An online presence is essential in today’s world; this article talks about 10 different sites to help expand your online presence and how to organize them.  This is a great article for those of you just starting to build your online presence.  I found this article when I was blog surfing the other day and thought I should share it, you can find it here: http://www.adamdistefano.com

10 Sites to Extend Your Online Presence – and How to Organize Them

March 22nd, 2010 | Marketing Strategy

The majority of small businesses don’t plan their online presences. They just happen. This kind of presence is inefficient and ineffective.  Advertisers duplicate efforts in some places, while others offer no benefit.  If we’re agreed that a small business must have an online presence, then the next step is to determine what that presence should look like, and how it should be organized to drive the greatest value. Every part of the advertiser’s presence on the web, should be leading a potential customer further into the conversion funnel.

In a previous post, I talked about the importance of having an online HQ.  From this piece, the rest of the presence will be built.

The small business online HQ needs to accomplish the following things:

1. It needs to have the essential information about the business
2. It needs to accurately reflect the business in both design and content
3. It needs to be optimized for conversion, ie. it needs to sell

In my previous post, I said it didn’t matter what your HQ was, whether it was a full-fledged website, or a social media profile.  I stand by this, as long as the HQ meets the three criteria above, we’re ready to move on to the next step.

Building a good headquarters is a task in and of itself, but even once that’s been accomplished, this is generally where most small businesses stop.  This is most evident when $5,000 are spent on creating a new website, which uses up the entire internet marketing budget for a SMB, and then there is nothing left to promote this site.

An Example of the Failure to Promote the HQ

A colleague of mine uses a classic example, wherein a friend asked him to take a look at the new website he had built for his business.  My colleague looked over the website, was suitably impressed, and then asked, “So, how do your customers find it?”

His friend gave him a blank look.  “Well, the address is on my business card,” he said.

This actually isn’t as bad as it could be, because at least the business owner in this case was promoting the site to existing customers.  Unfortunately, he had invested heavily in creating this site, and had no plan of driving new customers to it.  This is where creating the rest of an online presence comes in handy.

The rest of a person’s online presence will come in the form of outposts. These outposts will exist to provide some value to the user, but ultimately to drive traffic back to headquarters, where a potential sale can be closed.

Suggestions for possible outposts:

1. LinkedIn: If you have a decent sized professional network, your LinkedIn profile is a good place to plant seeds. People in your LinkedIn network may not necessarily be your potential customers, but they know your potential customers.

2. AmEx OpenForum: If you’re a small business, a great place to hang out is the American Express Open Forum.  The forum is dedicated to topics about small business.   Answer questions, and post relevant information, and always make sure to have a link back to headquarters, so that those you help you out can return the favour by sending some leads your way.

3. Forums for your topic: Aside from OpenForum, the internet is full of forums for niche topics. Hanging out in these forums, and offering relevant information and answering questions, all the while having a link back to HQ in your profile is an excellent way of finding exactly the people who are interested in what you’re selling.

4. Facebook: According to some sources, Facebook recently passed Google in terms of total visits.  A lot of people are on Facebook, and so creating a Facebook fan page for your business is quickly becoming a requirement. This is intrinsically sharable, and so your fans will find you new fans, and all of them, should be coming back to your website.

5. MySpace: MySpace is going through some re-inventing, and so its exact place in the internet’s stratosphere is murky, but it is safe to say that you can think of it as a good play if your industry caters to creatives and artists, and it can otherwise be used in a similar way to a Facebook fan page.

6. Flickr: Many businesses can benefit from posting photos in a public area like Flickr, and then pointing traffic back to HQ. For example, Mark Haywardruns a guesthouse on a Caribbean island, and he has had great successusing Flickr to drive traffic.

7. YouTube: YouTube is ideal for creating How To videos. These videos create expertise/build reputation, and have the added benefit of being sharable. Just be sure they point back to headquarters.

8. Twitter:  Twitter is a great way to connect with new people in your industry by using search functions, and just being active in the community.  Don’t carpet bomb your Twitter followers with constant pleas to visit your website (or you won’t have followers for long), but occasionally steering them towards your site especially if something is particular interesting is a good idea.

9. Squidoo: Is a service founded by Marketing rockstar Seth Godin.  You can create a “lens” on Squidoo, that will aggregate content from a number of sources.  You can then take the audience you’ve found from your lens, and steer them towards your HQ.

10. Guest writing: Writing for someone else’s blog, or writing an article for a website, doesn’t pay well, but if you include links back to your HQ, guest writing, pound for pound, will produce the greatest number of leads. Provided of course you were guest writing for a publisher in your niche.

Dealing with the overwhelm

You could go out and create every single one of these outposts (and others), but the fact of the matter is that most of these outposts are useless unless you have the time to donate to them.  You should not be afraid to open & shut down outposts as necessary – you don’t need to maintain all outposts simultaneously.  The one piece of your online presence that must always stay active is the HQ. Everything else exists only to drive traffic to the HQ.

Once you’ve created your online presence, you can apportion your time where you see the best results, and in the end, everything should be trickling towards HQ, and you’re on your way to creating plenty of leads.

It’s also worth noting that I didn’t invent this notion of setting up a main place to call home on the web, and then to create satellite pieces of content.  Here are two takes on the concept of the HQ vs outposts from two very bright guys.

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Here is an interesting article that talks about how to attract new clients for your business.  I found this to be quite interesting and the fact that it can be transferred to many different industries peaked my interest, so I figured I would post it. The article can be found here: http://www.christianfea.com/10-low-risk-high-return-tactics-to-attract-new-clients/?atid=7s_1432

10 Low Risk High Return Tactics to Attract New Clients for Your Business in 2010

Evan Sohn, a Business Networking Specialist from New York shares his insights on how to attract new clients for your business.

All businesses share the challenge of finding new business.  We recently conducted a survey of 700 small businesses.  43 percent of them needed to add over 10 new clients a year.  It should come as no surprise that $90 billion is being spent by businesses in the US to grow (American Marketing Association).  $20 billion is being spent in online marketingalone.  The common marketing portfolio for a company includes advertising (online and offline), public relations, event marketing (tradeshows), client marketing (referrals) and telemarketing (cold calling).  An effective marketing strategy will employ multiple initiatives under these areas targeting their customer/prospect segments.  Each of these items is important (in different varying levels) to achieve marketing results.  But, is there a way to achieve consistent marketing results without having the budget of a Cisco or a Microsoft?

Having been in technology marketing for nearly 20 years, I have seen various marketing methods emerge and some fall to the waste side (does anyone remember direct mail?).  The Internet has also provided alternative marketing methods by establishing new channels to targeted customers.  Our survey pointed out that most small business are not only concerned about getting good results from their marketing campaigns but are also concerned with high upfront costs of specific marketing campaigns.  With this in mind, here are ten low cost and low risk ways to drive new clients for your business.  By the way, it goes without saying that you have a clean web site that provides enough of a user experience regarding your service and easy links to the appropriate calls-to-action.

The top ten low cost and low risk ways to drive new clients for your business:

1. Client Referrals

Your path of least resistance to new customers is often from your existing client base.  Assuming you are delivering quality work, getting a client to refer another client often happens without even asking.  So why not ask?  Put together a campaign to drive new client referrals offering incentives to your existing clients.  Perhaps make a donation to their favorite charity, or discount on your service or even cash!  Be prudent in tracking client referrals as it is likely that your best referrals will originate from the same set of clients.  Always send thank you notes although I recommend David’s Cookies or Dale and Thomas Popcorn (a real office pleaser).

2. Blog yourself

While I know I am merely inviting you to join the myriad of people out there who are sharing their views, opinions and thoughts via the web it really is a good way to get the word out there.  Blogger and WordPress are two free Blog site that make it really easy to set up and publish your blogs.  Blog regularly and more importantly make sure you publish your blog on your social networkpages.  Blogs are often tapped right into the search engines so even by doing nothing you are getting the word out there.  (Check our Fastpitch Networking Blog promotion tools.)

3. Inverse Public Relations

Have you ever read an article online and seen a trail of comments and responses to the article?  Well why not do that yourself (assuming you have something interesting to add).  If you are a subject matter expert (and even if you are not) why not add your two cents to topical articles.  Include a link to your Blog or your web site in the response.  Of course it is self promotion but it is promotion nonetheless.

4. Socialize yourself online

Word of mouth is always a great way to drive new business.  Working ones rolodex was often the terminology for the art of taking out ones rolodex and “dialing for dollars” – reaching out to your contacts to see who might be able to refer some business.  Social networking and moreover professional networking has added a whole new dimension to managing ones rolodex.  Networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook as well as niche professional networks such as BizNik and Fastpitch make it easy to establish an online profile and provide good tools for reaching out to your network.  Join a group on Facebook or set up a live event on Biznik.

5. Face-to-face networking

Although there is a fee for the more popular networking groups they are a great way to meet other professionals all of whom are interested not in sharing photos or videos but in growing their businesses.  There are online versions of these groups such as Network for Professionals and a number of Meetup groups.  Start a Meet up or join one inviting everyone to happy hour (on you of course).  You’ll be certain to draw a nice crowd of likeminded professionals.

6. Web site optimization

Having a web site without it being optimized for search engines is like having an unlisted telephone number – both are bad for business.  You need to make sure that people could find you.  Go to Guru.com or eLanceand find an expert in SEO (search engine optimization) and pay some money to make sure that your web site is posted across the internet.

7. Pay-for-Performance

If you don’t have the stomach to deploy a PPC campaign and wade through all the unqualified leads and responses why not look into a pay-for-performance model.  These are also called CPA or cost per acquisition.  Usually the vendor will determine the price per successful lead acquisition.  This could be paying only for leads that complete a registration process for instance.  Salesconx.com (self promotion) also employs a pay-for-performance model which allows the buyer (the marketer or business) to establish the price for being introduced to a potential customer.  Salesconx has one advantage over current CPA provides insofar as having no minimum commitments.  This lets you get up and running very easily, quickly and inexpensively to closely monitor your return on investment.

8. Share the Wealth (Partnering)

Aligning yourself with another company is a great way to “double up” on your sales efforts.  If you providing expertise in X and a likely other vendor of your customer provides Y why not partner up with that company.  Create an incentive for the other company such as a percentage of revenue generated.  You could share clients and create targeted marketed programs reaching out to both your client bases.  Maybe deliver a unified presentation or online seminar to draw the synergies of both your companies.  This is generally an easy initiative to ‘kick off’ but often a bit harder to deliver in full.  To make a partnership successful requires investment (mostly of time) so be patient.  Keep in mind that your object is to add N new clients from this partner.  So as long as you are meeting your objective it is certainly worth the time and money.

9. Expert yourself

Assuming you are knowledgeable in a certain field why not make your expertise available to others ‘free of charge’?  For example, if you are a Tax specialist why not offer your community church or local library a free communal lecture on “Tips and Traps for Tax Preparations”.  Many organization and institutions are regularly looking for topical content and experts so why not offer these folks your services.  My mother was an interior designer in her own practice and started out by writing articles for the local paper on low cost decorating tips.  If you are in the health sector try the local gym – they regularly have evening informational classes.  Local chambers of commerce also have periodic meetings are often seek panel representatives.  Any opportunity for you to speak in front of an audience where you look like an expert in your field is a solid opportunity.

10. Independent sales reps

If you believe that your product or service is easy to understand and relatively straightforward to sell, why not recruit selling professionals that are paid only on commissions.  It wasn’t too long ago that most sales representatives were independent and there are presently 2.4 million independent sales representatives in the US alone.  Granted most of these folks aren’t selling synergistic products/services but, it does demonstrate just how many folks out there make their money solely through sales.  Try placing an advertisement in Craig’s list for independent sales reps in your industry or marketplace and see what happens.  It does require a good of time to train and manage independent folks but getting a few more clients into the pipeline thru a commission only source is certainly worth the effort.

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This article caught my attention because I agree that SMS is becoming more important and is a great tool for any business to utilize.  SOHOspot has this functionality built in so make sure you check it out.  This article can be found online at: http://ezinearticles.com/?SMS-Advertising-to-Boost-the-Business&id=4792457

SMS has become all the more important and popular in today's time as people prefer it over telephonic conversations. Looking at the growing use of SMS advertising by the businesses, a new trend called 2 way SMS has emerged. Advertising through SMS is more private than making a call as the receiver can read the message at his or her own convenience. In today's time, it is important for the businesses to stay connected and that too at low cost, therefore having a SMS virtual number can work for you as it cuts down the cost of service providers. For all the businesses, SMS marketing is a great option in order to target more number of people with lesser cost involved. SMS marketing campaign increases the brand awareness, customer frequency and the loyalty which are three important elements for a successful business.

Through web based SMS gateway, businesses can reach out to thousands of potential customers in no time. SMS gateway can easily be integrated on any website via API and marketers can push almost 25,000 messages in a minute. For many business applications, having a SMS virtual number is required in order to collect information from their employees, customers and partners. The traditional option of using short codes is obsolete now as it takes months to set up, it is expensive and is country specific.

Adopting 2 way SMS as an advertising tool can greatly help the businesses in generating higher sales without spending thousands of dollars for advertising. Now the website owners are also planning to grab this opportunity to provide the users with various services including wallpaper, ringtones and games. It has been found that companies are able to generate more revenues through SMS advertising. SMS has become the latest innovation in advertising and serves as a channel of communication between the company and its clients. In order to make SMS advertising successful it is always advisable to choose web based SMS gateway as with this the marketers can push SMS which will popularize brand and services of the company.
SMS virtual number enhances the results achieved through SMS advertising as it allows the companies to receive incoming SMS messages without spending thousands of dollars and waiting for months to get started. With 2 way SMS facility, incoming messages can easily be managed and can easily be deleted or modified as per the requirements. Through web based SMS gateway, personalized marketing messages can be sent to explicit cluster of potential customers.

While using the 2 way SMS facility, the marketers can use any number of words to create a message to send to large section of people. For successful advertising through SMS, it is important to opt for SMS virtual numberwhich gives complete freedom to the user to handle any inbound message. We based SMS gateway services allow the companies to store an online address book which makes it convenient for the marketers to push messages to the relevant set of people. Companies can get maximum ROI through SMS advertising and can also take the business to new heights.

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Twitter is an important online tool that is being used by businesses and people all around the world.  This tool can be a bit confusing at times, so here is an article that I found that talks about 7 different ways users approach Twitter.  This article was posted on Mashable.com and can be found here: http://mashable.com/2009/04/20/twitter-strategy/.  Enjoy!!

There are plenty of strategies for approaching Twitter(). It’s getting more complex each day, but in the end it can be boiled down to a few simple approaches.

From Twittering on behalf of yourself to Twittering for a company, playing the part of a classic character to being a robot, here are seven ways users approach Twitter.

1. You are yourself

You are on Twitter for the community, the knowledge you get and give, and the sharing of resources – whether it’s for professional or purely personal reasons. Twitter is your communication device.

I can go on all day providing examples of people who Twitter for their own enjoyment or just business networking but not specifically to promote anything or anyone in particular. Here are a few of my favorites that I follow:

@john_hunter– He’s a writer from England who frequently just tweets what’s on his mind.

@MaryKnudson– A professor from a prominent school who really just enjoys having good conversations and sometimes helping people get connected.

@amykchulik– The best friendships on Twitter came from out of the blue. @amychulik and I have been tweeting for months on a number of subjects and I can’t remember for the life of me how we connected. I’m just glad we did.

@jpage– She’s a twenty-something online marketer here just for sharing and networking. We used to work together and barely got out of there alive, but we survived to tweet another day.

2. You have a personal brand

You might use Twitter under an assumed or enhanced personality and stick to a strategic plan. It’s not necessarily as insidious as it sounds, it’s just that you are your own business and you need to promote it in a certain way, with a certain angle. You pay close attention to the things you say so they align with how you want the public to perceive you, and even in times when you share personal information it only goes to further the identity you’ve fostered online.

Whatever the reason you tweet, at the end of the day, it’s to sell yourself as an expert in a particular field or to promote your products and services. Some people’s true online personalities are so unique and so attached to what they do they become unintentional personal brands.

@garyvee– I can’t go a day without imagining Gary jumping up and down in one of his videos telling me that I’m so totally awesome. Is it live? Or is it Vaynerchuk?

@BadAstronomer– Before he was on Twitter, he was a one-man brand, defying Moon landing deniers and shedding light on myths about the universe. He’s still up to his old tricks.

@henican– He’s a Newsday columnist and a Fox News political analyst and a Talk Radio Network host and… A Cartoon Network voice? His tweets are high concept mini-columns that perfectly capture his sensibilities, his humor and his voice.

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3. You work for a corporate brand

You Twitter for a company that has its own history and values. Your own personality or interests rarely if ever leak into the Twitter feed, and usually it’s only if they are perfectly aligned to the brand’s strategy.

For example, you might talk and share opinions about social media itself but you’d stay far away from political discussions. Your main intent on Twitter is to advance the culture, the message and the products and services of the company that employs you. Your personality may be of a spokesperson, a brand name or even a remotely controlled rover on the fourth planet from the sun.

@shirleybrady– She’s the BusinessWeek.com community editor and a little bit of an exception to the rule. But for the most part she’s all business.

@ScottMonty– Less an exception to the rule, Scott, head of social media at Ford Motor Company generally stays on track when it comes to tweeting about Ford vehicles.

@comcastcares– As Director of Digital Care Frank Eliason’s job is to make you feel that a big cable company can be touchy-feely and your problems do matter to them.

4. You’re a fictional character or dead historical person

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You are a real person but your Twitter account is entirely dedicated to promoting a character in a story, tweeting as someone from history or as a new character created just for Twitter.

@R2D2– As the original tweeter, R2D2 is one half of the most famous robotic duo in the universe. After saving the galaxy from the evil Empire, he’s just building his network and tweeting about the old times with the Skywalker family.

@cdarwin– Charles Darwin was the 19th Century naturalist who turned the world on its ear with his book “The Origin Of Species,” proposing that random mutations and natural selection were the drivers of the diversity of life on earth.

@GeneHunt– He’s gruff, he’s offensive and he degrades women. He’s also on Twitter. @GeneHunt is the Twitter persona of Detective Chief Inspector Gene Hunt, a character in the UK version of Life on Mars and the spin-off Ashes to Ashes.

@joan_holloway– Somehow a sexy office manager from an ad agency from more than four decades ago has embraced Twitter. And I’m not all that upset about it. Joan Halloway is a character from the wildly entertaining show Mad Men that takes a look at the culture of ad agencies and relationships between men and women in the 1960s.

5. You’re literature

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Even more specific is exclusively Twittering out a story or some poetry or something of the like. Some have tried to use it as a true publishing platform 140-characters at a time, either with short stories that fit within a tweet or as an ongoing series of tweets that will make up a longer piece.

@smallplaces– A novel entirely on Twitter called “Small Places” written by N. L. Belardes.

@twitterfiction– Original works of 140-character fiction. Like a publishing company on Twitter, they take submissions for original work to tweet.

@arjunbasu– It’s not easy to put so much irony and wit into 140-character short stories, but he does it. Called “twisters,” they always have some sort of twist in the end.

6. You are a robot

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You are not really a person at all. You are a bot. I’m a science fiction fan. I’m all for the rights of robots and all that, but in the world we live in bots are not exactly the highly developed neural networks that will eventually take over the world as predicted by the Singularity or the Terminator series of films. For now, if you just use Twitter to promote content that is produced elsewhere and that process is automated, then you just might be a robot.

@NYTimes– All the news that’s fit to Tweet. Yeah, I said it.

@CNN– Cable news channel embracing and succeeding on Twitter.

@Newsweek– A national magazine trying to reinvent itself. Stories are fed into a Twitter stream.

7. You’re a blend

Like most things in life, Twitter is not black and white. Many Twitterers are a blend of the above designations. I think that Twitter is more fun when people mix it up a little, putting a personal and relaxed conversational tone to their stream even if they are there to promote a brand, whether it’s personal or corporate.

@ariherzog– He’s an online media strategist for business and government cultivating his personal brand. But what he does best is chat about a variety of topics from my Star Wars addiction to the best ways a business can use Twitter. Ari is an occasional contributor to Mashable().

@NeilDiamond– Sweet Caroline! The Jewish Elvis is on Twitter. Guess what? He’s not doing such a bad job. While he’s clearly a brand name, he’s quite honest and open in his tweets. This is one celebrity that actually feels more real and is more endearing on Twitter.

@balmeras– She used to work for The National Wildlife Foundation blogging and Twittering about children, education and the outdoors. Now she’s doing the same thing on her own terms and having lots of fun doing it. But when she’s not promoting her new blog and things you should be doing with your kids, you can find her just shooting the breeze.

@jojeda– Tech writer and author of a book on Twitter. (What else?) He’s sometimes wearing his journalism hat but mostly just tweeting about stuff and having good conversations, in English and Spanish!

The above examples are by no means hard and fast rules to using Twitter. Some people might say there is no such thing as a Twitter strategy and the very idea itself is anathema to the site. But we like to group people into neat categories. (Which probably explains why Psychology 101 is a favorite elective of undergraduates.) There are probably as many ways to group people as there are Twitter users themselves.

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This is an interesting article written by Barb Mosher.  This article is about creating an online presence for your business.  This is becoming more important as people become more reliant on the internet and use it as their primary resource for finding information regarding services and products.  You can find the original article here: http://www.suite101.com/content/defining-your-web-strategy-a18122

Whether you have an existing business or are starting a new one – more than likely you need a web site to help market and/or sell your products and/or services. Creating an online presence is no small task but can be done well if you follow four phases. You need to:

• plan it out based on your business requirements
• build it (or buy it)
• promote it
• maintain it

Phase 1: Planning

Planning is themost important phase of the web strategy. Without a proper plan you are flying by the seat of your pants and that never works well. There are several activities in the planning phase:

• Take an inventory of what you have now for an internet presence (if you have one).
• Take an inventory of what your competitors are doing. Create a matrix of functions and features that you can evaluate each site on.
• Define your top level business requirements – what do you want to achieve with an internet presence (these requirements must be measurable and achievable).
• Define the audience (s) you want to target.
• Then define your success metrics (how will you determine if your business requirements have been met?).
• Define all top level Roles and Responsibilities for this strategy. These are the people that have ultimate responsibility for the strategy and the resulting internet presence.
• Once you know what you want to achieve, break it down into manageable sub-projects. Don’t try to do it all at once. A phased development approach enables you to get a site up fairly quickly with some features and functions available while you monitor its performance and work on the next set of functions/features.

Phase 2: Building your site

This is the phase where you start gathering the details of what you are going to build, how you will build it and then the actual build. It is usually broken down in sub-phases as follows.

• Complete detailed functional and business requirements
• Develop the Information Architecture for the site. This is a blueprint for how the site is laid out. The Information Architecture is done once and updated as necessary for each sub-project defined.
• Define the content requirements and starting pulling the content together.
• Complete the Creative Design – this is how the site will look.
• Develop the technical designor if buying a solution, define the technical and functional requirements needed and complete a product evaluation and selection process.
• Build or buy your site and complete each sub-project accordingly.
• Don’t forget to test your site for usability and for functionality.

Phase 3: Promote

You can have the best web site on the internet, but if no one knows it’s there – what’s the point? Things to consider in your marketing strategy:

• Online advertising with Google/Yahoo
• Search Engine registration and optimization
• Affiliate Marketing
• Cross Channel Selling
• Privacy Policy
• Blogs
• eNewsletters

Phase 4: Maintain

How do you maintain your site? It’s an on-going process of monitoring and modifying as necessary to ensure you are meeting your business requirements. Complete regular reviews of the web statistics for the site. What are the peak visitor times, where are people coming from and where pages are they leaving from? How long are they spending on your site and what are they looking at the most? This information will tell you what parts of your site are working and what aren’t. It will also help you determine where your marketing is working.

Maintenance also means keeping up with regular technology patches and updates. Fixing bugs that may have been missed during testing phases and updating information architecture as necessary are also part of this phase.

A Strategy needs to be closely Monitored

Creating an online presence can be a lot of work. Defining your web strategy means planning what you want to do, building your site, promoting it and maintaining it. It’s important to understand that a web strategy is cyclical in nature. This means that once you define it, you need to revisit your plans on a regular basis to ensure the strategy is still in line with the business needs, and that you are meeting your expected goals. You may also want to modify parts of your strategy to take advantage of changes in internet technology.

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Search engine optimizations sounds confusing but it is essential to any business that has an online presence.  Having proper search engine optimization can help drive traffic to your site and drastically increase your number of unique visitors per month.  Here is an article that talks about SEO and offers a few tips as well.  I found this article here:http://morelandwebconsulting.com/blog/seo-important-local-businesses/

SEO

The first goal of any business is getting customers in the door (obviously).  This can be done through word-of-mouth, Yellow Pages, the Internet, etc.  However, the Internet has quickly become the most important place to draw in new customers.  In fact, 40% of searches on the web are for some sort of local purpose.  In other words, the Phone Book has given way to Google in terms of locating a local business.

Now, most small businesses have one or two people trying to manage every operation necessary for the business to flourish.  Very rarely does this include keeping up to date with the lastest trends in online visibility.  If this is the case for your business, it may make sense to hand over the responsibility to a professional SEO consultant or another expert in creating an online presence for small businesses.

As a small business owner, maybe the first two paragraphs were all that was necessary to convince you to go out and find an SEO guru.  If not, then please continue to read the following reasons why you are making a deadly mistake if you ignore Search Engine Optimization:

1.    Market Research

As with most business moves, it is essential to perform market research upfront.  With SEO, this means identifying the keywords, or search terms, that local residents are searching, which are relevant to your business.  For example, are more people searching for “Pittsburgh SEO Consultant” or “Pittsburgh SEO Services”?  ”Pittsburgh Attorney” or “Attorney in Pittsburgh”.  These simple steps can pay dividends in search engine traffic and, ultimately, more clients.

2.    On-Page Optimization

While the exact formula by Google is a mystery, I have seen estimates that how you optimize your web page accounts for about 25% of SEO.  In other words, targeting the correct keywords and having quality content on your webpage should make up about one-quarter of your SEO strategy.  So what about the other 3/4ths?

3.    Off-Page Optimization

Off-page optimization is essentially having high-quality backlinks pointing to your site.  In Google’s eyes, these are like recommendations for your site.  There are two things you want to focus on when accruing backlinks.

1. Relevant Anchor Text

This means, if I were trying to point back to my site in a Google-appreciated manner, then I would use the text “Pittsburgh SEO” as the anchor text to my website.  If I were to use “Horse Training” instead, then Google would probably be confused and/or give me credit for being a horse training site, neither of those are desirable outcomes.

2. High-quality/Authority Sites

Now, any link on any site is probably going to be a benefit to you, however, some sites are more of a benefit.  You want your website to be recommended by sites that have authority in Google’s eyes.  Why?  It is the same concept as personal recommendations.  Who are you more willing to listen to on movie recommendations: a famous movie critic with tons of credibility across the nation, or Joe the random guy that you have never met before?  One simple example of this in the Internet world is getting links to your site from .edu or .gov websites.  These are exclusive sites that do not allow many links on them.  Thus, a link from them gives your page a TON of “SEO Juice.”

What To Do If You Don’t Have The Time For SEO?

A small business website must be optimized to target customers in the relevant geographic region.  This includes the basics described above, but also includes local listings, video marketing, Social Media, and much, much more.  The businesses that take advantage of all the Internet has to offer now are the ones who will be thriving in five years.

Here is an article that talks about the basics of Social networking and how a person or business should approach it.  This article is for those of you who are new to social networking and are unsure of how to start building your online presence.  The article was found here: http://www.blueglass.com/blog/social-networking-101-basic-tips-for-online-and-offline-social-networking/

Guess what?  Social networking online is very similar to social networking offline (in the real world)!  Big surprise?  Believe it or not, for some, it really is a surprise. Whether you are looking to grow your network, influence, awareness and reach or advancing your professional and personal goals it’s important to recognize that being successful in social networking online and offline are very similar.  Most of us know the rules for networking in the real world, but it’s important to remember them for online, particularly if you are making your first moves into online social media and social networking.  The following are tips to become a decent social networker in either medium. Most tips apply in both scenarios.

Know the organizer:Make it a point either when you arrive at the event or prior to leaving the event to thank the organizer for putting the event together, let them know that you wish to attend future events and that you met some great contacts. Knowing the organizer and letting them know you appreciate the hard work needed to put together an event may put you in position to share the highest level of invite status in the future. Find out who runs things and take the mindset that you owe them something.

Offer assistance:If you really like the event/group, offer that you’d like to be a part of helping to organize future events by volunteering time and some of your core capabilities. Help your fellow social networkers by advancing their goals, sharing their goals with others or by introducing them to a new contact in your network. Make a solid public recommendation if you honestly believe in what they have to offer.

Be polite:Enter conversations gently and in a meaningful way with something to add. Don’t interrupt existing conversations in progress, but work your way into conversations. As a conversation hits a lull or comes to a conclusion, start it again, this time with a twist. Avoid cursing. There is no need to curse and swear to make your point. If you’re succinct in your discussion, people will get the point. Use of words like F*&K and SH%T become very unattractive after a while and show a certain lack of professionalism after some time.

Stay away from negativity, and don’t dwell on bad news. Bring uplifting anecdotes and share in the positives.  Clean yourself up and dress well.  Represent yourself with a decent looking avatar / profile image. Ask some of your closest friends and contacts what they honestly think about your profile image.

Meet the influencers:Take time to understand who the influencers are in the room, who are long time members and pay deference to their contributions to the organization. Share your experiences with them about the group. Ask questions of the influencers as they know a ton about the group and how to become established within the group. Perhaps you can help an influencer in some other area of life and they can help you within the social network group?

Meet the newcomers: Show a bit of bi-partisanship and don’t put all your focus on the influencers or the organizers all the time. A newcomer could one day become an “influencer”, so you should try to meet some of them. It’s important to show the rest of the group that you are not just looking to network up, but that you care about the development of the entire group.  After all, Susan Boyle was a newcomer, right?  Good for those who introduced themselves to her before she went on stage!

Follow up:Follow up with the people you’ve met in the network and at the event. Don’t leave your new contacts hanging. Make sure to follow up with some form of contact (phone call, email, hand written note) recognizing that you’ve met them and showing them you care about their work. Help them in their endeavors and help them reach their goals first, and they will be apt to help you.

Don’t sell and don’t spam:Tread lightly on the commercial approach. Don’t blanket the party with your pitch, your business card or with how great you are. If you try to sell things to your social network and you constantly GLOAT, chances are you will be rejected in some way.  This reminds me of a social marketing post we made some time ago where we said:

” [social marketing] is about acting like a human and networking in it’s traditional form; being a part of the discourse, part of the conversation, meeting people and not sucking people into an E-commerce funnel.”

Bring something to the table: Bring something to share at the event. Bring insights, a new contact or bits of information that others can benefit from. Don’t come empty handed. Bring an actual gift or bring your knowledge of a subject to contribute to the group discussion.

Find new events:Find new events, go to them and cross-connect the contacts you meet at one group with the contacts from another. Turning your friends on to new events helps them understand that you care about their development.

Introduce a new person: Bring a new person to the group who you think will add value for the rest. You’ll be in the good graces of the new attendee and likely the rest of the group for expanding the network in a meaningful way.

Relate: Make sure you remain relatively on-topic in discussions. Speak about the industry and if the conversation veers into the personal or off-topic, at least make sure those you’re speaking with have a remote interest in what you’re discussing.  If they can’t relate, you’re done!