If you’re tempted to think the following post is just another one of those rants, don’t. I really do want you to picture me holding this gun to your head as you read it. That’s how serious I am.

You’ve heard it over and over. Some hotshot techno geek gets in your face and says you’ve gotta have a website, or a blog, or run an email campaign, or use Flash, or use video, or do this or do that, blah, blah, blah.  As your eyes glaze over you wonder if he’ll ever get to the part about how much this will cost and whether or not it will help you make any money.

Unfortunately it doesn’t matter anymore if it will make you any money at all. Zip. Zero. Nada. What counts is how much it could cost you if you don’t.

You MUST have some stake in the online world. You MUST have some way to join the conversations (no matter how nasty or one sided they may be) and you MUST have some way for people who are looking for you to find what you have to say. Here’s a little story that shows just how far the Internet has matured and how much power the online marketing savvy really do hold over the profitability of your business.

My car broke down. It died on the side of the road and I had to have it towed to my favorite mechanic. He’s a certified master mechanic who has treated me fairly for years. It hurt him to have to tell me I needed to take it to a dealership for the diagnostic equipment and tools they have.

It hurt me to learn they wanted $800 to fix my car. It hurt me even more that I knew the person I spoke to was padding the repair heavily describing each part in terms such as “essential plugs and wires” and misquoting what this or that part does. I called my mechanic back and asked what he thought of the estimate and work to be done. Then I called the dealership back with a request for an estimate on just the one vital part to be replaced.

The dealership came back with two “absolutely crucial” things to be fixed and a new quote of $500. Thank God we got the $300 tune up off the table. I bet he thought I should have been happy he was looking out for my best interests. He raised his voice to emphasize just how sincere he was about not wanting to let his own wife or daughter drive off in a job half done not knowing whether that second part could go bad at any time. I didn’t need my master mechanic to tell me that was a scare tactic, but it was very nice of him to apologize to me on behalf of a fellow mechanic none the less.

This dealership is probably well aware of the marketing fact that a happy customer will tell 3 other people about their experience and that an unhappy customer will tell 9. So I’m sure in their staff meetings there is a Service Manager who drums home being polite to customers, sounding sincere, etc. Under those circumstances even an unhappy customer will have cooled off somewhat by the time they drive home and in a day or two will have moved on to other gripes. If you act politely, they may only tell 2 or 3 friends after all.

What they most assuredly haven’t taken into account is that the Internet has changed this enormously and permanently. In addition to having this blog, I could also post about my experience on Facebook, MySpace, and in my Friendfeed rooms.  I also have Twitter.

I’ve searched my local midwest metropolitan area for other people who use Twitter. Between Rockford and surrounding areas, there are more than 100 Twitterers. In 140 characters, I can make sure that everyone of them know about my situation. I could rally them to retweet my warning to everyone who follows them. I could link through to this blog post, or any one of those other social posting places and do all of that in less than one hour if I chose to.

By the end of the day, how many people will have heard? How many people have every been in a situation similar to mine? Do you think they would be easily persuaded that I am telling the truth? I am by the way, but I ask that to drive home the point.

If you are in business today, you simply must have an outlet to tell the world who you are, what you are and what you stand for. You need to have your story told somewhere, somehow, and you need to be able to jump in to the conversations around you right now. Today. This morning.

You may choose not to respond to every story like mine. In fact, if this dealership was a client of mine I would done everything possible to convince them NOT to respond immediately or in kind to my story, no matter how many twitterers contacted them to find out if it were true. But they still need to have a way for all those twitterers to reach them. Right from the beginning I would have had them using those avenues to tell people stories of the repair experiences that went right. We would have included a disclaimer that not all do and may have even pointed out that sometimes we had to turn repair requests down, but we would have been able to do it in a controlled way.

If even a local car dealership’s service department needs to be able to talk to their customers where their customers are today, don’t you think you owe it to your business to be able to do so as well?

Posted under local business

One of the hardest working plugins you will add to your blog is the All In One SEO plugin. It’s free, and easy to install and use.  But it won’t do you any good unless you use it. It’s not automatic.

This plugin allows you to set a separate title (what appears in the top bar of your browswer), description and keywords for each post and page on your blog. That’s a tremendously powerful combination.

• The title bar as the first element of the page is very important to your search ranking. Use the keywords you want this post to rank for in the beginning of your page title. Some people repeat the blog name at the end of each title, but this hasn’t been proven to be vital to success.
• The description is for your human readers. In one to two brief sentances, you don’t want to tell your reader what the article is about. You want to tell they why it’s important, or why they should click through to read the rest of it. The description should be a teaser. If it’s not that sort of post or page, use several of the related keywords and tags that apply to the page.  Just don’t leave it to the spiders to pick out the first 160 characters they find on your page. That will most likely be giberish.
• The keywords are your chance to have this blog post, written eight months after your blog was launched as the fourth in a series of technical how-to articles, become the front door for search engine spiders, referral site linkers, researching prospects and potential clients with money in-hand alike. Deep linking can improve your overall rank in the search engines as well.

BUT…you have to actually use the opportunities this plug in gives you. Don’t let yourself be shortchanged because you only have time to add a link to someone else’s article as your blog post today. Plan on two to three minutes with each and every post to craft this information as carefully as you do your lead paragraph or headline.

It’s that important. Every time.

Posted under SEO

You may have noticed one thing that sets this blog apart from the majority right away. It wasn’t done as a mistake, though it is something I may change in the future.

Right now, there are no dates to indicate when I’ve posted an item to the blog. I’ve done this to show you how you can use a blog even if you don’t intend to provide a steady stream of new content to your site.

When you set up a blog you gain a lot of functionality on the back-end that makes maintaining your web presence very easy.  Every time you do write something to your site, all you need to do is type it in and hit the publish button. Wordpress programming — with a little help from the plugins we use — takes over to keep things neat and organized from that point on. Here are just some of the things that happen in the background:

• A permanent spot in your directory (or permalink/single post) url is assigned
• The story is published on top of your blog home page as most recent
• Internal links between all posts are established/adjusted
• Backend links are created within categories, page or post types so you can find and edit this post easily
• Navigation links are made, updated and displayed on every page of your blog
• Links between the category you select and the post itself are established
• Any images, video links, podcasts, or other audio links are automatically sorted to the right directories and stored for you
• Links between the post and any image or other asset file are created or adjusted as a the post is moved
• A notation on your sitemap is made and Google is pinged (along with other services)
• Your RSS feed is updated and subscribers notified that you have added content

…and so on and so on. It really is true that the blog you see is only the very tip of the iceberg that is all of your blog. It’a slso true that there can be no magic formula that will tell you when it makes sense for you to set up a static website and when it makes sense to set up a semi-static blog. The choice comes down to how much time or expertise you have to lavish on your website/blog.

Do you have time to go through and complete each of these tasks manually if you post infrequently?  Even if you only made two additions or two deletions to the content of your website each year, chances are good you would overlook one or more of these steps. That’s assuming you worked from a very good checklist that remembered them all for you in the first place. (Ahemm…of course you could also hire me to do it for you…)

On the other hand, dates do help. Human readers love fresh changing content as much as the search engine spiders. They want to see that they’re getting the up to date scoop on all the specials in your retail store, or know that you’re up on the latest judicial rulings relevant to the legal case they may want you to handle for them, etc.

I’m going to continue making entries to this blog without dates for a few months. Of course I’ll be watching my stats closely. It will be interesting to see if traffic to this blog does or doesn’t grow at roughly the rate I’ve come to expect using web 2.0 promotion methods. Benchmarking numbers on this point are the one thing I wasn’t able to find, so we’ll just have to grow some ourselves — along with your comments and observations of course.

Posted under blog building