Lead generation is essential for any business that expects to be around for a while and prosper. I want to offer a couple of ideas for lead generation for small business that are relatively low cost, but can be very effective in generating new business. These methods focus on underutilized methods to reach new customers and engage existing customers and if implemented properly will yield positive results rather quickly. The four methods that I would recommend are:

Coupons – Coupon sites are all the rage with the exponential growth of Groupon.com and other group buying sites over the last year. These group buying sites that can have massive amounts of traffic, but also squeeze the margins on your sales and require deep discounts, which is why it is important to realize there are other alternatives to distribute your coupons and generate leads. The best place to setup and distribute your coupons are through your Google Places account, formerly Google Local Business Center. After you have completed their setup process and verified you business, there is a tab for coupons. This tab allows you to setup multiple coupons for your business that will appear on Google Maps alongside your business. Even if the discount that you are offering is not that great, there should always be an active coupon in your account due to the extra exposure it generates on on Google Maps. It sets you apart from all of your competition that has not taken the time to setup a coupon for their business.

Coupons can also be distributed through Google using Google Coupon Feeds, but this process is only for merchants with large numbers of coupons. If only have a couple of coupons and a couple of locations, Google Places is much more efficient.

Craigslist – Generating leads from Craigslist is a topic that I covered here and here, but it is worth mentioning again because it is such an easy and effective method that is still underutilized. It really is as simple as adding a reoccurring event to your calendar every two days to update your Craigslist listing. It does not need to be unique every time although mixing it up from time to time will help. A quick review of the posts mentioned above will provide much more detail about using Craigslist effectively, but this is a simple reminder to say get something posted.

Facebook Fan Page – A few months ago, I would have likely said that Facebook was not an effective method for lead generation for small businesses due to the amount of time necessary to maintain a page. With the additions and social hooks that have been added by Facebook over the past few months that allow for greater integration into other websites and greater sharing within Facebook, I would now recommend Facebook as a lead generation tool for small businesses.

The key to using a Facebook fan page effectively is growing your number of fans and creating activities that causes them to engage on your page which will spread to their friends as basically referrals. For instance, post a sign in your business for your customers to join your Facebook fan page or offer some incentive or discount to your customers that join and then post offers on the page that they may “like” which their friends will see. You may also offer an incentive in which anyone that “likes” your post will have a special discount coupon mailed to their inbox. As your list continues to grow and creative methods of interaction are utilized, your Facebook Fan Page can become an effective lead generation.

Local Business Referrals – It is also important to remember that lead generation should still occur offline as well as online. I recently read this story about a car wash with 12 locations that is able to generate over $40 million per year in revenue by placing coupons on the counters of other local businesses without even the need to reciprocate placement for those businesses. They simply would regularly distribute their coupons to each business as a “gift” to their customers and this led to an amazing amount of sales for each location. That’s it. Simple, but very effective.

There are many other methods for generating leads like Google Adwords and traditional advertising, but I wanted to highlight a few methods that have much lower costs and are very easy to maintain. Once these methods are put in place, they are very easy to maintain which makes it much more cost effective. Set a plan to have each of these methods in action within a week and I am confident you will be pleasantly surprised with the results.

WordPress is a terribly easy platform to use, but it requires installing some additional plugins to activate the functionality that you need to make your site run smoothly. Adding plugins is only an option if you are using the self-hosted installation of WordPress from WordPress.org and not the hosted option at WordPress.com.

Here is a list of 10 plugins that I believe are necessary for your site. This is only a small list as there are thousands of plugins available that can perform almost any task that you can think of. All of them do not work perfectly and mainly this is due to them being open source and anyone can create a plugin, but they do not always work correctly. Especially if you are on a version of WordPress that is higher than the plugin was created for. Fortunately, most of the developers are very good about upgrading their plugins to work with the latest version of the software.

The ten essential WordPress Plugins are:

Akismet

Akismet comes installed with your WordPress installation and only requires an API key for activation. Akismet prevents your blog from being overwhelmed with spam as it checks the commenters information against their database to determine if it is spam or not. You still have to go in and manually approve/disapprove spam though. If you do not have Akismet active, you will quickly find out how much spam your blog will receive very quickly. This plugin is a must have.

Tweet This
This plugin adds the “tweet this” widget to each of your post so that your visitors can share your story with their twitter followers if they are so inclined. This plugin works well and what I like most is that you can set which URL shortening service that you want to use. TinyURL is used as the default, but the plugin supports several other options.

All in One SEO Pack
All-in-One SEO pack is the most widely use SEO plugin for WordPress blogs. It adds fields to your admin panel where you can easily add custom title, description, and keyword tags to each of your posts. It also has an option where you can have the plugin use your tags and categories as your meta tags. This is definitely a must-have to get your site optimized for the search engines.

Brian’s Threaded Comments
Have you ever seen a comment on a blog that you wanted to respond to, but there would be twenty other responses between your response and it would not be clear that you are responding to that commenter? This plugin solves that problem so that you can respond to someone else’s comments and the comment will be listed right below the previous comment. This is a great plugin for making your comments section more conversational.

Comment Relish
Comment Relish sends a short e-mail to users who comment on your blog for the first time to say thank you. You can customize your message to say whatever you like so that it matches your writing style and fits your readers. The downside is that if you have a lot of comments, it can cause your site and server to run more slowly. For smaller sites, it should not be a problem.

FeedBurner FeedSmith

Feedburner is a RSS platform that lets you customize how your feed will appear, monetize your feed, and track readership statistics for your feed. Every blog should have a feed and since Feedburner(owned by Google) is the best RSS platform, this plugin should be used.

Google Analytics for WordPress

Instead of simply adding Google Analytics through your theme editor, this plugin makes it simple to add the code, but also gives the functionality to allow you to track extra search engines, click outs, and downloads. It makes some of the stats understandable for people that may not be very knowledge about Google analytics.

Google XML Sitemaps
Generates an XML sitemap for your blog used by search engines Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask. What’s an XML sitemap, you ask? Basically it’s a file that tells the search engines which pages on your site are most important and which they should crawl on a regular basis.

Subscribe To Comments

Allows commentators to receive e-mail notifications of new comments on an article (checkbox option in the comments form) on which they have posted a comment.This is a great way to get people back to your site and continue the conversation.

WP Contact Form III
Adds in a simple contact page on your blog with a form for name, email, website, subject, and message. This one isn’t as fancy as the other contact plugins out there but it’s simple and easy to use and most importantly works properly. You also have the option of adding multiple forms to your site using this plugin.

This is just a short list of plugins that I have found very useful. I use many more and may detail them as well at some point. By visiting the WordPress Plugins directory, you should b able to find any plugin that you need. If not, discuss it in the forums and most likely there is someone out that will develop it pretty soon.

On Tuesday nights, for the past several weeks I have been watching (more often listening while multi-tasking) a webinar of sorts on Ustream called the Twenty Minute Tackle that is hosted by Justin & Chaunna Brooke of Sitefling.com. As the names states, it is a twenty minute long show that usually runs over that covers different topics related to internet marketing and probably more important is the implementation of the techniques that are discussed and realistic results of what the actions will be. There are usually about 40-50 people viewing the show which is pretty good considering the show starts at 11:00 pm Eastern Standard Time.

As a part of the show, they always conduct a contest at the end of the show to give away different prizes. Some times it is software, or a book, or a learning system that they are no loner using. A few weeks ago the prize of the contest was an hour phone consultation with Justin. The contest is simple in that to enter all you have to do is guess a number between 1-100 at the end of the show and the person that is the closest wins. I guess 92 and the winning number was 87 (or vice versa) which made me the winner of the phone consultation. Chaunna worked with me through e-mail to get the call setup which was a bit of a challenge due to some things that Justin had in the works that required travel.

Since I really did not have any specific questions that I wanted answered, I was not sure how the call would go and since Justin does not know me, he did not really have a script for the call either, so we just covered some of the things that I was working on and he covered some of his and give me some ideas that I could implement. Justin seemed really cool and also seems to have tired of the over-hyped internet marketing world where people are selling crappy products and in many cases not providing great value for the money that people are spending. Justin has sold many of his sites lately and has started to focus more on offering services to clients than focusing on what can be the unethical world of people selling internet marketing techniques.

A few take aways from the call and some posts that I have liked from their site, www.sitefling.com over the past several months:

• PPC and SEO services are a gold mine when working with local businesses. Many do not have a clue about how to market themselves online and are willing to pay for help with these services.
• CPV(Cost Per View) advertising has been great for list building and it is still very possible to get clicks for 1 & 2 cents. Traffic does not convert as well as PPC traffic, but is so much cheaper that cost per conversion can be much lower. As with all internet marketing, a lot of testing is required. I also viewed Justin’s CPV Bully program with was very detailed and informative.
• Short reports are great for building lists and convert very well. Short reports are short informational products like whitepapers that require a person to enter their e-mail address to gain access to the information. An example of a short report that you might see is “30 ideas to help get your ex back.”  Lynn Terry of ClickNewz.com covers short reports in a lot of detail on her site.
• Outsourcing tasks to workers in the Philippines has been very effective in quality and costs. Justin says the benefits to using people in the Philippines versus other places is that that time difference is not as great as other places and the people he has used have been more consistent and reliable.
• I recently read Justin’s book, SEO Lies,  and it provided some great information about SEO and some of the myths that surround the industry. Much of the information I was already aware of, but some of the processes that he employs were interesting. A good book for well-grounded information about search engine optimization.
• A couple of posts from their site that I found very informative were “Free Traffic Is 100% Possible” and “21 Places To Buy more Traffic.“

Needless to say, the phone conversation went well and the price was unbeatable! The biggest takeaway from the call was something that applies to everything in life and Justin learned from his mentor Russel Brunson and that is to continue to do the small tasks repetitively. It is not about just hitting home runs, but hitting singles day after day so that you are ready to hit the home. The Twenty Minute Tackle is a good show and worth tuning into if you want to learn some internet marketing tips. You may even win a prize at the end.

As we all hope and expect to see some of the best commercials of the year during the Super bowl, Google purchasing a commercial during the game was a little shocker, but it was a good commercial that quickly demonstrates how importantly they view search( if you didn’t already know) and how much Google has become intertwined in every part of our daily lives.

With Super Bowl ads costing around $2.6 million for a 30-second spot, we know Google is one company that can afford it during this recession, while other companies, like Pepsi, that are known for their Super Bowl ads, sat this one out. The Google commercial takes us through a sequence of a man who meets a woman in Paris, France and then uses Google in every step of the process to find locations for a date, how to impress a French woman, plane tickets, a church to get married, and finally, how to assemble crib. Besides the commercial probably being well-liked by women, this is a sequence of searches that most of us use over a period of time for information that we need. As search results, become more personalized, my guess is that suggestions from Google will soon become more accurate as well because searches will probably follow similar sequences when aggregated overlarge groups of people.

What was clever was how Google demonstrated the many different features of search at the same time, which included Google Translator, Google Maps, Google Liveview, and Google’s flight status look up feature. Very good use of less than a minute to exhibit their search functionality, especially when most of the Super Bowl ads were lackluster except for the Doritos commercials and E-trade commercials. At least it was a good game.

January was my first full month of blogging in which my goal was to post at least one post per day, Monday through Friday. I did pretty well with posting on most days, but also missed a few in which I was able to make up for on the weekends. I thought I would have trouble finding topics, but between current events, some mind mapping I did at the beginning of the month, and simply remembering to write about some of the techniques that I regularly use, topics were not a problem. As I wrote more posts, new topics came to mind that I could add to the list, so topics should not be a problem for a time to come.

Here are some stats from Google Analytics that I was able to achieve in January. The numbers are not bad for the first full month and they set a good baseline for the months ahead. Using these numbers I can set goals for February and measure the percentage improvement.

Some of the January results:
Visits – 302
Pageviews – 546
Pageviews/Visit – 1.81
Time on Site – 2:05
% of Traffic From Search Engines – 30%

I am pleased with the 300 visits in January considering that I did not start posting until the 6th of the month and did not do any promotions on the blog. All of the numbers trended positively over the course of the month and with an average time on the site of over 2 minutes I can only expect that stat to improve as more content as added to the site

Goals for February 2010

My goal for February is to improve on the results from January and increase traffic to over 1,200 visits. That represents 4oo% increase in visits. It sounds optimistic, but without any outreach to increase traffic in January, a small effort in February should help to increase traffic. At least that’s my plan.

How I Plan To Meet My February Goals

I expect to be even more busy in February than I was in January, but there are some steps I will take ti increase traffic that I believe will have the biggest impact. Some of the techniques I will use are:

Social Media Submissions – I submitted two posts to StumbleUpon in January which drove 22 visitors. In February I will submit every post to Stumbleupon as well as other sites like Digg, Delicious and Reddit using Social Marker to save time. I would expect social media sites to drive at least 300 visitors in February.

Increase Twitter - My twitter account, @briankeithmay, only has about 80 followers right now and will have to increase for better exposure from Twitter. I will probably use Tweet Adder to increase my followers. In order to reach my goal of 1,200 visits in February, I will need over 1,000 twitter followers by the end of the month. I expect Twitter to drive over 200 visitors to the blog in February either through posts that I tweet about or through link on my profile page.

Post Four(4) Video Posts to Youtube – Although, I am not sure of the topic, I will post videos to Youtube that are training on some topic related to internet marketing or just life in general that may drive some traffic back to the site. My expectations for traffic from Youtube postings is pretty low, but it will help me to understand how to post videos best for success and which topics perform the best.

Three(3) Guest Posts – To increase links and to increase traffic, I will guest post on 3 other blogs throughout February. Since I have not identified any targets for guest posting, this will be more of a challenge, but it must happen if I am going to meet the goal of 1,200 visitors in February.

Facebook – With over 800 friends on Facebook, I will post at least 4 posts over the course of the month and my expectation is that I can receive at least 100 visitors from Facebook over the course of the month, Now that I type this I also think I may create a fan page so that I can get a message out to a group more frequently and more quickly. Facebook should become a nice traffic source.

Carrying through with each of the methods that I listed coupled with direct type in traffic and search engine traffic, I should comfortably be able to reach my goal of 1,200 visits in February. If you are reading this and want to help out, pass this post on to a friend or a hundred and help me reach my goal for February. I also have a personal goal of losing 10 pounds in February. This will simply require discipline in going to the gym regularly and eating better and staying away from the fast food.

The goals for this month are kind of aggressive but very attainable. I expect February to stand as the groundwork for even more aggressive goals in March. I will update my goals list on March 1st to let you know the results. Let’s go!!!

The mobile web has not been fully embraced by most businesses and for good reason because up until now the return and usage has not warranted the investment. Over the last few months, that has drastically changed and the outlook for the near future, next 12-18 months, is that your mobile web strategy should be your top priority as the way people are using mobile devices is changing rapidly.

Yesterday, Apple announced their quarterly earnings and worldwide sales of the Iphone have doubled to 8.7 million units in the quarter. This is significant because iphone users spend much more time with other functionality besides just phone calls. As you can see in the image below, iphone users spend much more time on their phone on average per day and also use their phones for search and visiting websites. A quick glance through your web analytics will probably show that some of the visitors to your website visited from a mobile device. This is a trend that will just continue to accelerate.

There are a number of events from the last month that indicate mobile phone usage is about to explode.

1. Iphone Sales – As I mentioned, Iphone sales set a record in the last quarter and Apple predicts strong growth going forward. Iphones in the United States are still limited to AT&T, but it is widely expected that the exclusivity will end with an announcement this week that the Iphone will soon be available on the Verizon network. Verizon is the largest carrier in the U.S. and by most opinions have a network that is far superior to AT&T in coverage and reliability. This will lead to a larger explosion of Iphones sales and possibly an exodus from AT&T for many Iphone users.

2. Nexus One – Google introduced their own phone, Nexus One, in the last few weeks and this will increase mobile usage. I don’t expect many people to move to the Nexus One right away because there is not much that differentiates the hone today, when Google completes the integration of several acquisitions over the next several months, I expect the functionality of the Nexus One to increase dramatically. This will include a number of applications that attempt to bypass the phone carrier networks and utilize the web more. This will include Google Voice and other VOIP applications that reduce the reliance on the phone carrier networks.

3. Android – The Android software from Google is a few years old now, but adoption of it is still picking up. Verizon introduced the Droid phone from Motorola over the last two months that has seen steady sales and there are a number of other handsets from other providers that will lead to further adoption. Much like the Nexus One, the handsets using the Android software will move more and more towards applications that don’t require phone carrier networks.

All of these phones have built-in search functionality that is very easy to use and are very heavily location focused. My guess is that the next 12-18 months will see an increase in mobile web usage that advances faster than estimates and in some cases will push the phone carrier networks to their limits. If you have not given some serious consideration to your mobile web strategy and how you can engage your visitors, now would be a good time. It is probably a good bet that your competitors are already doing so.

Image Source

Google often salutes different holidays with creative changes to their logo on the homepage of Google.com. Since today is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr Holiday in the United States, Google has added a creative logo to their homepage to salute Dr. King and the legendary accomplishments that he made for civil rights and human equality in the United States. Google has often been criticized because they choose not to change their logo for all religious or political holidays. No complaints on this one from me!! Well one complaint is they could have made the people a little larger and more visible, but not a big deal.

Google is also using the homepage to promote information and resources for contributing to the relief crisis in Haiti. The Google homepage generates a tremendous amount of traffic and Google is very selective in the causes or products that it chooses to promote on the home page. For the past two week, Google has been promoting the launch of their new mobile phone, Nexus One. Hopefully, the use of the Google homepage for the Haitian relief efforts leads to continued outpouring of giving and support that has been witnessed all of the United States and other parts of the world. It must be great for a company like Google to have the ability to point their large firehose at a problem and encourage their users to support. My guess is that the results will be very impressive.

Over the last three months, both online and offline media have been totally consumed with the saga of Tiger Woods and the allegations against him that he committed multiple acts of adultery against his wife. Not sure if it is all truth, but the court or public perception has decided for the most part that he is guilty of all of the allegations made by the various women that have said they had a relationship with Tiger. There have hundreds of reported sightings of Tiger at different places around the world, but there have not been any verified sighting since the day after Thanksgiving.

The infatuation by the media and the public with the sex scandal causes his good deed of donating $3 million to Haiti relief efforts to go unnoticed. This is an example of where a personal or corporate brand needs to dedicate money and resources to protecting their online identity and shaping the information that is shown first when there are searches for their name.

A search for Tiger Woods on the day after he pledged $3 million in relief aid, still shows links about his scandal before it mentions his donation. It will require a lot of work for a reputation management expert to overcome the many stories about the scandal because most of the stories were linked to from other websites hundreds or even thousands of times.

Even a search through Google News for Tiger Woods has no mention of his donation in the top 10 links. This is where Woods’ team needs to be pushing press releases and posting to various news sites, so that his stories of his donation moves ahead of stories about his scandal.

Unfortunately, most of the news outlets have not mentioned his donation, but from their perspective viewers are much more interested and engaged in scandal than humanitarian efforts. There are also many who question Tiger’s motive, thinking that the reason for the donation is to divert attention from his scandal. If that were his motive, a donation of $1 million would have done that just as well as $3million.

Managing your brand online is very important and as this example shows, very difficult as well. To limit the exposure of damaging information, brands should strongly consider hiring online reputation managers who could help to ensure that positive information rises above the negative stories. The cost of the reputation manager will seem like a steal when you consider the cost that it will take to repair your brand, if repair is even possible.

Online marketing jobs are probably one of the few disciplines that is growing in the current economy. This need will continue to increase as the shift from traditional marketing to online advertising accelerates. I have compiled a list of quality job boards, some better than others, that keep up to date lists of online marketing positions where companies are seeking search engine optimization experts, search engine marketing managers, and web analytics analysts. These sites have a healthy mix of entry-level, mid-level, and executive positions and for many of the boards, the positions are exclusive to their site.

The one drawback of some of the sites listed below is they are not as quick to eliminate positions form their board that are 6-8 weeks old. My guess is that if they are too quick to remove these jobs, then the number of listings is too low at any given time. Besides that, the job boards listed below have done a good job of listing and aggregating some of the online marketing opportunities available.

This list is not ranked in any order as they have different jobs at any given time.

SEOMOZ Job Board - http://www.seomoz.org/marketplace/jobs

Onward Job Search - http://jobs.onwardsearch.com/

SEMPO Job Board - http://www.sempo.org/jobs/

E-Marketing Silo - http://www.emarketingsilo.com/

Online Marketing Jobs - http://www.onlinemarketingjobs.com/

Web Analytics Association Job Board - http://www.webanalyticsassociation.org/en/jobs/search.asp

Search Engine Watch Job Board - http://jobs.searchenginewatch.com/c/search_results.cfm?site_id=2660

Marketing Pilgrim Job Board - http://jobs.marketingpilgrim.com/

Search Engine Journal Job Board - http://jobs.searchenginejournal.com/

SEO Consultants Job Board - http://jobs.seoconsultants.com/

SEOBook Job Board - http://www.seobook.com/jobs

Problogger Job Board - http://jobs.problogger.net/

Techcrunch Job Board - http://www.crunchboard.com/jobs/

If you know of any other resources that should be added to the list, drop them in the comments.

Google Analytics is the web analytics software for over 70% of websites which clearly makes it the market leader. When Google Analytics originally launched, it lacked much of the functionality that some of the enterprise solutions offered, but the price was hard to beat because it was free. It still remains free today, but the functionality has increased dramatically and in many ways Google Analytics is as robust as most of the other solutions available.

Google Analytics and any other web analytics software really begins to get powerful when you get past the surface level and start to dive into some of the functionality and reports that uncover nuggets of data that can have huge impacts on your user engagement and conversions.

The most comprehensive training program for Google Analytics is Conversion University. This is a self-paced training program that takes you step-by-step through Google Analytics and gives details about each of those element. I had been using Google Analytics for a few years prior to conversion university, but after sitting through the course, there are a number of elements that I am now aware of that I did not know about prior to the university.

Here are three resources that are not owned by Google, but provide great insight and techniques for getting the most out of Google Analytics.

Avinash Kaushik’s Blog (Occam’s Razor) Google Analytics Evangelist

Justin Cutroni’s Blog Google Authorized Consultants

Site Scan GA Analytics Site Scanner

I would also recommend a book by Avinash Kaushik titled “Web Analytics: An Hour A Day.” Which is a great resource for learning Google Analytics. The book can be kind of wordy in parts and Avinash sometimes speaks at a level too high for the topic, but a book that is definitely worth reading if you are serious about improving your ability to dive deep into Google Analytics and truly realize the power of all the functionality.

I would also recommend “Advanced Web Analytics With Google Analytics” by Brian Clifton. This is also a good read, but covers the information in a different way than Avinash. The main difference is this book is written for less techy readers who are more concerned with the metrics than the coding that got you to this point.

Web Analytics will become increasingly more important for most organizations and the better your department can derive actionable data from the web analytics solution, the further in front of your competitor you will become.