I know what you're thinking Small Business Owners and Marketers, you don't think you have time to post on YouTube, and you're not even sure why you should or what you should post about.  The proof is in the data.  If you can film yourself or your teammates going through your day, attending events, or even doing daily tips and how-to videos related to your industry, you will see the return on your time investment.  It will take consistently posting for a long period of time, like between 8-12 months, but you will build a following and a community of people commenting on your videos. Reply to every comment, and you will gain momentum and it will generate business for you.  Have a helpful attitude to your content, and expect 10-20 subscribers for a long period of time, but once you consistently post, and reply to every single comment, and once you get past 100 subscribers, you'll start gaining 2-5 more per week.  While this may not seem like much to your business, it really helps your SEO and organic visibility, which means your business gets found for searches related to your products and services, which helps your website come up at the top of Google Searches, which is what most marketers and Small Business Owners care about.  As well they should, because the data shows that Google Searches still make up more than 65% of web referrals.

Google updated its API requirements for Google Maps embeds on Websites, but many websites still have broken Google Maps / Location Finders. That’s the bad news. The good news is that there could be a simple fix. To use the Maps JavaScript API, you must get an API key which you can then add to your mobile app, website, or web server. The API key is used to track API requests associated with your project for usage and billing. To learn more about API keys, see the API Key Best Practices and the FAQs. This video explains how to get a Google Maps API Key.

This is a great follow-up Data Driven Daily Tip, from a fellow agency owner in Croatia, who saw this video ... Her question is: My question is, how should we manage our clients on Facebook. Should we create one Business Manager for our Agency and them create Ad Accounts to our clients and give them Admin access so they could add payment method? Or should we create a new business manager for each client separately? Or something else? Could you help me with that? All great questions. And I answer them all in this podcast.

Are you frustrated with your podcast following? Not enough listens or downloads? Or are you a Small Business Owner or Marketer looking to increase your exposure? The proof is in the data.  The best, easiest, simplest and most effective way to not only grow your podcast following but also save yourself time and increase productivity is to shorten your episodes down to five minutes or less, and to post them every day.  A year ago, I was doing hour-long interview style episodes with other business owners and influencers. It was fun, but it was hard work. I had to prepare, schedule, travel, film, edit, and publish, and all for ONE piece of content. 

When most marketers and small business owners think of posting on LinkedIn, they think of posting on their own personal profile, which makes sense. Personal LinkedIn Profiles are easy to increase visibility with, as you can simply invite anyone to connect with you. Then, when making posts, you’re able to gain a lot of visibility in the feed. However, posting on LinkedIn Business Profiles is different. You can make the same kinds of posts (upload a video, photo, or write up to 1,200 characters, embed links to articles, etc), but your posts won’t have the immediate visibility that they would if they were posted on your personal profile. This is a very similar concept to Facebook. The advantage to posting on a company LinkedIn page is that you can increase the desirability to potential employees and prospective clients. You can also boost posts and run ads off of the LinkedIn profile, as broken down in this post. But, like Facebook Business Pages, it’s hard to build a following. Unlike Facebook Business Pages, the data shows that simply posting daily on your LinkedIn Business Page actually works as a strategy to gain organic visibility and followers. Watch the video above for the proof!

As a digital strategist and marketer, I'm not ever an advocate for one particular platform. I'm simply an advocate for what works. Hence, data over opinions. Additionally, nothing I recommend have I not also done myself. Case in point, posting on Google My Business. After posting on Google My Business for 10 days in a row, it's clear that the proof is in the data. Simply posting daily skyrockets your business' organic search presence on Google Search and Google Maps results. Watch the video above. My love for Google My Business has been professed many times before. Google Wants Businesses To Post On “Google My Business” Small Business Marketing Tip: How To Make An Offer Post On Google My Business: Data Driven Daily Tip #200 SEO Tip: Benefits Of A Verified Google My Business Listing SEO Tip: How To Verify Your Google Business Listing

If you follow my blog at all, you know that I typically talk about ways to generate web traffic via ranking high on Google, best SEO practices, and even social media content creation and advertising. I even get into tracking data via Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, and digging into Google Search Console and Google My Business.  But there's one Google Product I haven't really blogged about much, and that's Google AdSense. I know this product very well from my days as a publisher. From 2006-2011, I ran an online publication that was able to generate revenue through a freemium content model. Part of that revenue was from advertising, mainly through Google AdSense.  AdSense is the other side of Google AdWords, meaning the sites that companies promote their sites on via the Google Ads Display Network, are the sites that publish those same ads on their site via the AdSense product.  Looking to monetize your web traffic by running some ads on your site? This video shows you how to get started with Google AdSense, create an account, grab the code snippet needed, embed it into your website, and what to expect next!

The data says that Instagram Stories are where your consumers and clients attention are. Regardless of your target persona, audiences are flooding to Instagram, and if you're not posting to your Story, you're barely visible on the platform. The metrics I've tested to gain this knowledge are: Story Views vs. Profile Views vs. Follower Count. If your business has enough followers (usually 10,000 or more), then you will be granted access to be able to add a "link" to your story, which allows the user viewing your story to be taken to a web page with more information about your business on it. I refer to this as the "Instagram Story Swipe-Up-To-URL" Feature. If you have enough followers to have this enabled, you have no excuse not to be posting 3-6 :15 second story slides per day on Instagram that link to various products, services and landing pages about your business. But there is yet another way to gain visibility now at a low cost per audience attention, and that is to run Instagram Story Swipe-Up Ads. This is done through Facebook Business Manager / Facebook Ads Manager, and this video shows you how, along with this earlier Data Driven Daily Tip. To run an Instagram Story Swipe Up Ad, you'll need to do the following: 1. Log into Facebook Ads Manager. 2. Choose any Ad Objective (but I recommend the Consideration Column and something like Traffic). 3. Name your ad, upload an image that is 1080 x 1420 px. Here is a link to the official guide on Instagram Story Ad Creative Dimensions and Guidelines from Facebook. 4. Have fun filling out your Website URL Link, ad Text, and Budget, and then click Confirm!

I've been using Facebook Ads SUPER ACTIVELY since 2016. I mean, I've run every single kind of Facebook Ad known to man or woman, and I continue to be a practitioner of the Facebook Business Manager, Facebook Ads and Facebook Events Tracking Platform.  It really is and / or should be integrated into everything every business does digitally, and I know that makes some old school IT and HR/Ops people cringe, but it's just the truth.  There are many examples of how Facebook Ads is an amazing brand building and customer acquisition platform, but the one I'm focusing on in this video is how to Narrow Down Your Target Audience for an ad/audience. For example, you may be a convenience store trying to appeal to "Mom's On The Go" in a particular geographic region of say, Tennessee. :) You may also be running a sale on say, AquaHydrate, a fitness water product. You can literally build an audience targeting all Women in Tennessee, then narrow it down to Mom's of Kids Age 8-10, then narrow it down to "with an interest in Fitness," then narrow it down to "interested in fitness waters" or even the brand AquaHydrate. Granted, your audience is going to get smaller and smaller the more you narrow it, to the point where it could get TOO NARROW and Facebook Ads will tell you your audience is too small and you need to re-expand it, but this is the era of marketing we're in now, and you need to familiarize yourself with it. It's amazing.

Google Domains Tip: How To Forward A Domain Name And Why You'd Want To: Data Driven Daily Tip 256 As you can imagine, having built and launched websites for more than 12 years, I've come across all kinds of domain name registrars and web hosting companies. One of the newest ones that I've come across, and seems to be more and more popular, is Google Domains. My understanding is that it's a new(er) product offering from Google, and makes sense as part of the GSuite for Businesses, which I'm a big fan of and have blogged a lot about. So having used Google Domains frequently now over the past year, I can tell you that one thing that isn't as intuitive as you might think, is how to simply forward a domain name from one to another. Why would you WANT to forward a domain name? Many reasons, including: - Marketing purposes - maybe you have a URL like myawesomepodcast.com, and you want to simply forward it to your URL on anchor.fm - Company name change. Maybe you want to rebrand from SallysSkinCareNashville.com to SallysSkinCareUSA.com or something similar. You can easily forward one to the other so that your users find you in both places. - Many entrepreneurs I know literally have 50-100 domain names in their accounts that are being unused, and are variations or misspellings of their primary domain URL. I'd strongly advise all of them and all of you to take the time to forward those to your primary URL. This will result in an increase in web traffic - even if a tiny one, it could still help! This video shows you HOW to forward a domain name using Google Domains.