If you are not including misspelled search terms in your website’s search engine optimization (SEO) process you are missing out on connecting with many potential customers.

It is no secret that the Internet has created our enormous global market. Customers, speaking any of thousands of languages, from every nation can make purchases online from a marketplace where everyone can be an international vendor. Understandably, most small- and medium-sized e-merchants can’t afford to build their Web stores in dozens of parallel pages to handle dozens or hundreds of languages. But they can make their main sites more efficient by using SEO tools to cast a broader net and reel in customers who misspell keyword search terms. In our case, we want to catch those customers who seek our business-planning software products, but speak English as a second language, or don’t speak English at all.

As just one example, how many ways can you misspell restaurant? Recent visitors to our sites who were searching  for sample business plans for eating establishments used these misspellings (and others as well) in their searches:

• restaraunt
• restauraunt
• restaurent
• resteraunt
• restruant
• restrunt
• resturant
• restuarant

Not getting any results, they also tried the plurals of these not-words by adding s and es as well. Maybe these were merely sloppy typing errors, or perhaps the searchers really did not know the correct spelling. (Sorry, claiming that since restaurant is a French word, and so, is difficult to spell in English is a specious argument, since much of American English came from so many other languages.)

With so many gazillion e-merchants out there, search engine optimization is essential to our success and survival. We must use every opportunity, every tool, every search to entice, suggest, direct, link, and otherwise bring potential customers in to our websites where we can sell them our products and services.

The developers, webmasters, and editors of our websites collect, track, and analyze all these bad searches. Then we add the misspellings into keyword fields and other code, behind-the-website-scenes, so that from now on anyone who makes an attempt to search on our sites with any of those misspellings will still  receive a list of free restaurant business sample plans.

I am saddened though, to think how our facilitation of successful Internet searches is enabling birth-tongue English-speaking people to slip into illiteracy. Effective SEO is proactively driving down the lowest common denominator in vocabulary and language usage skills. Internet users are becoming less literate every day, and we are enabling them to do it. They don’t need to know how to spell correctly to generate a successful Internet search. Anything that is a close approximation of a word will do.

And truly, from the retail business standpoint I can’t say this is wrong. Sad yes, but not wrong.

Steve Lange
Palo Alto Software

One of the greatest fears that people have is public speaking — people would rather deal with snakes, spiders, even death than have to get up and speak to an audience.

It’s too bad, because one of the best business-building tactics is to demonstrate your knowledge to a receptive audience. It pays to be able to speak well in public, and of course it helps if you have a little charm as well.

Public speaking is particularly effective if your business has a service or consulting component (actually if you are not selling services along with products you may be missing a high-margin bet). People like to be educated rather than sold, so if you are an expert in, say, interior decorating or adventure tours, you could hold a seminar entitled, “The Ten Interior Decorating Improvements that Increase Your Home’s Value Most” or “Planning an Adventure You’ll Remember for the Rest of Your Life.” Retail shop owners can offer in-store demos or hands-on workshops like the ones you see at Home Depot and the other “big box” stores.

Naturally you won’t have time to provide all the secrets you have learned about your subject in these sessions; after all, this is your business and you don’t want to make yourself redundant. But if you carefully plan an interesting agenda that informs, educates, and whets the appetite of the attendees, you’ll likely get some inquiries on using your services — not everyone wants to do it themselves!

And what’s more, you will have identified yourself to people who are obviously interested in what you provide; otherwise, why would they even come? If you want to make sure they’re the right people, identify who should attend. You could say something like, “if you are thinking of selling your home in the next six months, this seminar is for you.” Or, “if you have never been on an adventure vacation, this is the seminar for you.”

But whatever you do, be sure to plan your program and do a few practice run-throughs. You’ll need to see how much time it will take – count on it taking longer than planned. Make sure there’s two-way communication with the audience; ask for questions from time to time.

Have some handouts, like a sheet of “tips and tricks,” insider techniques that you use to do what you do. Or give samples of your product.

If you’re going to do this more than once, ask for feedback and hand out a survey form at the end to ask how you did or what could be added.

And if you’re really serious about building business, hold a drawing for a small prize of some kind, and in doing so, get everyone’s name and contact info. Put a check box on the entry form asking if they’d like more information from you. If they say “yes,” you have permission to market to them in the future.

Public speaking can open a lot of doors. Try it and see.

About the Author

Ken Burgin and Elizabeth Walker are the Marketing Masters (www.MarketingMasters.ca), a full-service marketing and advertising partnership that helps build busy businesses. Send your ideas on How to Thrive in Times Like These to liz@marketingmasters.ca or ken@marketingmasters.ca, or call 1-866-908-5720.

Web: http://www.marketing,masters.ca

blog: http://thebuzzwithkenandliz.blogspot.com/

By Varju Luceno of Global Office Partners

One-way, top-down communication does not work as well as in former days. Today, companies must create conversations with customers and deliver useful content at the moment their prospects, clients or constituents need it. Many firms will need to reinvent their marketing in 2010.

Marketers can’t push products on people. They have to think like journalists and create a dialogue with their audience to earn a prospect’s trust. Free or low-cost applications such as blogs and podcasts, in addition to social networking tools such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, have changed the old rules. In addition, free social networking applications can be used for managing your company’s reputation, conducting market research, monitoring your competitors’ efforts and collaborating with your colleagues. Twitter can also serve as a platform for your company’s customer service.

Ideal clients can now be reached with targeted messages that cost a fraction of the old expensive advertising campaigns. In addition, social media marketing and PR efforts often allow instant feedback and measurable results, so businesses can immediately see which marketing strategies are working for them and which ones are not.

Online marketing these days is not about flashy websites. More than ever, companies need to provide useful information to help customers make their purchasing decisions. Websites cannot be stale – content needs to be fresh and reactions of the visitors should be measured and analyzed, so that the content can be continuously improved.

Your company may have to invest in some “digital assets” such as a video camera or podcasting equipment in 2010, as now you can create and control your own media within the communities you are part of. Observe, research and listen carefully before you create your company’s social media strategy. Improve your social media marketing skills or find an expert to assist you. New Web-based applications to support social media marketing are developed and released all the time. Find someone who can evaluate these tools for you and make relevant suggestions.

How can a small business efficiently keep track of its goals, social media marketing efforts, measure related data and improve its marketing? The answer is in creating a marketing SYSTEM for your company. Re-evaluate your marketing strategies if you are not getting desired results. Work on a new marketing plan, document your efforts and create a marketing calendar.

Here’s how to get started:

• State your marketing goals for the year – describe how your company will reach these goals
• Know your ideal clients, their needs, wants and where to reach them
• Write or polish your core message to resonate with your target audience – test your message
• Develop educational marketing materials in formats that your ideal clients will appreciate
• Establish your lead generation strategy
• Develop and describe your education (sales) process
• Create a process for monitoring and evaluating your marketing efforts

Be consistent in your marketing activities; follow your system and your efforts will pay off.

About the Author

Varju Luceno is the owner of Global Office Partners – a marketing firm that focuses on the needs of professional service businesses. Varju is also a global marketer, blogger and writer on small-business and technology related topics, and a certified Duct Tape Marketing Coach. She earned her MBA in marketing from the University of Montana in Missoula.

Web: globalofficepartners.com
Blog: outsourcemiracle.com
Twitter.com/varjuluceno

By Fiona Friesen, president and founder of Glue

No matter what stage your business is at, you can benefit from a marketing kit. What’s a marketing kit, you ask? A portion of the Duct Tape Marketing system founded by John Jantsch, a marketing kit is the foundation of your corporate messaging. It’s a flexible and in-depth package consisting of separate pages of information that are interchangeable depending on your audience. You can pick and choose from your marketing kit to easily create all kinds of things your business needs, such as a website, brochures and direct mail pieces. Here are five ways your business can benefit from a marketing kit.

1) It keeps your marketing efforts consistent

A marketing kit is your one-stop-shop for content that will come in handy in your marketing strategy, such as FAQs, Remarkable Difference Summary, and Ideal Clients. Some of this information is for internal reference, while some is for the world at large. Whoever your audience, using information from a single source means that everything you create will carry the same tone and voice. This is ideal for building brand awareness and trust.

2) It tells customers why they need you

Each component of a marketing kit is directed sharply away from fluffy jargon and focuses only on facts that your client can really use. It tells them, quickly, that you know their frustrations and why they can trust you to help. Marketing kits also help you stand out from the crowd by showing your prospective clients that you’re a real person who loves what you’re doing. These are all factors that anyone would find appealing, especially prospects.

3) It keeps you on track

What’s your process? What’s your unique difference? A marketing kit can tell you. It contains everything your clients will want to know about your operations, your motivations and your results. Gone are the days of conflicting intentions and veering wildly off-course into bad marketing decisions. Knowing exactly what your business is all about will help you capture your unique positioning.

4) It keeps you flexible

A marketing kit comprises several pages of information that are separate from one another and usually printed on standard office printers. This makes it easy to update if things change, like you add a service or a customer gives you a testimonial. You can also mix and match the contents depending on which potential client will be receiving the information. This results in a perfectly customized package of information for each client, which is more than can be said for a generic brochure.

5) It saves you time

How much of your time is spent re-inventing the wheel when it comes to your marketing materials? With a marketing kit, everything you’ll need to follow up with a lead is right there. You no longer need to rewrite bios, search through files for case studies or ask past clients for testimonials – again. Simply refer to your marketing kit for all you need. Then, spend your saved time doing what you do best – making your clients happy!

Fiona Friesen is a certified Duct Tape Marketing Coach located in Calgary, AB, Canada. As president and founder of Glue, Fiona cares about client success – and it shows. She loves taking her clients’ marketing headaches away with a custom-tailored, systematic Duct Tape Marketing program. Her clients love their increased sales, higher productivity, and true customer connections.

By Joe Dager, Business901

Are your projects flowing smoothly? Are you assigning responsibilities, deadlines and tasks, but it is just a headache to keep up? A likely problem is that tasks are not getting handed off well or at the right time to others. Another problem may be that everyone’s priorities seem all mixed up, and one or two people or departments seem to be an enormous bottleneck. A project management system is not a cure-all, but it certainly is a start.

In marketing, I’m always amazed at the lack of formalized project management systems. Most marketers resist the idea, misunderstanding the role of detailed planning for marketing projects. They assume that the purpose of a detailed plan is the same as it would be for other repetitive activities like manufacturing. The purpose of a project plan in marketing is to coordinate many of the uncertain activities that happen. And possibly more importantly, a good project plan will coordinate the activities of your resource requirements. Not everything will be predictable, but if we can make even some of the unpredictable predictable, we will increase the likelihood of success.

Within a project plan, we can establish overall and individual process metrics. We will need metrics to produce information quickly. The value of these types of metrics is that they will allow you to take action during a project where and when you can still influence its success. Measurability is perhaps the most important feature of the project plan.

Project management covers all aspects of planning: coordinating activities and resources and forming a baseline from which to manage the project. This gives everyone involved the same reference point. Once a schedule is completed, it should be posted or made available to all stakeholders of the project. Constant updating should appear and be visible to all parties.

It is very easy for a team to want to jump straight in, generate a schedule and get on with the project. There is more to project planning than this. A project plan is an active document, and should be used to manage the process. A schedule is the translation of the project plan into individual tasks, identifying durations, responsibilities, start and finish dates, resources, flow and milestones.

Everyone knows we cannot do enough planning, but it’s the time factor that prevents us, right? How much time does it really take to plan? From my experience you should use a baseline of around 5% of your project’s time in planning. So if you have a project that will consume 400 hours, that would be 20 hours. Do you think that is unreasonable? Do you believe that a plan would produce fewer negative consequences, or less than 20 hours of non-productive, reactive activities, putting out fires?

Now, what happens if planning takes longer? You need to treat your planning process like any other process. Using a standard methodology, such as Lean Six Sigma and the toolset that it employs, will allow you the opportunity to get the most out of your planning cycle. It will improve your planning process, removing the waste that you have accumulated in it. I have found most companies actually enjoy planning, the collaboration and decision-making that take place during it. What everyone doesn’t like is the waste in planning, so get rid of it!

The first thing you can do is plan the planning process. Take 5% of your planning time to improve your planning. Set objectives, milestones, create key performance indicators and, most of all, create a standard work plan. After doing this a few times, planning will become very easy, intuitive and more productive. Consider that if you significantly improve your planning process, you will stop fighting such an uphill battle and create considerable down-flow opportunities of greater savings. Try it!

About the Author

Business901.com provides direction in areas such as Lean Six Sigma Marketing and the Duct Tape Marketing System. Business901 has designed their services and product offerings so that they are implementable systems that work in the real, not enough time, not enough people world we operate in. We provide tools that simplify the marketing process, not complicate it. Joe Dager, President of Business901, is a Duct Tape Marketing Certified Coach and a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt.

By Joe Constantino of Business Marketing Solutions

In my experience, one of the biggest mysteries surrounding marketing is the lack of understanding by many business owners about what marketing is actually supposed to do, or its purpose. I have been asked this purpose question so many times that I have actually devised a very simple test to determine if a business owner is utilizing their marketing efforts in the most productive way.

So, here’s the million-dollar question: what is the purpose of marketing?

Marketing’s purpose is actually three-fold.

The first purpose of marketing is to capture the attention of your target market. It’s impossible to market to anyone until you can get them to listen to your messages.

The second purpose is to give your target market the hope that, by reading or listening to your marketing piece, it will give them enough information to facilitate their making the best decision possible when buying whatever you sell.

The third purpose of marketing is to lower their risk in taking the next step in the buying process so that you can further educate the prospect about what you do.

So, did you pass the test?

If your marketing isn’t doing these three things, then you’re not getting all you should be from your marketing efforts. And you’re probably not turning as many prospects into customers as you should be.

It’s really pretty simple.

All you have to do, as the business owner, is figure out what is important to your prospects, educate them about what constitutes the best deal in your industry, show them quantifiable proof that you actually provide that best deal, in terms of price and value, and communicate to your target in a way that they will pay attention to you, believe you, and take action on your offers.

But, here’s the problem. Many companies don’t give the consumer what they want. Instead of using marketing as an educational tool to facilitate the decision-making process, build a case for why they should choose your company, and give the customer a low-risk offer, most companies create marketing messages that basically say “buy it from us for no good reason and now, or we don’t have anything for you.” That’s why your prospects resist your marketing efforts.

Here’s a simple method to improve your marketing:

Get attention – with benefit-promising headlines

Educate your customers and prospects with messages that show them what they need to know about your product or service and why you can deliver this better than anyone else in the industry.

Provide a low-risk way for them to try you with a free trial, 100% money-back guarantee, free whitepaper, etc.

By understanding and applying the three purposes of marketing, you will earn more customers and generate more revenue for your business.

About the Author…

Joe Costantino is owner of Business Marketing Success in Boston, a marketing company that helps professional service firms learn how to effectively market their businesses with a step-by-step marketing system. He is also a certified Duct Tape Marketing Coach and East Coast Regional Guide assisting in recruitment and training of new Duct Tape Marketing coaches. Joe also provides keynotes, seminars and workshops on a number of marketing topics. You can learn more about Joe at www.businessmarketingsuccess.com or by email at joe@businessmarketingsuccess.com

English has a certain something, a  je ne sais quoi, which makes it such a creative language for presenting your marketing message. It has a sponge-like ability to absorb and use words and phrases from other languages. And we quickly adopt these loan words into our daily usage, and adapt them to our advertising.

We regularly use nouns from other languages to improve the image of the same items in our product or services offerings. Pomme de terre frites, (or simply pomme frites) appears on fancy menus instead of French fries. Grande and Vente make our cappuccinos and caffè Americanos taste far better (and cost more) than simple big cups of coffee.

Atelier (a workshop or studio) is a popular addition to the store names of artists, or specialty shops or boutiques (to use one French word to describe another French word [wink]).

We use abbreviations such as R.S.V.P. instead of spelling out répondez s’il vous plaît, when please respond is just as succinct and stalwart.

When applying for a job we’ll prepare a summary of our accomplishments and call it a résumé, unless it is a job in academia, in which case that summary might be called curriculum vitae.

Our business plan financials are often labeled pro forma (in advance, or as a matter of form).

Your physician’s protégé may give you a pro bono prognosis and prescribe a placebo and wish you prosit. Geshundheit!

Can you tell the difference between ad lib., au-h2o, ca., circ., ebit, e.g., et al., etc., i.e., ibid., lsmft, v., vs., viz, v.s. or v.v.? Can you spell out all these abbreviations?

It is so easy for us to read over, past or through these foreign words that are emigrating into English. Many times we simply make a guess on the meaning, based on the context of the sentence, because we are too busy, or too lazy, to look them up. But then many of us compound the error. We incorporate them into our own marketing writing, advertising, and branding efforts, still without knowing what we are actually saying.

So, what can you do? Obviously the first thing to do is use your dictionary. There is the old standby, the printed book (our Documentation team has six different editions from different publishers). There are plenty of online dictionaries as well. Google or Yahoo! search and you get a plethora of links. Bookmark your favorites and return to them often.

There are a couple free translators on the Internet as well, such as SDL Free Translation.com and Babel Fish, though they don’t translate Latin.

And, here are two good reference books I’ll recommend to you.

Latin for the Illiterati: Exorcizing the Ghosts of a Dead Language by Jon R Stone. Over 5,000 entries of Latin words and phrases that turn up regularly in modern English.

Oxford Dictionary of Foreign Words and Phrases edited by Jennifer Speake. Covers 8,000 words and phrases from over 40 languages.

Give your marketing message that certain indefinable quality (je ne sais quoi ) of worldliness when you drop in phrases from other languages. No faux pas.

Steve Lange
Senior Editor
Palo Alto Software, Inc.

I’m coining a new marketing Web metric here—Pay-Per-Ignore.

Most of us have heard about, or use Pay-Per-Click, where we pay a search engine or affiliated website dollars and cents each time a potential customer clicks a link on their page which brings that customer to our website. It is a wide-spread practice, and can be a major part of a business’ marketing plan, marketing activities, and marketing expenses.

Pay-Per-Ignore is similar. In PPI your business spends money to get a potential customer to your website, and then you ignore that lead completely. Does that sound silly and foolish to you?

An example. A couple summers ago we were getting the family house in a Great Lakes state ready to sell. I live in Oregon, so I’d been using the faithful search engines to contact painters, realtors, estate sale agents, dumpster haulers…the works.

I found plenty of listings and associated Web pages. They had lots of pictures, good text, mission statements, service descriptions, and, very important for me, “For more info, contact…” links and some had built-in interactive email contact frames. But the results from my contacts were dismal!

I contacted three estate sale agents. One never responded — Ignored. A second sent me an email in a couple days, asking for more info, and then nothing — Ignored. The third emailed me right back and followed up with a phone call the next morning. Guess which one got our business?

I emailed two trash haulers about a dumpster. Neither responded — Ignored. One of two painters emailed me back. The other ignored me. The list goes on. Now, maybe these companies are in the enviable position of having so much business that they don’t need new customers, but I doubt it.

From my business viewpoint, this behavior seems like a unconscionable waste of time and money. From my viewpoint as the jilted customer I become annoyed, unsatisfied, exasperated, increasingly impatient, and left me with a very negative “I’ll never deal with those jerks” attitude.

The goal of your marketing efforts should be to introduce yourself to prospective customers, get them to know and trust you, and convert them from prospective leads to cash spending customers. You need a process for following up with each lead who asks for more information, who leaves their email address or phone number with your “Contact us” link. You need to connect promptly via a return email or phone call. This isn’t a cold call after all, the potential customer invited to contact them! They are asking you to convince them to give you their business.

So, ask yourself this: how much Internet marketing money are those businesses I mentioned above spending in Web design, hardware, infrastructure, search-engine optimization, etc., to attract me as a potential customer, only to ignore me? What is their Pay-Per-Ignore?

What do YOU spend on YOUR P-P-I?

Steve Lange
Palo Alto Software

by Cidnee Stephen of Strategies for Success www.strategiesforsuccess.ca

I love to write – creatively as well as for business. So last year I decided to take a course at a nearby college to learn how to hone this skill. I learned a very valuable lesson that REALLY should be the GOLDEN RULE for your marketing.

It’s always better to SHOW your audience than TELL them.

Speaking is a great way to do this, especially for those of you in service based businesses. Here are just a few of the key advantages of integrating this into your marketing:

• You have the opportunity to educate your target market in your area of expertise
• By demonstrating your expertise, you increase trust and credibility with attendees
• The content you create can be used in multiple other ways – articles, audio CD, teleseminar, webinar, report or book.
• You get to hone your public speaking skills and may find that you can even get paid to speak!
• Most importantly, you have the opportunity to attract more prospects to you and your business

Okay, so you know that speaking is for you. You do after all possess some public speaking ability. Maybe you have even done some talks already. If this is the case and you are finding that you STILL are not getting the leads you think you should, it could be because one or more of the following areas are not aligned.

• You are not presenting your subject in an appealing way or with a catchy title -Create at least 3 various topics to present. This allows the organizer to choose the one that is most appropriate for them. Research various topics that other speakers in your area of expertise use to give you inspiration in catchy titles and content.
• You are not attracting the RIGHT type of speaking engagements – Look for speaking engagements that have your qualified prospects in the audience. Don’t be afraid to ask about the audience or expected numbers. There is nothing worse than doing hours of preparation only to find a handful of people in the room when you are expecting 50!
• You are giving too little or too much away in your talk – you should be looking to explain why your topic is important to the attendee and what the key areas are they need to address. You are giving away too much if you start explaining HOW they address each area.
• You have no mechanisms in place to capture leads AFTER your talk – This is probably one of the biggest mistakes many speakers make. If you walk away after a talk HOPING that people will contact you, you are losing valuable control in your marketing system. Think of ways that you can contact them. Perhaps you can offer to send them the PowerPoint slides for your presentation or a special Trial of your product or services. By having a lead capture system in place you will be able to measure your results and implement a strong follow up campaign to move prospects closer to a sale.

How do you know you have been successful? That depends on your goals. I am looking to speak at least 20 times per year to an average audience of 50+ solopreneurs and business owners (so let me know if you are aware of such opportunities). At each event, I am looking to capture information on over 80% of them, and to close a minimum of $5000 in sales through each one (not on the day, but through my follow up campaign).

What are your goals? Remember, if you would like to build a system to reach those goals quicker, check out our Speak for Leads & Expertise Program.

About the Author
Cidnee Stephen is the owner of Strategies for Success – a marketing company that focuses on the needs of budget minded small businesses and professional services.  She has helped hundreds of small businesses get out of their peak and valley ruts to finally achieve that next vital level of success.  Cidnee is also a sought after speaker, writer and blogger on marketing topics that affect small businesses and B2B service based operations.

Purchase incentives are an every-day occurrence. We see them everywhere, from simple coupons to instant rebates to frequent flier miles.

Does your business offer a purchase incentive as a marketing tactic? How much good does it do for your business… really? Does your fulfillment deliver the goods?

I’m a geezer who remembers mailing in breakfast cereal box tops for plastic Moon Rocket kits. These were great marketing tools in the Sputnik age. However, sometimes those Moon Rockets never arrived. And boy, was I one angry little kid! I quit eating that brand of cereal… that showed them!

Incentive fulfillment is now an industry in its own right, with good and bad offers and good and bad businesses. We all know the good examples, such as the rebate checks that arrive in three weeks instead of eight weeks. They leave us with a good impression of the offering company.

When fulfillment is slipshod, or poorly delivered, or misrepresented it is the offering company that loses its good reputation, not the fulfillment company. For example, my wife recently decided to try out a different brand of home product because it offered a $15 rebate. However, when the rebate arrived, it was not a check but a voucher for credits at a third party redeem-for-product website. What the….!?!? Grrrrrrrr!

None of the products offered were of any interest to us so she passed the credits along to her sister. Unfortunately, the third party website company deducted credits for transfer, and deducted credits for checking the credit balance, etc., until there were not enough credits left to redeem a pack of facial tissues (to say nothing of the shipping and handling).

And who is getting the bad rap for this scam? Not the fulfillment company, not the people who sold this system, and not the third party website that we would never have visited (and never will again). Nope. All the frustration and ill will that was generated by this thoroughly unsatisfactory purchase incentive falls squarely on the product company. The incentive may have gotten them one sale from us, but they’ll not get another.

So this marketing tactic backfired. And any good impressions chalked up by other marketing expenditures by the product company were wiped clean off the board. Money wasted.

If you are going to offer a purchase incentive, decide if you really want to offer something of value, and whether your goal is to attract repeat customers instead of simply a bunch of one-time sales. Then, (I hope you are choosing the high ground) find a reputable fulfillment company with a good track record, and a commitment to serving you and your customers well.

Steve Lange
Palo Alto Software