We all know the high cost of attracting a customer or client to use our services or buy our products the first time. It’s not cheap. So with all that work and investment, doesn’t it make sense to spend a few cents on keeping them? It sure does.

Thats why Email Marketing rocks.

• Affordable communication with your customers - just pennies per!
• Branded marketing or information right to their inbox
• A fantastic “touch-point” to stay in their mind, in front of their eyes
• Tracking! What was opened, what was clicked … the data is there

Business of every size and type can leverage email marketing to it’s advantage. Just this past week while eating lunch at Quiznos my table was fixed with a table sign and sign-up pad for their email marketing. Just tell them a bit about you, drop a business card to them and you could even win $500. Why? Because the permission to interact with you is worth far more than that!

Right now is always the right time to start an email marketing program … so stop holding off and let’s get you started today.

If you need a bit more info or another perspective, try these recent blog posts on email marketing:

• Media Post on Email Marketing for the Small Business
• 10 Reasons to Use Email Marketing

I’ll just qualify post this as a bit of a rant right off the bat. Cheap hosting is killing small businesses by tricking them into thinking that their $5 or $10 is such a good deal, they don’t need to do anything else online. I have had meetings with numerous small businesses that basically brag on how cheap their hosting is. However, not one of them brags about how much business, leads or sales their website is bringing in. Do you see the correlation?

Hosting a website, at least the disk space and bandwidth is becoming almost free from many large providers. But only hosting your website will get you few results in today’s Internet marketplace. With millions of new pages hitting the web every day, you need additional Internet marketing services, tools and strategies to stand out online.

Here are just some of the additional website marketing services you should be looking into adding to your monthly fees of having a website:

• SEO - Organic search engine optimization can move you up the search ranks and produce traffic
• PPC - Pay-per-click advertising allows you to target terms, specific areas and even track it’s performance
• Email Marketing - Using permission based email marketing to stay in front of your customers is a must due to it’s cost effectiveness and ability to be tracked. It takes just pennies!
• Analytics - Your website can report to you just about everything going on with it. Data is king, leverage it!
• Business Blogging - Roll out new content, increase SEO, establish expertise, connect with customers and build a following.

Here at Five, we will never have a $10 monthly hosting fee or anywhere near that. We offer a monthly managed service that combines web hosting with a content management tool, web analytics (stats), support and basic SEO. From there we have further marketing services to customize what is best for our clients. It’s not our interest in hosting 10,000 websites that move little business, we’re into quality websites that make a difference to their owners.

Thanks for allowing me to rant.

I read a USA Today article this week about small businesses using sandwich board signs to attract more business and the issues some city governments/councils had with them “cluttering up” the streets. More businesses are looking to increase the ways that they attract customers past their existing signage in these economic times and the sandwich board is one of the cheap basics. I’ll stay out of the politics of the article, but it got me thinking about the online equivilant of a sandwich board.

So what is the Online Marketing Sandwich Board?
I don’t have the exact answer … but I do have the following to consider.

A Single Page Website
I do believe that small business can get away with just one very informative page for a website. There are obvious drawbacks, but simple done the right way can go a long way. You can have an easy to use layout covering who you are, what you do, specialties, hours/availability, map and how to contact you. This web firm has a great one page website. I know there are other services for one page websites out there for small businesses.

Small Business Blog
Many businesses today skip a website and go straight to business blogging. This St. Paul cookie company is one example and there are many others. With free sub domains through Wordpress and Blogger you can have a free site up and running in minutes.

Online Directories
In some industries like restaurants, some small business are utilizing the abilities of a profile page on Yelp, Dex or another web directory as a home page/website. With the ability to add text, photos, logo, hours and more and built-in maps, directions and reviews, these sites can have everything a business wants. Most of these offer a pretty clean URL to advertise offline, an example is: http://www.yelp.com/biz/la-belle-vie-minneapolis

Social or Networking Websites
Depending on your style or type of business maybe you can get buy with a LinkedIn profile, Facebook or one of the many other flavors of web 2.0. Many bands and music peeps have used MySpace for quite some time as their home on the web.

Do you have anymore to add? There are more and will certainly be more basic and entry level web tools coming online this year and it will be interesting to see what grabs hold. My opinion is to develop a great website and then utilize some of the basics outlined as landing pages to drive more traffic to your website.

If you are a search engine optimization beginner a great place to start is with your site’s page titles. Please make note right now that SEO is a process of many components, not just one or more “tricks” to rank batter. Page titles are very important to aiding in a better ranking from Google, Yahoo or MSN but they are not a magic wand (nothing is!). I can’t count how many times a potential client has complained of their lack of traffic from search engines, but then doesn’t even have a unique page title for their websites home page. Below is the classic “home” tag, showing they have done nothing with their page titles.

So lets break down the almighty page title and what you can do with it.

What is a page title and where is it?
The page title is the summary of what your web page is about. There is one for every page of your website located in your code and near the top.

Each page title should summarize that page’s content (which should be your targeted keywords). If you use a content management solution, it should have access to the page properties to complete this information for each page (Our CMS does). If you work with a web company, make sure completing the page titles and meta data is part of their service proposed. Also make sure they don’t talk about meta tag keywords for hours …. that’s a bad sign.

Why is the page title so important?
The page title has two jobs in todays world of search. First it is the summary of the pages content and the engines greatly consider the words in your title for their algorithms. The engines take this summary and use it to help them figure out what your web page is about. They will only pay attention to so many characters in your page title so you need to be brief and truly target what that page is about. Stuffing your page title with 30 words will do you no good. A few good rules of thumb are 4 to 8 words or under 65 characters including spaces. Below is the example of our home page’s page title. We are targeting “Minnesota Web Design” more than anything, it’s who/what we are, so those words appear first (left).

(ps- this is a competitive term and we will need some time to gain rankings on it)

This page title contains our main service, who we are and further down hits upon our secondary service (Internet marketing). Some people will put their name first, but I choose to place more importance on the targeted term for SEO as your business name is the easiest to get a top ranking for (almost always).

Here is another example for a Minneapolis plumber who has done the job of page title correctly.

It doesn’t hurt that their name includes major keywords they are targeting of Minneapolis (location) and Plumbing (service). You can see from above that their page title uses their location targeted twice, implying both “Minneapolis “and even using “minneapolis metro” to show they do the suburbs and area around the city.

Secondly is that the page title is what appears in the search engine result pages. Here is how the Minneapolis Plumbing example appears above in Google for a search of minneapolis plumber. They are the #1 organic web result.

The page title is what searchers see first and use heavily to determine if they will click that link. Building a page title that can rank you well is great, but you should also consider how it reads once displayed.

What should you consider when writing page titles?
1. Your page title should summarize the pages content, links and photos/graphics
(If it doesn’t, then realize your content needs to be more search friendly structured)
2. The main keywords you are trying to rank for that is your service or product
3. The main area, location or city you want to target. Location, location, location.
4. Most important words to the left.
5. Be brief, you only have 4 to 8 words or 65 characters.
6. Make sure it reads well and makes sense to a search engine user
7. Mix in your company name whenever possible, its good branding.
8. Lose the marketing words like “greatest, trusted, perfect”. Wasted characters.
9. Use dividers like pipes | or dashes - where needed to separate information
10. Most important - Write a unique and relevant page title for EACH page on your website!

In the weeks upcoming you can expect more basic SEO tips to learn more on picking which keywords to target, proper content structure, link building and more.

Here are some additional valuable posts on website page titles:

• Page Title Best Practices from SEOmoz
• Webtacs Video on Page Titles

Combine veteran business bloggers, business blogging newbies and those considering blogging with good pizza and an open forum and you have the recipe for some great sharing and blogging tips. Tonight was the 2nd meeting of the Biz Bloggers Meetup group started by blogging pro Caroline Melberg and about 16 great business people attended.

(photos taken with my Treo)

The mix of online experience and industries represented made for good conversation as we focused on blog content development and where to get blog post topics and ideas from. New bloggers talked about some of their early success stories and how some of their “fears” were easily overcome while blogging veterans gave pointers on strategies and creative angles to develop content. We also dipped into how to make time and properly plan your blogging.

I wanted to give some link love and attention to those in attendance. It was cool to see so many taking notes and soaking up knowledge while sharing their questions, fears or challenges. Below are some of the groups members currently business blogging, so check them out:

• Mitch Rossow who is a web designer and has a cool Minneapolis photo blog
• Caroline Melberg who is a small business marketing maverick (group organizer)
• Chris Mitchell has a small business marketing blog.
• Toni Haselfeldt who blogs for her client Belladerm Med Spa (I helped Toni and Belladerm set-up their website and blog at my former agency)
• Janet Roper who is an animal communicator and even can blog about rats as pets!
• Chad Sharp owns a Minneapolis record label and blogs on independent music

In addition to those blogging was the following companies there to learn more as they consider or start blogging for business including Bebe Bella Designs, Nextstep, Still Pond Shiatsu, Image In Nation, Porte-Kim Agency and Sundberg Chiropractic. Hopefully we’ll see these local businesses blogging soon. I hope I didn’t miss anyone!

If you’re interested, sign-up for the group and learn of the next meeting. One of the things I love about most experts in Internet marketing is their willingness to share. I also value the networking, the different viewpoints and questions of new bloggers as they are always sharing new ways to look at things.