Keeping a tight schedule is generally considered to be a good thing. We associate people who schedule their lives well in advance with being in control and organized. It’s certainly the case that having a full and well-planned schedule can help to make sure that you stay on task and not miss out on important meetings. But it’s also true that being too scheduled can have a negative impact on your ability to get things done.

Generally speaking, if you have schedule a meeting for a set length of time, it will go that length of time even if it doesn’t need to take that long. People want to feel like they blocked out a set amount of time for a reason and they will find ways to use the time — even if the use of time isn’t productive. This can lead to endless meetings where you are accomplishing a lot less than you should be with your time.

One way to solve this is to keep your meetings short — perhaps a half-hour in length. This gives enough time to discuss what needs to be discussed without inviting meetings to run on incessantly. If something needs more than 30 minutes, plan ahead and schedule multiple meetings. This will force you to address the problems in bite-sized chunks, which can be helpful in tackling complex issues.

You should also schedule time for yourself in between meetings to do something like take a walk outside of go get a coffee down the street. You might say to yourself that you are going to “find time” between meetings to take a break but it’s easy to let that time slip away. If you put breaks on your calendar, you are more likely to take them.

Scheduling phone calls the same way that you schedule meetings is a great way to avoid losing time to idle chit-chat. Unless it’s something urgent that needs to be dealt with immediately, you will almost always be able to schedule a call for later in the day. This gives you time to research the issue and be informed before having a conversation and it also sets parameters for how long the call should go.

The key to any successful relationship is communication and this is true when it comes to the relationship between a freelancer and who contracts with them for their services. When a person knows what to expect from their freelancer, they have the right basis for evaluating their success. It also gives a freelancer clear parameters to operate under since they know what their client is expected to receive.

This is especially true when it comes to the world of online content marketing. When you work with a freelancer or an outside content marketing service like eVisible, it’s critical that you set your goals before the project starts and communicate regularly with the outside freelancer or firm to make sure that objectives are being met. Expecting that they “know what they are doing” and are taking care of everything perfectly on their own is typically an invitation for headaches down the road.

When you are interviewing potential agencies or freelancers to help you with your content marketing, make sure that they are being realistic in presenting the services they provide. You don’t want to hire someone only to realize that they can’t deliver what you thought they would at the start of your relationship. Ask tough questions and don’t always be limited by talking about “best case scenarios” — find out what they think are the obstacles to the success of a content marketing campaign and what they plan to do if these roadblocks occur while they are working for you.

Ultimately, freelancers and content marketing agencies thrive when they are able to end projects with satisfied customers. This comes from setting expectations that are realistic but will also meet the marketing needs of their clients. In order to do this, it’s important for clients to be very clear about what they want to accomplish with their content marketing. Just saying that you want “better content” isn’t enough — you need to know what goals you want to use the content to achieve and have a way to communicate this clearly with the freelancer or agency.

Many people understand that it’s important to include public relations efforts as part of your online marketing campaign. However, in order for this to be successful, it needs to be more than just hiring a firm for press release writing and distribution services and emailing a release out to a few media outlets. You need to have a clear strategy for your public relations efforts if you want them to augment your existing marketing efforts.

A lot of businesses make major mistakes with their public relations, whether they hire press release submission services or decide to do it themselves. Here are 10 things that you need to make sure you do if you are going to put out your own press release:

Don’t Underestimate the Power of PR for SEO: While a press release doesn’t have SEO value on its own, it can lead to online sites writing stories about your company or running the release whole — including your business’ link.

Make Your Release Newsworthy: A press release serves as a way to announce news to the media. You need to make sure that each press release contains information that a reporter or editor will think is relevant and interesting to their readers and not just promoting a business.

Keep Focus: You’ll be tempted to write about every interesting aspect of your business in your first press release. Resist this urge and keep focused on one story you want to tell and save the others for future releases.

Keep Control of Everything: From the words in the press release to the pictures used to accompany the release, you need to make sure that you have control of all aspects.

Find the Right Journalists: A press release isn’t very useful if no one can read it. You need reporters and editors to decide to run the release in order for people to read it, which means putting thought into who you are sending it to. Finding people who have written about your business or your competitors is a great start.

Follow Up: Once you’ve sent out a press release, call or email the reporter to see if they are interested. Even if they aren’t, you might strike up a conversation that leads to a different story.

Be Prepared for What’s Next: Have a gameplan for what happens if a reporter is interested in doing a story. Not being prepared can lead to lost media opportunities.

Structure Your Release Properly: This means having a great headline and a first paragraph that entices people to keep reading.

Write the Whole Story: Don’t make reporters — often short on time — have to do more work to get a press release “ready for publication.”

Anticipate Anything: You never know when a chance for an editorial PR link will come up.

There’s no such thing as a “one size fits all” SEO campaign. In much the same way that your business offers something different from your competitors, your search engine optimization efforts should also be individualized according to your unique needs. Delivering targeted SEO efforts for our clients is one of the things that set eVisible apart from our competitors and it’s something you should consider in everything you do with your website.

Much the same is true when it comes to developing the code and design elements on your website. You need to apply analytical thinking when it comes to how you create and deploy your website. Even experienced web developers can make mistakes that can impact the ability of their website to perform its best. Here are a few things that you should consider:

Start Small: Instead of launching your website with a huge set of features, start small with a clean, basic layout and design. You can always build it out as your business grows by choosing individual elements to add that have been carefully developed and beta tested.

Keep Your Code Flexible: While your platform doesn’t need to be completely scalable from the start, you also don’t want it to be so inflexible that making additions or changes in the future is impossible.

Make Your Code Easy to Deploy: Instead of trying to create a site based on the limitations of your code, work from the opposite direction and plan your features and try to come up with easily-implementable code that will get these features to happen.

Launch Your Website at the Right Time: Don’t rush your website to go live if the elements aren’t all in place. If customers come to your site and have problems with it, chances are they won’t be repeat customers.

Focus on the Customer: Think about how you can create a website that meets your customers’ needs. This should be more important than implementing any one piece of code.

Along with these code-based tips, there are other elements to remember as you start your business. eVisible – Internet Marketing Firm – can help you with this along with all other aspects of getting your company off the ground. A few things to consider include:

Focus on Big Picture Problems: Instead of developing a product or service that fills a niche need, try to make sure you have a model in place that will attract the largest amount of people possible.

Stay Involved…But Not Too Involved: No matter what your role is in the company, you need to know about every aspect of how the business is operating. At the same time, you need to let the experts that you hire or contract with take the lead in their areas of expertise.

The list of things you need to do when you move your business to a new location is seemingly endless. But don’t forget about updating your online profile to include your new address! The last thing you need is a customer trying to reach you for a sale but finding an abandoned building. Before you finalize your move, make sure you do these things:

1. Try to Retain Your Current Phone Number. This will help with maintaining consistency with customers. If you have moved towns, try to keep your old number and have it forwarded to your new number.

2. Update the Address on Your Online Listings. This includes online directories like Google Places, Yelp, Angie’s List, Yahoo Local along with local Chamber of Commerce sites and specializes sites for your industry. And don’t forget to update your address on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

3. Update Your Marketing Materials. This includes your website, email signature, business cards, press releases and more.

4. Tell Neighbors You’ve Moved. Make sure that people you have worked near know that your business has moved in case customers are curious.

5. Let the Government Know. Along with updating your mailing address with the post office, you’ll need to update your business license with the city (or get a new one if moving into a new city), your tax information and any other licensing agencies you work with.

6. Refresh Your Paid Search Campaigns. If you are focusing on a local market or area in a paid search marketing campaign, you’ll need to readjust your targets and also your address so people aren’t sent to the wrong place.

7. Update Citations. Not all website listings with your address will be online directories. Do a search for your old address and see which results come up on the first page. Reach out to these sites and ask them to update their listing.

8. Change Over Automatic Payments. This might seem basic but many people forget to change the address on their business credit card or with their bank and wind up missing payments.

Whether you are launching a new website or redesigning an existing site, the temptation is to pack as much content and information onto the site — particularly the front page — as possible. This can include lots of pictures, videos, product descriptions and content information. Unfortunately, this is a mistake that can cripple a site before it launches. When it comes to creating an SEO friendly design, simpler is better.

More specifically, you need to design your website to reflect the visual expectations that customers have for sites like yours. This doesn’t mean that you should exactly copy the look and layout of one of your competitors. What it does mean is that you need to do some research to understand what the major design elements are that similar sites to yours have in common and why they are so frequently used.

If you think about certain types of sites such as online clothing stores, real estate offices or news sites, you’ll find that many of them naturally have similar elements laid out in similar ways. A big reason for this is because of a concept called “cognitive fluency,” which essentially means that people feel more comfortable looking at a site if the information they need is where they expect to find it. This means having graphics, headlines and logos in places that are comfortable and familiar if they have also looked at other sites in your space.

In addition, customers don’t want to be confused with an array of visual elements when they go to a site. Studies have shown that complex sites essentially make the eye and the brain work too hard to process information, causing people to find the sites ugly and leave them quickly. Instead, people prefer sites that are not as complex. This includes simple images, only a few colors and liberal use of white space.

The bottom line is that every element on your website – especially your front page – should communicate something important. Research has shown that an adult is only able to store about five to nine pieces of information in their short term memory. You need to identify the big points that you want people to take from your site and make sure they are front and center in your design. Doing professional website development with this in mind will lead to a cleaner, more user-friendly site that results in conversions.

Doing SEO efforts, building social media platforms and other online marketing activities are useless unless you have a plan. Just like how you wouldn’t go for a hiking trip into the woods without a detailed map, you shouldn’t do online marketing tactics without establish your marketing plan first. Developing your marketing plan helps you to get the most out of your small business Internet marketing and maximize your ROI.

It takes time and effort to develop a cohesive and successful marketing plans. Here are seven steps you need to take in order for your marketing plan to have a chance at succeeding:

1. Identify Your Position in the Marketplace

Customers are drawn to businesses that they consider to be leaders within their industry. Just as importantly, if they feel that your company is made up of experts in their industry and are people who spread reliable and useful information to customer, they will be very receptive to your marketing efforts. Your marketing plan should include ways to interact with people within the industry to build your credibility.

2. Strengthen Your Brand Positioning

At its core, your brand is really a summation of the way that people feel about your company when they hear its name. Ideally, you want people to have immediate positive associations with your brand regardless of the situation. Engaging in brand reinforcing tactics such as charitable campaigns or non-product targeted advertising can give people a good feeling about your brand.

3. Build Long-Term Awareness of Your Brand

Many people ignore a company or their brand if they have no need for their services at that exact minute. But subconsciously they might remember the brand if it is reinforced. When they are suddenly in need of what your company has to offer, the building of long-term brand awareness pays off and you have a new customer.

4. Attract New Customers

Performing web analytics on your current customers is one of the best ways to develop tactics to attract new sales leads and turn them into customers. Do research to find out how customers decided to purchase your goods or services. This can be as direct as sending customer surveys or you can track the entry points that people used to get to your site and make purchases.

5. Retain Existing Customers

It’s a common mistake to get so concerned about marketing efforts designed to bring in new customers that you end up ignoring your current customer base. Remember that any place that your current customers come into contact with your brand is a marketing opportunity. This can include your website, social media sites, ads or even the packaging on your products.

6. Plan for Success

The online world is filled with companies who were so successful that they saw their sales skyrocket faster than their infrastructure could keep up. This usually leads to shipping delays, unfulfilled orders and dissatisfied customers. Your marketing plan should have plans in place for what to do if you meet — or exceed — your “best-case scenario” expectations for your marketing plan.

7.  Analyze Your Results

If you don’t know how to analyze the results of your marketing efforts, there’s no way that you can know which tactics work or why certain tactics failed. Make sure that your marketing plan has clear and quantifiable goals and has ways in place to measure the success of your tactics as you work toward your goals.

When most people think about how public relations tactics can help their SEO campaigns, the first thing that comes to mind is to write press release. While it’s true that well-crafted, keyword-rich and interactive news releases crafted by press release writing services can help your SEO and your marketing efforts, press releases are far from the only public relations tactics that can boost your search engine rankings.

Some of these tactics involve establishing your company as an authoritative brand within the space; others involve marketing efforts that also benefit others. All of these tactics can help you generate publicity and help with your SEO:

Make Charitable Contributions: Being a good corporate citizen serves several purposes. A donation to a worthy charity helps people in need and can be a tool for your own promotion. Work with the charity to promote your donation. You can get creative and come up with a charity angle that is unique and will attract media attention.

Hold Unique Contests: Running a contest like a scholarship essay competition or product giveaway serve several purposes. They can generate social media links to serve as social signals; they can provide drive brand awareness; and they can provide reasons for media stories that will also boost your SEO. Making the contests unique and interesting — such as a food eating contest — helps.

Be a Guest Contributor: Pitch the executives at your company as “guest contributors” to local, national and industry media outlets and blogs. If customers read intriguing content with their names attached to it, they will think of them — and your brand — as thought leaders in the field. You can use ghostwriters for the content if needed and attach a name later.

Serve as Guest Talent: Many industries have TV or radio shows specific to their market. Get your executives to appear on these shows. It will help your brand and create links from the shows’ websites that will boost your SEO.

Speak at Industry Events: Getting your executives in front of convention attendees is a great tool for increasing visibility and creating links. You can host your own event as well.