Here are my top 5 recent podcast highlights from Small Business Big Marketing – the regular small business marketing podcast I co-host.

Episode 34: Australia’s leading Internet marketer, James Schramko

James is a online marketing genius. He’s one of the few online marketing gurus who walks the talk. If you’re just starting out, or even if you’re a seasoned professional online marketer, highly recommend you give James a listen. Listen to the interview.

Episode 45: Kettle Bells Australia

Ric and Cam from Kettle Bells are doing all the right things when it comes to marketing a product in a very competitive industry. Aside from their marketing efforts, tell a very entertaining story about how one of the kettle bell gurus users the apparatus! Listen to the interview.

Episode 63: Marketing lessons from an Adult Store

Call me juvenile, but this interview with adult store owner Annemarie was one of the most entertaining Tim and I have done. Annemarie has a fantastic ability to make her subject matter educational and fun as opposed to smutty. She is, of course, doing some great marketing - particularly using YouTube! Listen to the interview.

Episode 66: Mornington Peninsula Brewery

For all you blokes out there who ever dreamed of owning a brewery, Matt Bebe has one enviable story to tell.  He opened the doors to Mornington Peninsula Brewery only 18 months ago and was turning a profit within 12 months. Matt’s turned the dream into a very successful reality. Listen to the interview.

Episode 67: Stand Up Paddle Boarding

Jeff Lim recently traded in the board room for board shorts and is running a stand up paddle board lessons and sales business on the Mornington Peninsula. Jeff has some big ideas about turning the local tourism industry on it’s ear. Listen to the interview.

Thought I’d share a method of longtail keyword research I’ve started experimenting with recently. It uses two clever tools that have become an important part of my keyword research arsenal: Market Samurai (aff) and Ubersuggest.

Google Suggest seems to give you many more broad match terms than what Google’s Keyword tool does, so using a keyword scraper to fetch them combined with a research tool like Market Samurai will give you lots of juicy long-tails to investigate. It’s like panning for gold, you won’t find huge nuggets but you will find some golf flecks.

The method is really very simple…

Ubersuggest is a tool that scrapes Google Suggest terms. So head over there, type in your generic terms and see what comes out. Let’s use Dog Training as the example, (heck, everyone else is doing it):

 As you can see, we get a nice long list of long tail keywords (interesting to note the geo terms in there). Now, do the search again, this time making sure your language/country are checked as well as the TXT box. Doing this will export a txt file of all the Google suggest terms.

Once you’ve saved the text file list, open it up so we can copy the terms.

Open up Market Samurai, start a new project and paste your keywords into the Add Keywords field:

If you’re a seasoned Market Samurai user, you’ll know what to do from here. If not, just hit the Keyword Analysis button, then the Analyze Keywords button in the following screen. MS will then pull all the stats on each of the long-tails.

You could of course, use Google’s own keyword tool, but you can only paste 100 words into keyword search field.

Happy long-tail hunting.

A couple of weeks ago I noticed Google were testing an expanded search results for brand style searches. While I didn’t look at it in too much detail, Ryan Malone posted an excellent piece on this new search result display format.

At the time, Google were displaying the normal search result together with 12 additional site specific results, otherwise know as Sitelinks. It now appears they’ve decided to implement these changes permanently.

The extended results appear to now be showing up for author and brand type searches, effectively giving authority websites a more more significant presence above the fold.

This appears to be another step to reward authority and brand based sites. Google recently started recognising Authorship markup which means author profiles are now starting to be displayed in the search results.

The best way to control what appears in your Sitelink is to setup a Google Webmaster account and from the Sitelinks section, demote any pages you don’t want appearing in your Sitelinks.

For example, as you can see for the results for Boatsplus.com.au above, I really need to remore the Terms section as it provides no real value for visitors.

Great to see Google rewarding author and brand.

Deciding to invest a heap of time, effort and money into social media shouldn’t be a leap of faith. Here’s a quick video I put together to help businesses find out if their target audience are using Facebook.

If after watching the video you’ve found that lots of your target audience are on Facebook, you can grab a guide to setting up a Facebook page here.

Last week I blogged about how I use Reeder, Posterous and WordPress for blog curation, and fortuitously, this week sees the release of a purpose built curation tool called Storify. I was getting quite excited with Storify… until I published by curated story.

After publishing the post below I found a BIG reason not to use it. Storify uses Javascript to embed your stories in Posterous and WordPress when you publish them… this is a big fail from an SEO point of view as the content is not indexable by search engines when posted on your own blog.

Needless to say, I’m very disapointed.

You might have to wait a few seconds for the original Storify curated post to load below.