Pinterest is an online bulletin board for your [...]]]> A new player in the social media game has just stepped into the court and he can pretty much tell Facebook, Google+, and Twitter to move over. Even though Pinterest is a new player, it’s starting to get known as a really valuable marketing tool for businesses.

Pinterest is an online bulletin board for your favorite images. It debuted in 2010 and is now going through stunning growth. This claim is proved by the fact that the site got over 7 million registration from unique visitors last December from 1.6 million last September. Moreover, it’s driving even more traffic to business websites and blogs compared to Google+, YouTube, and LinkedIn all combined based on a recent report from Shareaholic.

So, why should small business care about the fuzz that this new social media site is making? In order to answer this question effectively, it’s important to understand how people are using Pinterest. The site enables you to organize different images inside boards for different categories. When you add or “pin” something new, your followers will see it. They can re-pin your images on their boars; hit like; or post comments. Like Facebook posts, your Pinterest pins can also go viral.

Engaged women can post different pictures of various wedding dresses to review. People who plan on buying a new car can pin images of the different options that they are considering.

Let’s take a close look at the different good reasons why business owners, specifically retailers, should take seriously consider creating a business profile on Pinterest now.

How Is Pinterest Used?

The ability to post images of your company’s products on Pinterest and have links back to your own website is considered as its most powerful application. This turns the site into a virtual store catalog. However, you need to know that this is social media so it’s important that you also contribute other content or share the pins of other users so that people will pay attention to your own pins. The last thing you want to be is a self-absorbed blowhard. It’s important that you don’t get too promotional by posting other things that might be of great interest to people as well.

Getting Sales

Pinterest has already been funneling buyers to a lot of websites. In the past 6 months, ideeli.com, which is a retail deal site had a 446% increase in the amount of web traffic that they’re getting from Pinterest and the amount of conversions from those visits have increased 5 times.

Is Pinterest Ideal To Use For Your Business?

I have to admit that the Pinterest has some drawbacks for businesses. For example, if your product or service isn’t something visual, your images may not be able to tie directly back to your brand. The site also doesn’t offer business-oriented features. Moreover, its search feature puts more priority on pin and board subjects compared to “people”, which is the category that business brands would fall into.

You can never jump into an accurate conclusion that Pinterest is or isn’t appropriate for your business if you don’t give it a shot. Trying it out is pretty easy anyway. You just need to create an account and start pinning things that are related to your business without being too promotional.

If you have a lawn care business, you can pin pictures of good landscaping online or take photos of good ones around your community. You can also do a search through Pinterest’s categories and add funny, beautiful, and inspirational images that you stumble upon.

You can attract followers by following interesting people and boards that post inspirational images. Pin some of these people’s images for a week or two so you can get some people to follow you. After you achieve that, create a new board for your products and add descriptions as well as prices to the images. Don’t forget to link your pins back to your actual website and start tracking the amount of traffic that you’re getting from Pinterest.

Creating images of special deals or coupons for your Pinterest followers is also a good idea. You can create a new board for deals. You can offer a prize to the person who harvests the most number of likes or comments of a re-pin of your coupon. Don’t worry about creating different boards because people who are following you will see all of them.

After a month of two, try to see if you’re getting a good amount of referral traffic or sales. Do some tweaks on your boards by adding new images and words so that you can increase the numbers that you’re getting.

The most important thing to remember about Pinterest regardless of you using it for personal or business reasons, is that the best images whether they’re cool, funny, inspiring, or thought-provoking, attract the most attention and followers.

If you [...]]]>

Here is an article written by Nyagoslav Zhekov of Searchenginepeople.com. I had heard this before from Perry Belcher at the LMASS convention in San Antonio a few months ago. Google Places is very hard to work with in many “special” situations and this article has some very good workarounds for them.

If you are (or have a client who is) a small business in the United States, Canada, or any other “Google Places country”, you know that verifying ownership of a Place page can be a painful experience.

While it is frustrating to have to wait “2-3 weeks” to receive a postcard, a bigger problem is any of these cases:

• the postal service doesn’t deliver to the physical address, but only to the business’s post-office box
• the postal service is bad or irregular
• the business has a room in a large business building but they don’t have specified unique address

Google stopped offering phone verification for new listings in January 2011, and since then problems started popping up more frequently.

Here are a few workarounds; note that they should be used fairly, not for spamming Google Maps.

1. How To Get The Verification Letter Sent To A P.o. Box

According to the Quality Guidelines for Google Places “P.O. Boxes are not considered accurate physical locations” and “Listings submitted with P.O. Box addresses will be removed.” Therefore, even if you are receiving mail only via a post-office box, you practically cannot use it as Google automatically sends the verification letter to the address stated in the Google Places listing. When you use the word PO box in the address, the listing is getting auto-rejected.

The workaround: use Address Line 2 to insert your postal address! Yes, Google, as per current, does not penalize the usage of whatever terms in this box. Of course it would be strongly advisable to delete the whole second address line once you receive the postcard. As the mail is being processed by the local postal service you will have to help them understand where you actually want it sent. Therefore, it is recommended that you type something like: “Send to: PO Box [number] [City] [State] [ZIP]” replacing the words in brackets with the correct information. You can do the same if you get business mail to your home address.

I had an interesting case with a veterinarian from Sweden. Instead of “Send to” I was going to write the Swedish “Skicka till” when I found out that the Irish office of Google Places is processing mail verification in the big part of Northwest Europe. If you are from a non-English speaking country you will first have to dig out such information, otherwise you risk your postcard being directed to the business address.

2. How To Get Phone Verification

This is one of the most frequent questions we’re asked these days. We always begin by explaining in which cases phone verification is impossible:

• if you have already used 3 times the same phone number for verification
• if you are trying to change your listing’s phone number
• if you have no direct line, i.e. the call has to pass by answer machine or extension

If your situation is none of these, keep reading.

The answer is hidden in the (semi) official statements of Google. When the phone verification was first tightened, they gave the following answer:

I understand there have been some recent questions about verification methods. If a business is new to Google, certain verification methods may be unavailable depending on the information provided for the business.

Recently, Google offered an opportunity for everyone to express their thoughts on what could be improved in Google Places. Google Places Community Manager Vanessa Schneider is answering some of the suggestions and here is one lucky enough to get Google’s attention: “Please bring back phone verification for Google Places verification.” Vanessa replied:

We do have phone verification, but only in this case: If you see an existing listing on Google Maps that is NOT verified, and you want to verify it, you’ll have the option to use your business phone. If you are creating a brand new listing  i.e. it does not exist on Google Maps already then you will only receive the option to verify via postcard.

The information hidden in these few sentences is invaluable. What we understand from the first statement is that if a business is “new to Google” they would not be able to verify their ownership by phone. The second statement gives further light to what a “new to Google” listing means: “it does not exist on Google Maps.”

The workaround: what we need to do is get the listing on Google Maps before claiming it. I am listing the top methods to achieve that below.

2A. Creating citations

Citations are mentions of the business name, address and/or phone number in close proximity on the same webpage. Everything from a listing on a business directory to mention in a blog post might be considered as a citation. However, some of these have more value for Google than others. In the United States, for instance, if you add your business to Localeze, InfoUSA, Yelp, and a few others, you will have a Place page automatically created by Google in a few weeks. If you get reviewed by customers on sites such as Citysearch, Judy’s Book, Qype, or Yahoo Local, the process will be even faster.

While this method takes almost the same time as the postcard verification, it is a workaround, and a good opportunity to start improving your online presence and visibility.

2B. Google Map Maker

Map Maker is the mapping tool of Google. It is currently available in 187 countries;  it’s not available in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and most of Europe. In fact, Map Maker was introduced to the US just this April.

Nevertheless, it is one of the most useful tools when talking Google Maps and problems with erroneous data. At the same time, one could add anything from a pathway to a building using it. Here is how to add your business:

1. Log in to your Google account

2. Go to www.google.com/mapmaker

3. Type the address your business is located at in the search box and press “Enter”

4. Click on the pin image in the upper part of the screen

5. Select the appropriate category – it should be as close as possible to your main business type

6. Simply fill in the boxes with your business information

7. Click “Save” in the upper left corner

Now your listing would be awaiting review by a “trusted user”. The process usually takes less than 24 hours, but sometimes you might have to wait 3-4 days. When your listing is approved you will receive an email notification. Then you can go and search for it on Google Maps and claim it. Google will allow you to verify the ownership by phone.

2C. For Canadians and British only

After reading the previous section, you might be disappointed that Google Map Maker is not yet available in your country. Don’t panic – there is a workaround for this too!

It is called Community Edits. Unfortunately, the actual edit option is not available in Canada and the UK, as they are from the so called “Add Only” type, i.e. they can only add information, but not edit old data.

This is enough for the purposes of our goal – getting the phone verification.  Google prepared a nice video for us:

3. Avoiding Re-verification

Google requests re-verification every time one changes their business name, address or phone number. In some cases it is possible to avoid this. If you need to modify or update the phone # or the city ZIP code, this workaround would not do the job.

Instead, you can use Google Map Maker or Community Edits (if “Edit” is available). However, these changes have to get approved by Google Moderator, so it might take some time.

Instead, if for some reason you need to fix your business name or address, simply go to your Google Places dashboard and click “Edit”. Then you need to delete letter by letter (using the backspace button) the mistaken or outdated name, and then write the correct one (kudos to Linda Buquet for this tactic).

Conclusion

We recommend all the workarounds are used with caution. If not done correctly they might lead to unsatisfactory results.

Read more: http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/workarounds-for-google-places-verification.html#ixzz1hQKloM6q

Making [...]]]> Chances are the content that’s already on your site is not bringing you many search engine benefits. So before you create more content, it makes sense to improve what you already have. Making small changes in all the right places doesn’t take long – and can actually double or even triple your website traffic.

Making small changes to existing content is great and wonderful, but note that this is a short and simple post that also helps my website’s rankings. Even my adding this short paragraph above to my SEO Business site helps create targeted content for my business!

So remember, good SEO practices don’t have to be hard or complicated.  They don’t even have to read like you are trying to manipulate the search engines by inserting your targeted keywords in the content a bunch of times. (Create content for humans first, then for search engines!)

Marketing is an important part of any business and the reason is [...]]]> With the current economic crisis going on, everybody’s thinking about what type of investment to make or how they are going to take their business to the next level so that their business doesn’t get caught up in the economic slump as well.

Marketing is an important part of any business and the reason is simple. Proper marketing allows your business to get seen and heard. It’s a given fact that no matter how good or affordable your products and services are, people won’t buy them if they don’t know where to find them, let alone know that they even exist in the first place. Most marketing strategies don’t come cheap, especially if you want to reach out to a huge market. However, this isn’t the case when it comes to the internet. The internet is a really powerful tool that a lot of businesses fail to see the true potential. Most people surf the net every single day. In fact, consumers nowadays are a lot wiser but they’re also stubborn to a certain extent. They’re wiser because they take the time to do research about the products and services that they want to buy. They turn to the web to look for reviews about the things that they need to buy and the companies where they plan on buying them from. They’re stubborn to a certain extent because they want to get quick results when they look for something. This is how people behave when they use search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. 

Now, here’s something even more important that you need to know. When people look for something using search engines, they assume that the sites of companies that are found on the top of the search results are the best ones out there. They think that these companies are at the top of the search results because they offer something really good and something that people can rely on. This is where trust is initially established and this is something that people want to feel before they decide to buy something. People want to make sure that they’re not going to waste their hard-earned money on something that’s not worth it.

Your business may have the products and services that are the best in your industry, the only problem is that they lack exposure. You want your business to be at the top of people’s mind, but you know that the traditional yellow pages and newspaper ads just aren’t worth the huge sums they cost nowadays. That’s where Make Page One can help. We offer reliable internet marketing services that will give you and your business that steady boost of new customers without robbing you.

Here at Make Page One, we have helped businesses get more customers by helping them get in front of many more people on the internet. By helping you get ranked in the search engines, we increase the number of visitors to your website every single day. But we believe that in order for you to get more money out of your business, you need to turn visitors into actual customers by convincing them to actually buy whatever it is that you have to offer. We help you to get the conversions that you need by highlighting the positive aspects of your products and services.

Make Page One is almost like a limo service that will find your customers; brings them to your store; and delivers them right in front of your cash register with your products or services in hand.

Being on the first page of search results brings you business that would have gone to your competitors. Are you OK with being invisible? Let’s change that. Give us a call or fill out the form on the contact page.

Would you like to be listed at the top of every major search engine such as Google, Yahoo! & Bing for multiple search phrases (keywords) relevant to your products / services?

Would you like an abundance of laser targeted high quality visitors [...]]]> Would you like to increase the leads / sales generated from your website?

Would you like to be listed at the top of every major search engine such as Google, Yahoo! & Bing for multiple search phrases (keywords) relevant to your products / services?

Would you like an abundance of laser targeted high quality visitors to your website every day?

MakePageOne provides a complete solution for your Online Business need. Our SEO & Marketing Steps and the Activities to Rank You are:

• 1. Keywords Research
• 2. Competition Analysis
• 3. Optimized Content Creation
• 4. Keywords Optimization
• 5. Back Link Creation/Link Building
• 6. Manage Submission so Search Engines and Directories Find Your Site Naturally (much better than direct submissions)
• 7. Submission to Article Directories
• 8. Video Creation and Submission for SEO Purposes
• 9. Video Creation for Marketing Purposes
• 10. Social Media Profile Creation
• 11. Citation Creation (helps rank locally)
• 12. List Building / Email Marketing / Drip Campaign Managment
• 13. Reputation Management