The Guide To Online Visibility For The Time-Poor Business Owner
This is the final report in my series on online visibility, helping business owners to boost their online visibility in a changing online climate. The other two reports are here:
This is the final report in my series on online visibility, helping business owners to boost their online visibility in a changing online climate. The other two reports are here:
This is the second in my series of three free reports (download the first here), helping you to achieve online visibility and build your brand within your respective marketplace.
My first report examined the challenges facing small businesses to build online visibility, given the significant resources it can take to gain traction on social media and to take advantage of content marketing, and the often limited resources available.
If it’s a struggle to keep on top of just one social network, let alone trying to connect with your potential prospects on the others as well, you’ll know exactly what I mean.
For many small businesses, it’s a critical issue.
If you:
Then, congratulations, join the club!
On the one hand, you’re supposed to be active, present and building large followings on the major social media sites like:
LinkedIn isn’t just for your resume. If your business is B2B, LinkedIn can be a primary source of quality traffic and leads. It’s another very effective channel through which to spread your brand and your message through content marketing.
In terms of numbers, LinkedIn currently has 277 million users, and 40% (111 million users) check in daily (source). And these are all predominantly professional, business-oriented users. The potential is obviously significant.
In fact, for B2B business owners, it makes for more sense to concentrate resources on LinkedIn rather than Facebook.
Think about how you use Facebook. Facebook tends to be where people go to socialize, catch up with family and friends, and generally switch off from work-related information. As a result, Facebook users can be far more resistant to business-oriented messages. It’s a bit like talking shop at a dinner party – they’ll go talk to someone else.
In contrast, LinkedIn users log on to work. It’s an active, often daily, part of their professional life. They are there to find nuggets of information of value to their work and their business, to build up a professional network, to look for new opportunities. The contrast is a significant and important one.
Did you know there’s an easy way to get more visibility on Twitter and increase your Twitter traffic every time someone tweets your content? This simple method potentially increases click-throughs to your site and raises the profile of your business.
Twitter has a system called Twitter Cards, which allows site owners to take advantage of expanded, media rich tweets whenever someone tweets their content.
By using Twitter Cards for your blog, any tweets linking to your blog posts contain media rich information, and as such are more visually prominent and appealing. This gives you the benefit of increased visibility, more potential re-tweets, and in general helps promote your content and attract more traffic from Twitter.
You might be forgiven for shrugging your shoulders, sighing, and ignoring Google+ as “yet another social network”.
Facebook and Twitter are the big boys in town, and you’re already part of that crowd – who needs that new kid skulking in the corner, Google+?
After all, you’ve heard it’s “like a ghost town” over there. (But look deeper, and you realize the only people saying that are usually those no actual experience of using Google Plus themselves.)
So what are the actual figures? In truth, there are now a billion Google+-enabled accounts with 360 million active users, the +1 button is pressed 5 billion times a day, and they’re growing at over 30% per annum. Hardly ‘ghost town’ figures for a network less than three years old.
Yet, it’s still in infancy, and the best rewards in social networks are nearly always reserved for the early adopters. For business, and with Google Plus gaining momentum on an upward trajectory, it’s a wide open opportunity available right now for you to gain a strong foothold before your competitors even realize they were left behind looking the wrong way.
By ignoring Google+, or seeing it as an annoying sidekick not worthy of attention …
Wait until you’re one of the last out the starting gates, and you may find your competitors in virtually unassailable positions, and find you missed the boat in terms of maximizing the advantages for your own business. And, unless you’re in any doubt, there are significant advantages available …
The more content you can share that’s relevant to your industry and speaks to the audience you want to attract, the more you’ll boost your influence and authority within your niche.
Why?
The more content you’re sharing, the more visible you become, the more frequently people start to recognize you and your content, the more credibility you attain, the more followers you attract, and so your influence and authority grows.
The problem lies in the constraints on the amount of content you can create, whether financial, time, or other factors. Producing all the content yourself that you need to gain traction on social media and to maintain the consistency required to keep audiences sustained is neither practical nor sustainable.
Fortunately there is an alternative that offers greater benefit … and that’s content curation, which rather than distracting from your own content, serves to enhance, supplement, and add credibility to it.
[…]
In last week’s post on using Google Plus for business, I shared four main reasons why I’d advise anyone in business to start using Google+, and start using it now.
The more people who add you to their circles, the more authoritative your content becomes … and your increased authority brings a host of benefits for your business, such as increased search engine visibility and online influence.
However, it’s tough to get people to add you to their circles and takes a long time, so the sooner you start the better. So how do you start attracting people to start following you and add you to their circles?
It’s early days for my own Google+ involvement, but one of the best ways to build up your following on Google+ (the number of people who have you in their circles) is to create great content and share it on a regular and consistent basis.
Google+ is rapidly gaining ground as a primary social network for business users, with far more to offer the business user than Facebook for example.
As a newcomer to the social network myself, and in the process of creating a strategy through which I’ll be using Google+, this post outlines four main reasons why you should incorporate Google+ into your own content marketing strategy and how it can provide significant benefits to your business. […]