Social Media Marketing for Entrepreneurs and Small Business

We are excited to bring such an incredible new tool to entrepreneurs that will make such a dramatic difference in the way that they can create, maintain and control their websites and landing pages to grow their businesses on a daily basis.  To compete effectively today, every entrepreneur must have complete control of their websites in real-time.

To help any entrepreneur achieve this level of control, we have created and included in this post a suite of information and tutorials on how to use Google Sites.  The tips for creating a website or landing page that you will learn here are not listed anywhere else.  Each tip specifically addresses the types of obstacles that are usually only discovered once you have already started the process.  We have eliminated that frustration in order to ensure that you have a great tool that is truly easy to use!

Listed below are the resources from within this post:

• Full article on the role of Google Sites for any entrepreneur in any business
• Two video tutorials on all the tips and tricks necessary to easily create websites and landing pages with Google Sites
• A complete list of the tips and guide for registering your Google Site

Real Time Control for Web 2.0

What is one of the most important aspects of a website in the world of social media marketing?  Is it interactivity?  The ability to stream in content from across the web?  Or perhaps the display of photos, videos, tweets or posts?  Not even close.

Your website is a conversion tool.  It is a place where you enhance your brand reputation, accelerate purchase decisions and add value.  In today’s online world, your website is an important business tool for creating, re-creating, changing, updating and adding content.

The most important aspect of a website in the world of Web 2.0 is real-time CONTROL OF CONTENT.  And you don’t want to wait on anybody when creating an event listing, adding a photo, changing a typo, inserting a testimonial, putting up a press release, adding a promotional offer, inserting a new link, displaying a news headline, showing a new video, highlighting a new service, adding a poll, re-writing an odd sentence, etc.

Today’s Web 2.0 website is a constantly ebbing and flowing point of interaction with customers and prospects.  Creating value through content is something you want to have 100% within your control.  In fact, you want to be a control freak when it comes to your website’s content.

Here’s another perspective.  According to Wikipedia, the definition of social media is…

The term most often refers to activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and content (words, pictures, videos and audio).

Social media intuitively would include new technologies and create social interaction, but it is the inclusion of content that surprises most entrepreneurs.  But it shouldn’t.  Content is the key to adding value through online interactions.  Just as you wouldn’t come up to somebody at a business mixer and start a hard sell, that isn’t appropriate in social media either.  Value is created in relationships online by sharing content.  Content is the currency for creating and scaling relationships on the internet.

This is the point where most entrepreneurs put on the breaks.  They don’t want to be in the business of content creation.  They chose their industry because that was what they wanted to do as a profession.  However, sooner or later we all discovered that we are not only in the industry of our choice, but also the business of sales and marketing.  After all, if we don’t promote our companies, then who will?  And now, we also find ourselves in the business of content creation.

In order to attract more high caliber prospects, companies give away content every day that you would have had to pay $200-$300 an hour for just a few years ago. It is now part of the value stream that is created online to attract new customers.

Since content is king for your website, you can’t let your site become a stale, online brochure.  One of the biggest reasons this happens is that the process of changing content is not easy.  You have to call or email your web developer who then goes into the back end of your site and changes HTML code, updates style sheets, feeds and more.  And if you give them a few things to do, one might get done right, one wrong and one not at all.  It’s not that they are lazy, but they usually don’t make a lot of money on these constant changes and it’s just lower on their priority list than it is on yours.

So why spend what can be days of time and lots of frustration when you can do it all yourself?

Introducing Google Sites

This is a great new choice for Entrepreneurs who want to start with a clean sheet of paper and end up with a website that places them in the content driver’s seat.  This is a completely free tool that allows users to include all the latest Web 2.0 eatures (videos, polls, slide shows, calendars, news feeds, MP3 players, etc) while maintaining 100% control of the content and how it looks.  And it costs nothing to host!  Google provides this all for free.  All you need to do is register a URL, or point one that you already own over to your new Google Site.  For an example of a complete website created on the Google Sites platform, go to our website at http://www.practicalsocialmedia.com.

And here’s the best part…it requires no coding or technology knowledge.  Although, there are some tricks that make it a lot easier to use once you know about them.  I would suggest reading the tips and watching the two videos below that were specially created for showcasing the tips and trick for how to use Google Sites. The videos ensure that you won’t have to go through the learning process I did in creating the Practical Social Media website!

If you still have any questions, I would highly recommend a true Google Sites expert, Tami Smith.  She created her company, DoItTodayWorkshops.com to teach entrepreneurs all about using Google technologies to promote their businesses.  Tami can also be reached at tami@doittodayworkshops.com.

Another Alternative

For those of you who would like to start from a template, WordPress.org is a fantastic alternative with easy back-end administration control of content.  You can also utilize fabulous design templates.  The give and take lies within the limited flexibility of WordPress and the complete content control through Google Sites.  I use Google Sites for my main website, and WordPress for the company blog.

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GOOGLE SITES – VIDEO TIPS TUTORIALS

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Additional Google Sites Tips & Tricks Support That Will Save a Lot of Time & Frustration

Together with the video, this is a complete tips and tricks guide to overcoming all the obstacles to get a web presence up and running through Google Sites.

1. Inserting Tables

HTML Style Code – This is the piece of HTML code used in the simple, “copy and paste” manner recommended in the first video (no previous experience required).

<table style=”border-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); border-width: 0px; border-collapse: collapse;” border=”0″ bordercolor=”#888888″ cellspacing=”0″>

2. Naming Images

Never place a symbol into the name of your image file.  Examples are the use of “&”, “%” or “#”.  Google Sites doesn’t like this and will not want to insert the file into the site.

3. Cool Text

In order to create really great looking buttons that can be inserted into your Google Site, and then used in everything from the main navigation on, please go to a resource online at http://cooltext.com/Buttons.  They are a website that allows you to create really great buttons, again with no previous experience.  And their service is free!

4. Inserting Images

This is a reminder from what was already covered in the video.  It is easy to highlight an entire page of work on Google Sites and literally copy and paste it into another page.  This works well when copying and pasting things like a main navigation set of images from one page to another.  The only tip that you need to remember is that each graphical image that is copied and pasted over has not been officially inserted into that new page.  It is helpful to use the copy and paste functions to bring over the tables, formatting, text, etc.  However, each graphical image on the new page will need to be removed and re-inserted through the “Insert-Image” process shown in the video.  If you do this once the correct way, then it will work for you from then on out!

5. Registering For A Google Sites Account

There are two ways to register with Google Sites and create a new website.  The first is to simply register a Gmail account with Google and then proceed to http://sites.google.com/ while logged in under that new email account.  There will be a big blue button directing you to create your new site.  The downside of this method is that you will not have a unique address like www.yourdomain.com.  It will be a long http://site.google.com… looking URL.  You can still get the URL changed, but it is a more difficult process.  BUT CERTAINLY ACHIEVABLE and easy to do if you know and understand what to do!  So no worries.  If this is the route that you would like to go, I would suggest contacting Tami Smith at tami@doittodayworkshops.com.

The second method is to register a new domian/URL through Google.  Then your new Google Site will automatically contain your customized URL.  To explore this route, please go to Tami Smith’s website for easy to understand and follow instructions.

Good Luck!