Dr. Ralph Wilson is one of the pioneers in Internet marketing. Here’s a video he recently made with Jim Sterne and Bryan Eisenberg on continuous improvement for small businesses. This is a great video for any small business owner, but there are two things I’d like to point out about it. First, the video:

• First bullet point: He’s using YouTube as a marketing tool. Here, Dr. Wilson demonstrates how YouTube can be used to market your business with a professional quality video that targets your niche customer. You can do that too!
• Second bullet point: Dr. Wilson, Sterne, and Eisenberg all point out that continuous improvement for small businesses boils down to one thing - do the most important thing first. The bottom line is, you are growing your web business for your site visitors. What can you do to make it better for them? That’s what you should be doing.

In order for continuous improvement to work, you’ve got to set aside some time to evaluate and analyze your business. Time alone. It can be 15 minutes, 30 minutes, or 1 hour, but you’ve got to put it on your schedule. I like what Jim Sterne said about making a list of the things you did in the last two things and pay someone $10 per hour to do those things that are taking up your time and that anyone can do. Pay them minimum wage, whatever. But clean your plate for the really important things.

I’m going to hit you with an analogy. Your SEO fork has three prongs on it. Break one off and your fork can’t function properly. Here they are in a nutshell:

• Content (keywords)
• Meta Tags
• Links

These are the three things you MUST do well as a webmaster to rank well in the search engines. All of them are important, but it starts with Content, the primary prong on your SEO fork. I have put together a two-part video series that discusses the 3 prongs of your SEO fork and how you can effectively incorporate them into your web strategy to promote your business. Feel free to take the time and watch these two videos. Here they are, parts 1 and 2:

Part 1

Part 2

For more great videos on SEO and Internet marketing topics, feel free to visit the Small Business Mavericks video page.

I’ve just published a 2-part video series entitled, “The 3 Prongs of the SEO Fork” that is a great how-to/tutorial for beginners on small business website search engine optimization. I cover the 3 basic SEO factors that all legitimate search engine optimization experts agree you MUST do to successfully optimize your site with the search engines.

Here’s Part 1:

And here’s Part 2:

Caroline Melberg
Back to the Small Business Mavericks Blog