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Watch this video below to learn how easy it is to use Posterous and why it’s a essential time saving tool for small businesses.

Anyone who knows me will tell that I love simple, especially since I deal with  small business owners who are typically not very tech or internet savvy, so when a tool is simple to use and integrates something like email, we’ll then I am ecstatic!

Simple Posting

Posterous allows you to post just about anything (text, word docs, power point presentations, video, photo’s and much more) all from sending a simple email. And because it’s posted from a simple email, just about anyone can do it. The most non-techie people can handle this. You can even set-up multiple users so you can easily allow your employees to participate in creating content.

Automatic Syndication

One of the most powerful features is that you can also attached dozen plus authority Web 2.0 content sharing sites like: Facebook Pages, Twitter, Blogger, Tumblr, etc and automatically syndicate that same info to those places. This way you are killing 6,7,8,9,10 or more birds with one stone.

Update

Other Video Tutorials on How To Use Posterous:

Ed Dale here shows some neat ways you can use your Google Reader & email to post to posterous. He recommends you use Posterous kinda like a notebook or collection of cool things your find about about your business, then sneak in links back to your main site(s). This quite brilliant because what it does it builds topical link networks that you can link back to you main businesses site(s) and captures traffic which you can funnel and breadcrumb back to your site(s) too.

Posterous Summary

Posterous is a MUST have tool for small businesses. I’d recommend using this tool weekly.  Like Ed recommends us it like your notebook.   Post collections of interesting stuff you find online that is related to your business and make notes.  This way the task only takes you a few minutes to do and by creating a mashup of content it creates content that is seen as fresh new content to the search engines.   It doesn’t get any easier than that!

Let us know your thoughts about great free tool and how you plan or are currently using it for your online marketing and syndication efforts.

If you are new to syndicating content or blogging as a small business then you might want to check out this post:  “What Can Small Business’s Blog About“

I work with a lot of small businesses and often they have no clue on what to blog about.  In  this post, I will (hopefully) inspire and give a boat load of ideas and topics that any small business can easily borrow and apply as a post to their business blog(s).

Blogging is really, really easy once you understand three things:

1. What it is
2. Why it’s important
3. What to write about

What is small business blogging?

I say what is “small business blogging” because I think it’s really different than other forms of blogging.  Generally speaking, blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic.  Typically most blogs give the ability of readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (Art blog), photographs (photoblog), videos (Video blogging), music (MP3 blog), and audio (Podcasting).  Microblogging  is another type of blogging, featuring very short posts (example: Twitter).  Right now you are reading a blog post.

Now when it comes to small business blogging I think business should create content that is more geared towards your local area as in creating a hyper blog and focused around solving your clients/customers problems.

Why Small Business Blogging is Important

The benefits of blogging for a small business is endless but just list off a few:

1. Gives your business more of personality
2. Creates more valuable content for your customers
3. Gives your local company more chances of being found online
4. Helps being listing in Universal Search and Real Time Search
5. Gives a reason for clients/customers to come back to your site(s)
6. Engages in conversation with your clients and customers
7. Can help in establishing your business as the authority in your niche
8. Will improve SEO efforts
9. It can be easily syndicated to other hot content sharing sites (like: facebook, twitter, youtube, blogger, etc)
10. And so many more benefits!

With how simple technology makes it to blog today, there really is no excuse for a small business not to blog.  Often the biggest objection I get from small business owners is a concern over time.  Well my answer to this is: outsource it! Or leverage your smart employee(s) knowledge.  Give them access or make them an author on your blog(s) and let them blog about their knowledge.  Now I still think a owner should write some posts and take some ownership over their businesses blog, but it’s totally not necessary.  So don’t give me an objection of “not having time”.

How Often Should a Small Business Blog?

As much as possible! As long as you follow these 2  simple guidelines:

• You have something intelligent to say
• Your content is useful and relevant to your industry or location

What Can a Small Business Blog About?

Here is a list of 50 ideas:

1. Write a signal post about each of your products and/or services
2. Write a post on a client using your products
3. Write a post on the most FAQ of each product or service
4. Write  ways your industry will change this year
5. Create a list of the best industry resources
6. Attend industry events and blog about them
7. Comment on an industry-related conversation going on in LinkedIn or Google Groups
8. Comment about other videos in your industry
9. Comment about other blogs in your industry
10. Comment about other tweets in your industry
11. Search Google News for relevant press releases and news about your industry Write your own take
12. Report new trends in your industry
13. Report relevant news about your industry
14. Break down the new laws that will affect your niche in
15. Interview someone well-known in your world and profile them
16. Rewrite an old post with fresh eyes and new ideas
17. Have a chat with a competitor and blog about it (again, with permission)
18. Debunk common myths in your industry
19. Talk about upcoming events you are hosting
20. Report on your local seminars and local meetups
21. Write a post about the minutes of your meetings (if publicly appropriate)
22. Create a list of the  books that someone in your industry should read
23. Create a list of blogs that someone in your industry should read
24. Create a list of videos that someone in your industry should watch
25. Write about conferences people in your industry should attend/speak at
26. Write a post about the top tweets in your industry or your very own top tweets
27. Post a photo that is related to your industry and comment on it (make sure you have rights to publish the photo)
28. Hold a contest on blog – reward best comments, most comments, or something that fuels conversations about your industry
29. Create a poll on your blog and you can blog about the results later
30. Visit other blogs and invite a guest blogger to post on your blog
31. Post photos from your company party/team building workshop
32. Find a question on Yahoo Answers or OnStartups and respond on your blog
33. Why you’re different (or better) than your competition
34. A video tutorial showing how to use your most popular product
35. The FAQ’s your sales people hear about most
36. Post a testimonials a blog posts
37. Blog about other places you are adding useful content: Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc
38. Answer questions left in your comment section
39. Share a case study
40. Review other competitors products and services
41. Review industry related blogs and books
42. Share a time when your company made a mistake and talk about what you’ve done to correct it
43. Praise your best customers
44. Give something away to one of your blog readers, kinda of a contest
45. Feature customer’s success stories with your products/services
46. Create a video introducing your team to your community
47. Introduce new employees and mention how they enhance your products/services
48. Write about local issues/challenges
49. Write blogs posts mentioning your other syndicated content (press releases, videos, etc)
50. Write what’s next for your company

Nonetheless, there is no shortage of things to write about.  Post can just be a few words and others can be 1000′s of words.  Feel free to use as multi-media like photos and videos to spice up your posts.  Be sure to have fun and write to keep the attention of your audience.   Write interesting headlines and make sure your posts have an easy to read layout with lots of sub-headings and bullent points.  Remember most people skim and don’t read.  Make it easy for them to skim.  If it’s hard to read they’ll bounce off your blog.

If you follow the above suggestions you should have no shortage of topics to blog about for you business.  Let us know below in the comments on your blogging efforts or questions you have about small business blogging.

Here is a great example of why and how any small business can use internet videos to grow their business.

Social video marketing is very, very powerful.  Why not take your business to your local college and ask their marketing department or film department for help.   They get to work with a real life case study and you’ll get some wonderful young minds for dirt cheap to help you market your business.  Does it get any better than that?

Malcolm Gladwell’s gives a wonderful story at TED  that offers some very significant insight to why it’s important to create products and services that cater to different types of people.  There is no “perfect” product or service, just “different” products and services for “different” types of people.

Does your business cater to different types of people…?

Google Maps has been testing with several different sponsored listing models in late 2009 and early 2010.  It looks like they have finally settled on “tags” as their way to monetize the maps.  Recently, they rolled out this sponsored feature across the USA.  If you have a business in the US, you may have noticed something that looks like this:

What is a Google Maps Sponsored Tag?

See the image below.  Notice the yellow tags beside some of the listings.  This is what a sponsored “tag” looks like:

I personally think it makes listings stand out big time.  if you are an early adopter in your local area, you can get a real advantage and get more clicks by having a “tag” before your competitors jump on the bang wagon.

Now I think this “tag” is only worth the money if your business is listed in the 7-Pack.  If it’s not there, then your listing is basically invisible anyway, so why spend the extra dough.  Instead spend it on a good Google Maps SEO company to get you in the 7-Pack then invest in the “tags” sponsored listing.

Some other Sponsored Benefits:

• You can easily and inexpensively highlight your listing on Google from Google Places.
• Potential customers in your local area will see what you think is most important or unique about your business.
• You can track the effectiveness of your tag with your Google Places dashboard.
• You will be charged a low $25 flat monthly fee, with no bids and no keywords required.
• There is no additional work or ongoing management needed.

What Can You Highlight With a Google Map’s Tag?

You can decide what type of enhancement you’d like to show with your business listing. You can only pick one at a time, but you can change or remove the tag whenever you’d like.

You can select any of the following tags:

• Website for your business
• Photos of your business
• Videos of your business
• Coupons for your listing
• Menu for your restaurant
• Reservations page for your business
• Posts for your business

The tag types you can select depend on what information you already have available in your business listing. If you want to highlight a video, for example, you’ll first need to add a video to your business listing. Once you’ve done that, the option will show up in the menu for your enhancement types.

Note: “tags” don’t affect the local algorithm, but they do stand out (assuming you are listed in the 7-Pack) for your main local keyword phrases.  For strong rankings in Google Maps you need to understand Google Maps SEO.

Let us know in the comment section (below) what your thoughts are on Google Maps new sponsored listings?

Often I have customers and/or subscribers who need to verify their business’s listing in Google Maps (now known as Google Places) and you can do that 3 ways.

What Google does is they send you a PIN # by one of your business’s listed contact details:

• Automated Phone Call
• SMS Text Message
• Mail (Good old snail mail)

However, sometimes the phone and/or text option does not work or is not available. Usually because if you try to verify via the phone you will only have 3 chances to get it right before it will force you to do the verification via the mail.

The reason I wanted to make this video is because often many small businesses owners can easily mistake this postcard for junk mail.

I wanted you to see what it looks like so you don’t miss it. If you are a business owner you may even want to show your employees this quick video too. This is one postcard you do not want to miss!

Recently one of my clients received a poor review and they asked me how they can deal with these negative reviews.  I thought what I wrote to him via email could be useful for any business so I’ve turned into a blog post.  Here is what I wrote:

(Client),  here are some great resources on how to deal with bad reviews (read below).  Treat this like a mini-resource guide to handling poor reviews & online brand management.

Most of the resource articles are written by my friends or local search marketing peers who do similar work to me.  This might be some good (or required) reading of your marketing, sales & customer support teams.  Let them understand the big picture and they’ll be better able to support your online brand management goals.

I suggest following ideas/strategies on these various local search engine marketing blogs when dealing with poor or negative reviews:

• My friend Mike Ramsey wrote this great post on the search engine journal about the importance online reviews and how to manage them: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/an-extremely-nifty-guide-to-reviews-and-local-search/17853/
• My buddy Don Campbell just posted this interesting story about how one of his client’s handled a poor review that any business can apply as a strategy: http://www.myreviewspage.com/blog/how-to-get-a-bad-review-out-of-google
• Here is post from Miriam Ellis (who I have not yet had the pleasure to speak with to yet), however her site is chalk full of great advice which I read all the time.  She’s often offers tons real life advice for small businesses marketing online: http://www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=502

My personal opinion on how to handle bad reviews is this:

1. Look at as a Positive – If it’s a real review, then learn from it and treat like an opportunity to improve your business.
2. Contact Reviewer – Try to connect to the reviewer and thank them for their feedback and ask how you can make it right.  If you can ‘make it right’ with the client/customer, then ask them if they wouldn’t mind amending their review with an update of how you corrected the challenge.
3. Be Offensive - The best way to fight bad or poor reviews is to get lots and lots of good reviews.  Find as many creative ways to ethically bribe your clients & customers to post online reviews of your products and/or services.

Now you can often respond to poor reviews directly on most of these review sites, however I caution you when doing so.  If you respond wrong, you could open yourself up for further scrutiny.  If you want to respond…PLEASE… before you do, read this post first: http://outspokenmedia.com/reputation-management/respond-negative-reviews/ by another blogger I follow closely (Lisa Barone), she too writes some great marketing advice for small businesses.

Now one more thing you can do that a lot of small businesses don’t do, and that is they don’t study the reviews of their competition.  Crazy, right?!  How we can easily miss the obvious.

When you read poor reviews (even good ones) about your competition you can learn a ton.  This is golden information that can help you not fail prey to the same problems your competition is having.  It can give you a better insight into what your target audience wants and expects in your services.

You may also want to watch this quick video: http://www.openforum.com/idea-hub/topics/innovation/video/on-bad-reviews-there-is-gold-in-there-inside-the-entrepreneurial-mind-series In the the video, Seth Godin (one of my favorite writers) discusses with Top Chef Tom Colicchio how he handled a business that was slammed by a poor review.  It offers some great real life advice and what kind of mental state is best to deal with poor reviews.

All in all, bad reviews is a part of being a business owner.  It is natural for them to happen.  They can also add some trust because no one ever has ALL perfect reviews.  Try to see them as positive/gift to improving your business and implement some of the strategies offered in the resources listed above.

Now I know there are quite few resources (listed above) to dealing with bad reviews & online brand management and it will probably take you (or your team) about 30 minutes to through all the material and digest it all.

This may seem like a lot of time for someone as busy as yourself, but I highly recommend grabbing a good Cup of Joe and take the time necessary to go through all the material.  By understanding this important element of online marketing better will only greatly improve the bottom line of your business.

BTW, if you think the review is fake and it’s on Google Maps here is an interesting thread on Google Maps forum on how to remove a negative reviews.  http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/maps/thread?tid=6204d049056a3584&hl=en

Let me know your thoughts…? Or if you have any other questions.

Regards,
Matthew Hunt

Get your Small Business products and/or services on TV with Google Adwords. The entry point to TV has definitely been lowered thanks to Google.  This is pretty exciting stuff! I know I am pretty “pro” internet marketing, but this might be another great  advertising medium for small businesses to market their local businesses.

I am for sure going to start testing this program. I think a Small Business can easily make a solid commercial using a tool like Animoto or even use YouTube’s Free Search Story Tool (this the type of commercial that ran during the Super Bowl for Google, and if it’s good enough for Google it can certainly be good enough for your business). Making a solid 30 second video is simple with the right tools and now getting some decent air time during relevant shows that relate to your local business is easier than ever.

If you have local small business, it might worth taking $1000-2000 and doing some testing for one of your services and/or products.  Be sure to set-up a unique landing page and/or website so you can directly track the results of this advertising medium.  If it coverts the run with it.  Just like PPC this will only become more expensive, so you may be able to snag some great airtime for dirt cheap if you are an early adopter.  The early bird gets the worm!

LIMITED OFFER: If there is a local business out there that would like to test this type of advertising out (then for a limited time ) I  can help them test it FOR FREE (no management fees, for the first 3 months.) as long as they cover their own Adword’s TV budget.   This is limited offer and won’t around for long. Note: This offer can stopped at anytime without any notice.

What I Will Do: I will help them make and manage the Adwords TV ADs, create the video, and create a unique website/landing page to track the campaign.   If you are interested please email at: sales@smallbusinessonlinecoach.com and make the subject line: “Adwords TV help”.  You must have at least a budget of $2000 or more you are willing to spend with Adwords.  If you are not at least willing to spend that then please do not contact me.

Let me know your thoughts of this new Adword’s TV advertising…?  Do you see this as a viable advertising option for your local business..?

Social search is not going away.  It is important for small businesses to get involved with the major social media sites especially now that social search is a part of the search results pages for people who belong to your social circles.

I believe small businesses should have several social profiles.  One that is personal for the actually owners or CEO’s.  One that represents the business (that can one day be sold with the business) – yes great social networks are worth big, big bucks! And savvy small businesses will educate and leverage their employee’s to participate in work social accounts.

The social sites I’d focus on are:

• Facebook
• LinkedIN
• Twitter
• YouTube

Then get a G-mail account and set-up your Google Profile and connect your social networks to it.  I’d also use Google Reader to follow current industry news for your business.  (Feel free to use the above links to connect me to your new social accounts)

Gary Vaynerchuk is one the smartest entrepreneur’s who use social media correctly. The reason I like him so much is he runs real business using social media as one of his major marketing methods, so he walks his talk.  Not the case with most folks who teach social media marketing.

My thoughts on whether social media marketing is for everyone really varies from company to company and product to product.  I don’t believe social media marketing is for everyone.  The big reason, is because it takes a ton of time and commitment and I haven’t met many (small) businesses willing to pour the money nor resources necessary to really use social media as a real marketing strategy.

If you are passionate like Gary Vaynerchuk (above) and willing to participate every day, every hour, every minute in social media activities then sure maybe this channel of marketing is for you.  But if your not, don’t waste you time nor money on social media marketing.

Now you can use social media sites as a SEO tactic (hint, hint – borrow authority to get secondary rankings in the Search Engine Results Pages) which is how I use it for most of my clients.  However, don’t register a Twitter account and tweek once a week thinking it’s going to produces sales, awareness, etc about your company.  Just not going to happen.

Client expectations are changing and it’s worth while looking at how you can integrate social media activities for your local business and be able to met this new client expectation that are forming.  If you do decide you want your business to become more active socially online then I suggest maybe start with one medium and really commit to that medium and then maybe re-purpose that content back out to the other social sites.  Pick from Facebook, Twitter, and/or YouTube – those are the 800 pound gorillas in the room.  My personal suggestion is choose video whenever possible.  It’s much more affordable then folks think.

That’s my 2 cents for today.  Share your comments below on your thoughts about social media and small business and client expectations of today’s marketplace.