure up.

Judging is simply the thought that occurs based upon the story we’ve created as our expectation. After all, all of our expectations were created by our own thoughts. When someone or something doesn’t measure up, it’s often because our expectation was unrealistic. It seems we imagine what something will be, wishing our life away waiting for that something to happen, only to find out when we get there that it is nothing like we expected.

We judge others harshly because we see something in others that we don’t like about ourselves. Our ego leads us to ignore what we see in our own life, because it is painful to do otherwise. It is much easier to transfer that emotion by making a judgment about another.

We measure success in ways that create an insatiable desire for more. Our friends have a boat; we suddenly want a boat. Our children’s friends have the newest gadget; we wait in long lines to get one because we don’t want others to make a judgment about our ability to keep up. We are running in circles to fill spaces with material things. Our homes are full of stuff - stuff we never use - stuff we look upon sadly after years of storage. We wonder how we got to this place of need where we fill the spaces with stuff.

It begins with our judgments. How many times has someone told you a story about someone, and your thought was “If it were me, I’d…” Well, seriously. If it were you, what would you do? How can we possibly know what we would do until we are in the situation ourselves? How can we know the emotions, the thought process, the feelings and actions surrounding a situation that is really no more than someone’s story? How can we judge anything about the person who is wearing shoes in which we haven’t walked?

We make unreasonable judgments about our own life, and our own performance and accomplishments. We set goals, only to feel unworthy when we don’t reach them. It’s not that goal setting is a negative exercise. It’s more that we try to fill the empty spaces with accomplishments, rather than taking a good hard look at what is missing inside of our hearts.

We must begin to look at the value of that space. All of the things that matter are meant to be inside it. We must be careful what we put there.

Coach Charrise

Karen Armon of www.marketoneexecutive.com has a new book just released on the 9^th of June. She presented last night to our Colorado FENG chapter a presentation called Market Your Potential, Not Your Past. I had some dialogue about online visibility with several people afterwards.

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As a co-chair of the local Financial Executive’s Networking Group chapter, I felt some elaboration might benefit my friends on Resource Nation.

Google yourself. Put your name in quotes, e.g. “marty koenig” so it searches on the whole phrase. I get 491 hits, and 6 of the 10 the top organic search responses are me on the first page.

Page 1 6/10 (my LinkedIn profile is at the top this morning)
Page 2 8/10
Page 3 3/10
Page 4 6/10
Page 5 4/10

54% of 5 pages of search results are yours truly. Not bad. What do you think a potential client/customer/vendor/employer perceives when they google someone with results like mine and looks at some of the pages? It’s not hard to get a pretty quick read.

Next I try “marty koenig” denver with these results:

39 hits. Not a rock star, but hey, I’m THERE.

Page 1 10/10
Page 2 9/10
Page 3 10/10
Page 4 6/9

90% of search results are yours truly. If I search on Martin Koenig, I get around 2% return on the first 5 pages, and over total 20K hits. That’s why I use Marty Koenig because there are fewer competitors for search results.

Summary of interesting findings….use these as examples for you to pump up your googleness:

• Reuters / Business Wire picked up an article about the recent Colorado Capital Conference 20 Year Rockies Venture Club anniversary to which I presented on a panel.
• O’Reilly Media picked up a book review I did in 1993 for a trade magazine publisher for which I used to write a monthly column.
• Denver Post picked up my name for our CO FENG meetings, and they even have a “Buy Now” button linked to our reservation system. All our posted events are there (I better get our upcoming presenters updated). http://calendar.denverpost.com/denver-co/events/show/81408900-co-feng-july-2008-meeting-extreme-linkedin-for-executives Feel free to go there and write a review.
• eWeek Microsoft Watch response to an article in March ‘07 The Dynamics of QuickBooks and Great Plains

So, why should you care if you have online hits in your name?

What does a new customer think when they google you, especially if you don’t show up on the first three pages? What does an angel investor or VC think? What does the hedge fund manager or private equity investor think of you, after you set up an appointment with him and he googles you? If you are competing for a contract against another firm, and the other CEO has a 50% hit rate, who’s going to be perceived a better executive? Who would you want to do business with? Are you portraying a “Luxury” vs. “Commodity” Viewpoint? (Karen’s words). Are you pursuing an Active Marketing Strategy? Do you have a National Presence? If your name is “John Smith”, you’re not going to be so distinct. (over 6 million hits). So try “John A. Smith” denver. If you have a common name, like Bruce M. Allen indicated to me last night in our conversation, you have to have more content out there with your name on it, to increase the likelihood of the search results actually being your content.

Your next customer or investor or employee or vendor will google your name and your company. Have you done that lately?

In line with Karen Armon’s 12 Desired Executive Capabilities, here are my Top 12 items to make you more visible online. Make these part of your system and you’ll enhance your ability to Market Your Potential.

1. Do some research like above, and see what your best signature should be for the largest, fastest growth trajectory on results. If you are Jane Gould, you might consider using Jane M. Gould in all your online content. If you are Jane M. Gould in Denver and google returns zero results, then you’ve got work to do. Our B2B CFO® Founder and CEO always uses Jerry L. Mills and he gets 7/10 on the first page. If I add CPA to the search, he gets 10/10 on the first page and 22/23 total.
2. Create a good LinkedIn profile. Setup a new, separate personal email address for this. If you are not sure how to do that, take a webinar or class from Integrated Alliances. I did. That’s why I have a great LinkedIn profile that shows up at the top of search results. That’s also why I have 2,400+ first tier contacts in my LinkedIn network.
3. When you read an interesting article online, look at the bottom, under the article. Most now have the comment feature. Use it. Show your opinions and passion about things, but don’t get too outrageous. Make sure you put your name (I always use Marty Koenig, never Martin Koenig). I always write responses in a word processor program, spell check, re-read then copy and paste into the text box on the website.
4. Write an online review of a meeting you liked. Be sure and add your consistent signature.
5. Go to meetup.com and join some groups. I joined a dozen or so but have only had time to engage in several. Many of my google results are the bios I added to these groups. Google seems to like them. Be careful not to join political or religious or other meetups that others might perceive wrong.
6. Karen says to figure out numerous ways to increase your word of mouth buzz. Once you have a nice LinkedIn profile, ask people you know for recommendations on LinkedIn. Sign up for Twitter and hook up with other important people. You’d be surprised how many stars of the business world are using it now. Each person that follows you and that you follow will give you a search result.
7. Find a relevant book, go on Amazon and write a review. Put your full name and location so everyone knows it’s you.
8. Offer to write articles for a trade magazine in your industry or craft. For five years in the 1980’s I wrote a monthly column for an international trade publication. I became the expert in a niche market, and grew my business tremendously because they saw me as an expert, the go-to guy, and bought my products and services because they felt like I helped them regularly.
9. Setup your own workshop or lunch-n-learn. Advertise it so you get the online hits and the attendees. This, of course, does much more than get you online visibility.
10. Invite yourself to speak or participate in a chamber event, a local chapter organization, hook up with your relevant organizations, get yourself on a on a panel that you know will have announcements in the business press. Be creative.
11. Get on an internet radio show. Every city seems to have them now. Your name will go on the show listing and result in a search hit.
12. It seems there are hundreds of online business social networks. The more you join, the more exposure you get. I don’t know about you, but I get invites from Plaxo, Naymez, Ning, BeBo, Facebook. More professionals are even putting up a Myspace page. Might consider making an interesting video of yourself covering an important topic, and put it on Hulu or YouTube.

If you are not sure about how best to enter your searches, see more info on search syntax here: http://www.google.com/help/cheatsheet.html