For local and small businesses, high-production quality does not bring the customers (in fact high-production quality is as likely to alienate customers!). Traditional videographers will sniff at this, but it’s simple, down to earth production where your prospects can really see you that has the greatest impact. What you should be aiming for is a “good, but not too polished” result. As soon as it gets too polished you lose that personal connection with people and they’ll see it as just advertising.

Small business owners and entrepreneurs like to jump right in and get started, which is crucial to success, but it’s also important to prepare and plan and set objectives, especially when it comes to email marketing. When you’re getting started with email marketing make sure you step back and think through what you’re trying to accomplish. The best way to do this is to try and see things through your customer’s eyes.

Gary Vaynerchuk may sound like an all-American boy, but at 33 he is a successful, grown-up businessman who has put his enthusiasms — and his penchant for publicity — to work in achieving 15-fold sales growth in his family’s wine business in the last decade, to $60 million… Last December, seeking to enhance sales, he offered free shipping and promoted it three ways. As a result, he said, a direct marketing mailing cost $15,000 and brought in 200 new customers; a billboard ad cost $7,500 and won 300 new customers; and tweeting the promotion on Twitter attracted 1,800 new customers.

Before TMZ released the infamous tape of a foul-mouthed Christian Bale on the set of Terminator 4, our Batman hero had played Patrick Bateman, just your everyday serial killer in the film American Psycho. Say what you will about the story’s controversial message, the scene in which Patrick Bateman proudly displays his new business card is simply classic. (“Oh my god, it even has a watermark.”) There are, thankfully, more savvy professionals today advising their colleagues and clients to run, not walk, to LinkedIn. This portal is revolutionizing networks for American small businesses. How…

One Detroit-area apartment owner is connecting online with current and prospective tenants. Interested in a place? Send a text for a floor plan
Forty-nine-year-old Eric Brown is no expert in social media. In fact, he doesn’t believe such a thing exists. For Brown, social media is a question of trying new forms of communication, from blogs to Facebook and Twitter, and seeing what works and what bombs. What he has learned, among many lessons, is that reaching out to the unhappiest customers can sometimes not only make them happy, but even …

I spoke at a local Chamber of Commerce here in the Portland area last week, giving a brief presentation on the fundamentals of SEO. Unlike a previous event I’d attended just three months ago in eastern Washington, about 75% of this audience had actually heard the term “SEO” before.
But after my brief synopsis on local search, I still received a couple of questions from the audience related to “claiming your listing” and what that was all about. It seems that even in incredibly savvy small business markets like the …

We enlisted e-commerce experts to help a bricks-and-mortar retailer make the transition online.
Dear CNNMoney.com: I have owned and operated a retail storefront for the past three years. I recently launched an online e-commerce Web site. I have paid an SEO guy each month and have aggressively marketed the site, but I’m only getting one sale a month. I am losing faith in all of the work, time and effort that has been put in. Do you have any suggestions on how to jumpstart the e-commerce portion of my business?
- Joanne …

When it comes to advertisements in online videos, Web surfers don’t know what to expect. Watch an episode of The Office on Hulu, and you’ll get a couple of 15-second ads from sponsors like Target. View a National Geographic Channel clip about emperor penguins on YouTube, and you might see clickable ads for an Arctic cruise company across the lower portion of the video. Other sites opt for a lowly display ad off to one side of the screen.
Whatever form they take, online video ads are confusing for consumers. Can …

When using Web analytics, it’s easy to get caught up in all the numbers and statistics and lose sight of the overall goal — getting the intelligence you need to make effective adjustments to your Web site and online marketing strategies to increase the ROI your site delivers. It doesn’t do any good to use Web analytics to produce cool charts and reports but then fail to make adjustments to improve your site’s performance!
To illustrate how Web analytics can be used to make decisions to improve the effectiveness of an …

Most Internet surfers are constantly subjected to a barrage of promotional messages and advertising. As a basic defense mechanism, they tune out most hype. Perhaps you have to be somewhat crass to get them to your landing page.
Once visitors end up on your landing page, stop screaming at them. You’re no longer competing for their attention with other Web sites, so change the focus to the task they’re trying to accomplish.
Your visitors detest marketese. Unfortunately, your landing page was probably written in this kind of over-the-top promotional style. …read more …