It’s just having a conversation, and hopefully starting more conversations, about the topic you are most expert in, passionate about and building your authority and web presence at the same time.

I am using this to help ease the way for traditional marketers and small business owners into the blogosphere and on-line community participation to give them that edge, but it’s really about all your marketing efforts. Just read this article on my favorite blog, and got inspired.
Relationships and community are being enhanced and built on-line. Funny, in the 90’s, during the dot com frenzy in which I was fully entrenched, we on-line enthusiasts were accused of destroying a sense of community. Now it seems as if we’re re-establishing it in a world where it is sorely lacking. Go us!

On-line where things could be so impersonal, to have a conversation and build relationships and community is the path to success. For years now we’ve been saying product is product now. It’s the value add that makes people decide on one vendor or another. One step further, it’s the trust and familiarity with PEOPLE behind the product and service.

Let’s get involved with each other!

Feedblitz’s Online Marketing Blog is one of my favorite “must-read” resources.  I subscribe and read daily.  Here’s an exerpt from a recent post that warrants more discusssion:

 Specifically, David Bailey from Google shared these five tips (some obvious, some maybe not) to take advantage of the specialized results:

1. Publish high quality, well captioned images

Well captioned is key here.  Don’t miss out on the alt attribute opportunity, but make sure they represent what the image shows, don’t keyword stuff image captions.  Also, open a Flikr account and put your images that aren’t on your site up there!

2. Create a Google video sitemap

Or any sitemap.  The key here is to have text links to all of your pages for the search engines to follow.  If you have dynamic pages, this is especially important!  Make sure there’s a link to your sitemap on every page…

3. Update business listings in local business center

Just posted about this.  If you’re not focusing on local search, start now.  It’s free and easy and becoming more and more important to being found on the web by people ready to buy!  Get a gmail account and a Yahoo! account and submit your business.  Also, put the address of your company in the footer or sidebar of your site and put up some real reviews - using the city names of the reviewer of your products or services.

4. Submit your feed to Google product search

Google offers a way to submit your product(s) or service(s) four different ways, individual items, a data feed of many items, a link to your on-line store or an API where you can sell right from Google results.  Again, free and easy!

5. Create a high-quality company blog

Couldn’t agree more.  Blogging can be so powerful and is so misunderstood by the average small business owner.  Do yourself a favor, investigate the power of blogging.   A great resource is the Blogger’s Blogger Rich Brooks of flyte new media to learn more…  He’s my old boss and knows more about how to make your blog a success than anyone I know.