Karen Scharf | Small Business Marketing Consultant

There is a myth floating around – and it has been for some time – that if a webmaster publishes the same content on his site that appears on another site (for instance, by publishing an article on his blog and also submitting it to Ezine Articles) then his website will get penalized for duplicate content and banned from the search engines altogether.

Here’s a quick email marketing tip that might help improve your delivery rate. Check the font sizes in your template and re-usable code.

In email marketing, the subject line is often seen as the single most important element. Afterall, if your subject line isn’t persuasive, no one will open your email and your message won’t get read. The subject line is generally equated with the headline of a display ad.

If you’re a local business on a tight budget, you can save money on your advertising budget by targeting only specific locations with your AdWords campaigns.

Designing the HTML version of your email message can be difficult since there are so many different email client and operating system combinations out there – and they have their own way of rendering HTML. And there really is no way to be positively sure which client your readers will be using to view your messages.

When we hear the words Landing Page we generally think of PPC campaigns or some other form of internet advertising. But I like to use landing pages for all of my off-line advertising also. However, you’re using it, a landing page is a web page, typically hidden from the site’s menu bar and other navigation – meaning the only way you can get to the page is to type the URL directly into the browser.

We often get inquiries from prospective clients who would like us to build them a new website. They believe that their current website must be “bad” because it’s not listed in the search engines. They’re convinced that a new website will automatically ensure a top ten Google rank.

Michelle, Cyndi and I are working with several new clients who are interested in redesigning their current websites. And, to be perfectly honest, a website redesign can be more difficult and time-consuming than building a completely new site from the ground up. Not only are we creating a new design, but we are also dealing with moving and renaming pages and other files, which puts traffic and page rank at risk. That’s why it’s extremely important to have a solid plan in place before the redesign process takes place.

I think every website should have a site map since it does help in traffic generation. As the term suggests a site map is a map of the web site and can be a simple list of links or a more complex representation. The type of site map you’ll need depends on the type of website you have.

If you’ve added social media to your marketing mix, you’re probably asking yourself, “Is it worth all the time and effort involved?” That might seem like a difficult question to answer at first, but there are definite steps you can take to measure the return on your social media investments.