There are lots of shark tanks out there. The Merchant Banking sales tank that small businesses have been forced to swim through for the past 20 years is a notorious one. But not anymore.

If you’re a small business — maybe one that only transacts a few payments a month — Paypal has a solution for you. No contracts. No flat monthly fee (unless you want to accept credit cards over the phone – then it’s $30/mo). And the transaction fee, at the low transaction volumes many small businesses are at, is very competitive: 2.9% + $.30.

As an Internet marketing company, my clients often want to start projects last week and finish up yesterday.  Sound familiar? Unfortunately, paying the down payment by check easily added a week to many project start dates. Now clients can just send money to me at Paypal and they don’t even need a Paypal account to do it! Of course, if they have one, it saves me the transaction fee, which is cool too.

Thought about making it easier for your customers to pay you?  Learn more here.

In the post, “20 Tips for Marketing Professional Photography Online”, I talked about the importance of site architecture in the development of a successful photography site. Here’s a site I developed over the weekend to demonstrate an example of what good architecture might look like:

This site is based on a css template by Dieter Schneider of Norway and here are the top 5 things I like about the architecture:

1. The Photography takes center stage
2. Details are hidden below the fold and on inside pages
3. Navigation is simple and intuitive
4. Audiences are separated into 3 categories (Photo | Studio | Print)
5. Pages are light and optimize well for search — No heavy, expensive Flash

I said “5 Things I Like”, but here’s a sixth worth mentioning: The Galleries are incredibly easy to browse.

Most of the small businesses I work with are not professional photography studios, but many of the strengths of architecture in Dieter’s design still apply.

Comments?

Chad Takenaka, owner of Design Models of California, has an approach to his work that really resonates with me:  Blending the latest technology with old school hand crafted values.

Chad Takenaka, owner of Design Models of California

After reading today’s LA Times article by Cyndia Zwahlen, I felt compelled to do something to help Chad’s business prosper. So, with a cup of coffee at my elbow, I sent the following email to Chad Takenaka, outlining 5 Steps he could take to improve his internet marketing:

Chad,

Enjoyed the Times article and hope it brings you lots of business. I’m particularly attracted to your concept of blending “the latest technology with old school values.”

As the owner of HandPickedTomates, I wanted to share a few quick (albeit unsolicited) thoughts about your website.

It looks professional, clean, simple, well organized, and (forgive me) really dull. Here are some suggestions to improve it to drive more business to you:

* 1. Improve the architecture
* Improve the impact of the landing page (you have 3-5 seconds to connect, don’t expect visitors to drill down to do it)
* Separate your audiences on the landing page
* Message to each audience individually (I’m guessing Mattel and Disney speak differently and have slightly different needs than Northrop and Boeing?)
* Enable zooming on all photos. (Imagine trying to communicate the beauty of Hawaii using only thumbnail images)
* Tag all images, links, and urls for better search engine optimization (SEO)
* Replace the email us link with a simple form, .e.g Contact Form
* 2. Name drop
* Your client list gives you instant cred. Yours more-so than most, so don’t hide it.
* 3. Make Social Networking work for you (Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter….)
* Your work is hip and interesting. Take the time to capture it and float it out onto the social networks.
* Use professional grade Photography and Video to tell the story
* Upload photos and video to YouTube, Flickr, etc. Make sure every post is well tagged for SEO.
* 4. Leverage Email Broadcasts
* Add an email subscription form to the site
* Send periodic email broadcasts to clients and other subscribers to keep your name in front of them
* 5. Post a Calendar of Events
* Consider offering regularly scheduled tours of your facility and post the date and time (see my Wednesday Free Consult for example)

This just scratches the surface. I hope you find some value in it. Please contact me if you ever decide to offer the facility tour.

Best,
Stephen

What do you other small business owners think about these steps. What others should be on Chad’s list?

A photographer friend of mine – let’s call him Tom – needed tips on how to launch and market his work online. Since I make my living helping companies market themselves, he asked for my advice. It’s my hope that this post, by way of reply, will help Tom and other professional photographers find online marketing success.

First, some background: Tom’s been shooting seriously for about 10 years. In my estimation, he’s qualified to teach most college courses on digital photography theory, lighting, composition, work flow – you name it. His understanding of computer software is exceptional too. He has over 20 years in software development and his technical understanding runs deep.  To round things out, he’s got a longer planning horizon than most people I know and has organization skills that, frankly, put most of us to shame.

But like many artistic and technically oriented people, he’s quick to share, “…the whole marketing thing has me a bit overwhelmed.”

The good news for Tom is he’s got all the hard parts already nailed: 1. He knows his craft 2. His work is impactful and connects emotionally 3. He shoots around “themes”, not just one off shots. 4. He’s accumulated a critical mass of digital assets (over 20,000 images). In other words, he’s ready to publish.

The Challenge:  How to successfully market professional photography images and services online.

The Solution: Start with a broad, well thought out strategy. Then execute consistently.

The bulk of this post will talk about building a web presence and summarizing the top online marketing opportunities photographers have. But first let’s start from the perspective of an overarching Marketing Strategy. As you read the following, keep in mind the goal is to execute consistent branding in all offline and online activities. Whether someone is talking to you face to face, reading your printed material, or looking at your online gallery, they should be getting consistent messaging.

The following primer on marketing your images and services online makes a couple of assumptions:
Read more…

A very cool new way to get noticed: announce your event with Schmap.it on Twitter:

Schmap is free, easy to set up, and really useful if you host informal events. Take for example, a neighborhood cafe that has lots of book club meetings, open mike nights, live music, etc.

A Schmap tweet not only gets the word out about the event, it tracks confirmations, maps your location for customers, and provides a link to your website via your twitter profile.

But the viral doesn’t stop there. Schmap automatically creates a retweet for each attendee along with any comment they made, e.g. “PaulHesseBroker @web_tomatoes I’ll be there! I’m a commercial real estate broker specializing in Southeast LA and Northern OC… http://schmap.it/GWk3zi “.

Have a question about Schmap, Twitter, or any other aspect of online marketing for your business? Post a comment here or contact me at HandPickedTomatoes.com.

 
What is the Wave?
Wave is a new collaboration technology from Google. It’s just been made available in a pre-beta version to about 300,000 to 600,000 people globally. (100,000 invitees who in turn can give access to 5  additional people each).

It’s a Swiss Army Knife of a tool for collaborating and communicating in real time. It has the potential to change the way we communicate, and I forsee many virtual teams using it to improve productivity, when it’s made generally available in the months ahead. Like Google Apps, the price for admission is free, so the barriers to entry will be very low.

The best description I’ve seen for what the Wave is and how businesses might use it is by Daniel Tenner, in his post “What problems does Google Wave solve?  (read the comments too, for a lively and mostly intelligent discussion of pros and cons of Wave).

Essentially Tenner postures that Wave is not a geek/hacker tool or a social media tool, but a corporate tool that solves real world work problems.

When Should You Jump In?
Business owners, executives, project teams and the rest of us with high collaboration requirements should have an awareness of the Wave – and in my opinion that’s good enough for now.

This “preview” version is pre-beta, with all the rough edges and incomplete functionality that that implies. I’d leave this pie in the oven for now while the early adopters do the heavy work in the kitchen.

In the meanwhile, get your mind around what it is and it’s potential for revolutionizing business communications and marketing. Then when the time’s ready to jump in that Wave, you’ll be both ready and stoked.

Creating a top URL shortener has the bling chasers in Silicon Valley coding like mad. One of my favorite’s is ”ow.ly“.

Why ow.ly? Two reasons:

1. the ow.ly url itself is super short.

Twitter power users know the importance of limited link size in a 140 character world.

2. ow.ly’s innovative.

By taking 30 seconds to set up a free ow.ly account, my ow.ly shortcuts become branded to me.

How? Ow.ly places a thin ”HootSuite” toolbox at the top of the visited page with a recognizable version of my Twitter profile image and a link to my full Twitter profile. The toolbox also includes uber convenient widgets for users to Follow, re-Tweet, Share,  or see Top Tweets. This helps me extend my “web_tomatoes” branding, is helpful to my audience, and way, way viral.

Since we’re talking about Hooters and Owls, let me end with this ow.ly link example:  http://ow.ly/oSyp.

Decades before the World Wide Web, Dylan wrote, “the vandals took the handles” as part of the lyric to Subterranean Homesick Blues. That makes the words pretty prophetic being that today there are people feverishly scheming to register every potentially valuable  name they can conceive of in hopes of collecting a “Ransom”.

What are some quick and free things your can do to protect your brand?

1. Scan the social networking sites to see if your name’s already registered. If not, grab it. Try this cool new tool: KnowEm.com (Just for fun, try typing in a well known brand like Pepsi or Facebook for comparison.)

Free search of social networks by brand name at KnowEm.com

2. Check your brand and related names at domize.com.  The site is fast, useful and free and is just plain simple and elegant.

So there you have it. A 2 minute checkup that can help protect your brand and save your company a lot of heartache down the road.

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Thanks for visiting. Leave us a comment if you found this information useful.

Something incredible happend this Wednesday. I stopped at the Stony Creek General Store in Sequoia National Forest and ran headlong into a need for Google Wave. Here’s what happened…

My son and I were just ending a four day backpacking trip through the Jennie Lakes Wilderness when we happened upon Markus Herzig who was just getting ready to mount his strangely customized Yamaha FJ-1200 motorcycle.

When I asked him where he started from his answer startled me: “Switzerland”, he said. “Wow, that’s a long way away” I ventured. “How long did it take you?”  ”A long time the way I went”, he replied and then he recited a rough outline of his travels over the past year, in lightly accented English:

“Started in Switzerland and road across Europe and the Middle East to Asia. Traveled from one end of Japan to the other and then across China, Mongolia (no roads here – broke my frame and had to wait for a replacement) and Russia, across the Bering Straight and through Alaska and down the Western Canadian Coast, and across Southern Canada to Nova Scotia and back to the West Coast of America.”

“Today I am going to Death Valley and then down to the Mexican border. Then over the next year back to Switzerland via Central and South America and Africa.”

Cool trip, but what does this have to do with Google Wave? Well, for starters this trip calls for global collaboration across languages and media. According to Google, with Google Wave people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, [voice] and more. Concurrency control technology lets all people on a Wave edit stuff at the same time – kind of like how people talk at the same time and even over one another in normal conversation.

Since Markus’ trip is currently being blogged only in German ( www.motonaut.ch ), it would be uber useful to have Google Wave’s ability to instantly translate chats, emails and other text based communication word for word into English or another of 40 different languages, as seen in this video. And wouldn’t it be cool to track Markus’ progress on an interactive map?

Good news for anyone looking to track his trip. Google Wave is due out later this year, in plenty of time for Markus’ scheduled return into Switzerland sometime in the latter half of 2010.

The tech part of me can’t wait. And at the same time I’m a bit daunted at the prospects of our shrinking world. Wish I could open up a Wave on that.

OK, this job didn’t really exist just a few years ago except in very big, very progressive companies. Now just about any company that can afford one – from the Fortune 500 to the Russell 2 million – are looking for Online Marketing mavens.

For example, here’s an ad on Craig List today:

Director of Online Marketing (Orange, CA)

We have several web properties in the financial sector. Our flagship property Lender411.com is a leading online community for mortgage and real estate providing Internet leads and other web marketing services to mortgage professionals. We have recently revamped the site with new and exciting technology and are about to execute an aggressive go-to -market strategy.

We are currently looking for an energetic web marketing and business professional with strong analytic and multi-channel marketing skills to play a pivotal role in the development and growth of our web properties. The position will focus on increasing consumer traffic and improving conversions on our sites.

Job Responsibilities:
- Develop, implement ,maintain and manage a customer acquisition plan for all the company’s web sites using SEO, SEM, email campaigns, affiliates, paid search, display banners, widgets and guerilla marketing. Structure analysis to determine ROI from various online acquisition marketing programs showing correlation with conversion rates and revenue growth.
- Strong focus on affiliate marketing since we have neglected that channel to date. Duties to include:
- Newsletter communications, acquiring/retaining/optimizing publishers.
- Promotion of affiliate programs through various affiliate outlets
- Online Grass-roots marketing
- Creating content for web site
- Analyzing/Optimizing online marketing channels & campaigns

-Define and implement results and metrics reporting. Prepare weekly traffic and advertising forecasts. Based on results and corporate objectives, initiate any modifications to marketing plans necessary to achieve and surpass goals.

- Develop, create and execute marketing budgets on a monthly basis for different campaigns
- Manage and expand the affiliate program & relationship
- Manage & supervise submission of product data feeds to search engines
- Establish presence & strategic alliances with major social network sites

• Location: Orange, CA
• Compensation: $48K-$52K/year + benefits + Bonus
• Principals only. Recruiters, please don’t contact this job poster.
• Please, no phone calls about this job!

Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.

Interested? Better have a good social footprint on the web already (blog, twitter, LinkedIn, facebook, myspace, meetups, website, etc., etc.).

I believe this field is hot, despite the cold economy. Would love to hear from you. What’s your opinion of the need for an in-house Online Marketing Stategists and why?