Kutenda Has Your Back
Part of the value that Kutenda brings to our partners is to act as a source of ongoing education about Internet marketing trends that you and your clients should be aware of. In that spirit, I’d like to let you know how we believe the Yahoo and Microsoft partnership will impact you, our Kutenda partners, and your customers.

Google: No Longer the Only Act in Town
As you know, Google has completely dominated the search engine marketplace—accumulating nearly 70 percent market share. While the company has done a great job of making it easy to find information and market products and services online, the result of their domination is a lack of competition. When it comes to online marketing, Google is the 800-pound gorilla, and you have no choice but to play by their rules and pay their prices.

Enter the Microsoft-Yahoo partnership.

An Industry Shake Up
This deal will have major repercussions for the online advertising industry. Currently, Yahoo and Microsoft rank second and third to Google, respectively. But combined they carry a lot of industry weight. Their roles will be divided. Yahoo will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers. Self-serve advertising for both companies will eventually be fulfilled by Microsoft’s AdCenter platform, and prices for all search ads will continue to be set by AdCenter’s automated auction process. This won’t be happening for at least a year after the deal closes, so don’t worry about it now.

The Impact on Small Business
Advertisers, publishers and, I believe, small businesses with limited budgets in particular stand to benefit significantly from a unified search and advertising platform, combined sales and marketing resources, and the promise of more competitive prices that increased competition brings. Bottom line: These companies are putting a lot of cash and manpower into taking market share away from Google.

But while this new partnership will result in more competitive Pay-Per-Click advertising prices (a big win for businesses), it will also require online marketing service providers to learn how to use Microsoft and Yahoo effectively—something most haven’t had to consider because Google was the one place to go.

Kutenda Can Help You Navigate the Confusion
The net result is that you’re going to have more to manage … unless you use Kutenda. (You’re so smart you should pat yourself on the back for partnering with us!) With Kutenda, you have one tool that allows you to:

• Optimize every web site you manage for strong organic results in all three search engines.
• Create, manage and track pay-per-click campaigns for all three search engines in Kutenda.
• Submit your clients’ business info to all three search engines’ local directories from inside Kutenda.

So, while the search world just got more complicated for everyone else, your world just got better. As the partnership between Yahoo and Microsoft is fully realized over the next couple of years, you’ll be in the perfect position to take advantage of the new opportunities created for you and your clients by partnering with Kutenda.

The current rage—the whiz-bang, change-the-world way to market your business—is social media.

Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, you could spend your entire day being lured into it all. And there are many bloggers and business consultants out there touting the big benefits to social media. They’ll tell you that if you’re not using social media, you’re missing the boat.

There certainly are benefits to social media, but let’s be clear—its not the big solution to the problem that is paramount in your mind—How the heck do I drive more traffic, close more deals and make my business thrive?

That’s not to say that some small businesses aren’t successful using social media tools to help market their businesses. The New York Times recently published a story about a few small businesses using Twitter to alert people about deals, specials, etc. And, I know of a few small businesses here in Colorado that are using Facebook and Twitter to stay in touch with customers. Here’s the thing though: All of them have a web site where they are hoping to drive traffic to. They use social media as one way to drive that traffic.

Here at Kutenda, we do that too. In fact, we get a good amount of traffic from Twitter to our blog.  I say good amount, not fantastic. It’s consistently just under 5 percent as a referral source. Contrast that to traffic coming from Google, Yahoo and Bing—the result of searches on our key terms—that’s over 30 percent of our visitor volume.

What does that tell you? Still the #1 way for people to find you is using search.  So, if you have limited resources—both money and your time—the biggest bang for your marketing dollar is still search engine optimization (SEO) and search advertising (PPC).

Should you try a social channel? Sure. But if you’re going to do it, think about what you want to achieve first. Ask yourself some questions to steer your strategy about what might work for you:

• Is your audience far and wide, or do you just want to touch your local market?
• Do you have the time to dedicate to daily interaction, or are you more likely to do something once or twice a week?
• Do you have a good way to make connections online that will delight people and not make you look like a spammer?
• Do you have interesting things to communicate?
• Are you naturally helpful?

If there is a Social Media Club or Social Media Breakfast in your area, check it out. You’ll meet other people who are experimenting and find our what is and isn’t working for them.

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PHOTO CREDIT: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lwr/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Here’s what came up in the map results:

#1 result in Google Local - a local pizza joint

Look, the top result is a single-shop, local owned pizza place (they really do have good pizza, too). In the local results, its beating out Dominos, Papa Johns and BlackJack and other big wig pizza-pumping machines.

Local search continues to grow in importance, which just means to you – local or regional business owner – that you have better ways to harness your Internet marketing efforts more effectively. That you do have the opportunity to beat out that 900-lb gorilla in your business area, if you have the right tools to make it happen.

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