Business Coaching

A quick way to an SEO ranking is fresh, updated content on your website.

Did you know a website won’t even show up in searches unless there are at least 10 pages on it?

Not many people do. This is why, with search engine optimization, it’s important to put content up on your website, update it fairly often, and, if you’re trying to build an SEO ranking quick, do it quick!

But how?

ActionCOACH’s Social Media blog has some quick and easy tips. Read more here.

Marla Erwin helped Whole Foods master social media.

Think you’re busy trying to constantly update your own Twitter page? Imagine handling more than a million Twitter followers.

Marla Erwin, Interactive Art Director for Whole Foods, is credited with Whole Foods’ social media success. In its first year on Twitter, Whole Foods gained a million followers. Since starting with Twitter, Whole Foods now has several separate accounts for users who have more specific questions about the store’s products — a Twitter account for cheese, one for Whole Foods recipes, etc.

How did Marla garner so many followers? She incorporated user-generated content onto Whole Foods’ Twitter and Facebook accounts. Recipes, product ratings and reviews and comments on the Whole Foods’ blog all went onto their Twitter feed.

Marla then went on to use Facebook and Twitter for different uses: Facebook she uses for more editorial content and to start discussions among fans and friends (since users can see others’ comments on Facebook, it’s easier to have a discussion), and Twitter she uses for Whole Foods promotions, information for customers, to answer customers’ questions and tweet out links to Whole Foods’ blog.

Read the whole article here,  and see if any of what Marla did for Whole Foods’ Twitter and Facebook can be used for your business.

Tracking progress with online marketing is easier with these tools.

After finding online marketing opportunities, like we said yesterday, you’ll need to track your “wins.” This can be a confusing and daunting thing to do, too…unless you know the tools that can track your leads for you.

Google Analytics helps yet again! It tracks referrals from the company’s social media profiles. And twinfluence and Twitalyzer are Twitter-specific tools that measure how influential and
far-reaching the company’s Twitter presence is.

Klout tracks the impact of your posted content and links, including which audiences are exposed to the content and how they interact with it.

Translate the information about results and figure out the positive financial impact on your
business. Key performance indicators can come in various forms, like new revenue generated, a good amount of time and money saved, or a good financial return on investment.

Armed with this information, hopefully it will become clear how much social media marketing is helping your business…or how much more you need to work at it in order to make a positive financial impact on your business! If you want to find out what needs work in your business quickly, take our Business Health Check.

Everyone’s talking about how blogging can expand a business’ reach further. Most business owners over the age of 35 are skeptical.

Well, it won’t get you instant success, but truth is, a business that consistently updates its own blog with info about the company and issues in its industry are more well-known businesses because of it.

For example, Google has a blog where it writes from time to time about ideas and concepts the site is thinking about unveiling (the latest is something called “Living Stories“), updates to its browser, Google Chrome, complete with screen shots, warnings of scams using Google’s name…the list goes on and on. When you’re as big as Google and have a lot going on, there’s a lot to blog about. Not that they need the SEO rankings, but a blog does help with SEO, and make users’ experience better by providing how-tos and useful information.

Want a lesser known example than Google? Coudal Partners, an advertising agency in Chicago, has a blog on its home page. Some people might wonder why they’d have a blog linking to interesting yet random articles and discussing various issues on the company’s home page. But not only does it make them stand out, fresh content helps their SEO ranking and the variety of creative topics their employees blog about show they get creative inspiration from just about everywhere at any place in the world (a post of theirs links to “Subway Architecture“. Cool stuff. ).

If your business starts its own blog, not only is it a great social media tool that provides networking by way of commenting on other blogs, people commenting on yours and leaving links to your/their blogs, it can also spread the word about your company by doing the following:

Increasing your site’s SEO (if you don’t know what these three letters mean, they stand for “search engine optimization”): SEO is something that is hugely important to businesses. Whenever someone searches an online engine for a keyword relating to your business, you want your business to be at the top of the page. It can be used to gain search engine traffic for given keywords or search terms. Your blog offers the opportunity to promote your Web site for hundreds or even thousands of different keywords.

Search engines particularly like promoting blogs because they offer a large amount of content that is updated and added to on a regular basis.

Easy Access to Company News and Info: However, be careful you don’t blog in press release style – if a blog is all praise for the company, it doesn’t sound genuine. Blog about company news and info that is useful and interesting, just like Coudal Partners and Google. People would always rather read genuine, high-quality content instead of filler information, too.

Expanding your Reach: A blog is a great way to find new potential customers. Write about the niche your business caters to in the market, and anything interesting within that niche, and people looking for anything related to your business could find your blog in a search. Keep in mind that updating information on the blogs and blogging regularly can keep people coming back to your blog for information and could become customers, too. Regular content is imperative to the success of any blog. This content needs to be informative, accurate, and written in a way that will appeal to your visitors.

Creating Fun and Familiarity: Faceless corporate blogs aren’t that fun to read. Why? Besides being dry and boring, they also don’t feel very inviting. Going back to our point about high-quality content, familiarity is very important with content – if the reader can’t relate to it or feels it’s just a higher up writing from a press release, the reader won’t take it to heart. Keep this in mind, and make it work for your company by designating a person (not necessarily the CEO) or a team to do the blogging. If you read Google’s blog, you’ll see that even their posts have a bit of personality to them. It’s easy to do.

All in all, a blog on your company’s site might be worth looking in to – hey, it’s good enough for Google – and it may be the extra piece your company needs to separate it from the competition.