Internet Marketing For Small Business

I’m attending Podcamp Toronto this weekend and the first day has proven to be a blast as well as a gold mine for great ideas and information. I have gotten loads of really hot tips and advice from each session I’ve attended, and so have decided to share some of the best ones here.

If you don’t know what a Podcamp is, it’s a BarCamp style meetup for podcasters and listeners, bloggers and readers, and web types. What’s barcamp you ask? Well, as explained on the Official BarCamp web site, it’s an

“ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment…with discussions, demos, and interaction from participants. The name BarCamp was inspired as a complement to FooCamp…“

And so the Camp phenomenon goes. And grows. There are even CaseCamp’s for marketing case studies.

Podcamps have been hosted in seven cities so far, and this is Toronto’s and Canada’s first. The presenters are generous and have come in from places like Boston, Indianna and Montreal. The atmosphere is friendly and warm. And to make it all just perfect, registration, coffee, donuts and even lunch – are all free.

And so, onward to the Top Tips.

Numbers 1-3 are from the session “Giving Your Podcast A Google Presence” with Julien Smith of In Over Your Head.

1. You need to use text to speak to Google.

That’s the language Google speaks, and so you will need to deploy it to get a good Google ranking. Your page title is most important for SEO. Make sure you choose your page title wisely and compose it so that your most important keywords come first – Google has a tendency to cap the amount of words in a title that they will index.

2. Use the free SEO for Firefox plugin.

Once installed, the SEO for Firefox plugin allows you to check up on other people’s web sites so you can do a little snooping about their rankings. Just surf to a competitor’s page, right click on it, and you can choose “Highlight Keyword”, then type in a keyword to see everywhere it appears. Or choose “Keyword Density” to view and assess why other people are ranking higher than you.

3. Giving things away for free can drive people to your web site

Wonder why giving things away for free can be good for business? Because everyone starts talking about you and your product and linking to your site from their blogs or sites. For example, Aaron Wall created this SEO plugin, and if you go to Alexa.com and type in his site’s URL, www.seobook.com, his web site is the 993rd most popular web site on the Internet. And that’s pretty damn good.

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I think RSS is great. I have been using RSS to keep in touch with what’s new at my favourite web sites for about 2 years now. It’s convenient, saves you lots of time, and is actually quite easy when you get the hang of it.

You’ve probably seen the acronym RSS on web sites. Sometimes it’s beside a little orange icon, like the one at left. Sometimes the words “Subscribe to this feed” are placed beside it.

If you’re curious, you may have clicked on the link and been taken to a weird-looking page, where most of the same content was displayed again but without the pretty formatting. Something like the page below.

That’s what happened to me the first, second and third time I clicked on the link. I scratched my head, felt stupid and left.

It took me a while to get the courage to go back and try it again, but since it’s my business and I am a research hound, I had to learn about it.

So I picked a morning where I wasn’t feeling pressured for time and typed the word I type most often into Google: “tutorial”. This I followed with the letters RSS.

I probably had to read about 10 articles before it started to make sense to me and I felt comfortable enough to try and set it up. Now I am a complete RSS addict, and I hope you become one too.

So here are my “Coles Notes” style cheat sheets on how to use RSS.

What is RSS good for?

To explain it simply, RSS is a way for you to find out when your favourite web sites have been updated – and even better – have these latest articles collected and displayed for you to read all from one spot.

It’s like having your own personal assistant whose job is to cut and clip out the latest articles from your favourite sites, arrange them all for you in an orderly fashion, and place them on your desk waiting for your imminent arrival. Now how handy is that?

How does it work?

You don’t need to worry about what it stands for or how it works. There are tons of articles explaining that if you are interested. What you need to care about is how to make it work for you.

The first thing you have to do is set up an account with a news reader, sometimes called news aggregator. It’s pretty easy; the hardest part is choosing the one you want because there are lots of good ones out there.

There are 2 types of readers: 1. those that are actual little programs that you download to your hard drive and run from your desktop, and 2. readers that run off the web. I suggest starting with the latter because they are free and don’t require a huge investment from you. Popular ones to try are: Google Reader, Bloglines, My Yahoo and NewsGator.

For the sake of clarity I am going to only talk about how to use the Google Reader. This is the one I started using a few months ago, and am quite happy with. Since then it has become super popular. It doesn’t hurt that everyone knows the Google name either.

First thing you have to do is sign up with the Google Reader. Go to google.com/reader.

The “Sign In” area is on the right (see A). If you have a Gmail account, or Google account all ready, you can use that login and password to sign in. If you don’t, there is a link under the blue box (see B) that says:

“Not using Gmail or other Google Account services? Create an account now.”

Click on that and fill out the few requisite fields. That’s it – you now have a reader. PS. Don’t forget to save your password.

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