As humans we are creatures of habit. I may be more habitual than most as I am someone that places a lot of emphasis on control and order. In short, I like to know what to expect.

For example: I wake up at the same time each morning, but then I hit snooze so I can rest for 5 more minutes. As I’m getting ready for work I am always tuned into Good Morning America, and then right before leaving I take my four-legged pup Kirby for a walk around the block.

As a marketer I have always been someone that is very interested in understanding why people make certain choices, how much of it is really within their control, and ways to train your brain to think differently.

It is much easier to fall into bad habits than it is to begin actively creating good habits in life and at work. If you are ready to begin understanding (or acknowledging) what your bad habits are, and want to learn how to make new ones I have 5 tips to help you start on your journey.

Tip 1 – Be Honest With Yourself

Identifying your good habits, is just as important as recognizing those that are less than favorable. If you can pinpoint what your motivation is for the good habits you have, you can begin working that positive association into altering your bad habits.

If you have a particularly difficult task that you dread doing and often put off until the end of the day, do it first thing in the morning. Get the task out of the way and reward yourself with a 5-minute mental break or extra long gaze out the office window (whatever motivates you to continue making that choice).

Even though this may be something as small as setting up your meetings for the week, responding to team emails, or scheduling social media posts for the day you’ll have a much greater sense of accomplishment if you get it off of your plate right away.

Tip 2 – Old Habits Die Hard

I’m sure this is an expression that we’ve all heard, if not said. You cannot change habits overnight, it takes time and effort. We may even need to remind ourselves on a daily basis for a while that we should not be falling into our old ways.

I for example obsessively check my email. I have found that the amount of focus I can direct towards actual marketing activities is greatly decreased when I’m checking email every five minutes.

Unless I’m expecting a very important communication I will only check my email during certain points throughout the day. I have setup calendar reminders that prompt me to check in and see what I’ve received. But other than during those allotted times I make sure I keep the window closed.

Tip 3 – Don’t Try To Make Too Many Changes At Once

There have been a few times that I have tried to drastically alter the way that I organize my work-day and have been met with what I consider to be less than ideal, and nerve-wracking results.

If you can focus on changing one habit at a time, your chances for success are much greater. Small habits you can begin changing today might include:

• Getting to work 10 minutes earlier than usual for the next week
• Organizing your tasks for the next day before leaving work
• Talking a short walk during lunch time to clear your head
• Trading that tempting donut for better brain food like a piece of fruit

Tip 4 – Cut Out Bad Outside Influences

We are influenced positively and negatively by those we spend time with. So, if you are spending time with people that have many of the same negative habits as yourself, it’s time for a change. Once you’ve discovered how to make the change yourself it is perfectly fine (and encouraged) to share with your team members how you turned a bad habit into a good one, and tips for them to do so as well.

Tip 5 – Wash, Rinse, Repeat, Adapt

The more you focus on changing your habits in a consistent way, the better your results will be. After you’ve begun to notice a positive difference in the new habits you are forming, it’s time to apply the same logic outside of yourself.

• Is the way that you’re interacting with your customers and prospects affected by other bad habits?
• How much are these bad habits costing your company in productivity/dollars?
• What can you do to better connect with them by changing these habits?
• Can you help other team members become more productive by encouraging them to change habits?

Getting Started

Below are some helpful tips to get you started:

1. Pinpoint three things that motivate you. An example might be positive reinforcement from your boss or a co-worker
2. Identify your bad habits. Maybe you spend too much time on Facebook during the day and want to improve your focus.
3. If you could change one habit immediately, what would it be? (feel free to leave your answer in the comments below.)

Because YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world, more and more companies are beginning to see the value in creating videos to help engage and inform their audiences. Oftentimes a “how to” explanation is best understood through a video, and it usually doesn’t cost a company much to put something together and post it on the site, so it’s an easy decision for most. So what’s the catch? Sometimes optimizing this video isn’t as simple as one would assume, and things are about to get more difficult.

For those who are unfamiliar, you have to optimize a video the same way you have to optimize an article. In other words, you want your search engine (in this case YouTube) to understand how it should rank and place your video based on certain keywords. Unfortunately, what so many understand about YouTube optimization is going to be short-lived—YouTube is following in the footsteps of Google and has officially changed their algorithm when it comes time to rank videos.

YouTube Algorithm Changes Explained

There was really one big difference that we saw with the update: clicks are less important. This goes for both the video as well as the ads connected to the video:

• Time is more important for content. In the past YouTube focused heavily on the number of clicks a video received. The problem with this was the fact that videos with catchy headlines were getting all of the attention. Now, YouTube is focusing more on the time that someone spends watching the video.
• Time is more important for ads. Not only is the time a user watches a video more important than simple clicks, but this same logic also goes for advertisements. If you want your video to rank higher, people will have to sit through those ads.

YouTube also made other, smaller changes that you can read about on the YouTube blog post. For example, the search engine will also take into account how long someone spends on YouTube and not just how long he/she spent on a particular video.

YouTube Algorithm Change Downsides

Most agree that YouTube is moving in the right direction, but some haven’t found the changes appealing. Controversy was sparked amongst those who are posting fifteen minute-long videos. It’s now going to be harder for these types of videos to beat out the two and three minute ones that are easy to watch, which isn’t something YouTube has yet discussed.

It is also interesting to think about those who post on YouTube as a way to gain exposure. This large group of people will likely have to rely on other avenues to gain exposure, get popular, and hope that it’s enough to get people to actually search for their name.

So what about businesses? It’s too soon to tell whether or not businesses are pleased with the updates or not, but in the end YouTube is going to do what it feels is right, and this usually means new work for marketing departments everywhere.

What This Means for Businesses Trying to Utilize YouTube

Companies will have to change their strategy with the new algorithm in mind if they hope to continue to really get the most from YouTube. There are a few different ways that a company may want to change their strategy:

• First, make sure that your ads aren’t going to cause someone to click off of your video. It’s true that nobody really wants to sit through an advertisement, but they will if they really want to see your video. It’s the others who aren’t sure whether or not they care about your video that you really want to grab with your ads.
• Second, consider creating two or three short videos as opposed to one long video. This will give you a better chance that someone will stay on YouTube and your videos (this was also true before the update!).
• Third, it’s important to understand that your company will likely want to focus it’s efforts on really promoting these videos on social media and the company website. Simply relying on optimization might not be enough.

The changes are significant, but this doesn’t mean that businesses have to go back and re-optimize everything. Utilizing keywords in your Meta data is still important; the updates are merely just another layer to the system.

We’ve been telling you for awhile now that the old-fashioned “black hat” SEO doesn’t work.

The evolution of SEO means that keyword stuffing, buying links, content spinning, and other shady practices just don’t pay off the way they used to.

But Marie Haynes wrote a terrific piece over on SEOMoz about how the wrong kind of SEO isn’t just useless … it’s actively dangerous.

Dangerous enough to destroy a small business, and maybe even a business that’s not-so-small.

Go read the article here, then come back.

Marie’s central point is that a certain stye of “cheap and quick” SEO — the style, in fact, that small businesses were often likely to choose — has now become actively dangerous.

In the past year, Google rolled out powerful updates that have destroyed the rankings for a huge number of small businesses. Those updates are called Penguin and Panda — and they were specifically designed to kill the rankings for sites that went for “cheap and quick.”

Why did SEOs do this stuff in the first place?

Well, it worked. Buying massive numbers of dodgy links worked. Adding hundreds or thousands of pages of thin, lame content worked if it had the right keyword structure. Directory submissions. Automated social media bookmarking. Spamming blog comments. (I have a particular hatred of the last one, as you might imagine.)

But here’s the problem. Some of these techniques aren’t reversible.

In particular, buying a bunch of unnatural links back to your site isn’t just useless … it’s now actively harmful. And try getting 1000 paid links taken off of the offending websites. It’s a lot easier to buy them than it is to get them taken away.

It’s time for small business to grow up

Owners of small businesses never wanted to become search engine experts. Most of us don’t. SEO looks complicated, it changes all the time, and from the outside it kind of seems like rocket science.

But if we want traffic from search engines, we need to grow up and face the new search reality — not the “Just trust us and we’ll build you 500 backlinks a month” message businesses are getting from some SEOs.

First and foremost, your site needs to be meeting the needs of your readers and customers.

You know that when you “stuff” your search keywords into a one-page article 52 times, that’s no good for your customers.

You know that putting 1000 pages of crap on your site isn’t good for your customers.

You know that “spinning” content from someone else’s blog isn’t good for customers.

And now Google knows that too. So quit playing silly games. Cheats and shortcuts won’t work, and over time they will hurt your business … possibly fatally.

So what’s a business owner supposed to do instead?

First things first: I believe in the practice of SEO. The good firms are amazingly good at what they do, and they can get excellent results.

But you need to get real. That type of SEO is expensive. If your business has enough revenue to justify the cost, high-quality SEO is a superb investment. The best firms will position you for long-term success that isn’t vulnerable to the Google tides.

(Here’s an insider tip: the best SEO firms are building programs around rock-solid content, smart content promotion, and intelligent strategy to promote social sharing.)

For a lot of smaller businesses, the revenue model just doesn’t support hiring a top-flight SEO firm. That’s why they “went cheap” in the first place.

Frankly, no SEO at all is better than using one of the “quick and cheap” SEO services. Re-read Marie’s article for some good warning signs to steer clear of.

But you don’t have to leave the fate of your business up to the whims of Google. The answer for the small business owner, believe it or not, is that you need to take your SEO in-house and start managing it yourself.

You still might outsource a few things, like content creation. You may very well employ an SEO to help you manage logistics. But you’re going to oversee the process and make sure things are being done properly.

Educating yourself is the only way to be sure you’re not shooting yourself in the foot. And it isn’t as hard as you think it is.

You can handle this

All of the evolution of SEO is actually making it easier for you to manage it yourself. The “signals” are ones you can control, rather than needing a technical expert to manage them for you.

You don’t have to be some kind of expert writer, and you definitely don’t need to be a technical genius.

We’ve created a free educational series for you on how SEO works today, and how to manage it for your business. It’s not going to teach you any ninja tricks. That’s because there aren’t any ninja tricks. There’s solid content, intelligent promotion, and a little bit of smart optimization.

For most businesses, you don’t need to learn to be an SEO wizard. You just need to build a site that works well for your customers, then take some straightforward steps to optimize that content.

Are you sick of the term content yet?

I’ll tell you the truth, we are too, a little. If anyone has a great idea for an alternate term, we’d love to hear it.

But the fact is, evolved SEO and smart business are fueled by the same thing: Strategic, valuable content.

Brian Clark and the rest of the Copyblogger editorial team have been working on a free library to help teach you the essentials. So you’ll know just what we mean by valuable content, how you can create it for yourself, and how you can start using it in your own business.

Whether you’re a solopreneur or you’re in a marketing department of a big organization, this is the path we’re all on for the foreseeable future.