Small businesses willing to invest some effort should be pleased with the results. Yesterday’s post described one strategy to sell marketing automation to small businesses: provide a specific, turnkey service that requires virtually no skill or effort from the user. Marketing automation vendors entering this market are essentially betting that they can make their systems powerful enough to be useful and easy enough for a small business to run. Summary: Hubspot offers a bundle of Web traffic generation and lead management features in one low-cost package.

The most difficult websites to search optimize are those of small or new companies, in a market with larger and more established players, focused on a highly competitive set of keywords. A company blog can also be used to give a (small) SEO boost to the corporate site. No matter how well the on-site optimization is done, it is tough to compete with the amount of content and external links that the established players have built up over time. However, a blog can be a valuable tool in helping smaller, newer players improve their rank and generate search traffic.

As a small to mid size business, the ability to listen, monitor and engage customers is more important than ever.  The bottom line is that the rapid growth in social media should be seen as an opportunity for small to mid sized businesses, and a prompt to create a social media strategy for your business as easy as “Monitor & Engage” (ME). Set up alerts with your companies name, industry keywords or even major competitors The current social landscape is evolving.  Why? 

Should we use social media for our business? “Ehhhhh, I’ve heard about it but I don’t have time, it doesn’t matter.”  8221;  This is a common answer and social media may not be for everyone but I really believe a strong majority of small-mid size companies can benefit if a well developed strategy is created, not to mention you can save some big marketing dollars!  Here’s a few tips for business But, before you can ever get to that point, how do you show it’s value?  You need a game plan: Let’s face it, the web is big and there’s

Here at FYIndOut we venture to ask the question: Why not business? “Time Time is money” as they say, and internet searching consumes enormous amounts of time in a business day. Search engines, in all their glory, don’t offer an effective means of finding the best business product, service, or research. Scanning Today people venture to the internet for answers to anything and everything. Unless you live under a rock, you are aware of the immense choices for filtering restaurants, travel, entertainment, news or purchases.

The posts below, some of the best of 2008 on the topic of keyword research for SEO, provide guidance and reviews of efficacious tools to help throughout the process of generating a comprehensive keyword list; analyzing the competition; and prioritizing keywords to generate maximum ROI from SEO efforts. Using pay-per-click guinea pigs: How to leverage PPC for more successful SEO campaigns by Hamlet Batista Search guru Hamlet Batista presents a detailed yet concise guide to using Google AdWords data to maximize the ROI of your natural search efforts, by focusing on those

LinkedIn - Start the practice of connecting with every business card you receive from contacts. LinkedIn Groups - Find groups that make sense for your business. also recommend using this CMS for any small-business website (also courtesy Tina Bentley ). IceRocket's Trend Had a great time yesterday at the MagsU workshop on "Opening the Emedia Toolbox". In the session, we reviewed numerous online tools on how to develop social media strategies for personal branding, new revenue streams, search engine optimization, new content initiatives and more

�) and questionable ( Stop using keywords in your URLs. Because if you don't know how to optimize a page without slamming keywords into the URLs, you don't know how to optimize a Web page.) A trained SEO should be able to spot what your keyword phrases are, but it shouldn't be glaringly obvious." Top mistakes newbie SEOs make by Jennifer Slegg - Search Engine Marketing Consultant Solid advice for newbies or SEO pros who need a reminder of mistakes to avoid, though one must be a bit careful with the first SEO is dead? Balderdash!

Ad copy can be used to filter out unqualified traffic – for example, using the word “enterprise” to filter out small business professionals – but doing so can waste precious real estate that’s better dedicated to action-oriented copy that compels qualified prospects to click on your ad. One of the easiest and most effective ways to improve the ROI from your search budget is through the use of negative keywords. Negative keywords work like filters that prevent ads from showing when queries include keywords that you deem to be irrelevant, and they’re one of the most

If I believed that, not only would I change careers but I would stop being a business owner. For if marketing can't drive sales because of this recession, then small and mid-sized businesses are headed for the junk heap, at least in the short-term, and corporations are spending down their reserves and heading for deep debt. We review keyword stats every month and respond appropriately, and for the first time we are offering Pay for Click to our customers who can benefit from We plan, we budget, we launch, we execute and we measure results. That's what good consultants