I’ve read enough of the doom and gloom articles for the coming year of business; I’m not going to take part in that. Are there challenges? Absolutely, but it’s not hard to wrap your mind around great people with great ideas overcoming them to make an impact.

For me, small business is all about great people. They are inspired, resourceful, passionate and ever adapting.

Thanks to these characteristics, I feel great about the landscape of small business in 2010. Though consumer and business spending may vary, credit and loans will remain tight, some great things are going to happen. Many have already planned out what they can do this year to improve.

Small business has two fantastic things going for it in 2010:

• Opportunity and Technology

Opportunity: With any slump or downturn, there is the new battle to emerge or launch new ideas. Whether it’s an existing small business adding a service or product to their offering, or a longtime corporate worker being laid off and now taking the jump to work for themselves, opportunity is rampant.

Technology: Without a doubt, here is the part that excites us at Five Technology. We’ll get the chance again this year to work with some incredible businesses ready to leverage technology like never before. It might be a web redesign, a CMS integration, starting a blog, networking with social media or a custom web application that will push efficiency like never before.  The web is business in 2010, just think about it.

So let’s get after it. Let’s take advantage of the opportunity and mesh ideas with technology, to increase marketing efforts, sales, processes and efficiency.

Let’s make 2010 the year of the small business.

Minneapolis and St. Paul cable TV show Around Town is currently featuring Five Technology’s web design services on their current episode.

Host Carla Beaurline features various businesses from the Twin Cities area on the show. Five is the web host and CMS provider of the Around Town website and is currently redesigning the website for 2010.

You can view the full current episode here.

Everyone in our office had a great time with the shoot. It’s fun to talk about what we do on a daily basis for clients.

It’s highly accessible and tempting for anyone to create a Google AdWords account and start spending some money on pay per click search engine advertising.  Unfortunately this easy access doesn’t translate to an ease in getting results.

The Details Matter
A successful Google AdWords campaign involves the right research, configuration and tracking to get you anywhere near the perceived pot of gold at the end of this rainbow.

When done right, pay per click marketing produces a marketing formula of sorts, a map of numbers that lets you evaluate the investment it takes to land a conversion.  Depending on your business and website, this conversion might be an e-commerce sale, a specific download, visitors to a specific page or just getting users to your website.

While this post is just an overview, the following main items are key to a solid AdWords PPC campaign:

1. Research – You must understand your audience, the keyword terms they will be searching for.

2. Configuration – The correct set-up of an AdWords account, campaigns, settings, budgets and tracking tools are all key elements.

3. Copywriting – What your ad says matters! In many cases you will want to test different ads and text to see what performs best.

4. Landing Pages – The most overlooked item is landing pages. You need to understand that when a user clicks an ad, you have this small window to convert them. Sending your ad link to your home page is not going to cut it, take them right to the conversion point and make it easy for them to buy, download or contact you.

5. Evaluation – The ability to track and review data is one of PPC’s biggest assets. Having Google Analytics and your AdWords configured correctly to track each movement is a must. Without it, your flying blind.

6. Adjustments – The best campaigns are reviewed and assessed weekly and even daily. Just setting it up and letting it run is a bad idea.  You want evaluate and make decsions on the right adjustments to find your strongest results.

We hope this quick overview is helpful.  If you have been wanting to explore Google AdWords or have tried it the wrong way in the past, Five Technology is here to help you with the right strategy to get results.  Give us a holler!

Today’s real estate market has a lot of sellers asking real estate professionals “can you sell my home fast?”.  Rosen Properties is a Minnesota real estate service that provides home buying, selling and renting services in the Twin Cities area.

An Improved Website Across The Board
Rosen Properties had been using a real estate website solution for some time that lacked in many areas.  While it did provide Rosen a presence online it didn’t have enough value to bring in new customers.  Five’s web design and Internet marketing skills went to work on:

• Web redesign to improve consumer trust and 1st impression
• Improve navigation and usability
• Improve search engine optimization and ongoing SEO
• Easy to update website powered by the SMC
• Added a blog to improve SEO and communication
• Stronger tools to market homes for sale, rent and rent to own
• Web analytics and goal tracking

The end result is a well rounded web design and web platform that Rosen can continue to build upon.  In this market where people need foreclosure assistance, credit re-building, rent to own options and a faster way to sell a home, Rosen Properties brings a ton of options.

Make sure you check out the new website:  www.RosenProp.com

While many companies and organizations rush to redesign their website to improve it’s performance, they overlook a simple change in approach that might make the biggest impact.

A shift is taking place on the web for small business.  Websites and web content are moving to reality, far away from marketing hype.  If a company can change their approach and find ways to bring valuable content to users, then they can improve traffic and ultimately leads.

A Clear View, Show What You Can Do
A buzz word in the web design world is transparency.  To me, this simply applies to the ability to show potential customers and current clients just what you can do for them.  Instead of pitching them that you are “the best, the leader, number one” why not drill into exactly how you can help them?

Example 1: A CPA Firm could use their content to outline their menu of accounting services … and their content might read the very same as 10,000 other CPA websites in their industry.  If they shift their approach, they could provide a summary of how they helped a small business find financial efficiency, position it for growth and help it succeed.

They could show their target market exactly what they ARE doing and make it easy for that user to understand the type of benefits they bring with their service.  Their services mix to create success for a client, instead of a users trying to guess what they need off the standard services list.

Example 2: A Restaurant can show their menu items and a burger is a burger is a burger in print version.  But if you take a short video clip of making your gourmet or special burger, post a series of photos and customer comments on it … you have something to bring hungry stomachs in.

In taking the approach to show the reality of your ingredients, the process and the visual WOW factor, you have created a distinct difference from your competitors websites.

Those are just two quick examples of how taking a better approach to web content and involving ideas, media and real web content can have an impact.  EVERY business out there can find these valuable ways to better illustrate how they can benefit, help and serve their clients and customers.

Build you website visitor a clearer picture on your offering, expertise and process and you will become a clear choice as the one to buy from.