The Clickable Marketing Podcast for Small Business

In this podcast, the 3rd in this series, we’re going to look at getting your basic onsite SEO, your content & your meta tags right to focus in on your local market. In Review From parts 1 & 2… make sure you: * Tracking * Titles * Descriptions * Headings, Sub Headings & Alt tags * Content over 500 wds * Google Places listing In this 3rd of 3 podcasts, we’re going to look at what I consider then final 3 most important steps. * Build local directory listings * Add regular local focused content * Start a small adwords campaign

In this podcast, we’re going to look at getting your website to focus in on your local market.  In this 2nd of 3 podcasts, we’re going to look at what I consider then next 3 most important steps. In Review * 4. Do your headings and subheadings and alt tags. * 5. Make sure your content is up over 500 words. * 6. Make sure that you do your Google Places listing. Podcast Transcription SEO FOR SMALL BUSINESSES – PART 2 You’re listening to the Clickable Marketing Podcast, where we help fired-up small business owners turn clicks into clients. Join us to discover how you can make more money online in less time. Now, here’s your host, Mr. Web Marketing, Brad Hauck. Hi, I’m Brad Hauck, Mr. Web Marketing, and this is the Clickable Marketing Podcast Episode 9. In this episode, we’re going to have a look SEO for small business focusing on the local market part 2. Welcome, wherever you are in the world today. It’s great to catch up. I hope you’re having a great week and that your business is going really, really fast. If you enjoy this podcast, please take the time to subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher. Remember, you can always find me on Facebook.com/mrwebmarketing or MrWebMarketing on Twitter if you want to have a chat, catch up, or have any questions you’ve got. This is part 2 of 3 on SEO for small businesses. As it follows on for the previous episode, we’re looking at what works in SEO for small businesses, even today, to get extra business and traffic. Even this week, I’ve used these principles to make a difference on at least a couple of websites. It’s very straight forward, and it’s something that you can follow. ON THE PERSONAL SIDE… Personally, over the last week or so, I’ve been quite busy just doing family stuff, keeping up with the kids, and generally enjoying the nice, fine weather. Spring has finally hit here. In fact, it was almost like summer there some days. It’s great to finally get some fine, dry, warm weather. We took the opportunity to have a birthday party for my little girl, so that was pretty cool. ON THE BUSINESS SIDE… I’m building websites as well as other stuff for some of my clients and working with Thrive Themes when I’m building. They are fantastic themes. I mention them all the time, of course, but the new landing pages that they’ve added, incredible. They got over 100 different landing pages that you can use, and they’re all editable. If you’re looking for a WordPress theme that works just like any other but is clean and fast and allows you full editing rights and gives you all the power that you’d get with lead pages, then you should seriously have a look at Thrive Themes. ONTO THE EPISODE… SMALL BUSINESS SEO FOR LOCAL RESULTS – PART 2 To review last week’s episode, Episode 8, we looked at number one, two, and three things that we should do when we’re optimizing a website to get more traffic from the search engines through an organic process. Number 1, just to review, was to put tracking in place. There’s no point in doing all these work if you can’t see whether it’s working – using Webmaster Tools and Analytics or any other editing program that tracks data that you can get your hands on. I prefer them, because they’re free. Number 2. Make sure you do all the titles on your page, that they’re all individual, that they contain your keywords and are focused on your local area, using you suburbs, towns, city, etc. Number 3 is making sure that the meta description tag is completed, because that information also shows up when someone searches through Google. Remember, that’s the area where you can make it a little bit more human-like and appeal to the human buyer who’s going to click on that listing. As I said, this is number 2 of 3 podcasts. Now,

In this podcast, we’re going to look at getting your basic onsite SEO & meta tags right to focus in on your local market. SMALL BUSINESS SEO FOR LOCAL RESULTS – PART 1 You’re listening to the Clickable Marketing Podcast, where we help fired-up small business owners turn clicks into clients. Join us to discover how you can make more money online in less time. Now here’s your host, Mr. Web Marketing, Brad Hauck. Hi, I’m Brad Hauck, and this is the Clickable Marketing Podcast Episode 8. In this episode, we’re going to look at SEO for small business, focusing on a local market; and this is part one of a three-part series. Welcome, wherever you are in the world today. It’s good to catch up with you again. I hope you’re having a great week and that your business is doing really, really well. If you’re not already a subscriber of the podcast, please subscribe so that you can get each episode as it’s released. Remember that you can always chat with be via Facebook, Facebook.com/mrwebmarketing; or look for me @mrwebmarketing on Twitter. ON THE PERSONAL SIDE... This week, a lot happening personally as usual, a lot of wet weather around and some quite ferocious storms happening here. They’re causing quite a bit of damage and flooding. It was my daughter’s birthday. She’s finally turned double digits. One of the things I did for her, which makes a really great gift if you got a kid who’s a gamer, is I had a shirt done for her with her personal Minecraft skin that she wears on Minecraft; and I had that put on the front, and it’s amazing how good it looks. She was really stoked because it’s a one of a kind t-shirt. Also, of course, here in Australia, it’s school holidays time; so we’ve got people going everywhere doing all sorts of things. ON THE BUSINESS SIDE On the business front, I’ve got new clients coming through who need SEO and AdWords work. They’re coming from different areas of Australia. It’s great to hear about their businesses. I really enjoy working with small business. It’s fantastic to learn what they do, and who they help, and what services they provide. I’ve been finding with AdWords over budget spends, it seems that they can spend up to 20% over what you’ve actually allocated, which then means you under allocate, which then can blow the budget apart both directions, which can be quite frustrating. I’ve been doing things such as adjusting my podcast description so it’ll be a little bit more accurate, and that would help more people find it by being a little bit more descriptive. ONTO THE EPISODE… SMALL BUSINESS SEO FOR LOCAL RESULTS – PART 1 In this podcast, we’re going to have a look at getting your basic onsite SEO and meta tags right. That way, you can focus in and get that traffic from your local market. SOME MYTHS AND FACTS ABOUT SEO SEO MYTHS I first thought we’d start by looking at a couple SEO myths that I hear, and these really do frustrate me. I understand where they come from, but in the end, you need to look at the facts. The first one is that SEO is out-of-date. That’s not true. SEO or search engine optimization is a key part of marketing online. It might only be a basic step, but it’s really, really essential if you want and get the best value out of your website; and it really does affect the whole range of things from your pay-per-click advertising right through to how people see your business when you show up in the search engines. It’s all very nice to have your website there; but when someone looks at your business and the description and title say, “home,” it doesn’t say a lot for you. It kind of shows that you don’t know what you’re doing and that maybe you need a little bit more experience in the online marketing world. The second myth that bothers me is it doesn’t work a...

In this podcast, we’re going to look at using paid advertising and a simple system that I use to get the best results out of Google and Facebook advertising.  I like to set up systems that leverage the existing and paid traffic to max effect so that I track all visitors, tag them, then remarket to them on Facebook. Podcast Transcription:  

Today we’re I thought I’d look at producing fresh locally focussed content to attract customers & visibility online. Why? Because people often ask me what they should be adding to their website to get more clients. Podcast Transcription: PRODUCING FRESH, LOCALLY FOCUSED CONTENT TO ATTRACT CUSTOMERS You’re listening to the Clickable Marketing Podcast where we help fired-up small business owners turn clicks into clients. Join us to discover how you can make more money online in less time. Now here’s your host, Mr. Web-Marketing, Brad Hauck. Welcome to the Clickable Marketing Podcast. I’m Brad Hauck, and this is Episode 6. Today we’re going to have a look at producing fresh, locally focused content to attract customers and to increase your visibility online. Welcome to you. Wherever you are in the world today, I hope you’re having a great week and that your business is doing really, really well. It’s a beautiful day here in Sunny Gold Coast, Australia. I’m enjoying the lovely weather. It’s around 24° and a very nice spring day. Today, I thought we’d take a look at producing fresh locally focused content to attract new customers and to get you more visibility online. Why? Because people often ask me what they should be adding to their website on a weekly or daily basis to get more clients. It’s one thing to have a website, but what do you do with it once you’ve got it? How do you increase your visibility? What do you do to produce content? ON THE PERSONAL SIDE… This week, it’s been a pretty busy week for me personally. I’ve been out helping do some hazard reduction burns for the local fire brigade and working with one of our local authorities to clear some land to make sure that its safety zones and buffers are in place before the fire season. I’ve been trying to keep fit. I’ve started riding again, only on a wind trainer. I’m not going to be one of those ones out on the road. I rode a bike for too many years, and I really don’t want to get hit these days, especially with the number of cars on the road. Finally, I actually spent quite a good time fighting with a smart TV. I spent a lot of time around technology over the years, in fact that’s how I started my career: fixing things, telephone exchanges in particular; but this new smart TV I’ve got is keeping me busy. It’s got android base, and even though it says it’s android, it doesn’t like every android app. And so it’s been quite interesting times. But I’m getting there. I’m still having a few problems with the synch between the voice and the mouse moving when I’m running my PVR, but otherwise, it’s looking pretty good. ON THE BUSINESS SIDE… On business terms, I’ve been busy building a couple of websites in WordPress, and I had to update a single-page website for a client to a responsive site. That seems to have come together pretty nicely. I’m slowly getting better recording with Raven Tools, which I’m finding really interesting. It’s a really great way to pull data from a whole pile of different source and to output a report. It’s great because you can automate it, but I’m still having a few issues pulling all of the information I need. That said, thanks to the helpdesk there at Raven Tools, they’re doing a great job answering my questions, and in fact I think I’ve got three running at once at the moment. They’re doing their best to solve the problems and the finances for me. Really, really helpful team; I highly recommend them if you’re looking for some way to pull your data together and get a report each month to see how your small business is going online. ONTO THE EPISODE… PRODUCING FRESH AND LOCALLY FOCUSED CONTENT That brings us to the start of today’s episode. As I said earlier, we’re going to look at creating content that’s locally focused. Why would you want to work like with focus? Let’s face it. As a small business,

In this episode, I look at how you can use Google Places to get more enquires for your small business. We’ll look at what it is, where it ranks and why you’d be mad not to get a free listing! Podcast Transcription: WHY GOOGLE PLACES IS ESSENTIAL FOR A LOCAL BUSINESS TO SUCCEED ONLINE You’re listening to the Clickable Marketing Podcast, where we help fired-up small business owners turn clicks into clients. Join us to discover how you can make more money online in less time. Now here’s your host, Mr. Web Marketing, Brad Hauck. This is the Clickable Marketing Podcast. I’m Brad Hauck, and this is episode five. In this episode, I’m going to have a look at why Google Places are essential for a local business to succeed online. I’d like to welcome anyone who’s just joined us for the first time, and for those of you who’ve been listening for a couple of weeks. Welcome back. If you haven’t subscribed already, please jump on iTunes or Stitcher and subscribe. I’d love to see you receiving this great information every week, and I also enjoy seeing everybody download the podcast. It gives me great pleasure, and also, it shows that at least some people are interested in what I’ve got to say. A couple of updates to get things started. First of all, run through a little personal update. Let’s see, about a week ago, at 3:30 A.M., I got a fire call to a bush fire or a forest fire, which ended up being an all-day fire at a local area. For those of you who don’t know or maybe haven’t looked at the icon for the podcast, you’ll see that, actually, I’m a volunteer fire-fighter. I work on bush fires and forest fires here in Australia. We went out there, and quite a few trucks involved, and a good-sized fire to be ringed and dealt with. Everybody’s safe. No property harmed, and all good. Secondly, I caught tonsillitis and pharyngitis last week, so I didn’t actually get a podcast recorded. In fact, I couldn’t talk at all. I was pretty unhealthy altogether. Finally, my son who is a swimmer, won six golds and broke five records at our state swimming titles last weekend, so that was pretty amazing and great to watch. Here in Australia we have state titles only held once a year. In this case, it was short course titles. That was swimming in a 25-meter pool. Obviously, long courses are 50-meter pool. That’s some amazing times for such a young fellow. I’m very proud of him this week. On the business side, trying out Raven Tools for the first time for reports for clients. They can bring in data from all sources, including AdWords and Analytics, but also social media data and all other different sources. One of the best things I’ve found is some of the information that they don’t collect live from AdWords, I can actually upload as a CSV file. That could be quite interesting and allow you to bring some stuff in. On the Google front, they’ve gone from seven businesses loaded on the homepage when you do a search for a particular topic, such as a plumber or something in your local area, down to three. Next to the map now, generally there’s only three, not seven. That’s kind of cut the competition considerably to anyone who ranks well in Google Places. That’s one of the reasons I’m having a look at it this week, because it is such a great source of traffic for small business. Lastly, a little program that I quite enjoy using called CuteRank, C-U-T-E-R-A-N-K, it’s free for one site; so if you’ve just got one website, you can load it into there, and it will give you the ranking of your site for specific keywords that you enter. You can pay for the professional version, which I quite enjoy, and you can load unlimited sites there. It’s a great piece of software, very quick, quite efficient, and allows you just to track where you’re ranking on those keywords if you want to do that. WHAT IS GOOGLE PLACES FOR BUSINESS In today’s episode,

In this episode, I look at how you can do 3 things right now today to improve your website conversions and success rate. Podcast Transcription: 3 THINGS YOU CAN DO TODAY TO IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE You’re listening to the Clickable Marketing Podcast, where we help fired-up small business owners turn clicks into clients. Join us to discover how you can make more money online in less time. Now here’s your host, Mr. Web Marketing, Brad Hauck. Welcome to the Clickable Marketing Podcast. I’m Brad Hauck, and this is episode 4. In this episode, we’re going to have a look at the three top things you can do to improve your website right now, today. There are so many things that need to be fixed on every single website. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve had your website, or how many websites you had done. There never seems to be enough hours in a day to get everything just perfect, but there are some things that you can definitely do to make things happen more effectively when visitors come to your website. Today we’re going to have a look at a couple of those things, three mainly. I’ve got about 20 in the list that I actually have in full. I might apply that list to my website for you, but these three things are the three things that I’ve noticed over the years caused the most irritation to people. They also are the first things people look for and they are the things that may have the most effect on someone who’s visiting your website. Let’s get started. CLICKABLE PHONE NUMBER – TOP RIGHT-HAND CORNER OF THE SCREEN The number one thing that you need to do if you’ve got a small business website is you need to add your phone number to the top right-hand corner of the screen, and you need to make it clickable for people who are on a mobile or cellphone. That might sound simple, but you would be surprised at how many people have websites, and they don’t have their phone number right up the top where people can see it. Based on my experience, looking at hundreds and hundreds of sites’ analytics, the second most popular page on almost all websites is the contact us page. If you talk to people, and you think about it yourself, you’ll find that they’re not getting hundreds and hundreds of contact forms. If they’re not getting hundreds of contact forms, and yet they’re getting lots and lots of people going to their contact us page, what’s going on? That’s pretty simple. They’re doing one of two things when they go to the contact page. They’re either looking up the address or they’re looking up the phone; or I suppose a third thing, they’re looking up both of them. One of the things I’ve noticed is that when we removed the phone number from that page or duplicate it realistically to the top right-hand corner of the home page and on the top corner of every page, put it in your header but definitely on the homepage, we notice the number of people going to the contact us page drops dramatically. That’s because people will quite often think, “Oh, I need to call you about such and such. Oh, what’s their number?” They can’t think of it so they quickly look it up, and they go to the website because that’s the easiest place to find the information. We don’t use yellow pages, and white pages, and those sorts of tools like we used to in the old days. We will go to the web these days. The quickest way is to do a quick search for your company, click on your website and have a look at the phone number at the top of the page. I don’t know about you, but it really bugs me when I go to someone’s webpage; and I want to give them a call, and they force to me to go searching through their site for the phone number. The one I really hate the most is when they don’t have the phone number on the contact us page, but it’s in the footer. The footer can be miles down the page, depending on how long the page is that I’m on. Think about this. Go and have a look at your website straight away now.

In this episode of the Clickable Marketing podcast, I look at choosing the right designer and how to work with them, difference website CMS platforms like WordPress and choosing the right theme to make your website work for you. Podcast Transcription: CHOOSING WEBSITE DESIGNERS, PLATFORMS & THEMES You’re listening to the Clickable Marketing Podcast, where we help fired-up small business owners turn clicks into clients. Join us to discover how you can make more money online in less time. Now here’s your host, Mr. Web Marketing, Brad Hauck. Good day, and welcome to the Clickable Marketing Podcast. I’m Brad Hauck, and this is episode 3. In this episode, we’re going to have a look at finding a good web designer, choosing a platform, and choosing a theme. FINDING A GOOD WEB DESIGNER – GET TO KNOW THEM WELL One of the most important things about launching a small business website or just rebuilding your existing one is finding a great designer that you can work with. There’s a lot of difference between designers. Some designers are very, very good at coming up with original designs that will support what you’re trying to achieve, and others are better at copying what other people have done before. You need to find the one that suits you. I’m often asked what a fair price is for a website. I’ve got to say, within Australian market, $3,000 is a fair starting price for a website. If you’re paying over $10,000 for a small business website, to be honest with you, you’re probably paying for their office, not necessarily their design skills. That’s too high unless you’re after really specific custom things, or you’re heading down the path of shopping carts. Things like that certainly make a difference to the price. If you’re looking to build a website for around $1,000, chances are you’re going to get a relatively inexperienced web designer or someone who isn’t really capable of doing the high level of work that you might want to do. That might seem unfair, but that’s based on my experience. More often than not, when you pay for a designer who is charging around $1,000, they really have a hard time finding enough clients to keep their business open. If you’re selling a website for a thousand dollars, it’s really plain economics. If you need to make $50,000 a year, you need to sell at least 50 websites. That’s a lot of websites to complete in one year. Most designers who understand the metrics of their business and want to provide a good quality service will charge around $3,000 or more to get the website done. If the website is being done for $1,000, more often than not, it’s being outsourced to an overseas designer, and they are just managing the project. That’s really the only way you can keep the cost down. When choosing a designer, choose one that you can work with. If you’re thinking of outsourcing the designer of your website overseas, and this is your first website, in other words, you really have not been on this path before; then I’d say to you, “Don’t do it.” It is really dangerous because you don’t know all of the pitfalls that you can fall into. The other thing is that it makes it difficult down the track when you want to make changes. If this is your first website, I would suggest going with a local company that you can trust, that you can walk in their office, and you can talk to them. Once you’ve done it once or twice, then yes, go ahead and outsource. It’s a great way to get a website built, but work with someone that you can actually meet with face-to-face and get to know well. When you’re choosing your website designer, make sure that you review their work. Go and look at what it is that they’ve already done. Go and talk to people who they’ve worked with. These days, everyone talks about the fact that all we know – interested in reviews, and we read all these stuff. No one ever takes the time to actually go and call someone who’s used them before.

In this episode, I talk about getting ready to launch or overhaul your small business website so that you get the outcome you want- more leads, more sales, more customers. Podcast Transcription: DESIGNING A SMALL BUSINESS WEBSITE THAT SELLS You’re listening to the Clickable Marketing Podcast, where we help fired-up small business owners turn clicks into clients. Join us to discover how you can make more money online in less time. Now here’s your host, Mr. Web Marketing, Brad Hauck. Good day, and welcome to the Clickable Marketing Podcast. I’m Brad Hauck, and this is episode 2. Today we’re going to look at getting a site that sells or building a site that sells. Having a website that sells you a business is super, super important. It’s all very well to say that we need a point of presence online or we need a place where people can go and check us out. In the end, I like to look at website as a member of staff. Its job, sitting there, is to sell your business, in other words, to get people to come to your website to take a particular action. People come to your website; they judge you by what they see. In fact, I’ve had numerous occasions where people have mentioned to me that when they are searching for a new provider where they pay for a service or a product, they’ll go and check out their website. They’re making judgments about you every time they look at you online. It is well and truly worth spending the money and the time to make sure that your website is clean, fast, and encourages people to take the action that you want. MEMBER OF STAFF – JOB OF THE WEBSITE If you look at your website as being a member of staff, like every other member of staff that has a function to perform – and that is to sell your business. When you’re looking at the existing website you’ve got, look at whether it is actually doing that or not. The first thing about any website is that it should be laid down in a way that helps promote the most popular option or the one that you want people to take. The most popular option might be the most popular products that people buy or might be your famous product, whatever it is, or alternatively, it might be to get people to fill out a form so that they come to your website, they fill out a form for a contact, or for a quote, or to get you to come out and see them. It depends on whether you’re selling, obviously, services or products. It’s up to you what that is. In most cases, I suggest that that option is the first thing that they see on the page. SECTIONS OF A WEBSITE – LEVERAGING THEM When you’re having a look at a website, the top section of the page is quite often the menu. The next section, which is quite often a large picture, is known as the slider area. Under that, we come down into the main section of the website. On your home page, that slider is one of the areas that are often wasted – meaning that people just put some pictures in there and put some words on it. It really is a great place for a call to action, and it is probably the most powerful part of your website because it’s the first thing that people see. Everything that you do should be laid out to take an action. If we’re talking about the slider in this case, then it shouldn’t be sliding. By the time the pictures load and then slide across, your visitor has scrolled down the page. I can tell you now. They are not waiting for 3 pictures to show so that they can read the great little slogans that you’ve got on it. You might think it’s cool. You might think it’s really, really useful, but in the end, you’re wasting your time. Studies have shown, again and again and again, that sliders do not work. They interfere with the flow of a website. If you’re going to put a nice image there, pick one image, get a call to action or a form on top of the image, and use it to your advantage to get people to take an action as soon as they come on the website.

In this first episode of the Clickable Marketing podcast, I look at the most important decision you’ll make regarding marketing your small business online… your niche (target market). It will ultimately determine how successful your Internet marketing is. Podcast Transcription: PICKING AN ONLINE NICHE FOR YOUR SMALL BUSINESS You’re listening to the Clickable Marketing Podcast where we help fired-up small business owners turn clicks into clients. Join us to discover how you can make more money online in less time. Now here’s your host, Mr. Web-Marketing, Brad Hauck. Welcome to the Clickable Marketing Podcast. I’m Brad Hauck, and this is Episode 1. Today we are going to have a look at picking your niche. Some people say niche, and some people say niche. It really doesn’t matter. What we’re trying to do is pick the place on the web that you’d best fit so you that can reach your target audience. Since 1996, when I first started working on the web, I’ve seen people struggle with this aspect of the business. They really want to reach the widest audience possible, and yet, at the same time, they want to get known for the one thing that they’re really good at. The fact of the matter is that you can’t be everything to everybody. It would be great. It would be a lot of fun, and I’m sure it would bring a lot more business. But on the web, if you try to be everything to everybody, and you try to target too wide an audience, quite frankly, you won’t reach anyone at all. Those you do reach will not be the people that you’re actually trying to target. When I started about marketing online in about 1996, it was very simple to rank a website. All you needed to do was put a few keywords in, feed it into the search engines, and hey presto! You are getting traffic. It was really quite simple in those days. That’s changed a lot over the last few years. Obviously, there are now millions and millions of websites all trying to reach a particular audience, all trying to sell a product, or service, or information to somebody. In your case, you’re not the only one who is working in your niche, and that’s super important to understand. NICHES WITHIN NICHES – TARGETING YOUR AUDIENCE Within niches, there smaller niches, of course. It’s never as simple as just saying, “Well, I’m going to talk to people who are interested in training their dog.” Or, “I’m going to talk to people who are interested in learning to play soccer better.” You need to come even smaller than that. That was fine 10 years ago, but now, with so many people competing for the same audience that you’re trying to reach, you really have to dig in and find something specific that you can target. Once you’ve found that target audience and you’ve started to build an audience then you can expand out a bit. But my advice to you, based on my experience is, try and keep it really tight. I’ve work on websites for audiences of all sizes and for markets of all sizes, but the one thing I do know is that you can break it down and find where your audience is. If you’re a local business, my advice to you is to actually focus in on the local area. The biggest mistake you can do is try and reach an international audience. If you can only deliver your service or product within a defined area, then that’s where you should be marketing. The great thing about this is there are less people in that area. There’s not that many people competing for that market, so therefore your chances of showing up are actually much, much higher. You’re getting known for what it is that you do much more quickly. If you’re in a city, then you should target the city itself, but also think about your suburb. Is your suburb big enough to actually support you? Is there more clients within 5 minutes of your home base than there is that you can handle in a year? If so, then stop trying to target the whole city. It’s just too many businesses.

I've just uploaded the short section that I am speaking in from last nights ABC Radio National discussion on "Social Media changing Language and Communication". I listened to the rest of the show and really enjoyed it. Quite a few interesting points were made and being from a teaching background, I enjoyed the educational part of the discussion too. Paul Barclay was a great host :-) Click the link below to download or play: Brad Hauck - ABC Radio National - May 2010