I recently hosted a podcast with Doren Aldana and it quickly became obvious that we needed to collaborate to help out not only our WebStores customers, but everyone who reads this blog and newsletter. So, Doren and I are hosting a webinar on Tuesday, May 29th at 11:00 am Mountain Time called: “HOW TO ATTRACT Read more about Webinar Invitation[…]
There is a special offer that I strongly recommend you take advantage of at the end of this post – make sure you read the whole thing by clicking through and reading to the end.
While the number one concern for most small businesses remains, “How do I get listed on page 1 of Google?,” the second biggest concern is “How can I get more positive online reviews?” And interestingly, these two concerns are intrecately tied together: the more positive online reviews you get, the higher you are likely to be shown in the search engine results. And, believe it or not, you can actually control how many online reviews you get. I recently interviewed Doren Aldana of MyTestimonialEngine.com for my podcast (20MinutesofInfluence.com) about this topic.
There are lots of places on the internet where people may be leaving reviews about you: Google, Facebook, Yelp, Amazon, AngiesList, Trip Advisor, Yellow Pages, Manta, Better Business Bureau (BBB), FourSquare, and many industry-specific sites like Houzz, Cars.com, Edmunds, OpenTable, and HealthGrades . Yet, businesses are often afraid to manage customer reviews on business review sites as they don’t want to end up in one of these situations:
Unfortunately, these businesses are missing out and hurting their business through inaction, as reputation drives both traffic and conversion. Online reviews and ratings heavily influence consumers’ purchase decisions and can make or break a business. A number of research studies suggest that online reviews are more trustworthy and useful than branded social media content, advertising, information from salespeople, and even natural search engine results. Here are 3 factors you want to consider when getting reviews: […]
Last week, I showed you how you can use YouTube to rank your pages on Google. This is a technique that I highly recommend. But there is a downside – you don’t own your content that you post to YouTube. That’s right, many companies are discovering that their YouTube channel is not their asset, but YouTube’s. In fact, I had a friend that was recently banned from YouTube. He was posting content that YouTube deemed to be too similar, with the direct intention of “driving people away from YouTube and onto another website,” so they banned him from posting. The amazing this was, he was providing valuable content – it was not spam. He appealled his case to YouTube and was denied.
The technique I described in last week’s article of course is meant to do exactly that: create similar videos all with the intent of driving traffic to your website. What this means is that it coudlget you banned from YouTube. So should you still do this? The answer of course is yes, but you may need to do it slowly so as to not raise any red flags with YouTube’s AI (artificial intelligence) bots. But remember, you don’t own your YouTube channel and therefore, you cannot rely on it for hosting important content.
This goes for all social media, podcasts, websites and any place you put content on. When you don’t own the asset, you can’t call the shots, and any income stream derived from those places that you have content on could at anytime pull the plug without warning and kill your livelihood. If you want to control your own content you need your own platform. That is why…
One of the first things Google looks at in a search is if the search term matches the URL you are looking for. If you are searching for “Gregs Gourmet Goodies”, Google looks to see if there is a domain name names “GregsGourmetGoodies.com”. But, unless you are a recognized brand, most people are not searching for your business name. They are looking for what you have to offer, such as “gourmet cheese dip.” Of course, you might be able to buy the domain name, “gourmetcheesedip.cooking” or gourmetcheesedip.party”, and you could do this for every one of your products, and then re-direct that new domain name to the page on your website where you sell gourmet cheese dip. this helps, especially because Google actually indexes every single page, not just your home page.
The next thing most small businesses worry about is whether or not their page is optimized for search engines, in part because there are SEO companies out there scaring them into buying their services. What these companies typically do is look at what is called on-site factors, and they make sure that your page titles, contain the search term you are trying to rank for and that you use that search term in the content of the page. For example, if we are trying to rank for the search term, “gourmet cheese dip” we would title our page “Gourmet Cheese Dip”, we would include “Gourmet Cheese Dip” in the heading tags, and we would write our copy to include that keyword phrase multiple times in the description, such as “Greg’s Gourmet Goodies offers the best packaged gourmet cheese dip available anywhere. using our gourmet cheese dip, you can mix this with your favourite cream cheese and create the most delicious gourmet cheese dip anywhere. Your guests will still be talking about the great gourmet cheese dip you served them for days. so if you are looking for the finest gourmet cheese dip, look no further than Greg’s Gourmet Goodies.”
But here’s the thing: there are 19,000,000 results returned by Google for “gourmet cheese dip”. The likelihood of you being listed on page 1 of Google is 1 in 1.9 billion, even if you do the on-site optimization I just talked about. Plus, your cheese dip mix is only one of about a hundred products you offer. There has to be a better way. And there is… […]
Earlier this year I started a pocast called “20 Minutes of Influence.” The idea was simple: engage with other industry experts, online influencers, and social media rockstars to bring you actionable information. The results have been incredible. I’ve already produced over 20 episodes and have had some amazing guests. You can check them all out at 20minutesofinfluence.com, but I wanted to highlight a few of these and really recommend that you listen to these great ideas on how you can get others to market and sell on your behalf.
And this week, I’m featuring Anthony Prichard as we discuss the importance of videos.
If these are the only episodes you listen to, it will take less than 2 hours combined and be well worth your time. […]
A colleague of mine recent posed this question, “What impresses you most in a thought leader and why?” with the following multiple choice answers:
A. # of social media followers
B. # of times they’ve been interviewed
C. Degree of succes they’ve ACTUALLY attained.
D. Amount of adversity they’ve had to overcome.
or…
E. If they are somone you could see yourself hanging out with.
This was an informal poll, but the answer might surprise you. The overwhelming majority of people said… […]
Amazon’s Echo Dot was the online retailer’s most popular gift this past holiday season. It has been estimated that over 16 million of these devices have been sold. With that kind of traction, this little voice activated robot could totally disrupt how we not only perform tasks like turning on lights, playing music or asking for help with a recipe, but the way that customers find us online. Alexa may well become a search engine.
Alexa continues to get smarter every day. One of the reasons that Alexa keeps getting smarter is that Amazon has provded developers with a way to add new “skills” to Alexa. Thus, if you are the producer a new gadget automates, say washing windows, you can create a skill for Alexa that would be triggered when someone would say, “Alexa, wash my windows.”
If you are selling something of course, that capability is already built into Alexa, as long as you are selling on Amazon. But what if you want to add a new skill to Alexa like playing your podcast? The simplest way to do this is to build what Amazon calls a “Flash Briefing Skill.” Start by heading over to: […]
Check out the radio interview at Experience Pros. Here’s the free gift that is mentioned: bit.ly/gregsgift
Do you get numerous calls from people (robots) claiming to be your local Google representative? I’m sure you figured out by now that these calls are NOT from Google, and in fact are illegal. Here is the official information from Google about these calls: https://www.google.com/safetycenter/everyone/start/report-robocall-scams/. Now, that being said, there are some very cool and legitimate ways that you can improve your Google listings. Many are new features that Google has rolled out over the last year, so I want to explore a few of these with you so you can crush your listing on Google.
First, you need to understand that Google has multiple departments which provide overlapping information. This causes some confusion for many business owners. There is Google+ (yes this is still around, and yes, your business should have a Google+ page for SEO purposes). There is Google MapMaker, which provides your business location on Google Maps. And then there is Google My Business (GMB), which is the heart and soul of the Google Local SEO platform. Even though they do talk to each other, you need to make sure your information is updated on all three services.
Until very recently, your G+ page was created for you, automatically, when you created your GMB page. However, even if you had already created a G+ page, the auto-generated page would take over as your official brand page. Because this caused a bit of confusion and frustration for business owners and marketers, Goggle changed the protocol earlier this year. Now, when you create your GMB page, Google does not generate a G+ page. The same is true with YouTube, another Google property. YouTube no longer generates a G+ page. Most people do not use G+, so you really don’t have to worry about it.
Google My Business used to be known as Google Places. Quite honestly, for most business, GMB is the […]
As the third post in this series of how to launch a product, it is important to understand that you have to keep the momentum going. Don’t stop just as you have things moving! Here’s a recap of what I’ve discussed so far and the initial results:
The results as far as my new book, The Influencer Effect (http://amzn.to/2vF516y) have been incredible! We reached over 2.1 million people on the Thunderclap cmapaign. I’ve had people posting photos of themeselves with the book all over social media. One person even interviewed me (you can watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xeYg2Rblnk). Another colleague ran a contest where he gave away 2 copies of the ebook and set an expiration for 2 hours into the future. People kept asking to be included for up to 2 days afterwards, and he pointed them to Amazon where they could get the book for just 0.99. Because of all this excitement, the book made it to number 1 on Amazon! That’s a pretty good start to a product launch, so now is not the time to let up.
This week, I’m going to host a book launch party – if you are in Denver, plese join us on Thursday evening (https://www.facebook.com/events/2039265059634659). If you can’t join us in person, then catch us on the Facebook Live video: https://www.facebook.com/g.w.jameson/videos/10207343169216734
Here is what you do next to keep the momentum of your product launch going.