An article at Inside CRM lists 15 websites that can influence your business for good or bad, but the article is rather flawed. Here are the 15 sites the article lists that are influential enough to make or break your company:

• Google
• YouTube
• Amazon.com
• Wikipedia
• Facebook
• MySpace
• Digg
• TechCrunch
• Colbert Nation
• Valleywag
• Twitter
• The Smoking Gun
• Oprah
• The Consumerist
• The Huffington Post

The problem with this list is that most of these websites don’t give a hoot about your small business enough to pay it one iota of attention, let alone boost it on a pedestal or drag it through the mud. Of this list, most small business owners need only consider 4 of them, maybe 5, as potential websites to concern themselves with in protecting their brand.

Those 5 sites are:

• Google
• YouTube
• Facebook
• MySpace
• Twitter (wild card)

Google, of course, is the most popular search engine today. They really don’t care about your site. An impartial source, Google algorithms do all the work. It’s up to you really how well, or how poorly, you are perceived through Google’s lenses. Google does nothing; you do everything. They catalog information; you present it. But you can build a solid business online without being listed in Google (though I wouldn’t recommend it).

YouTube is a video sharing site. Yes, you can have videos go viral. Many have. But look at the odds. Seriously, millions of videos uploaded, only thousands with a record of success. Possible, but don’t bet money on it. Just build your brand honestly, create and upload videos if they’ll benefit you, and just do good business. To be honest, YouTube isn’t for everyone, but for those that it will benefit it has potential.

Facebook is one of the best ways you can build your brand. Like Google, it does nothing. You do everything. These sites provide the opportunity; it’s up to you to take advantage of it. Network, network, network.

MySpace is for teens. Does your business cater to teens? Use it. If not, forget about it.

Twitter, I’ve never used it. I’ve heard it’s great. It probably is. Many people use it and say sweet things. If you want to give it a go I see no reason why you shouldn’t.

But what about the rest of these sites? Amazon.com is an online book store and product retailer. Do you sell through them? Is it a place that you could sell through? Then by all means it could help you. If you’re not a retailer then Amazon likely won’t be much good for you.

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia. Most of us don’t need to be listed there. Have you made any significant accomplishments? Maybe they deserve a mention. But don’t expect a flood of business just because your friend Biff went up and told the world that you won the Blue Ribbon Award for Dog Grooming in Nantucket, Illinois (Is there a Nantucket in Illinois?).

TechCrunch, Valleywag, The Smoking Gun, The Consumerist, and The Huffington Post are all news sites. If you aren’t newsworthy then you likely won’t be mentioned on any of these. TechCrunch and Valleywag only deal with technology so if you aren’t a technology company then don’t count on it. The Smoking Gun destroys reputations. Sound inviting? The Huffington Post is a political site. The Consumerist is The Smoking Gun of the marketplace, but if you aren’t a big brand worth talking about then they likely won’t care that you ticked off Bongo the Clown because you didn’t have any red balloons.

That leaves Oprah, Colbert Nation, and Digg. Oprah is very influential. But you have to work your soles off to get on her show and it’s a task. Unless you have something that has a very wide and potentially popular appeal, don’t waste a lot of time chasing Oprah.

Stephen Colbert is a funny guy. Why would he care about your small business? Only Colbert knows.

And Digg, hmmm. Interesting site. Can help you get a lot of traffic. But if you look like you are trying to get publicity through Digg then you’ll get blasted by the in crowd at Digg. They either like you or they don’t and they generally don’t like marketers. But you can get some traffic here. Personally, I think you’re better off with StumbleUpon and a few other social sites. The most popular isn’t always the best.

Honestly, Yahoo and MSN Live can do you better service than some of these sites. As a small business, just stick to the basics and you’ll do fine.

Do you have a small business Internet marketing blueprint?

OK, you may not think of yourself as a little guy and maybe I’m being a little bit condescending, but let’s face it - small business owners need every little edge we can get. Can’t we?

There are a ton of social media tools out there that can help you make the most of your online marketing efforts. Some are worth it and some aren’t. Erica DeWolf has put together a little blog post highlighting a few of the tools that you can find useful. Among them are:

• Facebook
• Blog
• RSS feeds
• Podcasts
• Videocasts
• Twitter

I can vouch for most of these myself. For business social networking I like LinkedIn, but I’ve heard that many marketers have been successful with Facebook (it’s probably a generational thing). But I highly recommend blogs and RSS feeds. What Erica says about RSS feeds, that you can use them for anything, not just blogs, is true.

Two things that work really well with RSS feeds are podcasting and videos. Two very powerful methods of marketing that allow you to communicate with your customers as if they were right in front of you.

I don’t have any personal experience with Twitter, but it is a hot item right now. I highly recommend that you include some form of social media marketing into your mix of marketing strategies. For a consultation on which methods might work for your situation, contact Small Business Mavericks today.

The article caught my attention, that’s for sure. The promise was bold and incisive. It’s as easy as 1-2-3. Get high rankings at Google. All you have to do is three easy-to-do things. Only it’s not that easy.

Here are three things you have to do to get those high rankings (the author of the article promises):

• Pick the best keywords and place them in your web page content
• Then you need to “find, get, and manage” great inbound links
• Finally, you need to monitor your progress

I agree that these are the three things you need to do to rank well in the search engines, but it’s not so easy. It’s hard work.

Picking the best keywords is not so cut-and-dry. You have to do some research. You have to look at the availability of the keywords and not just their traffic value. The best keywords are those keywords that get a lot of searchers trying to find information on them and where few webmasters are targeting them. That isn’t too many keywords. Plus, to add a kink in the garden hose, it changes from month to month.

This month, “auto repairs” might be a valuable search term. Next month, it could “tire rotation”. I wouldn’t suggest you change your website content every month to capture the latest high value search term.

To be sure, constant keyword research is necessary and finding the best keywords isn’t always easy. Even if you find high value keywords with little competition, you still are going to do better with keywords that are relevant to your business and if those are the keywords with the most content you are in for a long, hard drive to the top of search engine rankings!

Inbound links. Yes, you need them. Getting links isn’t hard. Getting valuable links consistently is hard work. Directory submissions are good, but even better are relevant sites within your niche that have authority. Getting them to link to you voluntarily is a difficult task, but it can be done. And when you do it those links can help propel you to search engine ranking success!

Monitor your progress. This is actually the easiest step. The hard part is finding the best keywords, developing great content, and building valuable links. But once you get the hard part out of the way, monitoring what happens on your site and using that information to make important tweaks that benefit you is much easier.

Need help with your goals. Try an Internet Marketing Blueprint before you go too far.

When you’re building links for your small business website, where should you begin? Who are your potential link partners? Do you know?

Link building for small businesses is easier than for large Web-only businesses because you don’t have to have a lot of inbound links really to stay competitive. If you are a book store owner in a small town, for instance, and you have a website then most of your prospects are going to be local people. Will you sell over the Web? If not and you only want to have a Web presence to drive traffic back to your brick-and-mortar store, then it’s pretty simple.

What you want to do is identify who your competitors are, direct competitors. Keep in mind that as a local business you are not competing against Web businesses that do not have a presence in your community, especially if you aren’t selling on the Web. You may be competing for a general keyword search term like “books” or “book stores”, but as a local book store you are primarily targeting a geographic area, which a large chain store or Web-only store wouldn’t be. So your strategy should be different.

Therefore, who are your local competitors? Write them down then find out what inbound links they have. If your competitors don’t have websites then that will be easy. If you are in a large urban area and you have chain competitors then consider them competitors.

Next, write down all of your suppliers, business partners, etc. See if they have websites and find out who their link partners are.

After you have found out who the link partners of your competitors and partners are then you’ll want to examine their websites to find out if those websites will make good link partners for you. Some will, some won’t. But it doesn’t hurt to analyze it.

That’s where I’d start my link building process. After that, you want to go a little deeper.

Greg Sterling had an interesting post on his blog, Screenwerk, which highlighted the top 50 local websites. Many of them, of course, are sites like Weather Channel, Wal-Mart, or Target that wouldn’t benefit most small business owners as places to advertise, and several of the sites wouldn’t offer advertising to local businesses anyway.

It is interesting, however, that of the top 6 businesses locally-oriented websites on the list, three of them are great resources for small business owners to use for targeted marketing. They are:

• Craigslist
• Superpages
• Yellowpages.com

Craigslist is a great resource and offers small business owners a way to advertise their local offerings for free.

Superpages and Yellowpages.com both offer free listings as well, but you can upgrade to a paid listing and be more effective. It’s just like advertising in the print yellow pages in your home town, except that you have a much broader audience and you can advertise in such a way that you increase your chances of being found someone looking for your services.

I wouldn’t ignore any of these three locally-oriented websites.

A new website, and political movement, has launched to attempt to make the Internet a free and basic right to all Americans. It’s called InternetforEveryone.org. Some of the names behind the movement are some big and powerful names, including:

• Google
• Skype
• BitTorrent
• ACLU
• Common Cause
• eBay
• National Council of Women’s Organizations
• National Organization for Women
• Writers Guild of America
• and several faculty members at Harvard, Yale, and Stanford law schools

It is obvious what these individuals and organizations hope to gain from this. If everyone had access to the Internet then that would increase the base of consumers for anyone doing business online. Is that a good idea?

Personally, I think anything that increases opportunities for everyone is a good thing. If this initiative does gain ground and win out in the end, which I think is highly possible, then it will become an absolute necessity to have an online presence if you run any kind of business online. Already, people who have access to the Internet turn here first for product research and to find information on businesses they are considering working with. If everyone has access to the Internet regardless of education, financial status, and social status then you can bet that will increase 100-fold. Businesses that have no Internet presence at all will die. This is worth keeping your eye on.

(Source) The Bottom Line? Internet advertsising is probably the single most cost effective means of advertising available today and companies continue to up their budgets to capitalize.

I think this is an amazing announcement. With fuel prices climbing ever higher and more people losing jobs (and businesses), for anyone to say that advertising expenses are rising is incredible. I think it means that consumers are growing more confident of the Internet - at least, business consumers are. With the increase in online advertising, I think retail consumers will follow with more confidence of online purchasing, which means two things for businesses that operate online:

1. More advertising should pay off
2. Offering purchasing opportunities online will pay off

In both of these cases, businesses that advertise online should win. But you do have a budget to think about. Have you started allocating a part of your monthly budget to online advertising? If not, you should think about it.

“Oh, Caroline, Caroline, wherefore art thou Caroline?”

Well, I’ll tell you where I’m going to be. On July 9th I’ll be speaking to the Business Women’s Network. I’ll be speaking on “Everything You MUST Know before creating a website.”

As usual, I’ll be drawing upon my 20 years of experience in marketing for large corporations to share with small business owners how they can get the most out of marketing their businesses with a website. You know my passion is helping small business owners find new customers and increase sales and THAT’s exactly what I’ll be talking about on July 9th.

My practical, easy-to-understand presentation should clear it all up for you. I’m as down to earth as dirt (I promise!) and I’ll help you understand “brainy” concepts like social networking, blogging, and Internet marketing tactics that have been around for years. Specifically, I’ll be sharing the following insights:

• The 3 elements of every successful website
• How to ensure your site looks great
• Making sure your website is found in the search engines
• Which questions to ask any web professional before having them create your website

If you agree this is valuable information and you’d like the answers to these concerns (and much more) then I encourage you to come and hear me speak on July 9th at the Women’s Business Network at Enjoy! Restaurant located at 15435 Founders Lane, Apple Valley, Minnesota. Guests pay just $30 to attend. For more information, visit the Business Women’s Network website or e-mail reservation@businesswomensnetwork.org.

Now here’s a Google tidbit I wasn’t aware of: Don’t end your URLs with .0. They won’t get ranked.

Evidently, this phenomenon is only true at Google. Yahoo! and MSN Live index those pages anyway, but it does seem to be a rather arbitrary rule. As Rand says, a human review might be in order to ensure that such pages aren’t spam. If they are, Google can ditch them. If not, then approve them and index them. Seems simple.

It pays to read the leading SEO blogs from time to time just to see if anything new develops. In fact, I’d say that the three most important activities for anyone interested in do-it-yourself SEO are:

• Read a handful of SEO blogs to stay on top of industry changes
• Test and experiment
• Review and analyze

I know SEOmoz does these things. Any serious SEO and any successful Internet marketer is doing all three and that’s why the .0 rule is such big news. None of us have ever seen it before.

You bet it is. This article tells it better than I can. But I’d like to point out a few things that I found interesting:

But when it comes to making decisions, Gen Y tends to rely on their network of friends and their recommendations, not traditional ads. “Ads that push a slogan, an image, and a feeling, the younger consumer is not going to go for,” says James R. Palczynski, retail analyst for Ladenburg Thalmann & Co. Instead, they respond to “humor, irony, and the unvarnished truth.” They’re also somewhat distrusting of ads, which is why grassroots efforts can also work. However, don’t get too comfortable, Gen Y doesn’t have brand loyalty - they’re quick to move the next big thing.

Take away: Cut the five-second soundbite. No canned elevator speeches. And don’t expect Gen Y to love you enough to live with you for the rest of your life (I’m not talking about marriage here).

Traditional advertisers know that young people are the most easily persuaded demographic in the world because they don’t have brand loyalty and their willing to try new things. That may change with the younger set today. No brand loyalty means never, not not yet. And did you get that part about valuation of peer opinions and attitudes? If you want to reach Generation Y, you’ve got to give them the ability to communicate directly with their friends about you and not be afraid of what they’ll say. Internet marketing is the only medium that allows you to do that comfortably, affordably, and conveniently.

Web Sites Will Need to Cater to Shorter Attention Spans: No more long boring text! Thanks to constant media input, Gen Y has shorter attention spans and their “grasshopper minds” leap quickly from topic to topic. (They also didn’t read this whole article…too long!)

Take away: Short, snappy articles with short, snappy sentences. And lots of multimedia.

Generation Y, who sees the mobile as a social device first and an information device second, is not using today’s mobile search as much as expected. But Generation Y is using mobile phones to access social networks.”

Take away: Make your website social and mobile accessible.