Why Sender Policy Framework is Vital to Your Small Business Website

You may not have heard of Sender Policy Framework (I know I didn’t know much about it when I first started my website).  But SPF is vitally important to the delivery of your emails.  Sender Policy Framework is a method for addressing the issue of email fogery (i.e. someone pretending to send an email from your account) and the issue of your email getting blacklisted from Internet Service Providers (ISP).

Deliverability of your email is a huge issue these days.  With so many people sending spam email, many ISPs are cracking down on email (even legitimate email!), if it looks like spam.  How does this affect you?  Well, if you don’t take certain precautions, when you send an email to someone it may end up in the junk folder, or worse, it may not be delivered at all!

Implementing Sender Policy Framework is just one step in your fight against spam and against being unfairly blacklisted.  Learn more about sender policy framework. This website has a free tool to help you create an SPF record for your website. Then you just have to add the information to your Domain Name System (DNS). If you don’t know what that is, talk to your domain registry or website hosting company, or hire a professional to take care it for you. For someone that’s done it before, it’s a quick way to protect yourself and ensure better email delivery. Contact me and I’d be glad to answer your questions or help set up SPF for you.

Get Your Website Noticed

I recently had a client tell me she was giving up on her Internet business because no one was commenting on her articles after 3 months.  This came as a suprise to me, and it made me realize that many people don’t fully understand how the Internet works. 

Building your website is really just the first step in a long process of building an online business.  Don’t expect someone to build your website, put it on the Internet and receive instant success.  It takes a lot of time, effort and patience to build a successful online business, and it doesn’t happen overnight.

How the Internet works

When you first launch your small business website, it’s like an undiscovered island, in the middle of a huge ocean–no one knows it’s there.  So while technichally  your site is on the Internet as soon as it’s uploaded to your hosting site, that doesn’t mean you’re connected to the millions of people surfing the Net.  For that to happen, you need to do a few things.

How to get your website noticed

Unlike an island, that just has to sit there, you have some other options for working with your website.  Here are just a few.

1. Add your website to directories - Directories are the easiest way for small business websites to go from isolation to people know they’re there.  Not all directories are worth joining, and many are not worth paying for, but there are many good, free directories that can help improve your visibility on the Internet
2. Write articles for ezines - There are many websites out there that will publish your articles for free with a link back to your site. Then, in addition, other people can republish those articles to their site as long as they include a link back to your site.  So you provide free content, and they provide you with visibility.  It’s a win/win in many situations.  Just be aware that once you release an article to an ezine, it’s now open for anyone to reprint, so the unique value of that article goes way down.  So don’t put up your best content–save that to add to your own website.
3. Join a forum - Every time you post on most forums, you can leave a signature with a link to your website.   It helps to contribute helpful information on forums related to your business niche
4. Comment of other people’s websites - Every time you leave a comment on a blog or other website, you usually get a chance to include your website url.  It’s even better if you can comment on websites and blogs that are related to your site’s theme
5. Write quality content - Continue to write quality content on a regular schedule.  As you add more articles to your site, search engines will start to pick you up more in search results and more visitors will come to your island…I mean website
6. Request link exchanges - Offering to link to another website in exchange for them linking to your site is a great way to improve your visibility on the Internet, and bring in some traffic to your small business website. 
7. Be patient - After 3 months, you’re probably just starting to get enough content to be picked up by search engines.  Don’t quit now! Keep at it for at least a year, maybe longer.

How long will it take to see results?

I have a website that ranks #1 for many meditation keywords on Google.  These pages bring in thousands of visitors every month.  I followed all the advice I’m offering here, and it took me over a year to do it.  I followed the simple formula of continuing to add new content to my website every week, exchanging a few links, commenting on other sites, and participating in forums.  And yes, being very patient.

For you, it may take more or less time to get things rolling with your website. But the key is: (and you know this), don’t give up too soon!  The truth is, unless you have tons of money for advertsing, things move very slowly on the Internet.  3 month simply isn’t enough time to see if something is working.  If you’re truly working hard on your website and doing the things I recommended in this article, then I would give it at least a year, and more if you’re not working on your website consistently.

Choosing how to use your website to promote your business

This process isn’t for everyone.  I had this conversation with my client before I built her site, and we discussed it again after 3 monts when she wanted to quit.  When she fully realized how much work her website was going to be, she just wasn’t interested in doing what it took to market it online.  And that’s understandable.  It is a lot of work and I hope you don’t underestimate that.  If the process I explained to you isn’t appealing, then don’t do it.  But that doesn’t mean you can’t have a website…

If you don’t want to do all the work of promoting your website online, you can still use your website to promote your business as a marketing tool.  If your business thrives on personal interaction, then you don’t necessarily need the search engines to bring visitors to your website–you can do that!  When you talk to potential clients about your business, and offer them a business card with your website on it, you’re doing what search engines do–you’re driving traffic to your website.  And you’re website can house helpful information for your potential clients to make informed decisions about purchasing your services.

Ultimately, my client decided to use her website as a marketing tool, instead of trying to build her small business through online marketing and search engine traffic.

Add Your Business to Google’s Local Business Center

Adding your business to Google’s Local Business Center is a smart marketing idea.  If you do a Google search using your location and the type of business (for example: Tucson Web Design), you’ll see that Google has implemented the first organic search result to come from local business results and Google maps.  What does this mean?  Two things:

1. Google is moving toward more relevant search results by adding a local component to their search results.
2. If your business is not listed with Google’s Local Business Center, it should be.

Google gives you lots of options for adding your business to its Local Business Center, including adding your basic business information, adding your business to categories, adding a link to your website, displaying payment options, uploading photos and videos about your business, and adding coupons.

With all the options available, you can basically create a mini site about your business, giving potential customers a lot of information about what you provide.

Here’s instructions for adding your business to Google Maps.

Using Screen Capture Software to Create Marketing Videos

Everywhere I look now, people are putting video on their site.  And why not?  It’s highly effective and much more personal than reading text. Today, creating your own video is fairly inexpensive. All you need is a decent digital video recorder and you can post your video to a video sharing site like YouTube or
Viddler and it doesn’t cost you anything.

Online video is a perfect opportunity to share your knowledge with people, while making your site feel more personal. I’ll be using this approach with my Yoga and meditation website. But I’ve also been playing around with something new…

It’s screen capture software called Camtasia.

Camtasia allows you to record whatever is on your computer screen while also recording your voice in real time, giving you the capability to create video presentations or video tutorials. It’s also great for creating howto videos as well as adding audio to a PowerPoint presentation and posting it on a website.

Camtasia has some amazing capabilities, and I’ve only touch the surface of it, but you can see the work I’ve done with it to create these WordPress training videos. The piece I like the best is the ability to create a “theater,” where you can link videos, one after another in a series. This allows you to create training video presentations, and also include a table of context that allows users to jump ahead in the video presentation series. See an example of that with this online video tutorial

The power of Camtasia is it’s ability to pack powerful features into an easy to use presentation. The learning curve was very low for this product. I was able to plug in my microphone, watch one Camtasia video tutorial, and I was on my way to creating video tutorials. And Camtasia comes at a reasonable price, just $299. I’d expect to pay a lot more for something this powerful.

If you’re looking to add video to your site, I’m working with a local videographer who can utilize digital video or HD technology for your video project. Conact me to find out how we might work together to add video to your site, or create a video product to enhance your product offerings.

Are you a Nerd?

Finding out if you’re a nerd is more than just a simple test; it’s a lesson in using viral marketing and social networks to improve in-bound links to your website and build strong Page Rank (PR). I took the test and received my official results today. Not as nerdy as my brother, but nerdier than 59% of all people…

I was more interested in taking the test so I could proudly display the badge on my website than finding out how nerdy I was. And this is a great example of how you can generate some one-way inbound links to your site. NerdTests.com has a Google Page Rank of 6/10. That’s pretty good, seeing as I rarely see a Page Rank higher than 7 unless the website is a major player. So this could be a strategy you might want to employ to improve your PR…

How does it work? Well, following this example, you create (or have a web designer create) some kind of online test or quiz. At the end of the test or quiz, you offer the results, along with a box of code that can easily be copied and pasted into a blog post like this one. In this case, the code is:

<a href=”http://www.nerdtests.com/nq_ref.html”>
<img src=”http://www.nerdtests.com/images/badge/dfe39791e486fc55.gif” alt=”I am nerdier than 59% of all people. Are you a nerd? Click here to find out!” align=”left” hspace=”20″ /></a>

So the code pulls a badge image off their site, allowing me to proudly display my results, and generating a very nice link from my site to theirs. And I’m anxious to do it. What a great marketing strategy for them.

Of course, this strategy works well for them because nerds are generally going to be the ones that know how to implement the code that the NerdTests.com site provides them with. They’re also probably the highest percentage of people doing the blogging on the Internet. It’s perfect for the nerd community, and something viral like this little badge could really generate a lot of traffic to their site, and give them some link love to improve their PR, and thus their search engine ranking.

In addition, every person that goes to the site that in turn links back to the site creates a snow ball effect. Just imagine as more people see the website, more people take the test, and more people link to the website; in turn generating more and more people continuing the cycle. Once it reaches a critical mass, that site is going to have a steady stream of traffic to their site, simple from the shear numbers of people who have participated (as I have) in their simple test.

I can think of some interesting ways to duplicate this for a couple clients I’m working with. Can you think of a way to implement this type of link building campaign to increase the Page Rank and drive some traffic to your website? I’d love to hear about it.

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