You can’t interact with any form of media these days and not hear about Twitter.  TV, radio, print, web, mobile and face-to-face networking are all jumping in. Big traditional media, big business, big stars, big sports … all on Twitter.

But you, you’re not big.   You’re a small business and while you’re interested in tools and strategies to grow your business, you don’t know how to evaluate the Twitter buzz.  It looks like a time waster, meaningless chatter and something that falls to #524 of what you have to accomplish in your day.

You might want to reconsider. I could list out my 100 reasons a small business should get involved with Twitter, but I think having 100 different voices (comments) would be better.

So I’m putting it out to the Twitter community in the attempt to gather a total of 100 reasons or more to be on Twitter as a small business. Give me yours, leave your Twitter ID too (I’ll link it for you), and lets help those on the fence decide and all of us learn a new thing or two on the benefits of Twitter.

Two things happened last week that had me thinking about Internet marketing and the opportunity for success a business has with it. It also made me think about why companies seem to be held back from exploiting the benefits of marketing online.

Number One: Who’s The Crazy One?
The first was reading a great Internet marketing article from Andrew Eklund on MinnesotaBusiness.com.  The article easily outlined why Internet marketing is a dream (and reality) for any marketing team/person.  Eklund had some great points that anyone could understand and my biggest takeaways were:

1.  Reworking old and tired traditional marketing is not the answer.

2.  Ignoring the medium (Internet) where prospects are, customers are and that allows for complete tracking of your marketing to sale process is plain crazy.

3.  Internet marketing is not risky, not marketing online is risky.

Give the article a read and you’ll hopefully find a spark to push yourself into investing more time and strategy into leveraging the great benefits of Internet marketing. You’re crazy not too.

Number Two: Ignorance Is Bliss? No.
The second thing that happened was a scenario that unfolded in my email inbox.  I received an email from a business development person I know that contained their newsletter in a PDF attachment.  I froze.  They had a great email subject headline on a topic that I wanted information on but … they would never know that.

I couldn’t believe that the company would ignore the fantastic benefits of email marketing after all that hard work.  They put together a well designed PDF, it had compelling and educating content … yet it was only doing half of its job.  It wasn’t going to clue the business in on its relevance, performance and its outcome.

If they had sent this information via an email marketing program they would have gained these valuable marketing benefits:

1.  Who opened their email newsletter

1b.  Better yet, they would have reduced effort (clicks & time) to get to the goods

2.  What links users clicked on to get more info or take action

3.  The ability to fully track users from email to website to conversion

4.  They can still include the PDF version AND see who downloaded that

This marketing campaign could have been so much more.  Don’t just go half way, take advantage of the simple opportunity to get everything you want from your marketing efforts.

So to get to my title question, what is holding your company back from Internet marketing?  As Ecklund’s article pointed out, it offers accountability, sustained progress, sales, leads, return-on-investment, and deep business intelligence.  Let’s add to that affordability too.  Email marketing is an extremely low cost.  Consider though, at any price, the ability to track and measure makes any number realistic when you know what it produced.

So get rid of your fear (or ignorance), make the move, take the right steps, ask questions, get answers and find the ways Internet marketing can improve your business.  There are many.

In our industry we often hide behind browsers, Internet connections, email and our web designs.  Just where are these web design experts working everyday?  So here is a look at our office space.  We moved into another section of our 100 year old building this winter as we found a renter for our old space.  It still needs some TLC, but you get the picture.

The last photo is of our 1950’s Philco refrigerator.  It’s where we keep our web designs and ideas cool until we need them.

I was very fortunate to get to speak at the Buffalo, MN Chamber of Commerce Quarterly Luncheon today.  I presented on some ideas to help a small business website succeed, search engine optimization (SEO) and web analytics. I think I only put one person to sleep and the group had a lot of great Internet marketing questions in the follow-up.

There were some great Buffalo and Wright County businesses / organizations in attendance and I enjoyed the 45 minute presentation. Getting to share my knowledge and passion for the web is one of the best things I get to do at Five. Thank you to the Chamber for the invite to speak and present!

Speaking of presentations, we will be announcing a business blogging seminar soon for late May.  We should be getting the details out next week.

Thanks to Five web programmer @travisneids for taking the photos.

Our last post looked at the new Google search features incorporating local search results into regular search queries.  For many search terms you no longer need to apply a city and state to get local results.

A New Top Keyword
I thought I would update that post with how this new Google search feature has effected our search engine traffic.  Prior to this local feature, our top terms of referral traffic were our company name and then “web design MN”, “Minnesota web design” and other variations.

In the past week we have a new top term for bringing traffic to our website, “web design”.  Prior to the Google change, we would have never even dreamt of competing for the term of web design without a location or another term attached. In doing just some minor research, we appear in the local search results for 11 different zip codes.  With our office being rurally located, we bleed into other areas results from as far as 20 miles away.  If we were right in Minneapolis this wouldn’t be the case, but the search volume for “web design” would be much higher.  Not too bad of a trade off.

This new local search feature creates a lot of opportunity for small businesses to attract more buisness from Google.  It also shines a much brighter light on local search, a focus we will see increase in the coming months for sure.