Google Archives - Monetization Magic

10 Ways to Expand Your Brick and Mortar Business – Part 2 of 2

This post is a continuation of 10 Ways to Expand Your Brick and Mortar Business – Part 1

Meaningful content on the website. Due to the Google search engine, it is imperative that meaningful content be placed regularly on your website. That is why most static websites do not rank well with the search engines. The search engines and your potential customers are interested in what is new and exciting. If you just have a billboard website that states your name, address and phone number, and your competitor has a website that talks about weekly events, what’s new in the industry, new inventory, new employees and is constantly updating their website, they will naturally outrank you in the search engines. Ranking is what the industry is all about because let’s face it, if you’re not on the first page or two of search results, most folks will never see your website. The object is to engage your customer so they see you as a friend even before they pick up the phone or park in front of your business. People buy from people they know, like and trust. They want to see people and people in motion on your website rather than just having pretty pictures and text to read.

Google places. Google places is a free ad for businesses so that their basic information can be found out on the internet. Optimally, your place on Google places will also have a link to your highly interactive website along with your business hours and a map so that your business can be located.

Host events. Your business needs to be a hub of activity and the way to make it a hub of activity is to host events. Invite people into your business. Host a Chamber of Commerce after hours event, ol’ Cal would often film the commercials at his lot so there was always a new animal to view. You can also invite people in for free maintenance or checkups to ensure they will not need expensive service later. For a car dealership, offer to have heater and air conditioning check ups, tire rotation, brake inspection, belt and hose inspection and other easy value added services. The events you host are done to add value to the customer experience. When you add enough value, your prospective customer will come to see you as a trusted resource.

Incredible Offer. You want to give prospective customers an incredible offer. For the car lot, it could be a coupon book for discount services or free detailing on their current vehicle. When you give the incredible offer it is always something they would definitely want and it is in exchange for their name and email. You will continue to use their name and email to notify them of future events and other items of interest.

Complimentary Products. Once your customers purchase an item or service from you, they usually will purchase complimentary products to make their initial purchase last longer or to decorate their initial purchase. In the example of the used cars, complimentary products would include extended warranties, car insurance, supplemental car insurance (like AAA), car washes, car audio, specialty rims, car security, tinted windows, windshield replacement and repair, mobile oil change services, after market part suppliers and apparel.

Digital Products. Digital products are great because you can make them once and sell them over and over again. Digital products for a car dealership might include a video of what to check when buying a used car, it could be an affiliate link to a supplier that carries something that is commonly ordered that you choose not to stock, digital products could be tickets to a concert for a celebrity that happens to be coming to town next week that sponsors your vehicles, or sound file of what your cool mufflers actually sound like when installed on your car. You’re probably laughing about that last one but that is an actual product…and my friend paid $29 for that sound file….still laughing?

Newsletter. The newsletter is published at least twice a month telling your customers about upcoming new events and information having to do with your business. You can also tell them funny stories or invite to future events. For the car business, a newsletter could be used to notify customers of recalls and give them ways to quickly and easily take care of needed maintenance. Let them know about your shuttle service.

Social Media. Social media is where you create a community around your business. You’re still being of service and it helps to create a buzz around your business. For the car dealer, you might want to list videos of the latest sliding cars due to the ice storm last week, or pictures of the most modified cars. You could have poll on the upcoming changes in the new car models. You could have a poll on whether girls or guys like a particular model better than the other. You would want to take pictures of your live events and post those up on social media for others to see.

If you like what you read in this article and would like to see how you can expand YOUR business, apply for a complimentary Action Strategy Session so that you can have a clear roadmap to take your busines to the next level! The Action Strategy Session is valued at $297.00 and will give you concrete ways that you can move forward in your business.

10 Ways to Expand Your Brick and Mortar Business – Part 1 of 2

By SoftwareGirl

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When I was a little girl, my family moved to New Mexico from New Jersey. In New Mexico, we only had 3 TV stations and they would only broadcast during certain hours of each day. The information broadcast on that TV station was selective and even back in those days, what they broadcast was determined by what would get the TV station the highest ratings. Everyday, I would see a commercial for a used car dealer who was in California and has some of the goofiest commercials I had ever seen. His commercials often featured his “dog”, Spot. His dog was often not a dog but would be an elephant or a tiger or some other wild animal. Sometimes I wondered if people would watch him just to see the day when dear ol’ Cal actually got eaten by his “dog”, Spot!

I tell you this to make this point…Cal Worthington was all the way in California and I was a little girl all the way in the desert of New Mexico…but I knew who he was. Cal Worthington sold a lot of cars when he ran those commercials. Eventually Cal passed away. Many years later, I had an opportunity to visit the great state of California. When I got there, what did I remember about California? You guessed it! I remembered ol’ Cal Worthington and his wild dog, Spot. I actually passed by the car lot and it was an event to me because I was able to remember all his commercials and the friends I was with at the time remembered him too.

Cal Worthington used TV to advertise his car lot and he attracted customers from the next town, the next county, the next state away. There are a lot of people in the great state of California and he advertised so well that a little girl all the way in New Mexico (954 miles away) and 30 years later remembered his car lot. Think about it, he was just another used car dealer and he found away to make his name known to a much broader audience. Within 10 years of beginning in the business, his dealership was #1 in the nation! He attracted so much attention that Johnny Carson even had him on the Tonight Show which had a national reach!

You are blessed because business owners now do not have to purchase TV air time to get our message out! We are able to rely on the technology that we have at our figure tips and our own ingenuity to promote our message.

To illustrate how this works, I’ll be using ol’ Cal Worthington’s business to show you how we could expand his business using today’s technology:

Website. Your website is the virtual hub of your business. The website could be used to show people the new car models, book appointments with customers to come in a look at a car, apply for car financing so that they could have the convenience of knowing that they were already approved for a vehicle before they arrived and they could just come in a pick out their new vehicle. They could schedule their normal service appointments, talk to a mechanic live via the website chat feature, order new accessory items for their new car or get a trade in value for their vehicle.

Keywords on the Website. Using keywords helps the search engines to direct customers to your website. Cal Worthington’s keywords might have been “Ford”, “dog Spot”, used cars, new cars, Long Beach, CA, and so on. Today, Cal Worthington dealership still exists and the keywords they use are as follows:

long beach ford, ford long beach, long beach ford parts, long beach ford service, used ford long beach, new ford long beach

What IS an Income Producing Website?

By SoftwareGirl

Quite simply, an income producing website is a website that produces more money than what it takes to keep it running each month. Every business person knows that it takes money to have a website and to keep it running. There are domain names to be purchased and hosting companies to pay to allow your website to be housed on their systems. Typically this amount is less than $20 each month. Business owners don’t mind spending money on their business if they know that they are getting a return on their money. If your website is not producing money for you, it might as well be an unlit billboard on a desolate desert highway in the middle of the night! Fortunately, there IS something that you can do about it.

Begin by finding out who sees your website. This will simply tell you about the traffic your website receives today. Think of this as being point A. This will tell you the good news and the bad news. The good news is you’ll know where people are going on your website and how long they stay. The bad news is you’ll know how small the traffic stream really is. You can find out who sees your website by installing Google Analytics on your website and allowing it to gather statistics while you work on the other items in this article.

Think about your ideal customer. If you can identify one customer in particular, an actual person with a pulse and a name, that is best. What are this customer’s needs in relation to your business? What do they buy? If they were to look for something to satisfy their need or problem and they wanted to use Google to search for a solution to their need or problem, what would they type into the search field to find that solution? What location do you want to service? Where is your ideal customer located? These are the items that make up your basic key words for your website: customer problem, customer need, location, services offered, best selling items. Your keywords need to be used on your website and in the content that you produce for your website.

Your customers are interested in your products and services and they want to know more about your business. This gives you an opportunity to create meaningful content to place on your website. Sell the sizzle of your product!

Your website has the ability to sell your products and services even when your business is closed. Allow it to do just that by providing a way for your customers to book their own appointments, email you, buy products from you, interact with polls about upcoming products that you’re thinking about offering, finding out about upcoming events and purchasing tickets to those events. Make it easy for the customer to interact with your site and they will continue to come back.

Just having a website is a great first step. Setting up the website to work for your is a wise business move because it begins to work for you and will free up your time and resources so that you can concentrate on your core business.

Social Networks Used for Surveillance

By SoftwareGirl

Are social networking being used for surveillance? In a word…yes. Is it legal? Yes it is. Anything that you put online is basically public information especially with Google! In the EULA for Google it very plainly states that it becomes the owner of that information.

In an article published today on MSNBC, it states that governments are pushing for the social networks to collect more information than they need for their own business purposes.

So what exactly can be collected? Any time to place data on the internet, your IP address and location can be obtained. The information that you place out there can be obtained along with the time that it was posted. According to a recent article in the Washington Post, Facebook’s new “Read” edge coupled with other technology gives the ability to see what you are doing online and serve up user specific information that it’s technology believes you would be most interested in. You don’t even have to click on a “like” button for this to take place. That sounds rather innocent on the surface doesn’t it. In order for this ability to take place, what you are doing has to be recorded in a database somewhere so that it can be queried to come up with future information to serve you. When you opt in to use the application, it begins to provide this individual content while collecting the data in order to provide the content.

While I believe that Google and Facebook are just attempting to provide a better quality experience for internet users, I also know that data can be used in many different ways. As it points out in the MSNBC article, many governments and law enforcement are obtaining the information for their own purposes. According to the article, “Soghoian estimates that U.S. Internet and telecoms companies may receive about 300,000 such requests in connection with law enforcement each year — but public information is scarce.” The influx of requests are so taxing that “Every decent-sized U.S. telecoms and Internet company has a team that does nothing but respond to requests for information,” Soghoian told Reuters in an interview.

What can you do about this? Basically, don’t post things on the internet that you wouldn’t be proud for your mom or grandmother to see. As you’re reading information, ensure that you are doing so responsibly. Most folks won’t have any issues with this; however, you need to be aware that where you go and what you do is being recorded in a database somewhere to be used at a later date. When you are opting into applications, make sure you are aware of how that information can be used. You don’t have to develop a phobia about it. Just be aware of what you are doing when logged into the internet. Ensure that others using your equipment are equally as responsible. The bottom line is to assume that what you put out on the internet is not private. After all, the internet is a public network.

What is Latent Semantic Indexing?

By SoftwareGirl

What is it?

According to Wikipedia, Latent Semantic Indexing is an indexing and retrieval method that uses a mathematical technique called Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to identify patterns in the relationships between the terms and concepts contained in an unstructured collection of text.

What?! You say you speak English? Oh! No problem! What this means in plain English is that when you write an article or post about a key word, certain other words normally occur in the same context. For instance, let’s say you were writing an article about schools. It would be normal to see the following words in the same article: students, teachers, teacher student ratio, classrooms, budgets, parents, curriculum, extra curricular activities, clubs, textbooks, books, schedules, grades…you get the idea.

Why Do I Care?

Not too very long ago, the way to achieve a #1 ranking with Google was to stuff your articles and posts full of your key work with no regard to the quality of the content. Those boys and girls at Google are pretty smart. They wanted to ensure that the readers had quality content to read on the internet instead of a bunch of garbage so they changed the magic formula. They now judge an article or post based on how many related keywords are in the article instead of how many times your keyword phrase appears in the article.

If you’re not on the first page of a Google search, your chances of being found by a potential reader decrease significantly. If there’s not anyone finding your site, there’s even less chance that any of your ads are being looked at much less clicked upon. Consequently, when you decide to sell your site, you’ll leave a lot of money on the table that could have been in your pocket.

Who Uses It?

Ultimately, Google uses it to rank your site. Since most people use Google to do their searches, it’s pretty important to rank in the first 3 or 4 choices for your keyword phrase as most folks don’t look any further than the first page of a search to get to the information for which they are looking.

Your competition is using it to gain ranking over you! Obviously, you won’t know this; however, your best insurance is to write content rich articles for your readers so that you don’t even have to be concerned about your competition.

Can I Leverage It?

Yes, you can. Find out your competitions keywords and write better articles and posts. If you don’t write well, hire someone who does write well to help you to get ahead! No one said you had to do it all. Finding out the keyword phrases that your competition is paying for and writing better articles for these phrases is even better!

Another way to leverage this concept is to sprinkle high paying keywords among your keyword phrases to raise the dollar value of the ads that Adsense is feeding to your blog so that when your reader clicks on one of your ads, you automatically make more per click. You will want to ensure that the high paying keyword actually fits in with your post or article. I would only use one extra high paying keyword per article to ensure you are playing by the rules and don’t get your Adsense account shut down by the nice boys and girls at Google.

Are There Tools to Help Me?

Once again, you’re in luck! I use a tool called BlogGlue Toolbox to assist me with my SEO when I’m posting my articles. It checks my title, description, keywords and document content and gives me suggestions on how I can write a better article. Best of all, this won’t cost you a dime! Talk about great insurance!

The bottom line is to show off a bit of your knowledge about your niche and give your readers great content. You will be richly rewarded for it.

UPDATE: Are QR codes the Mark of the Beast or the best?

By SoftwareGirl

I recently heard someone speaking about QR codes being the Mark of the Beast.

What are QR codes? In a nutshell, QR codes are paper based hyperlinks. Anyone in the blogging community knows that one of the keys to great search engine optimization is making sure you keep your website content updated, new and fresh.

Whether you do this with a blog, or you change your homepage with new offers, coupons or new products, it serves to show Google that your site is “alive.” Having a blog is an easy way to keep the site “alive” with new content and comments from your readers. That is one reason why Facebook has an Alexa score of 2 at the moment.

QR code for Monetization Magic

Small businesses sometimes struggle with this if they have the typical billboard type website. Once they upgrade their website to include a blog, that helps but what’s the next logical step? Have you heard of QR codes yet? Here is a quick introduction: What are QR codes? They look like this:

They come to us from Japan where they are very common. QR is short for Quick Response (they can be read quickly by a cell phone). They are used to take a piece of information from a transitory media and put it in to your cell phone. The airlines have been using them as early as 2008. You may soon see QR Codes in a magazine advert, on a billboard, a web page or even on someone’s t-shirt. Mari Smith gave me the idea of putting it on the back of her business card! That’s an excellent networking idea!

Once it is in your cell phone, it may give you details about that business (allowing users to search for nearby locations), or details about the person wearing the t-shirt, show you a URL which you can click to see a trailer for a movie, or it may give you a coupon which you can use in a local outlet. The reason why they are more useful than a standard barcode is that they can store (and digitally present) much more data, including url links, geo coordinates, and text. The other key feature of QR Codes is that instead of requiring a chunky hand-held scanner to scan them, many modern cell phones can scan them. The full Wikipedia description is here.

How does the cell phone read the code? The cell phone needs a QR code reader. It takes literally 1 minute for someone with an iPhone or Android phone to find and install the reader.

How do you generate a code? You can easily generate a QR code using a site like Kaywa.com or you can use the Open Source code to generate codes for you if you have a smart developer on hand.

How can you use QR codes to benefit search marketing? Here are a few examples of how others are using them. How will Google see them? If you add them to your website, the search engines will see that your pages have changed, and that you are updating pages. The search engine will see a new image and index it accordingly. At some point soon, the search engines will likely recognize QR codes and possibly index the content in them.

Will your customers use them? Today, a few may use them, but those that do will certainly appreciate your tech knowledge, and those that don’t will certainly be inquisitive, which may open the door for conversation and a potential sale. Those that do use QR codes will definitely have a high tech know-how and may be more receptive to your presence on the web, your Twitter presence, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube etc.

How could you use a QR code? Your business, no matter how small or large, could use QR codes in a number of ways. You could use them to direct your contacts to ever changing areas on your website. Prospective employees could use them to point to their resume online! The QR code is generated and the link to which the code points can be changed. I do see an issue there. You will want to use a very secure password to generate your QR code so that you can retain control over where it points.

I think it’s neat to be able to use them when I’m visiting new places of interest. I can see them being used to store video and audio of places of interest. I think they’ll be awesome for the education system! Perhaps this will help to usher in a mobile education system?

Need to know how to assemble something and you’re concerned about an issue with language translation? No problem! You’re instructions are now a video that is translated into your native language! How awesome is that?! Teachers could use these in their teaching plans to come up with all sorts of teaching tools to relate our history to our present day activities.

These codes are currently printed on paper. Could they be tattooed? They could but will the QR reader be able to read them? Have you ever seen someone who got a tattoo when they were in their 20’s that is now in their 50’s or 60’s? The tattoo becomes distorted over the years. The ink bleeds into the skin. If the person has gained and lost a lot of weight, again, there is more distortion. They are simply not practical for this application. The mark can be removed or re-pointed to a null pointer rendering it useless. So I don’t believe there is anything to be concerned about concerning QR codes in connection with the mark of the beast and end times predictions. You can breathe now!

UPDATE: Apparently some folks are actually getting these QR codes permanently tattooed on their skin! I knew it was just a matter of time; however, as I stated above, it’s only a matter of time before the tattoo will distort due to age. The tattoo in the video below is large. Never underestimate the power of marketing!

That being said, temporary tattoos might actually be a good thing for this band member. Bands evolve rather quickly and so a permanent tattoo is not a good idea. Even the Beatles split up after a while! A temporary tattoo could be sold to the fans of a band and that would further promote the band to others who would actually be interested in hearing the music thereby creating more fans and eventual ticket sales.

Although this tattoo parlor looks to be fairly legitimate, I would have preferred to see this tattoo artist counsel his patron on a better way to get the word out about his band. Indeed, the tattoo artist may have already done that, this is a short video and it just doesn’t show it.

Google has already moved on past QR codes in favor of NFC technology as of last December according to this article….rethinking that permanent tattoo yet?

What’s the Difference Between Tags and Categories?

By SoftwareGirl

What are WordPress Tags? What do they do?

These little tags that you add to your blog posts are used by All in One SEO and the search engines as the keyword phrases of your post. They basically say what your post is about. They also help search engines to find your posts.

Does this mean the more tags I have the better?

No, you don’t want to put any irrelevant tags on your posts. In fact, Google will lower your rating if you put irrelevant tags on your posts. I would recommend about 5 targeted tags that have to do with that particular post.

You’ll want to include the obvious keywords that pertain to your post as a tag. Also include other keywords that people might use when looking for a post like the one you are writing. For instance, this post is about “tags” and “categories” and one might look for “keyword phrases” as well. Be sure to use synonyms for your tags as well. Using 5 tags for each post should be plenty.

Keep in mind who your target audience is. If it’s geographically specific, you could potentially corner the market in terms of having a top search result for that topic. For instance, “small business owners” or “small business owners in Las Vegas, NV” would attract a different set of readers.

How do I pick my categories?

Categories are the broad topics that you would use to classify your posts. Several posts should fit in each category. Find the highest searched related keywords to give you a start on your categories. You can see the highest searched keywords by looking at your Google Analytics reports.

Since the categories are broad topics, it is possible to have one post that fits in several categories. You don’t have to have a post for each category; however, you can have several categories for each post. It is acceptable to have only one post for a single category.

Your categories should be 2-3 words long at the most.

How many categories should I have on a blog?

I would recommend about 5 – 10 categories depending on how many sub-topics you can go into on your blog that still fit with your main blog phrase.

In general, tags can be specific and categories are designed to be general yet relevant to your post.

Here’s a tip: Since I use both tags and All In One SEO on my blog posts, I had to find an easier way to include my keywords without typing everything twice. The tag area likes to put an “X” between each entry. So I use Notepad ++ to do a search and replace to turn the X’s into commas and then copy and paste into All In One SEO. It’s just a small task but it does cut down on some time as I’m not always the best typist in the world. By the way, Notepad++ is a free application. I love free, don’t you?

Best Advertising for Small Business Owners

By SoftwareGirl

Surely by now you’ve heard about the coupon sensation called Groupon? If you’re a small business owner, this is an excellent service! Since the buzz created with Groupon produces paying customers rather than just browsers, I consider this the best advertising for small business owners!

Groupon will use the social networks for you to get the word out about your special offering. They encourage deals to be sent out to friends or being using by friends to add to the fun. Prospective customers can use their social networks to arrange plans and further spread the word about your business.

Groupon negotiates huge discounts—usually 50-90% off—with popular businesses. They send the deals to thousands of subscribers in their free daily email, and they send your business a ton of new customers. These are not just browsing folks on the internet, these are actual paying customers that have already purchased and are ready to redeem their coupon purchase. That’s the Groupon magic!

There are no out of pocket costs associated with being featured on Groupon. They make money by taking a piece of each Groupon they sell. In other words, they only win if you win – and you know what you’re getting at every step of the process.

Since a minimum number of people must buy for the offer to be valid, Groupon guarantees paying customers. These subscribers are not looking for “the perfect deal.” They’re looking for the perfect excuse to try something new. They get them to your business, and you bring them back again and again.

A Groupon feature puts you in front of thousands of subscribers in each Groupon city – with thousands more opting in each day. Their subscribers share your offer with everyone they know via Facebook, Twitter, and other social media. This buzz will continue to attract new customers for months following your feature.

Just as you’ve seen people who have appeared on Oprah before they are ready, you should also be ready to receive a flood of customers to your business prior to advertising on Groupon. It makes you look better when you’re prepared and there’s less stress that way! Before advertising with Groupon, think ahead of time about how you will bring these new customers back again and again by offering a special promotion just for them once they visit your store.

Do you have a fitness business and you’re offering New Year New You packages? Perhaps you’d like to offer a special on a cruise celebration once they’ve reached their goal weight to show of their newly acquired physique? Or perhaps you could do a buy one get one at half price special for the cruise or other special event?

Groupon allows you to target a specific area which makes it great for opening up a new area of your town or state or section of the country. Perhaps you would like to couple it with a fund raising event to double your exposure and donate to a good cause as well.

Be ready to create a buzz about your incredible offering and get your message out to thousands of people for your next big launch. Contact Groupon today!