We are officially launching our Local Accelerator program to the Colorado public. Designed to accelerate online lead generation and sales for Colorado small businesses, this program promises to offer a complete Internet marketing makeover to one lucky local business every month!

The program combines fulfillment services with access to Kutenda’s Internet marketing tool-set and training to get your company successfully marketing online. We’ll be choosing one lucky company every month … Selected companies will receive over $9,000 in services at no cost and 3 months of free Kutenda access.

If you’re based in CO, submit your company here: http://kutenda.com/accelerator.html

According to new projections from Outsell, Inc., digital/online marketing will overtake print in 2010. Companies are projected to spend $119.6 billion on online and digital strategies. For small businesses, marketing online is a known challenge due to the intense learning curve, budgetary constrictions and the lack of available software. Kutenda has set out to change that with it’s Internet marketing tool-set for small businesses and the Local Accelerator program is making the extra leap locally by offering tools, services and training for free.

The Local Accelerator program includes all of the foundations for a comprehensive Internet marketing strategy that will drive leads and sales. We begin by creating a website or optimizing your existing website for lead generation and search engine rankings. Companies walk away with a list of campaigns, content and the tools, training and support to pick up where Kutenda’s fulfillment process ends.

Specifics include:

• Promotional landing pages with automated response emails
• A prospect-focused email marketing campaign designed to convert
• Customizable email templates
• A search advertising pay-per-click campaign
• Live local search listing
• Optimized keyword list for specific products / services
• A knowledge base of Internet marketing best practices

In order to qualify, companies must be based in Colorado. We’re accepting submissions at http://kutenda.com/accelerator.html via a short form. Each monthly winner will be contacted directly by Kutenda’s director of training, Alex Ross. We are allowing companies to resubmit monthly for another chance to win.

Submit your business today!

Suggestions for increasing your chances of being chosen:

1) cross your fingers

2) grab your rabbit-foot key chain

3)  send your intern on a hunt for the perfect four leaf clover

4) maybe eat a bowl of Lucky Charms… whatever it takes…

GOOD LUCK!

Why would there already be a listing for your business? Because Google sometimes creates listings for businesses that have not yet created their own, and it does this by pulling information from sources across the web, including human-powered directories. It’s common that these Google-gathered listings have errors—for example, you may have changed your phone number or relocated since Google gathered its information.

There is often much confusion on what the proper steps are when you discover more than one existing local listing for your business in the search engines. The thing to do is claim and edit the existing listing.

It’s important to remember: For each physical location of your business, you should have only one listing. Having more than one can negatively impact the position of all of your listings, decreasing your visibility among local prospects (bad).

What if there are multiple listings? Google has recommended some steps to take to properly handle multiple listings for their Local Business Center:

1. Choose the listing that you’d prefer to keep in your account. Make sure that you have all your enhanced content (photos, business hours, description) attached to this listing and this listing only.
2. For duplicates of this listing in your account (the ones you want to remove), remove all enhanced information. Keep only required information, like the business title, address, and one phone number.
3. Submit these changes and verify as necessary.
4. Now, sit tight for a couple of weeks – just for good measure.
5. Delete the duplicates from your account, choosing Remove this listing from my Local Business Center account.

The key point to remember is that it’s crucial to have one optimized listing for your business. This entry should have all of the additional information and be as close to 100 percent complete as possible. Local search has a ton of potential for small business and creating this optimized listing can dramatically increase your visibility among your target market and create a steady stream of free inbound leads.

We had an excellent turnout for the first installment of our free three-part webinar series on search engine optimization (SEO). We also had some excellent questions at the end. If you have questions of your own, be sure to register for part two now!

In part two, Kutenda’s director of online marketing, James Omdahl, will expand on his novel ‘SLEEP’ method (search, leverage, evaluate, estimate, perform) for generating inbound leads through SEO.

Part II: On-Page Optimization and Tracking (Evaluate, Estimate)

* How to evaluate your web site and tips to optimize
* What the competitive landscape looks like for your business
* How to measure progress by tracking your results

Why attend?
If your business isn’t ranking in the search results for key terms, you’re missing a huge, cost-effective opportunity to drive leads and fuel growth. Our webinar series will help you seize this opportunity.

Who should attend?
Business owners and marketers who want clear, practical guidance on using SEO to increase leads, sales and revenue. Maybe you need a refresher on key SEO principles. Perhaps you’re brand new to search engine marketing. Either way, you’re guaranteed to learn something you can use to grow your business!

What if I missed part one?
Don’t worry. Each installment is designed to stand on it’s own. Register here.

Yes, it’s true: Some people continue to use phone books.

But today’s consumer increasingly favors that great information repository known as the Internet, and they use search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo to find what they’re looking for. With this change comes a new mandate for businesses: make sure your web site gets found.

So how does one get found in the search engines? If your business serves a competitive market, just having a web site doesn’t mean you’ll rank for key search terms. Google may list your competitors ahead of you in the search listings, and studies show that searchers rarely even look at the results beyond the top three. If you’re not in the ‘Golden Triangle’ you’ll get crumbs for clicks while your competitors get all the action.

We can help. We’re offering a free three-part webinar on search engine optimization, which is the process of optimizing your web site’s content and code for better placement in the search results. It also involves off-site factors, such as acquiring inbound links (which Google interprets as votes) from other web sites.

The series will help businesses ‘SLEEP’ their way to the top of the search results. (SLEEP: search, leverage, evaluate, estimate, perform). At the end of the series, we’ll provide attendees with a free SEO checklist that will help you apply what you’ve learned to your business’ web site. Register for the webinar today!

Register here for Kutenda’s free three-part webinar series on how small and midsized businesses can SLEEP (Search, Leverage, Evaluate, Estimate and Perform) their way to the top of the search results.

As we mentioned in a previous post, if you want to meet new prospects and close more sales in today’s internet focused world, you need to be visible in the major search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing) for the search terms/keywords that are relevant to your business, a goal achieved through search engine optimization (SEO).

Problem is, SEO can be confusing for small and midsize businesses that don’t have the time or resources to dedicate to optimizing their company presence online. We’ve got the solution: Kutenda’s free three-part webinar series on how small and midsized businesses can actually SLEEP their way to the top of search results. Register today.

James Omdahl, our director of online marketing, will walk you through Kutenda’s SLEEP (Search, Leverage, Evaluate, Estimate and Perform) technique and provide the best practices, tips and tricks you need to start driving qualified traffic to your web site today.

Throughout the three sessions, James will demystify the optimization process so that you can grow your business online no matter the size of your marketing team/budget. All attendees will receive a free checklist designed to help you get started immediately.

Who should attend
Internet marketing beginners, small business marketers, and anyone else who wants to improve SEO.

Details/Registration

At the ConnectWise Summit, I spoke to many MSPs who use ConnectWise to manage the sales process. As I mentioned in my post last week, ConnectWise is really helpful for managing and tracking tasks for your sales team during the last 20 percent of the sales cycle. Kutenda helps with the first 80 percent.

That still begs the question: How the heck can you generate more and better leads for your managed services business? I had a conversation with Larry Walsh from Channel Insider just last week about the same thing. He basically told me that what he hears from MSPs is that yes, you need more leads. But you also need better leads. So lets talk about how Kutenda helps you generate more leads—of higher quality.

Generating more leads for managed services
How does your managed services business generate new leads today? Here are a few ways that you might use:

- knocking on doors
- cold-calling
- networking at local business functions
- referrals

All of these methods work, and depending on your personality and perseverance, they can work well. But, they all have one thing in common—they require person-to-person engagement. This limits the effectiveness of each of these methods because once you max out on dials (or doors), you have to hire another sales person to increase the number of leads you’re getting. Kutenda gives you a more cost-effective solution to use in conjunction with your other lead generation activities.

Question: If you could drive people who are already looking for your services to your web site to fill out a lead form, would you? Of course you would! That’s where search marketing (pay-per-click advertising, PPC) comes in. Running PPC is simply the fastest way to drive leads to your site. Even if you’re on page 755,343 of the Google search results for “Data Recovery,” you can get to the top of the sponsored results for that same keyword—especially if you narrow your target to your local geographic area. Kutenda’s PPC keyword research tool simplifies the process of selecting keywords for your ad campaigns. Plus, we also give you keyword lists and  ad copy for a whole variety of managed services (Help Desk, BDR, Managed Services and more), so you’ve got a head start in building campaigns to drive those leads.

Getting better leads for managed services
Let’s look back at the more expensive lead drivers again for a minute. Even if you get someone to engage with you from one of those methods, you may not close them all at this point anyway. Here are a few reasons why:

1. they’re not looking for a managed service (just want to deal with an immediate problem)
2. it’s not the right fit
3. it costs too much
4. they realize they can manage it in-house

Are these people still good leads for other services you offer? Might they convert to a customer in two, three or even 12 years from now? Yes! But most likely, you’ll lose touch with them because you don’t have an efficient way to nurture those leads into better leads over time. Again, this is where Kutenda helps.

Our MSP partners use ready-to-send email campaigns we provide to stay connected with these leads over time and nurture them into better (more qualified leads). By sending out regular email campaigns to prospects (and existing customers), you increase your chances of getting them as paying customers later down the road—of turning more of your leads into better leads.

What is a better lead?
What ‘better’ leads are is certainly up for interpretation, but in our world,  better leads are really leads that are more qualified—those that have first gone through 80 percent of the sales process. No matter where that lead comes from—referral, PPC, cold call, etc.—making them into a more qualified lead will improve your sales conversions. Using a lead nurturing system like Kutenda makes that lead qualifying process more automatic, allowing you to spend more time with those leads that are in the last 20 percent of the sales cycle. That is, by the way, when you put them into ConnectWise—so you can use Tracks to keep your sales people on task to close those more qualified leads.

As discussed in my last post, finding the right keywords for your search marketing campaigns is essential for getting the right traffic to your web site at the right price. But many small and midsized businesses should also consider adding geographic keyword modifiers to their search campaigns to really target their search marketing campaigns. In this post, we’ll define geographic modifiers and discuss why they are important to localized search marketers.

What is a geographic modifier?
A geographic keyword modifier is the use of a geographic term in the beginning, end, or in the middle of a keyword term. For example, if my core keyword was “health insurance,” you could geographically modify the keyword by adding the term “Denver” to it, making it “Denver health insurance” or “health insurance Denver.”  Pretty straight forward, eh?

Why would I use a geographic modifier?
Even if a business wants to appeal to searchers on a national basis, it’s not a bad idea to start out by targeting a local market, because they will be able to see better results more quickly. Why? Because competition can be fierce on the national level, and the timeline for success can be considerably longer.

An unscientific way to assess the competitive landscape is by Googling your keyword and viewing the total number of results. While this number does not express the amount of search marketing competition per se, it does give a good indication of how many web pages have been found on the Internet that could fulfill a search for your search term.

For example, the total number of documents (web pages, PDFs, etc) in the Google index for a term like “health insurance” is 105,000,000. That’s a lot. Even though a majority of those pages are not well optimized for that term, the web pages are still competing for a space in those search results.

Now, let’s add some geographic modifiers for a state, city and neighborhood and see how that number of indexed pages change:

- Colorado health insurance (state modifier) – 24,300,000 documents
- Denver health insurance (city modifier) – 16,100,000 documents
- Denver Highlands health insurance (neighborhood modifier) – 149,000 documents

As you can see, as the geographic area gets smaller, the number of web pages and other documents goes down as well. This shows the big advantage of geo-modifiers: a reduction in keyword competition.

Geo-modifiers give you the ability to target a specific local or regional market, and this means you can get results more quickly and get a faster ROI on your search marketing efforts. It also means you can focus on the areas that are most profitable for your business.

Starting local can get you from start-up to success quickly.  And if you want to go national right away, go for it, but consider doing it in a two-pronged approach where you target your local market with one campaign (including a local website) and another where you go for the whole nation.  That way you’ll be able to profit in the short term while waiting for long-term national success to kick in.

How do I choose the right geographic keywords?

So now that you have an idea of why you would want to use a geographic modifier, you might be wondering how to pick the right modifier for your business.

Sometimes it’s obvious. There are many businesses that are geographic dependent, such as sales people with a specific territory or a brick-and-mortar store that has limited regional draw. But other times it’s not so obvious.

Some companies that are able to operate in many locations struggle to define the geographic area that they will market to. This can be tricky, but one good way to make this decision is to ask the following question:

What is the smallest definable geographic area that I get or want to get 80 percent or more of my business from?

Is it your city? Your state? Your neighborhood?  Think of the answer to this and write down 3–5 potential geographic areas that would fit this definition.

Once you have done this it’s time for you to check and make sure there is search volume in your area for these search terms. Go to the Kutenda tool or another keyword tool, and plug in your keyword along with each geographic modifier (e.g., “Denver health insurance” or “Colorado health insurance”).  Check the monthly search volume on these geo-modified keywords and pick the one with the most volume.  This should be your primary geographic modifier.

Now that you’ve got your primary geographic modifier, it’s time to make a list of secondary modifiers. Secondary modifiers can come from a number of different sources based off of your primary keyword:

1.    Other nearby major cities
2.    Cities/towns within your primary modifier (if it’s a metropolitan area, etc)
3.    Adjacent states, counties, metro areas
4.    Neighborhoods within your primary geographic area

As you did with the primary modifiers, write down as many of the secondary geo areas you can think of and plug them into the Kutenda keyword tool along with the primary keyword you are using.  Check the search volumes for the words and then make a list of the highest volume locations you want to market to.  It’s good to have 10– 5 of these, if not more.

When you’re done, you’ll have a list of your geographic modifiers—congrats!  But what do you do with them? In the next post, we’ll discuss how to use these modifiers for search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising and local search engine optimization.  And no, the use is not the same for all three.

If you have any questions about this post, feel free to leave a comment below.  Thanks for reading and please remember to take action and succeed online with Kutenda!

Online advertising, long considered the lesser sibling to television advertising, has come of age.

According to a September report from the Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers, online advertising expenditures in the UK overtook television expenditures in 2008.

Last year advertisers spent $2.792 billion on online media and $2.615 billion on television.

The report defined online advertising as email campaigns, classified listings, display ads and search marketing. (Commonly referred to as PPC, or pay-per-click, search marketing involves placing keyword-based ads on search engines like Google and Bing. Incidentally, Kutenda helps small businesses with their email and search marketing—get more information here.)

The news from the UK comes on the heels of a similar milestone on this side of the Atlantic. In August, the Kelsey Group announced that spending on online media eclipsed spending on traditional media among small and midsize businesses in 2008.

What’s driving businesses toward online advertising?

For one thing, companies of all size are a lot more frugal these days, and as their marketing budgets shrink, the appeal of online marketing and advertising—with its trackability and precision—increases.

The other reason? Businesses realize that their customers are spending more time online than ever, and they have little choice but to follow suit.

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, broadband connectivity has increased across every demographic group—jumping 300 percent among the so-called Silent Generation, those born between 1937–1945.

In other words, it’s not just the kids who are online—it’s every demographic, young and old.

So what do you think—are you ready to tap the power of online advertising for your small business? Learn how Kutenda can help your business meet local prospects on the Internet through search and email marketing.

Summary: Small businesses that focus on creating effective conversion funnels will generate more leads and more revenue from their online marketing campaigns.

Conversion funnel. It sounds like another highfalutin marketing term, doesn’t it? Nevertheless, when you learn the definition, you’ll notice that the term has a way of creeping into your vocabulary…

conversion funnel: n. a sequence of steps leading (funneling) a prospect toward a desired action, whether it’s a purchase, application, quote request, etc.

In this post, we’re going to focus on one kind of conversion funnel—the kind that stems from ads placed in search engines like Google and Bing.

Once upon a time there was a keyword…
When a business advertises on a search engine, it bids on keywords—phrases that their prospects typically use when searching for their products and services.

For example, an insurance agency might bid on the keyword ‘car insurance quotes Colorado,’ a popular search term used by Coloradans shopping for car insurance. When a prospect enters that term into the search engine, the agency’s text ad is displayed in the results, either on the top or side of the page.

If the ad content resonates and the prospect clicks it, the business pays an agreed-upon price. (Thus the name pay-per-click advertising.)

Enter the landing page
After the click, the consumer is directed to a landing page within the agency’s web site. A landing page is designed to usher/guide/funnel/bully/goad/lure/entice a prospect toward a desired action. In our example, that action might be filling out a request for a quote and clicking submit.

It’s often the case, however, that the prospect isn’t quite ready to convert, and that’s why landing pages include text that reinforces and builds upon the message in the original ad. Without that continuity and reinforcement, the prospect—a skittish, fearful creature—might lose confidence and click away.

The landing page copy must also address the benefits of taking action (or, in some cases, the hazards of not taking action) and address any major objections or fears.

No conversion? There’s still hope.
Even if you don’t successfully convert every prospect, you’ve got a valuable consolation prize: data. You know which keywords they used; which ads they clicked; and which landing pages they saw. It’s the beauty of search engine advertising: the ability to monitor and tweak things—keywords, ad copy and landing page content—until you get the desired result. (Perhaps this is why paid search advertising is the only growth sector in the advertising industry…)

Back to our favorite insurance agency: Realizing that the keyword ‘car insurance quotes Colorado’ netted a lot of clicks but few actual conversions (i.e., quote requests), they decided to revamp their landing page. They added text indicating that the quotes are free, prepared instantly and non-binding. And to establish some credibility, the agency highlighted its membership in the Better Business Bureau. After refining their landing page, they were able to boost their conversion rate, capitalizing on more of those initial clicks.

One conversion begets another
Of course, our fictional insurance agency’s ultimate goal is to sell insurance policies, not just provide free quotes. So, a completed quote request is just one step, one conversion point in the larger conversion funnel.

In our example, the final conversion—the purchase of a policy—may happen offline, either over the phone or in person. And if no immediate sale is made, the lead can then be put back into the conversion funnel—perhaps into an autoresponder campaign that guides the lead back to the original landing page or a separate one with a different offer.

Make sense? Would a white board help? Click here to see Kutenda’s online marketing director explain conversion funnels using helpful circles and arrows.

File under: Small business online marketing > Search engine marketing > pay-per-click advertising

A search engine results page, or SERP, in Google.

My first forays into online marketing left me asking a lot of questions. Maybe you’ve had a similar experience. Luckily, for people like us, there is a wealth of resources and expert knowledge available on the Internet to help even the greenest of online marketers get started.

My first step was to get a working definition of SEO. I quickly learned that SEO stands for search engine optimization, the process of optimizing your web site so it is easier for the search engines to find it, thus driving more visitors to your site. More visitor traffic means more chances to communicate, and more communication can provide opportunities to produce more sales.

As a beginning SEO, there were a few resources that helped me immensely in charting these new waters. This particular one is a great guide to search engine optimization that starts right at the beginning:

Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization

I highly recommend reading the entire thing (it’s several pages) if you really want to further your knowledge and give yourself an edge. This guide covers just about every key topic including:

• How search engines work to gather information, and some simple steps you can follow to take advantage of these processes.
• Keyword research: What words/phrases people are using to search for your information and how to incorporate those keywords into your site.
• Great tips on how to make your site accessible and create content that is valuable to your customers.
• (And much, much more including links to other helpful resources.)

Here’s another great resource, courtesy of the web site Search Engine Watch:

SEM Basics: A Guide for Webmasters and Search Engine Marketers

They offer great tips, and several “101” articles to help beginners get started.

A great way to learn is to periodically check some expert SEO and online marketing blogs. In addition to our own blog (blog.kutenda.com), the following sites have excellent insights into the world of Internet marketing, as well as SEO-specific tips, techniques and news:

• Seomoz.org
• Searchengineland.com
• Seobook.com

Here are a few tips for developing a foundation in SEO:

1. Learn in manageable sections. When you have some time devoted to this, sit down and work on a couple of topics. Maybe play with some different content ideas, or spend an hour learning about Pay-Per-Click advertising and what it can do for your business.
2. Use the guides above or an interesting article to help you decide what topic to learn about.
3. Be sure to bookmark this blog and return for a regular dose of practical tips and helpful explanations.
4. Consider using a free RSS reader (we recommend Google Reader) so you can subscribe to numerous SEO-focused web sites and read them all from one place—a huge time-saver.

No one can expect to become an expert over night, but with some practice and the right tools—such as the Kutenda Online Marketing Suite—you too can be using Internet acronyms with the best of ‘em!