Dominate Your Local Market!

I’ll be presenting at tomorrow’s Small Business Conference sponsored by the Danville/Boyle County Chamber of Commerce, along with the Mercer County and Lincoln County Chambers.

From 4:00-4:30 PM I’ll be talking about how you can best use the Internet to grow your local business. What used to be a simple choice – market online or not – has become an absolute “must do.”

80% of home sales start online and 61% of those using local search for other products and services eventually make purchases. That is because when someone searches online for a specific item, they are usually ready to buy. You need to be more visible than your competitors at that crucial moment. We’ll show you how.

The Small Business Conference will be held at the Bluegrass Community & Technical Center in Danville on Tuesday, June 30. The event will take place from noon until 7 p.m. and will include seminars on topics relevant to current and potential small business owners. Exhibitors providing information pertinent to small business owners will also be on hand from noon – 5 p.m. This event is open to anyone interested in owning their own business, as well as current businesses, and who wants the opportunity to network with organizations that can assist them with business issues.

Register for one – or all – of these seminars. The event is FREE. If you haven’t already, contact the Chamber at 859-236-2361 to register!

Back in the old days (you know, the late ’90s, early 2000s), all you had to do was put up a website, register it with Yahoo! and you were in business. Well, maybe it wasn’t quite that simple, but you get the idea.

Over the years maintaining an effective online marketing program has been become more and more complicated. And more and more rewarding as consumers switch their business searches online.

These days, even ordering a pizza can become an online experience. The lesson is that every year it becomes more important to have an effective online marketing strategy. And very soon, maybe as soon as the next year or so, it will be a “do-or-die” necessity for most busineses.

Can I market effectively online?

Yes, you can. The basic elements of an online marketing strategy remain fairly simple even as implementing one has gotten more complex. Let’s talk about how to create a solid online marketing plan without the sugar-coated marketing hype you hear so often.

The three-legged marketing plan.

To keep things as simple, cost-effective and as potentially successful as possible, we can compare your online marketing program to a tripod supporting a very valuable object – your business. With all three legs in place, your strategy is stable and offers a solid platform to build on. Remove one of the legs and the chances of success drop dramatically.

The first leg of this plan is set a solid foundation for the other two. One thing that hasn’t changed in all these years is that you MUST have a website. But not just ANY website.

Click to see Full-sized Image

The website is where you present your information in a way designed for visitors to find it easily. It must be simple to navigate and be easily expandable. Ideally changes can be made within minutes, not days or weeks… and this applies whether you take responsibility for your own updates or have your webmaster do it.

WordPress is the foundation to a successful online marketing plan

What makes WordPress such a powerful foundation to build your online marketing castle on? One factor is that right out of the box, with some simple changes to the default setup, WordPress is search-engine-friendly. Add a few plugins, configure them to maximize Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and you leap light years ahead of the competition in the race for better ranking on Google, Bing, Yahoo and others.

Another is the wide range of plugins and themes available to customize the look and function of your WordPress-powered website.

Navigation is simple, forthright and is produced automatically as content is added. Automatic archiving of older information by date and category and an effective built-in search capability keep your content readily available.

There are literally thousands of themes that you can download from the WordPress themes website or from commercial websites such as MightyTemplates.com (click on “WordPress Themes” in the left column).

Likewise, thousands of plugins downloadable from the WordPress Plugins repository make adding functionality to your site a breeze.

To make the use of WordPress even more appealing, WordPress and most of the themes and plugind developed for it are Open Source – free for you to use. But free doesn’t mean you are on your own when it comes to support. OrangeCat.com and many other companies offer support packages to suit your needs.

And you have the support of the entire world-wide WordPress community behind you.

So that’s the first of the three legs of your oline marketing plan. We’ll be discussing the other two and building on this information in the days ahead. Stay with us to learn more about how to assure your business’s future by mastering online marketing.

In fact, sign up to be notified when we post new information and you’ll never miss an important post.

At 12:01am today, Facebook began letting you select your own username. That means that you can now have your own name on Facebook like this:

http://www.Facebook.com/bobstovall

instead of those cryptic, long default Facebook URLs.

This makes it much easier for friends to find your Facebook page and is easier to remember for those you give it to.

Now, as you probably realize, many people have the same name on Facebook. And I’ve always recommended grabbing your own name as a domain name. I am just as enthusiastic about grabbing your own name on Facebook.

So if you want your name, you should go get it now.

Here’s how:

Log into Facebook, or click the link below and then login.

Then go to http://www.Facebook.com/username

Once you are there, it will suggest a variety of names. That doesn’t mean they are the only ones available, so click on the ‘more’ link and it will let you
select a different name. For example I picked bobstovall instead
of bob.stovall or bstovall, but you can pick any variation that’s available. There is a button to check availability of the name you choose.

Don’t hesitate of you could miss getting your own name. Go to:
http://www.Facebook.com/username
now and get your own name while you can.

Sometime on Tuesday, more than 15,000 Web sites connected to San Jose, Calif., based Triple Fiber Network (3FN.net) went dark. 3FN’s sites were disconnected after a Northern California district court judge approved an FTC request to have the company’s upstream Internet providers stop routing traffic for the provider.

Bob’s NOTE: If you’ve noticed a little less “spam” in your Inbox the past few days, this is why.

Read more »

The latest version of WordPress has been released and can be downloaded from WordPress.org. This version 2.8 (Baker) has many new features. To preview the features of WordPress 2.8, have a look at this video:

2.8 represents a nice fit and finish release for WordPress with improvements to themes, widgets, taxonomies, and overall speed. It also fixes over 790 bugs.

WordPress 2.8 has made administrative tasks simpler and has enhanced features to allow you to customize your admin interface to organize your work the way you want.

Beginning today, all WordPress installations performed by OrangeCat will be of version 2.8. If you do your own install and/or updates, be SURE to backup your database and files before upgrading and check for updates to your plugins.

by James McCarthy for OnlineOrganizing.com

Our goal is to succeed, to win business competitions in order to maximize our profits or expand our market “presence”, to produce successful new products or services, or to achieve personal goals. Success is defining the desired future and then creating that future. We succeed consistently by thinking and acting STRATEGICALLY. Strategy is all about minimizing risk while maximizing reward; or put another way, it is about making sure that the ODDS for success are stacked in your favor.

LOOKING AT THE BIG PICTURE

It is about achieving LONG-TERM success — not about winning a single account, having one single successful new product launch, or coming out on top in a single competition. Long-term success means taking advantage of opportunity after opportunity and distributing resources correctly to ensure continued success. Winning one account and going bankrupt thereafter is of no avail unless the single new account ensures permanent success — which it almost never does.

WHAT STRATEGY IS AND ISN’T

We sometimes think that strategy is a LUXURY, something to be done once every few years in order to have a “strategic plan.” Most people think that it is a process you must go through once a year, to produce a really big document; that few people will understand, and that will go on the shelf so you can get on with the real job of running your business. Nothing could be further from the truth. Strategy is the literal LIFEBLOOD of your business. Trying to do business in today’s environment without a strategy is like playing Russian roulette with your future.

BUILDING THE HABIT

Looking ahead is a DAILY requirement and probably the most important function of a leader, business owner, or individual entrepreneur, for it is strategy that allows your day-to-day activities to have any kind of payoff and to be worthwhile. Strategy is a necessity whether you are doing business in the traditional “brick and mortar” world, or in the digital world of the Internet. Many people believe that strategy is simply scaling up TACTICAL activity; more e-products, better blocking and tackling, more sales calls. Great strategy can succeed in the absence of great tactics, but great tactics, in the absence of even mediocre strategy, are unlikely to lead to victory.

INVOLVE EVERYONE

Strategy, then, is the number one RESPONSIBILITY of all business owners, leaders, and entrepreneurs, whether engaged in on-line or off-line businesses — if they fail to take their strategy responsibilities seriously, they are greatly diminishing their overall chances for success. Strategy, however, is not just of interest to business owners, but it is-or should be-of interest to everyone involved in the business, from employees, to affiliates to internal, or outsourced resources. To the extent that everyone knows the strategy and takes part in building it, each person is far more likely to make the right tactical decisions that arise on a daily — or more frequent — basis.

COMING IN FIRST

The business that makes strategic thinking and execution part and parcel of its daily existence is the company that is most likely to SUCCEED, even if doesn’t have the best product or service available.

Certified Professional Management Consultant Jim McCarthy currently works in Oceanside, CA with his wife, Career Consultant Barbara McCarthy.

Content provided by OnlineOrganizing.com — offering “a world of organizing solutions!” Visit www.onlineorganizing.com for organizing products, free tips, a speakers bureau, get a referral for a Professional Organizer near you, or get some help starting and running your own organizing business.

Direct response marketing and social networking were made for each other. An article in today’s New York Times looks at the ways small businesses are beginning to use social networking for their benefit.

From the article:

“By choice or necessity, successful small-business owners are earnest networkers, gladly shaking hands, handing out cards and attending local meetings to find and keep customers, solve problems, seek feedback or support and bolster their bottom lines.

“Now, the Internet is starting to upend those long-established methods; online networking on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and newer niche sites can be instantaneous and far-reaching.”

This article contains some great info for small businesses and entrepreneurs. You can read it in it’s entirety at the New York Times website.