Blog · Posted on January 15, 2009
10 Reasons to Use Facebook For Business
By Mari Smith
Social networking websites, especially Facebook, have significant implications for business owners, marketers, and entrepreneurs. To keep your business current, you should at least be familiar with the latest conversational marketing techniques and viral technologies, including Facebook and its array of powerful features.
Here are ten reasons to be active on Facebook:
- Meet your peers. Facebook is not just for college kids anymore. Members are typically older and more mature than on other sites, and there are more white collar users.
- Find business contacts. With more than 100 million active users, and predicted to be 500 million by 2011, not only are your friends on Facebook, so are your prospects, your customers, your JV partners… and, of course, your competitors. You need to be on too.
- Instant gate opener. Facebook members are open to connecting. You can easily begin a dialog with highly successful–even famous–people who were previously otherwise unreachable.
- Build relationships. By engaging in conversations with your prospects and customers, you can better adapt your marketing and business services to meet their needs.
- Raise visibility. By consistently showing up, posting relevant information, and being a thought leader, you can increase visibility and credibility as an expert in your area.
- Develop your personal brand. The lines between business and personal have become blurred. You can reveal as much or as little about yourself as you wish, allowing you to personalize your brand.
- Target your niche. Users volunteer vast amounts of information about themselves that you can readily access. These kinds of demographics, psychographics, and technographics would previously have cost fortunes to access. Author, John Battelle, calls Facebook a “database of intentions.”
- Get rapid top Google placement. Create a Page for your business and “push” information to your “fans.” Pages (for business) and Profiles (for personal) are indexed for optimal search engine positioning. Facebook has a page rank of #5 according to Alexa.
- Place targeted ads. With Facebook Social Ads, you can test out extremely targeted advertising for minimal cost.
- Free marketing. Aside from paid ads, Facebook is totally free to use and with regular activity you’ll end up with more traffic, more subscribers, and more paying clients.
Visit Mari’s blogs for two free e-courses: 21 Keys To Profitable Relationships at http://marismith.com and 7-Day Facebook Marketing Tips at http://www.whyfacebook.com
Mari Smith is a Relationship Marketing Specialist and Facebook Business Coach. She helps entrepreneurs to accelerate their business growth using an integrated social marketing strategy, with particular focus on Facebook. Mari is passionate about showing professionals how to develop powerful profitable relationships.
Blog · Posted on September 18, 2008
Top Ten Internet Marketing Strategies
By Guy Siverson
Finding hordes of traffic visiting your website is every Internet Marketers dream come true. Unfortunately most websites simply do not receive all the traffic they would like to.
Even if you are happy with your traffic levels there are definite ways you can improve upon them. Review this list of top 10 Internet Marketing Strategies and decide for yourself what strategies you can add to your Internet Marketing success.
Google Adwords & Beyond
Good ole PPC. I’m sure you have heard of how Google pay per click campaigns supercharge your Internet marketing success what you may not know is there are other PPC websites than the highly expensive Google Adwords.
- 7Search.com
- LookSmart.com
- AffiliateFuel.com
However, if you are just starting out it’s best to utilize free Internet Marketing techniques to start with until your website generates enough cash that it pays you to do PPC. With that said let’s look at 9 more marketing options available to all Internet Marketers.
SEO Your Website
SEO sure isn’t what it used to be, but that doesn’t mean it should be abandoned. Don’t get overwhelmed in the area of SEO, but do make sure that the search engine spiders know what they are looking at when they arrive. Continue …
Blog · Posted on September 18, 2008
SEO Web Design Secrets For Beginners
By Peter Nisbet
SEO web design is a skill that can be learned, though most search engine optimization (SEO) for beginners courses dwell too much on linking strategy as opposed to web site design per se. There are many ways for most normal people to get an improved search engine ranking, and secure a high search engine listing, and while linking is important, good on-site SEO is also necessary.
Although it might not seem like it, getting a good listing on Google or any of the other search engines is not as difficult as many like to claim. There are rules to follow, and if you play the game properly then the outcome should be in your favour. The tips provided in this article are not really secrets as such; although many people offer to divulge marvelous secrets to you, all they are giving you is stuff that people have been using for years.
So you won’t get any secrets here. I have nothing hidden away that I don’t want anybody to know, and if I had I wouldn’t tell you about it! Would you? If you had some secrets that were so valuable that they were making you money, would you give them away free in an article like this one? Of course you wouldn’t!
So here are my not-so-secret tips on getting a good listing in Google and improving your search engine ranking. You likely know a fair bit about meta tags, and have been informed that most are not used by search engines. Well let me tell you something. If you ‘Google’ Article Services you will finds my website right at the top in the #1 position for that keyword. Check the description that Google provides right under the title: that is exactly as it is in the ‘Description’ tag that I have on the site. So don’t let anybody tell you that Google don’t use the Description tag, because they do. So do Ask and MSN (now Live Search), and Yahoo also uses it, but not the whole thing exactly as written. Continue …
Blog · Posted on August 18, 2008
Top Five Reasons to Do a Website Redesign
By Stephanie Diamond
Small business owners need to monitor whether their investment in a website is providing a good return. Are your products and services easy to buy? If they aren’t, you are wasting time and money and probably doing more harm than good.
Ask yourself the following five questions to see whether it’s time for a redesign:
1. Has the size of the site grown substantially?
If your site continues to grow and change like most business sites, you need to evaluate whether it’s still meeting your objectives. As you add new products and services you need to re-organize your information. In addition, you should consider adding multimedia information (audio, video) to sharpen your message.
2. Is some of the content outdated or unnecessary?
Does your website have up-to-date content? Someone should be revising spec sheets, changing promotion dates and adding new material weekly. If your website appears static, it looks like you’re not a serious business.
3. Is the most important content buried below?
Here’s where you need to do an “easy to buy” audit. By that I mean you need to evaluate how easy it is to find information and actually buy your products. This sounds like common sense, but we’ve all purchased online and know that it can sometimes be frustrating. Continue …
