Even though Facebook has more than one billion active monthly users, many businesses still aren’t using it to its full potential. Here are a few easy ways to use Facebook to increase exposure, communicate with customers, and grow your business:

• Offer Facebook fan-only specials that are promoted to fans who currently “like” your page. Encourage them to stay tuned for future deals as well.
• Use Facebook as a quick way to spread the word on exciting flash sales that have short time windows to act.
• Run contests via your Facebook page. Remember to read Facebook’s contest rules first, though, so you don’t violate any inadvertently.
• Ask thought-provoking questions, create quizzes, and post survey links to encourage fan participation.
• Add a Facebook social media widget that enables users to like your page without having to search for you on Facebook.
• Include a Facebook link in your email signature, on your website, and on printed pieces such as business cards, receipts, statement stuffers, table tents, and newsletters.
• Share exciting news about your company by posting updates on your Facebook page.
• Don’t forget that Facebook is a social website. Use it as a way to communicate with your audience, rather than simply to promote your brand. Post interesting content you think will be relevant to your audience, and encourage people to share your posts and to comment on them.
• Post photos from company gatherings, including grand openings, customer appreciation events, staff outings, and other celebrations. Encourage fans to tag themselves in the photos. This will allow their friends to see the photos and increase your exposure.
• Request input and involve your fans in product decisions, such as new product launches, celebratory events, and preferred customer rewards. Share responses on your wall, and thank fans for their contributions.
• Schedule posts in advance to be published at a later time to ensure your messages are delivered at the optimal time to reach your audience. Check out thisFacebook help center post for step-by-step instructions on scheduling a post.

Like most types of marketing, Facebook requires dedication. While immediate results are unlikely, a well-nurtured Facebook account can help many organizations strengthen relationships and grow their business.

Follow up with your customers after the sale is done.

Following up after a sale provides an opportunity to offer a heart-felt thank you and ensure customer satisfaction. It also lets you discuss additional services and improve a customer’s probable return to your business. Here are a few follow-up tips for after-sale marketing:

• Show your gratitude with a free offer that complements the original purchase. For example, a hair stylist could show thanks by offering a voucher for a free hair styling product. Include specifics, such as a $15 maximum value redeemable within 60 days of postmark.
• Boost sales by providing a coupon for free shipping or 25% off their next order. Encourage customers to pass it on if they don’t need to use the offer themselves.
• Suggest complementary products or services that will enhance the initial purchase and increase the customer’s satisfaction and loyalty. Consider creating an affiliate program with non-competing businesses to expand your offerings.
• Reward customers for providing referrals. Offer an exclusive discount to both your existing customer and a new referral to increase the number of referrals you receive.
• Highlight your contact information on an item your customers will keep, such as a business card, calendar, customized notepad, magnet, or pen.
• Become a resource to your customers by encouraging customers to sign up for an informational newsletter with industry tips and tricks. You might also consider providing valuable tutorials and training classes.
• Consider using the 10-10-10 follow-up pattern (or even a less-aggressive 30-30-30). Send an initial thank you within 10 days after the purchase. Contact them again after 10 days, then a third time after another 10 days. Vary your method of communication, such as a hand-written note, email, and phone call. Include an offer in all communications, and build on the urgency in each contact.
• Ask for feedback about the customer’s recent purchase or send a survey with an incentive to respond. Many customers will be eager to discuss their experience or may even have questions.
• A new idea might be to consider thanking them on Facebook or other social media.

If you need creative print ideas to stay in touch your customers, give us a call today. Our creative team is full of ideas to ensure your customers come back for more, and bring new customers with them!

So you’ve got your brand spankin’ new website, and you’re wanting to get some traffic to it to drum up business? We decided to come up with a multitude of ideas to help set you on the right path. While there is some overlap with some of my previous articles, the refresh will be useful, as each aspect, especially in the online section, synergize very strongly.

Direct Mail

One of the more traditional methods of marketing, creating a direct mail piece allows you to advertise directly through conventional mail systems with a postcard advertisement of some sort, whether it’s to alert customers to an event, or a new special. It’s best if you specifically target your mailing database’s demographic to something that is relevant to your industry.

For example, say your business is a pet store and there’s a coming sales event going on at the store in the coming month. To advertise for it, you could specifically target neighborhoods near your business, and within those specific demographics you could further break it down such as  by houses containing a pet owner, or by income levels of the property. Targeting a specific demographic like that would allow you to cut down on the cost of the mailing piece, removing people from the list that would be unlikely to find your piece of advertising useful.  (We have a whole class dedicated to this topic).

Local Signage

A fairly cheap method of marketing, yard signs are a good way to get started on increasing local exposure to your website. You can create yard signs, flyers, bulletin board pull tag signs, for example, to increase spread the word; you can even place a sticker in the your rear-view window. As a side tip, placing these in areas where people would be interested in your services or field of influence will increase your sign’s effectiveness.

This strategy is great to get an initial batch of visitors to your website, and is especially effective if your business is oriented locally. On the other side of the coin, this form of marketing is limited by your geographical range of the sign placement, as well as the time involved with the placement.

Search Engine Optimization

Content is King! One of the more important aspects of content creation for a website is knowing how important it is to properly infuse the site with content that will relate to Search Engines (like Google, Bing, and Yahoo!) what your website is about, whether it’s lawn-mowing, cake-baking, or industrial excavation.

When you start thinking about your website content, think about what a customer would be visiting your website for. Ask yourself not what product they’re looking for, but rather what the solution you’re providing with your product or service is. If you cater your content to relate how you will solve your client’s problem, you’ll have a better chance of achieving stronger SEO.

You can do this by brainstorming words and phrases your customers would be trying to search when looking for solutions to the problem you’ve set your sights on optimizing for. For example, a website that sells hiking gear could list out all the products in their catalogue and approach SEO from purely selling their products. It’ll probably work, but it won’t be nearly as effective as if they also were able to convey through the use of their keywords and phrases that their products solved issues specifically related to hiking and how they solved those problems. If they were able to correctly convey that information to google, when people searched up how to solve those issues with hiking, then their hiking gear website would come up more often than just the straight catalogue site.

Now, this doesn’t touch the surface of SEO, and if you’re serious about working on improving your site’s SEO, I’d recommend researching the topic further. There’s a lot of intricacy to it, and it is constantly evolving, so it’s good to learn as much as possible about the topic. For example, searching a term like “hiking solutions” will output different results than “solutions hiking” (for the sake of clarity, it’s because the term in the front of the search phrase is given more weight than words at the end of the phrase). You might not know that unless you are familiar with the functionality of a search engine.

For more information on SEO, please check out SEO class and or read this introductory SEO article by SEO Moz.

Social Media

Taking advantage of Social Media can be a strong persuader of people to use your services. Create a public page on a social media site, and begin posting topics that are relevant and useful to your customer base. Don’t try and sell your services through these pages, but rather use it as a place to say “Hey, we think this information is really fun and useful. Oh, and by the way, if you’re interested, you can take a look at our products and services here”. Try and keep the type of posting to a 33% insights, 33% personal and 33% about the business.

This creates a no-pressure relationship that will naturally build stronger if the customer finds your content sharing intrinsically valuable. The power of Social Media kicks in when you have a number of these customers that value your social media efforts. When you make a post, you’re increasing the chances of others that value your content will share it, which is free advertising, as well as an implied endorsement of your products/services.

This can also be sweetened by rewarding subscribers through various promotional deal systems offered through social media websites, but that’s getting into a little more detail than is needed for an idea article.

Blogging

Blogging operates on a somewhat similar level as Social Media, but also helps greatly with SEO, and integrates strongly with both tools (this article being an example). We discussed earlier in the SEO section about how conveying to your customers how you solve their problems is one of the better ways of converting them to a customer, this is one of the better ways to accomplish that.

A blog is often a side-section of a website where companies post both formal and informal publications about topics related to their business and industry. It can be fun, silly, topical, or product related, but it needs to be informational, useful, and concise for your customers.

The reason why this is such a great place to develop your business’ marketing is that each article you post becomes a part of your website’s content that gets related to search engines. To use the hiking gear example above, you could make a post about regional openings of trails in the region, showing pictures of the trails taken by employees in their free time, and their experiences on the trails would be great ideas for content creation. This also works well as a way of sharing the company’s passion for their industry as well.

If you see a post online on another website that is related to a blog post from your website, you can make a comment on their blog describing your article and why it’s relevant to their article with a link.  The key is not come off as trying to sell or drive people there, but rather that you’re trying to share information to be helpful. A take-it-or-leave-it approach is especially important on the internet, as people quickly become dissuaded when they feel pressured by salesmanship.

Online Newsletter

Supplying articles and information rich in relevant content to your customers is a great method of establishing a loyal customer base. This can be done in a physical form, but you can capably make newsletters online for your customers. There are restrictions in regards to how one can send these online newsletters. You can find the guidelines for a well-operated newsletter at the Bureau of Consumer Protection’s website.

We tend to use a service called Mailchimp for our newsletters, as it helps automate the process of subscriptions and message delivery. We also offer to help perform newsletter creation and delivery for you at a nominal charge, but you are able to do it yourself with some tech savvy, time, and effort.

Paid Advertising

Paid advertising, such as pay-per-click ads, are useful tools to supplement your more organic efforts at online marketing (SEO, social media, blogging). They are also more expensive from a monetary perspective. The other major drawback is that you can also spend a lot of money and not get a very big return on your investment unless you’re careful.

It’s best in this arena to start out small. Try making two variations of an ad on a small budget, and see how well the two of them perform. Make two variations of the version that performed better and see which of those variants worked better in round 2. You can repeat this process ad nauseum until you have a specific.

Conclusion

Admittedly, this is a bit of an exhaustive list, but it’s meant to give you ideas that you can implement right now to promote your business’ website. It barely touches the surfaces of these topics, however, but you can research these topics further on the internet or stop by and ask us for further help. We’re called “You’re Marketing Resource Center” for a reason, you know! You can learn more by searching these topics on Google, or by taking a look at our available classes in the near future.

By Scott Prindle.

The new timeline layout for Facebook gives you a lot more freedom to be expressive with your business page, but also comes with a new set of hurdles on how to effectively manage your page for customers. In this article, we’ll go over a couple of the new major items, and how to use them effectively.

Cover Image

The largest change on the facebook profiles is the advent of cover images. These are large masthead images that allow your business to establish your visual branding directly on facebook. It is not, however, meant to be used for promotional uses, such as deals, sales, etc, as facebook has structures in place already for promotions. Some of the big no-no’s include:

• No promotions
• No contact info, including phone numbers, emails, etc., which is meant to be placed in the about section.
• No call-to-actions or text trying to engage the user to interact with facebook’s user interface (liking and sharing for example).

These aren’t all of the guidelines, but the larger principles to go by for your cover image. To find all the details, visit Facebook’s help section on cover image guidelines for business pages.

No More Fan-Gating

Facebook used to have a rather nice marketing feature through the facebook apps that allowed you to hide away specific content based on whether the user accessing the page was a fan of the page or a new visitor. But with the new timeline, you’ll no longer be able to hide content on the homepage in the same fashion. This is to promote Facebook as more of a social network, and keeps people from feeling like they are being bombarded with ads everywhere they go on the site.

You’ll still be able to deliver subscriber specific content through the use of the tabs, though. Tabs are the new area for businesses to add in facebook apps, google map embeds, and other extras. Using these tabs, you can add fan exclusive content using facebook apps incentivizing visitors to like your page. The difference between the old and the new versions being that the user must make the leap to that fan gated content, rather than being presented with the gate from the get-go on the landing page.

Those tabs, however, have static locations (urls), allowing you to link directly to those pages from your website, newsletter, or other social networks. You can use this to your advantage by directly linking users to these fan-gated pages, rather than to the default landing page in order to convert them over to customers.

Pinning posts

You’ll now have the ability to pin specific posts that you’ve made at the top of your timeline, in order to put more of a focus on it. The post will remain at that spot for 7 days before returning back to its original place chronologically. This is great for posting your deals, or major upcoming business events.

As well, you can re-pin an event, and there is not a limit to the number of times that can be done. This will allow you to keep an event posting at the top of your page for as long as needed (provided you’re cool with some menial re-pinning).

Conclusion

This barely scratches the surface of your timeline’s capabilities, but these are just a few tips to help you better utilize your Facebook page to better cater content to your customers. Thanks for reading.

Further Information:

Facebook Timeline Marketing Tips and Ideas

Facebook Timeline for Business Pages – 21 Key Points To Know

3 Ways to Increase Your Facebook Page’s Visibility

5 Ways to Use Facebook Timelines for Your Brand

4 Marketing Tips for Facebook Timeline

A toll-free number is no longer the standard way for customers to contact you.
Customers are bombarded with choices in today’s technology-focused world. If your business doesn’t offer a method of communication that suits your customers’ preferences, they may find another company that does.

Here are 10 tips to make it easy for ALL of your customers to get (and stay) in touch with you:
Consider offering a live chat support service option on your website that provides real-time, text-based conversation with someone who can quickly answer questions.

• Use social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter to communicate with customers.
  Post helpful information in your stream, and encourage customers to ask questions and provide product feedback.
• Provide interactive maps that allow people to customize directions to your location, as well as a photo of your building to make your business easier to find.
• Include any helpful information that may save customers frustration when they try visiting you.
  For example: “XYZ Road is currently under construction — please use ABC Street instead.”
• Create a Google+ page to share updates, promotions, links, and photos.
  This will make it easy for people to recommend your business, products, or services to friends and contacts, while at the same time helping you measure your followers’ interactions.
• When posting blogs, be sure to offer an area for comments and feedback, as well as contact information, in case the reader has questions.
• Build trust with online customers by providing your company’s physical address in addition to email, phone, fax, Skype, and support line info on your website’s contact page. Add links to customer forums, your Facebook page, and your Twitter feed, as well, and consider offering a contact form as a convenience for customers.
• Include, at minimum, your website info, company email, and toll-free phone number on every marketing piece you create, including letterhead, notepads, brochures, flyers, quotes, surveys, etc. Customers who desire additional information will often seek out your website’s contact page.
• Consider a mobile website designed for smart phones that makes it easy for users to find information about you, regardless of what device they are using.

Provide a clear call to action in direct mail, email messages, and other marketing pieces so readers know how to get in touch with you.
We encourage you to contact us anytime if you have questions or comments. We look forward to hearing from you!

1. Make sure the card is great quality.
Good-quality cards are available on an economy of scale; unlike the long waiting times and expense of pressing traditional cards, the modern digital process is swift, economical and can result in superbly memorable designs. Thick, soft card with rounded corners can make a favorable impression.

2.Contact information should be 100% correct.
The correct name, address, phone numbers, email address and website address are essential to allow your contacts to reconnect with you long after your initial meeting. The important facts should still be prominent and easy to read.

3.Think of a card as a vehicle for your branding.
When spending money on marketing materials, you can get more value of your marketing dollar if you use consistent branding and image. From stationery to your website, to your inside of your business, branding is who your business is, what people remember, and the perception that is created.  Your card should not be limited to just you; it needs to tell people about what makes your company so unique and exciting. It could be that the logo isn’t very exciting, or the purpose of your company isn’t apparent. Take a look at your card and ask; what’s missing?

4. Card sizes vary greatly.
In the United States, business cards are normally set at 3.5″ wide x 2″ tall.  You can consider various sizes, to stand out, but be aware, if it is a functional size for your customer base.  Massage therapist for example can get away with a fun size such as 2.25″ x 2.25″ square, whereas a law firm should stick to the professional size.

5. Font, Spacing, color and style.
The font should be elegant but legible; Gothic script can be difficult to read, and Comic Sans suggests that you don’t take yourself seriously, let alone your business. Think about sizing and spacing of letters to ensure that the script does not conflict with the color pattern of the card.  Non-confrontation colors, can be an indication of the comfortable image that your company is trying to project. Cards in full color with custom logos are great for sticking in people’s memories.

6. Stock & Printing style Choices.
There are oodles of different papers and print methods that can create a card just for you.  Consider a textured paper such as linens, with a foil stamp, or a blind embossing.  Thermography, is a raised lettering technique that was really popular in the 70′s and is finding its way back into the design arena.  We also are creating business cards with different quality of lamination and Ultrakoting processes. If you are trying to convey as much information as possible, you can have a set of CD business cards made, with multimedia content, but ensure that your investment will cover its costs- these are expensive unless you commission a batch of several hundred.

7. Consider your photo or photo of your product on the card.
The new marketing is to create relationships, and people tend to first remember how they look and maybe not their name. So a photo on the card is very important.

8. Consider putting a QR Code and social media icons.
Consider the fact that social media is here to stay, well for the moment anyways. Might as well take advantage of this vehicle for what it is worth! It is not for every business, however, for ways of keeping on top of the mind of your customer, this is a great way to do it. You can create fun games and loyalty with all of the great technology advances social media offers.

9. Water run-resistance.
I have seen so many people try to print their business cards on their home ink jet printers. This ink is not water proof. And it looks very unprofessional – not to mention the sloppy quality of the graphics and fonts it generates.  The print and paper of your card should be crisp and the text unable to be obliterated by just a few rain drops. Accidents happen, and an occasional spilled glass of wine should not ruin an opportunity. Ink jet printers-produced cards do not use waterproof ink and leave a very unprofessional impression, no matter how small your business is and your budget. Business cards are your number one marketing tool in your tool box, do not short change it!

10. And lastly, Keep them in a decent case.
If you regularly produce dog-eared cards from fluff-infested pockets, consider the impression that this gives prospective clients about your business. Produce cards one at a time from a case with a lid and exchange them with care. The care you take over your card shows the concern you have for your business.

Take a look at your card and ask; what’s missing?

It is really simple, just follow these instructions and you will have it in two shakes of a stick!

When you first start your Like Page, Facebook gives you a url that looks something like this…..
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Kelley-Insurance-Agency-Financial-Services-Inc/302511421554

What you would like it too look like is this:
www.facebook.com/YourChosenName

It is much easier and cleaner to use for advertising in print, as well as you will be “share-able” on facebook easier by using the @YourChosenName will come up during a post.  You need to have reached 25 “likes” you are able to claim your own unique Facebook URL. This used to be 100 names, and as fast as facebook changes things, this may change too.

According to Facebook Terms & Conditions
Usernames were created to make it easier for Facebook users to identify their profile and share with others. As a public figure, business or brand with a Page on Facebook, your username should be straightforward and easy to remember.

Facebook encourages you to consider the following when creating a username for Pages:
•    Create a username that is as close as possible to your public figure or business name (e.g. ElvisPresley, BestBuy).
•    If you own the rights to a given name, make it your username so that others cannot obtain it.
•    Usernames can only contain alphanumeric characters (A-Z, 0-9) or a period (“.”).
•    Choose a username you will be happy with for the long term. Usernames are not transferable.
•    Your username must adhere to Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.

There are a few things to consider before creating your username.
•    Once created if can’t be changed
•    Do you want to use your business name or the main keywords user are searching for ie: BestBuy vs Everything Electronic
•    Facebook is indexed by search engines quicker than most website and therefore your fan page could appear in the search results quicker than your website
•    Make sure you follow their terms & conditions to ensure that you can keep your username.
So now you have decided on your username, follow these steps to claim it.

Log into Facebook then follow these simple steps:

1.    Go to http://www.facebook.com/username
2.    Select “Select a Username” for your page
3.    This brings up a drop down menu, select the page you want to create the username for.
4.    If your page has the needed 25 fans it will bring up a box 
5.    Enter your desired username and click on “check availablilty”
6.    If it’s available, you will be shown some final terms – if you are happy with your choice click “confirm” or select “cancel” to try another one.

Hope that helps!

If a picture’s worth a thousand words, have you ever thought about what your photos are saying? We live in a visual age, where images surround us. Whether on your website, marketing materials, billboards, or ads, the photos you choose to represent your products and services are very important. Here are a few tips to ensure your photos are saying what you want:

• Don’t photograph your products on a cluttered shelf. Rather, depict them in use in an appropriate abstract environment or on a clean white background.
• Save your originals, and don’t reduce their file size. You never know when you’ll need to re-purpose images, such as if you want a low-res image from your website to work in a high-resolution print brochure.
• Take a lot of photos when you have the opportunity. You may be surprised how a new angle or different lighting can change the appeal and appearance of your products.
• If images don’t do justice for your products, don’t use them. Consider posting a “photo coming soon” placeholder, rather than posting a poor-quality photo. But do so only if you fully intend to post an image later.
• Adjust the resolution of photos on your website to ensure they won’t slow the load time for the page. Nothing is worse than a great photo nobody has the patience to download and see.
• Use intriguing photos to supplement Facebook posts and create additional interest. Organize these photos into albums for easy viewing, and use relevant album names, such as “new products,” “seasonal promotions,” and so on.

The best way to not only survive the recession but to actually thrive in it is to bring in new clients and new business. Growth is possible, even in this economic climate.

The lifeblood of all businesses is gaining new clients. Acquiring new clients is challenging enough in any environment, but especially today. The lack of new clients is often the primary cause for the decline and failure of a company.

To get new clients, you must look for prospects who fit what you do best. Here are seven rules for prospecting in today’s environment. Following these rules will make it easier to start new relationships that will lead to new opportunities in 2012 and beyond.

1. Do This, and You Can Forget All the Other Steps!

You must have heard by now that all you have to do to get new business is to send a few tweets and Facebook posts, then sit back and wait for the hordes of leads to flood your website and your phone lines, right? Inbound marketing can fix all of your company ills by solving all the lead generation problems. Old school prospecting is a thing of the past. Your leads will now pursue you. No doubt you have read and heard about all of this, and for those who believed it, it wasn’t too long before frustration set in. Thousands of dollars later, the realization came that these are half-truths. Sure, there is a place to mix in these tactics, but to really succeed in growing your business, nothing can replace real prospecting that leads to real relationships that open the door to real opportunities.

2. Have a Plan.

You will never know where you need to go if you don’t have a plan. This is an old rule, but it applies as much today as it did in the past, and it will continue to apply far into the future. You must know the profile of the person and the company you can profitably do business with. You must set real goals and have a realistic plan to achieve those goals. Know what you want your ideal client to do as the next step when you are prospecting, and use that as your objective. Break it down to a step-by-step process, and track your leads to see where they stand in your sales lead funnel.

3. Research Before You Make the First Call.

Do some homework on your potential prospect before the first call or meeting. Know who the decision makers are, and try to find out their hot buttons ahead of time. The more you learn, the better your chances for making a connection and bond. You may never get that chance again. But don’t waste too much time researching. If you stop all of your prospecting activities to research, your pipeline will grow stale, and you will halt your momentum. So do your research, but don’t stop your prospecting.

4. Decide What Methods to Use.

Prospecting & Cold Calls

Which are the best methods to use for lead generation? The best way to open the door to a relationship with your ideal client depends on the prospect. Some will like phone calls, some will like email, some will prefer direct mail, some will only respond to referrals, and some will respond to a business or casual network environment. Don’t just rely on one method. Use as many as you can, and vary your approach. Let your prospect decide which one is best for them.

5. Just Do It.

Doing everything you need to do once you start the process of prospecting is not easy. Get help where you need it. It doesn’t matter if your process is not perfect. Can’t get an appointment to see the top decision maker? Go for the second in command. Do whatever is necessary to keep the activities moving forward. Work hard, but also work smart. Use all of the productivity tools and help you can get. But whatever you do, don’t let anything stop your momentum. Keep your eyes on your goals.

6. Make Them an Offer They Can’t Refuse.

Great. You are filling your pipeline and getting appointments. Now what? You will greatly improve the odds of getting your prospect to say yes if you have a compelling proposition that adds real value or potentially solves a problem for them. Why should they do business with you over any other similar company that wants their business? Why should they choose you and invest their limited time with you? How are you going to help them grow their business and improve their business results? In other words, you must answer the question: what’s in it for them?

7. Ask Questions and Follow Up.

Ask great questions and (more importantly) listen to their answers. Take notes so that if you can’t give answers instantly, you will be able to get back with them with the correct information later. Most of the prospects you meet will be juggling multiple tasks just like you are. It is very easy to forget about you and your proposal. Follow up relentlessly until you get an answer. Of course, you don’t want to be a pest, but at the same time don’t take a lack of response as a negative answer. Be respectful, but don’t give up easily. These character traits are what set apart the top achievers from the also-rans. If you learn these skills and master them, your prospect pipeline will never dry up.

So, I had a client this morning inquire about getting their website on the top of search results, which is a great question, so I thought I’d try to share some resources and information about it. Websites are seemingly straightforward at a glance but there are countless aspects to each that require a lot of considerations to make when building and utilizing them. I’d like to share some information on a couple of different topics, but the main point of each is to optimize traffic toward your website through Social Media and Search Engine Optimization.

Search Engine Optimization

One of the major factors in how you are ranked in search results is the content of your website. If a website is not updated frequently, its pagerank will be lower, as a more up-to-date website tends to have, well, more up-to-date information. Having consistent content creation for your website gives search engines something new to parse each time they analyze your website for content, increasing your pagerank.

Not only that, but your website will contain a much larger repertoire of content that contains keywords. When a search engine looks at your website content, they’ll note these keywords and relate them to your website. So when someone searches for that keyword at a search engine like Google, you’ll be considered more strongly by the indexing robots because of that article you wrote about weather winterization for a heating or house-siding business, in example.

One caveat to this is that it is an organic process that occurs over time. You can’t expect to write an article and have your website instantly become #1 for all the tangential topics related to your business. This is because your website is indexed periodically by search engine indexing robots,  as it takes time to calculate where you’ll fit into the pageranks with the advent of new content. It is a slow process that will over time develop into a more lucrative return, given consistent effort and management.

Social Media

Social Media such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and Google+ are powerful tools for leveraging your business to customers, but how does one best utilize these networks to drive traffic to your website? You, as the business owner need to entice users to get involved, whether through special deals (facebook just rolled out an updated check-in deals mechanism on their website), offers, providing content, hosting events at your business, etc. But one great way to reach out to customers is through Content Creation.

Content Creation

Creating content for your customers that is relevant, interesting, and engaging is extremely important for using the internet as a business tool. Engaging your customers with articles that help them better use your products or services helps develop a relationship with them that only increases over time. Consistent content creation through the blog also allows you to pop up on Social Media news feeds by sharing the articles on your business page. This not only increases awareness of your business by popping up in a fan’s newsfeed, but also links people back to your website.

Your website’s main purpose may not be to blog, but the driving content will bring your customer to your website, which is the important consideration. If they read the article, that’s great, mission accomplished. They may not need your services at this time, but you’ve enriched their experience, which will increase the relationship between you and that customer. Not only will traffic be brought to your site, increasing chances of people to look at other things on your site, such as your products and services, but you’ll also develop a marketing team out of this customer base that reads your content.

This is the underlying strategy of Social Media Marketing. To entice your customer base through instrinsic value to do marketing for you– by sharing the content you’ve created through deals, articles, etc., but also the more basic sharing: word-of-mouth recommendations.

Some Last Thoughts

All of these tools are at your disposal as a means of increasing your business’ online presence, driving traffic to your website, developing stronger relations with your customers, and increasing your pagerank in search results. The main advantage of these strategies is that they are cost-efficient and sustainable, and all it takes is time and effort(I can hear the groans already!). None of them are a magic bullet that’ll solve all of your pageranking blues, propelling you into sky-high success, but when managed properly and consistent, these avenues of communication can be a powerful utility among your toolset.

By Scott Prindle