Lunch & Learn: Web Presence Management and Building Online Dominance

TrustWorkz® is honored to be presenting the “Web Presence Management and Building Online Dominance” << (Please RSVP at the bottom of the page in this link) Lunch & Learn at Roam Atlanta’s Alpharetta location on Wed. 5/15/13. If you are a small business owner, or someone who has the digital marketing role within your organization, this is a “must-attend” for you.

Our intent is for you to more fully understand the convergence of Social Media, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and Content Marketing and to help you implement the neccessary tactics and disciplines in order to help you to truly benefit from your marketing efforts. This is NOT a hype session.

Valuable real-life examples and lessons will be discussed candidly – you are sure to take away actionable advice and guidance. You’ll learn the exact methodology and tactics that we use every day to help our clients to grow their businesses by leveraging the incredible power of the Internet.

We’ll be covering topics from our white paper, “10 Things Businesses MUST Do To Stay Relevant Online”:

1.  Have A High Performance Website – We discuss the best formats and features to include
2. Create Content Using Blogging – No longer an optional item
3. Content – Must be properly optimized for the search engines to find it
4. Social Media Participation – What that means for your business
5. Email Marketing – Using your collected lists to reach out
6. Facebook – The correct way to engage and build an online community
7. Google + – Unignorabe and how it is integrated with all google products
8. Video – The power of video and how best to use it for marketing
9. Google+ Local – Put yourself on the map and keep it there
10. Analytics – Someone has to watch the numbers

We hope to see you there!

How long has it been since you first started contemplating social media marketing for your business? I only ask because your answer should shed some light on the correlation between when you embraced social media as a marketing platform for your business and your perception of the value and benefits realized to date.

Still, and after however much time has passed, you are likely still puzzled by certain fundamental questions. What escapes even the savviest of marketers is the “magic mix” between application and moderation. How much is enough, and how do you know when you’ve gone too far?

For the sake of the point that I’m trying to make today, it will be necessary for you to take a subjective stance and contemplate what I say with that filter in place.

Enough and Too Much

You can naturally accept that the only results you will ever see from social media will come from the pro-active and intentional use of social media. It also stands to reason that if you were to do more, undertake more, and push harder that the yield would also grow. This is only true up to a point though. Too much is usually quite evident to the casual observer…and to the perpetrator as well. The problem is that the line marked “stop here” is not so clear and is easily stepped over by the zealous as he sows and reaps.

Over-sharing, posting too often, posting and sharing the wrong content, using social media as broadcast platform for your marketing message…this is the type of activity that gets to be too much. It gets there in a big hurry too. Posting interesting and valuable content that is relevant to your audience of customers and your customers-to-be takes finesse and a light hand. KNOWING your audience is paramount as you seed your content to generate interest, awareness, and LEADS.

The more you know your audience and what resonates with them, the better your intuition about how much to push out there and when. You can’t use other people’s standards. Best practices, data, case studies, and the like, these are good things and they do serve as great guideposts. Unfortunately, social media does not lend itself to a one-size-fits-all mentality. It’s going to take a fair amount of good ole’ trial and error before you can hope to find your own magic mix – time begets intuition. Intuition and knowing your audience will dictate the “what” and “how much” you need to share in order to achieve success from your efforts.

Not Enough

Not embracing social media or refusing to participate, for whatever reason, is no longer an option for businesses hoping to market themselves effectively. I’ll just let that statement hang as a simple truth. Today I am speaking to those who really are making a go of it.  If you are like many that fall into this group, you are likely concerned that your efforts don’t seem to add up and produce the same yield that your peers and competitors enjoy. This can be quite frustrating and bothersome indeed.

I mention a “magic mix” that exists, and that mix is different for every business. Put another way, this mix is your social media strategy. A social media strategy speaks to the overarching objectives that you have as a business as well as the goals you set for your use of social media use. Your strategy will also help you stay on tack by defining the tactics you will use to meet your objectives. This strategy should not be static. It is an evolutionary animal and its motivation and parameters are found and reiterated based on the balance that you find as you explore what is too much and what is not enough for YOUR business.

Not enough social media to make it worth your while is a sad place to find yourself. Many a business owner feels that all of their efforts are for naught and that the time invested has been a colossal waste. Enough should FEEL like enough…and it shouldn’t be hard to find and define all of the ways that social media has been a help to your business. An excellent way to determine that you are falling short is by comparing yourself to your business peers and competitors.

Make allowances for competitive research as you execute your strategy. Simply by having a look at what your peers and competitors are doing should help you to define the “not enough” metric. How much do they share? What channels are they using? Which of their efforts seem to be gaining the most traction? What types of content are generating the most engagement within their community? Do they seem to have an evident strategy?

Emulating what your peers and competitors are doing is a very good way to get started, but only inasmuch as you UNDERSTAND what it is you are seeing. As your experience deepens your intuition will grow. Your ability to win and to dominate comes with the wisdom gained as you pay attention to your surroundings online. When you know how to position yourself differently and better than your competitors…you’ve arrived at a very happy place!

Last week Invesp released the infographic below. I include it here today so that you can also assess your efforts from an objective point of view for perspective.

I wish you the best of luck with your pursuits. We’re here to help if you ever decide to hire a professional to help you leverage social media, search engine optimization, and content marketing to help grow your business. We’ll also assess your web presence if you’d like, no strings attached!

TrustWorkz is looking for new talent to add to our dynamic team of WebOps! Do you have what it takes? Read our job description and drop us a line!

WebOp Job Description 

Are you an expert on social media platforms, skilled in the visual arts and excel in written communication? Do you enjoy engaging with online communities and small business owners? If so, you may be the ideal candidate to join our team.

We are TrustWorkz, Inc., the leading provider of web presence management for small business. A WebOp is a creative and motivated individual who creates content across social media platforms for each client, engages with our clients’ communities on a daily basis, measures social media metrics, and creates and executes new social media strategies to increase customer awareness, loyalty, and increase profitable sales.

Summary

• Experience in digital communications or online community building.  Relevant experience is taken into consideration.
• Proficiency on social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+), content management, measurement tools and analytics.
• Have basic multimedia skills (photo and graphic design) and experience using visual mediums in social media.
• Have blogging experience and excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Be active and passionate about digital culture: it’s not just something you know, but an integral part of your daily life.
• Demonstrate a strong attention to detail.
• Sense of responsibility for providing excellent service for clients.
• Self-starter requiring little supervision.
• Able to work collaboratively with a group or individually.

Responsibilities include (but are not limited to):

• Interacting with communities across all social media platforms. (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+)
• Identifying and developing relationships with clients
• Produce web content for use in social media channels, blogs, contests and marketing campaigns.
• Measure results of social media strategies and promotions.
• Contributing new ideas to ongoing social media strategy.

Extras

• Health benefits
• Flexible work-from-home policy
• The ability to work with a group of quirky, fun-loving, individuals who truly love their job. (Don’t believe us? Check out what one of our employees had to say about working here!)

There’s no doubt about it, many people have a much better understanding of the way things used to be. Personally, I’m old enough to be quite sentimental about a great many things. My desk is currently covered in Post-it notes, and this takes me back to a more familiar time when these were the coolest thing since sliced bread…and they only came in one color. I wanted to share the cartoon below because it really resonated with me on a few different levels. For one, the visual parallels are pretty accurate. I also can’t help but marvel at how young many of the represented social networks are.

 Image Source: John Atkinson

Facebook was launched in February of 2004, Twitter was created in March of 2006, and Pinterest is a mere 3 years old. So how in the world is it that so many of us feel like we’re so behind the eight ball? Put simply, the hunger for technology has created a machine…a technology loop that is all but impossible to keep up with. This phenomenon is not new, with every new advancement there are those of us who are still dependent on the “old” technology. We see no real need to put ourselves through a painful learning curve when what we have is sufficient to meet our needs. What’s more, we’re all too busy doing what we do in order to make a living to keep up with what’s trendy. But therein lays the problem doesn’t it? Running a business requires that we keep up with what’s current in order to stay competitive.

Put aside any fears about the unknown just for a second and let’s compare ourselves to the rest of the world. Is it really too late to jump in and catch up? Is everyone else really that far ahead of you? Will you continue to ignore what is happening – or is it finally time for you to embrace and learn to leverage social media marketing?

Instead of waxing poetic and trying to boost your confidence enough for you to want to take the plunge, I’d like to share another very powerful image. It’s a living image that simply conveys the truth about how the world has embraced social media.  Of the numbers you see adding up, keep in mind that many of these metrics are being generated by brand new users. Some are people who are for the very first time creating a Facebook page for their business; some are just today buying their first iPad. For all of these that arrived ahead of you, there is an exponential boatload of people coming onboard after you.

 

Every day here at TrustWorkz® we help businesses leverage social media, search engine optimization, and content marketing. As much as it may feel like you are arriving late to the party, the reality is that many small business owners are just now jumping in. Contact us if you would like a candid assessment of your efforts thus far. We’d love to help you to understand the potential and the possibilities that are available to you!

When assessing the success of our internet marketing campaigns for our clients, we prefer to compare time frame trends. This helps us take a deeper look into what is working, what isn’t, and what can be improved for our clients. When it came to helping Healthy Smiles of Georgia rank in one of the most affluent, and dental saturated neighborhoods in the country, we knew that nothing was more important for their long term strategy than a strong foundation of original content. After a year with TrustWorkz®, Healthy Smiles of Georgia has made dramatic improvements in keyword rankings and traffic.

Content Marketing for Dentists

For this case study, we looked at six (6) month intervals for comparison. When we build websites, we have a certain set of keywords that we are targeting for our clients. Throughout that process, we expand on those original keywords and build out long tail keywords. These help our clients be found for a greater variety of keywords used in internet searches.

Dental Internet Marketing Results

By taking a full year, and splitting the information in half to compare, we can see dramatic increases after more than a year of service with TrustWorkz®. Here are a few facts from a year’s worth of work with dental internet marketing.

We are obsessed with seeing fantastic data for our clients. Depending on the market and needs, some clients take longer than others to explode online, but we always see dramatic results. Healthy Smiles of Georgia is no exception. With an extremely competitive market, we knew that marketing the company correctly, without taking any shortcuts, would help the dental practice in the long run. Here are a few stats from the last 6 months:

• Visits: 3,063 (+73%)
• Page Views: 5,763 (+66%)
• Search Referrals: 1,647 (+73%)
• Keywords: 650 +

As you can tell, our content marketing strategy has helped our dental client dramatically improve his results over the past year. By pursuing quality content marketing over quantity content marketing, our client has been able to secure solid first page rankings for the majority of his targeted keywords.

If you’re interested in increasing your exposure online and increasing the quality of internet leads, contact TrustWorkz® today!

The first quarter is about to end, and I’m sure that we will be seeing interesting numbers about technology, smartphones, and internet use since the beginning of 2013. I guarantee that you will not hear about mobile or internet consumption dropping over the past three months. Yesterday, comparisons between papal history of St. Peter’s Bascillica in 2005 versus 2013 (<- You REALLY ought to see these pics!) were appearing on various blogs and news sites. As you can see, the internet users are changing the way they use and consume media at a rapid pace. It’s time for small businesses to catch up with an affordable internet marketing solution.

Starting a Web Presence from Scratch

One of the first things that we insist on doing for new clients is to rebuilt their website. We believe that a fresh start with updated code, design, and mobile functionality is so important that we include it in our services.

Small businesses have a hard enough time keeping up with changes with technology and the internet. That’s why it’s important to build web presences with the future in mind. Building a website with WordPress (a wonderful content management system) allows small business owners the freedom to adapt with a platform that is updated a few times every year. These updates benefit website security, functionality, and more. This is one of the many reasons why TrustWorkz only build with WordPress websites for small businesses.

Keeping the explosion of mobile technology in mind, it’s important to make sure that your web presence can adapt to a variety of devices. When smartphones first began to hit the market place, some businesses adopted mobile websites. These were websites strictly designed for mobile devices, which typically did not function well across all mobile devices. This made things difficult for small business owners because they would be responsible for managing two websites; a normal desktop website, and a website for mobile. With the introduction (and blessings from Google and Bing) of responsive web design, small business owners now have the ability to own a website that serves desktop computers as well as a variety of mobile devices without having to worry about two different sites. Mixing WordPress into the equation gives small businesses even more power by making it easy to update content to meet the needs of their potential new clients.

The design and development of a website play a very interesting role in the success of a small business online. Without a current design  that stands the test of time, a small business might struggle over upcoming years. Whether they are trying to gain dominance or maintain their high position, an outdated website makes things increasingly more difficult. An elegant website that is designed to meet the needs of the user will leave a lasting impression that draws in new clients. Websites need to be thought through from beginning to end, with the ability to be adjusted as time progresses.

Building Website Content Never Ends

Internet users are no longer satisfied with place holder style websites. Today, websites need content to meet the needs and questions potential customers using the internet might have about your small business. A well qualified lead is going to put some research into your company (probably using the internet.) Your website should continue to grow over time to meet the needs of your current and potential clients so that they can easily find the information that the need. Using WordPress helps small businesses update their content within minutes. It also provides businesses with a search engine friendly ability to publish blog posts.

Blogs grant small businesses the ability to quickly update their clients from their (branded) website. Posts can benefit busiensses in a variety of ways. They help the brand look more human, social, full of expert advice, and blog posts also provide search engine optimization (SEO) value. Some blog posts meet the immediate need of getting information out quickly to your customer base. Other blog posts with evergreen content will be searched for in the future for months to years. These types of blog posts will provide your business with lasting value.

Using Social Media to Build a Web Presence

A web presence isn’t just built with a website though. Content creation for social media also plays a major role in building a dominant web presence. Small businesses should focus on a small selection of social media channels to focus on to maximize their results. Signing up for every new social channel won’t help you if you don’t take the time to update them.

Whether it is Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest, you want to find where your potential clients spend the majority of their time. It makes no sense to spend hours of time making posts on LinkedIn if your small business is predominantly B2C.

No matter which platforms fit your needs, the last thing you want to do is launch a profile and then abandon it. Businesses on Facebook frequently show up well in Google searches. If a business hasn’t updated their page in weeks or months, it might appear to a user that the business doesn’t care about connecting with clients or it might not even be around any longer. Neither situation is helpful to either party involved. The best option when building your web presence dominance is to select the profiles that make sense to your company and update them regularly.

Dominating Your Local Market

Building a dominant web presence doesn’t happen over night. While building the website doesn’t take much time, building quality, original content happens every month for every year. Small businesses that choose to build quality web presences now will benefit three years from now when their competitors are desperately trying to catch up.

If you’re interested in building a strong web presence for your small business, contact TrustWorkz® today!

 

We here at TrustWorkz® spend a great deal of time explaining to our clients (and would-be clients) how social media activity has a direct impact on the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of your website. There has always been a myriad of tactics that have been utilized to increase your website’s chances of showing up in the search engines:

• Keyword Density – Using keywords on your pages, posts, and in your meta information to help the search engines to find and properly index your content.
• Inbound Links – Making sure that similar sites around the web (preferably those sites that rank higher than your own) are linking to your pages and posts.
• Using “Alt Text” – This is text assigned to the images on your website that helps the search engines to know exactly what the image is about.
• Having Great Titles – Giving your pages and posts compelling, informative, and Keyword-rich titles and headers sends a strong signal to the search engines about your content.

Social media participation is not something to be ignored or taken lightly. Aside from some of the older and more understood tactics and strategies affecting your SEO, great social media activity absolutely begets great SEO. This infographic simply explains several ways that social media has a direct impact on how fast and how effectively your social media activity improves your website’s SEO. Enjoy!

Infographic source: Being Your Brand

 

Building a web presence for your small business holds many advantages for both short and long term marketing goals. Successful inbound marketing campaigns are constantly being touched, tweaked, and modified by humans to maintain and continually build their web presence. Through reporting tools that help us track data from websites, professional online marketers (like our WebOps®) are able to pull levers and make shifts when needed to increase leads for businesses.

Tracking website data provides insights to marketers so that we can see what’s working, and what needs more attention on the website. Some of the greatest information shared from website analytics is from the unexpected wins. By taking the time to thoroughly review data from our clients, WebOps® can spot trends in popular pages within the website or keywords that were used to find our clients. As time goes on, the data builds and is used to continue to dominate search engine results for our clients.

Data Takes Time and Energy to Grow and Decipher

The web analytics we receive and turn into actionable results from websites are like internet gold. Creating a well tuned, ever growing website from these analytics takes time. When building a web presence, we typically look for trends to help us make decisions. Website analytics become increasingly valuable as time goes by, so that we can look back on data from months at a time. If your business is seasonal, analyzing your website traffic might help find why your customers are coming to your website during the off season. It could completely change the content being delivered in order to suit the needs of your current and potential customers.

A residential landscaper, for example, might be more interested in delivering content about lawn maintenance and services during the spring and summer, while the late winter months could benefit from content surrounding landscape planning. The ability to track the data that draws local clients to your site helps to identify content that makes an impact. Over time, it can lead to the accumulation of thousands of keyword variations that helped internet searchers find your small business online. By spotting trends and addressing need periods, a WebOp® can create content that meets immediate needs for the business, as well as create evergreen content that lasts for months or even years.

Building a web presence takes time, especially if you plan on making it last for years to come. Initially, you might have in mind a handful of keywords that you think customers will use to find their way to your site. You might be surprised after a year of building your web presence when your WebOp® tells you that there were hundreds of keyword variants used by local searchers to find your small business online. The ability to record and analyze data from your website is an essential piece to growing your business.

Contact TrustWorkz® today to find out how your small business marketing can benefit from a professional WebOp® managing your web presence.

 

 

On Tuesday of this past week TrustWorkz® was honored to present a Webinar to the membership of the Roller Skating Association International (We are members). We were asked to help the members understand what has changed about the Internet lately and how this impacts their entire web presence. The Internet is in a constant state of flux and we spoke about the most important aspects of a business’s web presence that need to be managed and maintained.

This slide deck presented alone doesn’t really deliver the same value outside of the webinar format so please download our “10 Things Businesses MUST Do To Stay Relevant Online” white paper. This white paper is the basis for the spoken script used to accompany this presentation and it contains all of the information you will need to better understand and manage your web presence. Enjoy the slides…and the white paper!

“Web Presence Management” (SEO, SOCIAL MEDIA, CONTENT MARKETING) Webinar Slides from TrustWorkz, Inc.

 

When you start a small business, one of the most important things in becoming successful is differentiating yourself from your competitors. You want your potential customers to know that you have something different to offer than everyone else. From your mission statement, to the service you provide, to how your employees interact with customers, your business is living its identity as an original. Your small business website deserves the same attention to detail that your store front or service trucks receive. Aesthetics are important, but what you have to say will make you stand out to your customers and to search engines as well.

The content on your website is the foundation of a strong web presence.

What’s Wrong with Copying Content from Someone Else

Typically when you create a new site, someone within your business creates content for the main pages of your website. As time goes on and business responsibilities build up, it can sometimes become much easier to look at another website in your niche and say, “Hey, that sounds great. I’ll just use what they said for our site!” However, following this strategy for building out the content on your website can pose to be problematic.

The first problem with copying content from another business’s website is that it is plagiarism. According to Wikipedia, plagiarism occurs when there is “wrongful appropriation of another author’s ideas, language, or thoughts.” Copying a paragraph or two might seem innocent to you, but it is considered by most to be ethically wrong. Depending on what and how much content is copied, you could find yourself in legal trouble as well, especially without proper citations.

The second problem is that Google, the largest search engine in the world, knows whether or not your content is original. If your moral compass is off, Google will be sure to give you a lesson in ethics by penalizing your website for identical content. When you use someone else’s content over your own, you are missing out on a major opportunity for your business. Original content, that is well written, will actually help optimize your website for search engines. When the content is relative to each page and provides value to humans beings searching, your website can move up the search engine rankings. If you’re a small business owner, I know how much it means for you to show up in Google results. The content on your website is the foundation of a strong web presence.

The Do’s of Creating Original Content

Creating original content for your website will do wonders for your overall web presence. When done properly, your site should experience more relevant traffic and higher rankings in search engines for a variety of keywords. Getting it right the first time around is extremely important.

At TrustWorkz®, we create original content for small businesses with weekly blog posts. Every blog post is intentional, and always has a goal in mind for helping our clients grow their business online. Here are a few points we consider when creating original website content:

• We always want to add value to the business’s customers, so we always try to answer a question that needs to be answered. If your customers are anything like us, then they go to the internet and search for valuable information. By solving common problems or answering questions, your web presence builds authority and trust with your customers and search engines.
• Creating headlines that grab a user’s attention is also very important. If your headlines are informative and laid out well, users can find information that is important to them. This is something that Google is also noticing about your small business website.
• Always make accuracy a priority when creating content. If you’re reporting facts or analysis, make sure that you cite where you found the information. This helps you back your content, as well as give credit where credit is due. Quoting a thought leader in your niche is perfectly fine, but it’s important to cite their thoughts as you would if you were writing a book.
• Review your grammar and spelling for errors before publishing content. Potential customers reviewing your website could take one look at a few misspellings and head back to Google to look for someone who takes the time to review their content. It might sound silly, but the majority of us will turn away when we see spelling errors on websites.

The main pages of your website deserve close attention to be sure that your message is being delivered clearly and accurately. Consider it similar to creating ad copy, which will be used to attract new customers and convince them to contact you for more information.

If you have questions about your website or content marketing for your business, contact TrustWorkz® for more information about managing your web presence.

 

Photo via Flickr