If you can imagine your best perspective client (who hasn’t found you yet) looking for you at 10pm at night when your product or service happened to pop into her head - what search terms does she type into Google to find you?

Four things to do here:

1. Define your “best perspective client” to a tee, as much as possible.

2. Compile a list of keywords that they may think of and type in, pertinent to your product or service.

3. Type some of those keywords into Google yourself and see what comes up (your competition).

4. See what keywords some of those guys are using in their copy and add those to your list.

Try it. It’s an excellent exercise to start with if you are looking to optimize your website with keywords or launch a PR campaign - again - using those keywords.

5 Innovative Ways to Promote Your Startup Online

Whether you’re operating a brick-and-mortar company or an online business, the Internet is a great place to market your startup on a shoestring budget. Not only will online marketing save you money, it has the potential to reach millions of prospective customers. Fresh and innovative angles are being devised every day by “new media” marketers and the five promotional ideas below should assist your startup company. Read more »

Hi Island friends. I thought you might enjoy this blog post by Paul MacNeill - a rant about politics and golf on PEI. If you want to comment - like I did - you have to sign up on the upper left hand side of the page, I think. You can also sign up for email alerts on the right hand side.

We just launched the site the other day and from one day to the next traffic almost doubled!

Just thought I’d share I think it’s a way more interesting read than the Guardian or CBC - my old online newspapers of choice.

Peace!

–
Maureen Kerr
902-388-1800
Maureen@YourMarketingMavens.com

www.YourMarketingMavens.com
www.YourMarketingMavens.com/blog

“What sets Mavens apart, though, is not so much what they know but how they pass it along. The fact that Mavens want to help, for no other reason than because they like to help, turns out to be an awfully effective way of getting someone’s attention.” Malcolm Gladwell (Tipping Point).

Yeah! I’m so excited that my client’s - Island Press - new site is up… and that I’m a featured blogger!! I emailed fellow blogger, land baron and entrepreneur, Tim Banks, to tell him that HAHA, I got invited to blog on PEICanada.com - way better than the Guardian.

I may have mentioned to him at the Merchantman Pub the other night that I was a bit miffed that the Guardian asked him to be a blogger on their site and NOT ME. My ads should be up all over the Guardian’s business section soon too. Let the advertising begin.

Back to www.PEICanada.com - it’s great. You really outghta check it out.

I feel like I’d be remiss if I did not share something that I watched recently, something that has affected me deeply, something that I can’t stop thinking about.

Jill Bolte Taylor got a research opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: She had a massive stroke, and watched as her brain functions — motion, speech, self-awareness –- shut down one by one. An astonishing story. Click here to watch her story.

This video is from the Ted Talks series and was passed along to me last week from Tammy Younker, Life Coach.

Comments anyone? At last count there are 476 comments from viewers on the Ted Talks sight. That’s the most I think I’ve ever seen.

I Stumbled this site today and it caught my attention: Open Education and the article is:

Several Lessons to Be Learned from the Finnish School System

Anyone that knows my situation knows that my five-year-old son started kindergarten a few months ago after an announcement was made (on the radio) that the dates for the age of eligibility for entry into grade one had changed. Needless to say, it caused much debate over a number of issues - the most important issue to me was was making the best decision for my son in terms of the absolute best start that he could achieve.

The article I read today re-confirms what my brother mentioned in this blog post that in his research Scandinavian countries seem to produce children with high IQ’s and one of the reasons is that children don’t start school until the age of seven. My brother teaches grade three in Jakarta, Indonesia and is working on his Master’s of Education.

The Open Education website is worth a read-through if you are interested in our children’s education at all. With PEI being ranked lowest in Canada in many aspects of our education system, I wish someone could administer some much-needed changes to give our children access to quality education on Prince Edward Island. Being “open” to looking at successful education models is a start.

On a dreary, rainy day I headed over to the mainland with my friend to see a seminar by Gair Maxwell called the Seamless Brand. Once again Gair gave a fantastic presentation, which one could argue could be called a performance, in which his love and vast knowledge of entrepreneurial-ism shone. It was a pleasure to meet Gair’s partners: Darren Sears and Dave MacKenzie. Dave reminded me that we had met years ago when I was involved in the travel industry.

A highlight was having a young, up and coming businessman by the name of Pierre Martell of Martell Home Builders give a touch and go story of how his company made it out of the trenches. Read more »

Here is a great post from a blogger I’ve become acquainted with recently through Twitter. This blog is for volunteers, webmasters and administrators of associations, clubs, charities, communities and other groups. It discusses issues and trends in modern web technologies that help your organization achieve more with less.

Click here:Top 5 Web Tools to Create Your Own Online Quiz

Thanks Rebecca!

I’m a few days late, however am very interested in the following:

Google Health is now publicly available

5/19/2008 12:55:00 PM
Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience

Excerpted…

In terms of new products, we made Google Health publicly available. It offers users a safe and secure way to collect, store, and manage their medical records and health information online. How many of us have touched, or even seen, our medical records? In this day and age of information, isn’t it crazy that you don’t have a copy of your medical records under your control? You could use those records to develop a better understanding of your health and ultimately get better care. It’s your data about your own health; why shouldn’t you own and control it?

Back in February, I wrote about how Google Health will harness the power of the Internet to put users in control of their own medical records. Data will stay with you — if you change doctors, want a second opinion, if you’re traveling — and not stay siloed or stuck in files or databases that you can’t get to. To break down these information silos, we launched Google Health today with several partners and third party services already integrated. These partners are as committed as we are to solving this urgent need. Our flagship partners include everyday brand names such as Walgreens, Quest Diagnostics and Longs Drugs, to name just a few.

In addition to helping you get better control of your medical information, we’ve also put strong privacy policies in place to keep your information safe and private. (Read more about this on our public policy blog.) There’s a lot left to do in health — literally thousands of partnerships to forge and petabytes of data to move around — but we’re looking forward to hearing feedback from early Google Health adopters about our first step.

Unrelated to Google Health but in the interest of helping people get healthier, we launched our Go for Good campaign with the Cleveland Clinic. The Walk for Good iGoogle gadget encourages you to be good to yourself by walking regularly and tracking your progress. If you finish week 15 of the program by October 25th this year and have completed at least half of the total walking program by then, you can vote to tell us which of the health charities from our list should receive part of a $100,000 donation.

Link to Full Article and Video
Official Google Blog: healthcare
(Video: Google Health section is at 1:22 to 1:43 of 2H:10M total video time):

THOUGHTS, anyone?