Coaching For Success
IBC
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Posts by IBC
Increasing Your Twitter Use For Business
Feb 18th
Twitter is a great tool for Internet businesses that wish to grow awareness of their products and services. It allows you to connect to people who share similar interests and are within similar niches to your own. Unfortunately there are also a lot of Internet marketers who spam people and the last thing you want your business to be known for is that.
Getting the mix of self promotional internet marketing and unread tweets right does not need to be so difficult the key is to be someone worth following and have an understanding of how and when to best to use Twitter in your business and above all engage with and increase your potential customer base. Below are a few steps to make this process easier for you:
- It is important you time your internet business tweets for peak time which is usually working hours 9 – 5pm, if you cannot do it yourself just use auto scheduling tools like Hootsuite so people see content during peak.
- Try to follow people within your niche; this will help you with finding good content to retweet. Use listorious.com, and twellow.com to help you do this. Build a list of sites you would like to get links from and then find Twitterers from those sites to communicate with and share Internet business content with. If you give links and retweets you will usually get them back.
- Instead of choosing people to follow blindly why not use other Users’ Twitter Lists and “Following” Links. This should help you identify people or organisations on Twitter with similar offerings to your own. Just make sure to follow the individual users on a list and not just the list itself!
- If most of your business is local to your geographic location then use tools like Localtweeps.com and Trendsmap.com to connect to local consumers in your area. Also try tapping into influential local circles within your market or locale. Using tools like Twittergrader can help you find possible influential people or markets to follow then you can look at their lists to find the true people of influence in your area who you can follow.
- Check what topics are trending in your industry and get involved by sharing your information, knowledge and tips related to trending topics within your niche. You can find hashtags on topics of interesting using wthashtag.com and use that as a way to find questions and tag answers you provide this will help people trust you and show your expertise.
It is important for any Internet business owner to take time to respond and engage with their followers on Twitter. Twitter is a powerful tool, that can help you increase your internet business presence through proper use of its two-way communication process, which you if used correctly in your internet marketing efforts to engage with followers can help increase your potential customer base.
Internet Business Facebook Fan Pages
Feb 14th
In the pursuit of more potential customers and more visibility for your Internet business you should have at least looked into social media platforms once. Top of the list should have been Facebook, and how you can use this platform to reach those customers.
Please understand one basic fact about Facebook Fan Pages and that is they are great for internet marketing to promote your business, key features for online promotion include; discussion hosting and wall, messaging to members (great if you have a promotion or special offer on), video and photo public exchange, related event creation and promotion with social ads.
Fan Pages use features such as group contact, which allow messages to be sent to the group and they show up as a tiny link or “Update” in the upper right-hand corner of your Facebook Home Page. There are also many tools like targeted Message sending, you can filter by age, sex, country, etc. then you send the message to them, interesting for business you can use these options to specifically target your audience sector or group, collect stats and even promote your internet business site or Fan page using ads.
The main reasons a Facebook Fan Page is better for your Internet Business is it will help drive traffic and find a larger more targeted audience for your products and services, it can also help you build long-term relationships with your fans, customers and readers. Facebook and SEO are more connected than ever which both Google and Bing admitted in December last year they both stated that Twitter and Facebook impact rankings.
Fan pages are visible to unregistered people and are thus indexed and are a source of traffic – from search engines and from within Facebook itself. Building trust and credibility is important and you need to engage people on a personal level. Fan Pages are great for reputation management, as they are perceived as more personal and inviting than your standard Internet business web pages.
If you have an Internet business you should love the idea of reaching an unlimited audience, and the possibility of that audience growing all the time, then a Fan Page is what you need, since that also avoids any connection to a personal Facebook account.
The main point here is that your Internet business needs to establish a presence on Facebook as part of a complete internet marketing strategy, to gain you results and grow your internet business, if you are still not sure how to get the job done then speak to a UK internet business consultant here at The Internet Business Coach who can help you create a great Fan Page for $300
Google Updates and How To Stay Ahead
Feb 11th
Last year Google changed the way they rated links and many Internet business people did not really pay enough attention to this and in the process of recent updates found that their rank was affected. The latest update also had many Internet business owners scratching their head as to why their rank had changed.
John Mueller at Google stated that “the new algorithms where looking for high quality, unique and compelling content”, not easy to do these days in the ever burgeoning online content race, however if you feel your site content is unique try to separate it and ensure title tags and metas on that page are good, that it is within the top layer structures of your site where it is easy to find and not on pages where you have auto generated content from other sites. By doing this it helps ensure your content Internet marketing efforts are well received for the next round of updates by Google.
Back to links however, the basic fact is not all links are created equal, so many links you maybe creating for your site may not only not being weighted the way you think they should be but also the value of the link can be affected despite the fact that the link maybe within your field, come from similar and reputable sites. So really what does this mean for the perplexed Internet marketer, simply this Google is weighting links based on how likely a “reasonable surfer” would be likely to click on that link. In essence Google is looking at two things:
• Link visibility (where links are placed and their appearance)
• Link relevance (how relevant is the site you link to or that is linking to you)
This change means essentially that a lot of practises people used to use for linking really do not
apply in the same way as before or are no longer as effective as they once where. So methods like: Bulk directory submission – This has been bad for ages but people for some unknown reason are still doing it, Bulk link exchange – Use this only if you want penalties or to be banned from search engines. Forum posting and blog commenting was once extremely effective but now it can help people but do not count on it for link juice, similarly Social bookmarking is still a helpful resource but not really useful for link juice anymore.
Instead use the following Internet marketing linking methods, Guest blogging – This is always a great way of getting exposure for your internet business and also of gaining high quality links to your site, Link baiting is also great, basically you put great content up on article sites etc and it acts as bait which people will choose to link to, this method will only work with excellent content that you can spin a few times for variation. Try using Social Media to attract links via Twitter, Facebook, Myspace etc.
If you use any of the above your internet marketing efforts will be more effective so to will be your efforts to either hold onto your PR (Page Rank) or improve it. Most of all you need to ensure that incoming links are from sites deemed by Google as having a good weighting or value, you need to ensure your internet business websites content is unique and easy to find so that in the next round of Google updates your business does better.
Integrating Your Offline And Online Marketing Efforts
Feb 9th
online offline marketing
Marketing communications has an integrated approach associated with it. As a business owner/ marketer, you need to use different platforms to promote your internet business. Although the platforms may vary the objective is the same, to communicate effectively your business offering to as many customers as possible.
A promotional mix for any business contains both traditional promotional techniques, as well as modern online social media techniques. Traditional marketing is mostly outbound marketing wherein you make efforts to reach a potential customer whereas online marketing is an inbound promotion where you try to attract potential customers to contact you.
Online marketing can help your internet business reach many prospective customers which can help improve your bottom line however more often than not the message your website and marketing material both online and offline conveys to prospects is either not what you need or want or worse not presented in a way the prospect understands. Much of these problems can be avoided by proper campaign planning and full integration.
Most internet business owners look at their marketing in a very short sighted manner it is either online or off but the realisation that if you integrate the two will help your business grow a lot faster. A good match for integration is social media platforms and TV and radio ads where the use of slogans like ‘join the debate’ on Twitter/facebook etc can be widely and easily used in the ad to give broader appeal.
No small/medium business owner can truly afford long TV ads as they are too costly so a small snippet with a Youtube web address is a great way to drive offline potential customers online to check out the extended ad on a site such as Youtube which can easily be directed back to your personal internet business site. If you have your site set up for video then you could easily integrate a video you upload to Youtube onto your business site directly and give that address in your marketing ad campaign instead.
Using simple integration and tactics to grab offline attention to then encourage online participation is key if you want to increase the ‘volume’ of traffic and potential sales from your site. Presenting an accurate message and enforcing the repetitive effect for the advertisement on radio is a great way to get people to remember your brand remember brand is what sells.
By applying a bit of creativity to your internet marketing and to your traditional marketing you can generate a highly profitable stream of targeted traffic which has the potential to increase your internet business sales and turnover.
Facebook Is Officially The Most Visited Web Site – Or Is It?
Feb 4th
We’ve discussed the importance of social media as it relates to your internet marketing many times in these columns and, hopefully, we’ve managed to impress upon you how important it is that your internet business has a presence on the various social media platforms, Facebook in particular. If not, this latest piece of news regarding Facebook should make you sit up and take notice.
Facebook Becomes Most Visited Site
A report from Experian Hitwise shows that Facebook has now moved into the top spot as the most visited web site in 2010 in the U.S., taking over from long-time leader, Google.
According to Hitwise, Facebook had become the leader in monthly traffic, over Google, back in March 2010, but this marks the first time the social networking behemoth has been recognised as the winner of the traffic race over the course of a year.
Fact Or Fiction?
But, is Facebook really the winner when all facets of web traffic are considered? What we’re referring to here is the fact that Google’s online empire is made up of many sites these days with Google itself ranking number 2 and Yahoo ranking number 5, so that the cumulative total of the traffic to all the sites within Google’s network resulted in a 9.85 percent share, making Google the winner overall. When taking into account the cumulative totals, this resulted in Facebook being ranked second with 8.93 percent, with Yahoo! and its related sites coming next with 8.12 percent.
However, of all the individual web pages, Facebook was the most visited, with Google.com in second place.
Is Google Its Own Worst Enemy?
The ironic thing in all this is that the number one search term for the year 2010 was Facebook, which means that a lot of the traffic supplied to Facebook came courtesy of its biggest rival, Google.
The results show that the 10 biggest sites on the internet attracted 33 percent of all traffic, an increase of 12 percent over the previous year. This means more traffic for the bigger sites and less for the small business owners.
Small Internet Businesses Benefit From The Big Boys
But, the important point in all this is that, regardless of whether search or social is the winner, the overall winner in all this is the small internet business owner, who benefits from both Facebook and Google and owes the success of his business, and, perhaps its very existence, to these two giants.
An UK internet marketing service can help you to set up your business to use both search and the social networks to boost the success of your business online.
