Mr. Beaulieu also noted that there are some negatives adversely affecting the economy and recovery:
-The current 10 year deficit projection will lead to significant fiscal strain. At this rate of growth, the cost of borrowing money as a percent of the total federal budget increases from 10.9% in 2009 to 34.1% in 2015. This growth is unsustainable and the pressure will lead to either significant tax increases or dramatic cuts in government spending.
-Taxes are already going up
-Over the next couple years oil prices will likely increase to $120 per barrel and inflation is estimated to increase to the 7.5% range over the next two years.
-Money will continue to be tight and banks are not likely to increase lending significantly in this environment.
-Non residential construction is still trending downward
-The “unemployment rate” will appear to improve soon as the benefits expire and those unemployed are no longer counted. The real unemployment rate will remain high.
-Tourism in still declining.

The news isn’t rosy but at least there some encouraging signs that a modest recovery has already started.

A follow-up study shows that the mere act of blogging does not guarantee more site traffic. Anyone can set up a blog and leave it idle as initial excitements fade. Businesses that actively manage their blogs, however, fare much better than those without blogs.

A study of 2,168 HubSpot customers shows that businesses that published at least 5 blog articles in the last 7 days draw 6.9 times more organic search traffic and 1.12 times more referral traffic than those who don’t blog at all.

Via Small Business Search Marketing.

Bird Rock Surf Shop

If you have a website for your small brick-and-mortar business ( and we hope you do ) you’d probably like to have your customers be able to find you online. You want customers to get a link to your site in a search engine when they do web searches that are related to business, and to do that, you need to optimize the content of your website for those searches. While there is a lot of good advice about optimizing for local searches at places like Local SEO Guide there is one tip that is both important and incomplete.

If a customer is doing a local search on a search engine, the customer is likely to use the name of a city, neighborhood or zip code, and that local term may not be the one in your address. Including your address on your web site is not good enough.

Suppose you have surf shop in the Pacific Beach neighborhood of San Diego, but you also serve people from Mission Beach, Bird Rock and La Jolla. You customer might be doing any of these searches:

• surf shop san diego
• surf shop pacific beach
• surf shop 92109
• surf shop la jolla

There are probably several dozen searches that the customer might use, so  in addition to your address, your website should also include the zip codes and neighborhood names that you serve.

Also consider that your customers might be searching for a particular product, such as Sanuk sandals. Your customer might be searching for:

• sanuk bird rock
• sanuk 92037
• sanuk mission beach
• … etc …

So, you’ll want to have your zip-codes and neighborhood names on the same page as your top brand names.

Clarinova’s Front Window microsites do this automatically when the retailer enters the zip code and brand names for their stores. For instance, the Sanuk microsite for Mitch’s Surf Shop includes this text at the bottom of the pages:

Mitch’s Surf Shop serves the communities of North City, Cardiff by the Sea, Del mar, Rancho Santa Fe and Solana Beach. Mitch’s Surf Shop is conveniently near the zip codes 92075, 92091, 92007, 92014 and 92130.

Here is the text for the microsite for the Sanuk microsite for Pacific Beach Surf Shop:

Pacific Beach Surf Shop serves the communities of Pacific Beach, Bay Ho and San Diego. Pacific Beach Surf Shop is conveniently near the zip codes 92109, 92169, 92167, 92037 and 92138.

Text like this helps ensure that what every your customer’s search for, they will find your website.

Sanuk

Sanuk at Clairemont Surf Shop
Sanuk at Encinitas Surfboards
Sanuk at Bird Rock Surf
Sanuk at Witt’s Carlsbad Pipelines
Sanuk at Mitch’s Surf Shop
Sanuk at Surf Hut, Imperial Beach
Sanuk at Pacific Beach Surf Shop

West Wetsuits

West Surfing at Doheny Board Center
West Surfing at Surf Hut

Duplicate Content Penalty – How to Lose Google Ranking Fast

Duplicate content penalty. Ever heard of it? This penalty is applied by Google and possibly other search engines when content found on your website is largely the same as what is found elsewhere on your site or on other websites across the internet.

Here is what Google’s webmaster tools help site has to say:

Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don’t follow the advice listed above, we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results.

And from Google’s Webmaster Central Blog:

Before diving in, I’d like to briefly touch on a concern webmasters often voice: in most cases a webmaster has no influence on third parties that scrape and redistribute content without the webmaster’s consent. We realize that this is not the fault of the affected webmaster, which in turn means that identical content showing up on several sites in itself is not inherently regarded as a violation of our webmaster guidelines. This simply leads to further processes with the intent of determining the original source of the content—something Google is quite good at, as in most cases the original content can be correctly identified, resulting in no negative effects for the site that originated the content.

Finally, also from the Webmaster Central Blog:

Duplicate content. There’s just something about it. We keep writing about it, and people keep asking about it. In particular, I still hear a lot of webmasters worrying about whether they may have a “duplicate content penalty.”

Let’s put this to bed once and for all, folks: There’s no such thing as a “duplicate content penalty.” At least, not in the way most people mean when they say that.

(Emphasis mine.)

So, you really don’t have to worry about duplicate content, and if you write or speak on this subject, please stop scaring people.

We’d prefer to think of Retailing Together not as a blog, but a community site. We’re interviewing retailers, line reps, manufacturers and consultants and inviting them to be guest bloggers to create a broad story of how the retail ecosystem works today, and how it will improve in the future.

This recession has been particularly hard for independent retailers, with many going out of business and many more business failures to be expected in the next year. When the next recovery comes, I think the retailers that will replace those that closed during the recession will be very different.

This recession is going to drive a lot of retailers out of business, as it has been doing for the last 8 months.  However, people aren’t going to stop buying clothes, and they are not going to lose interest in fashion. The retail apparel market will return, and when it does, there will be a new set of retailers to replace those that went out of business.

 These newer retailers will be younger and more Internet savvy, and they are going to drive changes in the rest of the industry. What are these new independent retailers going to be like? Many more of them will be from  Generation Y, born starting from 1978 on, and will share many of these characteristics:

• They will have grown up with computers and the Internet.
• They will be very tech savvy, especially compared to the outgoing retailers. 
• They will be more demanding, more likely to expect instant gratification.
• They will be more likely to question the way things have always been done, and more willing to change things. 

The changes that the post-recession independent retailers will be driving are not new or novel; they are changes that are already happening. The difference is that in the next business cycle these changes will accelerate. 

These changes should be both expected and welcome, because they are the same changes that are happening in the people who are buying apparel, so by adapting to the new independent retailers, vendors and line reps are also adapting to the new consumers. 

They Will Be Internet Savvy

The new retailers will expect more of their businesses to run on the Internet, and they will favor business partners that are also proficient on the Internet. 

The Internet generation goes to the Web first to find new information—information that is only on paper does not exist to them. They don’t use the Yellow Pages, and they don’t buy printed business directories.  So, if they need a line rep, they are more likely to turn to FindFashionRep.com than a paper directory. Fax machines are far less convenient than e-mail and the Web, and they will prefer not to work with vendors who expect orders to be faxed to them. 

These retailers will ask all of their vendors a very sensible question: 

If I can buy clothes for myself online, why can’t I buy clothes for my store online?

Vendors who are not comfortable working with retailers online will have a significant disadvantage to those who can work online. 

They Will Expect Vendors to Be Flexible

Generation Y is used to things happening on demand—they want fast service, last-minute changes, and immediate feedback. They will order a book today and expect it to arrive tomorrow, and they will expect the same kind of turnaround from their business partners. The expectation may not be reasonable, but they will expect it anyway, and they will prefer to work with the business partners who deliver immediacy. 

This generation did not create just-in-time business, but since it has been a common experience for them, they will consider it a baseline business practice. 

They Are Connected

The new independent retailer is more connected to their markets than past retailers because of a variety of social media that let them have an enormous (although superficial) social network. They can communicate with thousands of people through blogs, forums, Twitter, e-mail, and social network websites. These retailers have nearly instant awareness of the trends emerging worldwide, allowing them to anticipate changes in local buying habits. 

This hyper-connectivity has also made them more aware of marketing, demographics, and media. Where previous generations studied marketing and are slowly warming up to new media, the new retailers have lived it and have a fundamental understanding of how media influences people and how people influence media. Because of this, they know when a vendor “gets it” and has crafted an appeal to the right markets. They will expect their vendors to be more than just manufacturers; they will want them to be their marketing partners, particularly with online marketing. 

Change Is Opportunity

The changing character of retailers is a significant opportunity and will create new sets of winners and losers among apparel vendors, line reps, and retailers’ other business partners. Partners who want to succeed in the next recovery can start with a simple practice: seek out their youngest retailers and ask them what they expect and what they need. They will be happy to talk about their needs, although they might suggest you follow them on Twitter or post  to their Facebook wall.

Most of the examples in the article are for stores that appeal to Geeks, the people who are most likely to read a blog, but there is also an example for a New York apparel store, reed space. Reed space is an excellent example of using Blogger.com for a retail store, probably the least expensive and most effective way for a non-ecommerce retailer to get online and promote their business. Another good example is one that we created to illustrate how to use blogger.com for a business website.

Apparel manufacturers have long relied on their retailers to sell their products to consumers. About 90% of the apparel market (by company revenue) consists of retailers with revenues of less than $2.5M per year and manufacturers with revenues of less than $50M per year—the realm of the smaller brands and independent boutique retailers. In this portion of the market, manufacturers work with 300 to 3000 retailers each, and the retailers carry products from 25 to 100 manufacturers. The market is very interconnected. 

Consumers see this as a two-tier market where they are aware of two types of brands: the brand of the manufacturer and the brand of the retailer. They care about both and have an affinity for both. When consumers use the Web to research a product—and about 90% of consumers do—they will visit the manufacturer’s website to learn about the product, and then they will look for the websites of retailers to find out where to buy the product. 

Boutique retailers are small businesses and don’t often have the time, money, or Internet skills to build excellent websites. Since many of the activities required for Web marketing can be centralized, it makes the most sense for manufacturers to drive the Web marketing strategy, creating the policies and tools to help retailers build websites and market products online. Furthermore, since each retailer can have 100 or more manufacturers, manufacturers should work together to create a single system or model for the retailers to use, rather than expecting them to do things a different way for every manufacturer. 

This sort of cross-industry coordination is difficult but will be necessary if the smaller 90% of the apparel industry wants to compete online with the larger 10%.