Is there someone you know who is 1) good at writing or talking 2) knowledgeable about your business or organization who can add valuable information to your blog? Do you have a client or employee or affiliate who might add valuable information about your business? Perhaps someone who runs a similar business or organization in a different geographical location might be able to present new approaches or ideas.

Locate Person to Interview

Whom to interview? People who already have a blog are good choices. They know how to write and express themselves verbally, so this will help make a coherent interview. Someone you know professionally who can educate your readers in a succinct manner might also be a good option. If you find a blogger online with whom you have had no previous connection but might want to interview, leave a few comments on their posts to start an interaction and see if this blogger might be a good person to ask. I have a good relationship with my heating – air conditioning – plumbing company, and I was pleased to present an interview with Raritan Air Water Power Service as a way to learn about a small business, how the business uses social media, deals with difficult customers and says thank you to clients.

Ask a Few Questions

What to ask? I usually come up with about 4 to 6 questions for the person I am interviewing and suggest the interviewee may skip any they choose and create any new ones. For question examples, read this interview with me by Shari Weiss. Here is one question you can ask almost any person you interview online: “When did you get started with what you want to call social media, and why did you start?”

You can ask questions that are specific to the person that you are interviewing as well as general questions that might be useful for almost anyone. Another question that Shari asked me: “What are the top lessons you have learned about life and/or business since you began your Life on the Net?” (Read my answers, including Put it in writing and Listen to your client.) How would you answer that question? How might someone else? We could probably come up with some great business and life advice if we asked 100 knowledgeable and articulate people that question.

Present the Interview

How can one make the interview easy to read? Going back to the example of Shari’s interview, note how she highlighted certain parts of the interview:

Shari took a list of my business – life learning lessons and organized them in an easy to read manner:

You can organize the information you get from the client and edit any parts that you might consider a bit too wordy for a blog post. Remember, attentions are short on the web. Grab your readers attention – you don’t get paid by the word (unlike Charles Dickens).

Show Relevant Images and Media

What kinds of images might enhance an interview? If you are interviewing a person with visual skills, show off their work – see my interview with Elke Reva Sudin. If they do well as speakers, perhaps a video or audio presentation would best show what they have to say. For examples of podcasts as interviews, visit Bella Buzz by Desiree Scales. Hannah Katsman regularly interviews cooks on her Cooking Manager blog – some show photos in the kitchen, working away at a culinary creation. For my interview with Hannah I sent her a photo of my family at a winery, raising our wine glasses.

On the Raritan Air interview, I used their logo and business information:

Now that adds color and interest to the many words of the interview.

Encourage Comments

How can one get readers to respond? Say so! Ask for responses to the interview at the end of the post. Announce the post on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media networks to give others the opportunity to read the post and give feedback. If you are interviewing someone who is not used to blogs, be sure to let them know that readers may want feedback, and there may be an opportunity to add further to the interview by responding to comments.

Have you ever conducted a blog interview? Have you ever been interviewed on a blog? Feel free to add a link to the interview in the comments if you feel it will add to the discussion.

While a lot of businesses are realizing the benefits, many are still unsure about investing in it. With search engine marketing still a relatively new practice, many of these businesses do not have any previous experience with it and rather than embrace it, they ignore it.

For these businesses however, there are a lot of benefits that can come by simply investing a bit of time and experimenting with new practices. Below are a few ideas (mainly Google focused) to help small businesses test the water without getting in too deep:

Natural Results and SEO

The main target for any business looking to increase online visibility and drive traffic is the natural search results. These account for the majority of traffic that comes from search engines and the ones that require the most work. While there are a whole range of factors that search engines consider when ranking websites, some are more important than others. To get a better understanding of SEO there’s lots of information out there to help you. Why not check out Leora’s intro to SEO which should help you get started.

As a business owner, there are small changes you can make to your website that can have a big effect on your positions in the natural search results. In my experience, the simplest and most rewarding change any business can make for SEO is optimizing title tags. These appear in the blue browser bar at the top of the page and are one of the most important on page factors search engines consider when determining the relevance of the page. Try to keep this to around 65 characters, put the most important keywords first and include the location or brand if these are keywords you want to be targeting.

For example, the current title tag for Navaro is “SEO, Search Engine Optimisation and PPC Company Warwickshire | Navaro”. After trying various layouts, we are currently using SEO and search engine optimization as the first keywords, as they are the most difficult ones to rank for, then PPC company as the second, followed by the location and then a “|” separating the company name. The company name is displayed this way at the end of every title tag.

Google Local Business Center

If your business provides services to a location specific area, Google will often return local business results when the relevant keyword is searched for. These results are displayed above the natural results and can often drive a fair amount of traffic. Submitting to Google Local Business Center (Google Local Business Centre in Great Britain) is easy and can be done through your Google account. A few things to keep in mind when creating the listing:

• User reviews will help improve your position in local search and increase trust in your listing
• Try to use keywords in your company name
• Fill in as many details as possible to help add further weight to the listing
• The closer your company is to the center of the city the better

Examples of local business results on Google:

Google Base

With Google now trying to help users find what they are looking for as quickly as possible, products are often show directly in the search results. These are taken from Google Base, which again can be accessed through a Google account. By uploading the details of the products you are currently selling you can help penetrate the search results, even in some of the most competitive areas. See also Google Merchant Center, which you can get to from Google Base.

UK examples:

PPC Advertising

Pay per click adverts are the ones that show up to the right, above and below the natural search results (depending on the search engine). As opposed to print advertising, where you pay for the advert whether or not it reaches prospective customer, pay per click advertising only costs money when someone clicks on the advert and is delivered to your website.

This form of advertising, along with SEO is one of the most cost effective and targeted around and a simple account can be set up in around half an hour. It gives the advertiser complete control over everything from daily budget and target area, to maximum cost per click.

Testing a couple of these methods should give you an insight into the benefits that search engine marketing can have for your business.

 

Ben Hook is the owner Navaro, a Warwickshire SEO company helping clients to grow their business by increasing their online visibility.

 

Thank you, Ben, for having the honor of writing the first guest post for this blog!

Leora Wenger (@leoraw), a Highland Park-based freelance web designer, met Kacy Campion Renna (@NJInsuranceGirl), owner of CCW Insurance Company, Belmar, on Twitter through another user, Deborah Smith (@jerseybites), a Social Media consultant in Ocean County. After about four months of exchanging informal tweets, Kacy needed emergency help with her website. They connected by phone, and Leora solved the initial problem, which then led to their business relationship.

Amy Boroff (@njdevmgr), development manger for Junior Achievement of NJ in Princeton, discovered one of her new Twitter followers was Kate Specchio (@ecsfoundation), co-founder of Morris County-based The Emily C. Specchio Foundation. Through their tweets, Amy recognized the potential for working together. They continued to communicate on Twitter in real-time, after working hours, to learn more about each respective organization. After several weeks, JANJ submitted a proposal to ECS for funding for an inaugural event: the Women’s Future Leadership Forum. The ECS Foundation accepted the proposal and granted funds to help support aspiring female high school students become future leaders.

Have you experienced a business success story through Twitter? How has Twitter helped you?

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Coming next week to Websites for Small Biz blog: highlighting a specific post (or posts) on your home page in WordPress.

Your small business or organization website is online – but is anyone finding it?
Learn the ins and outs of social media networking from some experts.

Larry Brauner

Larry Brauner is always coming up with great online networking ideas – last week he ran a worldwide networking party in honor of his 58th birthday. He talks about why one should have a blog for one’s business and 10 Easy Ways to Improve Your Blog or Website. Larry doesn’t just spout out his ideas and then walk away; if you ask him to give you feedback on your own business or organization, he will give thoughtful suggestions and ideas. Follow Larry Brauner on Twitter.

Shari Weiss

I met Shari Weiss through Larry Brauner (see, online networking really does work, if you take the time to have a conversation with people, listening to them and adding your observations). Shari writes in a friendly, easy-to-connect manner about how one can use social media to develop your business. And Shari has even more blogs for you to read. Follow Shari Weiss on Twitter.

Debra Askanase

Debra writes a blog called Community Organizer 2.0. The description says “a forum for discussion and opinions on web 2.0 and non-profits” – I found the information Debra presents to be useful to small businesses as well. When you leave a comment on Debra’s blog, she responds in a thoughtful, intuitive manner. Check out her category called Listening. Follow Debra Askanase on Twitter.

Janice Tomich

Janice Tomich has a blog called Calculated Presentations. Here’s how she introduces her site: “Ever experience death by PowerPoint? Find people falling asleep when you present this year’s financials? I will help you build better presentations and create messages that stick.” Find out Why Being Yourself and Passionate Trumps Distracting Habits. Follow Janice Tomich on Twitter.

Shirley George Frazier

Shirley Frazier has a blog called Solo Business Marketing. I particularly liked her post Marketing and Free Advice Doesn’t Always Mix – what do you say if someone asks you for all sorts of free business advice? Shirley might have some business advice that is just right for marketing your business. Follow Shirley George Frazier on Twitter.

Chris Kieff

I feel like I *almost* met Chris Kieff, as he runs a networking group in northern New Jersey, and we talked via Skype at recent Tweetup. Chris writes about internet marketing, web site promotion, advertising, blogs, SEO, and social networking. He provides great information such Top 10 Social Media Guides or his predictions of Social Media Trends in 2010. Follow Chris Kieff on Twitter.

Eva Abreu

Eva has recently started a column for the Home News Tribune in Central New Jersey. The information she writes about may be local to New Jersey, but anyone anywhere in the world can take Eva’s ideas and apply them to their location. Eva has been great about organizing Tweetups in New Jersey, and her enthusiasm is contagious. You can also read more at her website New Jersey Social Media. Follow Eva Abreu on Twitter.

Are you reading a great small business or social media blog? Care to share?

Smallbizchat is a Twitter chat group that “meets” each Wednesday evening at 8 pm ET to discuss small business topics. Melinda Emerson and Cathy Larkin are the hosts. Questions are put out to the “audience,” and people answer as they see fit.

This past Wednesday night the host was Yiana Palacios of Design Leap. Topic was website for small business.

These were the questions, which I thought were excellent ones for any small business starting out that needs a website.

Q1: What are some excuses that start-up businesses make about not having a website?

Q3: What do you need to consider when hiring a web designer?

Q4: What are the alternatives to hiring a website designer?

Q6: What are the common mistakes that you see people make on their websites?

Q7: Should a website have a Splash page (also know as a Flash page)?

Q8: What do you say about using your own photos vs. stock photography on your website?

Q10: How does one get on the first page of Google?

You can see how the participants answered the questions on this transcript from the chat. You can read the responses of Yiana Palacios on Melinda’s post Website Design Basics for Start-up Businesses.

A few comments of my own on some of the questions:
Q3: What do you need to consider when hiring a web designer?
Just as you would when you choose a physician, therapist or dentist, find someone with whom you connect well. There are many web designers out there, just as there are many competent doctors. Find a web professional who will help you achieve your goals AND will make the process comfortable and even enjoyable. I have formed great relationships with many of my clients, so we look forward to working on parts of their sites, which helps the site shine. Do make sure, of course, the web professional has the skills necessary and can produce what you want within your budget.

Q8: What do you say about using your own photos vs. stock photography on your website?
In my work, if I have the opportunity, I like to use my own photos. Also, some clients use local photographers with whom they have a good relationship at a reasonable cost. Some of my clients do use stock photos, but I can’t say it harms their business in any way; in those cases, the photos just serve to highlight the content. Other sources of imagery can be charts, public domain art or maps. Discovering or creating interesting imagery for your site can be part of the fun of building the site.

Regarding SEO, I read a great post this morning about code and SEO:

A comment about chats:
Tone of Voice – one cannot hear tone of voice on the internet (unless listening to a podcast or a recorded video) and certainly not on Twitter. I noticed that when the conversation turned to Flash and SEO tweets were flying all about and if one could hear tone of voice, perhaps it was getting controversial, confrontational and maybe after a while a bit silly? On the one hand, this is the nature of a chat; you don’t have much time to think or to edit your tweets, so you type out quickly the first thing that comes to mind. Maybe this is a good thing; if we were all sitting in a room together, we would probably be too polite to let the differences of opinions fly.
What do you think?

To learn more about SmallBizChat, visit How To Participate in #Smallbizchat. Thank you again to Melinda Emerson for bringing us this great forum.

Thanks to social media, you can’t really ignore your competitors like you used to. I mean, you can, but it’s a lot more obvious that that’s what you’re doing. You’re both on Twitter. You’re both on Facebook. You’re both using the same tools and communicating in the same space to a very similar group of people.

Here are some examples she gives where businesses can join forces:

• “You can work together to organize a block party where all the local businesses on the street stay open late to encourage sales.”
• “If you’re a local hardware store, you can partner with the other hardware stores in the area to raise money for Habitat for Humanity while building your own brand awareness.”
• “You can join together to hold one mega benefit instead of a handful of smaller, easier-to-ignore ones.”
• “You can fight together on important industry issues.”
• Create a Targeted Referral System: “By creating a good relationship with your competitors, you devise the perfect referral system for the both of you.”
• Learn Their Strengths and Weaknesses: “By monitoring and scrutinizing their movement, it helps you make smarter choices for your own business.”

Read the whole article.

So what do you think…does this apply to your business, organization, or blog? If one applies this to the blogging world, for example, I have found that bloggers that pair up to do say, a blog carnival or a meet up, do better than if they act alone. Certainly an organization in one town that is doing similar to work another nearby can find ways to work together. On Twitter designers get together for chats via #DCTH – that’s another way of sharing with your competition, sharing via Twitter chat.

Can you think of example where working together might not work? What has been your experience with your competition?

What are some reasons one might want to meet others in person?

1. You might get a new client.
2. You might learn something that will help your business.
3. You might help someone in the group get a new client or help them with their business.
4. Your work involves staring at a screen all day or talking into the telephone (mine certainly does!), and you love the idea of talking about your work in person, with real live people.
5. You like meeting new people.

Any more suggestions for why one would attend a face to face meeting?

I also ran a Twitter Research Workshop at the Highland Park Public Library on Monday night, so it was a good face-to-face week for me. It was great to have Dhaval Jani and Haim Cohen at the workshop, as they helped answer some of the participants’ questions.

Do you have opportunities to network in person where you live? How have you found the experience? Eva Abreu organized the tweetup on Friday, and she used http://www.meetup.com/ for the invites and feedback. If you want, you can use it to join our Central New Jersey group or to organize your own in your area.

If you have suggestions on how the audio for Skype can be improved, feel free to say so in the comments.

Update: See Eva’s video -

Linda Dessau, another #sbbuzz participant, provides writing prompts and marketing ideas, with posts to spark your creativity and make your great ideas come alive. One recent post that you might find useful – Defining a Perfect Article Opener.

Becky McCray and others write about small business and rural issues. Becky works with small businesses to maintain their web presence, and she helps city governments with project management and grant writing. On this post she was interviewed by Business Owners Toolkit.

Here’s a link to many more small business blogs.

If you have a favorite small business blog, feel free to leave the link in the comments. Perhaps I will feature the blog in a future post.

How can one use Twitter for research? One can divide this into two approaches: active and passive.

Passive Twitter Research

Let’s say you want to explore email newsletters for your business or organization. A passive twitter approach might be to go to one of these Twitter search and type “email marketing” or “email newsletter” or “html email” and see what you get.

I went to http://search.twitter.com/ and typed in “email newsletter.” Here’s what I got:

So how can one proceed with this? One can now ask macmktg what she recommends for an email newsletter. Or one can examine the WordPress method that mmangen suggests.

When I type in “email marketing,” I found at least 2 people recommending a post:

Active Research

When I suggested asking macmktg what she recommends for a newsletter, that would be an example of active research – one is no longer just reading the information on the web, but actually researching out to a person on a topic in which that person may have some expertise.

Way back in August I asked about this topic of email marketing services while participating in my favorite chat group, @sbbuzz. (More on sbbuzz on this post). I got many response from some small business experts, such as:

• working_arts: @leoraw constant contact – very easy to use #sbbuzz
• joemagennis: @leoraw Just moved from ConstantContact to AWeber. Scheduled messages according to signup date, number of posts etc very versatile #sbbuzz
• bradfordshimp: @leoraw I am in love with MailChimp. Super user friendly, and (this is important) fun! #sbbuzz
• bradfordshimp: @leoraw MailChimp doesn’t have triggers though, which is big for one of my clients. We use Big Response for that. #sbbuzz

More on this sbbuzz summary.

Here are the websites of those services that were recommended: MailChimp, Constant Contact, Big Response, AWeber

Update from Bradford Shimp: “MailChimp now does offer triggers via their autoresponders, so I have moved completely to their service. I highly recommend MailChimp.”

I also got a response via my contact form from Andrew Creem of Data Buddy who suggested his website: www.databuddy.com.

Have you had a good experience researching a topic via Twitter that you would like to share?

What’s a tweet chat? A group of people (Twitterers) decide to “meet” at a set time and use a hashtag (such as #sbbuzz) to connect. And chat.

What is #sbbuzz all about? First of all, that # sign in the front means it is a hashtag. You will see hashtags all over Twitter. Hashtags are a sign that this may be a topic of interest to others in the general Twittersphere. Anyone can create a hashtag. #sbbuzz stands for Small Business Buzz (and that link will take you to the sbbuzz blog). You can also follow sbbuzz on Twitter. #sbbuzz chats are held every Tuesday night, 8pm–10pm Eastern Time.

How did I find out about the Tweet Chat? Much thanks to NJinsuranceGirl for tweeting about #sbbuzz. I found NJinsuranceGirl (Kacy Campion Renna) because jerseybites recommended her on Friday for #followfriday (what’s #followfriday? That’s a whole ‘nother topic: go on Twitter on any Friday and you’ll see lots of these #followfriday tags that are suggesting people to follow on Twitter). I met jerseybites in person last February when I attended a TweetUp. Here are some instructions on how to get involved with the group: http://sbbuzz.biz/instructions.

This was the chat from May 19, 2009:

What was discussed at the #sbbuzz chat? The topic this week was Insiders Tips for Small Businesses on Twitter. sbbuzz tweeted these questions during the course of the two hour chat:

• Q1. What advice would you give a small business owner brand new to Twitter?
• Q2. What should businesses talk about? What are businesses doing on Twitter?
• Q3. Any good resources for Twitter how-tos, reference guides, etiquettes, etc?
• Q4. Is your local community (govt/academic/private) doing anything to promote entrepreneurship/small business? What is working?
• Q5. How do you find time to stay involved, engaged and contributing to online and offline networks?
• Q6. How many social media networks do you actively participate in? Do connections overlap? How do you keep track?

There was more, but you get the basic idea. I felt since I was new to the “party,” I mostly read what others had to say (and I picked a few to follow regularly), but I did tweet this in response to Q6: “Q6 Social Media networks: Twitter, my own blog, Facebook – I’m on LinkedIn, too; much overlap because of my own blog. #sbbuzz”

Want to know what people had to say? A summary is posted at http://sbbuzz.wordpress.com/2009/05/21/small-biz-tech-advice-resources-may-19-2009/.

Have you ever participated in a Tweet Chat? Used a hashtag in Twitter to follow a topic with others? How would you answer any of the above questions? What questions would you ask?