To help you promote your small business there is a website with some nice marketing tools. SmallBusinessSaturday.com has tools that may be of use to your business including:

• Printable signage to put in your store window
• An email you can send to your client list promoting the day
• Content for your Facebook Wall and Twitter Feed

The idea behind Small Business Saturday is that if each customer buys just 1 item from a small business, it will have an enormous impact on small business as a whole. And consumers do want to help small, local businesses for a number of reasons: local jobs, their local economy and the uniqueness of many local business products.

So take advantage of this nationally promoted day (you have seen the commercial, right?) and some of the promotional tools available to your small business to increase sales and traffic for your business. And once Saturday passes, start planning for next year’s Small Business Saturday to drive even more sales.

The first is the Facebook Question app on your Wall. This is the quickest and simplest way to ask the people that like your Page for feedback. Just type in a question, add possible responses (if you want to) and submit.

This is great for a little market research, or just to engage your fans.

The next tool is video. Almost everyone these days has a video camera, either standalone or as part of their phone. So why not film more and share it? For the most part people aren’t expecting high quality, professional video footage and editing all the time, especially in a social media space. So shoot a little video about your business, your products, your service. And then share it. If you get addicted to shooting video, you can even use the Facebook video App for a unique video tab, or use one of the many video apps (like YouTube) to build a more custom tab.

Another quick thing to do to improve the look of your Page is to have the best photos from your photo album be the five that show above your wall. To do this, just head to your Wall. If you are logged in and an admin of the Page, just move your cursor over the photos you don’t want there. An ‘x’ should appear. Click it. When you do, a confirmation box will appear letting you know that that particular photo will not show up on your Facebook Wall, but will still be visible elsewhere. Once you get a picture you like in a spot, move to the next photo in line. Continue until you have 5 photos you want to appear. This keeps the Page looking nice. If you don’t do this, you run the risk of some obscure photos showing there, or 5 very similar photos showing which is probably not what you want to do.

One tip I do on a regular basis is head to the Info tab on the business Pages I admin. Facebook regularly adds new fields, so I check in to make sure all the info I can possibly give people is populated. You’d be amazed at how many business Pages don’t have much filled out in the tab, not even the About Box which feeds the left nav, or even contact information.

Lastly, there are many Pages that do not share anything but a Status message. Now, Status messages are great, and definitely should be a part of your Facebook efforts. Put you need to remember how they show up on your fans News feed. They appear amongst pictures of their new baby nephews, amongst posts asking them to join a game and links to the funniest video of the week. If all you send is a little text update, it may be 1 in 10 or 1 in 20 posts that actual stands out and gets read. But if you include photos, videos or links in the posts it will look as appealing as all the others on a personal News feed. The quickest one of these is the link. If you read a blog everyday, or subscribe to a newsletter in your industry, there is plenty to share with a link. When you’re reading them, think to yourself if the information in the piece would be of interest to your customers. When you answer ‘yes,’ take that link and share it on your Wall. When you do, a title and blurb from that page are automatically added to the Post, along with an image from the page.

And you can easily edit the text and look for different images. All you then need to do is write a brief statement as to why your fans should click on the link. You’re done. You’ve now provided the people who like your Page with some great information and they will remember it came from you.

Which of these tools will you try first? Do they really make your life and Internet marketing campaigns easier? Let us know.

There is, however, one change we have noticed that has become more widespread for Google and could have a major impact on search traffic for some websites. And it has to do with Google AdWords.

What Google has done is opened a new ‘channel’ for AdWords advertisers so their ads can show up under more searches (and so Google can generate more ad revenue). The new ‘channel’ appears right where the AdWords have appeared for years (to the right of the organic search results), but above some ads or sections of ads there is a line reading ‘Related to [keyword phrase]‘. It looks like this:

So when does this show and how do you get your ads to show up under this heading?

When Do Related To Ads Appear?

It seems that searchers will see these ads when the search they perform is for a phrase that is not targeted by anybody with ads directly related to the phrase, or when there aren’t many people bidding for the phrase. We did one for ‘Lake George restaurants’, and there were no ‘restaurant’ ads to be seen, but we did get real estate and hotel ads.

There doesn’t seem to be any advertisers going after ‘Lake George restaurants’, but Google’s algorithms calculate that people who are looking for restaurants may be house hunters (so they show real estate) or travelers (so they show hotels).

How Can You Participate In The Related To Section?

Any AdWords advertiser is eligible for this. You just need to have your keywords turned to broad matching (vs phrase or exact match). Then, if someone types in a phrase related to your keywords, and there are no businesses specifically targeting it, your ad will have the opportunity to be seen there. Be careful with this – if you open up too many phrases to broad match, or the wrong phrases to broad match, you could negatively impact your campaign by generating more traffic that is not your intended target. This could increase costs, lower your Quality Score and cause some headaches. Small tests are recommended.

One more thing – we have also seen that in some cases, under Related to ads there is a ‘Also try’ section that offers other phrases that you, as a searcher, may want to see the results for.

Have you come across any ‘Related to’ results while searching? Will this change how you manage your pay per click program? We’d like to hear from you.

So what is Google Merchant Center? It’s an online business tool that lets you provide Google with a feed of all the products you promote and/or sell online (this usually means items you sell through a shopping cart on your website). This allows specific products and product information to show up within Google Product Search, on Google SERPs with images and other Google properties.

Now, just setting up an account and a feed does not mean that your products will always appear for related searches, or even for some very focused searches. Google doesn’t always choose to show information from Merchant Accounts in results, and when they do, the results are sometimes very competitive with so many vendors feeding product info to Google. But as the image below illustrates, when Google does choose to show Merchant Center products in its results, those products really stick out from the regular text results.

But what the feed does give you is the opportunity to get found in other ways (besides just for your website and on Google’s Search Engine Results Pages), and once you have the feed set, you don’t have to update it unless you have changes (i.e., price updates) or product additions or deletions. It also can be used in conjunction with a Google AdWords account. If you have an AdWords account, and attach it to your Merchant account, your ads may appear with more than just the headline, two lines of text and a link. It could possibly have a more-type ‘+’ button, that when clicked expands to show a few products related to the search, including product name, image and price (see image to the right).

So what do you need to set this up? Basically you need to develop a file (xml or txt) of your products structured to certain specs that Google addresses here.

The required attributes for each product you need are:

• ID – a unique identifier specific to only 1 product
• Title – the name of the product
• Link – the url where people can find info on this product on your website (only 1 product may be displayed on each landing page)
• Price – the cost of the item
• Description – product description
• Condition – new, used or refurbished

And there are a slew of others that may be useful in helping you get found from searches and letting people know more about your offerings. One other that we highly recommend including is a link to the product image. As with most web pages, images will help make your listing within Google Shopping and other outlets stand out.

Once you have a feed prepared, then set up a Google Merchant account. Easy to follow instructions are here. Once you have the account set up, you submit the feed to Google. You can either manually upload the file, which you would need to resubmit every 30 days, or post your feed to your website and set up a feed schedule so Google automatically grabs it each month (the second option makes it real easy since you don’t have to remember to upload the file each month).

It may take a few weeks for your products to show, but once they do appear within Google Shopping and during specific searches on Google they tend to stay there.

Do you utilize Google Merchant Center as part of your Internet marketing strategy? Do you know if it has driven traffic to your site? Has it led to any sales? We’d like to hear from you.

1. I’m not tech savvy
2. It would take up too much time
3. My target market doesn’t use Facebook
4. I started a Page but didn’t see instant results

We like to help businesses get the most out of their marketing, so if we feel they are missing an opportunity we like to tell them. So we offer the following rebuttals to the above reasons:

1. I’m not tech savvy – You don’t have to be. If you think setting up a Facebook Page is too much for you, ask someone at your business, or contact an Internet Marketing professional. Once the Page is set up, keeping it active can take as little as a few clicks and a few sentences every day or even every other day (or you could even schedule out your posts so you don’t have to go in as often).
2. It would take up too much time – Not really. Entering a post doesn’t take more than a few minutes (if that), and if you are in tune with your business, industry and clients finding topics to post about shouldn’t be difficult at all.
3. My target market doesn’t use Facebook – With over 500 million users worldwide and over 140 million users in the U.S., this may be the case, but very unlikely. People young and old are using Facebook more and more each day.
4. I started a Page but didn’t see instant results – Although there are instances when you may see instant results to certain campaigns or advertisements you do through Facebook, that’s not where the major benefits usually come from. The bigger picture with Facebook is more as a long term part of your business’ marketing program. It builds trust and brand awareness, can be used for market and product research, allows for word of mouth marketing and a can yield a host of other great results that aren’t always connected to that day’s bottom line.

Facebook is as close to a must as there is when it comes to pieces to a marketing campaign for any business. It’s where the people are, and once you get things started with your Page it doesn’t have to be a huge investment for you.

Is your business on Facebook? How long have you been using it? If you don’t have a Facebook Page yet, do you plan on building one soon? Contact Mannix Marketing, Inc., your local Upstate NY social media marketing company to learn how you can use Facebook to create better experiences for your customers.

First, what exactly is Online Reputation Management? In a narrow sense it refers to the practice of trying to get any negative comments/pages/mentions about a person or business to appear lower on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). In a broad sense it means taking inventory of what people are saying about you online, and doing what you can to have the most positive view of you or your business represented. This includes responding to negative reviews or ratings that may be out there.

Now that you know what ORM is, you need to take inventory of where you currently stand. There are plenty of tools you can use, and some of the more popular ones are:

• Search Engines: Just do a search on your business name and see what comes up – are there any negative results?
• Review Sites: Head to review sites like Yelp and Angie’s List to see what people are saying about you.
• Social Media: Visit Social Media communities (large ones like Facebook and even smaller, niche ones) and see how people are talking about your business.

If it seems that there are only positive things being said about your business, great. But some times you may find a negative review or post. What do you do then? There is a two part answer to this.

If the site allows, develop a professional response to the post. Be courteous, and address the issue at hand. If need be, see if you can take the conversation offline. Always keep in mind that whatever you type could be there forever, so don’t take a defensive stand and don’t attack the Poster personally. (If the Post is totally false, try and get it removed, as many sites have a process for this.)

The second part is to develop positive content for your business that has a chance for showing up in the search engines and pushing the negative comments down the SERP (Please Note: The new content does not have to be related to the negative comment). So if you found negative web pages when you searched on your business name, you will want to develop new content optimized for your business name. Some places where you can post the new content:

• Your website
• Your blog
• As a press release that you distribute
• In online communities
• As an article that you distribute

You’ll want to be sure not to duplicate content as you spread a positive message about your company, as search engines will tend to only choose one version of similar content to rank on SERPs. So if your plan was to submit content to each of the above, the plan may look like:

• Develop a new About Us page for the website
• Write a blog about a charity your business is supporting
• Write a press release about a new product you are launching
• Post to your Facebook Page about promotions within the company
• Write an article about why a product that you offer is such a good solution for a problem, and be sure to include company name and backlink in your boilerplate

Remember, if you don’t control your reputation online, somebody else will.

Do you currently monitor your online reputation? Will you start? Do you think it is important? Let us know.

Did your heart just skip a beat?

Don’t worry. Although some devices, (including the Blackberry), don’t always render a website as it was designed to be shown, for the most part today’s advanced mobile devices (iPhone and Android included) will display your website just fine! Even if you don’t have an iPhone, you can check your site looks on a mobile phone simply by going to a site like http://iphonetester.com/ and entering your domain.

If your site looks okay, should you not be worried? Or if your site looks horrible, should you drop everything and address the situation? Begin by looking at your website stats. Many stats programs now offer a breakout of mobile user stats, making it easy to see if people are visiting your site from a mobile device, what they visit and if they like what they find.

• Let’s say your site looks good on all mobile devices. That’s great! But what if your stats say that 100% of your mobile traffic exits the site within 5 seconds? That means they aren’t finding what they need to find. In that case you may be interested in developing a mobile version of your site. This is a streamlined version of your website with more direct and obvious paths to the information that these visitors really want.
• What if your site looks awful on every device, but your stats say that you have no mobile traffic? You may be in an industry where mobile traffic isn’t a huge factor, so you may be able to hold off addressing for a while (but you should put it on the To Do list down the road).

One thing to keep in mind is that mobile devices only get so much bandwidth. If your website has large files pulling into a page (think images), the page may be very slow loading leading site visitors to leave the site before they see what you want them to see. This may be another reason to either rethink your current website or start talking about developing a mobile version of the site.

Did you check out how your website looks on any mobile device? Did you like what you see? Do you have any new ideas? Let us know your thoughts.

The big change will be how the Facebook page looks. Gone are the tabs, and at the top of the page in place of them will be photos – only photos posted by the business. And if there are photos you would rather not have there, you can ‘X’ them away. So where did all your fantastic tabs go? Over to the left nav. People can now navigate to your information using a left nav, just like they do for most other sites out there.

Something else you’ll notice as new to the left nav area is that unless you are an admin of a page, you cannot see who is a fan of a page any more (or see their profile picture). All you will see is a number – here it seems Facebook has given the nod to a bit of privacy. Nice. But what you will see is a list of other Business Pages that a business likes (yep, businesses can now Like other Businesses). So you can show your fans what other businesses you recommend, are friendly with or use yourself (and of course, get your Facebook Page on their pages as well).

The new format will provide notification when fans interact with your page or posts. Hopefully this is pretty robust, as I have heard many people asking to be notified of everything and anything when it comes to interactions on their Business Page. This may help with monitoring the page for unruly posts and requests that need immediate attention.

The new format also makes it easier to go through Facebook as a person or as your business – there’s a link on the right (“Use Facebook as…”), so you can be sure if you are posting as yourself or as your business on other pages. Less confusion is better we think.

What are your thoughts about these upcoming changes to Facebook? Do you think this change will stick, or will Facebook feel pressured to revert back to the older version like some other times in the past? Let us know what you think.

So what is Google HotPot? It’s an extension of Google Places, a Google Product where you can promote your business and business location. We’ve talked about it at length in the past, and you can read up on it here.

Now, you may be saying, “Not another tool we need to spend a ton of time on!” If you are, don’t worry. Google HotPot could be very instrumental in directing traffic to your business, but if you have been keeping up with recent online trends this shouldn’t add much more, if any, work to your plate.

An extension of Google Places? Well what does that mean? Google HotPot is the revamp section of Places where local business ratings and recommendations are entered and displayed. Google has rebranded it and updated it in the hopes that by making it easier to access more and more Internet users will come to HotPot to not only write reviews, but to also go to find reviews and recommendations to make a purchasing decision.

From a customer perspective, HotPot is truly easy to use. If you have a Google account you can update and access HotPot through a number of entryways:

• Google Maps for Android
• On Google Places Listings
• Google HotPot itself

And when you access HotPot, you can search for what you are looking for (like where to each lunch, buy a gift or stay for the night).  For each business listing you get an aggregate rating and a list of all the reviews. And if a user has used a business, they can rate and review the business as well.  After using HotPot for a bit, it will offer up recommendations based on your friends and your own reviews and ratings.

So…why do businesses need to know about this? If even more people will be using Places and HotPot to find a business, you need to make sure that you have claimed your Places listing, and filled it out as best you can. As you see with the below search results page, not having an image will really dull down results in HotPot, while having the image can make it stand out.

Also, you definitely want to ask customers to head to HotPot to rate their experience and write a review.  Every once in a while peek in on the ratings and recommendations for your business to make sure they are true, or need responding to.

And right now Google is offering Portland, Oregon businesses a free promotional kit to help get clients to review your business on HotPot. If they expand this offer you can be sure we will let you know.

See, HotSpot isn’t causing you too much more work, but you do see how it could have a big roll in bringing in new business, right? Have you used HotSpot or have had a customer say they found you there? Let us know.

So what is Google Instant Preview? It’s a feature that shows a screen capture of the web page being referenced in the results. Over the past month you may have seen a little magnifying glass next to the blue text on SERPs. That’s the Instant Preview icon. When you click on one you’ll get an image that shows the page where you would land if you clicked on the link. This is supposed to the searcher a better idea of whether or not the page relates to what they are actually searching for.

What does it mean for searchers?

• If you are looking to get back to a site but don’t know the name of it, you don’t have to go clicking all the links. By just hovering over the magnifying glass you should be able to tell if one of the results is the site you are looking for.
• Although not all text is readable, you may be able to tell by the screen capture if the result is a site that pertains to what you are looking for.

What does it mean for website owners?

• It is even more important now to have a website that looks good at a glance. If someone hovers over the Instant Preview and doesn’t like what they see they can quickly go to the next result (a lot easier than clicking on your results to have a peek and then clicking back). Check out how your pages look in the preview and see if the image would entice you to click. If not, it may be time for a website redesign.
• Although not all text is readable, you may want to have important info and headers in a large, clear font that can quickly get the message to people taking a look at the Instant Preview.
• Flash doesn’t seem to show up in the Instant Previews at this point. Google is looking into alternatives, but for the time being it could deter traffic if all they see is a big blank spot on the preview or a plug in icon. If you have seen traffic drop recently you may want to look into alternatives to you Flash for now until Google addresses this.

Have you used Google Instant Preview in your searches, and has it influenced your click throughs? Or have you seen traffic patterns to your website change recently and think it may be Google Instant Preview? Share with us.