With the New Year basically here, it's important that we stay on top of what the trends are in the New Year.

The trends listed at Level Ten Designs include:

• Social fatigue
• Social shakedown
• Emphasis on ROI and metrics
• Mobile Boom
• Hyperlocal
•  … and more.

The trends listed at Entrpereneur.com include:

• Potential new standards in SEO
• Lower priced pay per click (PPC)
• Email marketing (still!)
• Social network marketing
• Content nesting (it's an interesting concept, be sure to read it)
• … and more

The trends listed at A B Strategic include:

• Growing prevalence of Bing
• Video marketing
• Mobile marketing
• … and more

Check out each list and figure out what is relevant and applicable to you. If you're already a social media rockstar then you should continue on that path and you'll do just fine in the upcoming shakedown predicted by LevelTen.com. If you're focused on global business but not on local, consider making changes to offer hyperlocal services. If you've avoided pay per click in the past because it wasn't a cost effective way to generate business, maybe Entrepreneur's blog will encourage you to rethink it for this year. If you haven't been doing any video marketing, perhaps A B Strategic's highlight of its growing predominance should encourage you to think about it for this year.

The bottom line? There was lots of "keep expecting a refinement on many of the things we've come to trust (like SEO, blogs, video) but we also saw 3 key trends in our research:

1. Bing. Bing is apparently going to grow. Could this be a breakthrough year for them?

2. Mobile. This shouldn't come as a surprise, it's been growing through 2009.

3. Social media shakedown. Now that Facebook and Twitter's honeymoon period is over, we can expect a shakedown and cleanout of people who have claimed to be social media experts but weren't!

Brought to you by: Contemporary VA - Run your business instead of running in circles.

Some blogs (like this one) are primarily text and that's okay. But other bloggers may want to combine other media into their blogs and pictures are one way to do that. Unfortunately, copyright doesn't always allow bloggers to include pictures legally. (They do anyway, but that's a rant for another time). 

So, how can bloggers create an engaging blog with pictures without breaking the law or busting out their digital camera every time they want to take a picture?

One great resource is available at Flickr. When Flickr photographers take pictures and upload them to Flickr, they can set the digital rights usage of that picture to a specific setting. These rights are based on the work that Creative Commons is doing for work (http://creativecommons.org/). And one of those settings is attribution 2.0 which says that the photographer gives permission for people to use their pictures for free as long as there is attribution (i.e. a photo credit). There are other restrictions that might be relevant, too, and you can view those here. 

Basically, that means that any picture on Flickr that has a Creative Commons "Attribution 2.0" license can be embedded into your blog and all you need to do is give a photo credit to the person who took the picture. And, to make things even easier, Flickr gives you a page where you can view all photos with this license.

So, click to that page, view the pictures, find one you like, embed it, and give appropriate credit. It's easy!

A friend of mine confessed to me lately that he has a love/hate relationship with Squidoo. He likes the idea of Squidoo – it's easy to build lots of lenses – but hates that the line is blurry between what he should post on his blog and what his lenses should be about. The challenge he highlighted was that he didn't want to create lenses about anything, but rather about something relevant to his business. 

At the time, I was already thinking about a lens I wanted to create but hadn't refined it yet. So I went in search of some lens ideas that would solve his problem and mind at the same time.

Squidoo lenses are best when they are niche-specific: A big dollop of thought on a narrow slice of a topic. Here are a few Squidoo lens idea lists to give you some inspiration:

49 Ideas for Awesome Lenses is a great list and one I've bookmarked to go back to again and again. Some of them are silly or redundant but some of them are really compelling ideas. I particularly like #22 – "What have you researched lately" and #24 – "Make a Twitter lens". 

Another great tool (which is also addictive, believe me) is the Squidoodlr, a lens idea generator. I spun it a few times to read its suggestions: "Bowler hats", "Baby's First Haircut", "Strange Sea Creatures".

Since Squidoo is one of the top 500 most-visited websites in the world, why not consider making a couple of lenses as part of your 2010 business plan!

When I was in college, my dorm was somewhat notorious for the people who had lived there before. And each year, the group of freshmen (and freshwomen) who lived there were ushered into a hallowed closet and invited to write their names on the wall, joining the hundreds who had gone before. It was an interesting tradition and somewhat meaningful to add your name to the list of people – luminaries and not-so-luminaries – who had lived there, too.

This same idea translates into the business world, too, specifically when it comes to commenting on blogs. When you leave your mark, you are joining with others to indicate your participation in that community – however modest – and you are aligning yourself with other likeminded people. This is the ultimate in positioning!

So, here's what you need to do: Go to Gravatar and sign up. This gives you an easy way to spread your face, logo, or recognizable image around the web. Then, identify your top three favorite blogs and comment in them every day. Also, find one other blog – a blog you might read but don't comment on – and comment in it every day. In this way, you'll help to contribute to a community at your favorite blogs and you'll also add 200 – 365 additional blogs (depending on how diligent you are at daily commenting). Imagine how rich those back links will be!

Also, check out Disqus. Their main system is a plug-in to help you manage comments on your blog but they also offer Disqus Profile so you can manage your comments on other blogs.

Brought to you by: Contemporary VA - Run your business instead of running in circles.

A business' customer base isn't static. Over time, that customer base will slowly decline. It doesn't matter if your business gives the world's greatest customer service, you will need to find new customers. Maybe some of your current customer base stops needing your product or they move to an area you don't serve or they pass away or whatever. This "customer attrition" will naturally occur. Often, it's unnoticeable, perhaps declining 5% to 10% per year. Over time, though, the results are catastrophic.

So getting new customers should be a primary concern, first to shore up your customer losses (however small they may be) and second to grow your business (assuming that you want to grow).

In acquiring new customers, there are marketing efforts which can create new "cold" customers who have never bought before and need a lot of convincing. But word of mouth is an ideal customer creation tool because it is highly trusted. If your customers can convince their friends to become customers, MOST of your marketing effort is done for you. Therefore, it pays to create a "salesforce" of customers and to empower them to tell their friends about your business.

One company that has built this right into their business model is Groupon.com, which I read about in a Harvard Business School blog recently. Groupon is a coupon site that helps businesses create those word of mouth customer acquisitions. 

Other coupon sites simply offer downloadable coupons to whomever is willing to click to the site (and perhaps sign up). There is no customer acquisition component. But there is with Groupon because their discount is only achieved when there are a minimum number of customers. For example, a substantial discount might be offered on a product or service within a specific urban area (they have 45 urban areas listed on their website) and the discount is only achieved if customers can convince a total of 50 people to sign up. This is a great idea in that it "pays" (by offering a discount) people to talk up the business to other people. 

The Harvard blog actually lists 4 reasons why Groupon is a great idea and this word of mouth customer acquisition factor is just one of the reasons. The other reasons are:

• "Interactions are super simple"

• "Create a sense of urgency"

• "Make it fun"

These four reasons are great secrets for any business to follow if they want to create an engaging customer experience… and especially an engaging experience that will also contribute to the growth of their business. 

Maybe Groupon's group coupon discount isn't right for you. But could the business model be augmented to suit your purposes?

Brought to you by: Contemporary VA - Run your business instead of running in circles.

The other day a friend of mine called me up in a panic. His website had been advancing dramatically in PageRank and he was working hard to build it up. Then he checked at the beginning of December and noticed that his PageRank had dropped to zero. The phone call to me was an "I'm ruined" phone call and it took me a long time to calm him down and assure him that he was not ruined. It inspired me to write this list of 4 myths of internet marketing.

1. PageRank is the be-all and end-all of marketing. That's not true. There are several factors that go into successful search engine placement. PageRank is a number that Google uses to determine your placement in search rankings but there are other factors, too. A higher PageRank is helpful, but it's only part of the equation. PageRank is determined from backlinks and how long your URL is registered for, among other things. But it doesn't take into account keyword placement and a smart keyword program can still benefit your business.

2. Keyword density. I sometimes wish this one were on the way out but it still rears its ugly head from time to time. Keyword density is a metric used by internet marketers to determine how many keywords they need to have on a page to optimize the likelihood that Google spiders will view the site and file it appropriately and, perhaps, more highly than something else. A density of 4% has often been the magic number. However, it's a terrible number to aim for because it results in non-readable content. So you might get traffic to your business but you won’t make sales from it.

3. You should only link back to your site from higher PageRank sites. If you're going for PageRank, this does make sense in theory. However, this is a common practice and what you end up with is a marketing plan that puts you in the most competitive places. It's like putting your billboard on the same street where your competitors are all putting their billboards. Instead, some lower PageRank sites might not give you the high value back link you want, but they can give you a steady stream of website visitors using the "long tail" approach.

4. It's not all about search results. One of the points I raised with my friend is this: Some people are online and don't even bother with search results. It's simply not in their sales plan. They know they are in a highly competitive environment, or perhaps they are trying to carve out a new niche with no highly searched keywords. They use advertising and other methods to drive traffic to their site. Search is not the most important. 

Consider picking a few high quality (although not necessarily high PageRank) sites and spend your effort on those sites, building up a name for yourself and creating meaningful content that can engage your audience.

Google has a very innovative tool called the Wonder Wheel that you should take a look at if you haven't already. 

Google Wonder Wheel is basically a simple mindmap that connects one keyword to related keywords that people are searching for. Here's how to find it: 

Step 1. Search for something in Google. Whatever. It doesn't matter. I searched for the word "pony" (just because it's the first word that came into my mind).

Step 2. On the search results page there's a blue line across the page that has the search results on the right hand side ("Results: 1 in 10 of 37,600,000 for pony") and on the left hand side is the word "web" and a plus sign that says "show options" right beside it. (See it? No? Keep looking).

Step 3. Click the plus sign. A right hand side menu will open with all kinds of insanely useful information that I always forget is there – like what the search results might be in the past week or the past year – and about halfway down the page is the word "standard view". See it? Just below that is "Related Searches", "Wonder Wheel", and "Timeline". 

Wonder Wheel is a graphical depiction of related searches. Sort of a mindmap of spokes branching out of the main subject. Clicking on one of those subtopic spokes will create another wheel and spoke branching off of the main one. Try it! I clicked "pony shoes" and it branched out to a series of spokes about related searches of other kinds of shoes. Keep clicking to drill farther and farther into the topic. 

(And in case you're curious, "related searches" is a list of searches that contain the word "pony" – "pony shoes", "my little pony", "Shetland pony", etc; and "timeline" is another great tool, although I thought it would show the date of key searches and instead it showed the date of content: In my pony example, there is a big spike in 1860 for some reason. Perhaps it was an important year for ponies. 

How can you use Wonder Wheel? Why not start by Googling your keywords and seeing what else comes up. You might be surprised what potential related searches are being suggested and it could help you to identify some important markets (or some marketing blindspots) that you need to resolve.

This is an exciting tool with several big benefits and insights.

I was recently doing some search engine optimization for a client which included some articles with keywords included in them. I think keyword rich (NOT keyword stuffed) articles are a good marketing tool. Most of the articles went okay. Then I got to one article in which the keyphrase was a four word phrase that was grammatically incorrect. I don't want to say what it was exactly, but to give you a fictionalized example, it was something like "Cadillac Dealership Car Oklahoma". In other words, it wasn't anything you would ever use in a sentence; it was just the result from a Google keyword search. I suggested to my client that they rethink this keyphrase as an article but they insisted because 500 people a month search for that phrase.

Welcome to the attack of the long-tailed monster. The long tail – a notion famously developed by Wired writer Chris Anderson  – is the idea that the accumulated amount of a small group of things is greater than the "short head", the total of the initial spike. So, when you add up all of the books sold on Amazon, the one or two they sell of millions of copies of books far outweighs the millions of copies of a best-seller. Thus, the long tail doesn't look to be that profitable for them but it actually is. (If that doesn't make sense, try reading this Wikipedia entry for clarification; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Tail).

The long tail applies to search, as well, as illustrated by my attempt to write an article with keywords similar to "Cadillac Dealership Car Oklahoma" in a sentence. In this article, over at SEOmoz, they report that the 10,000 most common search terms only account for the top 18.5% of all searches.

Let me put this into perspective for you: If you were to list the top 10,000 search terms, you'd be hard pressed to do so (but you could probably list the top 250 – 500 and then you'd dry up!) but if you could do it, you'd still not be able to only account for more than three quarters of the searches done online. This study was based on 10 millions searches done in the US. That means that 1,850,000 searches were conducted with the top 10,000 terms… and the remaining 8,150,000 searches were on different terms. That is crazy!

… It also means there's some dramatic opportunity for you to target the long tail in your business. So, even though "Cadillac Dealership Car Oklahoma" makes absolutely no sense in a sentence, it could be enough (when combined with other similar keywords) to bring in the traffic you want to bring in!

How it works in article marketing, well, that's going to be the tricky part for marketers and writers and business owners, but that's going to be the future of web marketing.

Brought to you by: Contemporary VA - Run your business instead of running in circles.

You want a sticky website. The longer people are on your site, the better, and you can do things to help make it sticky. In the last blog I talked about minimizing (or at least being aware of) links that pointed people away from your website, and I also recommended that you build up links that point to other parts of your site. In this blog, I will continue to give some pointers and ideas to help you create a sticky site. The ideas here are generally useful for most business and audiences, regardless of whether you use a blog or a more conventionally formatted website.

* Break up larger articles into several smaller pieces that require clicking from one page to the next to read. This gets people used to clicking around on your site, which is a good habit you want your readers to have!

* If you want your site's visitors to follow you on Twitter, use the target="blank" function to have your Twitter page open in a new tab. That way, they're still on your site and can return to it shortly after seeing your Twitter page. (Sure, they might click away, but they may still come back to your site).

* Give them a reason to stay! Offer lots of high value content. I shouldn't have to write this but I've visited enough websites with extremely low value content that I've decided to include it in my list.

* Use other types of interaction, such as chat, forms, and embedded Twitter updates to keep people communicating with you through your site. Google Gadgets is another easy way to increase the engagement on your site. There are LOTS of gadgets that you can embed to increase your audience's interest and to hang on to their eyeballs for a moment longer.

* Rather than having a downloadable pdf (like a report or ebook), just keep it at HTML and have it open in a separate page.

* Add a blog if you don't have one already. A blog is always full of fresh content and is a great way to create a sticky experience for readers.

* Get rid of those advertisements. Yes, you might want to have advertisements and they may be appropriate for your business model, but if you want a truly sticky site and you're just hoping for a bit of AdSense income as an extra bonus, drop the ads.

Obviously stickiness is not an end to itself. After all, who cares if people spend 2 minutes or 20 minutes on your site? Ultimately, it's about engaging an audience that pays attention to what you have to say, that shares it with others, and that buys from you.

Brought to you by: Contemporary VA - Run your business instead of running in circles.

If you run Google Analytics, one of the metrics you should pay attention to is "Average time on site". This metric indicates just how sticky your site is. The longer people are on your site, the stickier it is.

The term "sticky" is a great term. Think of a sticky fly strip in which flies land and can't leave. That's the kind of site you want to create: One where your audience, prospects, and clients show up and are "stuck" to your site; they can't leave.

As a website owner, you need to figure out how to make your site sticky. I can't tell you exactly what to do because it's different for every website, every industry, and every audience demographic. However, here are some general ideas that tend to work for many situations.

The first thing you'll want to do is get the baseline. Find out what your visitor's average time on site has been and write it down somewhere. If you are serious about creating a website that builds a loyal audience, you'll want to measure this metric. (The maxim "what gets measured gets managed" is very true here).

Next, review how people typically look at your website. You might be able to tell this from Google Analytics or simply from feedback you get from your customers. Do they have a natural progression (i.e. Home > About > Products > Buy Now)? Find out where people are falling off of that pathway and shore it up. For example, if people get to your products page and review your testimonials only to click to client websites, you may want to remove the hyperlinks from those testimonials.

Then, you'll want to review the rest of your website for "exits". Exits are where your readers click to another site from a link on your page. If you link generously to outside websites more than you link to other places within your own site, you could be driving people away. It's not that you shouldn't have links pointing to external sites, but you should be mindful of their placement and of their potential impact on your business.

After that, increase the number of internal links to your site: Think about using various methods to encourage people to click around your site. Use tags, labels, categories, and other similar labeling in sidebars and in content. When someone reads one piece of content tagged with something interesting, they will be more likely to follow the same tag if it is clearly available to them.

Also, use lists (commonly found in blogs but also quite realistic to use in more conventional sites) that have "latest articles", "most popular topics", "if you liked this, you might also like these", and so on. These help to drive people deeper into your site.

Tune in later this week for another post that talks more about stickiness.