Do you have a local business in Rochester, Michigan? Do you need help understanding how to get found online? Through September 2012, free help is here.
In an effort to help local businesses understand the basics of search engine optimization and local marketing online, I am recruiting YOU ... the local small business owner. And all you need to do is contact me and ask for a hand. Your only requirement: having a business in Rochester or Rochester Hills. What you get: a review of your website for search engine optimization suggestions and an understanding of how to get found for local search results through Google+. We can work by phone / e-mail for basics. If you're looking for more extensive help, we can meet at a time that's convenient for you. If you operate a local business, I wonder if you've checked out your business for local search results recently. So you run an Italian restaurant in Rochester, Michigan. Have you searched "restaurant rochester michigan" or "italian restaurant rochester michigan" to see where you show up in Google? What about the other search engines?
Importantly, have you registered with each search engine's local maps to make sure you're showing up even closer to the top, and visually? In Google, this is now handled by having a page on Google+. Are you on Google+? It's free, and if you're not getting found. ... If you run any kind of independent cell phone store or other retail setting where cell phones make sense, I'd like to invite you to make Solavei available to your customers and my FREE HELP in promoting it to them. Solavei hearkens back to MCI's "Friends and Family" plan, and this helps your business to earn a lot more than it can by only selling cell phones directly. Here's how it works: Solavei offers unlimited talk, text, and data on the T-Mobile network for $49/month. There's no contract or credit check, as this is pre-paid. For every three customers you sign up, you/your business earn $20/month. (In additional to certain one-time bonuses.) But beyond that, you earn another $20/month for every 3 people each of your customers refers. So if you shared with 100 customers who each shared with 3 other customers, you would be earning 133 (groups of 3) x $20, or $2660/month in residual income PLUS $2000/month in additional pay. That's nearly $5000/month for sharing a great cellular plan. If those additional members start telling more people, there is even more money in it for you. Keep in mind, your customers pay $49/month at first, but when they refer 3, their own bill is cut back to $29/month, even if they never tell anyone else. If you're interested to add Solavei to the mix of cellular options you provide, I am happy to personalize marketing materials you can use to help move this service in your business. I won't charge a dime for this, but of course you'll need to join with Solavei through me in order to enjoy these extra free services. If you'd like to join Solavei, please contact me and I can send you a private invitation. The company's official launch is September 21, 2012, though early phones are being used already. It's official: I wish every small business in my hometown (Rochester, MI) knew about mccardellwrite because I keep running into businesses that have no website; or terribly cluttered, unkempt, unhappily unprofessional websites; or websites with no search engine presence at all.
And too many of them don't realize how inexpensively they can have a QUALITY website built with good content and a valuable search engine presence for the Rochester area. This is of course true all over the place. I recently went on vacation and found local businesses with the same problems. How do you not have a website in this day and age when it's so easy? Because you don't know it's easy ... or that it's inexpensive if you don't want to do it yourself. You need to get that site in place, and then you need to get -- at least -- onto Google+ and point it to your website. Why not Facebook first? Because Google+ is feeding local search results on Google, and this is key for local businesses. I often marvel at the writing I see both within a business (between managers or owners and employees) and from a business to its customers -- whether B2B or B2C. It's as if people forget that business is about other people. Our communications affect employee morale and efficiency. They can alter public perception for better or worse. They can determine whether we make a sale. And so much more.
So if you're in business and you acknowledge this point and you're into the whole idea of making money, why wouldn't you make sure your writing is crisp? That it carries the right tone? That it's persuasive? That it keeps people happy and involved? That it engages people socially with you? In instances where a business doesn't have a top writer on staff, I can see a few reasons for not taking more care with writing:
I've tried to address all three of these concerns with a new writing retainer service. This service has me available to clients at the drop of a hat. More or less. If I'm handling another retained client, I juggle their priorities appropriately. But I drop other client work for retained work the moment I'm asked for help. So if you just need some professional eyeballs for 5 minutes to look at that precious e-mail ... you've got it. Or if you need me for two hours to work up the text for a new brochure, I'm on the job. Or if you need to give a sales presentation and need help with your speech ... you've got my pen on the job. If you've come to trust the quality of my work -- and hopefully you can see this in the style of my writing throughout this site -- you don't have to worry about whether you have a real professional helping out. And you don't need to worry about hiring me each time you need a little something. And you get up to 40% off my usual rates when using all the retained hours each month. It's a safety net, really. A kind of "writing insurance." But it's more than that. Insurance you pay for and you hope you never have to use it. With a writing retainer, you'll want to use every bit if you can because my goal is to ultimately help improve your bottom line. One of my favorite novelists today is Max Barry, who recently wrote a fun blog entry on why it takes so long to go from a signed publishing contract to the point that your book is actually on store shelves. Because it really can be from 9 months to 2 years. (One reason among many to self publish these days, though there are still some reasons to seek a publisher as well, especially for non-fiction where publishing credibility is important.)
But right after reading that, I received this other blog entry on how e-books don't seem to be taking over printed books ... and therefore there's a good future for the printed book. This came not long after I had a conversation in Barnes & Noble about how much I still loved being surrounded by REAL books, and how reading on devices just wasn't the same. BUT ... I don't think the story for the future of printed books is written so much by competition with e-books, but by the competition with everything else. Apps, for instance, and YouTube. And video games. And NetFlix. You name it. There's a lot of competition against the written word that just didn't exist not long ago. What does this mean for authors? Seth Godin talks a lot about building "tribes" of followers that naturally want to follow what someone is doing, and I agree with the networking approach. But I also wonder how creative authors ought to get. Upcoming movies tend to drive book sales. How many authors ought to go the extra mile to connect their book with a movie, or an app, or a piece of music, or anything else that seems to go viral these days while books struggle to do so? On the other hand ... we shouldn't forget that most apps, like books, lose money. Most songs, like books, lose money. It is the rare creation that makes much money for the artist. And in this case we need to remember that fiction is a thing that should be written by the author who must write it, cash be damned. In some cases, same thing for non-fiction, although many times non-fiction is used to encourage business in other forms, and the cash earned directly from the book isn't the end goal. Credibility and business sales are. In any of these cases, it is the idea -- not the form -- that wants to spread. And the author or publisher need only make sure that the idea is in the form that people want to receive it in. This might mean that the printed book sees an ongoing decline into the future. MAYBE some day it's gone altogether. But that will only happen when price can no longer meet demand. On Seth Godin's blog today, Seth comments that people who haven't bought from within a category yet very often aren't still choosing between their options. Instead, they don't believe they have a problem that can be solved by that product category yet. So rather than using an "ours is better than theirs" marketing approach, he suggests that they need to look at the category in a new way so that they DO feel it solves a problem for them. Inspired by the blog entry, thought I would share a possible copywriting opener seeking to immediately connect with the reader's "I don't need that" point of view in order to put everyone on the same team right away, and then to lead the reader into the new point of view. Dear So-and-So,
You know what? I didn't need a survival kit either. In fact, I was so damn sure about it that I laughed at my friends who had them. After all, survival kits were for those who lived in hurricane and earthquake zones. Or those who thought the economy was going to collapse. It never dawned on me that ... Last year I finished up what I thought would be my last book ghostwriting projects (as opposed to other forms of ghostwriting I do, from speeches to articles to web content, etc.) But this year I had a former client return for another book, and I've decided that I have too much experience in writing, publishing, and marketing not to offer the service for projects that are a good match.
So I've put up a new ghostwriting page on the site here. I'll always advise people that for investment purposes, the only books that make sense are related to a business. Either to promote what your business does, or to give you credibility as a speaker or consultant. Because most books will never make you money directly through sales. On the other hand, build the right kind of following or write the next rare breakout novel or autobiography, and yes ... you could make millions. Just not something to count on. Some people of course have plenty of money and just want to write a novel, or autobiography, or philosophical manifesto. If that's you, more power to you. I'm happy to assist. Whatever your circumstance, my goal isn't just to write you a book. It's to talk with you about what your overall goals for the book and to find the best way to reach those goals ... within the budget you have to work with. Yep ... publishing and marketing guidance are a big part of this effort. Please get in touch with any questions! I read it for the first time today. Someone suggesting that sometime in the near future ... Google would no longer rely on incoming links to a site to determine search engine ranking.
Knowing how long Google's used back links to determine the social value of a website, and therefore its ranking, it's interesting to think about this going away. However, it won't. Not entirely. But I agree with what I think was the spirit of the content. As always, Google (and other search engines) wants to deliver the highest quality results possible to its users. This means something relevant to their search while providing the best in terms of information and/or products and services. So their eternal goal has to be rooting out spammers. And spammers, to be sure, have abused the heck out of back linking, building thousands of unnatural links to websites just to show up at the top of Google. So recently, Google de-indexed a massive blog network, which people used to build links to their sites. Not that this was all spamming, because that depends not on the network, but how you USE the network. Still, Google slapped the entire network at once by just removing all its blogs and therefore the links that people had spent possibly months or years building. Especially painful if they weren't building elsewhere. Especially appropriate if they used the network just for links (what's in it for me?) rather than for giving valuable content (what can I offer you?) As I pointed out in a recent blog entry, if you want to succeed long-term in the search engines, you have to give them what they're after, which is quality. If you're going to build links to your site, they'd better have variety to them (types and locations) and be of QUALITY -- not just spam comments that link back to your site. Press releases and articles that you post elsewhere will of course link to your site, but they should be done with purpose, and should be well written, once again offering real information to consumers. With quality content on your site, you're also better poised to create natural incoming links to your site -- just what Google's looking for. People honestly talking about your website because there's something worth talking about. If you take a look at my personal website, you'll see that I offer a lot of my personal short fiction and even my own music for free on the site. Me offering something of myself to the world, and hoping that others will want to mention it to their friends if they've enjoyed it. If people want to buy my novel (or get it for free as an Amazon Prime member) because they've learned about it on my site, then that natural process of generating word of mouth works just as Google and others envision it. Over the last decade, we saw a lot of manufacturing head overseas, and this included work for writers because companies weren't looking for quality writing. They were looking for links. Now I have a feeling that, just as manufacturing is starting to head back to the States, writing will too, because businesses will discover what I've said all along: that building with quality is the best kind of building of all. I don't deny, by the way, that the grey and black hat techniques (what Google doesn't want you using for SEO) have worked for many. They are, by definition, techniques to trick the system as it is today. But by their nature, they are ripe to fail any day as Google finds them and wipes them off the books through deindexing sites or simply changing its algorithm, as we've seen happen many times. So yes ... these can work, but the long-term results come from offering something real. Any time you're running a display ad in print, you obviously want to choose the venue -- the magazine or paper you're running in. You want your ad to match the audience. Even better if you can choose the content it's running with -- and some publishers will run your ad alongside your editorial material if you've written an article or are getting featured in an interview or something like that.
Even if they don't feature you alongside your content (as it might appear to be a conflict of interest), having content and a print ad in the same issue is a way of reinforcing brand awareness and your message. This is an instance when I most encourage print ads. Context is of course the reason for choosing keywords related to your ad when running ads online. Only sometimes ... that can backfire. Click here for a funny blog entry with 10 instances where an ad is running ... well, let's just say in an unideal setting. All because the keywords ARE related. |
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