Zero To Sixty Marketing

Susan Hamilton

Susan Hamilton is the owner of OffBeat Business Media, editor and talk show host of The OffBeat Business Show on OBBM Radio and OffBeat Business TV, a business FOR business media company spotlighting what’s working right in American business today. To learn how audio, video, digital magazine articles and ads can help you build a strong, influential brand, contact Susan@OffBeatBusiness.com or call 214-714-0495.

Facebook Business Pages: How YOU Doin’?

by 3 Comments

Connect with Zero To Sixty Marketing on FacebookFacebook has a neat way for small businesses to interact via Facebook Business Pages. A page won’t cost you anything, and may very well be a terrific way to build a following and interest in your particular company. That’s what we’re counting on, anyway.

We started working on ours a couple of months ago, along with updates to all of our media campaigns, just to see if it really is all it is cracked up to be. Why not, right? Well, simply stated, I can tell why we’re not all jumping out there to do it! Facebook navigation can be time consuming and confusing. Thing is, I believe in the potential. We’re going to figure out exactly how to promote ourselves on Facebook because we strongly believe in what it can do for small and home-based businesses. Meanwhile, here’s a few things we’ve ironed out that we’d like to share with you.   [Read more…] about Facebook Business Pages: How YOU Doin’?

It Could Happen To You: Vacation Twitstakes

by Leave a Comment

It Could Happen To You: Vacation Twit-stakes
It was early fall, 2009. Our family was enjoying an incredibly beautiful view of the mountains in northern New Mexico. Antelope, elk, buffalo, trout of every kind; magical cloud shadows intermittently cooling the frugal warmth of the altitude, and then…
all of a sudden…
DID I LEAVE MY AUTO TWEETS ROTATING WITHOUT ANY CONTROL??
YES. Yes I did. I had a brilliant plan to test a group’s response to my various tweets for a 12 hour spell. Two and a half days later, I realized I had forgotten to turn it off before I left town. Something that rolls off my tongue when explaining how easy and effective auto-tweets can be for businesses everywhere desiring to reach audiences that vary their attention spans between hours of the day, immediately became an opportunity for me to lose my entire reputation due to the risk that I had become–Twitterspam.
AW, CRAP.
No wireless in the cabins we were occupying. Since my husband, the Greatest Fisherman Of The Mountain, was quite a ways down stream (yet with the car, go figure) when I came to my realization, I had to bum a ride from a local to the civic center several miles away and work out my wireless muscle to see if I could remedy this mess.
Guess What I Learned About Tweet Automation?
NOT easy to remedy!! I use Social Oomph Professional for keyword research on the businesses I’m interested in following, and also for their somewhat simple method of rotating tweets. They allow several tweets to be posted in a certain format that causes random, rotated tweets that only need to be drafted in once, and from there you can schedule the frequency and pauses as necessary. Sounds groovy, right?
Trying to get a wireless connection in the back seat of a Ford Taurus with the excruciatingly bright, early morning sunlight–defying your ability to even see the screen let alone follow instructions, made for an irritation much like I imagine the chaffing of the buttocks after an eight-day, showerless excursion into the Arctic. But I digress…
Once in, having never been in this situation before and assuming an ‘off button’ would exist, I realized with trepidation that alas, it did not. EVERY SINGLE SCHEDULED TWEET, even though they were in the same family of tweets, had to be deleted from the text box where they originated, and from the published posts that had already gone out.
After an hour and a half, I was able to go through each and every one of the 22 published tweets and get rid of the origin, and then the published tweet. My logic being there would be nothing

It was early fall, 2009. Our family was enjoying an incredibly beautiful view of the mountains in northern New Mexico. Antelope, elk, buffalo, trout of every kind; magical cloud shadows intermittently cooling the frugal warmth of the altitude, and then …

all of a sudden …   [Read more…] about It Could Happen To You: Vacation Twitstakes

Clean Up Your List

by Leave a Comment

Clean Up Your List!
How many times have you received the neighbor’s mail, or direct mail advertisements that had absolutely nothing to do with your life? With mail so easy to get wrong, why not make sure your direct mail campaign hits the nail on the head? It’s time to clean up your list.
You may think it doesn’t matter so much, after all, how much direct mail comes to ‘Occupant,’ anyway? Depending on your market, it may not matter at all. But I would be willing to bet you that your campaign would fare much better if you knew that what you were promoting was going to people who could actually use your promotion.
Take a good look at your holiday promotion lists, and start vetting:
Businesses no longer operating
Names and addresses that have not responded in the last 4 promotions
Direct competition (I mean, why bother spending money on them?)
Replace those with:
New businesses in the same area
New addresses that didn’t exist before due to construction
Customers you know you can serve. Ask yourself who you’ve thought about including but have neglected to reach.
Now go forward and let the world know what you do is important to them, and that you’ve got them on your mind this holiday season. Happy Holidays!

How many times have you received the neighbor’s mail, or direct mail advertisements that had absolutely nothing to do with your interests or needs? With mail so easy to get wrong, why not make sure your direct mail campaign hits the nail on the head? It’s time to clean up your list.

[Read more…] about Clean Up Your List

Where Are Keywords Most Effective? PT 5

by Leave a Comment

I gave away a little of today’s post in my last one when I addressed how to use keywords. Remember, I asked you if you could:
Use them effectively in your H1, or header title.
Use them in your H2, or header for a bullet or numbered list.
Use them in the body of your short, opening paragraph.
That’s a start. Choosing one keyword, and using it like I showed you in my last post is very important. Using too many keywords can often take away from the quality writing you want to share with your readers. That one primary keyword should be used as described above, and it should be used in the opening lines of text under your title.
More Keyword Effectiveness
Another important placement of your primary keyword is in the anchor text of a link. Here’s why:
The anchor text, or the different colored wording used when linking, provided the links connect (and you must always check), adds good authority.
Anchor text used for linking outbound to another, possibly higher ranking site, may naturally turn into an inbound link once a relationship between authors is established. Keyword-rich anchor text coming in on an inbound link is good for authority.
Anchor text using effective keywords for your internal linking between pages of your website is also good for your reader, and by default, you.
Posting comments on relevant blogs and forums will also bring links in from other sites, so you want to include good keyword-rich anchor text when you leave them.
You’re not completely limited to one keyword for all your content. If used too frequently, you can actually hurt your site, not help it. Shoot for using your primary keyword naturally 2-3 times on a page in the places we’ve talked about. Then, go back and see if another word or phrase that you’ve researched can be used as a subordinate, worked into the text of your content. Don’t use it more than a few times.
It’s imperative that you write for your readership; your potential customers, your existing customers, and others, such as information gatherers and peers in your business to business relationships. If you can do this fluidly, and maintain the quality of your content, you’ve got the basics of a recipe for success.
One more thing as I wrap up this series. Be a good steward of your site. Make sure to reply to comments and return links to readers who have helped you link. It’s not going to hurt your company to complement or agree with a competitor’s comments or product lines, and doing so can actually be helpful for more than just linking. Once relationships are built, and that takes some time, you may very well find yourself in a situation where you may be offered extra work. Sometimes a company finds it better to send extra work to someone they trust than to risk turning down work with no alternative for their customer. That could only be possible with effective link strategies.
We’d love to hear from you. Be sure to leave your comments or questions with a link to your company along with your name below. Here’s to your small business success!

I gave away a little of today’s post in my last one, where I addressed how to use keywords. Remember, I asked you if you could:

  • Use them effectively in your H1, or header title.
  • Use them in your H2, or header for a bullet or numbered list.
  • Use them in the body of your short, opening paragraph.

That’s a start. Choosing one keyword, and using it like I showed you in Part 4 is very important. Using too many keywords can often take away from the quality writing you want to share with your readers. That one primary keyword should be used as described above, and it should be used in the opening lines of text under your title.   [Read more…] about Where Are Keywords Most Effective? PT 5

How Do We Use Those Keywords? PT4

by 2 Comments

Now its time to put forth a little effort. I’m going to ask you my favorite question:

What do you have to say to your customers, viewers, and peers?

Notice I never asked you what you had to say to a search engine. Your content is king, and if you ever start filling your web pages, press releases, articles, and blogs with randomly placed keywords, they will no longer be keywords. They will then be useless, lifeless gobbledygook that will only make you look uneducated, and there’s absolutely no authority in that.

[Read more…] about How Do We Use Those Keywords? PT4

Using Keyword Research Tools – PT 3

by Leave a Comment

We’ve been giving you the nuts and bolts breakdown of SEO, and we want to make sure you have access to some of the easiest keyword research tools out there. We’ve been using Wordtracker for several years now, but I’ve only recently started using this tool myself. A couple of years ago I had tried it and thought it difficult, but then again I had very little working knowledge about how to use the tool, and they’ve improved the experience for the researcher (you) by leaps and bounds. Anyone can figure this out.

First, make sure you take the tour. I don’t remember taking the tour, if they offered one on my first try years ago, but I’ve taken the tour since then and now think that it’s very helpful and can’t imagine trying to use it without taking the tour. I like things spelled out.

Wordtracker Tour

Very basically, there are four steps that you’ll be walked through in more detail:

  • Enter a keyword (one you’ve chosen off of the list we worked on in the last post)
  • Find the actual search traffic volume for your keyword
  • Evaluate competition for the word
  • Export results, and
  • Research again from your list

While you’re there, take a look at some of the blogposts in the Wordtracker Academy. I thought Lyndon Antcliff’s post on social media was a really great breakdown for any business owner.

[Read more…] about Using Keyword Research Tools – PT 3