One job involves creating a unique branded experience that makes the client look great online. While the other is responsible for taking that wonderful looking site and making it work as a marketing tool.

I’ve seen some amazing looking sites that do absolutely nothing for the client.

That’s because the sizzle of a sexy site has an instant appeal to folks who don’t know any better.

An analogy I often make is that if you put a lawnmower engine in a Ferarri, it may look good, but it just won’t cut it – literally and metaphorically.

Let me be clear – a great web designer is an amazing resource, and everyone should be lucky enough to have access to at least one.

But problems arise when a business, assumes that a web designer is also a great marketing resource.

If you are looking to save money on your site by hiring a designer – without a marketing person to assist with the functionality – find out:

• What they know about search engine optimization
• Will they do keyword research to help you create quality content Google will love?
• Do they take care of proper page title tags and descriptions?
• Will they set up your Google Analytics?
• Will they create a proper site map and make sure you have an webmasters account with Google and Bing?
• Are they including privacy statements and copyrights?
• Are they blocking your content with a flash/splash pages?
• Will they create a mobile version that works with iOS, Blackberry and Android devices?
• Will they help you connect your RSS feeds to automatically update your various social media accounts?

All of these are important factors in building a successful online brand. Don’t get suckered into fancy, when functional is what you really need to market yourself more effectively and drive sales.

That would put most of us in a pretty sweet spot.

Alas, the internet has billions of sites. So good luck with that.

But there is a world out there that most of us don’t dare go near it because the costs seem prohibative. Of course I’m talking about mobile apps.

Recently JoeMobi.com launched a service that turns any WordPress blog into an app for the Android, Blackberry and Playbook.

Combined these app stores have less than 500,000 apps.

That sounds like a lot. But imagine if there were only 500,000 websites to choose from. And a good chunk of them only made fart sounds.

There are currently 1.8 billion smartphones floating around, and by 2014 Pew Research predicts web traffic from mobile devices will overtake desktops.

So this if there was ever a right time to get into this space, it’s yesterday. But if you want to take advantage of this exploding opportunity you can still get in on the action.

Here are a few tips that I’ve come up with.

Choose a name for your app that is keyword rich and descriptive. Nobody cares about your company, they care about what your app will do for them. If you are an expert in management and team development – don’t have the same name for your app as your URL or company name. Give it something snappy like The Management Toolbox.

My app is called Web Marketing Tips (and it’s available on the Android store here). The description is about what the app will do – which is provide tips and articles like this one to help small businesses market themselves more effectively online.

• If you’re a realtor in New York, call your app New York Real Estate. You can use the app to showcase articles or new listings in the market.
• If you’re a retailer, use your app to focus on new products or discount coupons.
• If you’re a recruiter in Edmonton, call your app the Edmonton Job Board and have all your positions pushing out.

For your description, use the Google Keyword Tool to find words folks might search for.

An unintended consequence of having an app like this, is the focus it brings to your writing. If somebody downloads an app they don’t want it to be overly promotional – which far too many blogs tend to be. This is your opportunity to break open a completely new channel to market your expertise by creating quality content for millions of people around the world.

Once you’ve created your apps, submit them to the Android Market and Blackberry App World.

But over the last few weeks I’ve talked to  a number of site owners – speakers, recruiters, SEO folks – and I’ve been really surprised by how few of them know anything about Feedburner.

Now Google’s wall-splattered with spaghetti approach to product launches makes it too easy for some of the great tools they have to fly under the radar.

Feedburner is one of them. If you are a site owner with a blog or podcast, stop reading this post right now and sign up for Feedburner.

What it does is take your raw feed – generally looking like this - and turn it into this.

Pretty slick.

But it does more than this. It will also create forms so folks can subscribe to receive your new blog posts via email, provide a metric showing how many folks are subscribed – along with their emails. Go ahead and subscribe to my feed using the form on this page.

It will also generate simple code for you to display your blog posts on virtually any page on any site you run.

It will also notify different services when your blog is updated – helping your SEO. And of course it will also automatically update your Twitter account.

With a couple of Facebook tweaks you can even connect your Feedburner feed to automatically send your new posts to your Facebook Fan Page.

So what are you waiting for. It’s a free service.

Over and over again, I hear it from clients and prospective clients. “I don’t see the value in Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter etc.”

“I’m on all of them and I’ve never got any business from them.”

Here’s the thing. The big difference between social media and advertising is that you have to be social and add value to the conversations if you want to build relationships and make some sales.

It’s not enough to build a Linkedin profile, create a Facebook Fan page or start a Twitter account. This isn’t a field of dreams. just because you build it doesn’t mean folks are going to beat down your door.

It requires a bit of work – not a lot – but some.

So if you only use Linkedin and all these other great tools to broadcast announcements about your amazing products or services, even the crickets will soon tune you out.

So here is a simple Linkedin strategy.

Set your account to get a daily digest from each of your groups where prospective clients hang out. And then each morning, browse the topics. If something is interesting or you can help someone out – do it.

The trick is to establish credibility and not come across like you’re always trying to sell something.

If you have something worth buying, and folks recognize that you can add some value to their business, then LinkedIn can actually become one of your biggest lead generators.

The best part is you can do this in as little as 5 minutes each day.

I was recently at the Canadian Association of Professional Speakers conference in Toronto. After a long day on the convention floor, I addled up to the hotel bar for a drink.

As often is the case, I met a few speakers.

None of us being shy we started chatting about our jobs. One fellow was just beginning in the industry. But his resume in education, politics and industry was so impressive that I was immediately able to pick out a niche, and could visualize specific companies that would be a great fit for his topic and expertise.

So what was he charging? $500.

No, I didn’t leave off any zeros.

After flushing out a quick business and marketing plan, I told him that he should be charging at least 10x that amount. And he’d get it too. Trust me. There was real value in his topic. And even the thickest manager would see it.

So why was he charging $500? Because he was a new speaker.

Here’s the thing, professional speaking is a meritocracy. It’s not a seniority-based business. It’s not how long you’ve done it, it’s how much value you bring to clients.

This guy could easily save a company millions of dollars, so charging $500 only demonstrated that he didn’t have confidence in his own skills.

I don’t know about you, but I prefer to have a few high value clients, so I’m not constantly looking for folks who will only pay bare minimum for what I do.

So if you value what you offer – don’t be afraid to charge for it. Trust me, you’ll feel better getting rejected 19 times at $10000, and getting a single great gig, than working your ass off for 20 cheapskates.

I’ll confess, I don’t spend a lot of time on YouTube – except for when I need to get a quick walk through on some gadget I can’t figure out *cough* *cough* BlackBerry Playbook.

But I am always telling my clients that they need more videos.

Of course the question I get back is “why?”

The simple reason – and the reason for most of the things I recommend – is search engine success.

Increasingly if you type a search phrase into Google, you’ll get videos on the results page.

If you’re a professional speaker, actor, pilates instructor etc., it’s a great way to get yourself onto the first page.

Of course just making a video won’t automatically bring you to the top of the results page. You also need to optimize the title, description and tags to fight your way to the top.

Do do this, Google gives you a neat little keyword tool.

Use this to find keywords that have low competition and high search rates.

Let’s say you’re a professional speaker.

That’s a very specific phrase with some very high competition. But Google gives you suggestions around that term, along with how often they are searched and how competitive they are. By doing a simple search by competiviness, you’ll quickly find some words and phrases for your video titles, descriptions and tags.

From that list I pulled:

• an inspirational speech
• motivational speeches
• national speakers
• find a speaker
• motivational leaders

Title: An inspirational Speech for America

Description: http://www.shortcircuitmedia.com Aidan Crawford is one of the most sought after national speakers. His speeches are both motivational and inspirational . If you are looking to find a speaker, Aidan Crawford is one of the most sought after leaders in the business.

Tags: motivational speeches, inspirational speech, nationals speakers, find a speaker, motivational leaders

You can use this same formula for any business video.

Bonus tip: While you’re logged into your YouTube account, go to Settings>>Sharing and connect your Twitter and Facebook accounts. This will then send out your YouTube videos automatically to these social media outlets as they are posted.

Extra bonus tip: Connect your Youtube feed to Linkedin.

To create an RSS feed from your YouTube channel, it’s pretty straight forward.  just take the following URL:

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/yourchannelname/uploads

and replace the ”yourchannelname” with your YouTube channel name.

Very simple stuff. Good luck!

It’s true that just a few years back, a website could cost upwards of $10,000. But today you should be able to get something far superior for a lot less.

Great free web tools from WordPress, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter make it easier and more economical than ever to update your web presence.

Just recently I rebranded and relaunched Kurt Shaver’s site The Sales Foundry. Kurt is a professional speaker, I met at the National Speakers Association’s annual convention this past summer in Anaheim.

At the time he had a site that folks generally describe as brochure-ware. Very little interactivity, and no social media integration.

If I were a smarter man, I’d have a screen grab of the “before” to really bring home the improvements in the “after.”

But alas, all I can do is provide a list of some of the new features to demonstrate how you can improve your own online marketing.

First of all, the new site is built using WordPress. It’s a great little content management system that is very easy to customize and is practically designed to feed content to search engines.

The first thing you’ll see on the home page is a set of rotating banners that promote all of Kurt’s services. You’ll also note how prominent the signup is for his monthly newsletter along with the icons for each one of Kurt’s social media pages.

Above each piece of content on every page we have icons to help people share individual pages across various social media – LinkedIn, Facebook, Google.

As I’ve stated before – LinkedIn is the most important social media site for business.

And on Kurt’s blog, we’ve replaced the default WordPress comments with Facebook comments to reduce spam and provide another opportunity for people to bring the conversation into the social sphere.

Staying with the blog for a second, we’ve connected the pipes so that whenever Kurt creates a new blog entry, that content is fed out Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn automatically. We used Feedburner for this.

But if someone is interested they can sign up to receive blog postings via email or install a native Android or Blackberry app.

Social media a a great way to let folks share content. But it’s important to have something worth sharing. Here you will see a quiz that allows folks to do a self assessment for the LinkedIn effectiveness.

Again this is a simple WordPress plugin. But it works great.

Other items a lot of folks seem to miss when building a site, that we’ve included:

• Proper XML sitemap
• Privacy statement
• Feedburner RSS feed
• Copyright
• Physical address
• Videos

If you’re in the market for a new site, make sure your coder/marketing person reads this article. You can also fill in this form and l’ll take a look at your site for free and give you some tips over the phone or via Skype. And of course, you can contact me and we can talk about building a site that includes all these features – in just over a month and for much less than you think.

From experience, I can tell you that it’s very easy to burn through $500 to a $1000 and not see any real return on your investment.

The main issue for me has always been the inability to narrow the audience enough to reach exactly who I’m looking for.

Over the last couple of years I’ve become a great advocate for Facebook Ads.

I’ve used them for clients and I’ve used them for myself.

In one instance I used them to help sell my own house – by targeting folks who lived within 50 miles of Toronto, between the ages of 25 and 35, who were married and “liked” Toronto.

Yes, I was able to get THAT specific. Better still, I was paying $.40 per 1000 views. So over the course of 5 days, I was able to drive 100 clicks through to my virtual tour page for less than $20.

So how can you use Facebook ads for your business?

There are few ways to do this. The first is to advertise your products and services to a specific region and demographic or you can use it to build your brand or target a specific company.

If you are a speaker, ask yourself who it is that you need to reach? The audience? Sure. But does the audience do the bookings or sign the cheques? Nope. You need to reach corporate planners, event planners, and anyone else who is likely to pick up the phone or send you an email.

So lets try a little experiment by creating an ad:

This ad is targeting folks in Canada, United States and the United Kingdom, who are older than 27, and like: event planner, corporate events, event planning or conference organizer

This ad is targeting 22860 people and it costs $.41 per thousand views.

So for $10 a day, this ad may be viewed well over 24000 times!

Building your brand and targeting specific companies

Facebook ads are also great if you want to work for a specific client or you want to reach people at a specific company.

As an example I randomly chose Research in Motion as a company someone might want to target. Using the same geographic regions of Canada, US and UK, I was given 4500 folks who work for RIM and are currently using Facebook. The cost for that ad? $.20 per 1000 views.

This can work for any company. You can also use Facebook ads to target current clients with new promotions!

So go ahead and experiment a bit. Facebook ads are an inexpensive way to get acquainted with online advertising.

I love travelling to NSA and CAPS events. And when I have to go home at the end of the day, I know I’m missing a huge part of the experience.

As an exhibitor, it was a great opportunity to put faces to names and meet some really interesting characters.

But there was also a lot of time, when I was left at my booth for hours at a time.

My options were to see how many levels of Angry Birds I could conquer or engage with folks as they participated in sessions.

I chose the latter. And I did so with a series of tweets that I sent out over two days. Some of these I’ve talked about before. But some of them are new.

So without any further delay, here are some useful tips, doled out 164 characters at a time:

• Turn your book into an ebook for iPad & kindle. Check out Smashwords.com #caps11
• Try using feedburner.com to push out your blog to the world. #caps11
• Get your book distributed internationally as POD. Look into lightningsource.com #caps11
• Grow your Facebook fan page by exporting your contacts from LinkedIn. #caps11
• Don’t be afraid to outsource your web development. Look into scriptlance.com #caps11
• Connect your YouTube account to automatically update your Facebook fan page. #caps11
• My mom doesn’t care how good of a speaker you are so I’m not going to Like your site. The most important share button for business is LinkedIn. #caps11
• Google+ might be a pain in the ass, but it actually counts for SEO. Just build the business page and complain like the rest of us #caps11
• If you’re using a personal Facebook page for business, you’re missing a lot of opportunities to connect with clients. Move them to a business page. #caps11
• How does your site measure up? Get a quick and dirty snapshot @ websitegrader.com #caps11
• Sign up for a Google Webmasters account and submit your site map. #caps11
• Chop up all those videos you’ve got in a box beside your desk and create a YouTube channel.

Because of this I have a very strict rule about becoming Facebook “friends” with business associates and potential clients.

This allows me to keep a big part of my life private. It also allows me to be myself without having to wonder about potential “career limiting” comments by friends or even by me. In short walling off this little part of my digital world frees me from professional persona.

And who really cares about pictures of my kids anyway?

But there is a significant proportion of Facebookers who have no problem mixing business and personal. That’s why so many speakers and consultants have 500 or more “friends.”

But what every business needs is to move those contacts to a custom fan page.

And the reasons are simple.

1- if you tie your blog to your personal account, not every “friend” will see it.
2- you can add custom applications to engage your “fans” in ways that you can’t do with a personal page.

So the first step is to build a Facebook Fan Page. But it’s not enough to just create a default page. You need to brand it.

I’ve recently created a Fan Page for Short Circuit Media.

Click here to visit it (and don’t forget to Like it).

The first thing you’ll see is a custom landing page with an introductory video. The big call to action is to “Like” the page.

This is important. Remember above when I said that not every friend will see your blog postings? Well if someone is a “Fan” your blog postings WILL show up in their feed.

You’ll also see on my page that I am giving away a free site evaluation when somebody “Likes” the page. An incentive is always good.

So now that your page is all set up, where do you go trolling for followers?

Well there are three places; Email Contacts, Facebook and Linkedin.

Linkedin allows you to export contacts. Here are the steps:

Go to Contacts>>Connections
Scroll to the bottom right corner of the screen and export.

Simple enough.

Now to move them to your new fan page.

In the Get Started page go through the steps.

- Click on Tell Your Fans
- Select Other tools
- Import the CSV file you just created in Linkedin.

Now don’t get too crushed if not everyone becomes a fan. Most won’t. But you may get a bunch. And that’s enough to get you started.