Whenever I talk to a small business owner about online marketing I am constantly asked the same few questions *(and statements):

1. How do you find a good web freelancer? *(I need to trust them with my business and I don’t want to be taken advantage of)
2. Once I find a freelancer how do I manage him or her? *(I don’t know a lot about internet marketing or development so I wouldn’t know if they are actually executing on what they promised me?)

I decided to begin writing a series of blog posts to cover all of these topics in depth. My goal is to arm the small businessperson with all of the information needed to successfully find and manage a web freelancer.

Like hiring any kind of service-provider, knowledge is power. You obviously don’t want to spend all day researching and learning the business, after all you are hiring a freelancer to save you time and to gain his expertise. But, if you know the language of the business and the basic strategies involved you have a much better chance of having a successful relationship with the freelancer. The topics in this series will include:

Part 1: Internet Marketing Basics and Terminology

Before building a site you should have a solid marketing plan. Too often small business owners simply throw up a site before they have an understanding of its purpose. I will explain

• The importance of setting goals for your site and creating a long term strategy
• Identifying your target customers and understanding their behavior
• Understanding the internet marketing options available to you to reach these customers (SEO, local marketing, PPC, display ads, affiliate marketing, social media marketing)
• Why you need analytics to gauge your success
• Converting your visitors into paying customers

Part 2: Web Development Basics and Terminology

After determining the purpose of your site and the ways to gain site visitors we will move on to outlining and then building the site. I will explain

• The basic elements of a site – header, navigation bar, body, sidebar, footer, meta tags, additional elements
• The importance of wireframing your site before building it
• Site usability, following web standards, and understanding visitor behavior and flow on a site
• Creating a “call to action” to maximize site conversions
• The functionality you can build into your site and the amount of effort and cost that can be expected to build that functionality – CMS systems, site “widgets,” custom web development, etc

Part 3: Finding a Freelancer

Now that you have a general understanding of how a website is built and marketed it is time to find a freelancer to do the work. I will cover

• Where to locate freelancers
• How to determine which is the right freelancer for you
• Creating a project plan and determining milestones
• Determining what is a fair price for the work
• How to interpret a project proposal

Part 4: Managing the Freelancer

Even with the project underway there is still some management needed on your part to ensure everything is moving forward as planned. I will teach you

• How to ensure the work is being done properly
• The kinds of deliverables you should be getting to monitor parts of the project
• How to interact with the freelancer and ask questions without being annoying or distracting
• For the additional work that inevitably comes up in the course of a project, what is covered in the original proposal and what will cost extra

Stay Tuned!

I will be writing these installments over the next several weeks so check back for the updates. Or even easier, sign up to my mailing list to get emailed the updates (see signup form on the righthand side of this page).

If you are interested in retaining my internet marketing and development services or have any questions at all please contact me.

This Billboard article about Devo using an ad agency for marketing their new album further exemplifies how a traditional record label’s usefulness has been reduced to only physical distribution (and artist development, when they care to do that).

It is relatively cheap and easy to get music distributed online and be on the same exact playing field as the top selling artists – there’s no barrier to entry. Once the music is online though, it needs to be marketed. Ad agencies are better than labels at researching the target market, getting creative with the marketing, and testing the outcome. They have the experience of launching big brands’ campaigns and answering to all clients with their value added. Labels, on the other hand, treat is as a gamble:

An ad agency’s agenda is getting things in front of people that they might miss. They have to sell one car out of 50 that are coming out that season, and there’s no room for failure,” Mothersbaugh says. “Record companies have this whole other trajectory. They shoot all this stuff against the wall to see what sticks, and if they get one success out of a hundred bands, they high-five each other.”

I believe that the future of the music industry lies in a hybrid record label/ad agency. A single destination that could manage all sides of the music distribution and marketing equation. Stay tuned for more news on this topic!

These days more and more people turn to search engines (like Google) and local review sites (like Yelp) to find local businesses of all kinds. Any business that doesn’t take the time to craft this local search presence is missing out on a relatively cheap and easy way to generate customers. This benefits ALL types of businesses – pizza shops, cafés, accountants, acupuncturists, bail bondsmen…you get the idea. Do a search for your type of business (search “bail bondsmen in brooklyn”) – I can guarantee that at least some of your local competition is already showing up in this space. Because the search engines place a lot of value in the age of a site or listing, the longer you wait to market yourself the harder it will be. I will be showing you how to get your own listings and show up for these kinds of searches. I’m also including a spreadsheet template to list the sites you need to be on and help you keep track of your work. This will be a huge timesaver for you!

(note: I provide local search marketing services on a freelance basis, please contact me if you are interested!)

Starting a local search presence can be intimidating. There are lots of resources online on the topic, many giving differing directions and opinions. There are also plenty of marketing companies offering local search services that are unclear and seem like a scam. As a local business owner you have already probably been contacted by one of them.

For the most part though, submitting your business to these directories is relatively easy and should only take about 20-30 minutes per directory once you do the initial setup work. So for a lot of businesses that means that these efforts are paid off for after gaining just one or two new customers! Once these listings are placed they are active indefinitely so odds are you’ll be getting some kind of traction down the road, if not a noticeable amount of new business.

Template 1: Gathering the Relevant Information

Before you begin creating listings it’s a good idea to get organized. Start by taking a look at the local search marketing spreadsheet template that I am providing. One of the tabs contains all of the information about your business that you will be using over and over again. You will need to copy and paste about 10 different things for every listing so having it all in one convenient location ahead of time will save you a lot of time. Make sure you fill out this information correctly the first time! It is very time consuming to go back and change your listings after they are live.

Here’s what you will need to fill out:

1. business name
2. business address
3. toll-free phone
4. fax number
5. website url
6. year established
7. languages spoken
8. business contact email
9. business hours
10. payment options – Credit cards accepted, paypal, cash?
11. photos or videos – Keep these files on your desktop so you can upload them easily.
12. products and services offered – A quick list of services.
13. category – Most sites provide you with a generic list of categories, just pick the closest one to your business.
14. tag line – Usually a quick sentence that sums up what your business can do for your customers.
15. short description – if you don’t know how to describe your business look at competitors for ideas. You should also be including some of the keywords that you selected somewhere within the actual description. Know that this 1-2paragraph description is your chance to sell the customer on your credibility so make it count. Some sites only allow a few sentences, so have a quick description ready.
16. long descripion – Other sites don’t have a limit on description size you can have a few paragraphs, just don’t make it too long or people won’t read it all. Instead say “visit our site or contact us for more information.”
17. keywords – Be sure to include keywords that you think people will be using to search for you. Make sure each keyword has a local term somewhere in them. If you’re an accountant in Brooklyn make sure you include terms like “Park Slope accountant,” “accounting services Brooklyn,” “income taxes Park Slope,” etc. Just don’t use very general keywords like “accounting” because that keyword is very competitive. You actually have a good chance of ranking for a term like “accounting services Brooklyn” though.

Template 2: The Local Listings You Will Be Submitting

The second spreadsheet tab contains a list of sites that you will be trying to acquire listings on. You will be dealing with a lot of sites with various verification listing methods depending on the site. This can get confusing if you don’t keep track of it early on. The fields you are dealing with here are:

1. site name – Name of the local directory. This includes Google Places, Yelp, Yellowpages, and many more (see the spreadsheet). There are a lot of other sites that I’ve removed from the template spreadsheet. Sorry! I spent a ton of time compiling these sites over the years so if you’re interested, contact me for more information about my services. Or, if you have some sites that you recommend add them to the comments. If you have the time, you can search for local businesses and note the types of directory listings that appear. If a competitor’s listing is appearing you should probably try to get on that directory.
2. site listing url – Where you go to create a listing
3. login name – The name and password you used to create this listing, and how you can edit it later on
4. login password
5. profile url – After your listing is verified add the url of the listing here, so you can check on it later on
6. status – The status of the listing – 1. not yet submitted, 2. submitted, awating approval, 3. approved
7. next steps – Some notes on what needs to happen next, for ex. “waiting for verification email,” “need to call a phone number to confirm”
8. Notes – Any random notes about the listing for future reference

Get to Work

Now that you have everything in your spreadsheet ready it’s time get busy. Go to the first site – Google Places. Enter all of your information in the form by copying and pasting from the spreadsheet. Submit it. Google will confirm by calling your listed phone number. After the listing is live just give the listing a quick review to make sure it looks nice. Change the status to “verified.” Done. Move to the next listing. Do the same thing. Yada yada yada. Before you know it you’re a local search kingpin.

Over the next few weeks and months do an occasional search for your business. Try your business name, and a handful of different keywords that you defined above. As long as you picked some good local keywords you should have no problems showing up in the top Google results – either on the map results, which shows up on the top of local searches, or on the natural search results below that.

FYI, I Can Do This Work For You!

I understand that a lot of business owners don’t have the time or knowhow to do this work themselves. I offer local search marketing services on a freelance basis and can work with a wide range of budgets. I can also do this as part of a larger internet marketing or website development campaign. Feel free to contact me for a quote or if you have any questions.

The Local Search Marketing Template

Below is the template you can use for your own local search marketing campaign. If you would like to edit the document go here and click File>>Download As, and you download it as an Excel spreadsheet or just save as your own editable Google Document.

As many aspiring bloggers know, it’s hard to find the time to write great posts on a regular basis (or even mediocre posts on an irregular basis, for that matter). So instead of trying to compete against the plethora of useful resources out there I’m going to do one better – direct you to them. These are my top go-to blogs that have taught me much of what I’ve learned over the past few years on the topics of internet marketing, development, and design.

1. Smashing Magazine – I could pretty much stop the list here because there is enough useful information on this blog to keep you busy for a lifetime. It covers design, marketing, development, and everything in between. Very well written posts and tutorials!
2. Six Pixels of Separation – Innovative ideas on internet marketing. What I love about these guys is that they separate the fads from the useful marketing techniques. There are so many blogs out there talking about how important it is to just get out there on Twitter because “it’s awesome,” Six Pixels tells you why you should actually get on it and how you should go about doing it.
3. SitePoint – Sort of like Smashing Magazine but more content about marketing and less about design. It also has some good resources for freelancers.
4. Search Engine Land – One of the most popular SEO blogs out there. This is a great resource to skim once in a while to make sure your site is on top of the SEO trends. Personally I find that most of the tried and true SEO techniques (links+good content) have not changed much over the years but there are always little tricks and site-tweaks you can pick up from here.
5. New York Times Technology – If you’re only reading the up-to-the-minute blogs out there a lot of times you could be missing the bigger picture. NYT has some great articles about technology trends and the companies that are making it all happen. Not to mention, there’s also a great NYT iPhone app that lets me download the news so I can read it on the subway!

There are plenty of other great resources, but 5 sounds like a good prime number so I’ll stick with it. Also, between these 5 there is more than enough information to keep me busy. I feel any more than this would just be a distraction. Post your favorite blogs in the comments!

“NYTimes: Once Just a Site With Funny Cat Pictures, and Now a Web Empire“  is a great example of when an idea works online, you milk it for everything it works and run with it till it dies. A web entrepreneur saw the potential in the popular cat-humor blog, ICanCheezburger.com (full disclosure: personally, I despise cats), and invested $10k to buy it and expand on the idea. He built a large network of mostly humorous, simple, blog-based sites.

Some examples of their successful sites are – Fail Blog (photos of anything gone wrong), There I Fixed It (bad repair jobs), Tots and Crafts (kid’s art projects), and a ton more. They come up with these ideas through market research – monitoring forums for humerous topics that seem to be gaining popularity.

You can tell that all of the sites are built on basically the same exact template – meaning, any time they think of a catchy cat-humor-ish idea they can deploy it almost immediately, do minimal marketing, and watch it grow. Of course, that low barrier to entry means anybody can start one of these easily. BUT, since the Cheeseburger Network attracts 16million visitors per month and they probably have tons of links to their sites (ie. they rank highly in Google), they can probably boost any new site to the top of the search engines quickly. THAT is the barrier to entry. Of course, since people with their own portfolio of sites see this tactic working they will try to create these kinds of sites. Cheeseburger already has a lot of their ideas already launched though, and the odds are slim of visitors wanting to visit a new funny-cat blog when there’s already a popular one out there.

They’ve also expanded to selling merchandise (books, t-shirts) based on the site concepts. They have expanded to over 40 employees and have not used any additional outside investment.

If you look around online you can find a lot of examples of this type of network of sites (although a lot of network owners want you to think they’re all unique sites). Anybody have any good original ideas to share with us in the comments? JK, if you have a good idea it’s probably best if you didn’t go sharing your secret with the world. But, if you want to talk about anybody else’s great idea go ahead!

Entitled “Social Media, Not Just for Kids Any More,” check it out on The JAR Group’s Blog

We’ve been tossing around the idea of offering reputation management services at the JAR Group for a while now. I recently started putting together the offering and marketing collateral, and the program is now in beta with a few test clients.

The main idea is that there are a lot of people who can benefit greatly from having a positive online presence but they don’t have the time or knowhow to create it. I think this service could do wonders for the careers of lawyers, doctors, executives, etc.

Here is the service offering page, and a blog post I wrote for JAR explaining a little bit more about the service.

To jump on board with all the bloggers writing about ways to make it through these hard times I am writing about how to make a flash-based interactive resume.

After spending the time building a flash MPC2000 drum machine that plays my songs [LINK], I decided I might as well use my new skills to build an interactive flash resume. There are many benefits to an interactive resume such as this:

• Demonstrate your design skills
• Show your creativity and “thinking-outside-the-boxedness”
• Learn some new flash skills – it’s inevitable that you will pick up new tricks any time you do a new project such as this

There are some problems inherent in a flash-based resume. Namely, most prospective employers, if they are not hiring you for a design-specific job, don’t care to see an interactive resume. They want to see a traditional format resume, that fits in the pile with the other resumes. There is nothing wrong with this, they have job to do, to sift through the pile. This is why I recommend adding a link within your resume’s url to a .pdf version of your resume.

The other drawback, and as a search marketer I preach this often, is that flash is not a very search-friendly medium. It is getting better as Google algorithms improve [link]. It is still another reason to offer an alternative version of the resume based in html.

Brands are always dying to know what customers think of them. I came across a site that tells them just that – brandtags.net. It shows you a brand logo and you respond with a word or phrase that pops into your head. You can then see what other people said in a “tag cloud” format, ie. more popular terms are displayed in a larger font. A very simple idea, but its simplicity is its value to marketers.

Many of the brands show what you’d expect – for Wallgreens I thought “drugs” and sure enough the majority also thought this, along with “drug store,” “pharmacy,” and “cheap.” If Walgreens is trying to position themselves as cheap then they are doing a good job. If not, then their Brandtags should tell them that they are off course.

For Jack in the Box I noted “fat”, which based on the font size was an average response. I would love to see the responses trended over time, ie. do less people think “fat” now than 6 months ago; is JIB’s health initiatives paying off?

Then there are the brands like Midevil Times – I immediately thought about that scene in Cable Guy where Jim Carrey jousts Matthew Broderick. Sure enough I wasn’t the only one. Based on the font size, “Cable Guy” is the most popular term to come to mind when thinking about Midevil Times. Not to say that their marketing people weren’t aware of this phenomenon in the past, but they should definitely understand how big of an impact this has been on their brand.

The results are interesting and sometimes entertaining, and I’d venture to say a lot of brands would really value the results. As opposed to focus groups where people say what they think they should say, you can infer that these results are honest because of the anonymity of the process. And much like search engine keyword research, the results can give you an unobstructed lens into the minds of your customers.