august 2007

Have you ever Googled your name?

If you are a creative professional that is trying to build up your expertise, are you building up your online references? In today’s electronic world, it’s important to build up your name in as many locations as possible.

On a recent Google of my name, there was over 18,000 pages for my name (there is another Lori Osterberg, so I’ve got competition ) I want people to be able to find information about me through a variety of sources - including my name.

I also Google my business name periodically, and see what comes up that way too. What pages are ranking well? What can you do to influence what’s most popular?

In today’s fast pace world, it’s all about exposure. What are you doing to get noticed?

Lori

p.s. Domain names are under $10US per year - do you have your name as a domain name? Get it now.

Remember when businesses could survive without a website?

I’ve been online and had at least one website working for me for over 14 years now. Yet I also know that even though I’ve embraced technology, and couldn’t live without it, there are still people out there that have never created a site for their business. In fact, I currently have a half dozen business cards in front of me without an email address on them.

Let’s look at a few stats for a moment. In 2000, Google indexed about 1 billion pages. By the end of 2004, those numbers had risen to 8 billion. Currently, the latest estimate is that Google has indexed about 14 to 15 billion pages. All of this means people are adding a lot of content to the online arena – and its growing not just in America, United Kingdom and Australia. It’s growing in the far corners of the world.

Doing business online has truly made it to the mainstream. And for all of you that have a website and realize the importance, you’ve probably contemplated the next step. SEO, or search engine optimization is about getting your site ranked and in front of your prospects and your customers. But what most people don’t realize the strategy it takes to make that move.

When you think SEO, what does it bring up in your mind? Getting ranked high in the search engines? Magically appearing in ads? Getting more traffic than you can handle?

All of that may be a part of SEO, but unless you create a strategy, it will never happen.

I recently sat down with Jeff, a business consultant. He created a small website a couple of years ago, and left it up more as a brochure than anything else. It didn’t go into a lot of detail about his business; it just gave a brief explanation about Jeff and his business. He received no business from his site, and he was looking to change that.

After a five-minute analysis, I began to see some definite areas where we could make changes. Jeff had a friend who designed his site. This friend dabbled in web design on the side, and did it more for fun. But he now had a new full time position, two kids – and no time to help Jeff make changes. The first problem was Jeff’s friend had used an old “template” for the design, and all of his keywords were from an entirely different industry!

Next, because Jeff knew very little about SEO, he only had one goal with his online strategy: to be number one under the keyword “business consultant” in Google. He spent a few hundred dollars on Google’s Pay Per Click strategy, but recently gave up when he had little success.

Jeff had never sat down and created an online strategy that would truly help his business. He was guilty of the most common problem made by today’s small business owners – he listened to all the wonderful stories about the power of the ...

I was reading an article today about the owner of the website Koloroo Like a lot of today’s entrepreneurs, he works a full time job, but decided to build a side business to make some extra cash. So he built a few widgets to use on an iPod - and the rest as they say is history.

So I had to head over and check out the site. Check out his demo at tipkalc This is a great example of how you should be showing your cliens what your product can do. You can interact with the iPod to try it out, and you can see how it works by mousing over the numbers in the layout dissection area.

Does this give you any ideas?

Lori