Tag: website

What? You don’t have a website!

A Website is the hub to your marketing. Or is it?

I met a woman recently who told me she deactivated her website because it wasn’t doing anything for her. I said, “You did what?” She told me that she relies upon her LinkedIn profile to do her marketing for her. I said, “We need to have a discussion about that!”website hub

After I walked away, I thought a bit more about it. LinkedIn does show up number 1, 2, or 3 in search results if someone is looking for you by your name. But it is not going to tell them about your product or services the way a website would. I advice jobseekers to at least have a blogspot blog to give them a space on the internet.

If you don’t have a website, or at least a URL driven email address, you cannot have a company page on LinkedIn for your business.

I wrote this article about your website being the hub of your marketing in 2013. I agree with that today. The other thing that I feel very strongly about is the fact that you need an email address that has a company URL associated with it. It legitimizes your business. If people see a gmail, yahoo, hotmail, or, heaven forbid, an AOL email address as your business email, they tend to think less of your business. I am not the only one that feels this way. Read this article from my friend at T.G. Consultants.

If nothing else, spend $10-25 and get a website tonight from a service like godaddy or wix. You can set up a site that links back to someplace else. But you at least have that branding going on that will only help your marketing efforts. If I can help you build a WordPress website to legitimize your business – or update it to this millennium – please contact me.

Building a Blog Post

Blog posts add umph to your website!

Let’s talk about websites, the key to a blog, and what they can really do for you.

  • Websites are your on-line brochure.
  • Websites hold your photo gallery.
  • A website is the hub of your online marketing.
  • All of your social media points back to your website (or a landing page).
  • Your website is the repository for your blog articles.key to a good blog

The key to a good blog is to write one. Regularly. Let’s talk a bit about search bots. When your website is new and you first publish it, the bots come and scour your site to see what you have out there. They check out the keywords and all of the goodies that you put out there to make it bright and shiny. They come back in about 30 days to see what other new shiny stuff you added. If you added several things, the bots reprogram to come back more quickly than the last time. If you didn’t they wait till maybe 45 days to come back. The more frequently you add new items to your website the more often the bots return ranking your higher in organic search results. The less often you add new items or changes to your website, the lower your ranking becomes until one day…

Whenever I build a website for someone, I typically use a WordPress platform. If I do that, I always include the Yoast SEO plug-in. Here are the tips I give to my clients when they write a blog post:

Make your blog heading a continuation of your title with the keyword in the beginning. Highlight the text and make it a heading 2 from the WYSIWIG bar.

Make sure to employ the “Press this” option offered so that when you read another person’s article, you can use the handy dandy tool to add a post to your blog and write your opinion on what you just read.

If you do that, make sure that you include a link to the original. Like this: You can read the whole article here. Highlight the word here, click on the chain link in the WYSIWIG bar and add the link to the original article – Ensure that it opens to a new window.

Write your thoughts. Include an image. There are many resources for free images. Don’t use any images from a website with a UK extension. One resources to check is pixabay.com Read about more options here.

Make sure to write 270 to 300 words. Complete the Yoast SEO boxes that appear below the blog post content frame.

Your keyword should be in your title, heading, meta data and body text.

Select the category on your website in which you want your post stored.

Add additional tags, especially if you have a tag cloud on your website. If you mention an organization or a searchable term, add the tag.

Last but not least, make sure to share your just finished post on your social media!

Let me know if I can assist you in any way.

Strategy

At a recent meeting, I overheard someone say that an entire campaign was going to be directed to a Facebook page.  Is Facebook your only strategy?  Are you relying on one method to get your message out, build your brand, or manage your customer service?  Most people will probably be answering that they have more than one path to lead clients to their information. But where are your potential clients being directed to find your information?

Back to the meeting, Facebook is a great option especially if you are a B2C business with a storefront.  But so many people, believe it or not, do not use Facebook or any social media on a regular basis.  So what you do for your marketing strategy truly depends upon your audience.

If you haven’t already heard it before, here goes – your website should be the hub of all of your hubmarketing efforts.  It is the repository of your on-line brochure, the way to contact you for more information, your blog – where your share your opinions and expertise, and a gallery of examples.

Everything that you do, whether it is phone calls, emails, brochures, direct mail or social media, should drive back to your hub – your website.

If you need assistance in learning more about how to do that with social media, please contact me so that we can schedule some one-on-one time or so you can find out if there is an upcoming workshop that you might be able to attend.

Recent Profile Changes, so…

If you haven’t already changed it, Twitter made an update to include a header image on your profile, LinkedIn company pages now include a header image on the overview page, and Facebook always has some update in the works or just changed. So…

My thought is: for new visitors to your platform, you need to have everything optimized to take advantage of all the real estate the various tools are allowing you.  The BIG question is – once you follow a brand on social media how often do you return to their page?  If you are like most people, you see the “welcome” or profile page when you sign up because that is where you landed.  I propose ( I am sure I am not the first) the theory that almost everyone just sees your updates in their streams of whatever platform they happen to be looking at at that moment.

So engagement is key. Is it more important to drive people to your website, your blog or to your profile page on a social media platform?  Tell me your opinion!

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