Companies that were diligent with collecting emails in the early days now have thousands of emails to show for, which is important as it becomes increasingly more difficult for people to fork over their email address.

Those that offered text messaging, or SMS, a year or two ago now have more luxuries because they can more easily reach peoples’ mobile phones and devices and produce higher response rates.

Likewise, those who dove in to blogging and social media a few years ago and kept with it, now have tons of content online and a more established presence, giving them more flexibility and maneuverability than those new to the space. In fact, for those new to any or all of these mediums, building your distribution lists is going to become increasingly more difficult, timely, and expensive.

Chicken and Egg

For celebrities and big name brands with lots of clout, resources and capital this is not an issue, but for everyone else it is potentially one of the biggest stumbling blocks getting in the way of your online success.

Like all new marketing and advertising mediums, there is a chicken-and-egg dilemma, and social media is no different. It’s not worth doing if not enough people are going to see you, but no one can possibly see you if you aren’t doing it. Therefore you have to somehow create the chicken to lay the egg.

Social media has evolved to the point where it has become almost essential to your overall marketing strategy, so how do you as a small business owner already strapped for time and capital, leverage this potentially powerful and hyped up medium?

While there are proven methods and tactics that are known to work, there is no “one way” to do things in social media, let alone any silver bullets. If you study online marketing trends, you are probably inundated with ideas, statistics, do’s, don’ts, and how-to’s.

Unfortunately, most marketers and small business owners have little visibility into their advertising results and are “blindly investing in strategies, unsure of the outcome.” This is what is called “advertising in silos” and Adobe recently published a white paper about the subject. But that information like this is not useful to you if you do not have large enough numbers to work with.

If you have 200 or 300 people on your Facebook page and you run a message on it or a campaign, you would be lucky to get 5 or 8 people interested, which is 2.5% of 200 and 300 respectively. This type of response rate for direct mail would be awesome, but are the expectations of social media any different?

The only way to increase this number (as opposed to the percentage) is to increase the number of people that can see your ad. This might be easier than increasing the percentage.

So what are some ways we can do this? Here are TWO:

Ask People to Connect…BORING

One way is to reach out to your customers and ask them to connect with you. This is always a good first step but you can’t do it very often. Your customers want and need information they can use, not chores to help you out. Therefore, it might be good to find alternative sources, or what I like to call Channel Partners.

Channel Partners

Channel partners are people and businesses with audiences that might like your product or service and who have agreed to work in conjunction with you to exchange audience members. This is a great way to attract more interest in your brand from people not already familiar with you. How you work with these channels is up to you. Here are a few methods you could try:

- Sharing blog posts and information in social media
- Commenting on one another’s material, or
- Doing joint campaigns that are mutually beneficial

These are only a few examples, I would be curious to see what other ideas people have for increasing their distribution so if you have suggestions please share.

Establishing channel partners can take time, and they don’t always work out as expected. What you expect from social media is up to you. But what you get from it is simple math. Get your message in front of more people, get more response. It’s easier said than done, but that shouldn’t keep you from doing it.

To help answer these and other important questions about mobile marketing, I have out together an article series that addresses the primary tenants of mobile marketing from the SMB perspective.

In this series, we explore the following topics:

1. Why Text Message Marketing is Important
2. What is SMS Software and Why Do I Need It?
3. Bar codes, QR Codes, Tags and Why Should I Care?
4. Mobile Marketing With Mobile Apps; Are Apps Right For Your Business?
5. How to Improve Your ROI with Mobile Website Marketing
6. What’s Best for Your SMB: A Mobile Website or Mobile App?

This blog series was also put together in the form of a White Paper which dives into these issues and offers solutions for small business owners, which you can download free by clicking on the button below.

These are important issues that depending on your type of business, your size, and of course your business marketing objectives, you will need to respond to in some way shape or form. The series and the white paper are meant to give you a real-world way of looking at these issues and offer practical ways to approach each of the these mobile marketing strategies for your SMB.

On a new project we have going on called Chester County Internet Marketers, or #ChesCoIM for short, we are experimenting with coupon offers and specials at the retail level. We started by launching a Facebook page called Chester County Deals which is meant for people to post coupons and special offers that local retailers are running.

There is no limit to what types of deals are posted. Hopefully people and businesses will get original and reserve their free range of the site to innovative ways of running special offers. Anyone can post to it, for now at least, including local businesses and their patrons.

It is not a group buying site like Groupon and LivingSocial. It is meant for running daily, weekly, and monthly deals. The idea is that by doing so you can drive more business with Facbeook using the social channels as opposed to the paid advertising method, which is effective in its own right too.

If it gains popularity, which it seems to have already, it could serve as a handy community page for people through time. Some sort of moderation and management would probably be necessary as it evolves too.

There are lot of ways to run coupons and special offers to people. I just did a post on the ChesCoIM blog that includes statistics from businesses that have deployed group buying campaigns and use daily deals to drive business. There are some ideas in there.

If you are a retail business local to the Chester County, Pennsylvania area then take a moment now to LIKE the Deals page and post your first special offer. Also take a moment to LIKE the ChesCoIM Facebook page where we can work with you as a business on how to do more with the ChesCo Deals Facebook page and other Internet marketing and local advertising tools that we offer.

This type of networking usually pays off in time. Seldom do I expect to meet someone and then have new business referred to me by that person right away. It’s a numbers game really. For every 10 people you meet that agree to refer you business, you can expect 2 or 3 referrals a year from one of them. Of course this ratio can vary from business to business and industry to industry.

But sometimes, it can pay off quickly.

One recent example of this paying off immediately came when I joined a local business networking group called the Business Vision Network, or BVN. After the first session of a BVN workshop series earlier this year, I met up with a few other participants over the next several weeks. One of them agreed to introduce me to clients that would need our mobile marketing product and lo-and-behold about a week or two later this person introduced me to a prospective client of his.

We met with the prospective client together and over the next couple of weeks he followed up with them, which was great because it is usually better for the person referring the business to do the follow up. Shortly after that they called him and said they wanted to press forward with the product.

All-in-all, this process took about 6 weeks I believe from the time the referring business owner and I met until the time when the referral became a customer. Six weeks might seem like a long time, but it goes by quickly, which is why it’s important to do a lot of networking for this purpose at all times to keep multiple irons in the fire. You never know when one is going to POP!

About BVN: Business Vision Network is an international network of businesses and organizations that are partnered together to positively impact local and global communities. This post was written to be included as a Success Story in a forthcoming issue of the BVN newsletter. To learn more about BVN or to get a taste for things to come, visit the BVN website and also join the BVN Facebook Page which was recently launched to start growing this business community online.

Some of the most common requests I receive from business owners are, “I need a Web site!” or “I need a brochure!” Now, to be sure, Web sites and brochures are valuable marketing tools. However, when I ask, “Why do you need these marketing tools?” it strikes me how many business owners respond, “Because I don’t have one yet.”

My friends, “Because I don’t have one yet.” is the first sign you need to rethink how you’re spending your marketing budget. Before you start building that Web site or writing that brochure, you will be well served to spend time defining how your marketing assets will be tactfully used to engage your target audience or ideal buyer.

To that end, here’s a practical marketing tip for you: Always connect your marketing assets back to a strategy.

“Marketing strategy” can be an elusive concept for some business owners, so allow me to break it down. Simply put, a marketing strategy is a structured series of customer touches planned over a set period of time for the purpose of identifying sales opportunities or raising brand awareness. That’s it. If you add more to it, you may be in jeopardy of over complicating your strategy.

A basic marketing strategy is simple enough to build. Start by defining each customer’s touch point and when it will happen. Each marketing touch should be a clear action–a phone call, a press release, an email, a letter, an advertisement, or maybe even a customized direct mail package. Next, define the “offer” that will be attached to each touch-a brochure, a BrainsharkTM presentation, a case study, a newsletter, a link to your Web site, or a clever giveaway. These are your marketing assets.

Finally, map the marketing touches on a calendar so you can see when you’ll need each marketing asset. Once you’ve got this basic strategy pulled together, you’re ready to start building some creative deliverables.

So, my recommendation to you is to spend a few hours this month focusing on developing a marketing strategy to help generate your sales leads or build brand awareness. Your strategy will help you drive the creative development of your marketing collateral arsenal. The payoff is you’ll most certainly get better response rates if you have a strong offer for each scheduled customer touch-not to mention, your brochures won’t sit on the shelf if you define their purpose before spending time creating them.

Here’s the story: A designer eyeglasses seller called DecorMyEyes (I’m not going to link to them) followed shady business practices with its customers, harassing them, overcharging them, and threatening lawsuits.  As a result, the company was rewarded with high rankings on Google.  How did this happen?  Vitaly Borker, owner of DecorMyEyes, received so much bad press from reputable sources such as the New York Times and Bloomberg that Google rated him as having high levels of credibility.

A Google fellow, Amit Singhal, wrote, “We were horrified. I am here to tell you that being bad is, and hopefully will always be, bad for business in Google’s search results.”

Although the business received complaints on numerous sites, these complaints were not increasing the site’s rankings; it was the media’s bad-press articles, which often linked to the site, that were driving the increased rankings.

This story does have a happy ending, but not for DecorMyEyes.  The underhanded company dropped from their competitive first page ranking for ‘designer eyeglasses’ and is now ranked somewhere near the 14^th page.

This doesn’t mean that harassing your customers should be the latest tactic in search engine optimization, as Google has altered their algorithm to weed out bad businesses.  How they can do this is a mystery, but I suspect they are utilizing sites such as Yelp and The Better Business Bureau to qualify businesses.  It wouldn’t surprise me if Google figured out a way to read star ratings on business-rating sites, but, unfortunately, the enigma that is the Google algorithm remains secret.  This does not, however, affect strategies for mobile marketing and other internet marketing strategies.

We’d all love a link from The New York Times, as one such high-quality, high-authority link can skyrocket a site on SERPs, but this example shows us that there is no easy (evil) way to get into these sources.  The best we can do (imho): continue to write quality content and press releases and hope the big-time media sources pick up on them.

“Cleaning Supplies,” “Lawn Care,” “Maintenance,” and “Decorative,” represent subcategories and can also reflect specific items. [...]

“Brooms,” “Mops,” “Vacuum Cleaners,” “Rakes,” “Mowers,” “Flamingos,” “Gnomes,” reflect the specific items to which individual documents and potential search query terms are associated.

The category hierarchy could equally be defined as a list with each category including a full item description. For instance, “Flamingos” could be expressed as a list item, “Household>Lawn Care>Decorative>Flamingos.”

What does this mean for internet marketing companies?  I agree for the most part with this article.  With the new patent in mind, it would be highly recommended that SEOs pay closer attention to the keywords they use, especially paying attention to hierarchies and focusing not only on the target keyword phrases (“pink lawn flamingoes” for example) but also on the hierarchy of categories.  In the example, an SEO may want to focus on the additional phrases of ‘household’, ‘lawn care’, and ‘decorative’.

This new patent forces SEOs to think on multiple levels when optimizing pages, so, in addition to including target keywords in the content of the page, they should take into account the big picture and really know their product in order to categorize it appropriately.  As always, content is still an important factor of SEO, but it may be a good idea to consider categories in the META and title information as well.

YouTube is unable to scan your video for keywords; according to YouTube’s blog, ““Our algorithms are good, but they can only read, they can’t watch your videos.  So in order to properly classify your video and index it for search, we need your help.”  That being said, the most effective way to attract visitors is to create keyword-specific META information (Title, description, keywords).

Much like optimizing a website Title, YouTube video titles should include frequently-searched phrases yet be specific enough to describe your video.  To find these keyword phrases, try YouTube’s keyword finder, with looks suspiciously like Google’s keyword finder.  This similarity is not surprising, because YouTube utilizes Google’s algorithm.

Descriptions may be as long as 5000 characters; however, when optimizing this you should keep in mind that only the first 120 characters, give or take a few, show up in Google snippets (descriptions on Search Engine Results Pages).  So it’s important to fit as many keywords as possible in the first 120 characters, without keyword stuffing.

While Google has admitted they do not use META keyword data to determine results, it’s still a good idea to include targeted keyword phrases, as YouTube and other search engines may still use the keywords META.

All that being said, the best thing you can do to draw traffic to your video is to create a good video.  A good video and keyword-targetted META information can cause a traffic explosion.

A survey conducted by miBuys showed that two thirds of women who use the internet on their mobile phones would be interested in obtaining coupons using that device.  Here are the results:

• 67.89% – Yes, they would use mobile coupons
• 21.49% – Would not use mobile coupons
• 10.63% – Not sure

When compared to a 2009 survey conducted by Honeywell, which found that 71% of women would not use mobile coupons, these findings show a dramatic increase in mobile coupon interest among females.

When asked for which services they would like coupons, mobile internet users worldwide responded:

• 53.49% – Retail
• 27.37% – Concerts/events
• 16.23% – Dining
• 7.31% – Cinema
• 1.60% – Cinema

According to Mark Bamber, CEO of miBuys, “Mobile phones and devices can already play a significant role in connecting retail brands with their customers. It is perceived that women are only just embracing mobile services, but the truth is they’re already well beyond this point and now want access to the entire high street through their phone.”

This is good news for mobile internet marketing, which may utilize online coupons for mobile devices to attract new customers, and many social media marketers and search engine optimization specialists are seriously considering this new method of attracting visitors and customers.

If, for instance, a searcher queries ‘Valentine’s Day’ around February 14, they will receive results for the holiday; however, if at another time of year a movie named ‘Valentine’s Day’ is released, the user at that time will be delivered results for the movie.

Here’s the abstract of the patent:

“Techniques and systems are disclosed for returning temporally-aware results from an Internet-based search query. To determine if a query is temporally-based one or more query features are collected and input into a trained classifier, yielding a temporal classification for the query. Further, if a query is classified as temporal, the query results are shifted by determining an alternate set of results for the query, and returning one or more alternate results to one or more users. Based on user interactions with the one or more alternate results, the classifier can be updated, for example, by changing the query to a non-temporal query if the user interactions identify it as such.”

This new Bing feature represents greater user awareness on the part of Bing, which can now take into account click-through rates for specific keyword phrases.  If a site receives less click-throughs at a particular time of year, it may be moved down the list of priorities.

What does this mean for search engine marketing?  It may mean that internet marketing experts should be aware of temporal searches and create content relevant to specific times of the year.  No matter what the strategy, Search Engine marketers will have to approach internet marketing with a greater awareness of time-sensitive queries.