17 Videos to Help You Grow Your Business

The amount of free quality video content available on the Internet is truly phenomenal. Whatever you want to learn, there is almost certainly a video to teach you. The following videos are presented to help you market and grow your business, with some inspiration thrown in for good measure. Enjoy, and let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Hot Internet Marketing Strategy For Your Online Business – 9:10

Presented by MarketingTips.com, this is a great primer on opt-in email marketing. The video is a couple of years old, but it has just recently gained popularity, and it’s still full of relevant, useful information.

Social Media Marketing Facebook Tutorial – 6:02

There’s no denying that Facebook can be an effective tool for your business. But how do you use effectively? This very well-made video by KershMedia.co.uk uses some great examples and explanations to help get you on track to forming a Facebook strategy to help grow your business.

Video marketing tutorial: What is video marketing? – 7:37

The posters of each of the videos above is participating in video marketing. They’re doing so because it’s a great way to get the word out about your business, improve your SEO, and establish you as an authority in your field. This video gives you the rundown on what video marketing is all about.

How to Write a Strategic Marketing Plan – 5:38

If you’ve struggled with the marketing plan section of your business plan, this video from growthink.com is for you. The what, why, and how of marketing plans are covered, and each section of the marketing plan is detailed. An excellent resource to finally get your marketing plan in place.

**HOT** Facebook Marketing Strategy – 9:14

Confused about the dos and don’ts of Facebook? This high-quality video by Angela Giles explains it all. She offers great tips with examples, screen shots and other useful information. Don’t let Facebook continue to be a mystery. Watch this video and get the answers you need.

Setting Your Social Media Strategy – 1:00:18

Yes, this video is over an hour long – and yes, it’s worth your time. Presented by Salesforce.com, this video was made at Dreamforce 2009 just a few months ago, so the information is current and very relevant to your business.

Using Twitter Effectively for Marketing and Sales – 1:07:23

Another session from Dreamforce 2009, this one focuses on Twitter as a marketing tool. The panel, made up of representatives from Salesforce.com, Virgin America, and Twitter, is very helpful and of course extremely knowledgeable about this topic.

Become A Blogger: Darren Rowse Interview Part 1 – 9:42

(Part 2 – 9:40)

(Part 3 – 9:01)

(Part 4 – 5:34)

Whether you are or aren’t already successfully blogging this video set is a must if you have any interest in blogging at all. Presented by Gideon Shalwick of BecomeABlogger.com, these four videos make up an interview with Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net, considered by many to be the foremost authority on blogging.

Les Brown: 1 of 6 – 9:02

(2 of 6 – 9:31)

(3 of 6 – 8:44)

(4 of 6 – 8:34)

(5 of 6 – 8:16)

(6 of 6 – 3:56)

If you’re not familiar with Les Brown, you’re in for a treat. Les is one of the best motivational speakers out there. This set is from many years back but still very relevant, and truly inspirational. If you need a kick in the butt or a reason to believe in yourself, watch these videos, and learn to lift yourself to success!

12 No-Cost Tools to Help Improve Your SEO

Even to some who have been online for years, SEO can be somewhat of a mystery. While there are a lot of differing opinions on the techniques that are the most effective for getting your site to the top of the search engines, there’s no doubt that a key factor in your success is being able to effectively access and analyze data. Below are 12 free web-based tools to help you in your SEO efforts:

Keyword Mutation Detection Tool We all strive for our sites to look professional and for our writing to be grammar and spelling error-free, but if you can find a way to incorporate some strategic misspellings into your page, it can pay off. This tool will give you common “mutations” of your key words, including misspellings as well as correctly spelled variations. For example, enter “entrepreneur” and you’ll get: entrepreneurs, entreprenur, and entreprenuer. As these are all commonly entered search terms, there’s an opportunity to capitalize on the mistakes people make when searching.

Term Extractor From SEOmoz, which offers quite a few helpful tools, this one will analyze your pages and determine which search terms it looks like you’re trying to target. It’s a valuable tool, especially if the resulting report shows you’re optimized for terms other than what you had hoped!

Wordtracker Suggestion Tool Enter a keyword into this simple tool, and it will provide you with a list of up to 100 suggested search terms that include your keyword. The nice thing about this tool is that it also provides the number of searches performed for each phrase, so you can target those most likely to drive more traffic.

Keyword Difficulty Check Want to see how hard you’re going to have to work to get on the first page of search results for your keywords? This tool is for you. Just enter the word or phrase you want it to check, and you’ll get a percentage of difficulty result. For example, if you want to be on the first search results page for the word “blog”, you’re looking at a 93.48% (out of 100%) difficulty ranking. Want to be right up toward the top for “sesquipedalian armadillo” though? You’ve got a great chance at just 22.91% difficulty!

Term Target Grader You might not have been an A student in school, but now you can get A’s where it really counts. Enter your URL and targeted keyword or phrase into this tool, and you’ll get a letter grade reflective of how your page actually targets your desired keyword, along with a detailed report. The only catch: unless you’re a premium member of SEOmoz, you’ll only get one of these reports every 24 hours.

Keyword Group Detection Tool Another tool from Microsoft’s adCenter Labs, this one “helps you find groups of words from the pool of online queries that are related or similar to keywords that you enter.” In other words, you enter a keyword you want to optimize for, and it will give you common search words and phrases relating to that keyword for which you might also want to optimize. It’s a good way to get your creativity going when planning your SEO.

SEO Browser is a tool that allows you to see your site as the search engines see it. Offering both basic and advanced modes for free, the resulting report generated by SEO Browser gives you a clear view of your site content, including meta data, text-to-page weight ratio, number of internal and external links, and tons more, all on one page. This allows you to easily identify problems and ways you can improve your site.

Keyword Tracking with Backlink Tracker Meant to be used over time, this very cool free tool tracks your search engine placement (Google, Yahoo, and Bing) for specified keywords over time. This tool also checks search engines for the number of backlinks to your page over time. You’ll need to sign up for a free account and place a PHP script on your server for it all to work. The detailed charts and reports you get make it worth the effort.

SEOToolSet offers several tools, from the not-so-useful source code viewer (your browser does that), to the very cool Competition Research Tool, which analyses your site and finds and compares it with your competitors based on your chosen key words. They’ve also got a keyword tool that returns results detailing demographics (gender and age statistics), click-through rates, and the CPC average for the major engines.

SEO Scores This tool gives you a ton of information about your site. Broken into four sections, the data is well organized and very useful. The areas analyzed are: 1. On-page SEO, which includes metadata, image summary, W3C validation, more; 2. Off-page SEO, including domain information, Google rank, backlinks, last Google crawl date, and traffic rank; 3. Blogosphere, which just tells you if your key words appear in your blog, and your Technorati ranking; and 4. Social Mediasphere, giving you del.icio.us bookmarks and a Digg submission summary.

Google Keyword Tool Meant for Google Adwords users, this simple keyword tool provides local and global search volume numbers for the keywords and phrases you enter, as well as about 150 related terms. It also supplies suggested terms and allows you to export the reports to a text or csv (for Excel) file. There are also some dropdowns with additional options, most of which are specific to those using Adwords.

Reciprocal Link Checker Want to see if people are placing the reciprocal links they promised? This tool does just that. Enter your site and multiple reciprocal sites, and you’ll get a report showing how many (if any) links on their sites point back to you. While this particular tool does not tell you which page(s) on the reciprocal sites are linking to you, it does save the time of hunting for your links on their sites.

These twelve tools should begin to get you the information you need to help improve your SEO. There are, of course, other tools out there. Which ones have you found useful? Be sure to share your experience in the comments below.

Set and Accomplish Your Goals: 5 Easy Steps

In business and in life, we all need goals if we want to be any better off than we are right now. There are a million different methods for setting and accomplishing goals, which is great, as not every method works for everyone. The following five step process is easy to implement and will help many get from here to there whatever your goals may be.

1. Get some clarity
To be effective, goals must be clear, concise, specific, and measurable. Be very clear on what you want to accomplish, the date by which you will complete the goal, and how you’ll know you’ve accomplished it. It isn’t enough to say, “I want to have the ‘go-to’ blog about do-it-yourself web deisgn.” How will you know you’ve accomplished that goal? More importantly, what does it really mean to have the ‘go-to blog?’ A more effective goal would be, “By May 1, 2010, my blog will be first in the Google search results for the term ‘DIY web design.’” Of course it’s also important that your specific goal is realistic. If you’ve just started a blog on Internet marketing and want it to be 1st in the search results within 30 days, you might need to reassess. The key is to have a crystal clear picture of what you want and by when you want it. Put that down on paper, then go to step 2.

2. Break it down
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time! For every major goal, there are almost always smaller goals that must be met first. For example, you’ve got to get to 10,000 RSS subscribers before you hit 40,000. If your goal is to bank $50,000 by October 1st, figure out when it will be realistic to have reached $40,000, $25,000, and $10,000. Set those dates and shoot for each one, with the larger goal always in your mind, but with the “sub-goal” as your short range target and primary focus, until it’s hit - then celebrate, and move to the next one. This technique helps to keep you from being overwhelmed with huge goals. If your goal is $1 million in sales in three years, and the most you’ve made to date is $800, there will be a part of your mind saying, “A million dollars is so much money. How will I ever do that?” Breaking your huge goal into smaller goals helps your mind accept the possibilities, and it will help you stay on track too.

3. Cross the bridges - before you get to them
No matter what goal you set for yourself or your business, there are bound to be challenges and obstacles along the way. If not, your goal isn’t big enough. While you can’t plan for every possible contingency, you can probably foresee the most likely complications that might prevent or at least slow your progress. Working through the “what-ifs” now will make them much easier to overcome when they actually do occur. Let’s say you write a blog on extreme mountain-biking, and you have a goal to reach 20,000 subscribers by August of this year. You’ve been injured before, and know that it’s not uncommon for those in your sport to be knocked out of commission every now and then. If you want to reach your goal, you’ve got to post relevant, interesting articles often, so what happens if you break both wrists and aren’t able to type for weeks or months? Having considered and planned for that possibility, you have a reserve of several articles on the ready. Because you want your posts to be timely, you also decide to begin right now forming relationships with other bloggers in your arena and asking them to occasionally guest blog. Now, if you do need to be away, you won’t be panicking about losing readers while you’re recovering from your injuries.

4. Aaaand… Action!
It’s been said that a goal without a plan is just a dream. In breaking down your goal and planning for contingencies, you have formed a plan that will carry you from where you are to where you want to be. Now, all that’s left is taking the necessary actions to get you to your goal. For this, it might be helpful to take step 2, and break your goals down even further. Ask yourself, “What actions do I need to take each day that will get me closer to my goal?” Taking action daily toward accomplishing your goals will keep you focused on the goal as well as on those smaller goals that will get you to the big one. Don’t let a day pass where you don’t take some step, no matter how small, toward your objective.

5. Assess as you progress
As you move toward your goals, it is important to check to see if you’re on the right track. If you were traveling from Los Angeles to New York by car, you wouldn’t consider taking the trip without a map. In goal achievement, your plan is your map. But you don’t just look at your map before leaving Los Angeles and then put it away. You must check it periodically to make sure you’re still headed in the right direction. It’s just as important to assess your progress toward your goals. This can be accomplished a number of ways. One way that works well for many is with a wall calendar. If your goal is based on a number (subscribers, money earned, search ranking, etc.) write where you are each day on your calendar. This will go a long way to helping you stay focused and on track. You might also notice trends that you can manage to, or a need to adjust either your goal or your methods of reaching it. And if you find you’re lost, don’t be afraid to ask for directions!

As Brian Tracy puts it, “Goals are the fuel in the furnace of achievement.” Whether you use this process or something else, the important thing is that you set goals for yourself and for your business. Share your thoughts in the comments. Which methods do you use to set or track your goals?

CoTweet – What it is and Why You Need It

You have a Twitter account, right? Of course you do. And you’ve read a lot of blog posts and articles on our site and everywhere else about optimizing your Twitter efforts for business. But you might still be struggling to efficiently, effectively connect with your customers and prospects using Twitter. Well, fret no more. If you haven’t heard about CoTweet, you’re in for a treat. If you’ve been looking for the best way to manage multiple Twitter accounts or want to maximize your marketing through Twitter, CoTweet just might be the app for you.

What it does

As they describe themselves, “CoTweet is a platform that helps companies reach and engage customers using Twitter.” The tools it gives you to accomplish that are like nothing else out there. Sure, there are tons of tools available for Twitter, but few are truly focused on the needs of business users, and none offer everything CoTweet does all in one place. CoTweet is specifically designed for businesses using Twitter. Not only does it let you manage multiple accounts and assign multiple users, but much like Google Alerts, it also lets you track trends as well as tracking when people are tweeting about you, your business, and/or your industry. If that weren’t enough, the application also allows you to schedule tweets, track clicks for posted URLs, and even assign on-call duty to different users so DM and other alerts go to specific people at different times.

How it works

The core of CoTweet is a lot like an email client. You have your folders, like Inbox, Sent, and Scheduled, on the left, your messages in the center pain, and some administrative functions on the right side. There is also a search box on the left, and you can set up saved searches for terms you want to track on a regular basis. Once you set up your accounts, your feeds begin flowing in, and it allows you to see your feed, your @replies, hash tag tracking, etc. at a glance. With a couple of clicks, you can compose and schedule tweets, check click stats, and respond to DMs or @replies. The interface is very polished and fairly intuitive, and users have reported few bugs and glitches. Overall, it’s incredibly easy to get used to and begin using, which, considering its considerable functionality is pretty impressive.

To signup for CoTweet, you enter your basic information, put in your Twitter account details, and you’re up and running in no time. The cost is zero at the moment, while they are in beta phase, but that will change soon enough. Still, the company promises “We’ll give you plenty of notice before we start charging for the service, and the cost will be reasonable.” Their announcement yesterday that they have been acquired by ExactTarget, a leader in email marketing, might or might not change that, but they insist the vision remains the same.

Who’s using it

Some of the largest, most prominent companies around are using CoTweet to manage their Twitter activities. These include:

• Coca Cola
• Ford
• Southwest Airlines
• McDonald’s
• Dell
• Starbucks
• Pepsi
• Microsoft
• And, yes, Twitter

Is it right for you?

Obviously the above is a list of huge companies, and it’s true that much of the platform is designed for corporate users who might have multiple editors posting and responding to tweets on multiple Twitter accounts. That doesn’t mean small businesses can’t benefit from the application though. Even if you never used the multiple-users feature, there is still plenty of value there. If nothing else, it’s nice to have all the functionality in one place. While it’s free, give it a try. You might just find it will be worth whatever they decide to charge after the beta.

The Socially Responsible Entrepreneur – Are You One?

As recent as ten years ago, terms like, “renewable,” “fair trade,” and “sustainability” were considered the vocabulary of the fringe. These words were uttered mostly by those some referred to as “tree huggers” and “granolas,” and “real” entrepreneurs were more concerned with making some cold hard cash than with making a difference. That’s not to say business was completely self-centered. The largest percentage of charitable donations always came from business, and for years many companies have included as part of their mission to make a difference in the world. Still, the emphasis on making the world a better place for all to live, while we build our businesses, has only recently shifted.

These days, you’re as likely to catch a CEO talking about corporate or social responsibility as the bottom line. No one can pinpoint for sure why this shift has taken place, but it might have something to do with so many young idealists starting companies that have become huge corporations. Not long ago the most prominent companies were all run by 60-somethings who prided themselves in doing business the old fashioned way. Now, even though the Fortune 500 hasn’t changed much, the companies getting the largest chunk of the media attention (at least positive media attention) were started by people in their 20s and 30s.

What is socially responsible entrepreneurialism?

Whatever the reason, social responsibility in business is here now, and it’s growing. But what exactly does it mean to be a socially responsible entrepreneur? The Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship defines social entrepreneurs as “Those who drive social innovation and transformation in various fields including education, health, environment, and enterprise development.” In other words, a social entrepreneur is someone who takes actions to make the world a better place while building their business. Does that mean your business has to be about green energy or saving endangered species? No, socially responsible entrepreneurs don’t necessarily devote their business to causes. Being a socially responsible entrepreneur is about doing what your business does best, and considering other factors, such as the environment, poverty, or social equality when making business decisions.

3 Steps You Can Take to be a Social Entrepreneur

1. Green it up. Even if you’re a home-based CEO, there are simple steps you can take to help the environment. The easiest and most obvious is recycling. Nearly every city has some sort of recycling program for your paper, cardboard, glass, and metal waste, but you can go a step further. Rather than throwing that draft print job in the recycling bin, why not use it as scratch paper, and then toss it to the recyclers once it’s really used up? Also, consider switching to more energy efficient light bulbs, and buying recycled paper. For more tips for a green home office, click here. Any change you make will help to make a difference, and those changes that save energy or reuse materials will save you some money as well.

2. Give it away. Time to replace that old printer, copier, or PC? Don’t just throw it out. If it still works or just needs some TLC, there are definitely organizations in your community that can use it. Check out the National Christina Foundation or TechSoup Stock to find out how to donate your electronics to a good cause. If you have a company with several employees, consider holding a food or clothing drive a couple of times a year. It’s not just during the holidays when people are in need. Local charities are always happy to take your donations.

3. Pick a cause. As an entrepreneur, you know it’s important to focus on what you’re most passionate about. The same is true when it comes to doing good. Pick a topic within the realm of social responsibility that appeals to you, and concentrate your efforts on making a difference in that area. Of course if the area you choose is saving the rainforest, you’ll still recycle, but your primary focus will be on rainforest conservation efforts and the charities that support that. If it’s the environment, that might mean reducing your carbon footprint by 30% and going paperless within 12 months. If your heart is pulled toward undernourished children, it might mean donating 5% of your profits to a charity of that kind and sponsoring a city-wide food drive for them every year. When you choose a single cause and do a good job of supporting it, your company becomes linked to that cause, and your customers and potential customers see that. So it’s good for business, as well as good for the soul.

While we all like to make money, finding meaning and fulfillment in our lives is a universal need, and one many entrepreneurs hope to satisfy through starting a business. Becoming a socially responsible entrepreneur helps us to do both. When we’re doing what we love, making money, and helping to make the world a better place to live, what more can there be?

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