Give Away Your Recipes

We originally posted a version of this on our tech blog in May, but decided to share it with you again…

In Des Moines, IA it is tough to find good seafood and when you find a place that has it – you keep going back. Our place of choice is Waterfront, but as you can imagine, fresh seafood in Iowa costs a little more than it does on the coasts. So last week, we decided to try to make our favorite Waterfront cuisine ourselves at home.

To our surprise, Waterfront offers up their recipes on their website – in printable 4×6 recipe cards. They also have a market attached to the restaurant that sells fresh seafood daily.

Many businesses consider their recipes top secret – whether it be business processes, industry knowledge, or expertise. So why does a business like Waterfront embrace it? Why do they give out their recipes and all the means to make it yourself when their core business is to prepare and serve you food?

This act of giving away information is core to the Freemium business model. It is fundamental to the content strategies Doug and I discuss on our internet business podcast and is something I teach my clients when we discuss organic SEO. It’s the reason I blog, record a podcast, tweet industry details, etc. I give away my successful internet business recipes daily – but for what? Why give away something when I can have people to pay me for that knowledge?

Lets return to Waterfront… They give you a recipe and the ingredients – and send you on your way to make that delicious Halibut Royale that you’ve eaten in the restaraunt a number of times. Excitedly you arrive home and start cooking. As you work your way through the recipe you find it’s not as easy as you had thought. And when you finally pull it out of the oven and take the first bite – you realize it’s not near as good as it is in the restaraunt. So next time you get the craving for fresh seafood you will likely return to the restartaunt and purchase the expert-made halibut royale rather than attempting to prepare it yourself.

So I give away all my web strategy recipes. Some people will take them and run – never requiring my consulting services. But many will take the recipes and try to make them work themselves only to realize they aren’t cut out for it. Upon this realization who do you think they will return to? … the chef that gave them the recipe.

This principle forms a significant cornerstone in how we are changing our business in 2010. Do you give away your recipes? Let us know in the comments or jump into the forums.

5 Things Your Business Needs To Do On The Web In 2010

Here are five things you can focus on when you are planning your 2010 Web Strategy….

1. Target Local

• Use Google Local Dashboard
• Write Targeted Copy (ex: “We are the top full service plumbers in des moines“)
• Geographically target ads on Facebook and Google

2. Use Content For Marketing

• Create some videos
• Repurpose content
• Spread it everywhere

3. Make Data Driven Decisions

• Use information and analytics to make decisions
• Test everything

4. Maintain Content Outposts

• Make sure the content you are creating is delivered TO your audience
• Stay alert on your outposts to further discussion
• Use tools like HootSuite to manage all outposts efficiently

5. Make Money Online

• Create new revenue streams using the web (it’s not as hard as you think)
• Generate hot leads using social media and search marketing
• Get and grow a good list

What are you doing in 2010 for your business? Let us know in the comments or jump into the forums!

Interested in how you can run your business online? Check out our latest webinar.

image via houseofsims

Top 10 Web Strategy Posts Of 2009

Here are our top ten most read posts of this year…

1. Social Media Is Not A Web Strategy

2. 5 Things Small Businesses NEED To Do Online

3. Where To Start With Small Business Internet Marketing

4. 5 Cornerstones Of An Effective Web Strategy

5. How To Take Care Of WordPress

6. Real Time Social Media Press Releases

7. 5 Tips For Creating A Data Driven Business

8. Bing Website Optimization

9. Is Your Internet Marketing Campaign Spam?

10. Web  Strategy Basics

Thanks for making 2009  a great year! Stay tuned for big changes coming to this site and our company 48Web in 2010!

Increase Your Shareability With The Meebo Bar

Today we installed the Meebo Bar WordPress Plugin on this site.

If you look at the screenshot below you’ll see it adds a “bar” along the bottom with several social and sharing functions…

Hovering the “Share Page” button on the bar allows visitors to your site to quickly share the page…

We also setup the ability for visitors to ask us questions when they are on the site. If you are reading something and have a question about it – just ask us! We’ll try to get back to you right away.

We also added the RSS, Twitter, Facebook, and StumbleUpon buttons using the easy configuration tool provided by Meebo. The RSS button pulls the latest from our RSS feed. The Twitter button pulls our latest tweets. The Facebook Button shows off our fan page widget. And the StumbleUpon button lets you share it to the SU network.

If you have any questions about the Meebo bar and integrating it into your website, jump into our forums or leave us a comment here.

Social Media Is Not A Web Strategy

Neither is email marketing. Neither is blogging. Neither is search engine marketing. Or Facebook pages. Or LinkedIn. Or an iPhone app. Or Twitter. Or WordPress. Or podcasting. Or creating killer content…

None of these on their own is as effective as using them all together!

Coordinating them all together IS a web strategy

Don’t get us wrong – we love social media, internet marketing, search advertising, etc. But just focusing on individual tactics is not a strategy. You need to plan on how to get all these practices to work together to run your business online. Every other year we have new buzz words and hot marketing tactics that everyone dumps all of their time and money into – especially when it comes to the web. This type of silo marketing works in the short term – but not in the long term.

If you really want to run your business online – you need to figure out how all these work together so you can plan a long term web strategy for your business.

Got a question? Jump into the forum or leave us a comment!

Small Business Keyword Research – An Interview With Larry Kim

In this video I get the pleasure of interviewing Larry Kim, founder of WordStream about using his free keyword tools for small business online marketing. We also talk about some of his fantastic premium products that change the way internet marketers hone and craft their PPC advertising campaigns. We also talked about the power of long tail keywords and how you can use WordStream to find the best ones.

[RSS Readers, click through]

Here are some of the topics discussed in this interview…

1. Who are you?

2. What is your background?

3. What is WordStream?

4. What tools do you offer?

5. How can this help small business

6. We share a lot of internet business models with our readers. Your model of freemium – giving away free tools with defined upgrade paths to premium tools – is one that interests a lot of our readers. Can you give us a high level view on how you run your business using this model?

7. How can people get ahold of you?

Check out WordStream’s killer tools, their internet marketing blog, and follow them on Twitter. You can also follow Larry on Twitter @LarryKim

Have any questions? Leave us a comment or jump in the forums!

Comment Spam, Getting Hacked, And SEO

A couple of weeks ago we shared with you how comment spam hurts SEO…

We also shared with you that our WordPress sites got hacked because we failed to update the site in time to block some vulnerabilities…

Because of both of these problems – comment spam and getting hacked – the #1 keyword on this very site became “levitra”. Scrolling down, #15 is “viagra”. In case you are wondering – this is not good.

This is a huge problem we’ve since cleaned up and we want to pass on some advice to you on dealing with spam and security.

1. Whatever platform you use – make sure you are running the latest version and take security seriously. If you are using WordPress, start here to learn how to take care of it…

2. As much as it completely sucks to deal with comment spam – deal with it and figure out a system to stop it.

3. Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools NOW. Not only did GWT alert me of malicious content on my site (from getting hacked) it also told me “levitra” and “viagra” were high significant keywords on my site – obviously sounding off a huge alarm pointing at comment spam.

Do you have any questions on dealing with this? Let us know in the forums, @webstrategyshop, or via comment here. You don’t want this to happen to you.

Vote For Next Webinar Topic

We are already planning the next webinar is our Web Strategy Bootcamp series – but we want to know what YOU want to learn about!

What do you want to learn for your business to succeed on the web?

How To Run Your Business Online – Webinar Video

Last week we did our first webinar for running your business online in 2010. For the last two years we’ve been running our business online and in this webinar we show you how we do it. We talk about everything from running your IT in the cloud to internet marketing and advertising.

This video is currently available to members only (free signup!) but we’ll open it up for everyone next week…

UPDATE: The video is open to everyone now!

Video
Sorry about the editing job – the next one will be better… My screencasting program unexpectedly quit in the middle so I had to deal with a different file format. Instead of messing around with it for days – I decided to release it as-is…

Slides
View the webinar slides for running your business online.

[register_free]

If you have any questions, please jump into the forums or leave us a comment!

Running Your Business Online – Webinar Slides

We’ll post the video soon! Thanks again to everyone that tuned in!

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