McIntosh Marketing Blog

Small Biz marketing success is dependant upon being found and building trust.  And in today’s economic climate, building your brand must entail a strong internet presence. As you may have discovered, simply having a web site is not enough. Yet, 90% of the small businesses in existence that have a web site are not engaging in the most effective method to building more traffic to it: Blogging.

Your company blog is not only a free method in which to build original content to your web site, a must be done SEO strategy for online marketing success, but it really becomes a long-term strategy to reach out and develop many of the potential niche markets that exist within your business.

Additionally, there are some simple steps to expose your company blog to more and more customers, as well as increasing your blog’s value as a B2B website. Here are some helpful marketing tips to gain maximum SEO potential for your blog:

• On all company emails, include links to your company blog.
• Ensure that your blog is listed within the blog option on LinkedIn.
• Ensure that your blog is prominently featured on your company Facebook fan club.
• Distribute your blog postings to all the various social media outlets via Ping.fm.
• Get your blog listed in the dozens of blog directories, such as Technorati.
• In whatever you print and publish off-line, such as letterhead, business cards, etc. include your blog address.
• Blog at least twice a week. Get an SEO expert to help you find the key words and longtail words to get best results.
• Watch this video and learn even more!

Before I knew better, I was sure that many “experts” understood how SEO worked. The word was thrown around so much, that I literally started to feel that I was the only guy in the room who was left behind, stupid and left to rot in SEO hell.

But apparently, I was the guy who was willing to admit it. Reality set in quickly and I discovered that many had been taken advantage of this, because the recently turned SEO expert perceived the weakness in most business people. Most business people delve into their fields so heavily that they consider that the SEO guys do the same. But I have discovered that this is not at all the case.

I recently met up with an internet “expert” who last job was listed as the senior teller at B of A. I guess being a senior teller is more prestigious than a regular one. Anyways, he was about 22, had started to grow some chin hairs and all his Facebook friends looked like the people he hooked up at his last frat party. When it comes to SEO gurus, I either to run into that type of crowd or the recently displaced mortgage broker who now has gone to a seminar or two and is now, Tah Dah, an SEO expert!

Sergio Zyman, a past Marketing Director of Coca-Cola and best-selling author, said it best. These marketing guys sell the voodoo to get business people believing that marketing is all a bunch of arcane information, understood only by special people born with innate marketing know-how and artistic abilities. Baloney! They play this games of charades to get away with the fact that they don’t really know their craft,  and they can’t produce a viable result.

Ok, so I am going to give the secrets away that is going to give these voodoo children a heart attack. All the secrets are published. You know, with Google and in books, like “The New Rules of Marketing & PR” by David Meerman Scott. For regular people that don’t practice voodoo.

Whew, I feel better now.  Like I went to SEO confession.

The expertise does not lie in what you know, but in execution. Doing is worth more than just knowing.