Here is a powerpoint presentation of the keynote Matt Cutts recently gave about “What Google Knows About Spam.”

What Google Knows About Spam

Imagine being able to focus on running your business while a team of experienced consultants stands by to answer all of your marketing questions and help your company grow like wildfire. It would be just like having your own in-house marketing director without the overhead. You can do exactly that for only $89 per month with our Catalyst Marketing Package!

Our Catalyst Marketing Package provides you with the information you need to execute your own marketing program without the typical “big agency” budget. Once you become a member of Catalyst, you will be able to email our team of marketing experts 24 hours a day with your specific questions and get timely, effective advice to help your business grow and will receive an answer personalized for your company within 48 hours.

A lot of things can go wrong when you design your own logo, and sometimes even when you hire a graphic design company. Here are just a few examples of logos that just didn’t get enough scrutiny before going live.

If you’re regularly posting to your company’s blog (and you should be) then you’re probably amassing a wealth of information for your website visitors. However, with over 80 million blogs on the internet today, readers have a tremendous number of choices, so it’s critical that you provide original information that stands out. After all, if they can find the same information on hundreds of other websites, why should they bother going to yours?

When you sit down to write your next blog post, take a minute to determine if it provides any real value. Is it original? Is it useful? Is it easy for your target market to understand? If not, you need to rethink it.

A mistake that a lot of business owners and sales people make is trying to sway everyone to their way of thinking. It will never happen, and spending time trying to do so is usually a waste of your time and resources. Think about it like this. Let’s say that you are a motivational speaker and you’re meeting with a prospect about putting a program together for their company. This particular prospect believes that he can simply motivate their employes on his own, even after you explain your tremendous amount of experience in the field, multiple certifications and degrees and even several glowing testimonials from clients in the same industry as your prospect. What do most people do in this situation? They often spend a lot of time trying to convince the prospect that they bring more value to the relationship, usually to no avail. If your prospect doesn’t already believe that there is significant value in what you provide, you should move on to one that does. The most effective use of your time and resources is to target prospects that already understand the value of what you provide. The best prospects will be the ones who have previously chosen business relationships based primarily on price rather than value, and have seen the shortcomings as a result.

We recently finished a project for General Fire Equipment, designing their logo, website and print materials. Take a look at what we’ve done for them here.

When the economy begins grinding to a halt like many experts feel that it is headed towards now, small business owners often feel the pressure first. More often than not, their knee-jerk reaction is to cut costs any way possible and the first thing to suffer is usually advertising. The problem with this approach is that while this does temporarily reduce overhead, it also causes an entirely new challenge; a dramatic reduction in revenue. You can only cut overhead to a certain level, but then what? What happens when the slump goes on for weeks or even months? Then you find yourself in a position with no resources and no means to generate new business.

If you want to improve your company’s position, you need to increase your advertising during slow times. This gives you an advantage over your competitors and lets you gain ground and earn market share while they are busy trying to cut costs. The leverage you produce will give you a solid foundation for even more growth once the economy picks back up. If you’re business is affected (or you think it will be affected) by a slow economy, now is the time to start getting ready by:

• Implementing a direct mail campaign
• Implementing an email campaign
• Increasing your sale calls and networking 
• Blogging more frequently
• Advertising in smaller print publications

These are just a start, but you get the idea. Now get out there and earn some exposure!

It’s not really. It’s more a matter of value. It can seem expensive for the same reason that good legal or accounting work seems expensive. There often is a fair amount of grunt work involved, even when software does much of the heavy lifting, but the real value comes from really understanding what will provide the greatest benefit and what will cause the greatest risk of harm. Just like an improperly worded contract can put your assets at risk in a lawsuit, a link building campaign executed without a complete understanding of all of the factors involved puts your website at risk of being banned by the search engines, resulting in zero organic traffic. For many businesses, this would be devastating.

An effective link building campaign takes into account a variety of factors, such as relevance, link age, rate of growth, churn, historical patterns and anchor text just to name a few. If you’re getting a bargain price, chances are that you’re just getting a brute-force link building campaign which is generally pretty easy for the search engines to spot and potentially ban your website. A quality link building campaign on the other hand will account for all of these factors and more, ensuring that you receive the best possible results while reducing your risk.

You get what you pay for.

There are a lot of people using the internet to generate exposure for their businesses these days. Unfortunately, there are also a lot of people using the internet incorrectly in an attempt to generate exposure for their businesses as well. With blogs, email and article directories, it’s easier than ever to blast your information out to millions upon millions of people with little effort and as a result, just about everyone is doing it. The problem is that so few people are doing it well.

You can not simply write a vague article on a common subject that has already been written hundreds of times by hundreds of other people, post it on your blog and/or various article directories or email it to your mailing list, expecting to make any sort of an impact. If you want to make an impact, you’ll need to come up with something new and useful, something that hasn’t already been beaten to death. The keys are originality and usefulness. I’ll give you a perfect example in each case:

Example 1

I recently saw an article in an article directory titled “How do build an effective email list” which went on to say that you need to build an email list, and you should do so by allowing your website visitors to sign up on your website. The article then rambled on for about 150 words or so about how this was so valuable and you need to do it and so on, until ending with a large paragraph extolling the virtues of the author and her brilliant internet marketing experience. So, here we have an author publishing an article telling readers something they already know while not providing any original or useful information, then going on to talk about how wonderful she is.

Example 2

Take a look at Aaron Wall’s SEO Book blog where you will find frequently-updated, original and useful content on search engine optimization. Seth Godin’s blog is another example of someone who is doing it right and of course, our marketing tips blog is a fine example as well, if I may humbly say so.

The people who follow example 1 either they have no value to provide to their prospects and clients, or they have so little that they’re afraid if they give anything away, they won’t have enough left to sell. Unfortunately for them, this keeps them in a scarcity mindset and they never grow. The people who follow example 2 develop a following and build trust over time, resulting in far more revenue than they could ever hope to earn by keeping all of their knowledge to themselves. So, which group are you in?

When asked what they do, most people respond with a canned answer describing their job title. If you work in a large company doing a typical job, this is probably a suitable answer, but if you are an entrepreneur running your own business, this is far from a suitable answer.

People are busy, usually stressed and often wrapped up in their own world so when you tell them that you’re a lawyer, accountant, business consultant or whatever it is that you do, it does not stand out. To them, you are just another face in the crowd. They know that if they need the type of services you offer, they can simply visit a search engine, ask an associate or friend to refer them to someone or even pick up the yellow pages.

If you want to avoid this situation, it’s often as simple as perfecting your answer to the question. Hopefully, you’re more than just a lawyer, accountant, business consultant or whatever it is that you do. For example, one of our clients is an accountant that specializes in developing tax strategies for small businesses so they can maximize their revenue to become larger and more profitable. That’s pretty specific and definitely stands out from all of the other “accountants” in the area. Furthermore, you can bet that any small business owner who’s trying to grow their business will be interested when they hear that.

So take some time to determine what exactly it is that you do, and craft your answer around that. It will be one of the best investments of time you can make in your business.