One of my favorite blogs to read is Seth Godin’s Blog and he just had a great post that I just had to share with you called “Lessons from very tiny businesses”.

One of the best ways to get natural organic search results on Google/Yahoo/Bing is to put your main keywords in your website title.

Now you can modify the title tags of your store.  Go to Marketing -> Basic Tools and enter in your website title.

What should your website title be?  It should be your store name and what you sell.

Ask yourself: “What do I want my potential customers typing into Google to find me?” - That is what your website title should be.

Feel free to ask me for suggestions on what your website title should be in the comments.

Allow bloggers/publishers/YOU to easily display your products on any website. 

Check out this video tutorial on what this feature is and how to use it:

This is what an embedded product looks like:

TV Saurus Tee

$15.00

The embed button is right next to the share links located on all stores:

This video demonstrates the importance of forming a connection with consumers to create brand advocates instead of simply encouraging people to buy a product.

Thanks Tim for the video!

We recently added the search box to all Flying Cart stores, but are you curious what your customers are searching for?  Wouldn’t it be nice to target your marketing efforts by being able to focus on products that you know they want? Now you can do that.

Our latest feature is a Search Statistics page where you can see a log of the last 200 searches done in your store.  Click on Marketing > Search Statistics in your Headquarters. For each search you will see the date and time of the search, the search term, and the user’s IP address.  This last field is the unique internet address of the user’s computer and you can use this to identify if the same user is doing a lot of different searches.

Note that the search logging begins today, July 2, 2009 so the data will be collected from this date forward.

Google Local Business Center

Video of me explaining why you need to put your business on Google Local Business Center now!

I just learned that 60-70% of all searches are local!

So now that we know that what should we do about it?

Advertise locally via Google. Go to Google Adwords and target your ads to a local area and in your ad copy write the city name.  Most local based business don’t advertise online so you can definitely use this to your advantage.

Feel free to ask me any questions on this strategy in the comments.

Talk to twitter users that are tweeting about the products you sell.  You can either search for your keyword on twitter via twitter search or auto follow people based on keywords using Twollo.

For example if you sell vegetarian vitamins search for the keyword “vegetarian vitamins” and jump in on the conversation!

Special Thanks to Anita at Small Bussiness Trends for prompting me to brainstorm about twitter and small business.

This guest post is written by Clayton Johnson of Viral-Tees.com

To Launch or Not To Launch? How Viral-Tees got it’s first sale.

Developing a business takes an incredible amount of time.  Viral-Tees has been brewing for at least a year with no launch, but when an opportunity struck we decided to launch even with only 1 design and it paid off!  Here’s a short synopsis of our situation:

President Barack Obama’s acceptance to be the commencement speaker at Notre Dame this year has created quite a controversy on campus.  Activist groups threatened to protest at this year’s graduation in opposition to Obama’s stance on abortion (ND being a Catholic Institution).  However, some 95% of seniors are in support of Obama speaking at the graduation ceremony according to the responses received in the student newspaper, The Observer.

A friend of Viral-Tees (a student at ND–Matt Degnan) decided to make a statement by ordering shirts that read plain and simple, “Obama? Fine by Me.” The campaign went viral.  Hundreds were sold on campus.  When an article was run on the story by the student newspaper, viral-tees.com got a plug which then generated our first order! (and many subsequent).

Taking the chance to launch unfinished has actually sped up the process of the business.  Many missing functions of the business have been developed by necessity and Flying Cart has made much of this possible by making selling online so easy!

About Viral-Tees
Viral-tees is owned exclusively by Identity Custom Imprinted Sportswear, a 30-year veteran to the screen printing industry.  We do wholesale screen printing and embroidery located in Mundelein, IL (NW Chicagoland).

Our website: www.identitycustom.com
Phone: 847-949-8337
email: clayton AT identitycustom DOT com

I just got an email asking:

“Help! My product posts keep getting Flagged and Removed from Craigslist, even though they don’t violate any of the terms of use. I suspect bored teenagers or some other nefarious bandit is responsible for this. Do any Flying Cart owners know of ANYTHING I can do to keep this from happening? Thanks!”

The answer is yes!  There are a lot of things you can do to not get flagged.  Also its not bored teenagers the Craigslist community is pretty good about that kind of stuff.  Here are a few things to keep in mind if you are getting flagged:

1. Don’t over post.  Nobody likes a spammer.  So if you are posting more than 3 posts a week I think you are overdoing it.

2. Don’t over hyperlink. At most you should only include one hyperlink.

3. Include a price.

4. Sound like a real person.

5. No typos.  The more educated you sound the less likely you will get flagged.  Copy/paste the posting into a word document to check for spelling errors.

6. No naked pictures! haha - This might be an obvious one to some…. but you will be surprised at how many people get this wrong.

Let me know if you have any other tips or experiences in the comments.