The Top Ten Reasons Why Every Small Business Should Be Using The Free Tools Online

We have all heard of the amazing success stories of companies using the world of social media. In fact, Inc. magazine says that the nation’s fastest-growing private companies are making use of social media. Forbes magazine calls social media a foundational shift that is here to stay.

The question still remains, is it appropriate for a smaller business? It may be great that JetBlue is using Twitter for customer service, Dell has an incredible Facebook presence or BestBuy is training all sales associates to use social media. But what about the 20+ million companies in America that have no payroll? How about the companies that have employees, but no significant marketing budget? Is social media appropriate for them?

The answer is yes. Social media is a new marketing fundamental that encompasses strategies that no company should operate without. There are tremendous opportunities for every business with the knowledge and desire to use social media as a competitive advantage.

Below is part one of a list of the Top 10 reasons why social media is a marketing necessity for ALL companies – from solopreneurs all the way through to Fortune 500 companies.

1. Getting Ranked High In Google Is A “No Brainer” For Your Business

People don’t surf the net, they search. 40% of all consumer spending and 85% of all B2B transactions begin today with a web search. Every business needs to come up within search engine rankings for those keywords that surround what it is that you do or offer as a company. There are over 18 billion searches that happen each and every month in this country. If you are not represented in the search engine rankings, you are missing out on one of the largest opportunities that is proven to embody people searching for brands that have the right products and services to meet their needs. They are hot prospects!

2. Marketing Exposure For Little To No Budget

Most people and companies have in common two extremely precious treasures, their money and their time. In this economy, for many companies, placing more money behind marketing is no longer an option. Thus, ideas that can be implemented with just the appropriate know-how and simple elbow grease are critical. This is the case for social media and why it is such a hot topic. Tremendous new marketing opportunities are unfolding daily for every business through the use of social media. And all they require is an understanding of the ever evolving online tools and how to get started.

3. Social Media Prospecting Is Easier Than Ever

Finding the right highly targeted audiences is easier than ever with social networks like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. People identify themselves and their needs by what they say online. If you are using the tools to listen well, you can intersect with them at the time of their need. This is a highly relevant way to find the highest quality of leads…and with tools that are the best at then following up and starting a conversation. These tools are social networks aren’t they, specifically designed towards one-on-one and viral communications!

4. It Is One Of The Fastest Ways To Build Your Expert Reputation

As long as you have been successful in business and have customers or clients that believe in you, you have the means to establish credibility, and trust in your brand online. These are critical factors to closing your fair share of the prospects discussed above. One out of two new people you meet in business will search for you online. The search engine results are a third party opportunity for you two shine by controlling the top page of rankings with everything you want people to know about you. Top page rankings aren’t as hard to “own” as you would think because the combination of your name and business name are not only the most popular search combinations for you, but are very low competitive search phrases. Thus, it is very easy to manage what people see. Especially those that you are directly prospecting!

5. A 180 Degree Change from Traditional Marketing

I call it PUSH versus PULL marketing. Traditional marketing (radio, newspaper, direct mail, etc.) is like casting out big marketing nets trying to catch the right people, or pushing your message at intended recipients. Sure, you can target using demographics, past behaviors, geography, etc., but how can you ever tell if you are reaching those prospects that are truly interested in what you offer as they have determined that they need it most? And traditional marketing costs money to reach each and every prospect, no matter their value to your business. In social media, interested prospects find you by typing keywords into a search engine or by you listening to what they are saying. They PULL themselves towards you by taking a specific action on their own that identifies their needs. This is a highly qualified prospect versus one blanketed by traditional marketing. They are literally raising their hands and identifying themselves as great prospects for your business. And the best part is that with social media, these hand-raisers don’t cost you a dime. Prospecting, blogging, writing articles, posting video, etc. are all free social media strategies to intersect with highly qualified prospects, allowing people to pull themselves towards you.

Look for the second half of the Top 10 reasons to to be posted soon!

A Solo Entrepreneur’s Best Place For Getting Started Right With Social Media

This Social Media Training webinar is meant for anyone who is just starting out, has been dipping their toes in the social media waters, or is more advanced…but feeling overwhelmed! Social Media Marketing for your business doesn’t have to be complicated, but there certainly is a recipe for success.

If you have never had an overview of how social media works, the right tools, their unique and individual roles, how they work and integrate together, and how they should each be deployed on behalf of your business…then this is absolutely the right place to get started!

We will explain everything that you need to know in order to have the best chance of succeeding with social media for your business, including a detailed explanation of the “7 Elements of Social Media Success.”

The total length of the Webinar is just over 46 minutes. You may have to wait 30 seconds to a minute for the video to start playing. After watching the webinar, please make sure to review the recommendations below for how to plan out the training for your next two months. And remember, month one is all about setting your social media foundation. Month two is where you actually start prospecting!

Below is a timeline For laying out your first two months of activity. Make sure to follow them in priority order!

Things You Do Once (your first month)

Week #1 – Review the webinar on Branding Strategies. This will show you how to create your brand (even providing templates to fill out), how to identify your target market niche and develop your keyword strategy.

Week #2 – Take the time to refine your brand strategy, target market and keyword strategy!

Week #3 – Watch the webinars and create your Facebook personal profile, YouTube and Twitter accounts. Even if you have these accounts already up and running, you will still want to take the time to review these since they are focused on using these tools for business! Make sure that you are providing the right information on each account so that it is a balanced reflection of both you as the individual and you as the business owner.

Week #4 – Review the two webinars listed below which will help you create a rock solid reputation online, and help bullet proof your credibility as a businesowner that people can trust!

• Google Training Webinar – 20 Minutes To Top Page Google Rankings
• Yelp Training Webinar – The Top 5 Strategic Uses Of Online Reviews You Can’t Ignore

Your Second Month (all about prospecting)

Week #5 – Start reviewing the three Prospecting Training Webinars in the University. This will give you an extremely solid foundation to start generating new business leads!

Week #6-8 (part one) – Continue to refine your prospecting strategies and tactics as you put the University’s lessons into action. Make sure that you have hooked up with an accountability partner during this process. If you need one, we can help!

Week #6-8 (part two) – Start to build your blog. As you will learn in the training, this is the hub of your social media activity! You will find a complete Blog Training series for your review. This may take you past the first two months, but is well worth the effort!

FINAL NOTE: If you spend the time to dedicate to your success through social media marketing, you will find all-new ways to achieve growth for your business that you never even knew existed before. As you will find as you go thru our training…Your personal brand, influence and ability to find and convert prospects from anywhere, anytime will be easier to accomplish than ever before.

Click through to return to the Getting Started series home page.

Getting Started With Twitter For Your Small Business…As A Solo Entrepreneur

This is the Twitter Training that answers all you questions. Want to know how Twitter should fit into your total social media marketing campaign? What the Top 5 most strategic uses are for Twitter and your business?  How to make sense of all the jargon and third party tools?  How to build a strategic follower base?  How to get started right?  Well, then this is the webinar on Twitter for you!

VIEW THE WEBINAR NOW!

What You Will Learn

• What is the role of Twitter for business?
• The Top 5 Strategic uses of Twitter
• Getting Started in less than 10 minutes
• Understanding the language of Twitter
• Getting followers, strategically
• How to start prospecting, creatively?
• How to tweet for business?

If you are feeling overwhelmed by all there is to do to be successful with social media for your business, then this is the webinar that can really help. Prospecting is a lifeline into your business. And Twitter is the most simple and powerful way to get started with a serious lead generation program that can happen seconds after opening your Twitter account. You don’t need thousands of followers, or a huge social media presence! All you need to know is your brand, your target market and how to use Twitter for prospecting!

It is the easiest way to get started because of it’s simplicity. It is also one of the most powerful prospecting tools because of its incredible advanced search capabilities. No other social network comes close to Twitter for being able to pinpoint your target market!

If you are serious about growing your business, whether you are an advanced or beginner user of social media marketing, this webinar makes it very clear what you need to do to be successful with Twitter! The more you learn about Twitter the more that you’ll like.

Please click through to view the entire Twitter Training curriculumn. You won’t want to miss the opportunity to dive in and learn more about third party tools like Hootsuite and Tweetdeck.

How Any Small Business Entrepreneur Can Get Started Right In The World Of Social Media Marketing

August 25th from 4-5p PST

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What You Will Learn From This Social Media Training 101 Webinar

• What should my expectations be to create a successful social media campaign for my business?
• What are the elements that I would need to create?
• What is the priority order?
• How do I create success with limited time?
• What are the few things that will make the biggest difference?
• Success stories?
• Why you can do it, with nothing more than a computer and a good connection to the internet!
• How to do it all, for very, very little out-of-pocket costs!
  

One of the most daunting tasks for most small business entrepreneurs is simply knowing where to start! If this is your situation, or you are already well under way, but don’t feel like you have a game plan…then this is the webinar for you!

This is the webinar where it all comes into one clear picture. And we guarantee that this webinar will include things that you have never hear of before. We don’t stop with the popular social media like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, we dig deeper for things you just can’t miss in your road to success.

You are not going to want to miss out on this webinar!

Identifying And Installing The Top Priority Blogging Plugins - A Two-Part Webinar Series

This Blog Training Webinar is so important to get you familiar with what plugins are, and what are the best ones to use with your blog from the start!

Webinar Part One – Search Engine Optimization and Social Networking Plugins (14:15)

This portion of the webinar will not only teach you about how easy it is to install a new plugin, but about the top priority plugins that you will want to have for your blog.

What is a plugin? It is a small piece of software that you can literally “plug into” your blog on WordPress that extends what the blog can do. No technical knowledge or experience is necessary for installation. One plugin might alert the search engines that you have just created a new post or page, another might help optimize the post content for the search engines, while another might allow you to display your tweets from Twitter in the sidebar.

Plugins allow new functionality and performance to be added to your site in both the back-end where blog readers can’t see the changes, and on the front-end where new content display options can be viewed. Plugins that create the ability to display new content for readers (tweets, video players, image galleries, etc.) usually do so by creating a new widget that adds content to your blog’s sidebar. All widgets can be found in the back-end of your blog by going to the DASHBOARD > APPEARANCE > WIDGETS.

In this webinar, we will take you through the following plugins (please view within the player below):

• All In One SEO Pack – Enhances Search Engine Optimization
• Google XML Sitemaps – Notifies the search engines when you post new content
• Facebook Social Plugin – Brings your Facebook business page’s experience to your blog’s sidebar
• Twitter Profile Widget – Brings your most recent tweets to the sidebar of your blog.

Webinar Part Two – Lead Capture Plugins (8:22)

This potion of the webinar allows you to gather contact information from your blog readers. Once your blog is up and running and has traffic coming to it on a regular basis, you will quickly see that you don’t have a good way of re-connecting with those blog visitors. You hope that they will come back to the site and stay connected in that way.

The best outcome is that they purchase from you  on the spot if you offer e-commerce, but more than likely, you’ll need to cultivate a relationship first. This can be done very easily by providing a simple form for them to give their contact information (name and email address) in exchange for something they perceive to be highly valuable. The chances increase that your blog readers will fill in these forms if the incentive to do so is time sensitive, compelling or both. The readers that fill out this form will be very qualified prospects since they came to your blog and filled out a form.

We will share with you two plugins that allow you to create a lead capture system in two very different ways.

• Google’s Feedburner
• WP Email Capture

Webinar Part One – Search Engine Optimization and Social Networking Plugins (14:15)

Webinar Part Two – Lead Capture Plugins (8:22)

Twitter Training

How To Customize Your Twitter Background With additional Branding And Business Information

There is real estate on the side of your Twitter background that can be used to display photos, logos, links to other social media properties, graphics, quotes, specials and much more. This is one of those things that you take the time to do once and then it is there working on your behalf from then on out! Plus, it makes your Twitter profile look that much more personalized!

Custom Twitter Background Example:

Twitter makes it as easy as creating a file, selecting it on your computer and pressing SAVE to create a custom background.

You will need to use a graphics program like Photoshop or a free online tool like that found at Aviary.com. Please watch the nine minute video below for a full tutorial on using Aviary’s free online graphics editor to create a custom background on Twitter. Make sure to follow the file size parameters within the video in order to create a background that works for Twitter and the majority of computer screen resolutions today!

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Click here for more Twitter Training resources.

And What You Can Learn

About six months ago, Starbucks held a “Free Pastry Day”, and attracted over one million people to their stores. How? Social media. Twitter and Facebook captured the buzz about the event and people went searching for a free pastry.

Starbucks is a leader in effective social media marketing. Starbucks has over eighteen million fans on Facebook. The company’s MyStarbucks Idea has also generated over 80,000 ideas, and the Vice President of Brand, Content and Online, Chris Bruzzo, credits Twitter for the success of the project. Starbucks was also the first company to offer a nationwide Foursquare deal.

So, where did Starbucks get their social media smarts? The company listens to their customers. Starbucks works on engaging a dialogue, and considers social media as a relationship, rather than a one-way promotion. Also, Starbucks uses social media to tell a story about their brand, via stories and videos. During the Haiti disaster, for example, Starbucks used videos as part of the Haiti outreach campaign on both YouTube and Facebook. Customers were able to donate to Red Cross in stores, and learned that Starbucks cared.

Alex Wheeler, Director of Digital Strategy at Starbucks, calls their social media approach “scrappy”.  As one of the first companies to really embrace social media, figuring out what worked and being open to different options was what led to their success.

As a small business entrepreneur, you can learn from the company’s social media activity. You can use social media to start a genuine conversation with your customers. It’s not about marketing as much as it’s about relationships (though, the relationships will lead to sales or clients).  And remember, your relationship is one that constantly gives value, and expects nothing in return.  Your are there to help and tell your story along the way!

This is yet another reminder of just how important your brand is to your social media success.  For more on this subject, please look over our lead article on “The Importance of Your Brand To Your Social Media Success.”

New survey has incredible results and news for businesses of any size

In a global study conducted by STUDYLOGIC LLC, surveying 4,204 people, 39% of correspondent’s said they “could not live without” social media sites. Of course, people were living before social media came along less than a decade ago, but they’ve become completely dependent in recent years. Almost half the respondents consider social media a vital component of their lives (somewhere up there with air, food, and water).

What does that mean for small business entrepreneurs? It means that companies can jump into a “vital” form of communication that people have become somewhat addicted to. People are using social media all of the time, according to this study. Four-fifths of respondents said that they checked in on social networking sites multiple times during the day, and one-third of respondents said they checked in several times an hour.

Before meeting a new business contact, more than half of the people surveyed admitted they’d done a little “snooping”. Of course, it’s hardly snooping when you’re looking at public social networking profiles, especially when everyone does it these days. Also, 60% of respondents claimed they had refused to hire a candidate due to a negative impression from a social media profile. As a small business entrepreneur, you’d better be careful what your social networks say about you: they can make or break a deal before it’s even begun.

Also, social media isn’t just in the office or at home anymore, it’s out on the road. 60% of travelers use social media to get in touch with friends or family when they’re traveling. 64% use social media to make their plans, and in the 25-34 age bracket 76% use social media to make their travel plans (um, if you’re a travel company, you’d better be tapping into Twitter and Facebook!). And, regardless of whether or not you’re a travel company, social media travels (literally) far and wide, and you’d better be on deck.

The STUDYLOGIC LLC survey demonstrates how widespread social media has become, and it’s good news for small businesses who know how to effectively harness the power of social media. Think about it: according to this study, social media has become a mainstream form of communication between friends and family (beyond telephone and email!), and if your business makes a genuine, honest effort to use social media well, you can enter this intimate form of communication. And, everybody is already hanging out there, all the time.

Don’t Be Original, Be Smart

Are you tired of laboring and worrying about what to post on your blog?

You really don’t have to worry any longer with this Blog Training tip.  I use to really worry about how I was going to create so much original content, in order to get new posts up on a regular basis.  I also worried about making sure that they had a lot of value and really helped people.  I don’t worry anymore!!

Once you get started posting, it will become more natural.  Right now, it’s like riding a bike for the first time, and being worried about falling over!  After a while, riding is second nature.  Soon your your social media posts will as well.

Here’s a big tip…spend some time looking up people to follow in your industry that you respect as experts that post on their blog on a regular basis.  Find a number of them, at least 4-5.  Sign up for their RSS feeds to get an email every time they post (there is usually something on their site that looks like the image below that you can click on, or a place where they ask you to sign up).

This will help you stay current and informed.  It will also give you a ton of ideas on what you can post about.  Just put your own personal point-of-view onto the latest news or trend that you are reading about.  If you have been in business for any length of time or had any success, you must have a point-of-view about what’s going on in your own industry.  What other experts are saying gives you a starting point, you can take it from there.

Also, don’t be afraid to put in your own personal experiences, trials and tribulations.  Just as in this post I mentioned how much I use to worry, and now I don’t.  It’s okay to show vulnerability as you roll out new content, value and wisdom.

The Practical Social Media University is full of blog training, for small businesses.

Just as Google Analytics tells you what keywords and other sites are drawing visitors to your website, Twitter Analytics will tell you which tweets make or break your Twitter popularity. As you may know, some third-party vendors offer similar services, but Twitter will offer analytics for free (and they have no plan to charge anytime soon). Most likely, the startups that currently offer analytics are looking for a new business model.

A bar graph charts 6-hour increments, and shows mentions, follows and unfollows. You can also filter your tweets to see them in the following categories: “best”, “good” and “all”. The dashboard has been built by Smallthought Systems, a team that Twitter acquired in June. In other words: it should be simple, easy-to-use, yet thorough.

Just to give you an idea how exciting Twitter Analytics is: more than 12,500 people tweeted the story when it appeared on Mashable last month. Why is everyone so eager to share this news? In part, because small business owners like you will greatly benefit from Twitter Analytics. You will be able to measure your success, better understand your customers and improve your marketing communication. Tweet on, tweet on!