Improving Your Online Presence Part 5: How to Utilize Social Media for Marketing Your Business

Social Media Marketing Strategy Development
I suspect that the followers of this blog were more interested in this topic in this series "Improving Your Online Presence" than any other topic.
I presented on this topic in front of a group of small business owners a few weeks ago, and to be honest, at least one person was frustrated because I was asking as many questions as I was answering.
It probably has to do with my "Jesuit" education, but I believe the best way to find better answers is to ask better questions.
In the midst of one small business owners frustration she asked "How do I utilize Linked In, Twitter or Facebook to gain high value clients?"
My answer; "That's a great place to start."
In other words; you need to ask a lot of really good open ended questions to get your brain moving in the right direction.
Once you know your business goals, then start applying questions around social media and those business goals like the business owner I mentioned above.
Simple, right?

Ok-ok - let me get to the part where I give some helpful advice on social media marketing.
First of all, assuming you understand your business goals, the next step is determining how social media might help you achieve those goals.
While I have not heard of any type of business that cannot benefit in some way from social media, there are two things you need to know from the start:

1. It is likely that your social media strategy is going to be partially or almost completely unique to your business.
2. Spending a lot of time on social media may not be an efficient way for you to market your business online.

In fact, just as there were many businesses that blindly threw millions at Internet marketing back in the late 1990s and early 2000s without first developing an ROI based strategy, there is a risk that businesses will do the same with social media marketing. There is a lot of buzz around social media marketing, it is considered cool and sexy by some right now, but that doesn't mean that just jumping into to social media is going to make or break your business. You are probably at more risk of wasting time and money than making money from social media. Whatever you do, make certain you do not fail to look at search engine optimization, pay per click marketing or offline marketing.

The best advice I can give you on social media marketing is that you need to be prepared to invest resources to make it work. Which is not so different from offline social networking efforts - it takes resources, but the right work can be very beneficial for your business.


Step one: Determine how social media can help you meet your goals. In order to do this you are going to have to spend some time learning about social media. You can either spend time on the Internet or reading books on social media. You could also hire a consultant. Of course, you need to determine if you have more time or more money. If you are really busy and your time is very valuable, then it may make more sense to hire someone to develop a social media plan for you. Just make sure they take the time to understand your goals, and that the road map they give you to meet those goals has measurable results.
How much time do you need to invest? At least in the neighborhood of 10-20 hours.

Step 2: Once you have come up with a plan, you need to determine if it is going to be worth it to implement the plan. It not only takes some resources to develop a plan, it is going to take even more resources to implement it. Again, this is a balancing of time and money. Your time may be better spent doing other things to grow your business. If you have come up with a good plan, you are going to need to dedicate a significant amount of time weekly or daily to implementing it. How much time? I would estimate 1-10 hours for setup, and 2-40 hours a week of work-depending on the details of your plan, of course.

Step 3: You are going to need to track and analyze the results, make adjustments and implement the adjustments. While social media may be out of its "infancy" stage, it is still in the "toddler" stage. If you are not tracking and analyzing results, you are at significant risk of wasting a painful amount of time and/or money.

Here are some good resources for learning more about social media marketing:

• Books about Social Media Marketing
• Step by step process to developing a social media marketing strategy

Good luck-and if you need any help feel free to call me at 720-279-1876 for a free initial consultation.

Improving your online presence Part 4: Adding the right kind of content to your website

I remember back in the 1990s when doing something akin to simply changing a comma to a period every day on your website might improve your rankings on the search engines. Assuming you are doing everything as good or better than your SEO competitors, making a slight change to your website might help, but the chances of it making a difference are slim. Nowadays, you need to have a strategy for adding content to your site on a regular basis. Of course, if your site is not already well optimized relative to your competitors, adding content may not help you meet your SEO goals. There are other reasons to add content to your website, especially if your site is a resource for others. However, if you want to help your SEO rankings you need to have a specific content building strategy, and you probably should invest in an SEO expert to help you maximize content building and SEO efforts.

I like the idea of having a blog on your site, but here are some other ideas for adding content to your site:

• Product Reviews.
• Press releases.
• Client testimonial.
• Client success stories and case studies.
• A FAQ page you update regularly.
• All of the above could be done in short video snippets. 

Important things to remember:

• The content you ad to your site needs to be unique
• Be careful about adding content stuffed with keywords
• Look for internal linking opportunities for your keywords within the content you add to your site
• Don't forget to format your Heading tags and Meta-data correctly when you add new content to your site
• Try to get external links that go directly to your new content, not just to your home page.

Adding content can be tedious, but if you develop a plan for updating your website's content on a regular basis you will have a much better chance of having a positive impact on your web presence.


Good luck-and if you need any help feel free to call me at 720-279-1876 for a free initial consultation.

Improving your online presence part 3:Track Your Results

If you do not sufficiently track your results, the odds are that you will waste money on marketing and advertising programs that do not work.

What should you track?

1. Conversions
   Gone are the days of tracking only site traffic. You need to be tracking the results of your Internet marketing and offline marketing efforts at the conversion level. This can mean conversion to a lead or conversion to a sale-BOTH should be tracked.
   For those of us selling products via a shopping cart on our websites and driving traffic via Pay Per Click marketing this can be as simple as placing the right code on our site. This will enable us to track which keyword search led to which sale so we can adjust our PPC campaign for optimal results.
   However, most businesses do not sell their products or services via a shopping cart on their website. Most businesses rely on offline customer interactions to secure sales, and some have sales cycles of up to 2 years.
   The more sophisticated your sales process, the more sophisticated your conversion tracking needs to be. This could be as simple as putting a tracking phone number on your website, or it could be much more involved. You may need to utilize multiple  tracking phone numbers, integrate your tracking system into your CRM or even invest in a sophisticated marketing automation software system. This can get more complicated when you are integrating your offline marketing (but still necessary).
   How much should you spend on tracking your conversions?
   If you spend $1,000 a month on marketing, you probably do not want to spend $1,000/month on tracking. However, you should probably spend $1-200.
   If you spend $10,000/month on your marketing and advertising campaigns, then it probably makes sense to spend $1-$2,000/month on conversion tracking.l
   In both cases, if you can improve your ROI or CPA by 10% or more this is a worthwhile investment. Many times a well integrated, monitored and professionally analyzed conversion tracking system can yield up to a 60% improvement in results. Well worth the investment.
2. Types of traffic
   Many business owners or marketing professionals receive many reports from Webtrends, Awstats, Webalizer or Google analytics, but they are not sure what they should be analyzing.
   You certainly should be looking at unique visitors vs. repeat visitors, bounce rates, time spent on site, the pages visited, the last page visited before exiting, etc. Most reporting tools will easily show you this data. You can also look at paid traffic vs. organic traffic, and branded vs. non-branded traffic. These require a little more sophisticated knowledge of utilizing, sorting and organizing the data. Nothing can completely replace human analysis by someone who knows your business and the goals of your marketing programs.
3. If you are utilizing SEO, you should track the external back links to your site and your rankings on Google, Yahoo! and Bing.
   If you are engaged in any type of Search Engine Optimization efforts, you should track your site with ranking reports and back link reports. Google webmaster tools will give you insight into this data for free, and there are some paid programs you can utilize that may be a bit more user friendly and provide some enhanced analysis capabilities.
   You also need to regularly perform keyword analysis, which is an art and science in and of itself.

I hope you found this information helpful.  
Do me a favor - if you see any typos in this post or have any questions please let me know via the comment section. Of course, for more detailed information on the topics discussed above you can follow the links to my Internet marketing website.and I am available via the phone for consulting.
In your initial call I will spend 15-30 minutes with you for free.
You can call me (Dan Stratford) anytime at 720-279-1876.

Improving your online presence part 2

Part 2: Fix your website!

At the risk of sounding like a hypocrite, you really need to fix your website. My website is about search engine optimization, pay per click marketing, social media marketing, and all of that Internet marketing stuff. I do not spend as much time time updating my website as I should. It probably does not convert as well as it should (I am reminding myself now that I need to simplify my home page), but it is setup correctly-for the most part.
Here are some basic things you need to do to get your website up to snuff. If you don't have your website setup correctly, anything else you do is going to have to fight like a salmon swimming upstream.
Assuming you have built a website that tells the human visitors about what you can do for them, this is what you need to do to let the search engines know what your website is about:

1. Have integrity based meta data.
   Your meta data needs to match your pages. Not exactly, but don't put anything in your keyword, description, or title tags that is not actually on the page they are describing. Don't repeat keywords and keyword phrases over and over and over again, but be clear in your meta data what the page is about. If you do this, then all of your meta-data will be unique from page to page, assuming all of your pages are unique.
   I hear different numbers regarding how many characters should be in each area, but here are some general numbers to follow:
   Title Tags: about 70 characters
   Description Tags: about 160 characters
   Keyword Tags: About 4-9 keywords or keyword phrases, about 100 characters. Bonus advice: don’t repeat any individual keyword more than 3 times, and don’t repeat any keyword phrases at all.
    
2. Fix your Heading tags:
   1 unique “H1” tag for each page-give your page a title that tells the SEs what it is about.
   If it makes sense to have more than one H2 or H3 tag, then go for it. Have at least 1 H2 tag.
    
3. Have an xml sitemap-and keep it updated
    
4. Submit your xml sitemap to Google analytics
    
5. Setup a Google analytics account
    
6. Setup a Google webmaster account
    
7. Fix your URLs
   If possible, format your URLs like this:
   Main Keyword Phrase should be dashed in URL
   Example: http://www.domainname.com/keyword-keyword-keyword
   NOT:
   http://www.domainname.com/ keywordkeywordkeyword
   http://www.domainname.com/ keyword_keyword_keyword
   Important: Needs to be unique for each page and relevant to each page
   
   There are a lot of other things that you will hear and you should pay attention to some of them; “flash is bad” (not necessarily true), “what about 404s” and “403s” and “errors”, “301 redirects”, “blah-blah-blah”. These are important, but not for discussion here. You should address those other issues, but if you are not doing what I suggest in this post, you will be fighting to swim upstream with everything else you do.
   
   You always have the option to call me for consulting-720-279-1876. I offer free advice and direction over the phone, and if it makes sense for us to work together, that may also be an option.
   
   If you saw any typos-please let me know by commenting on my blog post!