If you make a point of collecting your customers’ e-mail addresses, are you utilizing this list effectively?

A direct email to your past customers can quickly and easily invite them back for a new item on the menu.  You can also send coupons, extending a discount on a few specially selected items. Highlight your catering services, or let them know about your private meeting and event dining space.  I received an email from a restaurant that we go to fairly regularly letting us know about a “kids eat free dinner Tuesday” special. This is great! If I had not received an email , I never would have known!

A nicely done custom newsletter delivered each week, or even once a month can “paint a picture” to customers of the restaurants many offerings. Maybe your customers weren’t even thinking about going out to eat before they received your e-mail, but now that you’ve reminded them of your fine cuisine and made them hungry, there’s a good chance they’ll show up at your restaurant for dinner.

In short, keeping in touch with your customers through e-mail is powerfully effective and costs very little in comparison to other internet marketing services. If you’ve been searching for a way to dramatically increase your restaurant’s business without breaking your budget, please give Peachtree SEO a call today.

In June 2010, the average American spent 22.7 percent of their Internet time on social networks (up from 15.8 percent in June 2009), 10.2 percent of their time playing online games (up from 9.3 percent this time last year) and just 8.3 percent of their time checking and replying to emails (down almost 30 percent year-on-year).

“Despite the almost unlimited nature of what you can do on the web, 40 percent of U.S. online time is spent on just three activities — social networking, playing games and emailing leaving a whole lot of other sectors fighting for a declining share of the online pie,” said Nielsen analyst Dave Martin in a report released on August 2.

If all U.S. Internet time were condensed into one hour, this is how much time would be spent on each activity.

Nielsen

Read the full article here:

http://news.discovery.com/tech/social-media-online-gaming-rule-lives.html

As a small to mid-size business owner, what this really means is that your marketing mix needs to incorporate social media and search marketing.  Keep your eye on the customer!

Lots of people ask us who we recommend for the creation of website forms.  When you require more customization than is easily done with a standard Form Plugin in WordPress, or perhaps you have no existing web form

First of mind is the biggie….AWeber.  We won’t address this in detail, but suffice to say, this is the leading technology used by the majority of online businesses and internet marketeers.  Learn more about their form offerings at:

http://www.aweber.com/web-forms.htm

The only possible knock on Aweber is that it is not free – and that isn’t always a bad thing.  A nice alternative to Aweber is Wufoo.

http://wufoo.com/

Wufoo is incredible easy-to-use, and yet, powerful as well.   They offer a “get started” option for FREE.  This allows you to create 3 forms or reports, with up to 100 entries per month.  This may be all a new business would need.  Beyond this, they offer paid options to meet any businesses needs.

Wufoo forms are created online, in a simple step-by-step creator.  It’s so easy my mom could do it!

We use Wufoo forms with customized FaceBook pages all of the time.  New customers who have yet to build their customer list, typically do not have an Aweber account.  We start them off with Wufoo!

The first thing you need to do is to actually claim your listing in the Google Local Business Center.

Follow the following steps to begin creating your own Google Places local ad.

1) Go to Google’s Local Business Center right here ==> http://www.google.com/local/add

2) Complete your profile completely – make sure you focus on the keywords you wish to rank well for.

3) Enter the proper categories

4) Confirm your listing

5) Tweak and optimize you listing

6) Get your site listed with the other major local directories and city guides to help increase your authority in Google’s eyes

7) You can see your listing appear in as short as 1-2 days or as long as 30 days.  I wish I could tell you why this seems to vary so greatly, but I have no idea.

While this is a simple overview, it really is as easy as I just described to get started.

Like anything else, ranking in the coveted “A” position for your target terms is much more difficult than simple creating a listing.  Email or call our team for help!

While most of you know about FaceBook and Twitter, how many understand Google Buzz, Four Square and other similar sites?

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/5-emerging-social-media-sites-to-watch-in-2010/

My partner Sean is a strong believer in location-based marketing as a lynch-pin to your social media strategy.  I’ve been a bit slower to come to this conclusion, but do agree that it is very important trend to follow.  I’ve been an avid Four Square user for about 6 months right now, and while at first I thought it to be simple, and perhaps even silly — I now check-in to lots of places.

I won’t try to introduce and explain Four Square to you now, but if you own a local business, especially a restaurant or business with a high customer flow, this service could be a great social media marketing opportunity for you.

I’m the “Mayor” of Moes in Peachtree City, and would love to see them emulate Starbucks with special offers for their “Mayors”.

If you are interested in talking more about location based marketing and how social media of this type can energize your business, email or call Peachtree SEO today.

Instead of booting up my laptop, I used my iPhone (still a 3GS) to find local pizza restaurants in the Dupont Circle area of Washington D.C.  To my surprise, I could only find a few, and those that came up either had no website or one that was definitely not optimized for mobile visitors.

In a city like Washington D.C. with millions of yearly tourists, visitors will search for dining options on their phone.  If your business wants a piece of all of these local searches – get on the mobile bandwagon!

Recommendations:

1.  Mobile-friendly website – these are cheap and easy to create.  If you don’t have one, ask me, as our team will build you an optimized restaurant-centric mobile website in less than a week.  Even better – the pricing!

2. Lots of HONEST local reviews – Google, Yelp and other local directories  - c’mon people, fake reviews are so obvious and generate complete distrust, that I would be hard-pressed to order from that restaurant.   Whether good or bad, lots of reviews are key.  I can overlook a few bad reviews, as no one can please everyone all of the time.  What scares me more is trying a place that has no feedback!

Make sure your menu is friendly to an iPhone, Black Berry or Android user.  If not, you run the very real risk they will just jump to another site to find what they are looking for.  Clearly label hours, address and directions on your mobile site, as these are the most common items requested by mobile users.

If you are using WordPress, as millions of sites do, it’s critical that you protect yourself from those unsavory hackers who wish to cause you and your site harm.  Speaking from experience, it’s a really bad feeling to check your site and find it vandalized or even taken down.

9 out of 10 of our customers weren’t doing any security on their websites until they started working with us.  If this sounds like you – at the very least install some plug-in protection to help secure your WordPress installation.

For more great WordPress plug-ins, be sure to visit this informative blog on social media.

I was rattling off some war stories of how short 1 minute videos properly syndicated could generate 100′s if not 1000′s of links, at the same time boosting traffic to the primary website.

I thought it would be helpful to write up a few key points on “best practices” when uploading videos to YouTube.  As YouTube was purchased by Google, and has surpassed Yahoo as the #2 search engine, people need to understand how to incorporate videos into their online marketing.

YouTube is powered by a proprietary algorithm that factors in the optimization of title, description, tags, views, and ratings.   These items are manipulated by the video creator (owner), which power placement both YouTube search listings as well as Google’s organic search listings.

Make sure you use a keyword dense title, and incorporate a clickable URL at the start of the description field.  While this may seem obvious - be sure to include a clear call to action that lists your website and of course, a phone number.

Tips:

1. To increase popularity, add comments on popular videos to encourage viewers to check out your video.
2. If possible, embed YouTube videos on your website.  This will save you the bandwidth of streaming media, while providing you access to the popularity of YouTube on your website.
3. Video file name should contain keywords
4. Include rich keywords in video titles & description
5. Build your own online channel – or library.  Ideally keep adding videos until you pass 20 or more relevant titles.
6. Be as active as you can inside of your new YouTube channel.  Commenting, favorites, add friends all help to increase your visibility on YouTube.

The premise is that #1 position on Google commands roughly 35-40% of the clicks for a term, and the top 10 on page 1 control the top 90% of clicks!  .  So…if you are not #1, the rest of the page 1 results are a dramatic drop-off.  And…if you are not on Page 1, you may as well be on Page 20.  You don’t exist.

This provides some mathematical backing to what most of us have long known.  Check out the article, and specifically the graph showing the AOL data that was leaked out a few years ago.

When you consider the above data, with this next piece of data, you will see the sheer power of being #1. The following is research by Chitika research director Daniel Ruby done in May, 2010.

Ruby states, “It’s just kind of shocking to look at the numbers and see just how important it is, and how much of a jump there is from 2 to 1.  The biggest jump, percentage-wise, is from the top of page 2 to the bottom of page 1.  Going from the 11^thspot to 10^th sees a 143% jump in traffic.  However, the base number is very low – that 143% jump is from 1.11% of all Google traffic to 2.71%.  As you go up the top page, the raw jumps get bigger and bigger, culminating in that desired top position.

Numbers are based on a sample of 8,253,240 impressions across the Chitika advertising network in May, 2010.

Mike Ewing, of E-commerce Inbound Marketing, has put together a great series of posts on keyword research.  For those of you who often wonder about whether you are optimizing and attempting to rank for the right keywords, take a few minutes and read his 3-post series on a great keyword strategy.

Whether you run a monetized blog or a local business, keyword research is the key to your traffic success.