Building Your Online Marketing Ecosystem Part VII: Feedback And Comments

By John Joyce on March 16, 2010 - Comments 0

If you want to develop the “persona” of your small business, you have to make sure your audience is easily able to interact and share their thoughts and feedback with you. It’s also important to deliver engaging and, in some cases, polarizing and provocative content that will motivate people to interact. Finally, once you spark conversation and debate, you still have to maintain some semblance of control over the process so I have listed several tools available to help with this process:

Click on Image to View Interactive Online Marketing Ecosystem

Introducing The Interactive Online Marketing Ecosystem

By John Joyce on March 11, 2010 - Comments 1

In an effort to offer the most value to our readers, we have created an interactive map of the Online Marketing Ecosystem. There are so many marketing technologies available that we felt it was important to present your options in one central location. This will be a “living” map and will be updated as often as needed – as long as you’re willing to share your ideas and suggestions with us.

Here are some simple navigation tips:

• Click and drag to move around the map
• Hover over the small arrow next to the name of each tool to see/follow the external link
• Click zoom in/out buttons at bottom of the window
• Click “full screen” button to view in a browser window

Thanks!

Building Your Online Marketing Ecosystem Part VI: Friends And Family

By John Joyce on March 9, 2010 - Comments 0

Click Image to View Interactive Online Marketing Ecosystem

This one’s going to be quick based on the fact that most people are already Facebook users and understand the power of the platform.  As I have said over and over again (sorry for being a broken record), you have to present your business information in as many places as possible and that includes social networks.

As was illustrated in my last post, you can automate the process of spreading the word across different platforms without actually having to manually do so within each application.  If you don’t want to post your marketing outreach on your personal page, make sure you create a fan page in Facebook and only post there.  Either way, your friends and family are great resources for creating word of mouth momentum.

Building Your Online Marketing Ecosystem Part V: Create A Playbook

By John Joyce on March 6, 2010 - Comments 0

I mentioned in my last post that I would discuss the “how to” of implementing operational efficiencies within your social marketing efforts so let’s get to it.  Friends and clients are always asking me, “is this social media thing really worth the time and effort?”   My answer is, “it doesn’t have to take a lot of your time as long as you 1) Carve out a set allotment of time each day to develop conversation points and 2) Identify the appropriate tools to automate and streamline the delivery process.  The graphic below is only a small portion of the tools making up the “Twitterverse”:

Click Image to View Interactive Online Marketing Ecosystem

As a consultant, I work with clients during regular business hours so it’s most efficient for me to execute social media tactics early in the morning.  The overarching goal is to remain top of mind within your “community” by consistently helping, sharing and soliciting feedback.

Here’s a quick example of linking together several tools to more efficiently bring your message to social media platforms:

Click Image to View Interactive Online Marketing Ecosystem

It might take some time for you to figure out what tools fit your specific social media needs but, once you’ve identified the most effective system, you’ll actually find yourself able to focus on content creation instead of manual distribution.  You make time each morning to brush your teeth and have a cup of coffee so your social media efforts should be just as automatic.

I’ve shown you the tools; now it’s up to you to put them to good use.  Also, please let me know if there are any tools you’re using that you would like to share with us.

Stop What You’re Doing And Confirm You’ve Done These 3 Things!

By John Joyce on February 26, 2010 - Comments 0

It’s Friday and we’re all busy trying to close out the week strong but there’s no time like the present when it comes to improving your chances of “being found” online.  I continue to see websites that could substantially improve their SEO with very simple changes but, for whatever reason, it never gets done.  So, I recommend you check the following and fix (if not today, over the weekend):

Page Titles: Do you have page titles?  Do you succinctly describe the value you offer?  If the answer is, “no”, get to work.  Your page titles can be the most important search copy on your entire site.  Experiment.  Try different copy and see what performs best.

Blog: Your blog is also very important to organic rank so you need to make sure your site, http://www.yourdomain.com, gets credit for that content.  This means you don’t want http://yourdomain.blogger.com or http://yourdomain.wordpress.com because the content is separate from your website.  Secondly, if you self-host your website, you want your content in a subfolder and not a subdomain. http://blog.yourdomain.com is seen by the search engines as a different domain, therefore, the content is not credited to http://www.yourdomain.com.  We recommend you use http://www.yourdomain.com/blog instead.

301 Permanent Redirect: Do you know if http://yourdomain.com is permanently forwarded to http://www.yourdomain.com?  It seems like this is already done because they both take you to your website, right?  The easiest way to check is to visit http://bit.ly/duz3xu and type in http://yourdomain.com and click the “check redirects” button.  Here are the results from my check:

Checked link: http://thesmallbiznest.com

Type of redirect: 301 Moved Permanently

Redirected to: http://www.thesmallbiznest.com/

If you don’t know how to do these things yourself, check with your hosting company, website developer and blogging forums for step by step directions pertaining to your specific configuration.

Good Luck!