CloudOne Storage is built on the best-of-breed EMC® Atmos storage platform, which is known for enterprise level performance and security. If you host with PEER 1, you enjoy additional savings of free bandwidth across their 10GB SuperNetwork™ backbone. For more info, visit here.

There are a couple of things you need to know first, before you embark on a paid search campaign.

1. If your sales cycle is longer than 2 weeks from click to sale, your results might suck.

This is an important one, and many people miss the mark here.  If whatever you are selling takes multiple visits, multiple people in the decision process, or is a large, emotional transaction, chances are your paid campaign will suck.  Let’s look at a few examples:

Plumbing Service – you’ve got a overflow situation getting worse by the minute. Do you search 15 plumbers and call for quotes? No. You go to your computer (or mobile phone) and within 60 seconds search for a local plumber and choose the one that looks most   You might even pick the one who mentions “emergency service” or “available 24 hours” or “30 minute emergency response.” You probably don’t care much about the price either – you just want it fixed.

Real Estate – buying property is usually not an impulse buy. We look at lots of options, talk to lots of people, make personal visits and collect a lot of information before making the final purchase. This is definitely not an impulse purchase. Paid search can work in this case if the margins are high enough to where even if the conversions are dismal, one sale could pay for the whole campaign.

Air Conditioning Repair –Like the plumber, you need the next available company to service your system, because it is 100 degrees outside and your AC isn’t working. The first or second listing will get the deal.

Home Health Care – getting a parent or loved one into a home health care situation is an emotional experience. Not only is the sales cycle longer than 2 weeks, but the decision is usually not with one person, which makes it a harder deal to close. If clicks are going for $5-10 a piece, you could spend hundreds before getting a new client.

2. Send your clicks to a very targeted landing page.  Quality score matters and can greatly affect your cost per click.

We see a lot of businesses sending their paid ads to the home page of their website.  Sending someone to a page that has little to do with what the ad said will result in a poor Quality Score.  Secondly, your home page has lots of other links and things to distract a visitor (who you just paid for) to do just about anything other than what you want them to do – convert.

3. Find out what long tail terms in SEO convert well, and bid on those.

This is also an overlooked area in paid search.  If you take a gander at your analytics, you already know which organic search terms convert well.  Many of them are branded (include your company name), but some are not.  Many of them will be long tail, or terms which are extremely targeted and result in fewer visitors, but less bounce rate and higher conversions.  Bid on these long tail terms – they will be cheaper and will likely convert better.

Is the Apple iPad a funky tech fad or a game changer?

After listening to Wired Magazine Chris Anderson’s keynote at adtech San Francisco this year, the iPad is not only a game changer and will forever change the way we consume the Internet, but will also reinvigorate the gasping publishing industry. His main argument — the iPad and future tablets from HP, Google and the rest offer a controlled delivery and experience that you cannot achieve through the traditional html-web browser format we’ve become accustomed to – because they must be cross-platform friendly and therefore allow for less control over the final packaging. On the iPad, the experience is controlled, which allows the web product to be more packaged and polished. For example, examine the difference between reading the Wall Street Journal as a newspaper vs. through your web browser vs. through the iPad app version. The iPad app allows the WSJ to flow more like a newspaper as it was painstakingly intended to be by their design and publishing team. A beautifully packaged and intuitive experience rather than the after-thought feel of reading WSJ through Firefox or Safari. This, along with the simple touchscreen interface that anybody and their grandmother can use, makes the iPad a compelling piece of technology that is very, very hard to ignore.

Combined with the recent redesign of Moishes.com, this user-friendly interactive tool allows visitors to the website to simply drag and drop icons of items they plan to store, by room type, into a virtual storage space. The Moishe’s Storage Space Estimator calibrates the cubic feet of the items, suggests an optimal-sized storage space, and offers customers a price quote. Customers can then reserve their units online, schedule a free pickup, and upload the pictures of their goods for future inventory management all within seconds!

“Moishe’s has always been ahead of the curve when it comes to technology and customer service in the moving and storage industry,” said Moishe’s Moving Systems CEO Gene Lemay. “We’ve taken our online customer experience to a whole new level with the Storage Space Estimator, allowing customers to optimize their Self Storage costs.”

The initial launch of Moishe’s Storage Space Estimator serves Moishe’s Self Storage customers. Moishe’s has over 3 million square feet of state-of-the-art storage space in New York (Long Island City and Brooklyn) and Chicago. Moishe’s has filed for a patent for the Storage Space Estimator, and in the coming weeks, the online system will be expanded to serve Moishe’s Mobile Storage customers across the U.S.

A little history, the company was created in 1983 and by 1990, Moishe’s became the largest independent moving company in New York City, with a host of movers, a convoy of red trucks and several storage facilities. Five years later, Moishe’s was the largest moving company in the Tri-State area. Today, Moishe’s has hundreds of employees, scores of red trucks and millions of square feet of storage which utilize state-of-the-art technologies to assure the safety and security of their clients’ belongings. Moishe’s operates regional offices across the country and has established six specialized divisions catering to the unique moving and storage needs of thousands of individuals, families and businesses every day.

Business consultant and author Stephanie Chandler of The Leap! 101 Ways to Grow Your Business and The Business Startup Checklist and Planning Guide shares some great tips for business owners in this economy. Watch her video made exclusively for BIG Marketing for Small Business.

Social Media – start networking; it’s all about relationships. Don’t walk into a function thinking “What I am I gaining. What’s in it for me?” Go in there with the mindset that everything is an opportunity to build relationships.

Marketing Plans – get a vision; find what you need to make it happen. Where do you want to be in 5, 10, 15 years? What steps and goals must be accomplished to reach that vision?

Publicity Plans – create a month-by-month plan of publicity opportunities for your business. Know who’s covering what and when they are covering. Don’t forget about online!

Check out the video for more tips. She also talks about the Project Rev contest that could give your small business a $5,000 boost!

Here’s a video recap by NovusTV of the F5 Expo held April 7th, 2010 in Vancouver, Canada.

(Left to Right) Michael Tippet of NowPublic, Justin Young of Radar DDB, and myself discuss cost effective video marketing at the F5 Expo on April 7th in Vancouver, Canada.

Photos courtesy of www.jeremylim.ca

The F5 Expo held Wednesday, April 7th was a tremendous event. Rich content, well-attended and a powerful keynote from best-selling author of Blink, Tipping Point, and Outliers Malcolm Gladwell. His challenge to people using and developing on the Internet is to use it to create strong ties rather than just weak ties, of which the Internet is already very good at. Revolutionary change can only happen through strong ties Malcolm argued, as he cited several examples throughout history to prove his point. His feeling, and I agree, is that the world needs more social revolution, and if revolution can only occur through strong ties, then we must find ways to use the Internet to foster it. The question is, are we up for it?

Malcolm Gladwell argues that the Internet has only been good at generating weak ties quickly amongst crowds of people. Social revolution can only happen through strong ties.

I had signed up to moderate two panels, the first being Cloud Computing and the other Search Engine Marketing. Thank you to my panelists for a job well done. I got some very positive feedback on these topics from attendees. I was also a last second replacement on the Cost Effective Video Marketing panel and had the privilege of sharing the stage with Justin Young of Radar DDB Vancouver and Michael Tippet of NowPublic. All-in-all, I thought it was a great event… minus the registration snafu! Well done Linz!

Network and communications technology giant Cisco Systems has teamed up with Brickfish for a unique program called Heroes of the Human Network which celebrates and rewards small business operators. To enter the program, you’re asked to describe your small business and how technology has helped you to advance or how the right technology could help your small business advance. Your profile will then be posted on their site where it will be ranked amongst other profiles by site visitors. A winner will be drawn after March 3rd, and will be awarded over $10,000 worth of Cisco product in network improvement. Plus, the winner will be exalted to “hero” status in an upcoming Heroes of the Human Network advertisement. There will also be some runner up prizes doled out. If you’re interested, enter here.

Malcolm Gladwell takes live questions through Mingleverse at F5 Expo Launch Party.

I was in attendance at the F5 Expo Launch Party yesterday, January 26th. What a great turnout! The place was packed with over 200 people – and all eyeballs were fixated on the many screens around the V Lounge as Malcolm Gladwell appeared within the Mingleverse online universe (think Second Life) to take questions from the live audience. If this party was any indication of what we can expect of the main event on April 7th, the Vancouver business and tech scene is in for a special treat. F5 Expo is all about online business, marketing, and technology. Hot topics like Search Engine Optimization, social media, video blogging, and cloud computing will be tackled in interactive sessions and panel discussions. I’ve just been added as a moderator on the SEO panel. Should be fun!

If you haven’t registered yet, take advantage of my personal promo code that gives you 30% off the ticket price until Jan 31st.

REGISTER NOW

ENTER PROMO CODE: P1F510

The Internet, and the communications technology that has come with it, has handed small business owners an amazing marketing tool. No longer do middlemen wield a lot of control; instead, the small brands with remarkable products and services have the tools (namely search engines and social networks) to connect them with their ideal customer. But that means having a great website, because first impressions count. Here are a few BIG ideas for making your website a better marketing tool.

Make it a One Stop Shop. You’re putting in a lot of work and effort to keep your brand top of mind with the customer. So why not take advantage of being the business of choice? Partner with others or launch your own additional products and services to bring in some ancillary income. Airlines have done this for years with travel insurance, hotels, and car rentals.  Why can’t you? Web technology makes it easy – just think hard about what would be a good fit.  You don’t want to make it too complicated.

Find What’s Missing. In a lot of verticals, you’ll find customers often complaining about the information that’s missing. Maybe it is a lack of reviews, maybe it’s just a directory of suppliers, or maybe it’s something deeper. Can you find what’s missing?  You might have to launch a site separate to yours, but wouldn’t it be nice to be the only advertiser and sponsor of a site your niche or industry has been desperate for? Make sure it isn’t adding noise or just another layer in the process.

Make It Simpler. We’ve been talking about a lot of extra stuff. But you don’t want bells and whistles, you want value. So maybe, for you, less is more? If you are suffering from an information glut, the winning formula might be a better way to present and sort through all that information.

Build a Community. Yes, yes – the social media pundits have been touting this one for awhile. But they’re right: if you want people to keep coming back to your website and your brand, you need it to be a place where they feel welcome. The easiest way to do that is to give them a seat at your table. Allowing comments on articles and accepting contributions of photos/articles/videos are two easy ways to start. But change your tone as well – why not call them “community members” instead of customers?

Ask Your Customers For Their Feedback. Feedback is invaluable, so why not ask your “community members” (see previous!)– the ones who are the raving fans and active participants in the discussion – what they think? You want to hear about what they like, but more importantly, what’s wrong? As hard as you try, you will never be perfect, but if you are listening to what your most profitable and engaged clients are saying, you can come close.

Guest Contributor – Andy Hayes is a professional writer and published author. He is the managing director of  Travel Online Partners  (TOP), the go-to resource for small businesses in travel and tourism for help with online technology. If you need more BIG ideas for your small business website, he can help.