OrangeSoda Internet Marketing Blog

Search Engine Land has a monthly column I like to follow called, “Small is Beautiful.” It talks about small businesses and their online marketing successes.
This month there’s an interview with small business owner who is a musician. Musician John W. Tuggle teaches private guitar lessons and tried making an ebook. He only sold about 5 ebooks in over a year - he was discouraged and ready to stop teaching.

He got help with his online marketing and leveraged new media like YouTube, podcasts, blogging, and Skype. Here’s the result of their work: http://www.learningguitarnow.com

Tuggle is doing well by making his local business global. He teaches people all over the world. Small businesses should take note - by thinking bigger.

He teaches more than 40 students, including one in Portugal, and he has 10 students on a waiting list. His podcast has been downloaded about 6,000 times in a few months. YouTube has been a great success - 40,000 views of all his videos in three months and people also buy after seeing the video.

He had a web site but it wasn’t very effective,

“…I focused on looks instead of content. I didn’t know anything about keywords or SEO….the blog, in my mind, had to be an integral part of the site…Everybody is doing blogs now and when I learned how to tag, ping, and bookmark, I got more web site traffic in one day than my other site got in six months. Now that got me excited!”

Here’s the secret too - he creates new products based on research. Not just on his gut feeling on how it will do, but by first looking at the market. Search engine optimization (SEO) is market research - seeing what people are looking for online and creating or spinning your product so it matches what people are searching for.

About his guitar blog:

“I check HitTail and look at the suggestions and what I need help in ranking for. Then I determine what keywords I need to focus on and figure out what I can write about that will interest people, while at the same time help me to get searched or improve rankings.”

His Small Business Online Marketing Tips:

• Create a good lesson or story for a blog post.
• Insert keywords into the blog title and post.
• Add pictures to keep it interesting.
• Social Bookmark Posts (Digg, Delicious, Mixx, and Propeller, Slideshare and Scribd)
• Identify keywords that are effective and use your keyword list in blog titles, Technorati tags, and YouTube videos.
• Ping using WordPress.
• Create a system that will let you bookmark social sites by pressing a button in your toolbar.
• Submit blog to blog directories.
• Spent 15 mins. a day finding friends on YouTube.

He also promoted his site on Yahoo! Local, Google Maps, and Merchant Circle. Read the entire interview at Search Engine Land.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the options, but hire help and be willing to keep learning and take a step at a time.