It all started like this…

I read a lot.  Books, magazines, blogs (tons of blogs), newspapers,  white papers (that’s a fancy shmancy name for a multi page article or document), e-books, etc.  I received the Dispatch every day, Business First every week,  had subscriptions to 8 magazines (I did keep one subscription, it’s an important one), received post updates by email on 42 blogs (no, I’m not exaggerating) as well as reading the backs of countless cereal boxes and happy meal bags.

The newspapers cost $410.48 per year.

The magazines cost $185.00 per year.

If you’re still with me, that’s $595.48 per year.

As far as the billion hours claim… that might be a bit of a stretch.  However, I will tell you that most of what is printed (and I subsequently paid for) I didn’t really care about.  And with due respect to our hometown newspaper, it has become not much more than a pamphlet with  several ads that aren’t appealing to me. Sorry. The point is, it takes a bunch of time to page through newspapers and magazines just to find the stuff that is pertinent to me.  And, it costs a lot too.

If I’m being honest, the money saving is great but I would pay for good content.  Writers and publishers need to earn a living just like the rest of us I think.  Good topic for another post, huh? But, anyway, its the time saved and being able to drill down to exactly what I’m interested in that really excites me.

And, being bombarded with dozens of emails every day from blogs I subscribe to wasn’t much better.  Too much noise.  I needed to be able to see through the clutter to get to exactly what I wanted in as quick a time possible. We are all busy.

Introducing Google Reader (no, it’s not new… far from it actually) and RSS feeds.  Visit Feedburner to get your own account and go here to learn more about how RSS and Feeds work to make your life so much easier.

By the way, all of this stuff is free. And mega easy.

So, here’s how you can use this information.  Visit one of your favorite blogs, let’s just say Mashable, which happens to be one of mine.  On the right hand side you’ll see a little orange square with the letters RSS underneath it. Click on it.

Up pops the subscription page. There are several choices.  Click on +Google.

Up pops the Add to Google Page.  Choose Add to Google Reader.

That’s it!  Your are now subscribed to this blog.  You can repeat for virtually any newspaper, blog or magazine out there. Recently it was announced that individual web pages will be available for subscription through RSS feeds. Cool.

Now you control your content.  All in one place.  Quickly scan all of your different feed subscriptions and the headlines (and first part of the article if you choose)  and decide what you want to read.  You can also Star the articles you really like.  You can share articles with others. You can write notes.

It doesn’t get any easier, quicker or more efficient if you’re a reader like me.

One final tip:  If you use an iPhone or Blackberry (I use an iPhone personally) then you can download Feed Apps that bring the power and simplicity of Google Reader right to your mobile phone.  I use an app simply called Feeds and love it.  Everything is well categorized and the user interface is so easy to navigate.

How do you use RSS and Google Reader?  Would love to hear your ideas and suggestions.

This is just a quick hit. Many people have been asking me lately to point them in the right direction for information on to use Twitter for business. This is the best post I think I’ve ever read on the subject. Great information as usual from Chris Brogan.

50 Way to use Twitter for Business

It’s funny to think how much the world can change in five short years. Where there once was nothing, there now is a new form of media and marketing that is essential to the success of practically every business around. Social networking has been alive and well in one form or another since practically the dawn of time. Known originally as “word of mouth”, the internet has taken that word and turned it into a typed, emailed, posted, IM’d and tweeted message. These new social platforms have basically taken the world by storm and completely changed the way that we get the word out about just about everything. For a growing business, this makes becoming savvy about Facebook marketing more than just a novelty, but an actual survival skill.

Facebook was originally started as a sort of exclusive social networking site that was only for the students of Harvard. Created by students, for students, it gave them a place to connect with one another and exchange information and ideas. Before long there were new networks formed and more schools on board. Today, Facebook is open to anyone that is over the age 13 and is estimated to have over 350 million active users around the world. These users are organized roughly by the networks to which they belong, which can be regional, social, political, religious or any other number of things. Companies have networks for their employees, retailers have networks for their consumers, music artists and bands have networks for their fans. Regardless of who your target market is, there is a network for that, and each network connects with endless other networks, making Facebook Marketing a goldmine for getting your company name and image out there.

The beauty of Facebook of an online marketer is that word travels so quickly across it. If Jane becomes a fan of your company today, it will be posted on all of her friends’ news feeds, with a link to your company. Anyone of her friends that clicks on the link, and becomes a fan now has an update on all of their friends’ pages, who then, in turn click on the link and share your company name and info with all of their friends. Unless Jane and her friend are only friends with all of the same people, this can get information to literally thousands of people in less time than it takes to make dinner. Just think, you can be a nobody at lunch, but a super star by supper. Few other types of marketing can offer that. Facebook marketing has an incredibly wide reach.

So how, as a small business can you take advantage of the viral goodness that is Facebook marketing?   How can you translate the social networking giant into more click-thru’s and conversions for your site? Much like any independent person wanting to connect with friends, your first step is to join Facebook. Set up a page for your company. Give information about your company and make sure that you include your company’s homepage. Once your page is set up, you will need to start connecting with others. Search for networks that you think would be interested in what you have to sell or say, and join them. Set up your own page, if you do not already have one, and start finding friends. Once you have a good base of people, become a fan of your own company. This will post information about your company on every one of your friends’ pages.

If you have gotten far enough on the internet to be able to read an article, then chances are that you already realize that the internet is all about information. It is about giving information, sharing information, buying information, selling information and receiving information. Run from computers, everything that you see is actually the result of hundreds and thousands of pieces of information that are being interpreted and displayed for you in a form that you can use. Based upon binary code, which to the untrained eye, is nothing more than a series of ones and zeroes, computers and the internet are huge processors of information. When it comes to the internet, the thing to realize is that computers use those copious amounts of data to find the websites that you are looking for, every time that you do a search. A big part of that is the Meta data that is part of every web page on the internet.

Meta data is information that is not visible to the casual observer but that identifies what language a site is written in, what it is about and keywords that apply to that site to the search engines. Meta data can be viewed by looking at the source code of any website. To view the Meta data, go to “View” in your web browser and then click on “source”. A window will open with a huge amount of information, much of which makes no sense to the untrained eye. Toward the top of this, you will see many lines which start out with the word “meta”. This is information that identifies that a site is written in html or xhtml, what the site is about and what keywords are related to that site. Search engines use this information to attempt to provide the most accurate results for keyword searches that people perform.

Having the right Meta data in the header of your website can greatly improve your website traffic and help to eliminate visitors from getting to your site in error and immediately leaving. While all website traffic is good, traffic that stays and looks around is much more valuable to any website than visitors that immediately click away are. Your Meta data, or Meta tags as they are called, give you an excellent opportunity to identify and state the purpose of your site. One of these tags is your Meta description. This description will appear in search engine directories, as the description of what your website is about. Using that information, potential visitors can make an educated decision about whether your site is what they think it is, and whether or not they want to visit it.

Meta keywords are used to help search engines determine what your site is about, so that they will know if a keyword that someone searches on applies to your site or not. By matching the keywords in your Meta data to the keywords being searched for, the search engine can determine whether or not to display your site in the list of results. Unlike keywords which appear in your regular content, keywords in your Meta data do not need to be in sentences or any other type of text. They can be added in a long string in every possible combination that you believe someone might potentially search on to get to your site. For instance, if your site sells embroidered backpacks, you might use the words backpack, backpacks, embroidered backpack, embroidered backpacks, bookbag and bookbags to identify your site.

In some ways, opening an internet business is a lot like opening a store in the real world. You search out the perfect location to open your store, on the internet, that is your web address. You build a beautiful store that is welcoming and attractive.  On the internet, that is going to be your website. In both scenarios, you stock quality merchandise, and you wait for customers to start beating down your doors. And you wait. And sometimes, wait some more. And that is where the similarity ends.  If you had a store in the real world, you could at least hope for some traffic to come to you, just because the outside of your store looks interesting. For an internet store, there is no cozy Main Street location that people will notice as they drive by, on their way home from the gym. An internet store must bring traffic to itself, rather than waiting for traffic to happen, and that is where SEO for small business comes in.

If your store in the real world wasn’t getting enough business from the casual passersby, you would advertise to get people in, right? You would put up a billboard or two, get listed in your yellow pages, maybe take out an ad in the paper or even buy some commercial airtime on the local radio station. Before long, customers would be bound to stop in. By hitting your local area and getting the word out to all of your neighbors, you are bound to bring in some new business. On the internet, the world is your neighborhood. There is no street corner that you can put a sign up on, no local radio station to run a commercial on. If you want people to come to you, you will need them to find you when they type a keyword into a search engine, like Google, or Yahoo. They won’t be searching for your name; they will be searching for your product, so you need the search engines to find your site when people search for your keyword. SEO for small business is how you make this happen

Search engines aren’t like people. They aren’t drawn in by fancy decorations, or free food. They don’t care what color your carpet is or that you offer parking validation. Search engines scour the internet, looking for websites that most closely match the search terms that a user has entered. If someone searches for “edible camera cases”, you can bet that those search engines are looking for sites that reference edible camera cases. They will search the name of the websites – www.ediblecameracases.com? Sounds like a winner to a search engine! –, they will “read” through the content of the site – 101 Recipes for Edible Camera Cases? Score! -, they will look and see if there are links back to your site for that keyword phrase – linked on the Top 10 Edible Camera Case Companies in Des Moines? That’ll work! -, and then they rank their results and spit them out for the end user. The sites in the number one and number two spots might not be the best places to get an edible camera case at all, but they were the sites that had the best SEO for it. SEO for small business makes the difference between people finding you and you sitting in a room full of edible camera cases, all by yourself, wishing that you had gotten less of the banana flavored cases.

Chances are you want traffic.  To get traffic, you will need to optimize your site for the search engines. Once you have it optimized, you will want to keep it optimized.  Once you begin to understand that Search Engine Optimization is an ongoing marketing process, your website will start to achieve much improved traffic rankings and your bottom line will thank you!