Of course, there is Google Trends, which allows you to see a snap-shot of what people are searching for, but more interesting is the ability to compare not only what people are searching for, but when and where too. 

And that’s exactly what Google Insights for Search lets you do.

Especially useful for marketers, Insights can help you write better ad copy based on the popularity of certain keywords and phrases, find out how much interest or recall your ads generated (obviously, limited to Google searches), and compare any number of other things including things related to your brand and/or your competitors.

Here are two videos from Google that explain Insights for Search far better than I can.  The first one is geared towards the average Joe, while the second video is much more useful to marketers.

Visit Google Insights for Search

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Post Tags: brand loyalty, google, insights, planning, research, roi, search engines, Small Business, statistics, tracking, web apps
Post Categories: Advertising, Marketing, Public Relations, Small Business, Technology, Tips and Advice

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It can be a bit tedious, but if you spend about an hour a day visiting major online job boards and search for whatever it is you do, you’ll find companies looking to hire people just like you either on contract or full-time.  Either way, these are great leads IF you know how to sell yourself and your business as being able to fill the void that they have, meet or exceed their requirements, and do so while saving them the hassle and expense of employee-related overhead.

Now, most of you know that job boards are chock-full of garbage—get rich quick schemes, third-party recruiters, bait-n-switches—but if you know how to search, you can avoid all of that nonsense and find real companies hiring real people… just like you.

We love Indeed.com because they aggregate jobs from all of the major job boards and many corporate HR websites—a sort-of “one-stop-shop.”  Indeed.com also allows you to filter on just about everything—including the option to exclude third-party recruiters who are useless to you as a person looking for new business because they rarely cite the hiring company’s name until you’re well into their pre-qualification process.

The trick to this job search tactic is to be very careful and to do your homework!

Let’s say you’re a web designer searching for new business.  If you find a company on a job board who is looking for a web designer, first read the job ad very carefully.  If it’s a fit for you or your business, do more research on the company—don’t just email the job ad contact which is usually an HR person, recruiter or other sort of gatekeeper anyways.  Also, don’t upload a phony resume just to get them on the phone… that’s just a bad idea.

Instead, find out all you can about the opportunity and the company.  Then, find a better contact for them on their website—preferably, the department-head for which the job ad was posted.  If you can’t locate a contact, check their PR or news section.  Sometimes, you’ll at least get a name from a press release, then you can contact that person directly via sites like LinkedIn.

As I stated earlier, these are great leads if you know how to sell.  You should be honest and let them know that you noticed that they were recruiting for a web design (or whatever the job ad was for) and that your company can help them either while they are searching for a full-timer, or instead of hiring one altogether.  Be sure to also tell them exactly how you can help them and how you’ll save them time and money.

Some folks I’ve mentioned this tactic to shot me down… fast.  They claim it’s just bad business to search for leads using a job board.  I tell them, they’re dumb-dumbs and that I’ve acquired quite a few projects this way.  If a company is hiring for something that you can help them with, there is absolutely nothing wrong with opening a line of communication with that company.  The job ad was simply the little birdie telling you that Company X was looking for someone to do what you do best.  No harm, no fowl… er… foul (little birdie… get it?!?).  Sigh.

Now, get off your duff and GET A JOB!!

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Post Tags: lead generation, Marketing, Sales, Small Business
Post Categories: Marketing, Sales, Tips and Advice

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Post Tags: michael p. turner, totally random
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Google.

Google’s search engine indexes are updated so fast that, in some cases, if you post a blog entry and change it a few minutes later, Google will already have the original in its index—and that doesn’t just occur with their own Blogger.com service.  It’s crazy how fast things flow on the Internet and I’m sure some SEO dude knows exactly how and why Google updates its indexes so fast.  Others will just tell you that Google is an evil corporation spying on your every move, but I digress.

If you want to know when your company name or a specific keyword or phrase is mentioned in the news, the blogosphere, the social web, a discussion forum, or on some obscure website that you’ve never heard of, look no further than Google Alerts.  It’s all pretty self-explanatory and super-useful if you want a free tool to monitor all of the different chatter going on out there about your company… or anything else for that matter.

You can opt to receive alerts via email or RSS feed and you can chose to monitor all of the Google indexes or just a specific one (i.e.: blogs only).  And while you can create an alert without registering with Google, you’ll have to verify each alert by clicking a link in an email that the system sends to you.  If you do sign up and log-in to Google, however, it takes two seconds to create an alert and no verifications are required.

Of course, Google Alerts isn’t perfect and it really helps to understand how to execute a search using the many allowable operators—something the majority of users actually don’t know about but can learn by visiting GoogleGuide.com.  If you just throw a phrase in the box, you’ll likely receive alerts that contain some of the words in your phrase, but aren’t relevant to what you really want to monitor.  It’s a good idea to refine your search on Google.com first, then set your alert up.

I’d recommend at least monitoring your company name and probably some of your top competitors.  Beyond that, you can use it to alert you on just about anything.  You can also cancel an alert from within the actual email alert itself or via the administrative panel if you’re logged in to Google.

Check out Google Alerts and monitor some stuff—it’s neato.  And perhaps later on I’ll discuss how to actually respond to some of the things you may find about your company (good and bad).  Stay tuned!

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Post Tags: clipping services, diy, google, google alerts, media, news, pr, press, Public Relations, reputation
Post Categories: Brand Management, Marketing, Public Relations, Small Business, Social Media, Technology, Tips and Advice

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Zoho is one company we definitely watch as they consistently launch super-useful productivity apps that are either free or dirt-cheap to use when compared to their shrink-wrapped counterparts.

No matter what you do all day, Zoho probably has an online app to make your work easier.  Here’s a screenie of all of their apps as of today—impressive, indeed.

I won’t even attempt to review every Zoho app—I haven’t used them all.  Instead, I’ll just let you visit Zoho.com and check them out for yourself.

And while some desktop apps certainly do a much better job managing certain critical business functions, if you’re frequently on-the-go, online applications can make your life much easier.  We predict online apps will ultimately replace even the best desktop software.  In many cases, they already have.

Check out Zoho.com and you may just get more done =)

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Post Tags: on-demand software, productivity, Small Business, web apps, zoho
Post Categories: Interesting Stuff, Small Business, Technology, Tips and Advice

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Post Tags: article, design, Graphic Design, identity, marketing max, marketing tips, outsourcing, planning, Small Business, strategy, web design
Post Categories: Graphic Design, Marketing, Small Business, Technology, Tips and Advice, Website Design, White Papers

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Dropbox installs in seconds and adds a shortcut icon to your desktop.  When you launch the app, it simply opens a file box (ie: Explorer).  There, you’ll have access to a public folder or you can create private folders and share them with specific people.  Simply drag-n-drop files, right-click them and copy the link to your clipboard.  Share that link with whomever and they’ll have instant access to the file.  Recipients won’t need to log in or anything—it just gives them the file.

Dropbox as seen on your PC

Dropbox also keeps everything in sync too, so file changes are always up-to-date—even across multiple computers.   And when you log-in to the Dropbox website, you can manage your account, files and folders, and even view a history of all activity.

Dropbox as seen on the web

The free version of Dropbox offers 2 gigabytes of storage space, which is plenty for moving files back and forth amongst clients or team members.  To save space, just delete stuff as it’s retrieved.  Dropbox also offers upgraded versions—50 gigs for $9.99/month or $99.00/year and 100 gigs for $19.99/month or $199.00/year.  Not a bad deal.  And it’s much faster than sharing via FTP or email.

If you do a lot of file sharing like we do, Dropbox is worth a look.

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Post Tags: dropbox, web apps
Post Categories: Interesting Stuff, Random, Technology, Tips and Advice

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With the right stats package, you can find out…

• who is visiting your website (albeit not their name, which is fine)
• what country, state or city they’re visiting from
• what URL they last visited when they arrived at your website
• which keywords or phrases brought them to your website
• which page they first saw on your website
• which page they last saw when they left your website
• which pages they visited while on your website
• how long they were on your website and each page
• what their IP address is
• what browser they’re using
• what speed their internet connection is
• which internet service provider they’re using
• what search engines crawled your site and which pages
• and a bunch of other cool things.

Most stats packages also offer filters, so you can exclude your own visits from the reports and even set up custom filters—such as which downloads were the most popular today.  Many stats packages can also email you daily reports or summaries, customized by you, so you won’t have to log-in to check things every day.  What’s more is that most of the stats packages available today include really sweet bar charts and graphs so you can compare different statistics.  Super cool.

Having access to such information can be extremely valuable when you’re looking to target a certain market, ensure that your website is user-friendly or needing to figure out who the heck is Spamming your blog comments with get-rich-quick garbage.  The other great thing about monitoring your web traffic is that you can see exactly which marketing efforts are working by pointing your ads to custom landing pages (which also works with traditional marketing too—such as direct mail).

And a little trick: adding a question mark after your URL with some extra tracking information will not effect the URL at all when people click the link.  For example, when we post links to CriticalBiz.com on social sites and the like, we use something like this: http://www.CriticalBiz.com/?ref=somedudeswebsite.  If your stats package is worth a hoot, it’ll include that tag in your reports which allows you to track who came from where and makes custom filters much easier to manage.

Your web hosting company most likely provides a free, standard stats package for your account.  If not, or if you want even more information, Google Analytics rocks—and it’s free!  Rather than scanning your raw server logs, Google’s stats package uses a tiny snippet of hidden code that you put on each of your pages.  If you’re a blogger or use an open-source app like we do (WordPress) to power our website, there are several free third-party plug-ins to monitor web traffic as well.  Some of these applications delay data collection, so you can only see stats as late as the previous day.  Most, however, do archive your data for months or even years.  Others, like stats package that we use with WordPress, provide a real-time look at what people are doing on your website (don’t be scared, we have no idea who you are and we certainly can’t watch that screen all day =)

Monitoring your web traffic is what makes online marketing, advertising and PR so effective.  You can launch something one minute, see what’s going on with it the next, and make changes on the fly.  Try that with a billboard!

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Post Tags: google analytics, marketing tips, statistics, web apps, web stats, web traffic
Post Categories: Marketing, Technology, Tips and Advice, Website Design

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Post Tags: article, budgeting, business development, criticalbiz, customer retention, document, education, guerrilla marketing, imc, integrated marketing, marketing max, marketing tips, planning, pr, promotion, referral programs, scribd, selling, Small Business, strategy, white paper
Post Categories: Advertising, Brand Management, Customer Care, Marketing, Promotions, Public Relations, Sales, Small Business, Tips and Advice, White Papers

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When you look for tchochkes to give away to clients or at events, you should look for things that will be useful to the recipient.  Not just so they’ll keep it for more than a day after the event, but so they’ll actually use the item and even take it with them when they go places where others will be exposed to your brand as well.

Speaking of brands, when you order promotional items, don’t just slap your logo on it.  If there’s room on the item, go for a call-to-action message if at all possible.  And get creative with your message.  For example, a cooler would be great for an HVAC company—“Stay cool this summer with Superior A/C.” You get the point.  Also try to include your website address if it’s an easy one to remember.  That’s actually more important than a phone number.  If you can get people to your website and your website is designed to sell, you’ll be well on your way to landing a new customer.

Here’s a quick look at 10 useful promotional items that people will be more likely to use than a retractable phone cord for a laptop computer modem (you do know we’re all wireless now, right?!? =)

Note: We only hit-up one company to find these, but we work with a bunch of promotional companies, so check Google for others.  Most offer free samples and printed catalogs too.

A cooler is great because people will take them to ballgames and the park where others will be exposed to your brand!

Backpacks are like walking billboards!

Folding chairs ROCK for outdoor events! Try to place your logo on the back of it if you can.

Ball caps and sun visors make great walking billboards too!

Duffel Bags see lots of people and places and are super-useful.

T-shirts and sweatshirts are always a great idea—again, walking billboards. We're not as keen on fancy golf shirts with a tiny logo on the breast if you're really trying to get your message out there.

Umbrellas are useful on rainy and sunny days. Look for umbrellas that have large sides where your message will get noticed.

Beverage holders, or koozies, are very popular. Look for the thin, collapsible koozies that are easier to get your drink into and are very useful to stop sweating on everyday glassware.

Pens are probably the most popular promotional item, but they're limited in what you can put on them and who can see them. Nonetheless, look for comfortable pens that people will really like to use.

Picture frames are cool and an even cooler idea is to take a shot of your prospect or client and you together at the show or something and print them on-site. Look for unique frames like this one.

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Post Tags: branding, event marketing, events, promotional items, tchochkes, trade shows, trinkets
Post Categories: Marketing, Promotions, Tips and Advice, Trade Shows & Events

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