Generally speaking, a network is a one way operation. You make contact with a wide range of individuals in the hope that one day they could be of help to you. A relationship is a two way operation. You’re there to help them when required, and they are there to help you when required. Networks are easy to develop. You can do a little research, discover all the movers and shakers who could be of use to you, and you add them to your list of contacts. You may even add them to your social media accounts.

Relationships require work. They don’t happen overnight. In many cases, relationships are one sided – you’re doing all the helping, promoting their cause, even through social media. Relationship builders are by no means selfless. In fact, the art of building relationships still revolves around promoting yourself and building your business. The difference between a relationship builder and a networker is longevity – relationship builders are looking at the long term benefit to their business.

In the long term, relationships will survive the ups and downs of the business world. People in a network will come and go whenever it suits them. They generally don’t stick by you during troubled times, or help repair your reputation when a dissatisfied worker or customer goes on a social media rant. Those you have built up a relationship will, and where possible, help you to negate the effects of that hit to your reputation. Why? Because they know you, and they care – as you would if the same happened to them.

There is room for both, and it’s certainly a good idea having a strong network of people who could be of use to you. While networking, consider taking the next step and developing a strong relationship with those who really matter – it may only be a handful, however, the benefits will far outweigh a hundred in a network.

There is only so much a person can do. You have a choice, you can work on the periphery of your business, managing a website, keywords, content, marketing including a social media marketing campaign, and perhaps even a PPC campaign as well – and we haven’t touched on the business side of things, the stock control, money management and growth of a business. The alternative is to work longer building your business, increasing turnover and profitability.  There are some small business owners who can manage this full time, however, their stress levels are high and their interaction with family and friends low.

The alternative is to engage professionals to work on specific areas of your business.  Are they expensive? Despite popular opinion, generally not – although expensive depends on your own personal opinion. There are very competent web designers, content writers, marketing consultants and SEO professionals, just to name a few, who can help you build your business.  The key to their success is your ability to let go.

We can often identify one common trait amongst those who insist on a DIY approach to an online presence – they really do go it alone. The best recommendation we can make is to stop – and network. You don’t have to give away business secrets, although you’ll be surprised with what you’ll learn once you start networking, and that includes reliable information on who best to engage to help with your online presence.

Small businesses with a DIY mindset often fail, or at best, remain static and fail to grow.  The time will come when your business will need a professionally produced website, aggressive SEO, and perhaps a strong marketing (particularly social media marketing) campaign to survive in this brutal online world. Networking is one approach to breaking the DIY cycle, and to obtaining information that will help your business grow – are you networking? Are you doing it all yourself? It’s time you broke free and found professional help for your online business.

Duplicate content on the web has been a big problem over the years. Search engines, in particular Google, do everything possible to filter out the duplicates. If you have product descriptions that are the same, then the search engines will consider some of them to be duplicates and filter them out. It’s not just on your main website either. If you are a little lazy and copy those descriptions to your blog, or if you have affiliates that publish your content, you could have similar problems.

Google has become fairly adept at determining which content should be classified as the original, however, it does get it wrong on occasions, so your blog, or worse yet, an affiliate’s content, could be indexed as the original. If you have a number of similar products, you have a couple of choices. You can write original content for each product or group them together under the one description. The latter generally makes the better option.

If you have a blog, be sure the content is original and that you’re not just duplicating what’s on your main website. If you have affiliates that sell on your behalf, be sure their terms include a denial of the right to copy content from your web pages. They too should be creating unique content to promote your products or services.

Finally, when creating articles for guest posts or article marketing, ensure that each article is only published in the one place. So-called ‘spinners’ rarely do a good job of rewriting content, and content produced is generally poor quality and hard to read. Avoid duplicating your content and you’ll have more pages indexed for search, and that means more opportunities to be found.

There is a guest post on Marketing Pilgrim by Ann Smarty that goes into some depth on this issue, and she has some good advice on what you should be doing, and how to do it. I won’t go into the hows; you can read her article for that. What is important is that, in most cases, her tips are once off actions, and they don’t take too long to accomplish. The end result could be far more exposure in the search results than you currently see. Ann suggests three must do actions:

1. Verify the authorship of your articles
2. Create a master feed of your contributions
3. Claim your brand (or name) in the major social networks

You should already be working to claim your brand and your name in the major social networks. The more popular you become, the more likely it is that someone else will claim it to capitalize on your hard work. That can be a real danger to your long term reputation management, especially if they use their account (with your brand or name) for negative, illegal or brand damaging activities. It can be hard to prove that the account being used is not attached to your business.

It doesn’t take long to complete the three tasks that Ann has suggested. The end result is better brand and name protection whilst helping to boost your presence on the Internet.

Group deals do need careful attention. The particular deal in question was a $15 coupon for $30 of product. Groupon charged $7.50 leaving the retailer with $7.50 for $30 worth of goods – a loss of $22.50 for every transaction. With 450 deals sold, that was a loss of over $10,000 to the business. Coupons can be an ideal marketing tool, however, if you’re a small business, you need to limit your costs. In this case, it may have been wise to cap the coupons at 50 or 100 – better yet, to rethink the whole process. The Groupon deal was clearly not going to favor a small business such as this.

Twitter has been an ideal channel for the promotion of coupon type deals. Through Twitter (and Facebook) you can announce short deals; for example, you can offer a decent discount for all lunchtime (11:30 am – 1:30 pm) transactions. You can also announce similar deals – one day, five days, the first 100 customers are good examples. The important consideration here is that you, the small business owner, have a lot of control of the costs – the downside, you are generally promoting to existing customers.

You can use independent coupon sites, however, you do need to be in a position to control the number of coupons that are in the marketplace, and you do need to set firm expiration dates. Don’t fool customers by hiding dates in small print in obscure places – be up front. If the coupon expires, they’ll need to wait for the next coupon issue.

Online coupons are great promotion tools for new products, new shopfronts or websites, or for increasing traffic flow during quiet times. As a business owner, you need to maintain as much control as possible over the issuing of coupons; otherwise, you’ll have cost blow-outs that could cripple your business. On a side note, this business was lucky, the local community worked together to revitalize the business, but that’s a story for another day.

There’s an interesting article on TechCrunch which, while discussing privacy issues related to Google+ and Facebook, also had this to say:

Google’s PageRank algorithm is seriously out of date. It promotes pages based on the number of links to it. Today, pages are no longer the unit of publishing. Far smaller items than a page dominate our senses. And those smaller messages are produced in huge quantity and in real time.

Those smaller messages are references to Facebook, Twitter and many other social media sites, forums included. This raises the question of content on websites – will it become defunct and replaced by short messages? I for one hope it never comes to that. The content on Facebook and Twitter can never really adequately answer a question. Forums are a different story, questions are answered, often in depth, and with a lot of input from a range of users. You are more likely to find an answer in a forum than you will on Facebook or Twitter. Interestingly, most small messages on those two sites generally include links to more indepth answers often on blogs.

Logic would then suggest that the indepth answer is more relevant and more important than the smaller message on a social media website. Keith Teare, the article’s author, is right when it comes to the privacy issues facing social media. However, when it comes to content, I don’t think we’ll be losing that anytime soon. Yes, Google will find a way to reduce the effects of links in its search ranking algorithm, but that will be because they have found a better way to measure worth, and yes, social media mentions will most likely lead that change.

I wouldn’t be tearing down content or reducing the amount published in too much of hurry. Rather, I’d be concentrating on content that individuals find important enough to share with others. Blogging for small business is still one of the best ways to communicate with the rest of the world, and that won’t be changing anytime soon.

Of course, if you’re fortunate enough to have a positive viral outcome, control is not really an issue. You can sit back and harvest the results of that viral marketing campaign. It’s when that viral campaign is negative that problems really set in. Trying to wrest control back is almost impossible, leaving business owners with a reputation management problem that requires a lot of effort to repair.

For Mcdonalds, they spent money buying Twitter hashtags. There’s no problem there, and their first campaign, using #MeetTheFarmers as the hashtag worked reasonably well.  A cynical reader may well surmise that its success related more to the fact that readers didn’t relate that hashtag to McDonalds. MeetTheFarmers is the kind of hashtag that doesn’t really invoke many emotions. Where McDonalds went wrong is when they changed their hashtag to #McDStories.

Everyone has a story about McDonalds, and we’re talking about bad stories, not good. That hashtag immediately hooked into people’s emotions and it opened the floodgates. Every bad story about McDonalds steadily flowed through Twitter. About the only upside to this result was the humor that many found in these tweeted stories. The other upside is that others, like us here today, are talking about how McDonalds lost control of a social media marketing campaign. That, of course, is from an optimist who tries to find a positive in everything.

The lesson for small business owners is simple. Watch what you write, and watch how you use hashtags. McDonalds does have a poor reputation amongst some sections of the community, so a hashtag like #McDStories was bound to have a negative effect. If you do lose control, you will need to work hard to either reduce the damage or to turn it around to make it a positive.

Drawing traffic from search engines just to boost traffic numbers is not the best way to run a business. You are often better off drawing less traffic from a search engine whilst increasing the quality of that traffic. As a business, conversions are the most important metric, so your SEO efforts should be targeting quality traffic, not just ‘any’ traffic.

Traffic, even from a search engine, is not free. SEO takes time, and that’s either time away from your business or a cost to a business when you engage others to perform it for you. An experienced SEO professional will help you target your efforts towards quality traffic. This doesn’t mean you should totally ignore traffic of a lower quality, by all means, attract that traffic if you wish, but not by making on page changes that could hurt the conversion rate of your quality traffic. Batista makes the following point:

The key principle is to first make sure the site, the content, the layout, and the instruction and navigation makes sense for the users because …. you are not optimizing the site for the search engine bots to make a purchase. You have to optimize it for the user.

It’s an interesting situation for small businesses, especially those in competitive markets. SEO is designed to get the best search results, however, your website should be designed to achieve conversion goals from visitors. The real key is to get the balance right, and it can be done.

One thing is certain, Google is still pumping resources into the project, and their latest offering for website owners includes functional and cosmetic changes to the Google+ button. These changes include:

• the ability to configure a badge to a suitable width
• changing the background color of a widget to match your page’s color
• including a widget that displays your Google+ profile’s circle count

As a marketing tool, website owners have nothing to lose by including a badge on their sites. According to an article on WebProNews, some businesses are receiving a 30% increase in followers simply because of the widget. If your content is of a reasonable standard, then you shouldn’t find it too difficult to encourage readers to click on social media buttons.  There’s no harm in inviting your readers to click on social media buttons – they are often sharing a good story with friends whilst bookmarking an entry for future reference.

When it comes to marketing, you need to use every tool that adds to your website’s exposure. Google+ looks to be one widget that’s here for the long run – are you badged yet?

For small businesses, the bottom line always has been and always will be profitability. Engaging in a pay-per-click campaign is fine, and measuring traffic and conversions is always going to help with future planning, and perhaps even modifying your current campaigns. At the end of the day, if your pay-per-click is not making a profit, then your business could be on the slide. The same can be said for SEO and social media marketing. If your profitability is being compromised, then you need to either modify your marketing campaign or to look for alternative marketing methods.

Pay-per-click, search engine optimization and social media marketing are not always the best channels for some businesses. Alternatives such as email marketing and banner advertising can achieve better results in terms of profitability – the former, often achieved through data collected offline. You would be surprised at how many brick and mortar businesses now collect email addresses at the checkout and then use those email addresses as very successful email marketing campaigns.

The most important metric for any small business is the return on investment (ROI) that is measured against any campaign. There are times when a marketing campaign – for example, a brand awareness campaign – doesn’t result in short term profits that are easily identified. As a small business owner, you need to make judgements as to whether or not a marketing campaign should be measured or designed more for PR or branding. Analytics are important, however, you need the right data and that data should be measured against a desired goal.