7 Ways A Blog Can Boost Your Business
You’ve likely heard of blogs. There’s nothing really magical about them, but you can use a blog for your business to increase your market and talk to your customers. Here are 7 ways you can use a blog to boost your business and your brand online.
- Search engine optimization – Well optimized blog posts can increase your standing in the search engines.
- Social media optimization – Promote your blog through the popular social networks to increase your traffic and brand exposure.
- Field questions about your business – A blog allows your customers and potential customers to communicate with you. You can answer their questions and build your brand.
- Network with others in your industry – A blog is a conversation. Your market is a conversation. Why not join the two?
- Increased search engine rankings - Not only can each individual blog post be optimized, but the more blog posts you have the more chances you have of being ranked in the search engines.
- Close more sales – You can use your blog to close sales simply by putting links to your landing pages in high profile locations on the blog.
- Customer service – Handle customer service issues on your blog in less time and with fewer expenses.
You no longer have to sit on the sidelines and watch while your competitors steal the market. You can use a blog to drive more business to your website and increase your search engine and social media exposure.
Comic Ditches Traditional Media
Here’s a story for you. Famous stand up comedian Louis CK ditches traditional media and decides to deliver his own comedy routines through his website for $5 per download. Either that is genius of the highest order or sheer folly. What do you think?
Here’s what I think: He’s paving a new path for others to follow. And they will.
In every field there are innovators. The innovators come first. They meet with mild success, or sometimes wild success, while others watch and learn. Then, the second wave hits. Others pick up where the innovators left off and take that success to a new level.
I think we’re entering a new era. Creators have realized they no longer need a publisher or a large benefactor to increase their market share and visibility. Louis CK built his reputation on the backs of large companies who gave him a platform. Now that he has his platform he can take it out on his own. And he’ll likely succeed because he’s creative, good with business and has attainable goals.
What about you? Can you take your business on its own? Can you innovate? Should you?
Entrepreneurs can learn from the creative geniuses among us. Internet marketing is changing the playing field. Have you noticed?
5 Ways To Use A Blog
Blogging for business can be any number of things depending on your business model. I have found a blog to be a great marketing tool. But many businesses use blogs in different ways. Here are 5 ways you can use a blog for your business.
- Branding – A blog can be a great way to brand yourself. You can use it to communicate important messages about your business periodically so that your customers and potential customers understand your brand better and engage with you on your blog in discussions about your brand.
- Search engine optimization – Many businesses use their blog for SEO. They target their keywords in blog posts repeatedly until they gain a certain level of search engine traction.
- Reputation management – A blog can also be a great reputation management tool. Use it to improve your position in the search engines as well as your reputation online.
- Social media marketing – Many bloggers take their blog into the social media arena and use it for reaching out to others in their niche in a very social way.
- Customer Service – Other businesses use their blog as a customer service tool, fielding questions about their products and services that they then can use to engage their audience in a conversation.
If you use your blog for any of these purposes, then you are on the right track, but these are not the only ways you can blog. In what ways do you use your company blog?
Start Your Own Private Social Network
A new craze in social networking has companies starting their own private social network. Is this a good thing? Does it benefit the company?
There are lots of reasons why a company might want a private social network. You can’t share sensitive information through LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Those are unsecure environments. But Chatter, a website that specializes in providing private social networks for businesses is a secure environment.
In order to use Chatter, a person has to have an e-mail address from your domain. If they don’t, they can’t join your network. Pretty simple.
But what uses does a private social network have?
For one thing, you can use a private social network if you have multiple offices – either in the same city – or in various geographic locations. The private social network will allow you to collaborate more easily across distances. You can build better relationships between your office locations and the employees at those locations.
You can share information more efficiently through your own private social network. Instead of sending out an e-mail blast to everyone who needs to know, you can post one message to your network and the people who need that information will be able to access it.
A private social network can also be beneficial for training purposes.
There are a myriad of reasons why you might want your own private social network. Chatter is free and open source. That’s not a bad deal.
Is Social Gaming Good For Business?
You know those social games where people answer questions about you? Here are some of the questions that are frequently asked of gamers, who answer them about their social media friends:
- Do you think So-and-So is cute?
- Do you think So-and-So ever lied in a job interview?
- Would you like to go on a date with So-and-So?
- Do you think So-and-So would steal from their employer?
- Would So-and-So make a good boss?
- Would you like to see So-and-So dance like Michael Jackson for money?
These are actual questions of a Facebook app called Get Revealed. They’re fun questions to answer about your friends and it can be fun to see what your friends think about you. But should you, or is it just a silly time killer?
Many business people would say it’s a time killer, but there is one reason why you might want to do it. Your friends are typically people you know, but you may not be doing business with them. By playing the game with them, you could be opening yourself up in a new way, allowing them to gain some insight into the true you. That could lead to a deeper relationship and finally a business relationship.
One thing is for certain, though. If you don’t play the game, you’ll get nothing.
There’s No Business Like A Slow Business
Is your business slow? What do you do to drum up new business in your down times? When the market slows down and you have a deficit in customer relations, do you get proactive? Do you spend money? Here are five ways to turn your slow business into a thriving business during any economic circumstances.
- Build a new website. There’s nothing that says you should stick with one website. If you have a business with clearly defined multiple markets, build a website for each market. When your business slows down is a good time to start planning for the next wave or upsurge. Put your extra time into something productive.
- Initiate a PPC campaign. Many small business owners cut back on the marketing budget when business is slow. That’s when you should step up your marketing efforts. PPC is the perfect vehicle since you don’t pay for a click until after you receive it.
- Make a video. Since you have some free time on your hands, why not create a video. You can put it on your website or distribute it through YouTube and other video marketing channels.
- Connect with a new audience. Social media engagement can be time consuming, but it doesn’t have to be. In truth, you should be engaged through social media even when your business isn’t slow, but what better time to get engaged than when things slow down?
- Refine your SEO. You can always find a way to improve your search engine rankings. Prowl your website for new SEO opportunities, and take them.
Instead of fretting about your business being slow, take action. Find new opportunities to connect to old customers or go out and find new ones.
The Relevance In Google Maps’ Algorithm
Googler Jeremy Sussman explains in the following video how Google Maps uses location, relevance, and prominence to rank a business in Google Maps. Watch the video and we’ll talk about what the relevance factor means.
So what is meant by “relevance?”
Relevance in Google Maps means you have done everything you can do as a business to ensure that your Google Places profile matches the search queries that people use to find businesses like yours. Factors that determine relevance include the category you put your business into, keywords you use when writing your description, and other traditional SEO factors.
Of prime importance is category. If your business is a restaurant, you don’t want to categorize it as a butcher shop. That’s a no-brainer. But even subtle differences can make a big difference in Google Maps. For instance, an auto repair shop that does not do body work does not want to list itself as a body shop.
When you write the description for your business, be sure to use keywords that are naturally associated with businesses like yours. Don’t spam, but use natural writing methods to describe your business using the right keywords.
Other items that could affect relevance are how you write your offers within Google Places, whether your domain and business name have a keyword in them, and whether or not you use your business address in your listing.
Relevance is an important factor in Google Maps search. Learn how to make it work for you.
Integrate Skype, Facebook Into Your Business
Skype and Facebook are becoming more and more intimate every day. If you use both, or one or the other, then you should consider incorporating their integration into your business model. There are some very powerful ways to use them for your business.
First, the integration: Late last year, Skype announced that it would add Facebook’s news feed into Skype as well as include all of your Facebook friends’ into your Skype phonebook. Recently, however, Skype announced that you do not have to log in to Facebook separately to use certain features. You can interact with your Facebook friends through instant messaging with Skype, Like their comments, and comment on status updates – all through Skype.
If you can do all of that through Skype, then you can interact with customers, perform customer service functions, and even sell to your Facebook friends through Skype. It won’t be long before you’ll be able to make phone calls and hold video conferences on Facebook through Skype.
Here’s a tip: Add a Skype call button feature to your website. When you get questions for customer service, or questions about your product, from your Facebook friends, invite them to your website to call you through Skype where you’ll answer their questions directly in real time using voice and video. From there, it’s one small step to closing a sale.
Do You Have A Facebook Bureau?
A hyperlocal news site decided to kill its website and focus only on its Facebook page. The owner/publisher shares his lessons learned.
What I find really interesting about what Brad Rourke had to say about his Facebook venture is in the very last paragraph. Specifically:
In closing, Sonderman asked Rourke how he would handle Facebook strategy if he worked for a mainstream news organization, and he replied, “I would look at it as a place rather than a source of eyeballs. I would have a Facebook bureau.”
In other words, just as a news agency would have a separate bureau for its satellite editions, it should consider a separate bureau for its Facebook edition. For instance, a Miami newspaper that also prints a great deal of news about Jacksonville might have a Jacksonville bureau, complete with its own editorial staff, graphic department, and ad sales team. Rourke is suggesting that news agencies adapt the same strategy to Facebook.
I think it’s a good idea, not only for news organizations but for businesses as well. What can you do to make your Facebook page stand out? How can you attract new business through your Facebook page? By making it an entity all its own.
This is a novel idea and one worth considering. Businesses should count the cost in terms of human capital and resources. If they can justify the expense, rather than try to drive traffic from Facebook to their website, maybe they should try to capitalize on the traffic they get in their Facebook bureau.
The Twitter Shoutbox Vs. The Ear Piece
How do you use Twitter? Or, do you use it?
If you’re like most people, you’ve flocked to Twitter to see what the big fuss is about and you’re not quite sure how to use it. What is this thing called Twitter? There’s so much going on yet you haven’t quite figured out what to make of it, or how to use it.
Rest assured, there are as many ways to use Twitter as there are people using it. It’s a very flexible and versatile social media tool. That’s one of its strengths.
I know people, for instance, who simply use Twitter to listen in on what is being said in cyberspace. They use it for competitive intelligence. They also use it to hear what their customers are saying. They follow who they want to follow, then listen.
There are other people who just can’t seem to say enough. Any time something happens around the world, they have to tweet about it. They tweet their blog posts, they tweet the natural disasters, they tweet their grandma’s pea soup, they tweet other people’s blog posts, they tweet industry insider news, and the list goes on. Which way is the best way to use Twitter?
In truth, there is no best way to use Twitter. Most business owners and managers can benefit from using Twitter in a variety of ways, and that includes both listening and shouting. The key to effective Twittering is to figure out your strategy before you start, and to be consistent over time. But don’t be afraid to change your strategy midstream either.
Are You Learning Too Much Too Fast?
When businesses go online to learn how to participate in Internet marketing campaigns that work, there is usually a lot to think about, a lot of new information to take in for those business owners and managers. The problem is how to process it all.
What I always suggest is to take it a little bite at a time. You can’t learn everything in one day. You can’t become a master of every art in your lifetime. Don’t even try.
The key is to start with the basics. Study a little bit about web design before you do anything else. What are the best practices for web design for businesses of your size and in your industry? Study the competition to see what they are doing that you like and that you don’t like. Then analyze what is effective.
Remember, you are only studying the basics at first. At some point, you have to rely on the advice of experts because you are nowhere near that status yourself.
After you have learned the basics of web design, move on to another topic such as search engine optimization or pay per click advertising. Again, take the time to learn the basics before moving on to something else.
It takes time to truly learn how to successfully manage an Internet marketing camnpaign. It’s not going to happen overnight. With the proper guide, your business can achieve a little success and move on to greater success – one step at a time.
How Often Should You Blog?
So you’ve decided to start a blog to promote your business. That’s a good move. But how often should you update your blog?
That’s a good question. The answer is, It depends.
How much traffic would you like your blog to receive? How serious are you about search engine marketing? Do you want the search engines to crawl your blog often and update their search engine listings accordingly? Are you doing it for fun or for profit?
Blog marketing is not a hit-and-miss proposition. It is a commitment. The more often you do it, the more likely you are to see positive results. That’s how it is with just about anything. Right?
The search engines view each of your blog posts as a single web page. But they also pay attention to your entire website. Every time yo update your site, they send their spiders back to crawl it. Update it every day and you’ll get crawled every day. That means each blog post you write has the potential to achieve high search engine rankings in addition to your site as a whole achieving those rankings.
Every blog post is a new opportunity. The more opportunities you have, the better your marketing. So how often do you think you should be blogging?
How To Become A Media Company
An article at WebProNews has an interesting take on marketing online. It says that effective marketers do four things well:
- Reach their target audience through traditional media
- Use digital new media well
- Promote by being a media company
- And spread their content by social media
Two things are interesting about this approach: No 1, search engine optimization isn’t mentioned at all, and, secondly, you’re being asked to become a media company.
Now, wait a minute, you say, I never intended on doing that! Now, not so fast. All that means is you think outside of your own website.
Here’s what it really means: You set up one or two, maybe even three or four, online media websites that reach a different target audience or that provide a different publishing service. For instance, it could be a blog or it could be a community wiki. Maybe it’s a forum. It could be anything as long as it gives other people a platform for their voices. In other words, become an owner of media resources and not just a consumer of them.
There actually is a lot of wisdom there. Besides the profit that can be derived from these media websites that you own, there is also a branding element. You can spread your brand out in more directions and reach more people, which leads to more business. It’s just something to think about.
Oh, about that SEO – let’s assume that any community or media sites you build will include a healthy search engine optimization plan. It just makes good sense.
The No. 1 To Earn True Fans
Online marketing maven Seth Godin has this saying that if you can gain 1,000 true fans, then you can make a living on your trade. “True fans” are defined as those people who follow your every move and will buy anything you put out. Of course, it’s harder to earn that kind of loyalty than you think. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it.
But, truth is, it really is easy. People make it hard.
The surest way to earn fans is to provide value. Period. Do one thing really well consistently over time and you will earn your fans.
That’s what Michael Jackson did. You might not be a Michael Jackson fan, but a lot of people are. It’s because he provided them music that they could relate to. He entertained them. They got their money’s worth when they bought a Michael Jackson album or went to one of his concerts.
You could take the most successful icons of any sector of business and say the same thing. They are successful because they consistently provide value.
In business, your medium is your blog or website, your social media, your reputation. Provide consistent value over time and you’ll earn your true fans. It really is that simple.
How Bad Reviews Can Be Good
All the search engines have a place for local businesses to claim a local listing. Google Places, Bing, and Yahoo! Local are all tied to the Maps feature at the search engines and each one has a way for customers to write reviews of the business. All the reviews – positive and negative – have the potential to help your business rank in the search engines.
You’ve heard the expression “content is king.” What that means is any content has the potential to help your site, or your business, rank.
Let’s say, for instance, that your business listing at Google Places has 50 reviews. Forty five of them are positive reviews and five are not. Even those five negative reviews are helping your local business listing rank at the top of the search results for searches related to your niche.
But your website can benefit from negative reviews too. Add a reviews page to your website and allow your customers to write reviews on your website. The more reviews you get, the more likely you are to have that page rank in the search engines for searches related to your business.
While negative reviews can help, you can encourage positive reviews by providing excellent customer service and by asking your good customers to write reviews. If you add your Google Places listing and your website’s reviews page URL to your business cards, brochures, and shopping bag inserts, you’ll encourage customers to write reviews of your business. Provide them good service in the process and they’ll be good reviews.
Do Personal Tweets Matter?
You’ve got you a business Twitter account and now you’re ready to go. You’ve started posting, but you’re not getting a crazy amount of interaction. The question to ask is, are you getting personal enough?
Social media marketing is an interesting game. Online, users prefer a little more personal touch. They don’t want to be bombarded with endless dry and impersonal marketing messages. They want to talk to a real human being, even if they’re talking about business. That doesn’t mean you have to avoid talking about business at all.
A new study indicates that this could be true (though I do see some problems with the study as presented).
The study seems to indicate that young people prefer the personal tweets, but older people prefer no tweets at all. It also indicates that younger people consider personal to be more credible. However, it’s interesting to note that they preferred all personal to part personal and part business. That just doesn’t seem right.
I think the takeaway from this study is that you should incorporate personal messages into your business tweets. Don’t make it all dry. But don’t get so carried away with personal information about yourself that you tell too much. If you ate the worm, don’t tell us you danced on the table and took off your clothes.
Yes, Web Design Can Make Your Website More Profitable
There’s an old saying in Web development circles:
An ugly website that makes money is more attractive than a pretty website that doesn’t.
A web developer friend of mine has a knack for saying:
An ugly website that makes money gets prettier by the dollar.
These are both true statements, but let me add a third one:
A pretty website that makes money is more attractive than an ugly website that makes the same amount of money.
Bottom line, you’re in the business of making money. Anything you can do to be more profitable is a good business decision. And you’d better expect that your website visitors are judging your business by their first impressions of your website. Some people will just not buy anything from a business with an ugly website.
If you ensure that your web design is attractive without sacrificing functionality and practical usefulness then you’ll increase your website’s value to your visitors. There’s no need to settle for ugly.
Designing a Pay-Per-Click Campaign for a Smaller Business
When it comes to small business advertising on the Internet, organic search engine optimization may be out of your budget. I recently talked with a friend and small business owner from Philadelphia who had a very limited budget and was faced with the decision hire a firm he knew nothing about and either get a good deal, or become victim to one of the most common SEO scams on the web, which is a firm that requires a full payment up front before doing any work. My advice to him was to either find a pay per performance internet marketing firm like Reciprocal Consulting, and invest a little more, or try out a Pay-Per-Click campaign.
The general advantage of PPC over SEO is the level of control you have over keywords and the bids on them, but for a small business, the real beauty of that control is the ability to target local Internet users only. In my friend’s situation, he runs a small business in the greater Philadelphia area, so initializing an SEO campaign which would be seen by users all over the country would make less sense than a geo-targeted PPC campaign.
Setting up geo-targeting in Adwords is as easy is checking a few boxes in the Campaign Settings. For those running a content campaign, which is a good idea if you have a little extra ad money to spend, geo-targeting is available on the content network as well.
When in doubt, just ask an Internet Marketing firm like Reciprocal Consulting to explain PPC to you.
Just How Much Has the Internet Changed Marketing Efforts?
For those of you just popping online before work, I’ll give you the short answer: To immeasurable lengths. For those with a little more time on their hands, I’ll try to sum it all up the best I can, but don’t be surprised if I leave a lot of information out – this is a very broad topic.
In fact, I may not get very far from a single topic concerning how the Internet has changed, because something occured to me the other day, as to just how different the world is with the Internet, and how hard it would be for most of us to go back to the early 90′s, before everything we know and love about said Internet. What came to mind was not how many great resources for information are available thanks to the Internet, or how easy it is to book a hotel, buy a car, find a friend, or stay in touch. I’d like to say that the simple pleasures of cuteoverload.com popped into my head, but the thought was not so quaint.
No, my mind decided to remind me how easy it would be for a 13 year old to ruin me. Odd, I agree, but hear me out.
In 1992, what would a 13 year old need to accomplish in order to get his or her opinion seen, spread and confirmed? Perhaps a paper route, a friend who’s parents worked at the Daily News, a good deal of editing, a petition…the list could go on, but to quickly convey my point, that child would need to go to great lengths to have even a few hundred people see his review on the newest Nintendo game, or perhaps his favorite place to eat in his small town.
Fast forward to 2008, and what do we see on the Internet? Blogs, review sites, forums – and lots of them – many members on these sites of which are 13-18 year olds ranting about their uninformed opinions, trashing companies, and incoherantly attempting to disuade the world from making the same mistake they did by going with the cheaper model. Don’t let their lack of formal education and bad grammar fool you – these people have an amazing influence on the world.
But a few hundred-thousand teens aren’t so scary, right? What can they do to hurt your business? Well, imagine someone searches for your company because they can’t remember the website URL, and just as they’re about to click on your site they see the next search result, an excerpt from a high ranking blog: “Company makes crappy products”. Or maybe it’s worse. Maybe, the excerpt under the result, chosen by the search engine, reads something more like: “Company owner John Smith likes little boys”.
Yeah, that’s pretty scary.
Fear not, friend, the Internet is a very big place, so the chances of someone singling out your business over the rest is as unlikely as the number of businesses out there are many; but who really wants to take the chance? The fact is, simple Preventative Reputation Management can save you a huge hassle, as well as a lot of spend, later on.
The basic idea behind Reputation Management is to populate search results with positive content concerning your business, and it is much better if all those good pieces of information reguarding your business show up in the first 20 results, instead of those frightening 13 year olds who know more about the Internet than a lot of adults, with a brutal opinion, and 120wpm typing “skillz”.
If you’d like to know more about how to protect your online reputation, please don’t hesitate to contact an Internet Marketing Firm such as Reciprocal Consulting today, and ask how.