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by Jennifer Laycock

The first ever Small Business Marketing Unleashed conference has come and gone and I’ve had a full week to unwind and decompress. When we first announced our conference last fall, I had more than one person drop me an email asking if I knew what I was getting us into. I didn’t, but I’m glad. If I had, we never would have done it. For those who joined us in Houston, thank you! It was a true pleasure getting to know you last week. For those who didn’t make it, read on for a recap of the show.

Environment Counts!

Robert, Rachel and I aren’t the typical corporate types. In fact, we’re not corporate at all. I’d rather speak in jeans than a suit and we’ve always tried to reflect our laid back attitudes on our site and in our marketing materials. That’s why Northwest Forest Conference Center was the perfect spot for our first conference. From the log cabins our staff stayed in to the saloon where we held our pre-show networking events to the now famous “Alamo” classroom, the entire conference took place in a relaxed, yet fun atmosphere that really played up the opportunity to network.

And networking there was! On Sunday night, we gathered in the “Settlement House” for a night of speed networking and a silent auction to benefit the Houston Youth Development Center. Our silent auction raised nearly $1500 for the local mentoring program and even the most anti-social of our crowd was sucked into the fun of speed networking. (In case you haven’t figured it out, speed networking involves everyone lining up at tables, chatting for three minutes, then moving down the row to the next person for another speedy chat.) This mixer, combined with the small size of the show made sure attendees knew a good percentage of the speakers and other attendees before the show even got started on Monday morning. The evening was sponsored by PopLabs and featured a great live performance by m0serious, A.K.A the SEO Rapper.

Monday

On Monday morning, everyone showed up bright and early to collect their conference bags and have some breakfast while we kicked things off with a group “keynote” to set the tone for the show. (Read the recap A Common Sense Approach to Small Business Marketing.) The conference bags (decorated with the ultra-cool marketing style of the good folks at Emma Email marketing) were packed full of fun and useful items from our conference sponsors and included both a workbook and a Lyris flash drive to help attendees build their marketing plans during and after the show. The workbooks were created to hold the worksheets our team had created for each session and the Flash drives held PDFs of the worksheets so attendees could print out as many extra copies as they liked once they got home.

Once we’d finished up the opening session, we split the show into two tracks. The first was focused on web sites and search marketing, the second was focused on social media and blogging. Every session on day one was live blogged, so if you’d like a recap of what you missed, here you go.

Track One:

Track Two:

Social Media Conversations
Building a Community
Blogging for Business
The Joy of Analytics

One thing I noticed during the day’s sessions was how often the Q&A turned to a conversation. Mack Collier’s excellent presentation gave way to a lively discussion that had Mack, speakers in the audience and attendees brainstorming together and sharing ideas on the best ways to approach various aspects of blogging. I saw the same type of thing happening in the other sessions I managed to sit in on. It even sparked a fierce debate on the Twitter back channel as attendees battled over which blogging platform reigned supreme.

By Monday night, we were all ready to unwind a little and to continue getting to know each other better. Will Scott of Search Influence sponsored our “Fiesta Unleashed” that night and drove in from New Orleans to make sure the margaritas were flowing, the fajita’s were sizzling and the maracas were shaking. Someone showed up with a large handful of straw sombrero’s and in a matter of moments they were all claimed. In fact, the networking this night was going so strong, I didn’t realize until I was going to bed that I never actually ate any dinner. I just kept wondering from table to table having new conversations and saying “ok, I need to go get some food” as I got up to leave.

We closed off the official fiesta festivities with a game of “Giant Memory” featuring giant pieces of foam board marked with our sponsor logos and teams of three going head to head. Matt Bailey emceed a lively contest that saw one player on the ground taking directions from their team mates up in the balcony and trying to remember where the matches were in a game of Memory the size of my living room. Winning teams took home some cool Puppy embroidered neoprene laptops sleeves and bragging rights until next year’s event.

Tuesday

Tuesday morning saw the entire team gathering once again in the Alamo for a welcome breakfast and a few words on local search from sponsors Superpages.com. That must have made for a great lead up to Matt McGee’s local search workshop because the attendees packed the house in his session that morning. The day was filled with quite a few intensive workshops, many of which were live blogged by our Search Engine Guide team.

Local Search Workshop
Usability and Conversion Workshop
Viral Marketing Workshop
Building a Community Workshop

The crew packed a hearty lunch on Tuesday after a short talk about the growing small business community on Ideablob by sponsor Advanta. They followed that up with one final workshop and then returned to the Alamo for yet another snack and a final farewell before heading out to catch cabs and shuttles back to the airport. Several of our speakers and a few attendees stuck around for an extra night and we all gathered back at the staff cabins for an Italian feast and a gab fest.

Overall, we had an absolute blast. Based on the feedback, others felt the same.

Want to Hear What Others Had to Say?

You’ll find coverage of the show all over the web.

Scott Allen of Hybrid6 wrote:

Overall, it was an incredible conference, and absolutely should be on your list of conferences to attend next year if you are a small business owner.

Jackie Baker of Site Logic Marketing said…

I came away from the conference with a head full of knowledge and a contact list full of friends and resources willing to share ideas and input. And a whole lot of new friends.

Jim Stowe of Strider SEO quipped…

It just doesn’t get much better than SEO in the Alamo.

Amber Watson-Tardiff from Mininno Law Office emailed to say:

I tweaked some of my PPC’s after taking the Paid Search Class, and surprisingly we set up two appointments this morning for large weddings next year. The class has now more than paid for itself.

And that’s just a sampling. You can check out the full cadre of posts over on Google Blog Search.

WebProNews also had live coverage from the show and has been posting interviews with many of our speakers and bloggers over the past week.

Well This Was Great, Let’s Do It Again Sometime!

When is the next Unleashed? That’s a good question. Our tiny little team worked our tails off putting this show together for you. As a writer at heart, it feels good to be home and writing again. That said, the show was so much fun and the reaction was so positive, we’re giving serious thought to fitting in another show before next spring’s repeat show in Houston.

Interested in coming? Drop me an email and let me know. Interested in sponsoring? Happy to talk to you about that too. (Sorry, don’t need any speaker pitches as I already know exactly who I’ll be asking.)

Want more from your web site?
Search Influence can help! Targeted Traffic. Increased Revenue. Results Guaranteed. Customized Internet Marketing you can afford.

Apr 28

Blended Search Results Change Searcher Behavior

in Search Engine Watch

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Search marketers received more evidence this week that universal or blended search results are changing searcher behavior. If you’re not yet optimizing your news, image, or video content, you need to start.

Apr 28

SearchCap: The Day In Search, April 28, 2008

What Yahoo’s New Minimum Bid Means to You

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Below is what happened in search today, as reported on
Search Engine Land and from other
places across the web

From Search Engine Land:

What Yahoo’s New Minimum Bid Means to You
Yahoo recently announced that they are moving away from a $0.10 fixed minimum CPC to a variable minimum bid. However, there are some differences in how Yahoo calculates minimum bids tcompared to AdWords. These differences are important to note as you switch between these PPC engines so that each…
Monday MicroHoo Silence, Google Confident About Regulators In Deal With Yahoo
It’s Monday morning and there are no official statements from either Microsoft or Yahoo on the passage of the Microsoft-imposed three week deadline to respond to its takeover offer. (The deadline passed on Saturday.) The Wall Street Journal has a quick assessment of where things stand. Silicon Alley Insider also…
SMX Advanced: Looking For Pitches & Register Soon!
Double-duty with this post about our SMX Advanced search marketing conference happening June 3 & 4 in Seattle. First, some of our session coordinators are still looking for some good pitches. Second — with more than half our tickets sold, consider this early warning that if you don’t register soon,…
WWW2008: Search Research Paper Roundup
A variety of interesting research papers on search have come out of WWW2008, the 17th International World Wide Web Conference. Some I’ve blogged already. Below is a rundown on those and some other papers that may be of interest. For the attention-challenged, I’ve also included my now patented "Twitter"…
US Court Orders Advertiser To Use Negative Keywords In Trademark Case
Eric Goldman reports that a US District Judge in Florida ordered an advertiser using a trademark term to use the negative keyword option, to ensure that they would no longer bid on that term in the future. The judge ordered the defendant to stop using the word “ORION” in their…
Google AdSense Ads May Become More Behaviorally Targeted
Bill Slawski analyzed a newly published patent application by Google named Rendering Advertisements with Documents Having One or More Topics Using User Topic Interest Information. In short, the patent application documents methods Google can use to make Google’s contextual ads, AdSense, more behaviorally relevant to the user based on Google…
Sitelinks On A Google Minus 60 Result: What Does It Mean?
Last week, I covered an interesting observation at a Google Groups thread, where some individuals noticed Google Sitelinks showing up for a site in the 60th position. At the end of the thread, I noted that Googler, JohnMu, told the webmaster that he may want to join the -60 penalty…
Google Product Search Gets More Useful
I’ve personally never found Google Product search all that useful, but hopefully that will change now. Google Operating System reports that Google Product Search has undergone a redesign, of some sort. In the past, Google Product Search just showed you results but did not group stores offering to sell the…
Microsoft Paper: Improving Search Results By Mining Web Surfing Activity
A new research paper from Microsoft looks at how surfing behavior — as logged by a search toolbar — can be used to improve search results….
Yahoo Paper: Finding The Local “Center” Of Search Queries
A new research paper from Yahoo and Cornell University — with search legend Jon Kleinberg as one of the coauthors — provides a fascinating look at how a search query such as "red sox" or "hurricane deal" can be centered around a physical location — including one that changes…
Google Paper: Better Image Search Though VisualRank / Image Rank
A Google Prototype for a Precision Image Search from the New York Times covers a new research paper (PDF format) from Google that about a way of ranking images based on analyzing "visual links" between them….
SMX Social: Just What Did Calacanis Say About SEO & More Recaps
At our SMX Social Media Marketing conference this week, we had a great panel on the future of human powered search. Jason Calacanis of Mahalo, Jimmy Wales of Wikia Search, and Steven Marder of Eurekster all took part. Jason had some remarks on SEO that set off the usual wave…
Stay Tuned: Will Microsoft Sweeten The Deal?
The NY Post is reporting that despite public statements from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and CFO Chris Liddell that the offer on the table is final and that Microsoft might “walk away” from Yahoo, there may in fact be a new and improved offer to Jerry Yang and his fellow…

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

Google Docs Updates: CSS Editing, Saved Searches and More, Google Blogoscoped
Introducing Speaker notes and YouTube videos, Official Google Docs Blog
View your presentations and spreadsheets offline, too, Official Google Docs Blog
Yahoo site suffers stock-ticker display glitch, News.com
More Synergy Between Google’s Communication Services, Google Operating System

Business Issues

Google Hiring Freeze? , Silicon Alley Insider
Yahoo sees $29M in charges related to workforce reductions - Forbes.com, Forbes
Diller, IAC/Interactivecorp board to meet over breakup, report says, MarketWatch
Yahoo Japan Drops Most in 2 Years on Profit Miss , Bloomberg

Local, Maps & Mobile

The Real Threat to Google, BusinessWeek

Link Building

What To Do When You Run Out of Link Building Ideas, Bob Massa
Are Links from StumbleUpon Valuable?, Search Engine Roundtable
Creating a natural link profile for your site, Jennifer Slegg

Paid Search & Contextual

Ask PPC Hero! Is Bidding On Your Competitor’s Trademark Terms Legal?, PPC Hero
Paid Search Metrics That Every Marketer Needs to Know, Justin Davy
How High is Your Bounce Rate?, Traffick
Which Day Do You Make Most Your Google AdSense Income?, Search Engine Roundtable

Searching

Yahoo Answers: 11 Million Answers per Month, Small Business SEM
With Nile Guide, You Can Whittle Down Your Travel Options, TechCrunch
ZoomProspector Search Engine for Businesses, altsearchengines.com

SEM Industry

5 Years, Google Blogoscoped
SMX Social Media 2008 Recap, Wolf Howl
The Secret: SEM Sued for Trademark Violations and Breach of Fiduciary Duty, SEOmoz

SEO & SEM

Does Size Matter regarding an H1 tag?, Shimon Sandler
Measuring SEO Success: Solve Personalized Search Misperceptions, AIM Clear Blog
Focus on Ranking Improvement, Not Domination, Search Engine Guide
Get Your Search Marketing Resume Indexed By A Recruiter, Search Engine Journal
More Webmasters Report Google Sitelinks, Few Problems Arise, Search Engine Roundtable
Top 7 CSS Tricks for Better SEO, SEO 2.0

Social Media

Facebook Demotes News Feed Preferences, Inside Facebook
Twitter gets another round of funding, News.com
Twitter Twerp Scan - block Twitter spammers, Download Squad
Early Stats Show Twitter Taking Off in Japan, Read/Write Web
How to Analyze your Site with Del.icio.us, Search Engine Journal
How to Twitter an Event, Marketers Studio
Morgan Stanley’s March Internet Trends Report: Social Applications Dominating, TechCrunch
Privacy Feature Update, Orkut Blog

Video, Music & Image Search

Introducing TV view, Official Google Video Blog

Other Items

Google Annoyances, Google Operating System

Recent Hot Items From Sphinn, Our Social News Sharing Site:

Apr 28

Comments Off

Yahoo recently announced
that they are moving away from a $0.10 fixed minimum CPC to a variable minimum
bid. However, there are some differences in how Yahoo calculates minimum bids
tcompared to AdWords. These differences are important to note as you switch between these PPC engines so that each account is properly optimized for each engine according to how the bids are calculated.

What Yahoo’s New Minimum Bid Means to You

Apr 28

Comments Off

Yahoo recently announced
that they are moving away from a $0.10 fixed minimum CPC to a variable minimum
bid. However, there are some differences in how Yahoo calculates minimum bids
tcompared to AdWords. These differences are important to note as you switch between these PPC engines so that each account is properly optimized for each engine according to how the bids are calculated.

Focus on Ranking Improvement, Not Domination

Apr 28

Monday MicroHoo Silence, Google Confident About Regulators In Deal With Yahoo

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by Jennifer Laycock

Last week at the Small Business Marketing Unleashed conference, small business owners (and a handful of marketers) came from around the world (literally) to learn more about marketing themselves online. We decided to open the show with a tag-team panel approach aimed at helping attendees go into the show sessions with the right perspective. Search engine marketing, blogging and social media are wonderful; but if you’re a small business doing it all yourself, you need to approach things from a unique angle.

Based on all of the search marketing and social media marketing blogs out there, it would be easy to come to the conclusion that everyone and their brother is spending every waking hour working on ways to improve their rankings and their social media presence. It’s true that some businesses, even of the small variety, are spending an inordinate amount of time working on their search marketing and social media marketing approaches. That doesn’t mean you have to, though.

One of the things we aimed to get across to attendees during that opening session was the need to balance the time you spend marketing with the time you spend building your business. It’s easy to get caught up in the fun of Twittering or the conversation on a blog and forget about the need to write payroll checks. We’ve all heard the phrase “The cobbler’s children have no shoes,” but in the world of online marketing there’s also the risk that the cobbler’s store will have no shoes. Why? Because he’s too busy building out his Facebook page.

With that in mind, I want to highlight two of the points we made during that session.

Realistic Expectations of Success

In my own opener, I gave a brief explanation of The Pinocchio Effect to attendees.

You see, deep down, search engines want nothing more than to be real boys (or girls). That’s right, it’s that simple. As search engine engineers gain more and more ability to tailor the algorithms, their ultimate goal is to help the search engines make choices the way that people do.

I explained that while algorithm chasing is certainly possible (the industry does it all the time) it’s not the best use of your time if you have a business to run. Since search algorithms are always moving toward replicating human judgement, it’s enough for most small businesses to simply focus on delivering the best content and experience for their users. As long as they build search friendly sites, rankings tend to follow.

That’s oversimplifying it a little bit, but overall it’s a better idea for small businesses to learn the basics of SEO and to learn how to get involved in the conversation of social media than it is for them to obsess about innovative new marketing campaigns. That’s where I gave attendees the same advice I gave the industry several years ago; stop obsessing about rankings.

Imagine, for a moment, that other marketing industries had set themselves up with similar expectations. That email marketers were considered unsuccessful if you didn’t make the top ten list in terms of visitors to your site, that public relations professionals were a failure if you weren’t one of the top ten stories of the year, that television commercials were a failure unless they resulted in more store visits than all but ten other companies in their industry. Starting to sound a little silly?

Of course it does! Marketing is about finding new and innovative ways to present a product so that it drives purchases. It’s as simple as that. Commercial marketers work to capture an audiences’ attention in a way that keeps a company top of mind when the need arises for their product. Direct mail advertisers seek to capture a potential customer’s interest with a compelling enough offer to create a sale or at least an inquiry. In the world of traditional marketing, results are measured by ROI, not by some arbitrary “top ten” achievement.

My reminder (and my words of encouragement) to our attendees was of the need to focus on results. Rankings, are not results. Rankings are “achievements.” Results are what shows up in your bottom line at the end of the month. If you don’t have top rankings, but you have more search traffic and more sales than you did the month before, you’re in a great place.

Tinkering Verses Fine Tuning

The other point made that morning that bears repeating in this article was Matt Bailey’s analogy of online marketing and working on cars. Matt explained how much he enjoyed working on his vintage VW Bug. A little tinkering here, a little clanking there and eventually, he might get the engine going. In Matt’s mind, small business DIY marketing is a lot like working on his vintage Bug. Many specialty search marketing blogs and many of the top conferences are not designed for this type of “tinkering.” According to Matt, these kind of shows at designed for NASCAR pit crews.

Small business web sites tend to need “big, clunky changes” like writing unique title tags, or making sure you have the right redirects in place to keep both the www and non www version of your domain from showing up in the search engines. Large sites that have teams of search marketers working on them deal with high-performance tactics like Page Rank sculpting and multivariate landing page testing . Matt likened this level of SEM focus to NASCAR teams shaving millimeters off of cars to make them more aerodynamic.

While those millimeters will certainly speed things up, they’re just not necessary for his VW Bug. In fact, if Matt spent the amount of time and effort on his VW that NASCAR crews spend on their cars, he’d never have time to take it for a drive and enjoy his hard work. Small business owners have to walk the fine line between knowing how to make the car run well and still having time to drive it places. Your average small business owner doesn’t really need to worry about PageRank funneling or multivariate testing; they need to know about things like title tags, keyword selection, blog strategies and how to set up Google Alerts to watch for social media chatter.

Learn, but Don’t Obsess

While we did spend two full days packing our attendees brains with as much information as we could, the focus was on teaching them the tactics and techniques that could be realistically implemented. In fact, at the last minute I renamed my Social Media Marketing talk “Social Media Conversations” because I realized it would be better to give them a true overview of their social media conversational options and to pair it with some advice on how to listen to the conversation and respond to it. Most small businesses don’t NEED to dream up complicated social media marketing techniques. They simply need to leverage those networks to gain feedback, respond to customers and build up contacts. As they experiment and learn, they’ll gain the experience needed to take things to the next level.

Really, that’s how small business should approach all of online marketing. Learn the basics, experiment, get practice tracking the results and move on up from there. Start working on your site with a lug wrench and a floor jack, not a computerized diagnostic system and a lift.

Want more from your web site?
Search Influence can help! Targeted Traffic. Increased Revenue. Results Guaranteed. Customized Internet Marketing you can afford.

Apr 28

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It’s Monday morning and there are no official statements from either Microsoft or Yahoo on the passage of the Microsoft-imposed three week deadline to respond to its takeover offer. (The deadline passed on Saturday.) The Wall Street Journal has a quick assessment of where things stand. Silicon Alley Insider also posts (picking up on an item from AllThingsD) the argument that senior execs within Yahoo want the sale to happen and fear the stock crashing otherwise.

But most interesting this morning is Marc Andreessen’s post about hypothetical hostile takeover scenarios. It’s quite detailed and based on interviews with attorneys familiar with how these situations play out.

Monday MicroHoo Silence, Google Confident About Regulators In Deal With Yahoo

Apr 28

Comments Off

It’s Monday morning and there are no official statements from either Microsoft or Yahoo on the passage of the Microsoft-imposed three week deadline to respond to its takeover offer. (The deadline passed on Saturday.) The Wall Street Journal has a quick assessment of where things stand. Silicon Alley Insider also posts (picking up on an item from AllThingsD) the argument that senior execs within Yahoo want the sale to happen and fear the stock crashing otherwise.

But most interesting this morning is Marc Andreessen’s post about hypothetical hostile takeover scenarios. It’s quite detailed and based on interviews with attorneys familiar with how these situations play out.

5 Tips for Captivating Lists

Apr 28

5 Tips for Captivating Lists

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by Manoj Jasra

If you ever look on social media sites such as Digg, Delicious or Sphinn you’ll notice that many of the most popular items that get submitted are lists. People seem to really appreciate the simplicity of lists and also have an easier time going throw their content, hence their immense popularity. In fact, I would have to say that 80% of my most popular articles on Sphinn have been lists. But what makes a good list? Below I have suggested 5 ways in which you can create a strong list which will provide added potential to get Sphunn or Dugg:

Subject is Key: You can’t simply create a popular list out any subject, for example, who would want to read the top 50 types of door knobs? Pick topics that will help people in their research, are “hot” in your industry and that are easy to relate to.
How Many Items? Should you go top 5, 10 or top 100? I suggest you mix it up a little, if you’re going to do 100 items in your list make sure you can keep your readers engaged for that long. If you’re doing 3 or 5 make sure there is enough “meat” in your content.
External Links: I find that if you link out to other websites within your list there is a better chance for your list to grow in popularity. The owner of the site you linked to will recognize the incoming link and potentially spread the word for you as well.
Always Nice to Share: If you think you’ve outdone yourself with a great list then be sure to pass it around with to your colleagues as well as some notorious bloggers in your industry. Getting a prominent Sphinn or Digg user to vote for your story always helps too.
Ever try Video? Lists are not only meant to be done in text so I suggest you add some flavor into your routine by putting out a list using video. Video is different, fun and allows you to share the inner actor in you.

Want more from your web site?
Search Influence can help! Targeted Traffic. Increased Revenue. Results Guaranteed. Customized Internet Marketing you can afford.

Apr 28