Tag: online marketing for small bsuiness

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RedGage: Social Bookmarking with a Difference

RedGage Social Bookmarking

 

Social Bookmarking is designed to create online bookmarks that store information about your small business.

Sites that provide social bookmarking often have a high Page Rank with Google so information bookmarked on these sites can provide quality backlinks to your own small business website/blog.  This, in turn, increases the value of your own site in the “eyes” of Google.

RedGage is a social bookmarking site with a difference:

  • it combines social bookmarking with social networking
  • enables you to earn a (small) income just from sharing your content
  • provides bookmarking for images, photos, videos, blog posts, and other web content
  • provides a blogging platform to enable you to add blog posts on site

When you share your content on RedGage, you can build links to your own online content so that you generate traffic from within RedGage and via Google’s search results.

As with other social networking sites, RedGage provides a “profile” panel where you can add information about yourself and create links to your website/blog.

You could feature your small business products/services through RedGage by way of images, videos, links and by creating blog posts on the site.  The blogging platform is really an excellent addition and underutilized by most RedGage members.  It has all the edit features you would want and enables you to embed images and videos.

The RedGage community is very supportive and appreciates quality images and uploads.  Like other social networking sites, you gain visibility by commenting constructively on other people’s content and by regularly adding your own content.

For more information on RedGage and its marketing potential, visit my Squidoo lenses:

RedGage can be a valuable addition to your social bookmarking and an integral part of your social media marketing.

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Social Media: Where Are Your Customers Conversing?

Yosemite Valley

 

With the growth of social media, small business owners face new challenges in terms of locating their clients/customers.  Added to this is the fact that recent estimates show that 80% of people who have access to the Internet start their search via the Web, not via printed media (e.g. Yellow Pages or newspapers).

One of the key learnings for me in small business marketing was to learn to focus on my customers/clients.  This meant getting to know their demographic, their interests and needs and what appeals emotionally to them.

Now that social media has expanded rapidly, the nature of “word-of- mouth” recommendation has changed drastically also.  Are your products being recommended by others on Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, Squidoo or LinkedIn?

One of the keys to small business marketing online is getting to know where your customers are carrying on their conversations and joining them there.  For instance, since one of our client groups is professional public sector managers, we have found that they can be reached via LinkedIn.  The secret is to “get in front of the online conversation”.

One way to do this is to join social media sites and monitor what is going on in relation to your niche.  Another way is to use Google Alerts (via your Google account) to check on what is happening in relation to your niche and your business (name).   This will pick up who is saying “what” about you and your niche and where this is being said.   This is an aspect of reputation management as well as direct small business marketing online.

With your customers/clients spending so much time on social media, can you afford to ignore it?

Photo Source: http://www.pixabay.com

 

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To learn to master social media, check out my Social Media Marketing Training:

http://www.squidooroo.com

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Are Your Listings in Local Business Directories Accurate?


I was checking the search results for my business name, Merit Solutions Australia, in Google and was surprised with the results from local business directories.

A lot of the entries in the first two pages of Google results were listings from local business directories.

These directories create business listings (much like Google and Facebook have done recently) by scraping content from the Internet.  The only problem with the local business directories, as I found, is that a lot of the information is incorrect (because it is out of date).

So I noticed that while local business directories had eight (8) of the listings in the first two pages of Google results, most of them had inaccurate information – wrong address, phone numbers or business categories.

So I set about correcting these entries.  Most of the listings are free, so all you need to do is go to the site and claim your listing and update it.  Some allow you to add your logo and images, so it is well worth the effort to get accurate and comprehensive information about your business on the first two pages of Google results for searches on your business name.

Some of the local business directories also offer “premium” or paid listings – but you need to evaluate these offers in the light of the ranking of the site, the potential additional traffic and the added value in terms of potential increased sales.

An added benefit of listings in local business directories is that these sites often have high page rank – in other words, Google values their content and gives them high ranking in search results.  This means that your listings create quality backlinks to your site and thus add value to your own website/blog. One of the key local directories is hotfrog.com which has a Page Rank of 6 and is ranked (in terms of traffic) in the top 6,000 sites in the world.

So whatever you do, make sure your listings in local business directories are accurate.

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Small Business Marketing: A Personal Odyssey

Human Resource Consultancy

Our small business was created in 1996 and following the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in 2008, we found that we had to become actively engaged in online small business marketing.

Up until the GFC, our gross income had been growing at around 20% per year and we did not have to actively market our small business.  Most business arrived by word of mouth through the professional services provided by our HR consultants.

However, with the GFC, our business income dropped by 50% in six months.  So we had to look at ways to improve the income from our small business.

We decided to do three core things:

  1. expand our service offerings (e.g. include training)
  2. broaden our client base
  3. actively engage in online marketing for our small business

 

In 2010, we engaged Anne Corcino to redesign our static website into a dynamic WordPress website.  Anne’s website services are offered through her small business, SEO Praxis.

The new website design became a real platform for our online small business marketing.  Our HR consultants were proud of our site and our clients were suitably impressed.  Because the site was built on a WordPress platform, it has SEO embedded and is easy to update and add value.  Our RSS feed from the blog is an important aspect of our marketing.

What I will report here is my own experiences and ideas in marketing our small business.  So this blog is very much my small business odyssey – my journey into the challenges of small business marketing.