So as a small business owner with little to no experience with search engine marketing, how can you tell the difference between these two individuals?

There are exceptions to every rule, of course, but these are the most surefire wanring signs that I’ve gathered through all my years in this industry:

1. They Guarantee Results

No one can guarantee results on Google — there are way too many variables. First, in organic optimization (SEO), always remember that the rankings are controlled by Google and NOT a third party SEO vendor. A common trick is for an SEO vendor to guarantee you a first page result for a non-competitive search term that is specific to your business, i.e., “Jim’s Carpet Store, Denver.” Anyone can get you ranked for that. But want to be ranked for just “Carpet Store, Denver?” That’s another story. On the SEM/paid search advertising side, it’s important to understand that all your vendor can do is help you generate traffic to your site. They are not bringing you clients/leads/prospects, only the traffic that may ultimately become clients/leads/prospects. Many SEM firms promise leads and this is — pardon the pun — misleading. Tread carefully with any firm or individual that promises results and make sure you understand what the language in those guarantees is really saying.

2. They Have An “Inside Track” with Google

Maybe this individual has told you that they know people who work at Google, that they speak frequently with their Google contacts. Maybe they actually have a former Google employee or two on staff. Is this really a benefit? Google has over 33,000 employees as of this writing. Presumably, that headcount includes admins, interns, support, low-level developers, custodial staff and more beyond the (very likely) relatively few domestic employees who are actually “in the know” about strategies and development pertaining to search. And, even if you know or have hired one of these individuals, do we really believe that these people are happily willing to divulge Google’s company secrets? And, if they are, do you really want that person on your team? The “inside track” often comes early in the sales pitch for the sort of marketer that I would never want to do business with or expose my clients to.

Two quick epilogues to this point… First, a quick search of my LinkedIn connections revealed THOUSANDS of Google employees within three connections. Any of us is a LinkedIn email away from having an “inside track.” Second, it’s a little known fact, but I — along with many others who have ever lived in Atlanta — have an “inside track” at Coca-Cola. I know lots of people who work or have worked there. Sadly, to date, not one of them has ever given me the secret formula.

3. They Have Automated Tools

My rule of thumb with everything search is to remember that small business people like you and me are NOT in any way playing a chess match against Google for our search rankings. The relationship between a business owner and Google is more of a symbiotic give-and-take. Google and I need each other, after all. I need them to help generate web traffic for my business and they need my web content in order to deliver accurate search results for me and people like me. Do automated systems help further my relationship with Google? No, usually these systems are designed as a way to trick Google into thinking we’re more important than we are online. And I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — any marketing strategy whose success depends on your ability to outsmart Google for an extended period of time is probably destined for failure. As with any relationship, some aspects of my relationship with Google can easily be automated for the benefit of both parties. But some types of automation are meant to be deceptive  and we need to steer clear of those.

4. They Talk Constantly About Being a Google “Partner”

If you, as an individual, wanted to be a Certified Google Partner, do you know what you would have to do? Essentially, just take a test. That’s it. It’s the online equivalent of getting a driver’s license but with only the written portion of the exam. Being certified does not imply that you are good at running AdWords campaigns and, in fact, like taking the written portion of the driver’s license exam, you can become certified without having ever run an AdWords campaign. What is the requirement for being an AdWords Certified Company? Only that your clients (in total) spend $10,000 or more in AdWords over a 90-day period and that you have one AdWords certified individual working at your company. I don’t want to characterize the Google certifications as being worthless, but someone who truly understands the business and deals fairly/honestly with their clients would never use this as a major selling point.

Google also has a special designation for their large AdWords resellers called a “Premier SMB Partner.” This is a relaunch of their “Authorized Reseller” program which comes with it’s own baggage.

I am not suggesting that you should, or should not hire an “official” Google partner to manage your AdWords. Only that the designation really shouldn’t factor much one way or the other into your decision.

5. They Won’t Share the How’s or Why’s of What they Do

I’ve talked about this so many times, the phrase “beating a dead horse” doesn’t even begin to cover it. But SEO and SEM are well established practices with well-documented best practices. There really shouldn’t be any secrets, black boxes or magic tricks. If they won’t tell you what they intend to do for you and why, they probably have something to hide. And if they have something to hide and Google discovers it, your site will suffer, not theirs. I’ll leave it at that.

Hiring a managed live chat provider is one of the easiest ways a business can take advantage of the benefits of an online chat campaign — like more web leads and better quality leads. But effectively outsourcing this function to a group of outsiders who know next to nothing about your business can be another matter entirely.

For all the fantastic results that a well-run managed live chat solution can help generate, hiring the wrong vendor or mismanaging your vendor can seriously damage your brand. But don’t worry, I have three easy ways you can collaborate with your managed chat provider for success.

1. Set Clear and Realistic Expectations for your Managed Chat Vendor

An outsourced managed live chat firm is never going to be able to learn your products and services as well as you do. But the good news is that they don’t have to. Their job is not be an online sales rep, but rather an online concierge, making your site visitors feel cared for, helping them find their way around your site, or answering simple questions and then coordinating a follow-up with a real expert. Over time, your chat team will be able to take on more and more as they get more comfortable and learn more about your offerings. But unless your business is purely e-commerce based, expect that your managed live chat provider will be warming up leads for your internal sales people to close. Given that mindset, think about how you sell and what information your chat team can provide you that will make that job easier. Is your sales team territory-based? Make sure your chat vendor provides a zip code for every lead. Is your service licensed/quoted by the number of users in an organization? Have your chat operators ask that question for you. If managed well, your chat team will deliver better quality leads than any other online initiative.

2. Maintain a Quality FAQ Document

Sending chat operators to man your website without good information is like sending a soldier into battle without a weapon. They don’t stand a chance out there unless you give them the tools they need to do their jobs properly. Spend the time to put together a good Frequently Asked Questions document and don’t be afraid to revise it over time. If you’re not sure what should be in your FAQ, spend some time talking with clients, friends and family — their insight will be extremely valuable.  Some managed live chat vendors will maintain wikis or other collaborative sites where FAQs can be modified over time. If that’s not available though, even a Google Doc makes an effective way to share and curate support documentation.

3. ALWAYS Provide Feedback

Any professional managed chat firm should provide you with transcripts of every chat they handle on your website. Your job is to make sure you read them all as they come and provide actionable feedback. Especially early on your chat team is going to make mistakes as they learn the ropes. Anticipate this and make sure that you’re taking advantage of coaching opportunities as they come. Another useful way to manage feedback is to schedule a conference call a couple of weeks to a month into service and talk things through over the phone. Not only will you be able to coach your operators but you’ll also get valuable feedback from them as well.

Managed live chat can be an invaluable asset to your online marketing — but only if you are proactive with your vendor and take care to properly educate and manage your operators. But in the end you get a more cost-effective chat solution than most small to mid-size businesses could run in-house and, hopefully a steady stream of quality leads from your website.

Over the last few days, several folks have sent me this article from USA Today which discusses how blogging is being replaced by Facebook in business marketing strategies.

But let’s consider WHY businesses may be changing their minds about blogging — and note that in the article, “ineffectiveness” is not once given as a reason that businesses stop updating their blogs . In the small business marketplace, blog abandonment has always been an issue primarily because blogging is difficult, time-consuming and requires a lot of regular attention. Those of us who are parents can certainly relate: caring for a blog is the online marketing equivalent of raising a small child. But we don’t think of Facebook that way. The small business people I talk with look at Facebook like a college-age child: fairly low-maintenance, requiring only a few minutes of attention at any given time and something you only need to visit with every once in a while. If you have to choose one, why not choose the easier path? I’ll come back to this point in a minute.

In the big business marketplace, it seems that blog abandonment has a lot to do with market trends. Translation: it’s not longer sexy or trendy to have a blog so internal marketing folks bet on Facebook and Twitter because it’s more likely to impress upper management. As my friend Brian Cork told me once, “Entrepreneurs push a boulder up a hill, intrapreneurs roll the boulder down the hill and the corporate fellas just try to keep the village safe.”

In the USA Today article, when asked why his company had stopped blogging in favor of Twitter and Facebook, Bank of America’s T.J. Crawford said, “We want to be where our customers are.”

It’s a pretty silly explanation, really and especially when you consider how people bank in 2012. Heard of online banking or online bill pay? BoA, more than just about ANY other traditional business has a built-in online audience that visits extremely regularly. So while I don’t know the real explanation for why BoA doesn’t blog anymore, the one they cited doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

But all this debate is based on the idea that a business is forced to choose between blogging and Facebook, that the two strategies are mutually exclusive. But they aren’t.

ANY strong long-term online marketing strategy (for a non-commodity, non-impulse product or service) is fueled by quality content. Blogging provides both the method and the discipline required to generate it. And once that content exists, it contributes to the effectiveness of ALL online marketing activities including Twitter and Facebook.

For small businesses, blogging provides they key ingredient for not only meaningful marketing integration but also a level of marketing automation that is difficult-to-impossible for a small business, with the implied time and budget constraints, to attain otherwise. Blogging combined with some simple WordPress tricks and free/cheap third party services can drive a working marketing machine with little other effort required.

My opinion? Don’t spend too much time worrying about what’s trendy or what other people are moving towards or away from. Spend your time doing what works and in small business online marketing, blogging remains a big part of a successful strategy.

Marketing automation is a loaded term and one that is often misinterpreted. Often when a small business person thinks about marketing automation, they are envisioning a magical process by which they get to sit back and marketing just appears like a bag of chips from a vending machine. Yes, it sounds terrific but this scenario really doesn’t reflect reality.

As a business owner, I am by definition a subject matter expert on the products/services that my firm provides. I can’t outsource my expertise, nor can I build a machine capable of recreating it.

There are, however, mechanical processes associated with just about every marketing activity that can be automated. You fuel your machine with expertise regularly and let it do the work for you. Here are just a few examples of tasks that can easily be automated:

• Posting blog, news and website content that has been written in advance
• Synchronizing content across multiple social networks
• Formatting landing or offer pages
• Formatting email newsletters
• Sending leads generated on-site to third party CRM or email marketing packages
• Adding leads and contacts to lead nurturing or drip email marketing programs
• Updating email signatures with company news or blog posts
• Updating SEO (Search Engine Optimization) sitemap.xml files

“Do more with less” is more than a catch phrase for small businesses with limited resources in both time and money — maximizing effort and creating marketing efficiencies are necessary ingredients for success. Simple marketing automation techniques can greatly reduce the burden and stress that often comes with small business marketing efforts and make both maintaining and growing marketing efforts a more realistic (and profitable!) endeavor.

Stay tuned over the next few weeks: marketing automation will be a recurring theme on this blog as well as in our weekly Thursday webinars. We’ll be showing tips and tricks on how to execute on basic automation tricks like the ones I mentioned above as well as a few others.

There’s no question that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most confusing terms in the lexicon of online marketing. And, with the good SEO vendors charging $1000-$2000 per month for their services, there’s also no question as to why many business owners wish they could do some level of competent SEO on their own.

Here are five recommendations that I make to my clients:

1. Avoid complicated website templates and “software as a service” site-builders. These services can make content management really burdensome and Search Engine Optimization is all about content. Build your website in WordPress. Lots of reputable hosting providers like Hostgator and Bluehost also have a very easy 1-button WordPress install so novices can do it without help (also see our Practice Safe Site info for more on choosing the right platform/vendor)

2. There are a lot of really helpful WordPress Plugins that can help you streamline your Search Engine Optimization workflow. I’d recommend installing the following plugins and also make sure that Google Analytics is running on your site:

• All in One SEO
• Jetpack
• Simple Google Sitemap XML 

3. Optimize each page for only 1 keyword phrase like “Atlanta Online Marketing.” Remember that the more specific the term, the less competitive it’s likely to be and the greater your chances of success. Also note that the content on the page MUST relate closely with the keyword phrase. This article is about Search Engine Optimization and so I should not try to optimize it for keywords relating to branding, email marketing or social media even though those are all part of my business. The keyword phrase you are trying to promote should appear at the front of the Meta Title, at or near the front of the Meta Description, in the page headline, in the first sentence of text and once every 150-250 words or so in the text. Each page or post should also have a hyperlink to another relevant page on the site about once every 100 words. So a 450 word page/post should have about 4 links within the text. Also each page/post should contain more than 300 words.

4. Blog. Each post should be at least 300 words and you should blog at least once a week. Search Engine Optimization results will come quicker though if you can blog 2-3 times per week. Here’s an easy trick: most people tend to write 600 words or more in a clip. Writing 1000 words at once and then splitting into 3 posts will generate more Search Engine Optimization value for your  time investment. And WordPress allows you to schedule posts in advance which is a great automation tip for time-strapped folks. And use the same Search Engine Optimization writing guidelines from above.

5. Sync all your blog posts with social media: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+. If you can muster it, posting on these networks between blog posts is a good idea too, but over time, and especially if the content gets shared within your network, this will help build backlinks to your site which also impacts Search Engine Optmization.

And here’s a bonus tip: don’t be afraid to ask for help. Zero-G is actually going to be starting a webinar series next week where we’ll cover a lot of online marketing tips for beginners, including some basic SEO. It’s a cost-effective way to get acclimated into the mechanics of marketing your own business online (less than $25/session) and you’ll have a judgement-free forum where you can ask any questions you like.

Full details are here and I hope you’ll join us! 

Online chat is a proven means of boosting web lead generation. But some people are giving chat a bad name and this week a client of mine showed me a transcript which served as a particularly striking example.

In this case, an individual she knew had gone to a lawyer’s web site and, after spending some time on the site, was greeted with an invitation to join a live chat. She accepted and was connected to someone named Jack who asked how he could help. She made reference to a specific legal question that she wanted a lawyer’s assistance with.

Jack then asked a number of very specific, probing questions that made the visitor think for a second that he might actually be a lawyer.

But then came the bait and switch.

After several minutes in this discussion Jack said that he was going to put the visitor “on hold” and attempt to get some information from “the lawyer.” In the entire transcript, Jack never referred to his employer by name, he always said “the lawyer” or “they.” This type of language would make anyone suspicious and it wasn’t surprising to see that when Jack returned he had been unable to track down “the lawyer” but that he could take a message and “they” would be happy to call back at “their” earliest convenience.

This approach is misleading, disingenuous and insults the intelligence of the visitor. It turned out that the attorney had hired a third party firm to manage their online chat, and that firm was employing tactics that would likely only damage their attorney client’s online reputation.

Note that my company, Zero-G Creative also offers a managed chat solution but our approach is very different.

It’s my belief that chat on a lawyer’s website should really be for one purpose only: to schedule appointments. At the point that someone asks a complex legal question, our operators would have said something along the lines of “Sorry, I’m not an attorney so I can’t give you that kind of advice but I can schedule a phone conference or in-person consultation with our lead attorney Bob Smith.”

A chat operator can also answer “basic” questions like does your firm handle these types of claims, do you serve my area, what is your billing rate, etc.

But at no point should a layperson engaged in chat on a lawyer’s site pretend to give legal advice.

The other key ingredient to success is constant feedback/coaching from the client. The lawyer in this case should have been reading his chat transcripts and realizing that the operator was going out of bounds.

We work with our clients and tweak our approach and our responses all the time based on their feedback to what’s going on. It’s a big part of why we were so extremely successful with our chat initiative for NFCC which raised conversion rates almost 70% and may win us a marketing award. Our client would read all the transcripts and say, “OK, next time when someone asks ABC, say this.” And we would send the client messages saying, “Someone asked us XYZ and we said this but it might not have been right… How would you like us to respond next time?”

One of my colleagues and I spent a full hour on the phone with a client earlier this week just to break down two chat transcripts that happened to be loaded with a variety of interesting questions and we wanted feedback on how we should learn from those, how we should adjust our documentation and how we should handle them going forward.

If you want a successful chat program, don’t allow you operators to pretend they’re attorneys, doctors, bankers, contractors or network administrators. Their only job is to help better shepherd website visitors into good client relationships.

First time bloggers can have a hard time acclimating to a format that’s a little different than most long-form writing they’ve ever done. Through every level of school that we have completed and into our professional careers we’re taught that the things we write should be “complete.” Our words should all be carefully chosen, that our thoughts and arguments should reach logical and definitive conclusions.

Blogging though is a little different. The format and writing style is often casual and there are very few actual rules but — perhaps most importantly  —  the body of work we’re building isn’t a single post but rather a complex structure that may ultimately contain hundreds of posts connected together like bricks or building blocks.

A single building block isn’t a very good toy. There really isn’t much you can do with it and no matter how long you stare at it or how many ways you try to manipulate it you’re still not likely to create anything remarkable with it.  But if you add few more blocks to the mix, the dynamic changes quickly. Suddenly you can build a variety of things. Add a hundred more blocks and the possibilities are virtually endless.

The same idea holds true for blogging. The more we obsess about trying to perfect a single post, the longer it takes us to get to the “fun” part — when we start seeing organic search traffic grow, when our social media stream is always current and when the process of creating longer pieces like white papers and ebooks becomes almost as simple as, well, building with blocks.

Don’t worry if every post doesn’t come out perfectly formed. The nature of blogging is to be a perpetual work in process where you build on your ideas post by post, where you can always go back and tweak things and where you can flesh out complex thoughts over time.

Never feel that you need to apologize for a post that doesn’t meet your high standards and don’t hide material or let it sit on the shelf. If it’s not your best work, don’t get frustrated and don’t let your blog lose momentum. The posts you publish today — the brilliant and the average — are all just blocks in your bucket and you always reserve the right to revisit topics and build on them over time.

The more you publish, the more you learn, the better you get and, most importantly, the more you benefit. So keep building, stop worrying and don’t obsess over a less-than-stellar post.

“This is a double honor for us,” said Erik Wolf, founder of Zero-G Creative. “Not only are we being recognized for our work among the best marketing agencies in the Atlanta metro area, but the fact that we earned it for our work with NFCC makes it that much more meaningful. This campaign has helped NFCC help a lot of people in our community.”

The nomination was given in the “Web Lead Generation” category for the online chat initiative that Zero-G has been managing for NFCC since mid-October.

Providing the ability for clients, donors, volunteers and community members to chat live with an online representative allowed Zero-G to help NFCC increase their online conversion rate almost 70% during the first 10 weeks of service (full case study available here).

Zero-G handled all of the communication and logistics, freeing up the NFCC staff to attend to their increased end-of-year workload.

The mission of North Fulton Community Charities (NFCC) is to “build self-sufficiency and prevent homelessness and hunger” in the Roswell, Alpharetta, Johns Creek and Milton areas. As many charitable organizations do, NFCC depends on the generosity of donors to continue its admirable work. Publicity, recognition and smart marketing is essential to attracting and retaining vital funding.

Zero-G has worked with NFCC on a volunteer basis for nearly 3 years, helping them launch a revitalized brand and website in 2009 — an initiative which helped NFCC increase web traffic more than 300% in the first year alone.

The AMY Awards have been presented by the Atlanta chapter of the American Marketing Association every year for the last 55 years. This year’s winners will be announced at the awards dinner on March 29th at the Fox Theater.

The full list of finalists is available here.

If gravity were a marketing or advertising campaign it would be extraordinarily successful by anyone’s measure. After all, gravity boasts a 100% success rate of accelerating absolutely everything on Earth at exactly 9.8 meters/second² towards the planet’s surface. That’s a conversion rate any marketer would be insanely jealous of.

But gravity isn’t a product, business or a campaign, it’s one of the fundamental rules that governs our existence and we’ve learned — to great benefit — that trying to defy gravity without the aid of some sort of well-tested aircraft is generally a bad idea.

Many of us also know, whether consciously or subconsciously what the generally bad marketing ideas are. But, somehow, many business owners think that despite an almost certainly poor outcome that they will be the ones to make it work, that they will defy gravity and take flight against unbelievable odds.

I can’t defy gravity outside of an airplane, helicopter, rocketship or hot air balloon. And neither can you.

The Sales Brochure

Time was, that salespeople would walk around with a short stack of trifolds neatly tucked inside their jacket pockets and carried a briefcase full of collateral everywhere they went. But times have changed. Now we have websites, mobile applications, blogs and search engines, all of which have made the traditional sales brochure all but obsolete.

When I make this argument in meetings or at seminars a few people will almost always challenge me, telling me how important traditional collateral is to their business. So I’ll ask them how many sales brochures they’ve received in the course of their lives in the last week or two.

The answer is usually somewhere between 10 and 20 brochures.

So then I’ll ask how many of those 10-20 brochures they have actually read. Then their whole facial expression changes.

For all of us who receive scores of other people’s marketing materials every month but never read them — which is pretty much all of us — why would we ever assume that we’re going to be the exception to the rule? That somehow my trifold is going to be more relevant than everyone else’s, that I’m going to be the one who gets to fly like Superman while everyone else is stuck using their feet.

The argument is completely irrational. If you don’t read other people’s collateral you should enter with the assumption that no one will read yours either. So why waste time and money producing it?

The Field of Dreams Marketing Strategy

“If you build it, they will come” worked like a charm for Kevin Costner. But to my knowledge that’s about the only time it has. Proactive and consistent marketing  has long been recognized as a key ingredient for success. How many businesses can you think of that have been successful without marketing? How many of us can just hang an “Open” sign on our door and just sit back and watch the money come rolling in?

We can’t.

Like the classic paradox of the tree falling in the forest, can a business really be innovative, unique or potentially game-changing if nobody is invited to bear witness?

Sharing your business is part of being in business and it’s another instance where fighting reality won’t get you anywhere.

Before you tell yourself, “I’m not any good at marketing,” or “I can’t afford marketing,” or “I don’t understand marketing,” consider what the real cost of those statements are and how they mesh with your goal of owning a thriving business.

Pay Attention

Douglas Adams, one of my favorite authors wrote, “The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.” It’s a nice idea in theory but impossible to execute. It’s also a sad reality that most small businesses fail. The ingredients for success and the warning signs of failure are everywhere we look. The best advice I can give anyone is to pay attention and listen to the people with more experience.

You don’t need to fight gravity without a rocketship.

It goes without saying in our smartphone-driven world  that many small businesses would love to have their own mobile app. The problem, of course, is that — unlike traditional web development — mobile app development hasn’t quite hit the mainstream yet and so it’s still very expensive. A custom mobile app, built by a reputable firm, could cost anywhere from $10,000 to $20,000 or more depending on functionality.

And without any guarantees that your app will ever really be adopted by your customer base, that already hefty price tag also carries a LOT of risk.

But what if, instead of building an app from the ground up, you could create a “light app” that leveraged the content you already had on your website? Giving users easy mobile access to your directories, product catalogs or menus, news and blog posts? What if you could build in an easy way for your users to contact you for support or refer your business to others? Or a tool that your sales people could leverage in the field as they meet with their clients?

This is a smart approach to mobile development and the first that I’ve seen that truly enables small business owners to try their hand with one of the most cutting edge mediums available at a significantly lower cost.

The thing I like most about this approach though is that it keeps business owners focused on what’s really important to their marketing: the content. At some point or another just about every business person has fallen into the trap of pursuing something sexy or gimmicky because the “cool factor” just seemed so darn compelling. What you usually end up with is an expensive toy that never quite lives up to expectations performance-wise. It’s a risk we all have to be cognizant of as we consider app development as a marketing initiative.

With a steady stream of content, blog posts and announcements delivered directly to your customers’ smartphones by way of your website though, you’re getting more miles out of tools you should already be maintaining. The only thing we’re really adding here is a mobile delivery method and, with it, the means to get into the palm of your client’s hand without a mobile browser getting in the way.

In my experience, the thing entrepreneurs need to remember is that very little in online or interactive marketing is ever really “off-limits” for small businesses — we just have to approach our marketing a little differently and this take on mobile app development is just another great example of that premise in action.