Now that we're heading into the third week of the government shutdown, businesses across the country are affected to varying degrees. Obviously those business owners with direct governmental ties, for example those with government contracts, are affected the most, but the longer the shutdown continues, the further down the effects trickle.
All businesses with an online presence are trying to achieve the same basic goal - getting the largest possible captive audience so that the highest possible percentage of that audience will become (and remain) customers. Search engine optimization is one of the key ways to achieve this, because search engines are generally the first stop for people who are looking to purchase something or solve a problem. As such, the quest to rank high for particular search terms has become both an art and a science, with new techniques for optimization continually surfacing.
Facebook and Twitter are always there. You can pop in and check your accounts, disappear for a couple of weeks, and when you come back, everything is just how you left it, people carrying on the global conversation without you. What you're not seeing, however, is what your silence is costing you in followers and potential customers. Here are some reasons why it's important to stay consistently active on your social media accounts.
Most business owners know that they should have a blog on their website, but often once the blog is in place, there's some hesitation or confusion about how best to use it. Filling your blog with content isn't something to be done randomly - you'll want to adopt a strategy to make sure that you attract readers and, more importantly, retain them as customers.
Pinterest is one of those growing social networks that's still somehow elusive to many people. Sometimes, if the nature of your product or service isn't particularly visual, it can be difficult to see how to create boards with compelling content, and to build a following for those boards. If you've been having trouble getting your pinterest account to grow, here are five ways you can help get the ball rolling.
We all know the importance of periodic website redesign. Over time, you'll find that your site has outdated contact information, old photos that need updates, or design features that do not reflect current standards. However, though most of us keep up with our websites, often we don't give the same attention to our social media accounts.
Twitter, perhaps more than other social networks, has somewhat of a reputation for marketing spam. Quite often you'll see companies using their Twitter accounts for nothing but self-promotion, to the point where the entire tweet stream becomes tantamount to spam. Not surprisingly, this is a good way to lose followers fast, and what these companies are not realizing is that there's a reason the word "social" is the first part of social media. Here's how you can avoid making the same mistake.
If we had to pick one word to describe today's online experience, "dynamic" might be a good choice. Whereas the early days of the web featured mostly static pages with lots of text and not much else, the sites you see now are bursting with information of all kinds, with a lot of two-way interaction and audience engagement. The advent of multimedia, of course, has played a huge role in this evolution. As broadband speeds have become faster and media quality has improved, things like images, video, and even live streaming have become not only possible, but commonplace.
Fifteen or even ten years ago, the web was a sea of text. Sure, there were photos and even some video, but bandwidth limitations kept these aspects of the web to a minimum, and if you wanted to get a message across, well-written copy was the way to do it.
Marketing over social media, like most online endeavors, is less a monetary investment, and more an investment of time and effort. It takes work to keep up with Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, or however many other social networks you belong to, and keeping those conversations going strong is the key to making the effort worth it. So when you run across a new smaller, niche social network that seems like it could be promising for your business, it can be difficult to decide what to do. Do you really have time to be taking on another set of social media responsibilities? On the other hand, could a social network more tailored to your specific audience be exactly the boost your strategy needs?
Google is continually coming out with new tools to help you with your marketing efforts, and to reward those who have good content and sound expertise with higher rankings in its search engine. One of the more recent and most misunderstood elements of Google's ranking algorithm is Author Rank, which ostensibly allows authors to associate things they write online with a relevant Google profile.
By now you've probably noticed that mobile browsing is the next big thing, and in fact even now mobile computing is of the most popular ways to access the internet. This means that every business owner at some point needs to have a site that is mobile-friendly and optimized accordingly. It may seem like a mammoth task, but if you keep a few things in mind as you're developing your ideas, you can make the entire process a lot easier.
