As you know, Facebook is THE no 1 social media site around and not only this but it is also one of the best small business marketing resources there is. I was having a look at some stats to do with it today and it’s staggering how big it is. As local businesses, you simply can’t afford to ignore facebook for the following reasons:

• It has over 800 million members and your customers are using it.

• Every day Facebook users comment or press the “Like” button more than 2 billion times.

• Facebook reached one trillion page views in June 2011, making it the most-visited web site in the world.

And if these stats aren’t enough to impress you, then thinks about this; Fan pages, if done correctly, can turn fans into CUSTOMERS. That’s right, facebook is one of the best ways to get people interested in buying your products and services and once you have happy customers, they share this around their community of friends via recommendations. This beats other small business marketing resources hands down.

Now unless you live on the planet Mars, you would have noticed that recently, FB has decided to introduce their timeline format so with this in mind, I thought it a good time to present you with some of the best facebook marketing tips I have learned (and no, spending hours a day spamming people isn’t one of them). So check out these top 10 tips, and start using them immediately.

How to Turn Facebook into One of the Best Small Business Marketing Resources

1) Create a great cover for your timeline page:

As we bid farewell to profiles and start welcoming the new timeline format, it’s a great time to update your look. The new timeline gives us an opportunity to give ourselves a professional makeover by creating a new banner. This is fantastic for personal branding and I would definitely take advantage of this if I were you. So what should you include? Well, for starters, make sure the photos are actually of you. You can get professional shots done or get a friend to do it but make sure the photo makes you look friendly and approachable. Your image is going to be your brand and you want people to have positive associations with it.  Then highlight something about your business such as a product or service or tell them to visit the website you have listed in the space just below the cover. Include some other photos of your self or things from your life and you’ll have a fantastic banner that’s ideal for personal branding. You can get all of this put together by a freelancer for about $30. Just visit freelancer.com and see who’ll bid for the project.

I also found a great tool that you can use for free called FaceitPages.com, which allows you to create timeline covers and fanpages and they’re not bad at all. I created this one using my own background image. It’s great because it allows you to insert text, logos and social media profiles. I just added my own photo to the profile to make it more personal.

2) Make sure you are posting lots of good-quality content:

Did you know that once people start clicking on your posts, they will appear more times in their own walls as top priority items? This is why you need to engage friends and fans as much as possible. For this reason, you need to be creating fresh content and make sure that content is something that people will want to read. Create catchy headlines which encourage readers to click on it and read and also put an interesting image with it and you will find that over time, people will following you regularly without even knowing that they are. The new facebook format allows people to subscribe to you as well so if they see your content as particularly relevant, useful or entertaining, they may subscribe to your posts.

3) Create some ‘buzz’ around your page: Get people talking.

Ask people questions, poll them about important things or entice them to give feedback. People are going to want to follow someone more if they have been interacting on their page. Make sure some of the questions you ask or info you share is more personal so your page isn’t just a forum for sharing business opportunities or selling stuff – otherwise people will lose interest in you.

4) Add photo albums:

Nothing gives people a better idea of who you are than a photo album. Albums are great for personal branding and, like ‘creating a buzz’, they add life and interest to your page and encourage eyeballs to stay on your profile longer. Make sure you include plenty of personality shots and fun ones. Remember FB is a social networking site and there is no need give a serious ‘businesslike’ appearance.

Here’s one me and my friend Katy taken in Oludeniz that I really like:

5) Add an opt-in tab to your fanpage:

Why do we bother having fanpages if they are not going to collect the email addresses of people who visit? Creating an opt-in box isn’t the easiest thing to do but again, you can easily visit freelancer.com to find someone to do this for you. If you haven’t created a opt-in box with Aweber or one of the other email marketing service providers, then you should definitely do this. After all, facebook can easily become one of your most important small business marketing resources and you don’t want to waste the opportunity.

This is an example of a fan-page that is utilising an opt-in. You can see the box at the bottom telling readers to subscribe. I would also give the new facebook optin app a go. It works in conjunction with your autoresponder and makes collecting emails really easy.

So now that I have given you some ideas, you should go out and implement them immediately.

If you found these small business marketing resources tips useful, please tweet, plus or like them and I’ll see you again in the next post which will give you even more useful tips.

Also, if you would like to know how I can help you to market your small business online using other small business marketing resources, then don’t forget to register for the free webinar.

Or download the e-book ‘Unleashing Google +‘.

The other day, a really important document was brought to my attention – The 2012 Social Marketing and & New Media Predictions. If you haven’t seen it yet, it is basically a white paper which gives insights and predictions on the directions that social and new media will be taking in 2012.

The paper was put together by the Awareness Group, a world leader in social media software and contains the thoughts and opinions of the world’s leading marketing strategists, brand marketers and agencies such as David Meerman Scott, Steve Rubel and Marc Meyer of Ernst and Young.

You would already know that in social media as in other types of business, the leaders are those people who understand where the ball is headed, not just where the ball is now, so in this case, it’s really important that take serious notice of the predictions the experts are giving us for the year ahead and to make it easier for you,  I am going to summarise the important points in simple language.

So grab a cup of coffee, and read  carefully.

   ‘Social marketing will become marketing. It will just be what you need to do when you’re trying to sell something to more than one person.’ …………………….Michael Troiano (Holland Mark)

This is a quote taken from the paper and I think it pretty much summarises the direction in which social media is heading. But what specific changes will take place?

Well, one of the most important changes to take place will the integration of social media with more traditional types of marketing like PR and advertising. Brands will also have to change their PR mindset from capturing audiences through paid media to creating their own audiences through social channels. In other words, all companies will be media companies to some extent as content becomes the primary means by which brands communicate with their customers and the focus becomes creating a ‘community’ of readers. Greater use of video and mobile devices will be included as part of these changes.

This means that corporate websites will need to incorporate social media and provide a seamless experience as the user moves between the host site and the various social media channels. There will be a rise in social media marketing tools which will, as Marc Meyer says ‘bundle marketing, monitoring and management into one dashboard in order to address multiple accounts and reduce multiple logins.

Other changes that will have an impact on the IT sector,  will be the demand CRM systems that will allow for greater integration of social channels. As well as this, there will be a greater demand for metric tools which will help marketers to give brands specific measured feedback on their ROI, as well as a greater demand for mobile technology as mobile social takes a bigger and bigger share of the social media pie.

Many experts also predicted that Google + will become more prominent, as businesses realise the importance of participating in a social media site that is integrated with the search engine giant. Not to be left behind, Facebook will enter the search engine game and finally make use of all that data they have been accumulating about us over the years. (better get those fan pages up and running if you don’t want to get left behind).

Another really interesting prediction is the rise of the ‘Online Recommendation Culture’ as communities develop trust amongst each other and even produce ‘influencers’ or opinion leaders.

Finally, one prediction that I found to be particulary positive (for me not for you) is that there will be a shortage of social media talent as more and more brands try to leverage social strategies.

So there you have it – the major recommendations for the year ahead. Of course, there is more to say but I’ll have to save it for another post.

In the meantime, download my 21-point checklist to see whether your site measures up, register for the free webinar or download your free guide to Google+.

If you would like to know how my team and I can help you online, check out our services here: http://lindapaull.com/blog/work-with-linda/.

That’s all for today

Don’t forget to tweet, like or plus.

Linda

When it comes to local SEO optimisation, the first and most important step is doing keyword research and yet it amazes me how little research some people do. What usually happens is that in the rush to get their business online, most business owners put a whole bunch of content on their site that they think is related to their industry or that they think people will be searching for and then they are often disappointed when they don’t get the results they were hoping for.

Poor results can be avoided by simply doing some keyword research of your own. In order to make this easy for  you, I have outlined four ‘golden rules’ for you to follow.

What are the Characteristics of  ‘Golden’ Keywords and Why Are They Important for Local SEO Optimisation?

 These four rules are as follows:

 relevance

1. traffic
2. competition
3. commercialty

Relevance

Sometimes, in their rush to get their business online, many business owners stick a whole bunch of keywords in order to get traffic. The problem is that, although the keyword may be relevant to your industry, it may not be relevant to your site, so when visitors do come, they may be disappointed by what they find. If your site is for a boutique hotel in Sultanahmet, then don’t include words related to holidaying in Istanbul such as tours and sightseeing unless that is a seperate service you actually provide. There may be a great view from your hotel but this is not the same as ‘sightseeing’ and the visitor is looking for a different service. You see, the secret is not just traffic, it’s targeted traffic and making sure your keywords actually match what is on your site is the best way to ensure this.

Traffic

Another way to increase your local SEO optimisation is to follow the second golden rule for keyword research, traffic. In most niches, over 90% of keywords have insignificant traffic and are therefore are not worth focussing on but the less than 10% of keywords that are worth bothering with can drastically improve your traffic and growth. It is not easy to know which keywords can get you the most traffic. You would need to find a good traffic tool like Market Samurai, Wordtracker or use Google’s own keyword tool to to really get an insight into this.

The Biggest Mistake People Make When Doing Their Own Local SEO Optimisation – Not Assessing the Competiton

The biggest trap that people often fall into when doing their own local SEO optimisation is using keywords for which there is too much competition. You may find a keyword that is relevant to your business and gets loads of traffic, but there is already too much competition for. The best way to get visitors is to get a front-page ranking but the problem is that there are only 10 spots. So what to to? You need to consider your competition carefully and remember that in order to outdo your competition, you DON’T need a brilliant-looking website, you just need to be a little bit stronger than them.

Now, there are two aspects of competition that you need to consider.

1. the amount of the competition, and

2. the strength of the competition

The amount of competition is, of course, important as some words have high levels of competition with a lot of people vying for first-page rankings, while others don’t. Obviously you want to go for the ones with lower levels of competition as this will increase your chances of being found on searches. The other thing you need to consider is the strength of the competition. Imagine if you were entering a boxing ring. Would you want to step into the same ring as Mohammed Ali or would you prefer to see an inexperienced lightweight with a similar physique to the annoying blonde guy in ‘How I Met Your Mother’? (sorry but I find him really annoying and he probably deserved to get punched in the face for all of the sexist jokes he makes).

local SEo Optimisation – competition strength

I’m fairly sure you wouldn’t choose Mohammed Ali unless you were a complete idiot. Well the same rule applies on the internet. If you find a phrase that has sites trying to rank for it that are older, have lots of pages of high-quality, professional content and hundreds of backlinks, then you’re in the wrong boxing ring. Instead, go and find a phrase that has competition which consists of newer sites with not much content and not many links.

Ever heard of the phrase, ‘pick your battles carefully’?. Well, here’s a situation in which it definitely applies.

Commerciality

The last of the golden rules for local SEO optimisation measures the potential a keyword has to earn money. A keyword may be relevant, attract high traffic and there seems to be a reasonable level of competition but the visitors are not buying. When this happens, you have targeted a keyword that isn’t what I refer to as a ‘buyers keyword’. Instead, it is searched for by people looking for information only, hence it isn’t converting. A great example of this is an antique furniture manufacturer I did some keyword research for. They were great at finding keywords relevant to their industry, for example ”French Renaissance’, ‘baroque furniture’ and ‘restoration’. But when I did some keyword research for them, I discovered that buyers were looking for actual products like ‘antique sideboard’. It’s simple but the closer you can get your keywords to actually match products that people buy, the more likely you are to turn those visitors into buyers. We sell things and services, not concepts.

So how does Google work out the ‘value’ of a keyword?

Its refers to its own tool, Google Adwords. As a keyword becomes more popular, advertisers will pay more for it. This means that those advertisers have realised which keyword gets more buyers and are prepared to pay to eliminate the competition. The higher the adword value, the higher the potential to sell something.

So there you have it in a nutshell. In order for your site to be successful on the internet, you need to find relevant keywords, keywords which attract a lot of traffic, have a low level of competition and have sufficient ‘commerciality’. It’s very difficult to do this research yourself, so I would like to make a suggestion here and that is to either make use of one of the excellent keyword tools such as Wordtracker, Market Samurai or Google’s own tool. Even better, hire someone to do that for you. Even if you have to pay a consultant to do your local SEO optimisation, the result (a list of targeted keywords) will no doubt make their fee worth it.

If you have any questions about keyword research or local SEO optimisation, feel free to leave a comment.

If you would like to more about how you can attract more customers to your business site, register for the free webinar by copying this url into your browser.  or simply download the 21-point checklist form by clicking here

Alternatively, you could click on the ‘like’ or ‘tweet’ button. Cheers.

Linda

If you have been following movements in the internet marketing world recently, you may have heard about ‘The Panda’ and its effect on the ranking of many sites so for this reason, I have decided to give some free website marketing tips that will protect your site from falling victim to the panda. Those of us outside of the US may not have felt the impact of the big bear slap yet as during 2011, Panda’s target was mostly US-based domains but the word on the street is that as of this year, Panda will be looking for fresh hunting grounds that contain English-language websites and this means that we need to get our sites in order to avoid losing our hard-earned rankings.

Now this is not a bad thing per se. Think of it from a customer’s perspective. Have you ever put in a search term for something and come up with dozens, maybe hundreds of sites that all offered the same thing and contained the same content, adding no real value? I know I have and there’s nothing more frustrating. It’s like walking down a main shopping road and seeing 5 Starbucks cafes….BORING.

Basically what’s happening is that Google has decided to redefine it’s definition of ‘low-quality’ and create an alogorithm that detects sites that fall into this catagory and lower their rankings, as stated by Matt Cutts, Google’s Head of Spam (interesting job title),

“This update is designed to reduce rankings for low quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”

Now I can’t exactly blame Google for doing this.

And with that being said, there is definitely is a positive aspect to all of this and that is that if you act quickly, you can ‘Panda-proof’ your site and I’m going to give you some useful and free website marketing tips on how to do that but first, I want to point out something of immense importance………

The fact that the Panda’s main target is content should tell you how important good, original content is to your site. I know you have heard this before but it is more important than ever to make sure the content on your site is good because I predict that many sites that come from countries outside of the English-speaking world are going to fall victim to a lot of bear-slapping.

So where were we? Oh, yes…..’panda-proofing’.

Free Website Marketing Tip no. 1 – Duplicate Content

The first thing the panda doesn’t like is a lot of duplicate content so before you decide to simply copy-paste content from other sites, think again. There are three crimes you can commit here. These are:

• A high % of duplicate content. This might apply to a page, a site or both. If it’s a site measure then that might contribute to each page’s evaluation.

• A low amount of original content on a page or site.

• A high % (or number) of pages with a low amount of original content.

I would recommend going through your site and getting rid of any content that you have simply copied and pasted, whether it’s from your own site or someone else’s.  Replace it with quality, original content. Get someone else to write it if you have to. I would definitely recommend having a report written which gives visitors in-depth information about your sector, product or service.

Free Website Marketing Tip no.2 – Don’t Over Optimise Your Content

Another sin is over-optimising your content. Panda can see when you have done this just to get rankings when it sees that your title tag words don’t match the content of your text or when the text contains too many keywords so that the writing doesn’t read well.

If your average visitor doesn’t spend much time on your site, this could affect your rankings. There are things you can do to increase the time spent on your site. You could put more videos on your site as videos are a proven way to keep the eyes on the screen longer. Also make sure you always have links to other pages on your site so they read more at a time.

Free Website Marketing Tip no. 3 – Inappropriate Advertising

The Panda is also not a fan of inappropriate advertising or too much advertising  on a page so make sure anything you advertise is relevant to what your site is about.

Free Website Marketing Tip no. 4 – Professional Content

One more note on content. Please please please get someone who knows how to write good English copy do your content for you. Translators do a great job at translating but they are not copywriters or even writers for that matter. Poorly-written copy that doesn’t make sense and just reads like a translated version of something from another language will never do you any good.

So this should give you something to get started with. Follow my advice and I promise you that you’ll replacing those bear slaps with bear hugs in no time.

If you would like to more about how you can attract more customers to your business site, register for the free webinar by copying this url into your browser. http://dcswebinar.dotcomsecrets.com/w/2?tracking1=1057 or simply download the 21-point checklist form by clicking here: http://lindapaull.com/blog/website-self-analysis/

Have a great day……and don’t forget to tweet or post to facebook.

Thanks to Google Places, getting started with local business internet marketing is not as difficult as it seems. Even if you don’t have a website, you can still easily get started by getting yourself a listing on Google’s local business listings portal.

What Is Google Places For Business?

Google has millions of users and you will be able to reach them quickly and easily with Google Places. Google Places is a free service. You simply create a business listing, which Google may show in the search results.

Benefits of using Google Places

The biggest benefit of using Google Places is that it gets better rankings when Google displays local search results. So if someone enters something in Google such as ‘laser hair treatment – Istanbul’, Google will retrieve information from the Places Page and combine it with data from businesses’ websites. A word of warning though; it is claimed that you don’t need a website to get started but because of the merging of Places with regular sites, it means that you should have a website if you want to rank well.

Another thing I really like about Google Places is that it is easy to use. It only takes a few minutes to set up and you can visit your listing anytime to edit your information or see how many people have seen and clicked on your listing.

You can also be creative with your listing and you can make your listing as personal as you like by adding photos, videos and offering coupons. There is a space for you to include little tweet-style updates and your customers can leave a review – basically, a whole lotta value for a free listing.

Tips For Getting the Most Out of Google Places

It is really worth spending a little time making your listing as effective as possible. When they go to write a listing,  many businesses are content to make sure their business name, address and phone numbers are correct.  But if you limit yourself to these basics, you’re not taking full advantage of one of the internet’s most effective marketing tools.

Take company names, for example. GP allows you to adjust your company name slightly so that you can get more organic traffic. A Lebanese restaurant might simply be called ‘Habibi’s’, but if you add the words ‘Lebanese restaurant’ to the listing name, you are more likely to get better results.

Here are some more useful tips:

• Always put an address, even if you are a driver and don’t have an office or fixed location. The reason is that Google will often list according to location, and you are not showing an address, your listing may not show.

• Always check to make sure you are in the right catagory. Also GP lets you list up to 5 different catagories so use them if you need to.

• Make sure you include keywords in your business description

• Upload a video of yourself. Nothing gives a listing a personal touch more than the business owner speaking to a potential customer. This is especially true if  your customers are coming from abroad, as they will probably want to know that you speak good English.

• Take advantage of things like the tweet-style updates, and especially the reviews. For some reason, even though we may think they are fake, reviews really work. The same thing goes for professional endorsements.

• Include something that you think is unique to your business

• Tell people which areas you serve. You are more like to show up in location searches if you do

• Put your logo on your site – it makes your listing seem more professional

I mean it. Stop whatever you’re doing and get registered on Google Places. It truly is one of the best tools a local internet marketer has.

And while we’re on the subject of google, make sure you download my free copy of  ‘Uncovering Google + the Next Social Media Giant’ and don’t forget to retweet.

Cheers

Linda

Strategic marketing consulting, as the term implies, is a plan of action that will increase your efficiency and save you time in your internet marketing, as well as in your offline marketing. There are several processes that form what is known as internet marketing. It is a vast and complex world that is evolving constantly and rapidly, and will continue to do so. But it is crucial to your overall marketing success. If you are in business, whether it be local or large-scale, and you are not on the internet, you are missing out on reaching most of your customers.

If you are just starting out in internet marketing, you might be tempted to try to figure out how it all works before you actually start doing it. But unfortunately, most experts agree that this plan will not get you very far. In order to figure it all out, you really need to be doing it. Will you make some mistakes? Without a doubt. But you will learn from these mistakes and turn them around into advantages. So, the key is to take action. But you don’t have to do it all alone. That is where strategic marketing consulting comes in.

This kind of help usually gives you a step by step plan to follow so you don’t feel lost or unsure of what you are doing. This way, you get a glimpse into the big picture as well as the details on all the various parts that make up internet marketing. You can get consulting on a variety of aspects of your business: target market research, keyword research, SEO for your web content, online and offline public relations, online and offline advertising, traffic generation, list-building, split-testing, and much, much more.

While taking action is one key, focusing on just one action is the next. It’s easy to get caught up in the newest business enhancing tool or program. If you can make sure that you stay focused on the task at hand, or establish the consulting to do it for you, you’ll always be at least one step ahead of the business manager or owner who is jumping around from one focus to the next; never able to complete a task.

Of course, one of your main concerns is to have a good flow of traffic coming to your website. Internet marketing consultants can set you up with a traffic generation blueprint, which shows you exactly how to generate more traffic and to keep it constant.

While there are many traffic generation techniques that work, you may have never learned how to do them the right way, and this is another reason to seek strategic marketing consulting. You will save a great deal of time, from days, to months, to years by cutting to the proven successful internet marketing methods and strategies. And, as you know, time is money, especially in the present-day internet economy.

Local business internet marketing is here to stay. Where else can you reach the hundreds, thousands, or even millions who make up your target market. If you are local business, or a large corporation, internet marketing is indispensible.

Why?

It’s been proven that most folks don’t even glance at a yellow pages book anymore to find a local business. Nor do they go on the online yellow pages. Now, the average consumer just types their need into their search engine, whether it be Google, Yahoo, Bing, or any of the other hundreds out there. If you want to come up in their searches, you need to learn how to take advantage of  local business Internet marketing, or hire someone to do it for you.

Here’s Something You Probably Didn’t Know About Local Business Internet Marketing

If you’re a local business, you don’t even need a website to come up in Google, Yahoo, or Bing searches. All you need to do is fill in your information on their Local Business pages. You can include your company name, contact details, directions, photos, and a website if you have one. You can also choose to offer coupons for your customers, which brings you up in popularity and rankings. These pages also offer users the chance to review what it is that you offer. Ask your happy customers to review you, and you are also boosted in ranking. And the best part of all? This listing is completely free! Think of how much you save on yellow pages or newspaper ads that are no longer even getting results. If you run a local business, take the few minutes it will take you to get listed on the search engine local results and you can start seeing traffic immediately. Other free options include setting up accounts on Twitter, FaceBook, and YouTube, or any of the other social media sites. Blogging is another way to create interest and establish credibility in your field.

If you haven’t yet started your local business internet marketing strategy, luckily you can get in on the game very quickly whether you hire staff to handle this for you or you outsource the job to someone else. One of the major sources of income for larger companies who take advantage of internet marketing is pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. While this type of advertising is not free, you only pay when someone actually clicks on your ad. This is one of the huge advantages of pay-per-click versus offline advertising. You only pay when you get results. Large companies are also taking advantage of FaceBook, Twitter, YouTube, and blogging. If they are using these free methods even though they have millions of dollars to spend on marketing, you better believe that local business internet marketing is working for them.

If you would like to more about how DCS Local can help you with your local business internet marketing needs, then click here.

You can also download my free Google Plus e-book by entering your details in the box on the side of this page.

Cheers

Linda