how to market small business online – Page 11

October 22, 2011

Commenting on Blogs and Social Media Sites

One of the most effective means of small business marketing is commenting on blogs and social media sites. However, commenting is something that has to be done consciously, not as a “throw away” activity. It should be done with full awarness of the impact of your comments on your brand, on the receiver and on the social media site.

Central to this small business marketing idea is the notion that when you comment on blogs or social media sites, you are branding yourself and your small business in the eyes of your reader (potential customer).

When you comment on blogs, for example, you are not only displaying your knowledge and expertise (or lack of it) but also who you are and what you value. This disclosure (intended or unintended) flows over to your business brand.

I have written more extensively about the impact of commenting on branding in the following article:

Branding You, Branding Me, Branding Wizzley

There is an art to effective commenting and previously I have identifed three core strategies:

Consider the author
Share something of yourself
Consciously add value

These guidelines for effective commenting are developed and illustrated in another article I wrote earlier:

How to create quality comments

In the final analysis, when you comment you should be attempting to add value for the originating author, the social media site and your own brand.

There is strong evidence that effective commenting on blogs and social media sites can build your brand, create connections with customers, increae your web traffic and boost your sales as a small business owner.

October 20, 2011December 3, 2011

10 Top Tips for Small Business Marketing on LinkedIn

Here are 10 top tips for building your LinkedIn presence together with tactics and strategies for marketing your small business. LinkedIn is growing in status and size, so a presence on this site is becoming increasingly important for small business owners.

#1. Make the most of your LinkedIn Profile

Your profile is the core of your presence on LinkedIn – it is what people will visit to connect with you or to view what you have to offer. LinkedIn understandably provides a comprehensive profile area – covering aspects such as current and past positions, education, specializations, experience and websites. Make good use of the summary area which allows you to personalize the information by adding applications (”add sections”) that enrich your profile presentation. The additional information area is where you add your websites, interest, groups/associations and awards.

The website descriptors are “my website”, “my blog” , etc. – choose “other” instead and add a keyword rich title for your website(s). Here are some other suggestions for your profile:

hyperlink wherever possible using anchor text
use keywords in description areas such as summary, specialties and experience
add an image for your profile (critical for this professional network)
create a personalized URL for your LinkedIn public profile (option provided), e.g. http://au.linkedin.com/in/ronpassfield
consciously determine your public profile settings to ensure you display the aspects you want to be visible to the public.

#2. Create your small business profile

LinkedIn, like Facebook, provides the opportunity to create a Company Page. You can build your small business profile on this page and add your blog feed and other content. As discussed in a previous post, a key aspect of your small business page should be your Company Status Updates. This operates like Twitter but enables you to include a website image and description.

#3. Build your network

A key strategy for LinkedIn marketing is building your network. Your connections are a reflection of who you are and your small business brand. You can connect with customers who know you, business associates, employees/contractors, professional colleagues, potential joint venture partners and contacts from other social networks such as Squidoo, Facebook and Twitter. You can really get to know your “friends” through their work experience, background and current business pursuits.

You can grow your network by direct invitation to individuals, active participation in relevant LinkedIn groups or through people finding you via the LinkedIn search option (reinforces the importance of your keywords!). LinkedIn, like Facebook, suggests connections based on your key interests, business associations and existing connections. Your role is to consciously develop and shape your network.

#4. Create a group and participate

Another key LinkedIn marketing strategy, once you have developed your LinkedIn network, is to create a group. You can build a group around your brand, particular product/services or professional affiliation. However, you need to be active in your group to stimulate participation by others. This could involve starting discussions, sharing news, creating sub-groups and posting relevant valuable information and resources. When people join your group, this will be visible to their own network via the news feed.

#5. Use Slideshare to upload content such as presentations and videos

SlideShare is the world’s largest community for sharing presentations. You can:

share presentations & documents with your LinkedIn network
upload portfolios, resume, conference talks, PDFs, marketing/sales presentations and display them on your LinkedIn profile
use a range of formats such as ppt, pps, pptx, odp, pdf, doc, docx, odt, Keynote, iWork pages
embed YouTube videos in presentations or add audio to make a webinar
upload your videos.

If you have a SlideShare.net account, you can import your existing presentations into LinkedIn. If you don’t have one, you can signup from LinkedIn to share your presentations worldwide and get more views/traffic. You can add the SlideShare presentations to either your profile or your home page. Your SlideShare uploads show up on the LinkedIn pages of your connections (if they have added the SlideShare application).

You can use SlideShare on both Linkedin and Facebook. You can synchronize these with SlideShare so you have a three-way leverage. If you upload anything to any one of the networks — SlideShare, Facebook or LinkedIn – it shows up instantly on all three.

#6. Promote your LinkedIn profile

You can promote your LinkedIn profile on your website, blog or Squidoo lenses by adding the LinkedIn button or text link. Alternatively, you can use one of the many social media icon sets to encourage readers to connect to you and your small business on LinkedIn.

#7. Use LinkedIn applications

LinkedIn has a range of applications that you can use to brighten up your profile. These include Portfolio Display, Blog Link (sync with your blog posts from Blogger, etc), WordPress (sync your WordPress posts), Reading List by Amazon (share the books you are reading), Company Buzz (Twitter activity about your company), Polls (create a poll for market research) and Tweets (display your tweets and view and comment on your connections’ tweets).

#8. Provide and seek recommendations

Recommendations are central to the purpose of LinkedIn as they contribute to your credibility and can reinforce your brand in the eyes of potential consumers/customers. They strengthen your personal profile and give you increased visibility. An integral principle of social media marketing is reciprocation, so you should both give and seek recommendations to build your profile on LinkedIn. Your recommendations will appear on your profile page and can often say as much about you as they do about the recipient – as they disclose what you see, and value, in other people. As with any social networking site that you are trying to build a presence on, it is important to maintain your contribution with regular sharing.

#9. Ask questions and and respond to others

When you join a group it is very useful to ask, and respond to, questions and to be active in discussions. In this way, you can display your expertise, engage others and connect with potential customers who share your interests and/or perspectives.

#10. Create LinkedIn Ad Campaigns

Contrary to popular belief, LinkedIn has ad placements that you can purchase, either by way of cost per click (CPC) or cost per impressions (CPI or CPM). You can target your audience by:

Geography
Job function or seniority
Industry and company size
Gender and age

You should keep in mind the demographics of LinkedIn when using the site for paid advertising. It pays to read the FAQ’s to learn about ad placement, advertising conditions and recommendations for writing ads.

LinkedIn is a valuable way to build your small business brand, make new connections, increase the online visibility of your small business and develop relationships with customers

October 19, 2011October 20, 2011

Company Status Updates on LinkedIn: A Boost for Small Business Marketing

On the 6th October 2011, LinkedIn introduced Company Status Updates for Company Pages that were launched about a year ago. LinkedIn Status Updates provide a new, powerful avenue for small business marketing online as LinkedIn is the largest online professional network in the world with over 120 Million members.

This new status feature gives further access by small businesses to a professional network of people who are affluent, highly educated and influential in terms of purchasing decisions. LinkedIn is ranked 12th by Alexa.com in terms of global traffic to the site and has a Google Page Rank of 9 (out of 10).

As illustrated in the image above, Company Status Updates provide the facility to attach a URL (web page address) which automatically displays a related image and “page description” drawn from the target website. Readers can easily “Like” the update, comment on it or share it with their social networks (thus making the status entry viral).

Company Status Updates on LinkedIn enable small business owners to develop their brand by sharing news, videos, podcasts, articles, blog posts, available jobs and product launches.

LinkedIn is a rapidly growing network and this new feature will provide a real boost for marketing small businesses online.

October 17, 2011

Do You Know Where Your Web Traffic is Coming From?

I recently added Google Analytics to my small business blog and now I have a much better idea of where my web traffic is coming from and what is influencing this traffic.

You can access Google Analytics if you have a Google account (e.g. Gmail). All you do is identify the site that you want Google to monitor and then add some code provided by Google to the coding of your site.

The “Traffic Sources Overview” above for one month of web traffic to my HR Consultancy business site shows that 63% of web traffic is coming from organic search engine results, 21% from sites that have a URL link to my small business site (backlinks) and 16% from people who access my site directly by using the business web address.

Google Analytics provides considerably finer detail on visitor sources and visitor behaviour. The following screen image shows a breakdown of primary traffic sources:

This more detailed report gives you a clearer indication of the search engine traffic sources and identifies the primary sources of referral traffic (people visiting via links on other sites).

In relation to visitor behaviour, Google Analytics tells you how many pages visitors access per visit and how long they spend on your small business site. The more fine-grained information provides this visitor behaviour analysis in relation to each primary traffic source – so you can see what traffic sources provide the more “sticky” traffic and which sources result in the largest “bounce rate”:

So in the above analysis for visitors to my human resource consultancy site, you can see that the different traffic sources (shown in the previous image) vary across a range of variables:

how many pages are viewed per visit
how long a visitor spends on the site
the percentage of visitors that are new (“unique” visitors)
the bounce rate (the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the landing page – in other words, viewed only the page they landed on).

From the above information, I have developed a chart to compare four sources of traffic and the behaviour of the traffic from the different sources:

From this analysis, you can see that traffic from Yahoo spends an average of 33 seconds on my site, views 1.44 pages and has a bounce rate of 77.78%; in contrast traffic from Google search results spend 3.07 minutes on the site, view 3.71 pages and has a bounce rate of 53% – overall much better quality of traffic from Google than from Yahoo.

Critical information in relation to traffic behavior is the high quality of LinkedIn traffic – which is to be expected given that our business is in a professional arena – provision of human resource services. The LinkedIn traffic spends 11.52 minutes on our site, visits 10.58 pages and has a bounce rate of 25%. LinkedIn is clearly a valuable source of traffic for our business and we need to put more energy into developing this traffic source.

A number of key points come out of this basic analysis:

not all traffic is the same in quality
the number of visitors is not the primary measure to be considered for small business marketing
small businesses need to focus on the primary sources of quality traffic to their website/blog
social media can provide an increasing percentage of traffic if cultivated.

The “numbers game” will vary in significance according to the nature of your small business. For example, for our human resource consultancy business the value of one sale can vary from $50 to $10,000+ – varying from a single registration for a one hour training workshop to a public sector client commissioning a series of tailored, in-house training sessions or a number of recruitment exercises.

So core considerations in relation to web traffic analysis are the nature of your business, the type of customers you want to attract and the purchase behavior of your ideal customers. Gross traffic numbers is a very poor indicator for planning your small business marketing and this is why Google Analytics is an essential tool for small businesses.

Google Analytics also gives you information about the primary keywords that people are using in searches that result in access to your site. Other useful information includes what pages visitors are landing on, together with an analysis of traffic behavior for each page accessed – time on page, % unique traffic and bounce rate. There is also a map showing visually the countries that are the major sources of your traffic.

Google Analytics is a key tool for small business marketing – it tells you where your traffic is coming from, provides information about the quality of the traffic and gives you the basis for informed marketing decisions.

October 15, 2011October 15, 2011

Backlinks: To Buy or Not to Buy, That is the Question!

Backlinks are one of the core measures that Google uses to evaluate a small business website/blog and determine where the site will appear in search engine results.

Unfortunately, many small business owners have been convinced by some Internet marketers to buy links to build up the ranking of their websites.

Matt Cutts, speaking on behalf of Google in the video above, makes the point that buying backlinks is contrary to Google’s quality guidelines and will not add value to a website in the final analysis. Elsewhere, Matt Cutts has stated that Google is improving its capacity to determine whether or not backlinks are artificially generated. While you may experience a temporary surge in rankings on Google by buying backlinks, you will suffer in the long run.

Recent history shows that Google eventually enforces its quality guidelines. For example, for a long time Google had been warning about duplicate content (information on websites copied from elsewhere) and many sites enjoyed a temporary benefit from using this approach. However, early in 2011, Google punished the sites that had ignored their duplicate content guidelines:

Google’s response to Poor Quality Sites

I predict the same will happen to websites that have created backlinks artificially by buying large numbers from suppliers who have little concern for the quality of the small business website being promoted or for the relevance of the backlinks being offered at a price.

What Google really values, as Matt Cutts explains, is organic backlinks – backlinks that occur naturally because of the quality of the content on a website. Matt argues that if you create great content then people will not only visit your site more often but also create backlinks to your articles/blog posts by mentioning them on social media sites and their own blogs or websites.

Here is a perfect illustration of this principle of organic backlinks which occurred in the last week. A French Chef, Alain Braux, created a blog post about his Raspberry Souffle which was picked up by a website with a high page rank and this created a quality, organic backlink for his Healthy Chef Recipes blog site:

http://www.celebrations.com/blog/?p=4969

Alain Braux’s site, which draws on his cooking and nutritionist background, offers French recipes that are easy to make and healthy to eat. His attractive and informative site was designed by my friend and business partner, Anne Corcino, of SEO Praxis.com. Alain offers many recipes on the site as well as his healthy French recipe books.

As Matt Cutts argues, in the final analysis what is important for a small business blog/website is to offer quality, relevant content that will generate organic backlinks from people who value what they read.