One of the things our teams here at Page One spend a lot of time doing is writing, editing, and tweaking website copy.  In the normal course of our day, we find the need for the occasional dictionary or thesaurus  or word counter, amongst other things.  Since a good part of what we do revolves around search engines and around Google in particular, we naturally reach out to the big G to serve as all of the above (and more) on a regular basis.  I don’t suppose that most non search obsessed folks might be aware that Google actually serves many functions beyond the one that made it famous. I’m going to go ahead and go through a few of the ones that I use on a regular basis:

1) Dictionary. Type into your search box the word “definition” (without quotes) followed by the term you would like the definition of.

2) World Clock. Type into your search box the phrase “what time is it” (without quote) followed by the name of a city and voila- you have a world clock at your disposal.

3) Metric and Currency Converter. I use this one all the time.  Simply type into your search box the conversion you wish to make (no quotes). “5,000 US Dollars in Euros”, or “50 lbs. in Kilograms”.

4) Track Your Flight Status. Again, pretty simple.  Enter your Airline and flight number into your search box and you’ve got it.

5) Make Google Recognize Faces. This is a Google Image search, and  a bit more complex, but still cool. You have to make an addition in the actual url of the search. Let’s use the name “Rose” as an example.  Search for images of “Rose”. You will get a bunch of flowers. Now, go to the end of the url in  the address bar and add &imgtype=face (at the end). Hit refresh. Now it only returns faces.

6) Identify an object or phrase even if you don’t know what it looks like. This is what Google Images is all about.  Say you’re reading a book about the jungle and you don’t know what an ocelot looks like. Type ” image ocelot” into your Google search bar (no quotes), and there you have it! This also works great for foreign language terms which you may not remember or not known in the first place.

As always, feel free to email me at chris@pageonewebsolutions.com with questions or for a free webinar to talk about all things internet.

So I’m driving this afternoon, and onto the radio comes a commercial which starts something like  “in today’s economy, small businesses need all the customers they can get- instead of chasing them, why not have them come to you for once???”…so naturally, the thing pops into my head is  “well, why would that even be a question in 2009 if you are marketing yourself properly on the web”? Sure enough, the ad is hawking websites……for $4.99 a month. They go on to talk about “choose your site, put it up, and get your new customers as easy as 1,2, 3.” You have got to be kidding me…

Look, its almost 2010 and we all (I think) know that we need to be spending a good portion of our marketing budgets online. The questions that we, at Page One, are hearing now on a regular basis, though, are “well, how much of the budget should be online?” and “what specific areas online should we be focusing on”? I’m going to take a few minutes here and answer those questions for you.  If you don’t know the answers to them, you are going to sink before you’ve started. Online marketing is anything but “easy as 1,2,3″, and I don’t know about you, but my 5 bucks a month would be better spent on a foot-long from Subway.

The answer to the first question is pretty straightforward.  We can assume safely that all businesses are going to spend somewhere between 0 and 25% of  revenue on marketing and/or advertising their product or service. Smaller companies will spend less, and medium and large companies will spend more. Now, and please listen closely: if you are not spending AT LEAST HALF–YES HALF-of this on the web, you are losing business to your competitors. If this comes as a surprise to you- PLEASE, email me RIGHT NOW at info@pageonewebsolutons.com to set up a free webinar session to discuss.  I am not kidding.

As for the marketing components themselves.  Products and services have some inherent differences that require them to have different online marketing needs. However, two things will always stay true.  YOUR WEBSITE ITSELF, YOUR SEO and YOUR ANALYTICS  are by far (and its not even close) your best online friends, and need the majority of your budget. And I  mean 50-60%.  Period. Youcan be flexible and spend on PPC as well, and in many cases we’d advise it- but your Website and your SEO-  one ties into the other, they go hand and hand, and YOU WILL FAIL online if they are not tended to properly. There is no time like a crappy economy to have a solution like web marketing, and SEO in particular. But folks– it needs to be the majority of what you’re doing…..as always, please email info@pageonewebsolutions.com for a free webinar session delving into what we’ve discussed here, and our recommendations as to how to build (or repair) your online marketing program.