Is Your Business On Mobile Yet?

In today’s economy you are probably wondering what is really happing?  Your business is still not as good as it was and everything is starting to cost more.  The government says there might be 1% or 2% inflation next year and the paper says gas is already up 10%, silver 74%, cotton is up 56% and that means clothes are going up too.  What is a business owner to do to survive in this economy?

Rustic Creek Logo QR Code

Most of us are probably wondering what is the real truth.  The important question is really; “why do you care?”  Worrying about the entire economy is like banging your head against the wall isn’t it?  Your head hurts and the wall hasn’t moved one inch.  I propose that we stop worrying and get back to work. 

The turmoil in the economy and the move to mobile technology presents some killer opportunities to make your business a runaway success.  The entire mission of our marketing business is to help connect your business to your customers.  You might wonder exactly what that means.  It means we want to help focus customers in a way that guides them to want your products and services.  Most importantly, we need to make it easy for those customers to find you and to buy your products and services when they are looking.  Don’t make your customers work to buy from you. 

How Will You Look Back At Your Business Of 2010

As we get to the end of the year a lot of people are looking back and already saying they are glad it’s over.   Yet somehow they aren’t feeling any better about next year.  Are you glad that 2010 is almost over?  Are you thinking 2011 is going to be worse like most people do?  Do you find it at least a little funny that we break up our life and businesses into an arbitrary time period that ends with our most expensive time of the year.  

I don’t know about you, but somehow we spend a lot of money every year during the holidays we didn’t plan on.  People we forgot, customers we wanted to thank a little more and that one extra thing for someone special that all add up to an empty feeling looking back over the year.

How Do You Think Your Business Will Be In 2011?

In business, we look at last year and make predictions and assumptions about next year.  The funny part is how few people really spend the time to understand why anything happened last year. I am not a big fan of reflection at the end of the year.  I want you to do just enough to find the 20% of your work that led to 80% of your income.  Now you have something to focus on for next year.

Why SEO Is Important To Business Owners

SEO, or as is known by its full name search engine optimization, is the professional practice of making your website easy to understand for search engines. One of the primary methods of doing this is keyword and headline optimization. The key benefit of a good SEO program is that somebody looking for your business is more likely to find your business if you have made it easy for the search engine to understand what your website is about. When someone types in a keyword, the search engine looks at that keyword and analyzes your website trying to find the best match. The search engine select the best optimized websites and put them at the top of the list.

Unfortunately there are people who abuse the system and overload websites with keywords in order to attract customers to a website that really has nothing to do with what they were looking for. This is why Google, Yahoo and Bing also check what are called back links. They look at other websites which might point to your website therefore giving you credibility in your field. The domaineers have figured out how to beat this system also.  So how do you get ahead?  Well I'll tell you.....

Why Success Requires Focus.

In today's fast-paced world, it is very easy to fall into the trap of entrepreneurial ADD. There are so many opportunities out there it sometimes makes it difficult to know where to start and what to do. Whatever it is that got you thinking about changing jobs are changing businesses are starting a new business, it was probably one thing. When I ran the home theater business, vendors would come to me all kinds of great tools and toys to sell my clients. Everyone of them demanded more time and more attention.

Use Video For Better Customer Engagement

One of the great things about being in the internet marketing business is I get to choose my customers.  There is more work than I could ever do so I get to say "no" if I don't believe in a business or a product.  Some I like so much I'll even make short quick video's myself.

Video is a great way to introduce your business and your products online.  Here is a quick video I made for Walt Garrison's Gourmet Texas Rub.  This is no store bought seasoning salt, this is a genuine Texas rub, created by a great Texan, and made in Texas.

So when you need some time away from business and just want to kick back and grill some delicious meat, give Walt Garrison's Gourmet Texas Bar-B-Q Rub a try

See the video and get some ideas for your business. Sorry No critiquing the actor, he is a bit rusty...

Buy the Rub.

Quick Start Keyword Checklist

If you read the quick keyword action plan, and a couple of the entries before that you should've come up with a pretty simple checklist. Just in case you didn't I'll include it here.

Quick Keyword Action Plan

One of the questions I get most often when I speak to a group is the same question matter what the group is. Without fail someone will walk up to me or call me after the class or send me an e-mail that says "okay I get all that great stuff, but how do I do it?"

One of the reasons I wrote the book “So, Now What?” was the number of people asking me that same question. They would tell me that they've taken all kinds of classes,  read all kinds of books and they still aren't sure what they're supposed to do. When I wrote “So, Now What?” I checklists and some worksheets right in the book to help people know exactly what to do in order to get onto the first step of a good business and a happy life.

What does this have to do with Internet marketing? Well the funny thing is I get the same question after Internet marketing classes. It doesn't matter if I teach a live class or a webinar, someone always has that question. So today I want to give you a quick action plan with some steps you can take to make sure you have the right keyword campaign for your Internet marketing. If you are still doing research for Internet marketing my very first suggestion in your first step is to get a Google ad words account. Google is at least 50% of all search marketing, and even though they're losing ground they are still the biggest and most important. Starting here will give you the best education you can get in exchange for your time.

Keyword Targeting For Small Business

Keyword targeting can be one of those make or break disciplines when it comes to Internet marketing. The reason the keyword targeting is so critical is because search engines have the ability to follow the clicks as they say. If you create an Internet marketing program based on the wrong keywords, when customers click your website and quickly leave because you targeted the wrong keywords, the search engines take note.

For Google ad words users, one aspect of the scores is called the quality score. If your keywords are poor and aimed at the wrong market your quality score declines.  The lower your quality score, the higher your cost per click. So now you have a downward spiral where your costs are going up and the people who are clicking are not your customers anyway so your sales are going down. Your website is losing position on the unpaid section (this is known as the organic search section) and your ads are increasing in cost because the quality score variable is going the wrong way.  It is the double whammy of Internet search.

Focus On The Perfect Customer

One of my favorite aspects of Internet marketing is the fact you have to focus. Any company that tries to market to everyone on the Internet is going to go bankrupt unless they sell something that everyone on the Internet wants to buy and will buy. Most people that will buy anything shop at Walmart.  On the Internet they're looking for something in particular. The trick is to figure out how they would look for you.

One of the things that separates every business is the owner and their personality as it evolves into the business. That uniqueness is what your customer is looking for and vice versa. When you understand exactly who your customer is and I'm not talking about every customer, but your best customer, you can do a lot better with Internet marketing and all of your marketing for that matter.

Focus On The Objective

The other night I had the pleasure of going to the new matchsticks movie premiere party. I haven't been to a premiere since I was a little kid and my dad's friend Dwight Brooks premiered his movie. One of the things that impressed me about the matchsticks movie THE WAY I SEE IT was the producer’s connection to his audience. Every single person in there was a skier or snowboarder. No one showed up just because it was a premier. The night that I attended, the premiere had three showings and I would estimate 350 people per showing.  Not a bad gig when we don’t even have snow yet.

At first it appeared a little strange that this premiere was being held in a hotel ballroom.  I would expect an established production company premiering a new movie to be in a traditional movie theater. After a while I realized this was by design. Scott Gallagher and his team understood that their customer would sit on the floor or stand in the back if that's what it meant to see the movie.  Sit and stand they did.  As a bonus, skiers featured in the movie like Ingrid Backstrom and JT Holmes were in the back of the ballroom signing posters and magazines.

Specialization Pays Off

One of the most difficult conversations I have with my clients on a regular basis is about focus.  As business owners, there is a mentality along the lines of "I don't just want my customers business, I want all the business."  The mentality of getting "all the business" is a very dangerous path in business.  Since the earliest days of commerce and civilization we have known that specialization helps grow businesses more effectively and therefore economies.

Even in the 4th Century, Plato found it worth mentioning:

All things will be produced in superior quantity and quality, and with greater ease, when each man works at a single occupation, in accordance with his natural gifts, and at the right moment, without meddling with anything else. - Plato

Leave Your Comfort Zone

“One of the greatest discoveries a man makes, one of his greatest discoveries a man makes, one of his great surprises is to find he can do what he was afraid he couldn't do” - Henry Ford.

All throughout my life I have had the pleasure of doing things most people dream of. The part they don't realize is each of these events, was a dream once for me too.  Two years ago, we shut down our business to re-think what we did. We asked the customers we had, what they liked and what we could do better for them. We analyzed everything we did, and stopped doing several things that looked profitable and turned out not to be. We placed more emphasis in other areas that were very profitable and offered a very high level of service our customers were asking for.

In October of that year, I submitted an article to my friend Jason Knott at CEPro, and got flamed in a big way when he published my outlook online. The prevailing view was that shutting down to work on the business would put most companies out of business. Clearly to me this begged the question: Why be in business? What no one knew was that we had already shut down, re-evalutated, changed staff, closed a location and moved forward. I believe we did so successfully. We weren't turning the gross numbers we did the previous year, but we were still alive after 10 years in an industry abandoned by Tweeter and Circuit City as well as a host of other smaller companies across the country.  Even then it was still comfortable.

Why You Should Care About The Economy

Sometime ago I was on a flight with a Frenchman from Paris.  He turned out to be a professor of economics in Paris.  The professor made some very interesting observations about the economy and world politics that got me thinking.

One of he statements was this: "One of the most difficult tasks for a government is to keep it's citizens engaged so that they are not rebelling.  A government is graded on the level of crime and poverty it hosts within it's borders, and each administration should be judged by the change in crime and poverty.". I guess that The French have a different perspective on this than we do, after all they did be-head Napoleon Bonaparte.

This really hits home when you start looking at the responses to crime in Arizona.  When your state is over run with crime, and the federal government does not effectively protect the borders or discourage illegal aliens from returning, why shouldn't a state do it?

To begin with, aren't services of the government reserved for citizens by law?  What is wrong with requiring citizens to prove citizenship to vote or use services paid for by the citizens?  I am amazed that we so easily give up our fourth amendment rights to get on an airplane, and then get mad when the some public service office asks us to prove we are citizens and eligible to use the services.  Maybe Reagan and Clinton had it right with the national ID program?

In a day and age where the biggest consumer is the government, we all should recognize the problem when trying to shrink a government or its influence with a majority vote.  If the majority or close to it are directly or indirectly benefitting from the spending of the government how can we ever expect the right thing to happen?  Selfishness and easy survival will always trump the vote for a smaller government that might cost a job specifically Joe Voters job.  Only once has the government decreased a department that I can think of, and that took a union strike followed by a presidential order locking out all of those on strike.

Every person that claims to be responsible for themselves needs to stand up and accept that the government is bloated and doesn't have any real money to pay it's employees anyway.  It is time to step up and step out.  

Recently a newscaster on CNN said the government should be proud it pushed through a 600 billion dollar healthcare bill.  How can they be proud of spending another 600 billion dollars they don't have. This is just a continuation of the insanity where the government makes an issue out of air to pacify people.  It fails every cornerstone principle the founding fathers used to create this country.

We all know that one of two things happen in basic money management.  First you have to take in more money than you spend.  This method leaves money for investing to make more money, money for emergencies and money to pay the taxes that run an effective government.  The second method is to spend all you have and borrow more for emergencies, investments and taxes.  Even if you are totally broke and borrowing for food and clothes, chances are high that you are still paying sales taxes.   The obvious problem with the second method is simple, at some point the people lending you money stop giving it to you and you are bankrupt, because you have none to borrow to pay your bills.  The same is true for governments. 

Bernie Madoff is the villain of Wall Street, and yet our government does this every day.  When are we going to hold the government accountable like we do it's people?  What happened to of the people, by the people, for the people?

When the US government first started borrowing money to pay it's bills, it was supposed to be a short term plan to help  get the economy going.  The euphoria of not having to say "no" became the opium of politics.  Now we are paying for it.

It is time to elect leaders that can say "no" and stop the madness.  It is time to stop giving away the store with open borders and amnesty programs.  When Mexico opens it's borders to all Americans that want to work and own property there, we can discuss the same treatment for Mexicans coming north.  Until then we need to treat illegals like illegals.

There are thousands of Mexicans who have come north, obtained the right to work and thousands more that become citizens all the time.  Why to we want to smear their hard work and offer amnesty at a time with double digit unemployment? Does everyone really just want to ignore the issue and hope it goes away?  Do we really want to say to all of the legAl immigrants "Gee we're sorry we made you spend all that money and do all that stuff, but we really didn't mean it."?  This is plain and simple laziness on the part of our politicians. They don't want to do the work and face a very small and very vocal majority.  Only when we get involved will the right things happen.  It is time to become vocal.

We are facing an economic tidal wave that took nearly 80 years to create.  As a business owner, and senatorial candidate for CT, Peter Schiff said in his book Crash,  the crash is coming, we just don't know when.  He called the mortgage collapse two years before it happened.  The smart attorneys became bankruptcy specialists and are now reaping in the money.

Mr. Schiff contends in Crash 2.0, the updated version of his book, that the next wave is coming.  As a business owner you should understand the dangers of voting for self serving  policies that expand the debt of our cities, states and of course the Federal Government.  

It is our duty as leaders in our community to educate people, specifically voters, what their vote really means.  We need to remind them that a government has to make more money than it spends, just like every household does. We need to grow our businesses responsibly and with a level of integrity that the country can be proud of. 

So what can you do to help you community make the changes and sacrifices it needs to get on the right track?  It won't be easy but it needs to be done if we are to survive the next crash.  

Your thoughts please.......

Tech toys for business, the iPhone 4 story continues

Now on day 45 with my iPhone 4, the BlackBerry withdrawals are getting worse. Seeing the new BlackBerry Torch on the AT&T website didn't help. You gotta hand that one to AT&T, legions of former BlackBerry users are unhappy with the iPhone 4, and they drop the early hint of the BlackBerry Torch as the rumors of the Verizon iPhone build up steam and the massive EVO launched.

Every call that drops makes my stomach turn, every appointment that I can't sent out invitations for makes my head hurt, and every time some one says they can't hear me when I am on BlueTooth makes my eyes squint.

I heard today the "Executive in charge of the iPhone has left Apple. No surprise there, the iPhone 4 is definitely not "twice the phone at half the price".

There are just four main things the iPhone missed do be a serious business tool, an they are:
1. Decent reception, the cover didn't help and the dropped calls are a headache. I've found at home if I leave the iPhone 4 in the kitchen window on the charger and only use Bluetooth it doesn't drop calls.
2. Invites for the calendar, I mean what kind of nut job doesn't send his wife an invitation to dinner. Do you know how embarrassing it is sitting at my friends restaurant waiting for my wife when she is out with the girls? Thats what happens when she doesn't get my invites. Worse is when I schedule something when she has an appointment that I was supposed to be at. It turns out that not being able to accept her invite is no excuse for not showing up. Invites kept my marriage and work life balanced and now they are gone.
3. Task sync with outlook, ToDo works ok, but it is Bluetooth sync only and requires more steps. If you are any kind of mover and shaker you are probably little too busy for that nonsense. I am sure Mr. Jobs just says "call my people and they'll put it on my calendar."
4. BlueTooth that works. I can hear everyone perfectly, when the phone is correctly placed (see #1). The issue is, I sound garbled to everyone else. This one the "geniuses" at the Apple Store deny even after I showed them dozens of complaints on the Apple forums at Apple.com

While I was in the Apple store I also asked about items 1 through 3 the Apple Genius asked if I used to have a BlackBerry. When I said yes, he suggested it would be better to go back because he didn't know of anything to correct items 1,2 and 4. He did suggest trying ToDo to correct the task sync.

Oh yeah, and how about a little better cursor placement capability while we are fixing things?

Now, in he interest of fairness, if I go to the BlackBerry Torch in a couple of weeks, there are some features of the iPhone 4 I will miss. First among them is the killer screen resolution. This little thing is really nice for viewing videos and photos. I am sure my eye strain, looking at such a small screen so close isn't getting better, but it is fun to look at.

The camera and video capabilities are pretty sweet on the iPhone 4 also. For nearly a month now my digital camera and Flip have collected dust on my desk at home. There is an annoying little bug that blacks out most of the pictures in the preview mode. I had 89 photos last night, and only could see the twenty most recent. I had to go to the slide show to see the rest. I'll live with this in exchange for the picture quality.

The thing I will miss the most is the iPod video capability. Right now I am on the road working, and I downloaded nearly four hours of home study videos and watched them on the airplane and in the airport. I got over the short battery life pretty quickly. I'll gladly trade the time wasted booting up my dual core 64 bit laptop for the time required to hunt down an outlet. Besides the little pose cord weighs a whole lot less than a HP laptop with an 8 cell battery. Don't ask me what I was thinking buying that brick for the road.

If I could just get the unlimited data plan back, I might keep both phones with AT&T. I just got my overage notice for those home study videos. Ouch.

Remember to choose your tools based on how you live, not how other people tell you to be cool.

Where you a BlackBerry user? Did you go back? Let us know why or why not, so we can all make better choices.

Cheers

Scott Bourquin

Use the Internet to Net Fish or Fly Fish for Customers

As I sit here perplexed by a prospects website, I realize the website isn't necessarily the problem.  It is the prospect.  In the Search Engine Optimization or SEO business, the primary goal is to get the right keywords to get customers to the customers website.  If you have a big enough budget, any SEO can bring  you thousands of website visitors and even hundreds of calls.  This is no different than buying every billboard in town.

What is all this for anyway.  The reality is we all want people to buy something from us, either a product, service or both, or we want them to donate to our cause.  In the case of an e-zine or blog, we want them to read the thoughts that have been added to the site and hope they click on an ad so we get paid.  Making a living as a blogger that isn't selling some system or high dollar product, can be a tough gig.

Are You Ready For Internet Marketing?

One of the great things about internet marketing is the accuracy of the feedback you can get.   For instance even with a simple cost per click or CPC advertising program you can see how many times your advertisement showed up on somebody's computer screen, these are called “impressions”.  You also can see what percentage of those people clicked your ad, these are the paid for “clicks”. You can see pretty quickly which ads get a better response. If you put up several ads that link to the same website, it is very easy to determine which ads people like.

The next step is true also, you can see how many of those people that click on your ad got to your website and either called, purchased or quickly left. This is also the reason why internet marketing or advertising can be so frustrating for people who don't do it every day. It might take two or three months of watching ads every day just to figure out what type of ads work. Then you find out people get to your website and don't buy or call, creating more frustration.

You might then spend another three months or more working on a website that matches the expectations of the people who click on your ad, and that is what internet marketing is all about. When you are meeting the expectations of people sitting in front of a computer or tapping away on a cellular phone your internet marketing is working.

A good aspect of internet marketing is you can change any part you like any time. If you think it is the ad that is attracting the wrong people you can change the ad at any time. If you think the website does not really represent your product or service correctly you can change the website at any time. It only takes time and effort to make whatever changes need to be made.

This is why there are so many internet marketing companies and products out there. As easy as internet marketing looks on paper, a lot of time investment is required to create an effective campaign. Also the Internet changes every day. New websites are added, old websites are removed and the competition is always changing the playing field.  Some days no one will click on your ad. Other days will be off the charts and if you haven't been paying attention you will never know why.

Even if you hire an internet marketing company, you should pay close attention to what they find. What they find out about your website, your ads in your customers will give you great insight into their expectations. Understanding your customers expectations can be a game changer for any business. If the customers expect something you don't want to do or don't want to offer, then you can use your internet marketing campaign to change the expectations.  In order to do this you need to have real feedback you can understand not a pretty picture with no meaning on the screen.

The secret to internet marketing success is the same as all success; the more consistently you apply your time and efforts, the better the result will be. As long as you stay focused and move forward in the direction of your goals the right customers will be there.

Get Your Business, Life and Marketing in Harmony for Better Success

A friend of mine, who is a communications consultant, told me the other day that she couldn't see how my business and consulting life were in harmony. I spent a little time trying to explain it and she just said "work on it". She and I both agree that having a life in harmony makes everything better.

You see in Physics there is a phenomenon known as "sympathetic resonance". The easiest way to demonstrate sympathetic resonance is with two pianos in the same room. If you struck a note on one piano, you could feel the same string moving on the other piano. This is sympathetic resonance and amazingly the second piano doesn't decrease the sound level of the room, it actually can increase it slightly. So by having two pianos in the room, one person can make a louder note without doing any extra work.

There are a dozen ways to apply this phenomenon in business. In my case having a business that is predominantly focused on Search Engine Marketing or SEM and adding some business focus consulting causes a similar alignment of energy. You see when the website tells the correct story about a business, and the Search Engine Marketing is set to the keywords of that story there is an exponential gain for the business. When the business doesn't have a "sympathetic resonance" with the website the website starts to work against the business not with it. If the Search Engine Marketing keywords don't resonate with the message of the website, the people that click the ads will leave the website before they commit to the next action.

Affiliate Marketers and Super Bloggers have this down to a science. They work the system backwards like picking a note on the piano first and making sure every other instrument in the room has that same note.

For instance a blogger might start with the keywords "stop dog digging". Then he builds a marketing campaign around those words. Then he builds a website that is centered on those keywords. Finally he finds books and products related to those keywords to sell.

Traditional business can't really work backwards like that can it? In some ways it can. If you start with your product and skip to the end to decide what the keywords are, then work backwards you can do it. If you come up with more than three sets of keywords longer than four words each, you haven't yet focused enough.

For instance an attorney might jump forward and focus on the keyword phrases of "Truck Accident", "Auto Accident" and "Work Accident". Since the keyword phrases are all accident related, it becomes easier to write advertisements online that fit the keyword phrases. When people search on those keywords and see the compelling ads, then they click. When they click the ad, they find a website that is centered on those keywords. There isn't any mention of divorce cases or real estate cases. The law firm then focuses on becoming the best accident law firm in the area.

Once the law firm has aligned it's operation, it's website and it's marketing, the business is in harmony.  The law firm will grow faster and with less effort than it did before applying the benefits of sympathetic resonance.  Initially this approach may feel like a step back because they lose the divorce and real estate business. It isn't, it is re-trenching the business to the core competency and giving it new life.   Give this program 90 days and see what happens.

Go Local for Better Reach

As Google moves through it's process of continuous improvement, subtle changes are happening in the search and marketing worlds every day.  Let's put some things in perspective, and in following the intent of full disclosure, I am an owner of a Search Engine Marketing and Optimization company.  

The most recent critical change is the improvement and increased use of “local map” displays for search.  Adding the map and phone book style results changes how much real estate is available for SEO's to compete.  Getting a “Top 10” is no longer good enough, most screens can only show two or three organic entries after the new and improved map.

What does this mean to me as an SEO?  It means as an SEO, we have to put more effort into getting our clients into the top spot.  This means fewer clients per manager, and higher fees for the SEO clients.  It also means we must make sure our clients map data is correct and that they are spending the right money on the paid search  advertising.  Oddly, this paid space on the right has not lost any real estate.

What does this mean for Google?  Simply put, more paid ad space, less free or “organic” listing space.

What does this mean for a business owner?  It means you will need to spend more time on your advertising campaign and your search engine optimizing in order to maintain visibility.  We all knew the free deal had to come to an end soon, free search doesn't pay the bills at the big search companies.

What can you do now?  Get on your Google, Yahoo, and Bing accounts, make sure that your address and phone number are current and correct.  Get your adwords fine tuned to put your ads only in front of buyers, skip the “maybe's”.  Finally go out and look at all the other sources that might have data about you such as yelp and jigsaw.  If you don't have the time, hire someone or hire and agency, because everyone uses search and you can't afford to be overlooked.

Stay Focused for Succes

Some time ago, Chris Anderson of Wired magazine wrote the now infamous article about "the long tail".  He argued that the music industry needed to have broad based "hits" and serve narrow "niches".  How does this apply to staying focused for success or Internet marketing for an attorney in Fresno, California or an Aston-Martin dealer in Scottsdale (or Scotsdale as I have been known to spell it) Arizona?

The long tail theory applies to smaller businesses and Internet marketing in a very direct way.  Successful Internet marketing only happens when you know exactly how people are looking for you.  The search engines are smart, but if they were perfect, they would match the right website to the right person every time and Internet advertising would die along with their key source of revenue (and mine).

Until that day comes business owners need to clearly understand their customer.  The Aston-Martin dealer is a pretty clear case.  They pretty much sell and service one British marque, the Aston-Martin.  If you have a Ferrari, you go next door, a Porsche around the block.  The Lawyer presents the more common challenge.

Should Your Business Have a Blog?

My friend and super communications consultant Mary Mayotte has said she doesn't like blogs because it is all "Blah, blah, blah, blahging".  She is right about that.  Think of internet search engines as small children.  In order for them to understand something you need to tell them over and over.  Blogging is one way to do that. 

You can write the same idea with five different angles. Each of those angles might appeal to a different group of readers.  Even though your are "Blah, blah, blahging" as Mary says, you are also writing to several different groups of readers.  For some this is fun, others theraputic and some people juse despise it and should pay to have it done for them. 

The other nice thing about a blog is your readers don't have to read your whole blog, just the part they were looking for.  Some blogs like the blog the movie Julie and Julia was based on might be read in their entirety, I doubt it though.  The internet isn't for readers, it is for skimmers, surfers and people with a specific topic they want to "browse".  That is why you are reading this in a "browser".

Why Tweet?

Twitter for SEO is important because "Tweets" are indexed. Let's say for example you own a sandwich shop. A sandwich shop like a dozen others in your area. You tweet a few friends about a coupon you put on your website. They re-tweet to their friends. Your website just got a big vote count increase from the search engines for all the tweets.

Welcome

Welcome to the Rustic Creek Blog. Here You will find tips and tricks for improving your internet presence.

This week,

Take a look at Yelp.com. Are you there? Is your listing correct?