Unfortunately most Internet marketing strategies consist of writing professional corporate speak to customers. Small businesses have this desire to seem big and professional, but miss the opportunity to be personal.

What you get is the same information that all of your competitors are saying about themselves. Of course you are innovative and have great customer service. That’s also what your competitors say on their web site and social media profiles.

So lets examine some ways you can get out of the boring corporate speak

I Don’t Like You, You Talk Funny

People like people who remind them of themselves.  This is why despite being rich and highly educated political candidates often work to appear like the everyday man. You can listen to how your target market speaks on social media profiles, blogs, forums and review sites. Ignore sites and competitors in your industry.

#ThisEventIsBananas!

These days millions of people talk about the events they are experiencing in real life, online. Many event organizers will create a hashtag on twitter for attendees to use when talking about the event like #CES for the Consumer Electronics Show. Follow the events in your industry on Twitter to see how people speak about it.

I Hate Stock People

When I first started blogging in 2006 I used a stock photo of a lady that looked pretty nice. I chuckle whenever I see that photo used on major site and publications. It’s hard to seem authentic when you say you have happy employees and show a picture  a stock photo. Use your own photos and people whenever possible

He who has been cursed out is wise

Your customer service department is a good resource for how people speak about your products and industry. Also ask your sales and tech support. If you use twitter for customer service study the interactions you have with the public

Its 2012 but I still want to see your face

Research (fun spying) is nice and resourceful but nothing beats person-to-person interviews.  Learn about their needs, how your products meet them, and hear how they speak first hand.  Interview across all of your target markets often to discuss relevant problems in detail.  You can ask your followers on Facebook and Twitter to volunteer to be interviewed. You can also use a PPC campaign to reach some people that may not already be fans.

Take Away

1. Replace boring corporate speak
2. Listen to how your target market speaks online
3. Follow industry events on Twitter
4. Don’t use stock people!
5. Get help from employees that deal directly with customers
6. Conduct 1 on 1 interviews

Google Santorum and the first site that appears is spreadingsantorum.com. The description of the site is a definition of Santorum 1. (too nasty to type here). 2. Senator Rick Santorum. This is not a real definition from Webster’s though

Rick Santorum pissed of the Homosexual community in 2003 and columnist Dan Savage launched spreadingsantorum.com in his outrage. Initially it was just a contest to come up with a definition for his name but grew into a site that tracked the meme as well as Santorum’s political positions.

You don’t want something like this to happen to your business so here are 5  things you can start doing write now to protect your name.

Register your name before you need it

The spreadingsantorum.com site has been around since 2003. Google likes older sites with the thought process that age and wisdom are linked. Newer sites take a little longer to gain authority in the search engines.

Links

The site is linked to from a ton of sites with high authority like popular blogs and news sites. Quality links from relevant and popular sites are one of the strongest determinants in search engine optimization (SEO).  Make sure you create great content that others will want to link to.

Anchor Text

So instead of typing click here, whatever you link to should always be the text of the link. Many of the links to the site have Santorum as the link text, which tells Google that this site is really about Santorum (See what I did there?)

Domain Name

So we have already discussed the age of the site but the name of the site is important as well Santorum is actually apart of the sites title. This adds to Google’s trust that this site is really about the subject. Be careful here if you are selling someone else’s products.  I sell WordPress powered websites but I’m not allowed to put WordPress in my site title. (Without fear of lawyers!)

Content

I tell my clients to blog about their topic because it helps create hundreds of pages on their site about the topic that they are trying to rank for.  Google knows people are searching the Internet for information so relevant content is of the utmost importance.  This site has way more content about Santorum than his does.

Take Aways

1. Register your domain now
2. Get Links from sites with authority
3. Use link description as link text
4. Use keyword for domain name
5. Create relevant content

Which of these do you need to work on?

Blogging is central to any inbound Internet marketing strategy so finding a process to keep up is critical to success.  Your interesting and useful content attracts visitors that you can then convert to leads. But without the content no one is attracted. Here are 5 ways small business owners simplify blogging.

Keep it Short

If you are strapped for time take 30-45 minutes to write a 1-3 paragraph blog post that teaches your audience something beneficial.  For inspiration look at your FAQ’s, customer complaints, and recent situations. Your customer pain points will bring them back for more info.

You can also have regular short features like a fit Friday tip. This could be a short weekly 3-4-sentence tip to help customers maintain their fitness goals through the weekend.

Repurpose content

If you are doing inbound marketing correctly your blog post have a call to action at the end of them. This leads them to give you their email address in exchange for access to something useful like an eBook, webinar or consultation.  Re-purpose your blog content for your email newsletter and social media profiles. I could take this post for example and expand on each of the 5 points and treat each one as a separate email. I could also take a snippet and use as a status update on my social networks.

Hire Help

You want to focus on creating quality content for your audience. To do this hire a freelancer to do your graphics work when needed and maintain the sites overall appearance. No need to bother your self with trivial technical details that don’t add to your Internet marketing goals.

Allow Guest Posting

Although you want to maintain consistency with your readers, from time to time allow guest post from other professionals. These professionals can be partners, vendors, customers and even competitors that you have a good relationship with. Many people will be willing to write a guest post provided you allow them to link to their site.

More Ideas for Post

Use Help A Reporter Out (HARO) to get pitches from companies that would like to be featured on your blog. This is also a good way to attract attention to your site. Also feature stories from your customers and how you helped them achieve success.

Takeaways:

1. Keep it Short
2. Repurpose Content
3. Hire Help
4. Allow Guest Posting
5. Use HARO

What reasons do you have for not blogging for your business?

Step 1: Does Google know you exist?

The first thing you need to do is use Google’s Webmaster tools to determine what problems your site may be experiencing.  These include pages not indexed, missing, identical content on multiple pages and outdated Meta information.

Sometimes updates to your site aren’t crawled or found by the search engines.  It is a good idea to use the WordPress sitemap plugin to inform the various search engines on a continuous basis of your site changes and updates.

Google penalizes you for having identical content on multiple pages and it’s also confusing for your visitors. If you have multiple pages with nearly identical content consolidate them.

Often the purpose of your site or business changes direction, or the content of a page may change.  In these cases what you have for your meta description may not match what is on the actual page or site.

Lastly don’t compete with yourself by having older and newer versions of the same product on your site if your customers will more than likely be looking for the new one. This is huge in the consumer electronics industry, having last years camera come up instead of this years will hurt sales.

Step 2: Create great content for important topics

Tons of high quality content is crucial for SEO success. One of the easiest ways to achieve this is creating a customer-focused blog. The blog should be informative and helpful rather than promotional.  Of course the post should have a way to lead customers to your products but you need to first fulfill their need for information.

Look at the data of what was searched for on your site. This could lead to ideas for content that needs to be produced that isn’t found on the site as well as ideas for where more content needs to be made.

These searches could also lead to new product opportunities for you, if you see that many of your visitors do a search for particular brand on your site that you don’t carry.  With data in hand you could approach a vendor letting them know that you have a market that’s ready for their products.

Step 3: Links from Other Reputable Sites

Although links are the most powerful aspect of SEO, all links aren’t created equal. You want links from reputable authoritative sites that also have high quality content.  Links from spammy sites will actually get you penalized by the search engines. Google assumes that if those sites link to you then you must have similar content.

Another source of bad links are old unkempt blogs and sites. These sites may have been authoritative at one time but are no longer updated. Google once again assumes that your site is outdated as well.

Content scrapers just copy and paste content from other sites. These sites are irrelevant and often contain only other peoples content and some sort of advertising.

In either case you will want to reach out to the site owner (may be difficult) to ask them to remove the links to your site.

Step 4: Use History to Set Expectations

The phrase history teachers everywhere use to keep you interested in learning history is “You can’t know where you’re going unless you know where you’ve been.” This bit advice works well for SEO research.

Look at the sites traffic and click data for the same time in the previous year or seasonal uptick. This will help you set benchmarks for what to expect in the upcoming season. Obviously this year won’t be the same but getting excited about 1000 visitors when last year on the same day you had 12,000 is moving backwards. You won’t know unless you pay attention to the data though.

Taking these 4 steps will lead to results such as year-over-year increase in leads sent from natural search, increase in natural search traffic, and an increase in sales which is the purpose!