Down the street from my house is a delicious little bakery; fresh doughnuts, pastries and breads every morning. Across the street from this bustling little place are two nameless businesses and a therapeutic massage clinic. During the busy mornings you can’t find parking in front of the bakery. The clinic and nameless business are not yet hitting their stride so they have ample parking. BUT these 3 businesses have a huge NO PARKING sign in their lot for any patrons of businesses other than theirs. If you dare park there as I do, you risk a tongue lashing and a possible tow. The only thing I every remember about their businesses is their hostility towards the parking space thieves. If I needed the service I would easily drive 30 minutes or more before getting my clinical massages at that business. We have all experienced this before. Hopefully, we are not those kinds of organizational leaders.

Think creatively with me for a moment —
What if those 3 businesses saw their parking spaces as a potential audience?

What if they put kind notes on my car? Placed a coupon my windshield? (I can’t prevent them, I am in their spaces after all.) What if they invited me in to look around as part of a parking space trade? What if they had a doughnut morning in their lot in cooperation with the bakery? What if they did advertising over at the bakery in cooperation for opening up morning parking spaces? The ideas could just keep flowing but you get the point. The 3 grumpy businesses are missing a positive marketing opportunity.

Unfortunately, we may also be missing these same kinds of opportunities. So, who is around you that is successful? How can you intertwine their success with yours? What positive marketing opportunities exist for you that you are missing out on that may very well be right in front of your face? Who is coming by your business but leaving with a sour impression before they even purchase? How do you reach them?

Creative questions and identifying opportunities make for thriving businesses.

1. Follow people, businesses or organizations that matter to you. Identify those who are in your field or in your area of interests. People are watching who you follow.

2. Add value to the people who follow you. If you run a business or lead an organization make sure that you are adding value when you contribute something on twitter. Don’t say things here that you wouldn’t say in a relevant business meeting. Please, don’t tell everyone about your morning breakfast from your work account.

If you are like most of our clients, you need a great web presence, and you have better things to do than figure out how to do it yourself. So you hire great companies (like factor1) and you end up with a great looking site.

But now what? How do you manage content? How do you edit and crop photos? How do you track your traffic? The list goes on and on.

In this series of weekly posts, we will share some great tips, resources, and ideas specific to managing your presence online. Lets get started!

Week 1: Content…Quality Content

Your website has a purpose. It may be to generate leads, sales, present information, communicate services and expertise, etc. Regardless of that purpose, content is driving it. Sure it may look pretty, but after the first 5 seconds, your visitor stops admiring and starts reading. They begin in the upper left, and generally scan left to right, top to bottom, looking for what they came for. When you planed out your site design, we probably discussed the user flow, what are the big directional elements on the home page, what navigation is there, and how do we use graphics to help that user flow from one thing to the next.

We use headlines and graphics on the home page to draw that user in. View that service, product, or mission statement. Eventually they go deeper, and dig in. We want them to read your content, find what they are looking for.

My challenge to you.

Answer the following questions. On every page, Yes every single page. Think about your typical (not perfect, not current customer, but typical) visitor.

• What are they here for?
• What single concept do you want them to take away from this page?
• What is a next action for this visitor? (contact? next product? directions?)
• If this is the first page they saw, will they understand us? (remember, not everyone comes in through your home page)

I feel that if every page on your site has this kind of thinking and purpose behind it, you are off on the right foot. Now there are still some fundamental tasks you must take into account on your content.

• Good content is free of spelling and grammatical errors. Trust me, this one is tough, I’m a big picture guy and typos plague me often. Hire a copywriter as needed.
• Good content is keyword rich. We’ll talk more about basic SEO in the coming weeks, but using words that are search terms, relative to your page of course, are important. Give the search engine something to find.
• Break up content with headlines, lists, and images. While you don’t want visual road blocks, creating content that is easy to follow will help readers flow down the page, or jump to what they are looking for.
• Avoid the run on sentences or paragraphs.
• Use bold and italics formatting sparingly, and have a reason or pattern to using them.
• Don’t underline text for emphasis. Users expect underlined text to be a link, and are frustrated when its not a link.
• Read, re-read, and have others read your content.
• Cross link your pages. Is something on your page relevant to your other content? Link it!

Anything I missed? Please share your tips for good content!

Do you have a topic you want covered? Ask!

We all need to stop doing that and we need to start zeroing in on our target audiences.

I read this article about a business owner who has over 2 million monthly subscription customers. He spends a majority of his time writing, editing, re-writing and fine-tuning their website and marketing content. The E-myth (great classic book about small business) teaches us that we need work on our businesses not just in our businesses.

So here are some simple challenges to all of us:

• Study your front page / landing page – Is it geared for new customers?
• Look at your language – Is it clear? Is it proper? Does it have your customer in mind? Are you too wordy?
• Does your website navigate easily for the most important information?
• Do you have a clear call to action?
• Have you any idea how much traffic your site is getting and other important statistics? (Link it up with Google analytics)
• Spend 1-5 hours EVERY WEEK fine-tuning your messaging on your site – Learn how to make it the powerful tool that it can be for placing you first in your market category.

[Ryan also writes for RedBikeLeader.com - engaging & developing young leaders]

A property manager once told me that the best indicator of the nature of a renter is to take a look at the condition (exterior and interior) of the personal vehicle they arrive in. If it is well maintain, it is a strong clue that so too will your property be. Their behavior will be consistent.

Consistently good sells. So does consistently helpful service. Consistent quality. Consistently accurate and reliable information. Consistent insights. Consistent and effective design.

You favorite place to eat hasn’t just been good one time, but it has been good 9 times out of 10. And if that one bad experience would have been the second time you went, you probably wouldn’t have gone back.

So here is a kicker… not every place that has something good to offer is going to be consistent. Wanna know if you are going to get consistently good? Compare these 4 simple things before making a commitment or decision:

- the individual you have interacted with

- the place of operation or the service vehicle

- the website of the company or a print piece advertisement

- customer feedback

Go with the outfit that consistently presents the quality, message and experience you desire to receive. As a leader in your industry you must consider that ALL aspects of your organization communicate about the mission, message, quality and service you aim provide.

Huge reminder = People DO make decisions based on your web presence, fair or not.

Some quick and easy things tim make improvements:

- Determine your audience – Identify your target audience and always have them in mind when doing anything on your website.

- Clean up your content - Keep it straight forward and easy to understand. Most people say to much and don’t get to the facts and basics fast enough.

- Less is more – If you don’t have high level of graphic design abilities or insights then certainly error on the side of ‘less’. Keep your site clean, fresh and under control. Don’t over use graphics (especially ones you copied & pasted), fonts, font colors and amateur photos.

Here are some recent things I found.

Brain Water.

Y brain water is vitamin water for kids. $1.60 – $2 per 9 ounces of water. The key here is the great marketing & a fun package. Most city water has plenty of minerals, and if you ate a balanced diet, the extra vitamins are simply not needed.

Apple juice formulated for babies.

(I must be the father of baby boys, because im seeing a trend here.)

Ounce for ounce, this is 2x as expensive as normal apple juice. Im pretty sure your kid, nor my kids will be brain surgeons because they drank this.

Fancy pants dog food.

Seriously. They are dogs. They eat anything. This product is 100% marketed to the pet owner (well duh, dogs cant read). Its tugging on the owner to give their dog the best of the best. I do think that natural dog food with less filler junk is better for a dog, but some owners go to far. I’m glad to see Cesar Canine Cuisine is there to assist the owner in the disposal of extra income.

Silly Computer services

Geek squad (the best buy tech support team) will take your audio CD, and place the mp3 files on your ipod for $25 per cd. really?! They market the heck out of this service in their store. I know not everyone is tech savy, but thats a rip off!

I guess at the end of my rant, i will say, wow these are all GREAT marketing achievements! I wish just one of my past ideas were as big as any of these. Future ideas will trump all of the above. Im just saying.

Is it Premium? is it Plus? Ultra? What makes it all 3?
Car companies do it too. Employee Plus Plus + pricing.

At what point is the ‘one-up-manship’ creating stupid product names?

KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid.

We are excited to publicly launch our new email marketing service called Bacon. Why Bacon you ask? Because Bacon is always good. and it makes everything better.

Let’s think about it:
Burgers = good; bacon burgers = better.
Lettuce tomato Sandwich = boring; BLT = tasty.
Eggs and pancakes = good breakfast; Bacon, Eggs and Pancakes = now we’re talkin’.
pigs = ehh; Bacon = yes!

see. I told you.

So go, check out Bacon
EmailBacon.com

the new terrible chevy volt website

So clearly Chevy is trying their hand at social media integration. Lets count up all the “apps” shall we.

1. videos
2. facebook link
3. ohh i can create my chevy account
4. a foum
5. a blog
6. photo feed
7. news
8. polls
9. events
10. twitter tweets
11. and a site share stuff at the bottom

Wow. all on the home page. This site does NOTHING to promote what the volt is, why its cool, or why i should care. Instead it blasts me with its attempts to get me to engage. Unfortunately I dont really want to subscribe to the blog, be their friend on twitter, because I dont yet care about the car, or the site.

For me, the home page is overwhelming, and over the top. I appreciate the video, i think videos are cool. And a blog / news updates are good. The layout and presentation is so far behind the times. We used to see sites like this in the late 90′s.

The volt is a cool car, and should really be impressive for chevy to launch. this site is more in the way of other marketing efforts than anything.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll offer my solution. What are your thoughts? Am I being too harsh here?