Category Archives: Small Business Marketing

5 Web Trends Every Business Should Know

SEO, SEO video, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Video marketing, , ,

5 web trendsWhether you conduct business in cyberspace or run a local small business, the Internet inevitably will influence the success of your business. Recent years have seen web technologies evolving at an astonishing pace. These five trends represent some of the most vital web trends that businesses should know and consider.

1. Cloud Services are becoming Standard

Cloud services have leveled the playing field between businesses of all sizes. Unfortunately, this also means increased competition. With the cost savings and productivity benefits of cloud services, many businesses will need to consider not whether they can afford to utilize cloud services, but whether they can afford not to use them. From allowing more work outside the office to managing clients, cloud services offer affordable ways to accomplish more at prices any business can afford. For an in-depth guide on cloud services, consider this guide at InfoWorld.

2. Webinars are changing the Way that Businesses Conduct Video marketing

From product demonstrations to question and answer sessions, webinars are quickly becoming a popular way for businesses to engage their clients and customers. Though in-house events and promotions will always have their place in business routines, webinars are becoming an ever-popular way to invite others into some aspect of your business and to build up buzz about a product launch or event. These online events are also a great way to capture information for marketing purposes. Chris G offers a brief overview of how webinars work and what they have to offer your business.

3. Virtual Environments are the Next Hot Trend

Virtual environments, such as those offered by InterCall, are one of the newest ways to host events and extend your business’ online presence. From virtual trade shows and meetings to employee training or online learning, virtual environments combine popular elements video marketing, Internet conferencing, webinars, trade shows and other business events with an easy to use Internet interface. This allows customers, clients or employees to attend from anywhere in the world with a few clicks of their mouse. Many virtual environment hosts make it easy to customize the environment with branding and other visual elements for increased engagement and marketing potential as well. As an emphasis on globalization, cloud services and other technologies continues to grow, this innovative solution will become more popular.

4. Internet Video Conferencing is becoming increasingly Affordable and Vital

Video conferencing is helping to eliminate physical distance as a hindrance to business communication and productivity. From small team collaborations and personal conversations to full-scale conferences with hundreds of attendees, there are a variety of platforms available to meet business needs. Most modern conference call services support numerous ways for attendees to get involved. Features, such as collaboration, conference archiving and file sharing, provide numerous benefits over traditional or phone-based conferencing. Whether they are streaming the conference to their smart phone while on a business trip or sitting in a virtual conference center with other attendees, the result is a fully interactive and engaging experience for everyone. Computer World recently outlined 7 of the most popular solutions.

5. Social Media is Here to Stay

In the last year, social media has solidified its place in the business process. While the coming year will likely see many businesses analyzing the benefits of social media with increasing depth, it is certainly not going anywhere. Customers are beginning to view social media as a common communication platform as well. A recent post at eWeek outlines some of the findings from a recent Gartner study on social media expectations. Gartner predicts that by the end of the year, businesses that fail to establish a social media presence and monitor it regularly could see a significant backlash from both existing and potential customers. If your business has not yet established a social media presence, BlogTyrant offers a great guide on choosing the right platforms and getting started.

The Internet continues to change the way that the world does business. From making it simple to communicate around the world to providing new and powerful ways to market your brand or products, the Internet is an essential tool for any business. These five trends are likely to shape businesses in the coming year.

About the Author: Stephan Jukic is a freelance writer who generally covers a variety of subjects relating to the latest changes in white hat SEO, mobile technology, marketing tech and digital security. He also loves to read and write about location-free business, portable business management and finance. When not busy writing or consulting on technology and digital security, he spends his days enjoying life’s adventures either in Canada or Mexico, where he spends part of the year. Connect with Stephan on LinkedIn.

What is SEO and how does it work?

Link Building, SEO, Small Business Marketing, , ,

what is seo?SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. Search engine optimization is the process of improving the website visibility in the search results of search engines. This process involves various SEO techniques to improve ranking.

The need for SEO arises because research shows that most people don’t look beyond the first page of search results, so if you want to create awareness about your brand, then you need to appear at the top of search results.

Effective SEO can help you:

  • Broaden awareness in new geographical areas
  • Build reputation among customers, employees
  • Improve customer service by delivering strong online support
  • Increase awareness of product benefits among public
  • You can improve the products, by conversing online with the customers via blogs, forums and feedback forms.

How does SEO work?

Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing index pages on the web with the help of spiders or crawlers. These spiders or crawlers use web pages links and travel from one site to another after the links. When search engines find any new page, then it will crawl its code and transfer it back to its data center. To keep their index fresh, spiders may visit indexed websites daily. Search engines use a formula commonly known as Algorithm to “rate” relevancy of the websites for each search query. The most relevant websites for a particular search query appears at the top of search results.

Some of the major factors contributing in Google algorithms for better ranking in search results are:

  • Keyword rich on-page content in the form of paragraphs
  • Keywords in description tag
  • Number of links on a page
  • Keywords in title tag
  • The number and quality of the web pages available on the internet that are linking to your site
  • Keyword density

Visibility of the website can affected by two basic factors:

  1. On-page SEO factors
  2. Off-page SEO factors

On-page SEO factors: On-page factors are those factors which affect visibility of the website on search engines, but it can only found on your website. These factors include:

Content, title of URL, title and Meta descriptions and keyword density. Different search engines place different values on various elements. For instance, what Google carries value for particular element may not equally important for Yahoo?

Off-page SEO factors: off-page factors are those factors which affect t visibility of the website but cannot be found on your website. To find relevancy of your website on the basis of off-page factors, search engine will assess that, what other websites think about your websites. It will depend on the measure and quality of the links which you will receive from other websites.

Search Engine Optimization is extremely a wide topic. Besides this there are no set of particular rules for optimizing the websites for search engines. Due to this online marketers work hard to search or find the loopholes within the search engine algorithms and once they find, they end up with providing UN suitable or irrelevant content to users. To sort out this, search engines update their algorithm constantly, so that they cover up these loopholes and give relevant content to the users.

Kristine  Lise an author who is interested in written on SEO/ Internet marketing related topics. She is currently working with SEO Rank Smart, who offers best SEO Packages to its clients you can see her work on her company site.

Three Ways To Make Your Tweets Stand Out From The Rest

content marketing, Copywriting, SEO, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Twitter Marketing, , ,

make your tweets stand outWith so many people on Twitter these days it can be difficult to make your tweets stand out from all the others.  This is particularly true when you have people who are following a lot of people following you.  How can you ensure that they are seeing your tweets and that they even care about what you are writing?  It is not enough to have a Twitter account to promote your business if your tweets are being skipped by your followers.  The following are three ways that you can use to make your tweets stand out from the rest and to generate more interest in your company.

Write a Headline Not a Tweet

One thing you can do is to look at your tweet as more of a headline for a newspaper rather than worrying about staying within the character count.  You want to grab the attention of your readers immediately so it needs to catch their eye.  Think of the days when newspapers ruled the information sector and think about how the writers would use shocking or catchy titles for their stories to engage readers.  This is how you should think about your tweets and if you do this, you will get people to read them.  If the post is too long for Twitter, then you can always add a link that takes your reader to the full story.

Link to Your Products

If you are promoting a product then you have to include a link to the product’s page on your website.  People are typically lazy when it comes to the internet and even if they really want to purchase the product they won’t go through much hassle to get it.  You may find that there are some who will go to your website without the link but they are not the norm.  Make it easy on your customers to find your website because you can bet your competitors are offering links.  Also, there is some legitimacy to a tweet that has a link so your followers won’t think that you are spamming them.

Use Statistics to Make a Point

There is nothing better than reading a tweet that offers a strange or interesting statistic.  These tweets tend to be retweeted more than many other types of tweets.  When you get more retweets then you have a better chance of gaining more followers.  Unless you want to buy them and keep it a secret then you need to find creative ways to get people to follow you.  Again, make sure you provide the link that backs up the statistic you provided or people may think that you are making things up off the top of your head.

It is not enough to have a Twitter account; you also need to provide tweets that get the attention of your followers.  You can think of your tweets like the headline of a news story or use interesting statistics to get the attention of the readers.  Also make sure to link to any pertinent article or to your products website when necessary.

Our guest blogger, Amber Christy has been a power tweeter for four years and has been actively promoting her business on Twitter.

New Advertising Ideas To Help Your Business

Blogging, content marketing, email marketing, guest blogging, interactive ads, Small Business Marketing, , , ,

Innovative Advertising IdeasSavvy business owners are always on the lookout for new forms of advertising, and unique ways to surprise potential customers. In recent years, we have seen the advent of the QR code to engage mobile phone users. Another popular method of advertising in recent years is having a viral sensation, the way the new Old Spice man has been.

Here are some other new advertising ideas that may give you some ideas of your own for your business:

Interactive ads within a magazine

You know about scratch and sniff ads, or the peel-open perfume ads. But that is just the beginning.  Forbes magazine recently made an issue Wi-Fi-enabled, which means that the reader carrying it around could get free Wi-Fi. Microsoft sponsored the ad, along with T-Mobile to provide the technology to make the magazine Wi-Fi-enabled.  Springwise says that “the campaign, created with advertising tech firm Americhip, simultaneously promoted the validity of Microsoft’s cloud-based program and gave Forbes’ readership another reason to carry the publication with them – killing two birds with one stone.”

You may not have Microsoft’s budget, but try to think of some interactive way that you could reach out to readers. Even something as simple as asking potential customers to identify a photo or quote, and directing them to your website to potentially win a prize, could help engage them in what you do.

Marketing to bloggers

A small business with a small budget does not have the money for a big advertising or marketing campaign. But they can easily get some good buzz by marketing to bloggers. Here’s what you can do – reach out to bloggers in your area, or your field. For example, if you market baseball t-shirts related to the New York Mets, a good way to get your product out there is to offer a free t-shirt to any blogger who gives you a plug in the blog.

There are several reasons why doing so can be appealing to you:  bloggers are easier to reach than their counterparts in the mainstream media, they have a fan base and a good number of readers, and they generally are savvy in social media as well. This can help promote your business, and if the bloggers like the product, they will tell their friends, and their friends will tell their friends, and so on and so on.

Email advertising

You may already be doing internet advertising. Email advertising is less well-known, but can provide a terrific bang for the buck. Think about it – whether on a desktop computer, laptop, smartphone, or tablet computer, people will check their emails on all of the devices. So if you have an ad running in, say, a newspaper’s “Top 10 Articles of the Day” newsletter, the reader will get to read the ad wherever he or she is.

In addition, email ad platforms like LiveIntent will seamlessly update the ads, if need be.  So if you had a Memorial Day sales ad in an email newsletter, but the reader does not actually open the ad until late June, you can switch out the ad dynamically to reflect the new ad in the old email.

That is just the beginning of new marketing and advertising ideas out there. Tell us about what you new ideas you have tried with your business.

Lisa Swan writes for a variety of tech and business sites, including Huffington Post. She lives in New York City.