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If you are a small business, why bother having a blog and blogging?

By Heike

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

I hear it regularly at local networking meetings: why should a local business worry about blogging?

Most small business owners still believe that blogging is a) only for crazy online geeks with big glasses and b) won’t be of any use to small businesses that provide services or sell to mainly local markets.

Point a) I know many bloggers that are quite normal people who have families, go on holiday, drive normal cars, go to restaurants, have friends (yes, it is possible as an Internet geek to have real life friends!) and live a normal life, just like you. So don’t judge them on the stereotype (although I agree it’s funny).

Point b) In this post I would like to point out the advantages of blogging to YOUR business. You could be a real estate salesperson blogging about the market and newest listings, a coach blogging about midlife crisis, a consultant about tips on finding a new job or a cosmetic institute blogging about the latest eye shadow fashion.

The main thing about having a blog is to attract the right kind of people to your website or blog, the people who likely love what you have on offer – either your knowledge or your goods. You could have tons of people visiting your website, but if they are not targeted – people who are not in your target audience – you gain nothing from it, just a fleeting visitor who vanishes into thin air within two seconds.

If you are a dating coach and you regularly blog about dating tips, how to dress for a date, dating body language, dating psychology and so on, chances are that you will get the attention of single folks who are eager to read your newest advice – and eventually book an appointment for a consultation with you.

Chances also are that other businesses who have something to do with dating, for example men advice forums (like Askmen.com or similar) may find some gems in your post and link to you – bingo, and you have started to become more important in the online world and your blog or website will be ranked better due to this link. The more you have the better it is, but don’t fall for these weird emails from foreign people who ask you for a reciprocal link to their dodgy website that sells even more dodgy products. If the other website’s content has nothing to do with your content it won’t give you any advantage, the opposite can be the case. So beware.

When you have your own blog for your business make sure you research what your target market wants to know. Ask them when they come through the door of your shop or send them a survey (great free survey tool is http://www.surveymonkey.com) This tool has a weird name, but is used by many large companies as well as small ones.

If you are a fitness coach, the amount of topics about weight loss is sheer endless and you actually offer a kind of community service to blog about your fitness and diet advice. It would be crazy if you didn’t make use of a blog to show off your expert knowledge, build relationships with your readers and even offer your products or consultations occasionally. But be aware and don’t stuff your blog posts with constant “buy this” or “order that”.

A blog is there for information and relationship building in the first place. Remember you talk to people who look to you to find help with their problems. Once you have build relationships and you use an integrated marketing approach (including email marketing marketing and opt in reports and freebies) you will earn money with your knowledge and attract more clients who are keen to sign up with you.

If you get a blog from your webdesigner, make sure that it’s connect to social networks. There are many plugins (loosely translated as a connector) that help blog visitors to share your post with other people. If you mention “plugins”, your web developer will know what you are talking about…

If someone, for example, loves your post on how to loose weight without starving yourself, they can “retweet” it to their followers on Twitter. Twitter is a ultra popular Social Media tool that millions of people use daily. Many people keep the window of Twitter open throughout the day, always ready to read about something new or interesting. If your post gets re-submitted to a large group of people, chances are that other people will tell others about it, too, and you have quite a viral effect with your one post. Other people, who have never heard about you, will come to your blog or website and read what you have to say. And maybe even become your customers…

Another thing to ask your webdesigner for is the RSS feed to your blog. With this feed your loyal website visitors can sign up to receive all your future blog posts straight away after posting. There are different options on how they can receive them (in a reader or per email) and you can discuss this with your webdesigner). It is important to have this function so that you can start building relationships.

“Heike, I’m located in xxx and all my customers are locals. Why should I blog? I don’t need to get website visitors from the other side of the globe”, you may say now.

Becoming an authority in your field is a great thing, if you are recognized in Iceland, in the Seychelles or in your hometown, your website will get a better ranking when you have optimized your keywords that describe what you do, offer or write about. Your local people may well put in a search term, such as “Hamilton real estate”, into the search engine and if you have optimized your blog posts’ keywords, chances are your post will come up for the person to read.

Additionally, never really discard selling globally! I know it sounds scary, but it’s sometimes even easier than locally because there are so many people out there maybe looking for exactly your tools and knowledge while your locals might not even care. So don’t close your eyes to the opportunity, especially when you offer a service, such as coaching, consulting, training, etc. You’d be amazed how many people train with overseas institutes nowadays or buy wares from foreign countries. It might be time to open up your mind about the opportunities worldwide.

The Internet has made it possible for us to cross borders, communicate with people from around the globe and to sell and buy easily from other countries, so keep your mind open about this. If you would like to have more information on this, please send me an email.

Summing up, blogging is a great tool if you are a local business targeting local people just as much as global audiences. Be brave, try it and you will reap the rewards of getting a better website ranking, more targeted visitors to your blog, more inquiries and connections.

Categories : Blog, Web2.0, Wordpress

Tags : become an authority in your field, Blog, blog post, blog site, blogging, expert status, global marketing, keywords, links, local marketing, plugins, retweet, search engine, search ranking, small business, Target Market, Twitter, webdesigner, website site

Social Media: LinkedIn – why are you doing it?

By Heike

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010

I went to a local workshop for coaches on Social Media and Marketing and noticed that many newer, and even established, life coaches are having trouble with Social Media and its relevance for their coaching practice, and ultimately their bottom line.

Some coaches particularly asked about Twitter and LinkedIn and why one should even consider using it. Today I’m going to briefly look at why a life coach could benefit from participating on LinkedIn.

The first thing to consider is the overall Social Media and Business Strategy. Unfortunately, we can’t just dive into a Social Network and expect great results, we need to deliberately plan it. Why are we using LinkedIn and does it actually fit into our business model? Very important questions.

Research is always a good start. Stroll around in LinkedIn.com and look who’s around. What kind of people do you see on the forums, what kind of people do you see in the profiles? Do they fit into your target market? How about your colleagues, are they on LinkedIn?

If none of them is on LinkedIn, this could either indicate that coaches like you don’t need to be on this social network or maybe coaches are still a bit hesitant about using Social Media in general. This doesn’t help you, of course. So scroll through LinkedIn’s groups and see what kind of groups are available and what kind of questions are posted on the forums. Is there something that catches your eye? Are there interest groups dealing with coaching? Are there groups that may have the answer to some of your business questions, such as Internet marketing or Social Media questions? It may be a good idea to join those and watch the questions and answers and learn more about online marketing.

Another aspect to consider is the exposure from simply having a LinkedIn account and profile for you and your business: it definitely helps you to get found online if someone types in your name into the search engines. Social Media networks rank extremely high in search engines and it is beneficial for you to have a presence online.

LinkedIn is a bit different to Facebook and Twitter. The audience is more “professional”, that means you will find lots of professionals and even corporate companies on it. This can be a good thing as many life, business, leadership, life balance, and career coaches target this segment of the market. Many coaches deal with people who are employed or who are executives in a company. So you are in the right place to attract ideal clients for your coaching services.

If you join groups where these people hang out you have one foot in the door. Look at the groups these professionals would be interested in, such as business, leadership, marketing, etc. Try to post meaningful messages, helpful tips and ask good questions in these groups to stand out from the crowd. You’d be surprised how easy it is to get noticed with helpful, informative posts on the right messageboards! But beware of spamming and advertising your services. A great way around this is to have your profile well written, fully filled out and a signature created so that each post shows who you are and what you do, for example: “Linda Doyle, Career Coach, website address.”

Be aware that a good(!) photo is highly important. Don’t make the mistake and download a casual holiday photo, one with friends around you or in too casual wear. Many photographers take a nice headshot of you for little money, make use of this.

Summing up, yes, LinkedIn can be a great Social network for a coach, especially for those coaches who deal with professionals. You are doing it to find out more about your target audience, read their questions, see their troubles and get them to know, like and trust you through helpful and informative participation.

Categories : Social Media

Tags : career coach, leadership coach, life coach, LinkedIn, LinkedIn groups, LinkedIn profile, Social Media, Social networks, target audience, Target Market, Twitter

Thoughts about ’14 Things I Think I Think About Social Media’ by Jay Bear

By Heike

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

Jay Bear, Social Media consultant, was interviewed by Social Examiner’s CEO, Michael Stelzner, about Social Media Marketing, and brought up very interesting thoughts.

Jay Baer Interview from Michael A. Stelzner on Vimeo.

This interview gave me a different view on Twitter’s development during the last year. Jay felt that Twitter used to be the Social Network that described “where you are and what you are doing”, but has moved into a more resource sharing tool where people tells others about good resources and important news they feel others need to know about. Foursquare and Yelp are increasingly taking up Twitter’s former role of “where am I right now” with local/ized Social Networking. Jay also stressed to not undervalue Yelp for its role of local social networking.

Facebook’s Fan/Business pages can be viewed in a way of replacing company’s newsletters and convert previous customers into repeat customers through relationship building communication.

Jay also described that “tools”, such as Twitter and Facebook, are only “tools” and usually interchangeable. He stated he believes current dominant Social Media networks will change in the future, just in the same way as dominant Social Networks of the past, eg. MySpace, lost its dominance and got replaced by Facebook. It is important to have a content strategy using the Social Media tools, but not solely seeing the Social Media networks as the end all without having a proper strategy. Without a strategy that connects all utilized tools and social networks the social media campaign is worthless.

Jay also pointed out that many companies have different people handing Social Media and email marketing, which leads to a lack of coherence in their campaigns. It is important to link them together and also make sure that email newsletters have “share” buttons included so that your messages and blog posts can be shared easily by readers.

Video and Youtube is still underutilized by companies in its importance of improving search rankings. Companies need to catch on to use video more often.

Categories : Email Marketing, Social Media

Tags : Jay Bear, Michael Stelzner, Social Media, Twitter, Yelp, youtube

Social Media Marketing – what a timewaster?!

By Heike

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009

I just attended a very interesting webinar run by Jon Morrow (from the famous Copyblogger) and Laura Roeder (creatingfame.com), which went back to the basics of Social Media Marketing.

Looking at the comments during the webinar on Twitter (hashtag: #copybloggersm) some of the attendees expected to learn about innovative social media tools and secrets that no one knows about yet. Instead, Laura and Jon talked about the basics, that these people felt they knew already. But did they?

For me it was rather a timely reminder. How often do we “struggle” at keeping up with yet the newest and best Twitter applications and social media trends while actually we are wasting our time doing this. It’s not important to have a profile on every single brandnew social network just invented, it’s important to build deep relationship. Jon was very clear about that. How often do we feel we need to join every social network under the sun to be “in”? Not at all necessary, Jon explained.

Both Laura and Jon stressed that focusing on one or two channels is much more profitable when it comes to business. After all business nowadays bases on relationship building. Check where your target market hangs out – where are they? Are they on Facebook, Twitter or on MySpace? Concentrate your effort on this specific network and forget about others because they are not important to your target market. A little research is required (ask your VA to do the research if you are pressed for time).

If you have a blog, congregate your community there. Don’t get tempted to start lots of different channels to talk to your people, stay put and build the community of your blog before you rush out and build a forum because you heard someone else has a forum. How many “ghost forums” do you know that start off with a lot of noise and then develop into a ghost town with “new posts” dating back from half a year ago? Don’t create a forum when your community is less than 100 people, Jon recommended. Rather focus on your blog as point of contact.

Instead of getting nervous about having to create a blog post daily, rather write one really good one weekl. This will actually help you and your readership better than a lot of mediocre posts. Post this post out to your Twitter or Facebook friends, connect the social media channels. Your VA can automate this for you if you don’t know how to do it.

When you subsribe to other blogs to make new connections, don’t comment saying “good post” only. Give reasons or extend the subject of the blog post so that you add valuable information. This will give your comment an edge and start off new conversations.

Laura stressed that you need to remember that all social media channels are seen as customer service channels as well, so be sure you are contactable on your social networks. Check your messages regularly to avoid disappointment from your readership.

To eliminate the overwhelm in your inbox every morning, make a rule and send the notification of new Twitter followers to a separate folder. Go through these emails at a convenient time, not when you are already stressed out. Also make sure you don’t send direct messages from Twitter to your cellphone, otherwise you will be inundated with those, which will create overwhelm and stress for you.

Be authentic in social media. Jon mentioned Frank Kern and his personality. Frank is a character who shows what he likes and what he does. He is open about his life and what he is doing and his readers can easily decide if they like him or not. Not everybody may love you, but the people who have similar interests and behaviors will love you. So focus on being you, rather than being a bland nothing. Show your social media friends who you really are, what your interests are and what makes you tick. The deep bonding and relationship building will be much more profitable than being a bland marketer who sends out a lot of spam saying: “buy my products”.

Laura said that promotion is ok in social media and on your blog, but don’t overwhelm people. The 80/20 rule (80% valuable content and 20% promotion) definitely applies. Jon expanded on this saying that you even have an obligation to tell your target audience about valuable tools and products that are out there if it’s relevant to your audience. And I agree with this. If a social media friend tells me of a good program that would be beneficial for me I feel grateful. Promotion is not all bad, but do it right and be relevant with it.

Summing up, it’s important to go back to the basics of social media. Deep connections are better than shallow ones. Yep, we all know that, don’t we? But do we actually adhere to this?

Focus on a few networks or social media channels to learn all about your target market and the problems they need to have solved. Engage with people rather than sending out spammy messages. Show your personality, you will attract people who are like you and you can create a vibrant community.

Don’t jump on every new social network, go where most people of your target market are. Connect with people who are important to you and don’t try to reach “everybody”. Less can be more and quality goes over quantity. We all know that, don’t we? So let’s start doing it.

Check out Jon’s Twitter profile on http://twitter.com/jonmorrow and Laura on http://twitter.com/lkr.

Categories : Social Media

Tags : be authentic, building relationships, customer service, Facebook, Frank Kern, Myspace, social marketing, Social Media, Twitter

22 tweets a day? Are you serious?

By Heike

Wednesday, March 4th, 2009

Looking at this interesting article http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/4594/Is-22-Tweets-Per-Day-the-Optimum.aspx it appears that posting about 22 Twitter messages daily is the figure to aim for if you are a serious Twitter user. Some people even send 150 tweets out daily. Where do they get the time from to do that? And what are they tweeting about?

If you are anything like me you probably don’t do that. I’m glad to have the time to post one (!) per day, so I’m a bit more like Barack Obama who posts 0.38 tweets daily.

The NY Times sends around 39.04 updates out daily, but I understand that, of course. They’d have a lot of things to post about and there are always fresh news in the pipeline. I guess if I was the NY Times I’d probably post even more! But then no one would buy their newspaper, so cancel that idea.

Over the past few days I’ve made an effort to tweet more often. The only thing I’m concerned about is the quality of posts. I don’t think a post saying “I’m having a sandwich” is great for networking. If you post a lot describing your daily life, starting from “walking the dog” to “giving the dog dinner” and “brushing the dog”, lots of people will take you off their list. Or maybe they enjoy perving into the intimate details of your dog’s life and help you count the flees he’s battling.

So what on earth do you post about when you need to send 22 messages into the Twitter realm? After all, you are looking at brand building, making a connection with potential clients and joint venture partners, driving traffic to your website or blog or trying to sell your services and products.

But be aware: a lot of Twitter fans don’t want to hear your sales talk anyway! I have to admit that I won’t follow people who post only one update about their “great” product, follow thousands of people and expect you to follow them. No way!

Then the others I don’t like are the people who have their sales pitch in every tweet they post. So boring! Actually, I prefer the “making a sandwich and cleaning the benchtop” crowd over the sales people who can’t even relax on the toilet without thinking about selling something to you.

How about you? What do you do? Do you send 22 tweets a day (sounds like 5+ a day, a New Zealand campaign about eating more veggies) into Twitter heaven? What do you say in all these posts? Where do you find all the content to post great information?

Categories : Social Media, Web2.0

Tags : Twitter

Facebook versus Twitter

By Heike

Tuesday, January 13th, 2009

I have to admit that I’ve only recently started subscribing to Twitip.com, but I really love it! For every Twitter user there is lots of relevant information and discussion.

Today they discuss which one of the two giants in the social media world are the best and will be the most significant eventually after the first hype goes off: Twitter or Facebook.

I use both and as the Twitip blog says, they are very different. For me Facebook is a great tool to connect with people I actually don’t really know, like business connections. I have only a few real life friends on Facebook because not many of them actually use it. This is probably due to the fact that I’m from New Zealand and it looks like the Internet is yet not dominated by New Zealand websurfers. Consequently, I use my Facebook profile as a business and networking tool.

What fascinates me is the way you “get to know” someone on Facebook. Although I don’t know most of my connections/friends on Facebook, I feel I know them, especially the active ones. You see their family photos, they discussions, you read their words of encouragement, their feelings when things are a bit harder, etc. It’s amazing to be able to learn so much about strangers and feel connected to them.

Wwhat I value about Facebook: the connectedness and the kind of conversations you can lead with others. You are able to see parts of their work, their interests and networks, so you are actually able to connect better, which in return may lead to strategic alliances at some stage. I bet Facebook helped a lot of businesses to connect and I’m sure that many people bought business packages, like coaching and training, from some of their Facebook networks, so for these providers Facebook will be quite a lucrative option.

The Facebook business pages are a great idea, but many business pages seem to be deserted. Someone set them up at some stage, but then never bothered again to update them. This is very counterproductive, of course, so why bother even setting up a page if you don’t ever care to update them?

Twitter is more anonymous than Facebook at first glance. You can just sit there and watch. And you can actually stay in this position for hours without needing to do anything. You have a larger number of contacts and only a few are very familiar. Due to the nature of the tool, you often get either trivial posts, like “off to bed now” or links to other sites. This is good and bad. You see the “human” side of the industry leaders you follow and admire, and still you never really seem to get connected as no longer conversation can take place on Twitter.

You can learn a lot from reading a few posts of some of the well known social media celebrities (including famous bloggers) and you feel part of their life because you read some snippets of what they are doing right that minute you read their tweet. But often you experience being left out of the conversation because there are so many people you don’t know and don’t recognise. And they all seem to be in conversations with each other – and you really never know what’s going on. Sometimes you don’t even want to interrupt them, so for newbies it will be hard to get to know people on Twitter.

Is Twitter good for business? I think it may be for people who tweet regularly and who tweet valuable information. Thoughtleaders will benefit greatly. It takes effort, though, but the well known bloggers, for example, are used to putting effort in. I believe Twitter will take a bit longer and more effort to gain any monetary value from it. But if you are authentic, bring good information to the table and make an effort to be present several times per day, you will eventually gain at least a good amount of trust from many potential customers. And then this “I know, like and trust you” will probably lead to some business as well.

Another thing that is great about Twitter: if you ever feel lonely and you sit all by yourself in your office, log in to Twitter and you won’t be lonely anymore.

Categories : Social Media, Web2.0

Tags : networking, social+media, Twitter, virtual assistant

For the Twitter novice: How to make sense of Twitter without getting crazy

By Heike

Saturday, January 10th, 2009

Many small business owners join Twitter to attract more clients and get their name out there, but often encounter a confusing world of “insiders” and do not understand what benefits Twitter can actually offer them.

That’s what usually happens: if the Twitter novice gets an account and hopes to be able to dive right into the social network, she or he is in for a big disappointment. You hear that Twitter can be very effective to get yourself known as an expert of your niche, but how on earth are you meant to use it? At first glance it just looks like a crazy bundle of inane chatter about five million different topics. “What’s the fuss all about?”, you think, and want to log off again. But hang on… read a bit further.

What is Twitter? It is a microblogging tool with the aim to network with people who you either know personally or who have similar interests or business ideas. Twitter is a platform where you can tell the world (or better: the people you choose to talk to) what you are currently doing, what plans you have for the day or for your business in general. You can share tips and tricks or brainstorm, but all this has to be packaged into only 140 characters, which is good news for the busy small business owner!

You can actually learn a lot on Twitter when you choose your network wisely. Networking on Twitter is called “following” and it means you click on a person’s profile to “follow” them. Almost immediately you can see what this person tweets (talks) about. If you follow a market leader in your field of interest you can benefit greatly from the advice they post into cyberspace.

Twitter can also be a personal tool for people who like to keep in touch, without any business interests. This makes it a great platform for your friends and family, especially when you are busy and can’t always keep in touch by phone or email. Just get a Twitter account, follow your friends and ask them to follow you. This way they will know what you are up to in an instant.

Twitter at first is overwhelming, confusing and weird. But once get into it and have a followership that is a bit bigger (over 50) it is very interesting, but you need to filter through the rubbish. Unfortunately, there are spammers on Twitter, too.

A tip: If you get a follow notification from someone, you should check out their profile before you follow them as well, otherwise you have the whole Twitter homepage full of inane sales messages that at some stage will get on your nerves. Following someone is a voluntary activity; you do not need to follow them as well if you are not interested in what they are doing. It is good etiquette to follow most people who follow you, but if you feel the person has nothing you want to know about and maybe even appears a bit dodgy then just do not follow them.

Make sure you check out the person’s title, website, statement and the number of followers and followees. These should be fairly equal for most Twitter members. If you see a profile of someone who follows 5,679 people and only 23 people follow him (or her) then you know this person is probably not worth your time. Quite often this is the case with internet spammers who follow a large number of people, but don’t want to add value to anybody’s conversation, they just want a quick sale and usually offer only one update with a link to their sales page. This is boring! Sometimes, though, thought leaders and celebrity type Twitter users have a huge following, but do not follow a lot of people. In this case you can probably benefit from following because these people post a lot of valuable advice.

Go for the normal, genuine people who follow a number of people and who are followed by a similar number of people. And check out what they actually tweet about.

It is fine to follow someone who has only 34 followers and follows 50 people, in the same way as it is a good idea to follow someone who follows 8,754 people and is followed by 10,857 people. It means there is some equal sharing in place. People who do not follow anybody are probably too self-absorbed to be a good contact, but if you feel you can still learn from that person’s tweets (messages), by all means follow them, you can still decide later to “un-follow” them.

Twitter thrives on sharing and getting to know each other. Try to post messages that have some value to people. You can choose to send just status updates, like “working on a client’s new WordPress website” or “going to a dog clicker training course” or “just heading up Mount Everest, will be back next year” because they reveal your interests or work expertise, which can help to connect with others. But remember that posts like “wiping the benchtop”, “eating a sandwich” or “going to the bathroom” might be a bit too trivial. The consequence of too many trivial posts could be that people decide to stop following you, and that can be disappointing.

So think about some interesting information to share with your followers. Think value. Be authentic, do not pretend you are someone you are not, do not use a fake photo and say you are Britney Spears’ baby monkey when you are not. You are, after all, on Twitter to grow your business.

Now get out there and have fun…

Categories : Social Media

Tags : social+marketing, social+media, spammers, Twitter, Web2.0

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