The problem is that as good as these platforms are, they are generally a poor fit for small businesses — organizations limited in in time, money and human resources. Generally speaking there are 3 primary barriers to adopting marketing automation in small business, and we designed ORBTR to solve them all, making it the ONLY platform designed specifically for the needs of small businesses and organizations.

1. Feedback is important, get it early and prioritize effectively.

We got a lot of feedback early on, especially as a few of our clients began using early versions of our software. Their feedback, as was our own team’s experience in using ORBTR 1.0 on behalf of our clients, was critical in crafting the first public release. Almost all the feedback was constructive and helpful but there were also a lot of feature requests. Some of these made sense to incorporate prior to launch but there was absolutely no way we could do everything. Our goal was to launch a relatively simple suite of tools and services and unless we stayed focussed, it would be easy to overshoot that goal. This talk that Ben Deda gave at Ignite Denver 12 also stayed top of mind for me:

2. Talk to your developer community. 

Our team has been developing for WordPress for more than five years and marketing is what you’d call a “core competency” around here. So we thought we already had all the knowledge we needed to build and launch this product even though, with all our experience in consulting and building for clients, we had never launched a commercial product for WordPress. It wasn’t until we started talking to business owners who had sold commercial software for WordPress that we realized everything that we didn’t know. There were issues regarding licensing and overall business practices that we were unaware of, having never participated in this aspect of the community. There are best practices and hot-button issues in every marketplace — no matter what your experience, don’t assume you already know everything.

3. The launch is the beginning, not the end.

 The weeks and months before you’re ready to ship feel like an ultramarathon. Hard work, long nights, testing, nerves, borderline exhaustion. When we finally arrived at WordCamp Atlanta for our launch, we felt like we’d achieved something great. But as one race ended, another began. Now that we had launched our product, the task of actively selling and marketing began in earnest. It’s easy to lose sight of the race after the race. The work isn’t over when you get there but the race after launch is more fun in a lot of ways

This is my third blog post this month, and the 281st posting on this site over the past five years, which amounts to over 150,000 words.

Not all of those posts were brilliant or even especially well-written. But I published them anyway because — regardless of their relative genius within the scope of my overall work — they did appropriately reflect my feelings about a particular topic at the time I wrote them. My viewpoints aren’t always popular or widely accepted. When held up against the test of time, my opinions aren’t always correct.

But in sharing my perspective, right or wrong I contribute positively to my small business community and to the overall conversation revolving around topics important in my in my business and to my clients.

More than anything else, this is why I wish more business people would take the time to blog regularly. We all accumulate knowledge in the day-to-day operation of our businesses. We accumulate knowledge by delivering services to clients and from the wisdom that our clients share with us. And, all too often, this knowledge stays inside our heads and is never shared in a meaningful way with the business community at large.

There is obviously a significant investment in doing this, primarily the time investment that comes with writing at least once a week regardless of how busy you are. As I write this, I am less than three weeks away from launching my company’s new ORBTR marketing automation product. But I’m still writing today. On a Saturday, but getting it done. I posted a few days before and a few days after my son was born five years ago. I posted during a very hectic period last year when my family was in the middle of a cross-country move.

Sharing this stuff has become important to me, and part of who I am and I will likely continue to do it as long as I have something to say.

Of course, doing this has certainly come with many benefits for my business. Blogging has helped me write two books, helped me secure speaking engagements, build traffic and SEO for my website and win clients.

Would I continue to blog regularly without a tangible benefit for my business? Probably — I blogged before I was a business owner and NOT writing every week would feel a little strange.

Clients always ask me why blogging is important and I usually answer the question from the perspective of why it should be important to YOU. But I rarely talk about why it’s important to ME. I don’t know if that’s helpful, but it’s honest.

But here we are, again, talking about three more signs that you may be getting taken advantage of.

1. Their contract specifies that your firm will actually do more than theirs to build SEO

Let’s say your sink is broken and you hire a plumber to come help. Would you think it was odd if he came to your house and stood there with his arms crossed waiting for you to fix it instead of getting his own hands dirty?

We have actually encountered clients whose SEO firms contractually require the client to blog twice a week. So if SEO is all about content and you are providing somewhere between 2400 and 4800 words of quality content every month, what exactly are they doing to earn their retainer?

Blogging should be part of every SEO strategy. So if your SEO company doesn’t have the in-house competency to provide a managed blogging option, they should at least provide coaching, guidance or a quality referral.

2. They include “reputation management” as a cornerstone of their service

We all know that online reviews on sites like Yelp, Google and Kudzu contribute to our search engine results. But the only things anyone can really do to help you manage that online reputation is:

• Coach you on appropriate responses to online reviews and delivering killer customer service
• Implementing programs to encourage customers to post reviews

Some SEO firms will manufacture positive reviews for their clients, a practice which can get your business in trouble with companies like Yelp and Google. We have even heard stories of SEO firms manufacturing NEGATIVE reviews for clients they want to pitch reputation management services to. Of course, once the SEO firm is under contract, the negative reviews magically disappear.

3. They complain about Google
Sometimes an SEO guy (especially the sales guy) will slip up in casual conversation and tip his hand about what kind of tactics they use for their clients. You might ask, “Is it tough keeping up with all the Google changes?”

At this point, they might say something like, “Of course not, we know our business and we know exactly how Google’s changes will impact our clients.”

Or they might sigh and say something like, “Dealing with Google is frustrating, every change in the search engine means we have to change our approach.” What he just told you is that his firm is using unethical or “black hat” tactics. White hat tactics rarely change much no matter what Google does.

Below I have detailed 3 dead simple things that you can do to ensure that you’re actually building links every time you post content to your blog. While the ultimate goal of blogging is to create a trusted online resource which establishes your company as an authority in your vertical, driving potential customers to your site via organic search, there is no reason not to leverage that content in the form of legitimate links back to your site, which will in-turn benefit your site’s organic search rankings. Here’s how:

1. Set-up RSS Submissions

RSS feeds are a great way to earn organic links just by putting out content. Here’s how you do it:

Step 1: Make sure you have an active blog feed on your website. If you’re blog is on WordPress, you’ll have a XML feed automatically generated. You can find your feed at www.website.com/feed.

Step 2: Next, you’ll want to create a feed on Feedburner.com. This is a product from Google that serves as a user friendly environment to automate your RSS feed. To add your feed, simply login using your Google account, paste your feed URL into the dashboard, and click Next:

Step 3: Customize your feed title and address. I recommend using your business name to brand your feed, rather than using a spammy-looking keyword phrase:

That’s it! Now every time you post content on your blog you will be automatically sending links to that blog post from FeedBurner.

Bonus Tip:

There are other good RSS submissions sites which achieve the same thing. Here are our top 3 suggestions:

• http://www.technorati.com
• http://www.feedage.com
• http://www.alltop.com

2. Share Your Content on Google+

Did you know that links placed in Google+ posts are indexed by Google and marked as followed links? This means every time you share a post on Google+ you are getting a followed link from Google! There is no reason not to post links to your blog posts on your business or personal Google+ account.

The instruction for this tactic is not complex; simply sign into G+, compose a new post, and share the link to your most recent blog post.

Bonus Tip:

Who wants to actually have to login to G+ and share the link? If your blog is on WordPress, you can automate this process! We recommend a plugin called SNAP (Social Network Auto Poster), which allows you to configure your social profiles, and automatically shares posts on those networks as they are published.

3. Implement and Optimize Breadcrumb Navigation Links

Implement

This is actually an internal linking technique, rather than an inbound link technique, but it’s effective nonetheless. You probably know what breadcrumb navigation links are without necessarily realizing it. They are the links that appear on the top of any page of a site, and let the user know where they are within the architecture of the site. They look like this:

Breadcrumb navigation automatically creates a link pointing to the home page of your website every time a new page of content is published. So, if they are enabled, you are automatically building internal links every time you publish a new blog post! Yoast has a good plugin for WordPress for easily implementing breadcrumb navigation links. And because you are automatically building links for each new blog post via the RSS submissions and the Google+ sharing techniques outlined above, the breadcrumb links on those posts which point to your home page are passing that good link juice right through to the home page.

Optimize

Once breadcumb navigation is enabled, you’ll want to optimize the anchor text. A lot of times you will see that the link which takes the user back to the home page of the site will be anchored in the text “Home”. Why should this link read “Home” when it could be a search phrase that describes your business? We have actually seen cases where updating the breadcrumb link anchor text to a relevant search phrase has taken the site to page 1 of Google’s search results for that phrase, without any additional efforts.

I hope you find these tips actionable and useful. If you have questions, please drop them in the comments section below!

About the Guest Author

Hi! My name is Matt Green, and I’m a SEO strategist over at Ethical SEO Consulting. If you would like to contact me for any reason, you can track me down at the following places: Twitter, G+, My Blog or shoot me an email.

The percentage of visitors that leaves your site after viewing only one page is referred to as a bounce rate by web marketers and it’s one of the most important numbers in your analytics dashboard. Sometimes a high bounce rate (above 60%) is a product of poor quality traffic being driven by search engine optimization or social media strategies. But sometimes a high bounce rate is driven by high quality visitors who simply can’t figure out how to use your website.

Your site navigation may be to blame.

It’s important that your site navigation be simple and easy for a first-time visitor to understand. Sometimes a branding agency or web design firm will suggest overly creative or clever names for navigation items but there’s a reason that so many websites include boring headings like “About Us” and “Contact” and “Our Blog.” These titles are simple and anyone who sees them will know exactly what to expect when they click them. The same is not necessarily true for headings like “Backstory” and “Holler” and “Join the Conversation.”

If visitors can’t use your site in the most literal way, they won’t stay on your site and you probably won’t get their business.

Some readers may be thinking, “But hold on, I’ve seen a lot of websites for successful companies that use clever or irreverent navigation.” That’s true and companies like Chipotle come to mind as good examples of this. But Chipotle is a national brand and is well known and loved not only for their food but also their attitude. Their navigation (which, by the way, has gotten more conservative in recent years) is an extension of that.

Small firms just don’t have the kind of equity that will allow them to get visitors a little lost on their websites. So my advice is to keep your navigation as simple and obvious as possible. Save the creativity for other aspects of your web strategy.

1: They affirmed their company’s long-held beliefs on quality SEO tactics and effectively killed the spammy search engine manipulation techniques being employed by a great many SEO vendors, and

2: Ensured that — at least for the foreseeable future — content would be placed firmly in the online marketing driver’s seat.

And, predictably, we have seen a lot of business owners respond by diverting budgets from SEO and social media vendors in favor of blog or article writing services and coaching. But, with a lot of options out there, how do you pick the right fit for your firm? Zero-G has been helping business owners with blogging for the last two years, so I have a lot of insight to share on this.

There exists a wide spectrum of consulting/coaching and services in the online content marketing arena and, generally speaking, the spectrum starts on the left with firms and consultants who you will engage for a limited time to teach you how to blog effectively, how to use the tools and how to hone your writing for favorable SEO. On the right side of the spectrum we have, in essence, anonymous or crowdsourced ghostwriting services where clients pay a monthly fee and content appears on their website regularly with little (or often zero) interaction between the client and the writing resource. Oftentimes in this scenario writers are crowdsourced, meaning that each post written may have been crafted by a different writer.

Both sides of this spectrum are seriously flawed.

While you could effectively argue that the coaching scenario on the left will produce the best results, success requires a business owner or subject matter expert who is willing and able to write between one and three original posts religiously every week. The failure rate in this scenario is high.

On the ghostwriting side, while there’s no issue in ensuring that content will be consistently created and posted, the major tradeoff is quality of writing. Without direct access to the subject matter expert, writers often use competitive websites and blogs as research material. As a result the writing tends to sound mechanical and the quality of the posts are usually poor. It’s not uncommon for business owners to find content on their website that doesn’t accurately reflect what their business does or their opinion on important industry matters. You can probably guess that the failure rate in this scenario is high as well.

The best writing services are usually found in the middle of this spectrum, finding a balance between ensuring consistency (like the ghostwriter) but without compromising quality or the business owner/subject matter expert’s perspective. Good services will also include time to plan with the client on a regular basis and will keep writing resources on retainer (if not on staff) to ensure consistency in the writing over time.

Apart from these tips, here are a few questions you should ask any potential writing service:

• How will we measure success?
• How will we impact SEO?
• What is the process every month?
• What are my responsibilities in this process?
• What if I’m not happy with your posts?

Choosing the right partner to help you execute this strategy is one of the most important decisions you will make. Be sure to do your homework before you sign a contract.