For one, the economy is about as low as it can get, and gas prices are the exact opposite (and raising). Not to mention inflation is quickly making its way towards us.

On top of that big corporations are earning big bucks daily and getting stronger and stronger. So what can we do to gain our ground against these monsters of commerce?

Team up and work together!! We cant make it on our own no matter what resources we have at your disposal.

There are an endless amount of ways to team up with like minded small businesses in our area or industry. The first thing I would suggest is participating in a meetup group for entrepreneurs. I would check out meetup.com or a chamber of commerce to find out more information on these meetups.

If your business doesnt rely on local clients then you can get involved in online community’s such as LinkedIn or The Small Business Web.

The next step I would recommend is getting into the Social Media aspect. Facebook and Twitter are great places to meet small business owners and create either formal of informal relationships that create a win win scenario. I have personally meet dozens of individuals, that I have helped and in return gotten help from, through Facebook.

“What if I cant find a meetup in my area?” Create one! With Meetup.com they give you everything you will need to start a meetup, so dont wait around for one to be created!

I cant stress enough the importance of working together to successfully achieve your business goals, whatever they may be.

It consists of some of the basic fundamentals that search marketing has, such as keyword research, that is the biggest and most important step for either form of marketing. If you do not have good keywords then you basically have nothing. The only big difference that I noticed was that you will be using a lot more keywords and keyword groups with the content network. basically you can either choose between a keyword group a website URL list, or a list of negative sites or (sites that you do not want your site to appear e.g. Myspace). You can use tools such as textant to help you configure these big keyword groups.

One great benefit that the Content Network has is that the links are cheaper than they are for PPC. As far as what I have heard they are just about as profitable if not more in some cases (every niche is different completely).

You have two choices as far as how your add can appear, either as a text add or as an image banner. It is said that most people now days are “banner blind” as they call it or just simply pay no attention to a banner whatsoever. You can also get sneaky and make your image banner appear to be a text link but that will take some creativity on your part.

All in all it seems like a legitimate way to market your business with Google, cant wait to give it a whirl. Sorry if this post isn’t the best , I know I’m forgetting a lot, feel free to add to it.

Long Tail Keyword Phrases! First of all let me define; A long tail keyword phrase is simply a key phrase of between three to well… infinity words I guess, but we know that won’t happen. Really its kinda up to you how long the key phrases is but it has to consist of at lest three words to be considered a “long tail”.

Let me use the infamous “Baby Cribs” niche as an example. The words “baby crib” and “crib” alone are what is know as a core phrase (usually highly traffic and tremendously tough in competition). Those very reasons are why long tail key phrases are preferred for me and my colleagues. They also ensure a better conversion rate believe it or not. Say you decide to rank for the phrase “baby cribs for sale”, those words “for sale” means a whole lot. For one it is a call to action, meaning it is implying that the consumer is looking to purchase. For two it weeds out traffic that will be of no use to you. Not to mention it will be easier and faster to rank for.

Now that we know what it is we are going to rank for it is now time to decide how we want to rank. There are many different ways to build back links to your site.

*Editorials (the best)
*Blog Comments
* Articles
* Directory Submissions
*Press Releases
* Forums
* Sponsored {Posts
* Profiles
* Social Bookmarks
* Satellite Sites

There are a few things you need to know as well. To some it is a wise decision to let your site site online with content for a few weeks. This allows Google to recognize your site and classify it according to your content. Then you can slowly and steadily start to build (or buy) back links to your site. This also ensures that Google doesn’t flag your site or monitor it (which may not matter to some). If you would like to purchase back links you can get in touch with me and I will get you taken care of. Be sure to be diverse in your selection and use as many different methods as you can. Also try not to make big campaign spikes, stay small and consistent. The last thing to take into consideration wound be the on site SEO. Which is a very important element. This means that you have your keyword phrase in your site, preferably a few times, and you need to have it be a text link to a specific product landing page. Also having your keyword phrase in both your sidebar and your footer is wise because Google associates these parts with every page in your site. That’ll do donkey, that’ll do…..

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- What is email marketing
- Rule #1, constant contact
- Know your audience
- The actual email
- When to send the emails
- Getting emails
- Automated emails
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Email marketing in basically keeping in contact with your target audience. You can do this many different ways. Offering a newsletter or subscription list works. What works even better than that, is offering a free tool or service or even an eBook to your customers in return for their email address. You want to be careful not to actually ask for their email either because that will lower the chances of them actually completing the task. Instead try disguising it by saying “please enter your email & we will email you the results”, or “and receive your free copy”.

You want to stay in constant contact with your audience (or list) so you need to send emails out on a reglar bases. This can be made easy by products such as Aweber or Mailchimp. Jon recommends that you send out an email about every week or so. Depending on your market of coarse, some markets may require less or more. Even if they do not purchase something from the email you will at least keep your brand in front of their eyes. In turn that keeps you in the back of their head, so…. if they ever do need your product or service you are assured that they will come to you first.

Knowing your audience is also very important because you need to be sending content that is worth while and will actually cause conversions. The best way to do this is to go out and find related forums about your specific industry. READ what people are saying and how they are talking, all of it. This will give you some insight on how you need to construct your emails and what to target.

When it comes to writing the emails themselves don’t make every email a sales pitch (people get tired of that). Instead mix it up a bit and throw in some juicy tips and knowledge that will interest your consumers and will make them want to open every email they get from you. It is also a wise idea to add discount codes in your emails because people really like that “special treatment” so to speak.

Now, when it comes to the point of when to send your emails, listen up. The majority of people get paid either on the 1st & 15th or somewhere real close to that. So it makes sense to send out your emails on the following Monday after the 1st and 15th. Why Monday? you ask… Well think back to every Friday you have ever had, you aren’t planning on buying anything on Friday, NO! You are more worried about getting done what needs to be, and getting the hell out of there. SEE YA!! If you will now think back to every Monday, you are working at a slower pace and thinking about what needs to happen in the week to come, so if you happen to get a lovely email about a discount on a special product that you need or want you are more likely to buy it. Try it for your self and see what happens.

Here are a few good tips that were brought up and I think could have a great impact on the outcome of your email campaign..
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- read the goverment legalities first
- buld a brand instead of trying to get a sale or conversion initially.
- automate your emails so your band is always in front of your audiences eyes
- discount code emails work the best
- keep in constant contact
- go to a related forum of the product/service you want to push in order to come up with a worth while email
- subscribe to your competitions lists to see how they go about it
- send emails on the Monday following the 1st and 15th of the month at around 8:00 am
- give away tools to get email addresses
- email past customers to target return customers
- contests are a great way to capture emails

We had a special speaker by the name of Bart Miller. Bart is a full time video marketer that lives in Ririe Idaho. He works with big stars in the make-up industry along with many more people in various industries. He told us of how he got his start and why he thinks that video marketing is the future. He also told us a few tip of how to create a short inexpensive yet viral video that will drive traffic to your site.

The first thing that you need to understand is that people view videos for one of two reasons. Either to be entertained or to be educated, keep that in mind when constructing to blueprint of your video. An example he used was for “Bullydog” diesel performance, he shot a video of a kid putting his face into the smoke stack of a diesel truck and allowing the exhaust to cake his face in black suit. Then they pilled off a sticker with the logo on his forehead. It might not sound funny to you now, but in fact, the video was a success and became very viral. In turn it drove a lot of traffic to the “Bullydog” site that he was promoting. Its as simple as that, don’t try to over due it, make it short and sweet. If you are making a comical video keeping it under a minutes times is highly suggested. If it is an educational video you can make it a little longer in length because it may take some time to explain all you are trying to get across to your target market.

Bart also suggested that you use a variety of both comedy and education in your video selection. Also you need to insert the keyword(s) you are pushing both in the video, and in the tags on your YouTube account. Also be sure to insert a link to your site so that people will be able to get to it. That is one of the biggest mistakes that people make when constructing a video, if you don’t put a link back to your site how do you expect people to know where it came from or what it is promoting.

In closing, be sure to think outside the box and don’t follow in anyones footsteps. Also, don’t think for a second that it is going to take lots of money to do something like this. There are plenty of video editing softwares out there that are easy to use and inexpensive (if not free). And you don’t need a Hollywood quality camera to make a good video, Bart has made many successful videos with nothing but his phone camera!!!!

There are multiple ways to find these keywords as well. One great tool that is free and often over looked is the related terms that Google gives you at the bottom of the page on every search. So, say you type “basketball hoops” into the Google search. If you scroll all they way down to the bottom of the first page you will notice the “Searches related to basketball hoops” Under that you will see the searches that Google records as the best possible matchs that others look for in relation to basketball hoops. The funny thing is that these results are not shown in the external keyword tool, idk why, but thats what I have come to realize with the help of others.

Another great way to find those long tail keywords is to size up your competition and view their page source. Usually they will have all their keywords in the meta tag. There is no reason to do this anymore because search engines simply don’t use it and don’t care. So I wouldn’t suggest putting your keywords there but you can get ideas! And of coarse you can use other tools, there are plenty of them out there dedicated to helping you with any of these kind of problem you may run into while constructing your online business.

The example that was used was venturing into penny stocks. Now as the instructor suggested, it is probably not a wise idea to pursue this niche for various reasons. One of the biggest being that they are absolutely hit and miss. You can be a “BIG STAR” one minute and in the slums naked the next.

We were shown various websites that carry a ton of pre-designed templates that were targeted for affiliates. The advice was to go this route because its quick and easy. The next step (following researching a good niche of coarse) is to start an add campaign. When it comes to affiliates, AdSense if a great way to go because it is instant and you will quickly know if your niche is cut out or not. If you are not quite into affiliates (like me then I would suggest SEO as your marketing strategy, especially for eCommerce. If you choose less competitive niches in your research process, then it is cheap to rank with SEO. Plus people trust the “natural” links more than the “sponsored” links anyways. If yu set yourself a financial goal of maybe $50 to $100 to spend on marketing, then you wont break the bank when you fail. Notice I said WHEN not IF because it is bound to happen eventually and theres really no way around it, so don’t get discouraged.

There are a lot of tools out there that will assist us in starting these experimental sites that you may not know about, I know I found multiple sites/tools today at the meet-up. The conclusion I came to this week is, All it takes is a little determination and a lot of JUST DO IT!

Just a small turn out, but still a great meeting!