How To Monitor News About Your Company and Keep Tabs On Your Competitors Using Google Alerts

If you're a small business owner, getting online to do essential research about your industry and your competitors could be next to impossible.  With the endless number of tasks that you need to oversee, delegate, or finalize each day, it's not easy to schedule this important reconnaissance.

For instance, it's hard to stay on top of posts about, or mentions of, your company in news stories, opinion pieces, forums, and reviews. It's equally tough to keep up with what your competitors are up to, and how your industry is reacting to their latest developments.

In today’s marketplace, knowledge is power – so to increase both, Google Alerts can be a fast, simple, and convenient solution.

Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results based on your queries.  They allow you to choose what or who you’d like to be alerted about, and the results can be delivered to your in box as the information hits the web, once a day, or once a week.

Sign up is free.  To get started, enter in your search query, choose your delivery options, and enter the email address where you’d like your alerts to be sent.

You can sign up for as many alerts as you’d like, and once you start receiving them, you’ll be better equipped to make smarter decisions about such things as…

• how to create relationships with industry thought leaders who are supportive or critical of your company
• how to respond to negative news or posts about your company 
• how to react to gains that your competitors are making 
• how to take advantage of opportunities that your competition is ignoring, unaware of, or handling poorly

Since these in-depth investigations are being done for you and delivered to you, Google Alerts takes one crucial task off of your ever growing to-do list. 

3 MINUTE MARKETING #3

Rafe shares the details on how to build market awareness, ramp up your search rank, and Increase your sales using SEO P.R.

More info: VCIncMarketing.com

How to Build Market Awareness, Improve Search Rank, and Increase Sales Using SEO P.R.

Sending out press releases with news, updates, and developments about your company is a great way to build marketplace awareness and generate potential sales.

Implementing a search engine optimization plan that enhances your website content with the right keywords is a great way to increase your company’s search rank and attract business.

Unfortunately, most companies don’t realize that if they combine these two tactics, they’d make each of them even more valuable.  They’d also achieve long lasting results that would deliver measurable benefits with tremendous return on investment.

The merging of these two disciplines is called SEO public relations, or SEO p.r. for short.

SEO p.r. unites the craft of press release writing with the metrics of SEO keyword research.  It allows you to tell a compelling story that attracts immediate attention and creates clicks to your site both now and into the future.

The first step in building an SEO p.r. news release is to create your release.  Focus on one single message that you’d like your readers to remember and write clearly, simply, and concisely.

Next, use a research tool to determine the keywords that are most relevant to your product or service and are most searched by your target audience.

After that, go to the websites of your competition and analyze the keywords that they use.  This will give you ideas of additional keywords that could be helpful to include in your SEO p.r. news release.  Using particular keywords of your larger competitors can help you to leverage their superior market position and actually divert traffic from their site to your site.

Finally, after reviewing your list of top keywords and your competitors’ list of top keywords, create a working list of the most desirable gold nugget keywords with the most relevance to your product or service, and are also the most searched by your target audience.  Take these keywords and sprinkle them throughout your news release.  Substitute them for other words that you may have used in your news release that don’t pack as much SEO punch as the ones that you’ve compiled.

You now have an SEO p.r. news release that will have value and deliver benefits far beyond the usual news cycle of 5 to 7 days that most news releases have.  Your release will come up in the results when people search for the keywords that you’ve sprinkled in, and you’ll be able to attract that traffic.  Your SEO p.r. news release will also help to increase your search rank, generate backlinks to your site from the sites that use your news release, and get you discovered by new potential customers.

The #1 Way To Drive Sales (and also get re-hired if you're looking for work)

Want the secret to generating sales and marketing results?  Rafe reveals it in the 12/12/12 edition of Tom Taylor NOW, #1 weekday newsletter for radio industry executives.

3 MINUTE MARKETING #2 PODCAST

Rafe explains how to use LinkedIn to track down key contacts who you're trying to reach at particular companies.

How To Use LinkedIn To Uncover The Contact Info of Potential Customers/Clients/Prospects

A fast, easy, and effective way to leverage the power of LinkedIn is to use it to track down key contacts who you're trying to reach at particular companies.

For instance, if you’re a software maker and you’re trying to get in touch with a potential customer, such as, the name of the vp of information technology at Company Y, it may not be easy to find out this info when you ring up Company Y's main number.  A lot of times, receptionists have been instructed not to give out such employee details when calls come in.

To get around this hurdle, LinkedIn can be a solution.

Simply go to the search engine of your choice and type in the following:  "vice president of information technology" "Company Y" "LinkedIn.com".

In most cases, the name of the specific person who you're looking for will be listed among the search results.  When you click on the link to your target's LinkedIn page, you'll also find a bunch of other potential contacts who are listed under the heading "Viewers of this profile also viewed..." which is on the right side of the page.  You now have a great selection of perfectly targeted choices to get in touch with at Company Y, and when you ring up the main number, your call should immediately go through - and you can then make your connection.

3 MINUTE MARKETING #1 PODCAST

3 Minute Marketing, hosted by Rafe Gomez, features 180 seconds or less of indispensable info to help take the pain out of your marketing and generate the revenue results you’re looking for.

This segment features 3 completely random yet absolutely essential tips that all business owners need to memorize and be able to recite in their sleep.

More info: VCIncMarketing.com

Would Mitt Romney as Secretary of Business Be Good for Small Business?

A possible new cabinet position could be right for Romney,

but his Bain experience and jobs platform indicate that he might not be right for SMEs

While on the campaign trail, President Barack Obama suggested that he would want to create a new cabinet-level position called Secretary of Business.  The responsibilities assigned to this new role would include the oversight of nine existing commerce-related government agencies, including the Small Business Administration.  The day after the election, Toure - a featured pundit on MSNBC's weekday show "The Cycle" - opined that Mitt Romney would be the perfect person to fill the job.

Romney enjoyed a stellar career as the founding CEO at Bain Capital.  But facets of his work at Bain, along with the ideas that formed the basis of his candidacy's job creation platform, suggest that his success in one type of business does not indicate proficiency in others, especially when it comes to helping small to medium-sized companies as a Secretary of Business.
 
Romney presented himself as a credible business expert during the campaign, and his extraordinary achievements at Bain Capital confirm this assertion.  Yet while he was a visionary at buying, optimizing, and selling companies, his Bain experience didn't include the operation or supervision of these organizations on a day to day basis.  He was involved in the macro financial processes of the firms that he acquired, not in the workaday details of figuring out how to attract and keep their clients; build their sales; manage and motivate their staffs; effectively define their brands and communicate their sales messages; or improve the quality of their products/services.

His goal at Bain was to scrub and polish his purchased companies so they'd be attractive for eventual sale to potential purchasers, and his success in achieving this goal has been proven.  What isn't proven, however, is the assumption that Romney understands how to successfully execute the quotidian details of running a B2B or B2C business, or grasp what owners of small to medium-sized firms need to do in order to survive and flourish.
 
Also in question are the solutions that Romney presented during the campaign to remedy our employment challenges. 

Romney's job creation platform relied upon three planks: reduce corporate taxes, reduce corporate regulations, and increase training of America's work force.  According to Romney, these three solutions would allow American firms to become more competitive, more profitable, and more open to hiring new workers 

The problem with this approach is that it does not address the key reason why firms of any size hire new workers:  to meet increased demand.  If consumers are buying more of a company's products or services, that company would need to increase its workforce in order to meet this surge in sales.
 
By not considering the link between increased demand and increased hiring, Romney offered a job creation plan that was predicated on a mistaken notion: companies would create jobs, but only if there are sufficient incentives to do so.  In Romney's macro business view, this idea made complete sense.  But for business owners, the only true inducement to hire is if there are sufficient new sales coming in for them to be able to afford to pay additional salaries and benefits on a sustained basis.

Mitt Romney's business acumen has been confirmed by his impressive private sector accomplishments at Bain Capital, and Toure's respect for these achievements is understandable.  But Romney achieved success in a specific type of business, namely private equity, venture capital, and public market investments.  To assume that Romney's financial wisdom would translate to good judgment as Secretary of Business - in which he would seek to improve the prosperity of America's small to medium sized companies - isn't supported by his lack of experience in the day-to-day operations of B2B and B2C organizations and his unproven ideas of how to increase American employment.