Grab your slice of the holiday pie!

An article in the November 2008 issue of Pet Product News International indicates...

"The National Retail Federation in late September forecast sales would increase 2.2 percent for the 2008 holiday season (November and December), the slightest increase since 2002, when holiday sales rose 1.3 percent. Over the past 10 years, holiday sales have increased about 4.4 percent annual, so this year's expected increase will be half that."

It's not the best news for pet business retailers or service providers, but increases are still expected despite the lapse in the economy. While dog, cat and other animal lovers may be conservative in their holiday spending, my bet is that they won't forget their cherished pets. Sales are still to be had and services will still need to be provided. But consumers will be making wiser and more conservative choices. Make sure you are on their list.

The holiday season is the best time for pet businesses. You've made your plans, you've got your holiday stock, you've scheduled your holiday services, you've created traffic driving holiday promotions. But have you planned everything you can or need to? Pawsible Marketing can help you create a last minute, all conclusive, holiday plan that will help you maximize your sales for the best potential holiday season possible.

JohannTheDog.com sales have already begun increasing. Have yours? Email us today for a 60-90 minute consultation to make sure you grab the biggest slice of the holiday pie as possible. Here's just a sample of what we can help you with:

• Learn how you can effectively communicate with your individual audience through the holiday season and drive more sales.
• Get a great list of creative, fun and traffic building promotions and suggestions for your individual business.
• Receive a review of your currently holiday plan and learn how you can improve to maximize your sales and services.
  
• Pick up marketing tips and ideas to focus your holiday plan specifically to your audience and build traffic to your site and store.

JohannTheDog singled out as a powerful brand!

A couple of weeks ago, I was incredibly honored to have JohannTheDog featured on the Giant Squid Community Showcase Blog. It's a blog that highlights Giant Squid lensmasters and their amazing lenses.

This was an extra special honor. You see the driving force behind Squidoo is none other than online marketing guru extraordinaire, Seth Godin. Seth is the author of some of the best and most popular marketing books on the planet, including:

Purple Cow : Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable
Word of Mouth Marketing : How Smart Companies Get People Talking
The Dip : A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick)

And he has a new book, being released on October 21st: Tribes : We Need You to Lead Us

I remember the first book that I read of Seth's. It was Permission Marketing : Turning Strangers into Friends, and Friends into Customers. I still have that book in my library today, and often refer to it to refresh my ideas and get some inspiration.

Seth's involvement in Squidoo was the main reason I decided to get involved in Squidoo, and utilize it as my vehicle for creating Squidoo lenses as educational pages in support of JohannTheDog.com. I have long admired Seth, his work, his intelligence, foresight and marketing savvy. And I immediately felt comfortable signing up with Squidoo, and believed that the site would stick.

So when we saw this very gracious post on Giant Squidoo Community Showcase that said 'a good example of a Giant Squid Lensmaster with a powerful brand is JohannTheDog,' I was incredibly honored.

To be recognized in this way by your peers, in a community you are involved in, is not only gratifying, but it's also an amazing confirmation that you are on the right track. And that, my friends, you just don't hear nearly as often as you should in life.

As with all honors, there come the skeptics. And this instance was no exception. Just after the post was announced on the Squidu forum, nice congrats from fellow Squidoos starting coming in through the forum post. But an interesting discussion about branding quickly ensued.

The skeptical question? In basic summation: 'Is a dog credible enough to be a brand?' And 'who is behind JohannTheDog?'

Good questions and ones I believe I answered. If you'd like to read a little on the friendly debate, head on over to the forum post - it's a nice little chat about branding, what people want and need, and providing them with the information, services and/or products they seek through a vehicle they enjoy.

Tips: Guy Kawasaki shares his five most important lessons he's learned as an entrepreneur

One of our Twitter friends, Guy Kawasaki is a popular entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and blogger and understands business. Guy is a managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, columnist for Entrepreneur Magazine, and author of eight books on innovative business. He's also the brains behind the new site Alltop.com, a great “digital magazine rack” of the Internet, listing blogs on all types of subjects.

On Monday he shared his five most important lessons he learned as an entrepreneur on Sun Microsystems website. Here's just a taste:

1. Focus on cash flow. I understand the difference between cash flow and profitability, and I'm not recommending that you strive for a lack of profitability. But cash is what keeps the doors open and pays the bills. Paper profits on an accrual accounting basis is of no more than secondary or tertiary importance for a startup. As my mother used to say, "Sales fixes everything."
   
   
2. Make a little progress every day. I used to believe in the big-bang theory of marketing: a fantastic launch that created such inertia that you flew to "infinity and beyond." No more. Now my theory is that you make a little bit of progress every day--whether that's making your product slightly better, increasing your skill in one small way, or closing one more customer. The reason the press writes about "overnight successes" is that they seldom happen--not because that's how all businesses work.

Read more. It's worth taking the few minutes. And thanks Guy for sharing your wisdom.

Don't overthink it!

We found this video on YouTube. Spot on for one more reason not to over think your marketing!

PR: Pawsible Marketing president provides marketing advice in recent issue of Pet Age!

Check out the current issue of Pet Age Magazine. Leslie May, President and CEO of Pawsible Marketing, is quoted frequently in the magazine's article "CounterIntelligence: Making Words Pack a Punch", written by Patricia Frank.

The article discusses a variety of ways that pet businesses can bring their marketing messages to the highest, most effective, level possible.

Read the article here!

PR: ShortTakes wishes they'd thought of us!

From the ShortTakes blog...

WISH WE'D THOUGHT OF THIS

"We here at Short Takes are known for our predilection for finding offbeat animal marketing reports, so this one shouldn’t have surprised us, but it did anyway. Pawsible Marketing is now up and running in Carmel, Ind., consulting with, and implementing, “marketing plans and projects for any type of business related to pets.” Considering that Americans spent upwards of $40 billion on their pets in 2007, this may well be one of the breakout agencies of 2008. See how they do it at MarketingMyPetBusiness.com."

SEO for pet businesses!

Type in 'marketing pet business' in your Google search box and what do you see? Yep, Pawsible Marketing is (at the time of this post) #4 and #5 in Google's search engine rankings.

How did we get there? We followed Google's advice.

One of the most frequently asked questions I get from clients is, how do I get my site listed on the front page of Google?

It's also one of the age old questions asked by most anyone who has a website. Competition for top spots on Google is tough and Google algorithms are a mystery, but there are things you can do to increase your chances of getting a better placement in Google.

Here are some quick tips via an interview with USAToday from Matt Cutts of Google. Matt joined Google as a software engineer in January 2000 and is currently the head of Google's Webspam team.

Google's Cutts: Good directions drive traffic to your website

By Jefferson Graham, USA TODAY

You have a website and can't figure out why it's not showing up at the top of Google's search rankings. You go to Google.com for some guidance but get lost trying to find answers.

Certainly, achieving visibility in Google's search rankings can be a mystery. To help solve the riddle, USA TODAY sat down with Google's Matt Cutts, an engineer and active blogger, who has five easy tips on how to "optimize" your site so Google and the rest of the world can find it.

TALKING TECH: Google's Matt Cutts discusses how to improve your site's search ranking

More and more businesses are turning to the Web to find customers: $5.8 billion was spent on advertising in the first quarter alone, up 18.2% from the prior year, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Google's share of Internet searches continues to rise as well — to a record 61.8% in May, according to measurement service ComScore Media Metrix.

If you haven't "optimized" your site, here's how:

1. Spotlight your search term on the page.

"Think about what people are going to type in to try and find you," Cutts says. He tells of meeting a chiropractor from San Diego who complained that his site couldn't be found easily using Google search. The words "San Diego chiropractor" were listed nowhere on his site. "You have to make sure the keywords are on the page," Cutts says. If you're a San Diego doctor, Des Moines architect or Portland ad agency, best to let people know so immediately, at the top of your page.

2. Fill in your "tags."

When creating websites, Internet coding language includes two key tags: title and description. Even if you don't know code, which is used to create pages, software programs such as Adobe's Dreamweaver have tools that let you fill them in in plain English (rather than "title-San Diego Chiropractor-title"

If Cutts' chiropractor had properly tagged his Web page, a search would have returned something like this: "San Diego chiropractor. Local doctor serves San Diego community."

There's also a third tag, to add keywords, or search terms, but Cutts says Google doesn't put much weight in its rankings on that one.

3. Get other sites to "link" back to you.

Google says it looks at more than 100 pieces of data to determine a site's ranking. But links are where it's at, once your search terms are clearly visible on your site and the title and description tags correctly marked.

In a nutshell: Google ranks sites based on popularity. If authoritative sites link to you, you must be good, and therefore you get to the top of the list. If you can't get top sites such as USATODAY.com or The New York Times to link to you, try your friends. And what if they don't have a site? They probably do. Read on.

4. Create a blog and post often.

Cutts says blogging is a great way to add links and start a conversation with customers and friends. It will cost you only time: Google's Blogger, WordPress and others offer free blogging tools. With a blog, you can link back to your site and offer links to others. It's also a great way to start building content, Cutts says.

5. Register for free tools. Google's google.com/webmaster offers freebies to help get your site found. You can upload a text-based site map, which shows Google the pages of your site (create it at www.xml-sitemaps.com). Once that's done, you'll be registered with Google, where you can learn vital statistics — including who is linking to your site and how often Google "crawls" your site for updates.

Google's Local Business center (google.com/local/add) is the place for business owners to submit a site so it shows up in local searches, with a map attached. Savvy consumers who use Google for searches know that the first 10 non-advertising results often are from Google Maps, so if you have a business and haven't submitted it, you're losing out on potential customers.

Don't overdo it

When weaving keywords into a main page, Cutts says, some zealous Web publishers will use the term over and over again. That's called "keyword stuffing." It's a big Google no-no that can have your site removed from the index.

"After you've said it two or three times, Google has a pretty good idea — 'OK, this page has something to do with this keyword,' " he says. "Just think about the two or three phrases you want to be known for and weave that in naturally."

For blogger newbies, Cutts knows that writing (for example, posting new material) doesn't always come easy. He suggests finding ideas by visiting social news sites such as Digg and StumbleUpon, to see what people are saying about your particular topic.

Aside from that, Cutts says, new material falls into the common-sense category: It's all about your business. "If I'm a plumber in Iowa, I may want to write about some of the strange things that happen to me on the job, or the five most common ways to fix a toilet," he says. "That kind of content can get really popular, and it's a great way to get links." Folks will post your piece on one of the social media sites. And with links comes higher Google rankings.

Finally, Cutts says, there is one big misconception about getting Google visibility that he wants to clear up: In order to be found at the top of Google's rankings, you do not also have to advertise.

"One thing doesn't have to do with the other," he says.

Also Google has a wonderful Webmaster Guidelines section on their site to help webmasters. By following these guidelines it will help Google find, index, and rank your site most quickly and easily.

And don't miss the other tools that Google provides for you and your website. And if you want to keep up-to-date subscribe to Google's Webmaster Central Blog.