While the internet is a wonderful place to be, exposing you to inumerable leads worldwide, for many smaller businesses, hiring the services of a digital agency is just not feasible.

Digital agencies are a great investment for businesses whose website is important to them, businesses who don’t have the time to keep up with the ever-changing world of the internet, and businesses who like to outsource services to specialists for peace of mind.

For small businesses who aren’t yet at the stage where they can afford to hire a digital agency, this doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be doing any digital marketing at all. There are plenty of things small businesses can do for a small budget, and that won’t take too much of their focus away from their core business.

This blog post is the first in a series I will do to help all my friends and all those out there, who are small business owners who want to cover the basics of online marketing for themselves.

The series will cover web analytics, online shopping services, SEO, Social networking, online PR, Adwords and anything else that I come up with as time goes on.

Purpose of your website

The first step for any digital marketing strategy – is to think about what your website means to your business. Is it there for selling? For supporting current customers? For branding? An online portfolio? All of these? You need a purpose for your website, so you know how much effort, and what kind of effort, you need to put into your campaign.

Once you know exactly what your website is for, this will help clarify the purpose for all your online strategies.

Where are Your Customers?

The next thing you need to do is think about how people ‘might’ find your website online. You don’t need to know every way right now, but this brainstorm is important to get things going. Do you think you could get customers searching in Google? On topic blogs? on Facebook or Twitter? Is there a marketplace for your product on EBay or other online shopping stores?

By identifying these opportunities, you know where to initially target your marketing efforts. However, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep thinking about this over time and keep your eyes open constantly for new opportunities.

Keywords – How do you describe your product/service?

Finally, you need to decide what keyword themes describe your business? Here, you might like to look at my keyword research post. This will help you clarify what your customers are searching online for, and subsequently will help in the SEO, Adwords and social networking aspects of digital marketing.

Like all things online, your keyword list will need to evolve over time, so don’t think you can make this list then leave it, it will need to be reviewed every few months.

After a long courtship, is the Microsoft/Yahoo deal finally settled? Well, nothing is ever set in stone until the fat lady sings (like how I can seamlessly mesh cliche’s?), but for now, this is how the land lies…

• Yahoo will scrap it’s search technology and use Microsoft’s technology (front end Yahoo branded, back end Microsoft tech), in what is being termed a ‘10 year search partnership’.
• There is no boatload of cash upfront.  Yahoo will simply earn a proportion of any revenue Microsoft makes.
• This will only apply to web, image and video searches, and aggregators that use this technology (like Yahoo news).  It will not affect things like the Yahoo directory, Yahoo answers, Delicious, Flickr, etc.
• Microsoft’s Bing will continue on as is.
• Changes will start in early 2010, and hopefully be all rolled out by this time next year.
• Yahoo’s search technology will be able to be used by Microsoft (perhaps to be integrated into Bing)
• Yahoo and Microsoft ad marketing will reach the whole Yahoo plus Bing audience.

Does this benefit consumers?  Yahoo and Microsoft say yes, because of  ’scale’. I am not sure what that means, but there are two ways of looking at it. It could be yes if the various pieces of the ’search’ puzzle that Microsoft and Yahoo engineers have independently come up with fit together to make something even better than their individual parts.

However, elimination of a major competitor doesn’t ‘usually’ have positive outcomes for consumers…

On the other hand, by allowing advertisers to reach the Bing and Yahoo searches using only one advertising portal saves a lot of time, is more convenient, and could help compete with Google (who of course will still have the lions share).

The News-Google War (so-named by me because of the confusion of the phrase Google-News), is a well known battle between the big newspaper conglomerates and Google. The strangeness of the battle lies in the fact that the News conglomerates are both the customers and enemies of Google, a position that you would think would give them a lot of clout. And so they were hoping…but it is turning out that Google is not to be halted in its march towards Monopoly, and not only have they fought against some of their biggest sponsors once – now they are doing it again.

The reasons behind the war are many. The first battle, The Battle of Content, (emphasis on first syllable), was waged mainly in the US, by the big newspapers who were feeling that their news was being devalued, and plagiarised, due to dissemination from listing in Google. The rub for them was, did they want to block Google from their site, and thus lose millions of visits? Obviously they didn’t.

With newspapers across America being shut down, due to not being financially viable, it quickly became apparent that the business model of the newspapers was becoming obsolete, and they had to take a page out of Google’s book and move to the future. What they need to do is redefine their business strategy to encompass the threat of plagiarism and free views.

In Australia, the second battle has begun. The Battle of Real Estate.

Google Real Estate

Google has recently released Google Maps for Real Estate, where you can use the Google Map programme to search for listed properties. This development immediately raised alarm with News Limited and Fairfax, who run the domain.com.au and realestate.com.au websites. The new Google Maps application is direct competition for their real estate websites. Google creates its map listings through a free service available to all real estate representatives, including individual landlords.

Following its introduction, both Fairfax and News Limited have independently announced they would be reconsidering their generous spends on Google Ads. The biggest consideration for them would have to be the sacrifice of the large amount of traffic brought to them via Google.

While the news giants are complaining about this new development, real estate vendors and consumers seem to be considering it a good move for them, providing more information, and breaking down what was almost a duopoly in the online real estate market. It is another marketing venue for small providers, much like Google Adwords, where they can compete with the bigger players on a more even playing field.

However, the dangers of the new service will rise if it isn’t controlled properly, for example, by spammers or disreputable real estate agents and landlords. Also, the ever-present threat of the Google monopoly is a worry, if it discourages development in any of the areas it competes in, or renders it not financially viable to provide services which might otherwise be useful for consumers.

Not only does China have the largest population in the world, it now also has the most internet users in the world. China has so embraced online technology that a whopping 338 million Chinese people are internet users (according to the China Internet Network Information Center ).

To be able to understand such a huge number, note that this is 35 million more people than live in the United States and 16 times the number of people living in Australia. The number, while huge, is only 25% of the Chinese population, so of course there is a lot more room for expansion. The USA has an internet penetration of around 70%, which means China still has a long way to go.

Internet use in China is always under scrutiny – their ‘Great Firewall’ aims to suppress sensitive information, and since the riots in Western China a couple of weeks ago, Facebook has been blocked across the country. The recent Chinese Government bid to include censoring software in all PCs sold in China was met with condemnation from around the world. Years ago, Google copped abused for operating in China under the Government’s restrictive rules, but I think any Chinese person would agree with me that restricted Google is better than no Google at all.

Google isn’t the leader in the search market in China, unlike most other places. That honour goes to Baidu, and is probably due in part to the difficulty Google has in dealing with deciphering the Chinese character as much as national pride. In China, colleagues and friends advise that Google is used for more ’serious’ searching, while Baidu is used for entertainment, such as downloading music, movies and games.

With this burgeoning internet audience comes the desire of marketers to appeal to them, and so digital marketing in China is becoming a bigger and more competitive industry with agencies springing up every day and conferences scheduled throughout the year. Optimising websites in China raises a lot of new concerns such as Baidu including ‘paid’ ads in their natural results and the Chinese love of flash and interaction. However, cracking the Chinese online market will expose you to the largest online market in the world – so I pretty much think it is worth the trouble!

Search Engine Bing has now added another feature to it’s search results page – excerpts from the page of each result, which can be viewed by rolling over an icon placed at the right of each entry.

Doing this helps reduce the need for clicking through on multiple entries to find what you are looking for. The feature seems to take a random grab from the page, and presents that text. It also has an ”Also on this page” section, which lists menu items and links from other sections on the page.

If you were optimising for Bing (or more likely, if Google started offering this functionality), I guess you would try and make your content overall more compelling (i.e. make just as much effort as you would for your title and description meta tags), as well as making sure links on your menu’s and to other pages were titled appropriately so they could properly inform a person on the search results page who was seeing them out of context.