Why?
You can certainly host videos on your own small business website, but there are some great advantages to hosting your videos on YouTube instead. Here are a few you should consider:

• YouTube is the world’s most popular online video community, with millions of users. The site’s features make it easy for users to search and browse by topics, view their friends’ favorite videos, and subscribe to their favorite channels–all things that can attract viewers who have never before heard of your company or your website.
• Hosting your own videos takes up your server’s limited storage space and bandwidth. Bandwidth becomes particularly important if you have a terrific video that goes viral. If you host with YouTube, they will be responsible for dealing with the increased traffic load as people flock to see your video, so you won’t have to worry about overloading your own server.

How?
Registering with YouTube and creating your own channel is a simple process, and they have a pretty comprehensive help center if you get stuck. Making your videos doesn’t have to be complicated, either. You need a digital camera, but it doesn’t have to be professional quality–your video will most likely be viewed in a small 320×240 pixel window, so an expensive high-definition camcorder isn’t necessary. Depending on the type of videos you decide to make, your computer’s webcam may be all you need.

Once you have created and uploaded your videos, you can easily embed them in your website and link to them from all over the Internet. Great places to include them might be your social networking profiles, emails, forums, and other Internet video communities.

A few important tips:

• Include your business name, website, and other contact info in the video itself as well as in the description.
• Keep basic SEO principles in mind when writing your video’s title, description, and tags. Using the right keywords will help customers find you and get your video listed on related searches.
• Be an active member of the YouTube community. In addition to posting your own videos, comment on those posted by other users and add ones you like to your favorites.

• Create a video blog that you regularly update with short videos, usually under 5 minutes long. This isn’t much different than a written blog, but feels more personal and is more interesting for some website viewers. Check out my article on what blogging is for more info on why you should blog–it’s specific to written blogs, but the same principles still apply.
• Make demos of your product or services. Customers will feel more confident in the product they’re purchasing if they can see it in action, and they’ll be able to see that you know a lot about the products or services you’re providing.
• Offer tutorials or mini-lectures on topics related to your business. Just like with article marketing, these videos will provide your viewers with useful information or skills while also establishing you as an expert in your area. They’re a great opportunity for product placement, as well–for example, if you sell scrapbooking supplies, you can use your products in a how-to-scrapbook video.
• Post video answers to frequently asked questions, or even respond to general customer inquiries with video messages.
• Provide videos of customer testimonials to prove that the testimonials are authentic and show off your satisfied customers.

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My answer is always the same: regardless of the size of your business, and whether you plan to sell your products online or not, you do need to have an online presence, or you risk losing potential customers. Here are the four main reasons why even the smallest mom and pop shop should have a website:

Make It Easier To Get More Info About Your Business

Even if you don’t plan to sell online, you should have a presence on the Web so that customers, potential employees and business partners can quickly and easily find out more about your business. These days, when people search for information, the first place they go to is the Internet. More and more research shows that in almost every area, the first step in the decision making process is gathering information online. Not having an online presence will make some potential customers assume that you’re not a serious business and look elsewhere.

Your Competitors Are Online

For many prospects, if they have a choice between two businesses, and one business has a strong online presence with lots of info and the other has no website, they will feel more comfortable doing business with the site that has a website. A website makes a business seem modern, up to date and more accessible. A lack of website conveys the opposite – it makes a business look outdated and less professional.

Your Customers Are Online

This is easy. If your customers and prospects are online, you should be online too, and since these days almost everyone is online, regardless of what you sell or who your customers are, you should have an online presence. The same is true for social media, by the way – you don’t need to be on Twitter if your customers are not using Twitter. But if they are, you should have a regularly updated Twitter account and a prominent link to it from your website’s homepage.

Streamline Customer Service

A website is a great way to provide support for your customers and save yourself valuable time. Your website should include as much information about your business as possible, with the goal of minimizing the volume of phone calls you receive and the time spent on answering phone calls and emails. Include your address, directions, store hours, as much information about your products and services as you can, and answers to the most frequently asked questions you receive.

It’s important to realize that it’s not enough to just have a website. You should have a professionally designed site if you want to be taken seriously. A generic, low-quality website could actually hurt your business instead of promoting it, so it’s better to have no website than to have one that makes your business look bad. Small business website design is probably more affordable than you realize. Click here to read more about professional website design for small businesses. [LINK to October’s blog post).

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What is a landing page?
A landing page is exactly what it sounds like—the page a potential customer lands on after clicking a link. Technically, any page on your website can be a landing page. However, the most effective landing page is one that was created to match the needs of the person who clicked on the link that leads to it. The goal of a landing page is to capture the visitor’s attention and get them take an action you desire—make a purchase, for instance, or fill out a sign-up form.

Why you need a landing page for your advertising campaign
When you create an advertisement, whether it’s a banner ad or an email to your client list, you craft it with a specific goal and audience in mind. You do this to connect with your customers and encourage them to click on the link to your website. But your interaction with your customers doesn’t end there—you want them to take a certain action once they reach your website. This is where the landing page comes in. Sending people to an ad-specific landing page on your website will provide them with exactly what they came to find, making it more likely that they will make a transaction.

Here are a couple examples to illustrate what a landing page can do for you:

Imagine that you own an online store that sells women’s clothing. To market your website, you create an advertisement that promotes your new swimwear collection for summer. To go along with this advertising campaign, you design a landing page that features the top-selling swimwear items. People who click on the swimwear ad are more likely to stick around if they land on this page and immediately see what they’re looking for than if they’re directed to the homepage of your site, which has just a small link to the swimwear section.

Or maybe your marketing goal is to get people to sign up for your email list. To do this, you offer them a free e-book in exchange for their name and email address. When people click on this offer, they’re sent directly to a landing page that contains the form they need to fill out in order to receive the e-book. This will be much more effective than sending them to your website’s homepage, where they will have to hunt on their own for the link to sign up for the e-book. You’ll get many more people to sign up for your email list if you create a landing page specifically for this purpose.

Essentially, a landing page increases the effectiveness of your advertising campaign by immediately engaging visitors who are attracted by your ad. How many times have you clicked on a link only to find yourself on a webpage that seems completely unrelated? That was an example of a bad landing page, and chances are you hit the back button on your browser within seconds. Keep that from happening with your ads with a well-crafted landing page.

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My unscientific conclusion: small businesses seem to either love social media and use it as much as they can, or avoid it completely. There’s almost no middle ground, and it’s especially interesting to me that the clients who avoid social media are almost, it seems, afraid to use it.

Businesses worry about using social media for several reasons. The main reason is that they worry they will be wasting valuable time and resources on something that is no more than a hype – a passing trend that will disappear within a few years, leaving all those businesses who poured time and money into social media marketing with nothing.

Another common fear is that since social media is essentially about opening your business to your prospects and clients and having conversations with them, you would lose control of your brand and of your image if you engage in social media.

I would like to address the second issue first. I don’t think you should be afraid of social media. The conversations in social media about your brand are going to take place whether you are involved in them or not. It’s actually better to be involved, to initiate some of the conversations and certainly to follow mentions of your brand in social media (use Twitter Search) and respond to them.

As for the first question, most experts agree that while no one can say for certain that social media as it is now will be here in the same form a decade from today, the general concept of engaging customers and prospects in direct conversations is here to stay. I agree: consumers and businesses are quickly learning to expect two-way conversations with each other instead of solely relying on the traditional one-way promotional messages in print ads and in television commercials.

So, can you show clear return on your investment in social media marketing? This is where things get a bit trickier. Marketing is one area where it’s been traditionally difficult to show hard numbers, and social media marketing is no different. However, social media ROI can and should be measured.

A few ways you can measure the success of your social media marketing campaign:

1. Is your favorite social media channel (such as Twitter or Facebook) among the top ten referrers to your website?

2. When people get to your website through a social media channel, how engaged are they? Do they immediately bounce back, or do they spend a few minutes on your site?

3. What percent of your social media visitors become leads by downloading white papers or eBooks or by subscribing to your blog or to your newsletter?

4. What percentage of social media visitors become clients or customers?

Remember that whatever you do to track your social media ROI, you need to be patient. Establishing a social media account, growing it and cultivating connections with clients and prospects isn’t something you can do overnight. I would say that the typical social media account takes at least six months to start showing results, and the longer you keep at it, the better your results, provided you only follow relevant people and engage them daily.

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You basically have two options for securing a domain name that has already been purchased by someone else:

1. Ask the owner if they’re willing to sell. Visit the URL you wish to have to see what the owner is using it for. In some cases, the domain will be “parked” or inactive, meaning that it’s currently undeveloped. You might be in luck if the domain name you want is parked or doesn’t direct to a website, because it means the owner doesn’t currently have a use for the domain and may consider selling it to you for the right price. Sometimes a parked domain will have a page stating it is for sale and providing a way to contact the owner. If not, you can look up the owner’s contact information with a WHOIS search. Most domain registrars offer their own WHOIS database search, or you can use a site like http://whois.domaintools.com. Even if there is a site already up on the domain name you want, you have nothing to lose by asking the owner if they’re willing to sell. If you feel uncomfortable contacting the owner yourself, you can pay to have a registrar do it for you. For example, two of the largest domain registration companies, GoDaddy and NetworkSolutions, will contact the owner and make an offer on your behalf for a fee. Keep in mind that there is still no guarantee that the owner will be willing to sell, and you’re out the fee regardless.
2. Wait for the domain registration to expire. The WHOIS data on your domain name will list the date the current owner’s registration expires. If the owner doesn’t renew their registration, you may be able to snag the name for yourself. There are a few things to consider if you decide to go with this method:
   • Domain registrars offer a grace period after expiration, usually around 35 days, before they put the name up for sale. This means that a domain won’t necessarily become available on the day it’s set to expire.
   • Many companies will let you “backorder” a domain name, where you pay a fee to be put on a waiting list in case the name expires. The fee is nonrefundable and you aren’t guaranteed a chance to buy the domain—the owner may renew, or you may have to compete in an auction against other people who have paid to backorder the domain.

Alternatively, you can always go with a similar name that is available or think outside the box to come up with a unique and memorable name that represents your business. Another option is to choose a different domain extension, such as yourbusinessname.net if yourbusinessname.com is already taken.

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Claim your search engine listings. Google, Yahoo, and other search engines allow business owners to claim their listings. This allows you to make sure your website address is listed and control the way the search engines index your business. You can use www.getlisted.org to see how your business has been indexed by the top search engines and find out which listings you haven’t yet claimed.

Submit your website to business directories. There are many business directories on the Internet besides those operated by the major search engines. Major national business directories include InfoUSA and YP.com; you can check out GetListed’s Resource Center or do an Internet search to find a number of other good directory options. Many directories will list your business and website information for free. Also look for local and industry business directories that might more directly target your audience, such as the local chamber of commerce or your trade association.

Make your website address part of your signature. Whenever you sign your name on the Internet, also include the address of your small business website. Many places offer the option to create a custom signature–from member-based websites to your own email–and you should always include your website address.

Comment in online forums. As a business owner, it’s always a good idea for you to stay active in your industry’s online conversations. Find online forums that are relevant to your business and take part in the discussions, making sure to leave your calling card—your website address—behind.

Build social networking profiles. Social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn all have places for you to enter your business website. Link your profiles to your website, your website to your profiles, and even your profiles to each other.

Try article marketing. Write about topics relevant to your website and publish them on the Internet, with a link back to your website in the “about the author” section. Learn more about how to promote your website with article marketing and consider giving it a try.

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Benefits of Article Marketing

• Publishing articles on other websites will help you reach a broader audience—the more information you have on the Internet, the more likely it is that your target audience will find you.
• Writing high-quality articles related to your business is a great way to establish yourself as an expert in your field. People searching for information on the topic will read your articles and see that you know what you’re talking about, which will encourage them to check out your website for more information.
• Readers will come away from your articles with a positive impression of you and your business, since you’re providing them with useful and free information.
• Every article you write and publish will have a link back to your site, providing you with valuable backlinks that may improve your search engine ranking. Keep in mind that search engines like Google take into account the quality of the sites linking to yours; for this reason, try not to sacrifice quality for quantity. It’s probably to your advantage to focus on writing well-written and informative articles that high-quality sites will be happy to publish, even if this means you’ll end up with fewer articles overall.

Be Careful of Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is large blocks of text from different webpages that are identical or extremely similar. Google can penalize you for providing duplicate content by lowering your search ranking or completely removing your site from the Google index. These duplicate content penalties are part of Google’s effort to provide useful search results—they don’t want every search result to have basically the same content.

Duplicate content only results in penalties if Google believes your intent was to manipulate search rankings or deceive users. Submitting the same article for publication on multiple sites in order to promote your own website can be seen by Google as deception and result in penalties. Article marketing can be very effective in boosting your search rankings and increasing traffic to your small business website, but make sure to avoid duplicate content to ensure that your efforts don’t backfire.

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Think of choosing a web hosting provider for your website as choosing a hotel to stay at on vacation. Your website has to stay somewhere in order to have access to the Internet, but some hotels will be a better fit than others. Do you really need a huge suite with a minibar and 24 hour room service? Or will a single room and a continental breakfast serve your needs just fine?

One of the most important factors to consider is web space–most web hosts provide you with a set amount of space on their server. You’ll want to be sure you get enough space for your business website as it is now, as well as consider whether you might need more space for future expansion. Keep in mind that things like images, video, and Flash take up a lot of space.

Bandwidth or data transfer is another factor to consider. Bandwidth refers to the amount of information your website sends across the network every month. Every time your site is viewed, it uses bandwidth. When choosing a web hosting provider, you’ll want to make sure they provide enough bandwidth to cover the number of visitors you expect. Also check whether the web host charges fees for going over your monthly bandwidth–some advertise “unlimited bandwidth” but actually do have restrictions. How much bandwidth you need varies depending on the amount of traffic you expect.

In addition to these basic factors, there are many additional things offered by web hosting providers that you may or may not want:

• Domain registration/setup–Does the web hosting package come with domain registration and setup included? Many offer it for free as part of choosing their services, which is a great freebie if you need it (you don’t if you’ve already registered your domain name somewhere else).
• Email accounts–You’ll probably want to be able to create an email account for every employee, but most small businesses won’t need the ability to create 100 different email accounts.
• FTP access–FTP is usually the easiest way to upload new pages to your website.
• Programs and scripts–Interactive websites often require databases and the ability to use scripts like PHP. As with emails, you probably won’t need a huge number of databases; you can do a lot with just one.
• SSL (secure server)–If you plan to have an online store, you’ll want to provide a secure server for your customers. If you don’t plan to collect credit card payments through your website, a secure server probably isn’t necessary.

As you’re trying to choose a web hosting provider, remember to look critically at the services they offer. A great hosting package for one small business website may not be the best choice for another–it all varies depending on factors like what you plan to do with your site, how much traffic you expect, and how large your business is. Don’t be swayed by the promise of “unlimited” amounts of things you only need 5 of, and make sure the provider offers the important things you need to run your site.

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Yelp.com is a website where customers can search for local businesses and leave reviews of their experiences, and it also offers a number of free tools for small business owners. If you haven’t already, check Yelp to see if your business is listed; if it isn’t, you can list it for free. If it is listed, claim your page to take advantage of all that Yelp.com offers small business owners: communicate with your customers by responding to their reviews, promote discounts and special events, check the amount of traffic your Yelp business page receives, recommend other businesses, and provide detailed information about your business–including your website address. With more than 26 million visitors in December 2009, Yelp.com is a great way to connect with local traffic.

Google’s Local Business Center offers small business owners the opportunity to customize their listing on Google and Google Maps, with options like adding pictures, coupons, business hours, and more. You can also see behind-the-scenes information to find out things like who’s searching for you and what search terms they’re using to find you. You can even see where driving directions requests originate, so you will know where your visitors are coming from and whether you’re targeting local traffic.

The social networking phenomenon Twitter is another way to stay connected with your local customers, and Twitter is beginning to cater to small business owners. It’s a quick and immediate way to communicate with customers, see what people are saying about your business, and build relationships with customers and other businesses. Put a Twitter badge on your website and begin following local individuals and businesses, and before you know it you’ll have followers of your own. One of the really cool things about Twitter is that your conversations with customers are publicly visible and searchable, meaning they often attract attention from other Twitterers in the same locale or with similar interests.

Facebook, which began as a social networking site exclusively for college students, has expanded dramatically and now offers great opportunities for small businesses. When you create a free business page on Facebook, anyone can become a fan of your page and suggest that others do the same. You can provide detailed information on your profile (including your website address), post business updates, make photo albums, and converse with your fans. Facebook users can search business pages by location, and many are thrilled when they can become fans of their favorite local businesses. And since their friends can see what businesses they’re fans of, your local exposure increases exponentially with every fan you acquire.

These are four great websites that offer free ways to connect with local customers. They will help you target local traffic, learn about your customers, and provide your small business with a strong local presence even on the global Internet.

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