"Small is the new big," according to Seth Godin. Where businesses used to want to appear to be big, they may now want to look small, cutting edge, and nimble. Small businesses, by this reckoning, should revel in their fresh, new identity and their close-to-their-roots feeling. And many do.

Good for them. What if you still want your business to look a little bigger than it really is? You may be in an industry that still places mroe trust in larger businesses. You may plan to be much bigger next year than you are now, and prefer to begin as you mean to go on. You may just prefer the idea of a bigger business.

You can do it online. And we can help.

We're not talking about deception, here. We're just talking about a highly professional self-presentation.  Here are some steps you can take to give yourself an image worth growing into:

• Have a professionally designed website. Nothing says "just getting our feet wet" like an amateur website, and yes, everyone can tell.
• Put thought, effort, and a bit of money into your logo design. This is an investment, but you can get a lot of mileage from that one investment, and it fixes your company's identity the way few other things can. This is not the place to choose something generic or auto-generated.
• Use a corporate style. Avoid down-home, handmade effects. Sure, they can be attractive, but a polished, professional air makes you look like a larger company even if you're really working out of your garage. A traditional font, rounded corners, and neutral colors may be elements you'll want to use -- discuss it with your designer. Don't be shy about that, either. Your designer can help you create just the image you want to present.
  
• Use a consistent style. Large companies get everyone to use the same style in their correspondence and writing; you should do the same. 
• Say "we." Even if you're the only employee right now, you can still say, "We carry..." or "We'll have that for you..." or "We've been in business since..." Just be sure to keep it consistent: don't say "we" sometimes and "I" sometimes, or you'll seem confused.
• Use online services to pick up the slack. SmartPay e-billing, SugarCRM, professional email, and other online tools give you a "big company" look from the beginning.

Last year, businesses and nonprofits might have discussed whether social media might be a useful tool for their particular organization. Now, we know that our customers are looking for us at Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, so we'd better be there.

We hosted the Fargo Twestival and saw for ourselves that social media has the power to make a difference. This year's donations were twice last year's. It can make a difference in your business, too.

If you're ready to stick your neck out,  take a few simple steps to make sure your first forays into the wilds of social media are effective:

• Have a goal.  By choosing a simple, measurable goal, you set yourself up for success, and you can measure the outcome. If you plan to "Improve our company's reputation," you might have difficulty deciding when you've succeeded. If you decide to get 100 followers at Twitter or 500 fans at Facebook, to double the amount of traffic you get through social media, or to gain 30 links through social media,  then you can tell when you've succeeded.
• Recruit some allies. At a party, the animated group with a fun conversation going draws more people than the lonley wallflower. Get your staff, friends, and family to help you kick things off. Start a discussion, and others are likely to join in.
  
• Remember you're not advertising. You can suggest to your whole address book that they become fans of your business page -- once. You can e-mail people and ask them to add a link to your website onto their Facebook pages -- once. It's not intrusive, and some people will be happy to learn about you. Doing it every week is irritating, and doing it every day is spam.
  
• Be interesting. You may get some helpers to kick the conversations off, but you have to say interesting things to keep people coming back. Talk about your new products, sure, but don't forget to share things that are useful and entertaining. And occasionally you can share a little personal tidbit -- but watch out for too much information. Trouble with fellow employees, snarky comments about competitors, or complaints about customers are not going to do your company any good.
• Measure your results. Watch your site analytics for visitors coming to your site from your social media networks, use Facebook Insight , even create a special offfer for your network. All these efforts will help you see what's being most useful for your company or organization. 

Soon, you'll be enjoying your online networking as much as you enjoy meeting people in the physical world.

Is it possible to do all the marketing for your business from your website?

Maybe. Why? Are you doing an experiment? Unless that's the plan, it's hard to see any reason to limit yourself in that way. Your website is an essential part of your marketing mix, certainly. But it will combine well with other marketing ingredents:

• E mail marketing Build your house list  with your website, trade show booths, a sign-up sheet on the counter at your physical place of business, or your Facebook page. Then use e-mail to bring customers in --to your website or to your brick and mortar shop.
• Direct mail marketing Send out a postcard, and make sure that your website's address is on it. Studies show that consumers now usually check three different channels of information in the course of their decision to buy: that might mean your postcard, your website, and your shop. Studies also show that an e-mail follow up to a direct mailing can be expected to increase responses by 50%.
  
• Shows and speaking engagements Hold a seminar or workshop, set up a booth at a tradeshow, or take a place on a panel at a conference. Hand out business cards with your website's URL when you do, and you'll be bringing interested people in where you can tell them more.
  
• Your brick and mortar shop If you have a store, an office, or another physical place of business, be sure to put your web address on the sacks, brochures, and signs. Train staff to ask, "Have you visited our website?" when they check customers out.  And be sure to show your address, map and/or pictures of your place of business on your website. The two venues will support each other, and both will get more traffic. 
• Public relations When you do press releases, include a link to your website. Put your press releases on your website, too, or link to them. Again, there's a synergy there, and each supports the other. 
• Social media Have a blog, a Twitter account, and a Facebook page for your business. Link to your website from those social media pages, and link from your website to those pages, too. Encourage staff to link to the company website from their pages at LinkedIn or Xing, Jigsaw or Spoke or Ning. The links help your website, and they make your staff's pages more interesting, too. Friend your colleagues at Facebook and follow them on Twitter.
  
• Physical world networking Share your business card, and make sure your website's on it. When someone at the Chamber meeting gives you her email address, ask whether she'd like to be on your company's email list. People you know in the physical world will be more receptive to your email contacts, and they're likely to visit your website, too, if you tell them about it.
  

 Each time you connect your various marketing methods, you increase the value of each one, till the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. 

Tonight we will be gathering together as Tweeps for a cause at the second annual FargoTwestival.

Thank You! to all of you who have made your donations and bought your tickets. We have not only reached our original $500 goal but we have surpassed our second goal in just one week. As of this writing, we're providing supplies for 26 children, and we're not through yet!

There's still time to buy a ticket for tonight's Twestival.  Your $7 donation will buy school supplies for a needy child for a quarter of the school year -- $28 buys school supplies for the whole year. Do the math and help as many kids as you can: every donation equals a ticket to the Twestival.

When we see you at Jitter’s you will see a physical representation of the help we are providing to those who truly need our help. Not to mention the chance to see the people you have been tweeting with, the volunteers, and the great selection from Jitters.

As an online community we have proven the power of our online connections and the powerful impact we have as a group. We can make the world a better place.

Tonight is the night and you can still purchase your ticket online or at the door! Beginning at only $4 you can help a child with the supplies they need to go to school. Look at what we can accomplish! I think we have destroyed the misconception that Twitter is a “time waster”.

See you at Jitters 1414 12th Ave N, Fargo6:00pm to 8:00 pm Feel free to park in the NDSU “T” parking lot. They do not monitor after 4:30pm 

The Fargo, North Dakota Twestival is coming up!

We'd like to meet all our fellow Fargo Tweeps, and here's our chance. Join us on Thursday night at Jitters Coffee Bar for music, food, fun, and conversation -- all in a good cause. 

Tickets support Concern worldwide in providing school supplies for children who cannot get them for themselves. Onsharp is providing pizza, cookies, and libations. Rosie Savageau and Petter Eriksmoen are providing music.

We'll see you there!

Thursday, March 25, 2010
6:00 - 8:00 PM

Tickets:

• $4 supplies for 1/7 of the school year
• $7 supplies for ¼ of the school year
• $28 supplies for 1 year of school
• $140 supplies for 5 children for 1 year of school
Buy now! >>

Venue:
Jitters Coffee Bar
1414 12th Avenue North
Fargo, ND 58102
(701) 364-0210

Entertainment:
Enjoy the music stylings of Rosie Savageau (@FargosRose) and Petter Eriksmoen (@songsofreedom)

Refreshments provided by OnSharp:
1 free beverage with ticket purchase
Free pizza
Free cookies

Tami Dowers just finished presenting a free seminar on SEM -- search engine marketing, in case you were wondering. Specifically, we learned about how to use paid search ads to drive targeted traffic to a website.

We learned about Google Adwords, Yahoo! sponsored search, and bing search ads. Setting up these ads, Tami said, is like going to an auction and buying a chair. "Except in this case, the auctioneer will take into account how enthusiastic you are about the chair, and how well you're going to use it when you get it home.

In other words, the quality of your website and ads matter to the cost as well as the effectiveness of your search ads.

So your process needs to begin with three considerations.

First, your budget. Google will suggest an Adwords budget for you if you ask, but their recommendations may be a big rich for most budgets. Tami shared an example in which they recommended a budget of $40,000 a day. Onsharp went with $500 a month, and the client is getting great results. 

Tami recommends looking at what you're currently spending on direct mail or other marketing efforts.

"I hear people saying that SEM is expensive," she says, "but I think they're not tracking the ROI of their other marketing efforts." A $500 postcard mailing that brings in five customers is costing $100 per conversion. A trade show that costs your company $2,000 for the booth, materials to give out, and travel may bring 15 customers -- and the cost per conversion is  over $130 per conversion.

Often, this kind of expense isn't even measured in terms of cost per conversion. The costs disappear into the overall marketing budget, or into specific line items like travel or printing, and the company never realizes what their cost per conversion really is. SEM allows you to track and measure those costs with a high level of accuracy. With that kind of information, you can also tweak your campaigns and put more of your marketing budget into the things that give you the best return. You can even set a target for your cost per conversion, based on the value of a new customer, and work toward that goal in an organized way.

The next thing to consider is your targeting. SEM allows you to focus on customers in particular places, people who are looking for particular things -- not just people in your zip code. You have so many options for choosing keywords and targeting ads that you can narrow in on the customers who are most likely to want exactly what you have to offer. 

"If I have a lead in my pocket right now," Tami asked, "what would you be willing to pay for it?" The value of that lead is higher when it's someone who actually wants to buy your services than if it's simply someone who happens to live in your neighborhood or read a particular newspaper. SEM is "pull marketing" -- people are actively looking for you when they come to your website. Compare that with "push marketing," which is what you get when you put an ad on TV. People who see your ads may or may not be interested. They may leave the room just when your ad comes on. They're not out looking for information on your goods and services, as those who come through SEM are.

The third thing to think about for SEM is conversion tracking. You can set up your page and your campaign to measure people's interest very closely. This can give you -- in addition to sales and new customers -- extremely useful information about how people interact with your website and your product. This information can be valuable enough in itself to make an SEM campaign worth doing. 

Plus, the high degree of measurability and control in SEM allows you to adjust your campaign as it goes along, to increase your chances of success throughout the life of the campaign. This is not an option with a print ad or direct mail campaign. 

How do you measure success? Tami's slide above shows some of the ways a company can measure the success of an SEM campaign.

Wanamaker's famous claim that he knew he was wasting half his marketing budget -- he just didn't know which half -- doesn't apply to SEM. Each business has its own ways of identifying success, but all businesses can tell exactly what their return on their investment is with SEM.

The webinar was recorded, so you can contact us if you'd like to see it. We'd also be happy to talk with you about your own web marketing needs. Call Onsharp at 701.356.9010 to get started.

You have a great website with a great message.

Unfortunately, unless the right people are actually coming to that website, the message is missing them, and your work on that website is wasted.So maybe you need to increase the number of people coming to yoru site.

Or maybe you have people coming to your site, but they don't seem to be your customers. Sitting back and waiting to see who shows up can get you traffic, but it won't always get you the targeted traffic you want. Taking control with SEM can bring you the kind of business you want.

And it may also be that your traffic is increasing  steadily already, but you have big plans, and you'd like to bring even more people to your site. 

How can you drive more traffic to your website? With SEM.

SEM also offers a more measurable way to advertise your business.If you've been relying on traditional media ads, you may be echoing retail magnate John Wannamaker, who once said he knew that half his marketing budget was wasted, but didn't know which half. Diverting mroe of your marketing budget toward SEM gives you an opportunity to track and measure results in a way that you just can't with TV or radio.

Join us for this webinar to learn more about SEM:

• what it is
• how it can benefit your business
• basics for managing your SEM account

Register online or call us at: 701.356.9022 for more information.

Admission is FREE.

Onsharp is in the business of designing and building beautiful websites, as well as providing web applications and development. We're proud of the appearance of the sites we build, as well as of their overall quality and optimization.

But you have to wonder: how much does that matter?

Search engines can't see the beauty of a website, and they don't have much aesthetic sense anyway, what with being machinery and all. They don't choose sites because they're beautiful, or reject them because they're ugly.

So perhaps an ugly website would do just as well as a beautiful one. 

We don't think so.

Here's why:

• Part of the beauty of a website may be its colors and images, which the search engines cannot in fact see. But part of the beauty is the website's bones -- its information architecture, which search engines can see. Given equal quality of content, Google will choose a cleaner, standards-compliant, fast site over a poorly-built one. Well-built sites look better to humans, too, as it happens.
  
• Part of what makes search engines choose one site over another is the number of links the site has from other sites. Links are generally placed by humans. People are more likely to link to your beautiful site than to an ugly, poorly-designed one.
  
• People are also more likely to click through to your beautiful site from Twitter, Facebook, and other places that show a screenshot. That traffic can be great for your business, regardless of what the search engines do.
• A beautiful site will be more appealing to your visitors, and they will be more likely to become customers. A professionally-designed, attractive site makes your company look better to people who visit your website. You look professional and trustworthy, so visitors are more likely to shop at your website or to visit your place of business.

Onsharp is a Fargo web design and development firm. We build websites and web applications,  and also provide a full range of web services for businesses and organizations here in Fargo. 

One of our offerings is SmartPay, an electronic invoicing solution that allows users to go green, save money, and streamline their office systems. 

Last week at the Hilton Garden Inn in Fargo, area businesses joined us for lunch and a conversation about SmartPay.

Ryan Conley of InterceptEFT spoke. InterceptEFT is our partner for merchant accounts, and co-developer of the SmartPay system. While businesses can choose to use other providers for their merchant accounts, we recommend InterceptEFT for complete security.

Joe Sandin, CEO of Onsharp, also spoke. Then Jennifer Rise of 702 Communications shared her company’s experience using SmartPay.

The businesspeople who came to learn more about SmartPay had lots of questions, and the seminar was definitely interactive. We felt that we'd learned a lot and had some great opportunities to share with our fellow Fargo businesspeople.

If you missed the seminar, you didn't miss your chance to talk about SmartPay or about Onsharp's other services. Come and see us, give us a call, or email and let our representatives contact you.

So you've got a Facebook fan page for your business. Now what?

Your Facebook page can send people to your website, help you interact with your customers, and give you more front page rankings at Google. 

How can you get maximum effectiveness for that page?

• Get some good content there. Onsharp sends blog posts to our Facebook page automatically. You can, too. Depending where you house your blog, you might find it easier to do this from your dashboard, or you might prefer to set it up at Facebook. You can also automate the process by following the step-by-step instructions at Twitterfeed. If we take care of your  website and your blog for you, just contact us if you need help. You can also add content directly at Facebook. Uploading photos and videos is easy at Twitter, and it lets you make a personal, behind-the-scenes connection with your customers. You know how many people tune in to watch someone working in a bakery, tattoo parlor, or auto shop on TV -- they'd like to see what you do, too.
  
• Get some fans. Start by having all your staff suggest the business page to all their Facebook friends. That's just one post on your friend's walls, in amid the Farmville and Mafia requests -- it's not too intrusive. Some will accept the suggestion and become fans, and your interesting content will show up on their walls. Things can just naturally grow from there.
  
• Post some ads. Facebook has an astonishing reach -- hundreds of millions of users. If your product has broad appeal, you can pick up quite a few fans -- and new customers -- by diverting some of your advertising budget in that direction.
• Interact with your fans. Have some conversations, visit your fans, send out some virtual cheeseburgers. Even the most intense job has some downtime during the day, or moments when people might need to take a break. Let your staff know that you'll value their taking a couple of minutes from time to time to represent the company. Many busineses worry about timewasting and hesitate to make this suggestion, but we're betting that some of your staff visit their Facebook pages on coffee break anyway -- why not make that productive time for the company by asking them to drop by your company page when they get back to work?
• Keep track. Use Facebook Insight and your analytics to see how much interest Facebook is creating in your company and how much traffic Facebook is driving to your website. If it's minimal, then you may want to maintain a minimal presence at Facebook. If it's impressive, then you know you need to increase your investment.