Got 15 minutes to help your business grow?
No matter how busy we are in our businesses, we all know that we have to devote some time to grow our network of customers and clients. It is that awful thing called marketing; you know, the time-consuming, budget eating monster that only large and successful businesses can afford to do right. At least that’s what we often tell ourselves.
The fact is that there is a medium for advancing your brand that is often unutilized by small business owners; social media.
Yes, I know – blogs and tweets and article submissions and press releases and fan pages and lions and tigers and bears, oh my! We’re small business owners. We have small budgets and small offices so how can we handle large and complex processes like social media?
You might ask the same thing about the large and complex world of print advertising, or billboards, or radio. Somehow plenty of small businesses managed to find the time to prepare and execute marketing strategies that included some or all of these older media venues.
And the one thing you can be sure of is that you probably spent more than 10 to 15 minutes a day on average in the creation of those strategies. How did you find the time? You had to, and so you did.
Marketing has to happen for a business to grow or to even survive. There are not enough of us lucky enough to have the perfect product or service in the perfect location so that everyone is willing to search you out and find you on THEIR time.
Marketing is not always a direct sale; quite often it is simply the effort to get your name, your brand out there. It’s the golf game with potential clients, the networking lunch where you schmooze with other business owners, the cocktail party you force yourself to go to so you can meet new prospects. And those are hours of marketing eating away at your business time.
As is often said, Social Media is the new water cooler. It is the electronic venue through which people connect socially, just as they have done physically at the business dinners and golf outings for decades. You need to get your face out there (wonder why they call it Facebook?), to let people know what’s new with your business (Twitter anyone?), to offer advice on how to help other people solve their business or personal needs (“Blog” does come from “weB LOG” after all), or to simply be seen in the company of other business professionals (where you can be LinkedIn to their conversations).
It’s not easy, but it certainly is not hard to get a start in social media. Just a few minutes each day to collect your thoughts to words, and a click of a button to send those thoughts into the web sphere. The Internet is open 24 hours a day, and plenty of your potential customers are out there having a conversation. Drop in on them and say hello. You’d be surprised at how many of them would like to hear from you!
Talk to me
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Social Media Optimization
Social media is online content created by people for people. Social Media Optimization is the art of tagging and otherwise flagging the content, images, video, and/or audio in such a way as to make the posted information more readily searchable.
Search Engine Marketing is the only viable form of advertising which will expand into the future. Paper media is slowly dying; TV is being co-opted by the Internet; radio advertising is covered over by satellite. Search Engine optimization and Social Media optimization are the doorwatys today.
Friday, February 20, 2009
Search Engine Optimism
Will I ever be the top position on a Google search? It a question we all ask at some time if we are working with search engine optimization.
The answer depends on what we want to invest in time, energy, competitive analysis, and of course money. It is not after all matter of “if” so much as “when”, as long as we understand what we are up against.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) requires a certain degree of faith, since the world of SEO is fraught with unknowns. When will a search engine index my pages? How often will updates to my website be viewed as incremental value-added? Is my content equal to the challenge; my meta data superior to my competitor’s? Are incoming links as relevant to my keywords in the eyes of Goggle as I had hoped?
Regardless of the unknowns (and the unknowable), there is amble evidence available that a number of quality SEO-targeted and search engine acceptable procedures (site maps and submittals, proper meta content, care in creation of content, keyword and link relevancy to name a few) will force a website to rise in both ranking and search positions over time. The speed of the rise and the level of the increase are still a matter of some forces outside of our control (unless of course we work at Google!), and for this reason we need to temper all of our work with some wait-and-see, hope-and-pray, and simple optimism.
Which is why I am a Search Engine Optimist.
The answer depends on what we want to invest in time, energy, competitive analysis, and of course money. It is not after all matter of “if” so much as “when”, as long as we understand what we are up against.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) requires a certain degree of faith, since the world of SEO is fraught with unknowns. When will a search engine index my pages? How often will updates to my website be viewed as incremental value-added? Is my content equal to the challenge; my meta data superior to my competitor’s? Are incoming links as relevant to my keywords in the eyes of Goggle as I had hoped?
Regardless of the unknowns (and the unknowable), there is amble evidence available that a number of quality SEO-targeted and search engine acceptable procedures (site maps and submittals, proper meta content, care in creation of content, keyword and link relevancy to name a few) will force a website to rise in both ranking and search positions over time. The speed of the rise and the level of the increase are still a matter of some forces outside of our control (unless of course we work at Google!), and for this reason we need to temper all of our work with some wait-and-see, hope-and-pray, and simple optimism.
Which is why I am a Search Engine Optimist.
Monday, November 17, 2008
You Found The Internet, Now Let The Internet Find You
Okay, you found this post on the Internet; now let us show you how the Internet can find you.
We are an independently owned Internet Marketing company in Royal Palm Beach, Florida but our client base runs from coast-to-coast. Our WSI network of over 1,500 consultants provides a service bureau of Internet expertise second to none.
The focus of our company is to make the Internet work for you and not the other way around. You've invested time and money in your business and the last thing you need to do is spend even more time trying to keep up with the thousands of tools and services on the Internet that can help you market your products or services. That's where we come in.
At WSI we provide optimization techniques that are state of the art and always conform to the best practices requested by the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN for examples). In other words we do not perform Internet tricks to get you high search positioning for a couple of days – rather we are in the business of making permanent inroads into search results for your business.
Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing are the waves we help you ride to success. You found the Internet, now let us help the Internet find you!
We are an independently owned Internet Marketing company in Royal Palm Beach, Florida but our client base runs from coast-to-coast. Our WSI network of over 1,500 consultants provides a service bureau of Internet expertise second to none.
The focus of our company is to make the Internet work for you and not the other way around. You've invested time and money in your business and the last thing you need to do is spend even more time trying to keep up with the thousands of tools and services on the Internet that can help you market your products or services. That's where we come in.
At WSI we provide optimization techniques that are state of the art and always conform to the best practices requested by the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN for examples). In other words we do not perform Internet tricks to get you high search positioning for a couple of days – rather we are in the business of making permanent inroads into search results for your business.
Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing are the waves we help you ride to success. You found the Internet, now let us help the Internet find you!
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