I think people get this from their years in the workforce. When you got a performance review, your boss would usually talk about ways to improve performance, and a lot of times it involved getting a certification, learning a new skill or software, cross-training in another department, etc.

You know what though? If you are a business professional and have some level of expertise, you know more than a lot of people out there! There is someone who would love to know what you know, and in that way, you offer value to them.

Now, I’m not saying that additional training is important. But I think a lot of entrepreneurs use the excuse of wanting to get more training/skill/knowledge/another certification as a way to avoid taking that next big step, stepping up, and really marketing their business and seeing the success they deserve.

“Marketing is more important than mastery”.
-Ali Brown

Marketing is THAT important. And if you’ve been holding back until you get that next level of education, I challenge you to STOP! It might take a major shift in the way you’re currently thinking about your business, but think about it this way: it doesn’t matter how much you know, if nobody knows about you, you’ll be out of business before you know it.

How can you best showcase the expertise you already have?

A quick, easy and low-cost way to get started showcasing that expertise is online marketing. You could write a series of articles on a topic that a lot of people have questions on, or a How-To series. Share little mini-tips regularly on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Use some of this content, and create short videos that you put on YouTube. Fill your blog with all of these different pieces, and you might just be amazed at your own expertise!

Not only does this increase your visibility and get you out of your own head, it helps you get more clients through the Know Like and Trust factor. People will see your expertise, they’ll get to know you, and they begin to trust you. And that is an awesome way to start a new client relationship.

If you’re ready to embrace your current expertise and start marketing yourself online, there are lots of articles here on my blog, and online, to get you started. But if you’d rather have a system to work from to help you generate expert content and increase your visibility, take a look at my Social Media Content Creation Kit. It’s a step-by-step system for quickly creating lots of content for your blog and social media. It lays out a simple strategy for creating a content calendar, generating original ideas for your own content, and quickly distributing it across the web, so you build up the expert presence online that you deserve!

Register Your FREE Seat on this Teleseminar NOW!
Tuesday, August 10th at 3pm EST

Can’t make the call live? No worries! Be sure to register, and we’ll send you a copy of the recording.

Hopefully, you’ve taken the time to go through and do that. Not only is it just good practice to look through your site every so often, it may remind you of things you started, but didn’t finish, or ideas you had that are primed for execution now!

Item 2:

Go, right now, and take a look at the analytics or stats for your website and blog. And if you don’t have some sort of analytics set up, we need to fix that.   Pronto!    Please!!

Look closely at what your highest sources of traffic are.  Can you do more with them? For example, if you are getting a high number of visitors from Twitter, maybe you could spend some more time there, and phase out another site that isn’t even showing on your traffic sources right now.

Or, if you’re getting a lot of traffic from a few articles you submitted months ago, maybe now is the time to put a specific article marketing strategy into place, and generate lots more traffic through the regular submission of fresh articles.

Or maybe, you’re getting traffic from a collection of websites and blogs of people you know, work with, or that are affiliates of yours. This is a great one, because it’s quick and easy to deepen the relationship, and generate more traffic from the same sites. You can do this through regularly commenting on their blogs, starting conversations with them in social media, becoming a guest contributor to their blog (you already know their audience is interested in your content!), or simply asking them! A quick email is a great ice-breaker. All you need to say is that you’ve noticed a lot of traffic coming through from their site, and you wanted to thank them for it. You can offer to guest post for them, or suggest that there may be the potential for a Joint Venture between the two of you. And if they’re affiliates of yours already, just ask them what they would like in order to promote you better, and earn more commissions.

Finally, once you know where the highest sources of traffic are, take a good hard look at where you’re spending your time. If you spend hours every week writing articles, but don’t see article directories as a major traffic source, maybe that time would be better spent somewhere else.  This isn’t about creating more tasks for you to do (because almost all of them will probably offer some value to you), it’s about knowing where the biggest return on your time investment is, and focusing your efforts there.

This is it, only mine is white!

This past weekend, I got super excited when I happened to find the absolutely perfect kitchen “island cart” at one of my favorite stores. My kitchen is on the smaller side, and we don’t have a ton of cabinet space, so I’ve been looking for “just the right” piece of furniture for my kitchen for a long time. So when I found one that was just perfect, you know I snatched it up and raced home with it! I then spent a good portion of my weekend (which was rainy and cold, by the way – spring has left Michigan for the moment!) completely reorganizing my kitchen.

While I didn’t see this particular episode as spring cleaning (it was more excitement!), I think that spring still gets a lot of us in a mood to clean things up and refresh our surroundings.

And if now is a good time to get rid of old winter clothes that no longer fit, it’s also a great time to freshen up your website, your online presence and your marketing.

Just like clothes in your closet, there are probably tasks in your marketing plan that no longer fit and serve your business. And at the same time, there might be a buried treasure hiding under all the junk – something you’ve forgotten about or didn’t know you had in the first place!

You may be spending lots of time on a social networking site that no longer has the audience you’re wanting to connect with. Or maybe your business has evolved, and you’re still getting traffic to your website, but have never checked to see where it’s coming from. And if you don’t know where you’re getting interested visitors from, how in the world can you go out and get more?

So here is a little Spring Cleaning Challenge for you:

Item 1:

Go through your website carefully, and make sure it’s up to date. While things like copyrights, email addresses and phone numbers may seem obvious (and please get at least those right!), look at things like

• Is your pricing current?
• Do you have events listed that are way old?
• For those events that are over, do you have recordings? If so, are they available? If not, now’s a great time to make those available for download – either free or paid. Look, we just created a fresh new freebie or product!
• Do your newsletter/autoresponder signups and website contact forms work?
• Is your bio current? Check your website, as well as your social media profiles, article directory sites, and anywhere else you have yourself listed.

On Monday, I’ll give you part 2. But over the weekend, take a look at your website and get that current!

Web Search Strategies in Plain English

RSS In Plain English

What is a Browser?

As a Web Intern, you will participate in a variety of marketing projects in a creative and self-driven environment. Working directly with the marketing team the intern will be given a unique opportunity to learn hands-on transferable skills within a diverse array of website, marketing and sales disciplines.

List of Duties:

1. Write/ prepare/ distribute press releases, articles and marketing pieces including blog posts.

2. Implementation of Social Media Marketing (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube) and Search Engine Optimization.

3. Making minor edits to websites and blogs (HTML/CSS skills appreciated, but not required).

4. Building relationships with prospective clients and generating leads for “free consultations” which will require your marketing expertise. You will be driving marketing and new business for the company, and will have the chance to participate in the launching of a new product/branch of the company.

The benefits of this position are:
-Chance to earn income during unpaid internship through lead generation and sales activities. Commission is 15% of new client service packages.
-Resume builder: You will be able show success through the process of creating and implementing a marketing plan, and increasing business sales.
-Potential future career opportunities, either part-time while in school, or full-time.
-Flexible hours: You will have a hand in making your own schedule. The work week would be 10 – 20 hours per week
-Credits, at some schools.

Schedule: 10 – 20 hours per week.

Feel free to explore this site – it gives you a very good sense of the types of services we provide to our clients, and the types of skills we’d really like to see in our intern. If you feel you are, or could be, a very good fit (i.e. savvy with the internet and social media, understand the development and implementation of a marketing plan, and will be passionate about the power of online marketing while speaking with potential leads on the phone), we’d love to hear from you! Please email careers@marketinggeeksintl.com with your school and career experience, and reasons for wanting this internship opportunity.

Permalinks are the way Wordpress displays the url for your posts and pages.

Here are some examples of different formats that Wordpress offers:

Default - http://marketinggeeksinc.com/?p=123
Day & Name – http://marketinggeeksinc.com/2010/01/10/sample-post/
Numeric – http://marketinggeeksinc.com/archives/123

Or, you can use a Custom structure – http://www.marketinggeeksinc.com/how-to-set-up-wordpress-permalinks

In my opinion, the last one is the best format to have your permalinks in for 3 reasons:

1. It’s friendly on the eyes and easier for other people to link back to you
2. It usually keeps them shorter than some of the other Wordpress permalink options (day & name can get really long)
3. It’s best for SEO – it uses keywords in your url, and keeps those keywords as close to the beginning of the link as possible, which can be a factor for SEO as well

So if you’re starting from scratch (or don’t have many incoming links), you’ll definitely want to check your Permalink settings. But what do you do if you already have an established blog? You can’t just go in and change them and leave it at that, because any incoming links you already have will stop working.

To get around this problem, you will first need to install the Redirection plugin.  Once it’s installed, go to Manage –> Redirection –> Options, and make sure both that URL Monitoring boxes are set to “Modified posts”. Now you can change those permalinks to SEO-friendly permalinks without having to worry about the search engine consequences. Now you’ll want to change your Permalink structure. Go to Settings –> Permalinks. Select the Custom structure, and enter /%postname%/

One last thing you can do to your permalinks to increase your WordPress SEO is install the SEO Slugs plugin. This will automatically remove stop words (words like and, to, from, if, etc.) from your slugs once you save a post, so you won’t get those ugly long URL’s when you do a sentence style post title. It also helps keep your most important keywords (which should be in your title) towards the front. And since they give you no SEO benefit anyway, you might as well take them out and give that SEO priority to your good keywords!

One thing clients often say is “How can I be sure my list is targeted? I can’t control who signs up!”

So before we get into the ways to integrate your list building efforts, here are a few tips to ensure that all those new signups are really targeted to what you offer:

- First and foremost, do you have a freebie? If not, you should! That is, by far, the easiest way to get people to actually sign up. Most people do NOT want any more emails in their inbox than absolutely necessary, and generally won’t sign up to get a newsletter if there’s not anything else in it for them. So create a freebie that hits a nerve for them, and makes them “gotta have it”. You can get ideas from questions that clients ask you over and over again, or by polling clients or even your network on Facebook and Twitter to find out what their burning questions are.

-Use language that excludes people that aren’t right for you. So if you’re a coach for single parents, mention single parents in your freebie title. As an example, my freebie is “11 Easy & Effective Steps to Creating a Search Engine and Social Media Friendly Business Blog“. If someone stumbles across my website, but doesn’t have a business blog, or they don’t care about search engine and social media traffic, that freebie won’t speak to them. They won’t care about that info, and so they won’t signup. This ensures that the people that sign up want the kind of expert advice that you’re providing.

Take a good hard look at your current freebie or newsletter signup. Is it speaking right to your ideal clients? Is it compelling – something that will help them solve a problem they’re currently having?

You may decide it’s time to change things up a bit, and now’s the time to do it!

Once you’re confident that what you’re offering speaks right to your ideal client, here are the 4 Easy Ways to Integrate List Building Into Your Current Online Marketing:

1. Your Website or Blog – this may seem basic, but do you have your freebie and signup displayed prominently on your site? All to often I see clients wondering why nobody is signing up for their list, but when I check out their site, it’s very hard to find their signup. It’s at the bottom of the page, or on one page but not another. You want to display your freebie & signup consistently on every page, as close to the top as you can get it. Ask a friend or family member to sign up for your newsletter, and you’ll get a much more honest picture of how easy-to-spot and compelling your offer is. If the text blends into the rest of the page, or the page is too busy, you might consider having an ebook cover designed – this gives more pizzazz to your offer, and also increases the perceived value.

2. Your Resource Box on Article Directories – are you using article marketing for your business? If so, do you mention your freebie (with a link to sign up) in your Resource Box? Why not? That is a great place to encourage signups. They’ve read your article and hopefully have found it of value, but they’re not on your site! If they leave now, they won’t have any idea that you offer a great freebie related to that exact topic!

3. Your Social Media Profiles – if you’re active on social media, you probably have your website listed. Hopefully, you have a well crafted business description that speaks to your ideal client, and tells them exactly how you can help them. But did you know that you can actually provide a way for them to sign up right from within Facebook? You can use the Profile HTML app or the Static FBML app to display html code right on the sidebar of your personal profile or on your Fan Page.

On Twitter you can have a custom Twitter background created that gives visitors more info about you, and directs them where to go to sign up for your freebie.

On your YouTube videos, add the signup link to the description box, or use the annotation feature to add the web address right onto the video itself.

If you’re already using social media regularly, then let it work double-time and help you with your list building efforts!

4. Your Offline Marketing Materials – just because list building is thought of as an online tool, there’s no reason you can’t promote your freebie on all your offline marketing materials as well! Create a short, compelling description of your freebie, and add that to your business cards, postcards, invoices, proposals, or any other offline correspondance. This will give you leverage to build your list with people that may not be as active online, but are still a good fit for you.

The GetSocial plugin does the job of 3 plugins I used to use -

• adds the TweetMeMe retweet button (which encourages people to retweet your blog post)
• adds the Facebook share button (which makes it easy for people to share your post to their Facebook wall)
• adds a Google Buzz button (so users of Google Buzz can easily “buzz” your post)
• plus it adds a StumbleUpon button (to encourage visitors to stumble your post)

And it does it all in one simple, floating GetSocial box.

To install the GetSocial plugin, just visit your Plugins menu, do a search for “GetSocial”, and click Install. From there, just go to Settings –> GetSocial to add your Twitter username. If you find that you don’t like where the button is located on your site, you can also control positioning from this screen as well.

Now that your site is set up for maximum Search Engine-findability and Social Media-sharability, it’s up to you to create great content that your visitors and the search engines will love! If content creation is something you really struggle with, feel free to check out my Social Media Content Creation Kit.

You may not know it, but in Wordpress, you can actually tell the search engines NOT to visit or index your site. I guess this is for people that want to do a private blog. Many people aren’t aware of this because it’s something they would never think of – “Why wouldn’t I want the search engines to find my site??”

But unfortunately, certain web hosting companies that offer Fantastico or a one-click Wordpress install occasionally set the built in default to keep your site private. BAD! This means you are telling the search engines that you don’t want them to go through your site or put it in the search engine results.

To check this on your site, login to your Dashboard, and go to Settings –> Privacy.

It should be set to:
“I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers”

If it’s not, change it! This should immediately help you start to see more traffic. If it’s correct, good!

As I said, today’s tip may not be necessary for you, but if you have it wrong, you’ll definitely see improvements just with that one simple change.