Category Archives: Blogging

10 Tips To Help Establish Online Authority In Your Niche

Blogging, content marketing, Facebook Marketing, Reputation, SEO, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Twitter Marketing,

online authorityAn online business with authority will stay ahead of the competition. Of course, when looking to get to the top, one must work hard. Here are 10 tips to help establish online authority in your niche.

Organic search results: When using a major search engine, a potential customer will place a lot of value on the top results. Remember, a business that ranks highly for the main keywords will have a serious advantage against the competition. Luckily, a website owner with great content and solid links can rank highly in the leading search engines

Guest posting: A well-written guest post will build the authority of an author. To get started, the business owner should contact bloggers to swap posts. With a well-written post, a business owner will see a serious spike in traffic to his or her website.

Advertisements: When searching on Google, one will see ads. When the ads of a company appear at the top of the search results, one will gain more customers. Remember, when a business has more exposure, customers will take notice.

Articles: A business owner should write articles relevant to his or her field. Then, the expert can posts articles all over the Internet. This will help a person establish their authority and gain in the SEO results. Remember, an informative article will help the individual gain authority for the short and long-term.

Social media: Now, customers expect to see a company on Facebook and Twitter. Luckily, one can set up social media accounts in an afternoon.

Website: When making a website, one must keep customers in mind. Ideally, the webmaster should include solid and interesting content on the Web pages. When including useful information, one will have a leg up on establishing a rapport with visitors.

Book: When an author can write an e-book, he or she will gain a loyal following. Fortunately, one can write an electronic book in their spare time. When giving the material away, an entrepreneur will go a long way in marketing his or her idea to thousands of followers.

Questions and answers: There are plenty of question and answer sites on the Internet. An informed individual should sign up for these sites and start answering questions. When doing so, the site owner will gain interested and loyal followers. Using these sites can also help a business owner with their SEO results.

Videos: People love to watch videos on the Internet. When posting an informative and helpful video, an entrepreneur can garner interest in his or her product or service. Remember, with a video, one can highlight their big ideas.

Press release: When writing a press release, a company can create a buzz for a product release. To get started, an individual should research the basics of a press release. Then, the entrepreneur should write the content and release it on news sites. With well-written release, a company should build authority on the Internet quickly.

When following these 10 tips, a company should have no problem establishing online authority in their niche.

Mark Smith is a business developer and technology enthusiest who swears by the Servecorp virtual office.

Why You Should Be A Social CEO

Blogging, content marketing, Copywriting, Facebook Marketing, Pinterest, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Twitter Marketing, ,

Three-quarters of executives wants their chief executive officer to become the social face of their brand, a new study from KRC Research and Weber Shandwick has revealed.

That’s because eight in 10 executives believe CEO sociability improves company reputation. 630 executives were interviewed and the vast majority wants their CEOs to use social media channels and engage with customers more frequently.

The benefits of a social CEO

The report actually predicts that the number of CEOs participating in social media will increase by 50 per cent in the next five years as people’s need to put a face to a brand and see who’s behind a company grows.

Some companies may be tempted to offload this responsibility on someone other than the CEO, but it should remembered that with a unique position comes a unique ability to influence how people feel about a company.

A social CEO can:

• Humanise the company

• Boost the company’s reputation

• Improve business results

• Show the company is innovative

• Set a social example for employees

Clearly all these duties can be carried out by someone other than a CEO, but it’s very rare for a company to have an employee who is better placed to lead from the front on these matters.

So, it’s time for CEOs to start taking social media seriously and learn how to use it to their businesses’ benefit.

They need to understand that social media takes time and it’s not just about updating the company’s blog or a social account like Facebook or LinkedIn with annoying promotional messages that customers will probably ignore.

CEOs should use social platforms to engage with conversation with existing and potential customers. They also need to understand that their social media activity should revolve around their audience. It’s all about the needs, wants and desires of the people a firm is trying to reach. It shouldn’t be all about the company.

The CEO Blogger

A blog is a great way to introduce a CEO to customers as it provides a solid platform to which other social activities can be anchor.

However, content needs to be well-written and helpful. Try and stay away from dull posts about what you had for breakfast and instead focus on tips and advice that will help people out.

Engaging in conversation and replying to comments will help gain customers’ trust, especially if they come right from the top.

In fact, the report showed that 32 percent of the executives with a socially active CEO believed comments posted by CEOs on social media channels are more credible, compared to 24 percent of executives who deemed CEO comments quoted by news media to be more credible.

The habits of highly social CEOs

Aside from blogging, Weber Shandwick’s report outlines several habits of highly social CEOs. These are:

1. Using a bigger set of social tools

2. Maintaining a presence on the company website

3. Writing their own content

4. Acting spontaneously but not becoming too informal

5. Engaging a wider variety of external stakeholders

Having a social CEO can bring so many benefits to a business so long as the CEO understands what social media is and doesn’t see it as a tool to push the company’s products and services on their customer’s feeds.

Guest post Alex Gavril – part of the 123-reg blog team. The company is the UK’s largest provider of domain names and offers a range of services including web hosting.

6 Awesome Strategies that Will Show You How To Grow Your Business Locally

Blogging, SEO, Small Business Marketing, Viral marketing

How to grow your business locallyBusinesses need to rely on either excellent marketing or local customers if they want to be successful locally. The only thing is that businesses usually have low budgets for local marketing. One optimal method of ensuring that you maximize your potential in terms of marketing is to utilize local sources of marketing and develop your business locally.  There are more than just a few methods you can get this accomplished so you need to select strategies that best fit your business model. You need to always identify the demographics of your customers before anything else and cater your efforts of marketing to them when you can.

Setting Up for Local Business
Before you launch a local campaign for marketing, make sure you are completely set up especially if you are beginning a brand new business. It is a good idea to do research of the options you plan to pursue and plan up to half a year in advance while you get your business license or settle a lease. In the case where you have already set up your business, you might want to think about local business rebranding. You need to consult your graphic designer or website developer to ensure that you have great, attractive, and professional local branding. In the long run, it will pay off.

Create Local Website
Setting up your website is the next step. This is something you should do especially when you are planning to penetrate the local market. After all, local customers search online for stuff they need using search engines. Having your site online with service details, directions and contact information is highly recommended.

Advertise with Free Ads
Use free advertising online. Sign up for a free account on Google places where you can list a service description, post a picture, list a website link, phone number and your address. Outside of Google, there are also going to be places your customers might look so get listed as much as you can. Sign up for free accounts on CitySearch, Yelp, FourSquare, Twitter and Facebook. You should set up a Facebook page and make friendly suggestions that your customers or visitors ‘like’ your account. When used regularly, these are great tools for exposing your business to local customers.

Start Blogging
If you love to write and want to share your business, your craft, offer videos, photos and tips of your business then you need to consider blogging. This could attract a throng of customers. Keep in mind that successful business blogs are the ones that give out stuff other than business promotions. They offer insight about the community or the craft. Blogs updated regularly will gain followers and can be linked to Twitter, Facebook or your website.

Network Locally
In your local newspaper business section, find out who the local reporters are and get to know them. They can, after all, be the key to getting your business promoted locally. You might first ask about advertising that is paid and then inquire if there are free listings for businesses on the website of the newspaper.  When you can, make sure you keep networking with them and other local businesses.

Get Referrals
Encourage all your website visitors and customers to write reviews on your website to help promote what you have to offer. Not all reviews might be great and if a majority are favourable they will get you more customers.

Growing your business, whether locally or online will demand a lot of time from you and the only way to succeed is by using proven strategies. Try these 6 awesome strategies to grow your business locally.

Emma Ursula is the local online marketing expert at OSI Affiliate Software providing local marketing help. When Emma is not golfing, she is always reading.

How Google Glass Could Change SEO

Blogging, Google glass, SEO, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Technology, , , ,

How Google glass will change EOMost of us who have been in the SEO game for a few years, will be somewhat reliant on Google to continue our trade. Google is the largest search engine by far, so it’s there that we want to reach the top of the SERPs, and it’s generally ‘what Google say goes’ as far as our promotional strategies are concerned.

But Google is reliant on hardware to be any use. In order to access Google at all, we need to be using a computer, smartphone or tablet of some kind – and so changes in the hardware industry could very easily have a big effect on the way we optimise for search. With Google Glass poised to make a huge splash in the hardware scene sometime soon, how might we expect this to alter the way we use search?

Factors to consider

Of course for Google Glass to have any impact on SEO, it is somewhat necessary for the device to actually be a hit. If nobody uses Google Glass, then it’s not going to affect search – end of story. That said though, even if Google Glass doesn’t take off in a big way, it could certainly prepare the market for the introduction of other augmented reality hardware. It might be that Google Glass flops, but ‘The Viewmaster 5,0089’ becomes a huge hit. And if that happens, then Google needs to make sure that it is the number one search provider still – lest Bing get in there first and steal a big portion of the market.

The New Search

How Google Glass will change search

Assuming though that Google Glass is a hit, and that the competition doesn’t turn up and throw a spoke in the works, we will likely all be using Google to search still – just on our faces.

Currently Google Glass isn’t really a device that you might surf the web with, but as developers start creating apps for it, we’ll probably find browsers popping up and people searching the web ‘hands free’.

And to do this, people will want to be able to use voice commands. With no other way to input text, they will be completely reliant on the in-built voice-recognition software in order to get the search results they want. In turn, this means we might start seeing a change in the kinds of keywords that people use – they’ll be searching for things that come more naturally to say rather than things that come more naturally to type.

This will likely mean a wider variety of keywords, and it will probably mean more ‘long tail’ keywords – though because voice-recognition isn’t perfect, most people will still probably want to keep their searches rather brief.

Searching on the Move

Augmented reality with Google glass

The fact that people will be walking around as they wear their hardware though, might also affect the kinds of things that they search for – we might start to see people searching for local conveniences more often for example, or for the weather reports.

Likewise, Google is likely to include location services even more closely as more and more people start searching on the go (something that has already happened to an extent thanks to the popularity of smartphones). Watch this space to find out what else might change, but just make sure that your site and your SEO is ready.

Today’s guest writer, Mike, is an internet marketing consultant who works at Wisdek. He is a passionate blogger and likes to share his strategies and views on marketing. He loves technology and is fond of knowing more about the latest gadgets that enter the market.