http://www.neighborhoodmarketing101.com/community/blog Neighborhood Marketing 10 <p>Google is always working to improve the search results for a given query. As of last count, Google uses over 200 factors to come up with the right results. The most popular of these is known as PageRank or the number of incoming links. Yet, PageRank is just one of 200. And, to make matters a little more confusing, these factors change as Google determines new ways to create better results.<br /><br />So, how can a business get highly ranked on Google? The first rule is to give up on trying to get highly rated for a broad query like “restaurant” or even “dallas restaurant” and focus on narrower queries like “restaurant near 75205″ or “indian restaurant in highland park”. Make sure your website has the location and text that Google can find. Then, follow these other tips that help:</p> <ul> <li>Take advantage of all the standard website practices for search engine optimization. Avoid heavy use of flash and other content that Google can’t “read”.</li> <li>Use the broad queries to identify the online directories that Google likes for a given category. Then see about getting your business listed in those directories.</li> <li>Claim your listing on Google’s local business list.</li> <li>Look for other opportunities to get your business listed on other websites such as online yellow pages List your business in all available online directories.</li> <li>Blog and blog a lot. The more your blog, the more content you create and the more likely one of your articles will match a query.</li> <li>Don’t cheat. It may be tempting to try to create bogus content or a site with lots of links back to your site. But Google has been scammed by much more elaborate efforts and their a number of the 200 factors are designed to punish the “cheaters”.</li> </ul> <p>If every business was great at the above steps, it might be difficult to get on the front page of results. But surprisingly, most businesses still don’t take follow these steps. Remember it’s not important to be the best, you just have to be better than your competitors to get Google to notice.</p> http://www.neighborhoodmarketing101.com/community/blog/library/353170/key/3556283/200_Ways_to_Make_Googles_First_Page Sat, 26 Jun 2010 23:07:00 GMT <p>The link in this article references the 200 million blog post milestone celebrated at Wordpress.com. That is a lot of blog posts. More importantly it is a lot of blog posts for customers to search through trying to find your blog posts. That is why where you put your blog is more important that what you say.</p> <p>Unless you are actively marketing your blog you need to make sure your blog is hosted some place that gets visitors already. This is the idea behind our neighborhood websites and just one more reason why a neighborhood website is a much better place to setup your business blog.</p> http://www.neighborhoodmarketing101.com/community/blog/library/353170/key/3556980/200_Million_Blog_Posts Tue, 22 Jun 2010 16:40:41 GMT <p>When planning your marketing strategy, it helps to have a primary goal that you want to accomplish. For most businesses this primary goal is typically "more customers". However, this may be a misdirected or incomplete strategy. For example, some customers:</p> <ul> <li>Spend more than others</li> <li>Are easier to service</li> <li>Generate more repeat business</li> <li>Generate more referrals</li> <li>Are worth more over their lifetime</li> </ul> <p>Targeting these types of customers rather than just any customer generates the best return on your marketing.</p> http://www.neighborhoodmarketing101.com/community/blog/library/353170/key/3567184/Why_All_Customers_Are_Not_Created_Equal Tue, 11 May 2010 21:08:10 GMT <p>HubSpot, a web marketing firm, recently completed a survey of their 2,500 business customers and compiled the results into some very interesting graphs and reports. The one that struck my attention was the one below:</p> <p><img style="border: black 1px solid;" src="http://www.neighborhoodmarketing101.com/viewimage/key/3568113/hubspotchart.jpg" alt="" width="592" height="345" /></p> <p>Clearly, they found a correlation between frequency of blog posts and new customers. But I think there are some other factors that are reflected in this chart that are also driving the correlation. Companies that blog more are also more likely to:</p> <ul> <li><span>Broadcast to Existing Customers</span>- Customers who receive blog posts are more likely to pass the information on to their friends and family. Even though a blog reader is most likely an existing customer, they are also your opportunity to reach their network of contacts if you give them something to pass on.</li> <li><span>Integrate their Online and In-Store Efforts</span>- Businesses that blog more are also more proud of their blog and more likely to encourage new readers with sign up encouragements.</li> <li><span>Become Findable in Search Engines</span> - The more content about a business, the more for Google and other search engines to work with.</li> <li><span>Become Findable in Neighborhood Websites</span> - The more content about a business, the more likely neighborhood readers will see and learn about the business.</li> </ul> <p>Creating and growing a blog take time, but the chart above gives businesses a compelling reason to keep it up. Though it takes some time, a business blog is often the least costly way of growing revenues.</p> <p>For more charts and information from HubSpot, visit <a href="http://www.hubspot.com/charts" target="_blank">http://www.hubspot.com/charts</a></p> http://www.neighborhoodmarketing101.com/community/blog/library/353170/key/3568792/Blogging_for_Results Fri, 23 Apr 2010 20:51:05 GMT <p>Location is becoming an increasingly important part of the way Google searches. For anyone looking for a restaurant, automotive service, dry cleaning, dentistry or any other product or service delivered in the neighborhood, location is vital to find the right information.</p> <p>Recently, Google added the ability to refine searches with the "Nearby" tool in the Search Options panel. One of the really helpful things about this tool is that it works geographically — not just with keywords — so users don't have to worry about adding "Minneapolis" to a query and missing web pages that only say "St. Paul" or "Twin Cities."</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://www.neighborhoodmarketing101.com/viewimage?key=3560272" alt="" width="389" height="381" /></p> <p>For neighborhood businesses, the Nearby search option starts to tilt the advantage back to local businesses as opposed to the national online businesses typically favored in past Google searches. If you haven't tried out this feature, check it out by doing a search, clicking on "show options" and selecting "Nearby."</p> http://www.neighborhoodmarketing101.com/community/blog/library/353170/key/3560671/Google_Highlights_Local_Results Tue, 2 Mar 2010 05:02:59 GMT <p>Technorati is an Internet search engine that specializes in blogs. When you go to the Technorati website <a href="http://technorati.com" target="_blank">http://technorati.com</a>, you can search blogs by title, content or category. If you want your neighborhood blog listed on Technorati it just takes a few steps:</p> <ol> <li>Create a Technorati account and then login</li> <li>Go to your account settings by clicking on your user name on the top of the page</li> <li>At the bottom of the page is a link to "Claim your blog". Click this link and enter your blog details (see setup notes below). After this step, you'll get a message saying it is processing. </li> <li>Return to your account settings and you'll now see a link for verifying your blog. Click the link and get the claim code for your blog. Usually it looks something like 547Z8BXWGEDD.</li> <li>Then, post a new entry on your blog showing that claim code.</li> </ol> <p>That's it, your blog is now listed in the Technorati index.</p> <p> </p> <p><span>Setup Notes for a Neighborhood Blog:</span></p> <p>During setup, you are asked for a two URLs for your blog. One points to the blog and the other to the RSS feed that Technorati uses to "read" your blog. Your blog URL should look something like this:</p> <p><a href="http://www.neighborhoodmarketing101.com/community/blog">http://www.bubblelifemedia.net/community/blog</a></p> <p>Your feed URL can be found by using the RSS feed icon at the bottom of the commands column. It looks something like this:</p> <p><a href="http://www.neighborhoodmarketing101.com/shared/PostsRSS.ashx?c=353170">http://www.bubblelifemedia.net/shared/PostsRSS.ashx?c=353170</a></p> <p> </p> http://www.neighborhoodmarketing101.com/community/blog/library/353170/key/3560660/What_is_Technorati Sun, 28 Feb 2010 13:59:01 GMT <p>Each of our communities feature one or more newsletters that contain highly relevant local content. Behind the scenes there is a some smart setup combined with great deal of automation that assembles the articles and then delivers the newsletters (which we also call feedletters) to our website and via email to neighborhood readers. The following diagram lays out some of the process:</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://www.neighborhoodmarketing101.com/viewimage?key=3569614" alt="FeedLetter Diagram" width="300" height="403" /></p> <p style="text-align: left;">Behind the scenes, content is:</p> <ul> <li>Scanned for SPAM content</li> <li>Coded for inappropriate language</li> <li>Checked for previous submissions</li> <li>Categorized</li> <li>Corrected for URL link errors</li> <li>Summarized</li> </ul> <p style="text-align: left;">This allows FeedLetters to provide a high quality of publication without the need for constant human intervention.<br /><br />FeedLetters are a part of the BubbleCommunities hyperlocal community platform.</p> http://www.neighborhoodmarketing101.com/community/blog/library/353170/key/3565334/How_Does_Our_Newsletter_Work Tue, 9 Feb 2010 20:55:01 GMT <p>With over 120 million sources of news and blog content, the web is a flood of information whose very breadth often makes it difficult to find the best information for expert and novice users alike. While there are well recognized sources for a few key topics such as technology or political news, there are a large number of other topics whose best information is lost in the 120+ million sources.</p> <p><span>What's Wrong with Existing Newsletters?</span></p> <p>The existing methods of search revolve around finding previously existing content. For users who want to stay on top of new information, often the only choices are to manually revisit selected sites or subscribe a clipping service if available. Problems with these approaches include:</p> <ul> <li>Knowing the best sites for topic specific information</li> <li>Sites with good content but with infrequent posts often loose repeat visitor interest</li> <li>Niche topics may not have good clipping service representation</li> <li>Inability to prioritize search results on newness rather than popularity.</li> </ul> <p>Email newsletters have been a popular way to overcome these limitations and good newsletters exist in some very popular topics such as technology or news. However, there are often problems with this approach as well including:</p> <ul> <li>Newsletters often represent only one publisher or one site's contents</li> <li>Newsletters on niche topics often don't exist or are lost in the 120+ million web sources</li> <li>Newsletters must be “published” and so require human intervention to create.</li> </ul> <p><span>How can Newsletters Be Improved?</span></p> <p>Given this set of problems, a new paradigm is required to get new content to interested readers. This paradigm must feature:</p> <ul> <li>Citizen editors to research and identify the best sources of web content for a specific topic</li> <li>Automatic creation and distribution of newsletters to eliminate publishing time</li> <li>Searchable directory of newsletters to help connect new readers to existing product</li> <li>Community discussions to help readers connect with editors and new readers to identify the best topical newsletters.</li> </ul> <p><span>What is a FeedLetter?</span></p> <p>This paradigm is addressed in the concept of a “FeedLetter”. A FeedLetter relies on a “citizen editor” to pull together content from one or more RSS feeds. These feeds can be filtered using keywords to include or reject specific articles. Then, the newsletter is available online or can be delivered automatically via email to subscribers as new content becomes available and on a schedule the reader defines.</p> <ul> <li>A FeedLetter is great for:</li> <li>Pulling together web content</li> <li>Creating newsletters or niche topics</li> <li>Building a community of interest</li> <li>Delivering new content in near real time as users request</li> <li>Optimizing content for iPhones or Blackberrys.</li> </ul> <p>As a FeedLetter's citizen editor users can:</p> <ul> <li>Name their newsletter</li> <li>Include and filter RSS feeds</li> <li>Provide easy links for subscriber signup</li> <li>Control the formatting of the newsletter using one of the built-in templates or design their own</li> <li>Insert their own introduction that displays at the beginning of every newsletter</li> <li>Review newsletter statistics including readership, popular articles and viewing habits</li> </ul> <p>In creating a FeedLetter, an editor can:</p> <ul> <li>Solve problems for themselves and easily share that solution with others</li> <li>Help build their brand by becoming identified with specialized topics</li> <li>Attract new customers by assisting others get information they want</li> </ul> <p>When receiving a FeedLetter, a subscriber can:</p> <ul> <li>Tailor a schedule that works best for them</li> <li>Optimize the FeedLetter display for reading on mobile devices</li> <li>Read back issues online</li> <li>Easily subscribe or unsubscribe to multiple FeedLetters through a single account.</li> </ul> <p>A FeedLetter addresses the problems with typical newsletters while at the same time giving readers more control over how and when content is delivered.</p> http://www.neighborhoodmarketing101.com/community/blog/library/353170/key/3569412/What_is_a_FeedLetter Wed, 20 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT <p>In Newsletters, some articles are much longer than others which makes the formatting look odd. With Smart Summaries, we now have a way to automatically compute an article summary for display rather than just showing the first 250 characters as is the normal method. <br /><br />Smart Summaries use word and sentence analysis to determine which sentences are most important in a story. It then extracts these sentences as an article summary. Smart Summaries work well for news stories, blog entries and other articles that follow a standard sentence/paragraph layout. Smart Summaries don't work as well for articles where there is a lot of text in non-sentence form. For those blogs, the first 250 characters is the best way to shorten a story.<br /><br />For example, from a 19 paragraph/624 word article from InfoWorld, Smart Summary was able to summarize the article as: <br /><br /><span>"Zend Technologies is putting the finishing touches to Zend Server, a new Web applications server aimed at mission-critical PHP applications."<br /></span><br />When you see (SMART SUMMARY) preceeding an article summary, you'll know that our servers have been busy trying to summarize content as usefully as possible.</p> http://www.neighborhoodmarketing101.com/community/blog/library/353170/key/3569401/Whats_a_Smart_Summary Tue, 6 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT <p>One of the cool getting started features we offer is Wordpress import. If you already have a blog on Wordpress, you can easily migrate it by simply exporting your Wordpress blog and importing it into your group.</p> <div>To migrate your blog:</div> <div><ol id="false"> <li>Export your blog from Wordpress by going to your dashboard and choosing the Tools option followed by the Export option. Save the exported file onto your computer.</li> <li>Login to BubbleCommunities, and create a blog community.</li> <li>Goto your new community and choose the "Manage this group" option.</li> <li>Click on the import content option, choose Wordpress and upload the file saved in Step 1.</li> <li>Done!</li> </ol> <div>To see a before and after, look at this blog at Wordpress: <span><a href="http://sportsesteem.wordpress.com">http://sportsesteem.wordpress.com.</a></span></div> </div> <div><br /> <div>Now, see the after at: <span><a href="http://www.sportsesteem.com">http://www.sportsesteem.com</a></span>. <p>As a BubbleCommunity, the blog can now be:</p> <ol> <li>Converted to a blog, discussion or workgroup community.</li> <li>Easily "bubbled" into other communities.</li> <li>Sorted into topics as well as tags.</li> <li>Broadcast on Twitter.</li> <li>Enhanced with new formatting options such as story summaries.</li> <li>Enhanced with your own custom CSS formatting at no extra charge.</li> </ol> <p>While Wordpress has a great solution for blogging, the blog stands alone. A BubbleCommunity shares with other communities.</p> <p><img src="http://www.neighborhoodmarketing101.com/viewimage?key=3569681" alt="" width="500" height="314" /></p> </div> </div> http://www.neighborhoodmarketing101.com/community/blog/library/353170/key/3569423/Moving_Your_Group_from_WordPress Wed, 5 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMT <p>Changes in the group dashboard make it easy to track the success of your group. Simple charts make it easy to see at a glance what is going on.</p> <table border="0"> <tbody> <tr> <td><img src="http://www.neighborhoodmarketing101.com/viewimage?key=3569653" alt="" width="300" height="157" /></td> <td><img src="http://www.neighborhoodmarketing101.com/viewimage?key=3569692" alt="" width="300" height="157" /></td> </tr> <tr> <td><img src="http://www.neighborhoodmarketing101.com/viewimage?key=3569603" alt="" width="300" height="157" /></td> <td><img src="http://www.neighborhoodmarketing101.com/viewimage?key=3569620" alt="" width="300" height="157" /></td> </tr> </tbody> </table> http://www.neighborhoodmarketing101.com/community/blog/library/353170/key/3569490/Keeping_Track_of_Your_Group Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:00:00 GMT <p>It is easy to broadcast your activities using Twitter. To enable Twitter broadcasts:</p> <ol> <li>Setup your account with Twitter</li> <li>Change your community settings</li> <li>Done! - Now any changes to your community are automatically broadcast on Twitter.</li> </ol> <p>To change your community settings:</p> <ol> <li>Click on "Manage your group".</li> <li>Go to the Settings tab and scroll down to Email, Facebook and Twitter Options. (see below)</li> <li>Enter your Twitter account information from Step 1 above.</li> <li>Test your settings by clicking on the Test Twitter Link.</li> <li>Press Save.</li> </ol> <p>After these steps, all of your content updates are broadcast on your Twitter account. Plus, the Twitter feed link is shown at the top of your Spy alerts.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://www.neighborhoodmarketing101.com/viewimage?key=3569664" alt="" width="546" height="201" /></p> <p>To see this in action, see the BubbleLife Twitter feed at <a href="http://twitter.com/bubblelife" target="_blank">http://twitter.com/bubblelife</a>.</p> http://www.neighborhoodmarketing101.com/community/blog/library/353170/key/3569462/Twitter_Broadcasting Tue, 9 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT