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You started your business, your digging the freedom, but now you need to set the example. You’re the mature grown up that can run a business so prove it. It’s pretty frequent that businesses fail due to lack of leadership and lack of setting the example.  Too often business owners don’t create space for themselves. What does this mean? Pretty simply put – Plan Ahead. You’re the one running the show so you need to be the one that plans your budget out a month or further, attend classes you sign up for or cancel with proper notice, stop showing up unannounced and do what you would expect from your employees.

Business requires organization and not flying by the seat of your pants. You may have it together, but it’s pretty common place that most business owners don’t act like business owners and as you may guess this can create problems.

Let’s say you’re in the retail business and you sell children’s clothes. You’re wholesaler is very organized and takes orders a month ahead of time in order to make sure everybody gets what they need in time without any unnecessary difficulties. If you don’t order on time there’s no slack and you’re pushed to next month’s delivery schedule.  But you own your own business so you can do whatever you want, right? So you wait until you need clothes delivered in a day or two and place your order. What do you think is going to happen? Do you think the CEO is going to make a special exception because you couldn’t get it together to make the order on time? Not likely. What is likely is you’ll have a whole bunch of unhappy customers that are pretty sure that the customer is always right and you’re dead wrong.

Do you understand who was wrong in this scenario?

Create space for yourself. Work with others to make your work easier. No the world doesn’t revolve around you, but it does revolve around business and yours will sink without you setting the example, being the grown up and being the professional.

What exactly is SEO and how can it help you?

Wikipedia’s definition of SEO is as follows: “Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a web site or a web page in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.”

If done correctly SEO can be a businesses’ key to getting visitors to their website and making a sale. Google and many other search engines take thousands of factors into account to make sure that all websites that rank high for any given keyword or phrase is exactly what the searcher is looking for.

Generally SEO is free and can be done by the business owners themselves, however it is a full-time job all to itself.  Optimal SEO efforts will include things such as article submissions, press releases, youtube videos, reviews, other websites linking back to your own, website optimization which includes meta tags, meta descriptions, organization and site maps. This is all just the tip of the iceberg…easy to see how it can be a full time job.

On top of being a full-time job it can take years in some cases to begin ranking on search engines. Search engines even take things like website age and how long a domain is registered for into account which is one of the reasons it can take so long. A brand new website has a slim chance in ranking for anything for at least 6 months. However I myself have ranked a brand new website in only two months, it is possible, but very time consuming.

At first glance it seems like a lot of work with little pay off. Not true at all. For example say you sell a program for losing weight. It’s a great program and it works and after a year or more the publicity begins to build up and the word gets out. Now your website can be found when people search “lose weight” on Google. Your website is on the first page and likely to be clicked on. Do you know how many people you’re website will be exposed to in one month for just that one keyword? 2,740,000 people in the United States alone searches that term in just one month.

Even better is SEO will allow your website to show up for potentially hundreds of keywords. It’s long hard work, but just think it 1% of those 2,740,000 bought your product, that would be 27,400 sales. Think you could live off that?

Don’t have the time to do SEO yourself, we can help. Visit us at

http://www.wix.com/msopen/virtual-assistant

 

www.ChrisBrogan.com/50-ideas-on-using-twitter-for-business

Self explanatory. 50 ways to use Twitter for your business.

(Source: buildyourbrandllc.com)

Book suggestion: Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug

Learn the key concepts to convert website visitors into buying customers.

You may have gotten thousands of Facebook fans, but how do you convert those fans into paying customers? Think of your business from the customer’s point of view. If you’re a business owner you know how challenging this can be.  If you were the customer what would entice you to your business? An easy answer is a giveaway of some type. Everybody likes something free which makes it the perfect chance to get your foot in the door and make an impression.

Think about what service or product you’re selling. What do you know about it? What would be valuable for someone to know? Write up a “special report” on this topic. It can be any length you want, ranging from 5 pages all the way up to 100 pages if you want. Offer valuable and useful information for your consumer. For example if you’re a florist offer free information about the benefits of keeping fresh flowers in your house. The possibilities are endless.

Whatever you choose to write about make sure to give your prospective customer information about how to can help them at the end. Include contact information including a website if you have one, address, number, email, etc. If your free giveaway is high quality then of course your product or services will be too. Think from the consumer’s point of view for good ideas about what you write and how your write it.

Let your fans know about your FREE Special Report regularly and make sure information about it is on your fan page either under a tab or in the information box. You also have the option to insert an email capture box into your fan page. In exchange for you fan’s email, they get the free report. With this tactic you’ll have contact information for following up and marketing to that person in the future.

The delivery options very for getting customers they’re special report, but the result is the same…paying customers.   

http://www.buildyourbrandllc.com for help building you business profile.

I’ve been asked the question before. Is it more important to add friends on your personal facebook account or start a fan page? The answer is both. Without having a lot of friends on your personal facebook the fan page will fail.

Fan pages have become a great way to promote a business, personal brand, or product brand. You’ll want to make sure to provide as much enticing information about your business under the “Info” tab. You may have seen fan pages with tabs that look like that business’ website. This is done by finding FBML fan page on Facebook fan pages and using that application. If you have a web designer they’ll be able to help more with this.

Once your fan page is presentable with lots of information about your business, it’s time to start adding some content. Before people start liking your fan page there will have to be content on the wall to make them want to like it. Spend a week, or two weeks preferably, adding information related to your business to your wall. For example, if you’re an accountant and your fan page is for promoting your accounting business, offer tips about filing taxes.

In the meantime, start adding as many friends on your personal Facebook page as possible. Find fan pages that are related to the same topic as your fan page but already have thousands of fans. Start adding all those people as your friends. Facebook allows a maximum of 5,000 friends. Have about 2,000 friends before you make your fan page. Engage in conversation and let people know you’re a real person.

Once you’ve gotten lots of content on your fan page’s wall you can take the next step of getting people to become fans. Fan pages are different from personal pages in that you can’t request somebody to be your fan. This is why it’s important you add as many friends to your personal page as possible. On you fan page you’ll want to “suggest friends to become fans”, underneath the profile image. You’ll be able to select any or all of your friends to receive request to become a fan. It’s up to them if they want to or not.

Continue maintenance by adding friends, keeping up conversations and regularly suggesting people join your fan page. Make sure to keep content on your fan page wall regularly, too. Every two days is a good frequency to keep up. Websites like www.hootsuite.com  also, make it easy to automate everything.

Consistency is key when building a presence for your business online. If you have a website and a blog make sure to provide the links on your fan page. If done correctly in a year you could build a new strong returning customer base. 

http://www.buildyourbradllc.com

http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php?campaign_id=368885149649&placement=pgall&extra_1=1

Facebook link for creating a fan page, community page, or group page. Build Your Brand offered packages that we will create your business fanpage, manage it and get potentially thousands of targeted customers. http://www.buildyourbrandllc.com

If you just started your business website don’t forgot the #1 step for showing up on search engines…..Submit your website to the search engines. Here are a list of website you’ll need to submit your website to:

http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx

http://websearch.about.com/gi/o.htm?zi=1/XJ&zTi=1&sdn=websearch&cdn=compute&tm=5&f=20&su=p284.9.336.ip_p504.1.336.ip_&tt=2&bt=0&bts=0&zu=http%3A//submit.search.yahoo.com/

Now that you’ve submitted your website so the search engines know your business exist, they will start indexing it so one day it will show up on search engines. However, to show up within the first several pages you’ll have to take extra steps.

Step #2 would be to ask your website designer to put together an XML formatted map of your website. This map will have to be submitted to search engines also so they know how your website is supposed to be navigated and where any pages are they won’t be able to see. It’s important that search engines know about all the pages on your website and what’s on them so your website is indexed correctly for targeted searches.

Here are the links for submitting your website map:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156184

http://webdesign.about.com/gi/o.htm?zi=1/XJ&zTi=1&sdn=webdesign&cdn=compute&tm=27&f=20&su=p284.9.336.ip_p504.1.336.ip_&tt=7&bt=0&bts=0&zu=http%3A//www.bing.com/webmaster/

https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

Step #3. Now a comprehensive keyword search should be done. The keywords will have a good ratio between being a targeted word that describes your website, receives high search volume per month (100,000+), and doesn’t have a lot of competition in the search engines. These keywords will be used to write concise meta titles and meta descriptions. This is the most important part out of all the steps for proper website optimization.  In Spring of 2010, Google began phasing out the importance of meta keywords for your website. Now more than ever it is your meta title and meta description which will make or break how well your website shows up on search engines. www.BuildYourBrandLLC.com  can assist your business with these steps, helping to build your business’ brand marketing. If done correctly these steps only have to be done once and can get your business a possible quarter of a million targeted viewers.

Take the right steps for getting your business ranking high on search engines. The most basic steps are usually the ones you tend to look past but taking 5 minutes out of your day to do these steps can greatly improve your website’s visibility in search engines.

It’s essential for business websites to have meta titles and meta descriptions which use keywords that meet the search criteria, appeal the customer, & finally have a good ratio between how many other related search results their competing with and how many search that keyword each month.

Use the example below. HDtvs has to compete with 5,060,000 other websites. The term HDtvs is searched by 246,000 people around the globe monthly. So is this a good ratio? Let’s find out. Divide the monthly searches into the competition: 5,060,000/246,000=20            

20 is actually a great ratio. One of the best there is. 500-600 is good, 200 is better, under 200 great!

A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose