Comments on: Cultivate Your Online Garden

By: The Best Brochure You Can Ever Print | Small Business Marketing Guide - Brought to you by HP

Mon, 04 May 2009 03:55:53 +0000

[...] know, I know, you’re all saying: “Print? Print? Battelle, in your last post, you implored us to get with the social times, start a blog, start Twittering, figure out Yelp. You [...]

By: Anita Campbell

Anita Campbell — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 01:28:22 +0000

The one thing I would add to this, John, is that the numbers of small businesses that have websites vary greatly according to factors such as:

(1) size of the small business;
(2) industries they are in;
(3) need for a web presence.

I was able to obtain some research from Barlow Research, based on a sample size 3 times as large as the study mentioned, and just as I suspected, the numbers showed the bigger the small business, the more likely to have a website. When you get to a business with $5Million in revenues, almost 75% have a website — a figure that is itself amazing because it’s hard for me to imagine a business with $5M in sales that does NOT have a website, but hey ….

All of which is to say, some small businesses do get the Web, especially as the business grows larger. Too bad it’s not 100%, though. But then, as you point out, there’s an entrepreneurial opportunity!

By: Five Fundamentals for SMB Websites | Small Business Marketing Guide - Brought to you by HP

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:03:31 +0000

[...] Done? Then it’s time to start cultivating your online garden. [...]

By: Duke Williams

Duke Williams — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 20:54:23 +0000

John, I would add a few things. 1 – begin understanding your online reputation with free tools like Google Alerts. 2 – comment appropriately on other blogs – not for the link back, but for the contact with the blogger. Mostly on smaller blogs. I would say no need to waste time like I am wasting mine right now commenting on a major blog.

Finally, I feel search is not where the small business person needs to concern themselves except for local search. I often ask people if they bank online. Then I ask how they found the bank’s online web site. None of them found it in search. So the goal in my mind is to provide something as useful as online banking as a reason to use the small business web site. This is not as hard as it sounds. It is also all about social.

Always remember you are a real person and the people you work with are real people too. The web is just another way to connect with and enhance your relationship with other real people.