Having a small business means that you have a smaller budget to work with, and with all the marketing that you need to do to compete with the larger companies, you need to make smart marketing decisions.

One of the best ways that your small business can market itself is to use search engine optimization (SEO). While it can help give your company the online presence you need to compete with other companies, there are a few things you can do to make your SEO endeavors more successful.

1. Take your time to research the right keywords.

Keywords play a huge role in SEO, and it’s very important that you choose the right ones for your business and fill your website, social media sites and other web-related pages with these keywords. Google’s Keyword Tool is a great resource to help you learn which keywords generate the most interest with your niche, and you can also use tools like SpyFu to check and see what keywords your competitors are using.

2. Think outside the box.

Most companies focus all of their SEO attention on their website, and this isn’t smart. You also need to make sure that you have a social media presence and a blog. Both of these can help you snag the right keywords and give you online visibility. In fact, many companies find that their blogs have a higher page ranking than their website because the content on the site changes regularly, which enables them to use an array of keywords and receive more attention from search engine crawlers.

Another great idea is to claim your business on popular online review sites. Customers are turning to these sites on a regular basis to make a purchasing decision or to share their experience, and if you claim your business on these pages you can provide your customers with the right information about your brand, allowing you to again have more keyword success.

3. Don’t forget about it.

Many small businesses see their SEO strategies fail because they think that once they add keywords to their website or take out a few PPC ads they can forget about it. Unfortunately, successful SEO requires constant monitoring. You need to see how well your keywords and your PPC ads are doing on a monthly basis, and if you notice that you’re not generating the right traffic, you’ll need to make some changes.

4. Pay attention to trends.

A great way to generate more visibility for your business is to use keywords that relate to current trends. For example, during the holiday season, you’ll want to use keywords that revolve around the holidays, such as “gifts”, “holiday” or even “free shipping”. If a current event occurred that has something to do with your business, you can also use it in a social media post or blog post. This way, you can catch the attention of those who are searching for the current event, but make sure that it relates. If you start throwing in random keywords that don’t make sense, you’ll end up hurting your SEO efforts rather than help them.

Jacob Grant is a small business manager and avid blogger.  He enjoys giving advice to other small businesses about SEO and reputation management.

Social media marketing is very important if you’re going to run any business online today. While newspaper, television and radio advertising and marketing still exist, there’s no replacement for this organic growth which social media marketing brings you. You do this by finding your existing clients online and then expanding your customer base from there. Keep reading into the following paragraphs to learn the basics of social media marketing that keep things steady for you and your business.
Five Social Media Marketing Fundamentals
You need to have a blog to focus as the center of your social media marketing efforts and profiles. Alert readers and followers on all platforms when you update your blog through tweets and posts. At the very least, these are great backlinks from trusted sources that can help boost your blog and central website in the search engine rankings. In your blog content, do not get too spammy or hyped on selling your product or service. Focus instead on the problems served or solved by what you offer, not actually what you offer. Potential buyers want to know what answer your product or service provides them.
If your fan base is global, consider that your followers are spread across very divergent time zones. That said updating all your statuses at the same exact time every day might get completely missed by followers on the other side of the continent or world. Scheduling Facebook updates is not always a good idea, but you can make use of something like Buffer or Hoot Suite to randomize the updates to varying times for maximum exposure.
Run social media marketing campaign
Run an actual social media marketing campaign. Study on how to do this. Get everyone involved. Plan on goals and expectations. Make them specific and measurable. Identify approaches to accomplish them and then put them into play. Mark down how well it works, and then you can learn what you can do again next time and what ideas just do not pan out.
In between campaigns, try to dedicate a half an hour per work day to your social media marketing efforts. Your followers will start dropping you if they are cleaning up their pages and see a Like to you when you have not posted in weeks or months. Stay on their radar to keep your fan base count up between campaigns. At the very least, continuous engagement reminds people about your business. Keep reading comments and responding to those who post so that you can keep your finger on the pulse of the niche you serve.
Knowing the average users
Consider the average educational level of the users of various platforms. You can target highly educated users at LinkedIn, where almost 40% of the platform members have graduate degrees. Keep things more casual on Facebook, where half of users at least started college, but a quarter only finished high school.
Keep these five fundamentals in mind in your social media marketing efforts, and you can find success in keeping customers and finding new ones. Try each of these to maximize your results for the efforts and resources that you put in.

Attached Images:

•  License: Creative Commons image source 

Eric is a social media entrepreneur and consultatnt.  If you need more information regarding the basics of social media marketing, the Empower Network is a good resource to check out.

Social networking sites have turned out to be our best friends with whom we share almost everything. Even in our most pressing time, we take out time for posting and tweeting to vent out our emotions. Our dependence on these social networking sites has grown manifold. However, the same paves way for some ‘oops moments’ where we regret for the awkwardness, we created on this social platform. While these sites are lenient, enough to provide with options like ‘edit’ and ‘delete,’ the content spreads like wildfire  before we try to make up for our mistakes.

A few embarrassing moments that happens to be a part of our sophomore stage at these social networking sites:

1. The Dilemma- To Like Or Comment

After a lot of pondering, little do we know that we have taken the wrong decision of liking when we were supposed to comment, and vice- versa. A like for a post ‘My Grandmom passed away’ would be one such example. Similarly, you need not comment on every post like someone saying ‘Had a great time with a good friend’ asking details about that personal incident on a social networking site. Why be a laughing stock?

1. Incase you do not know, there is an option to ‘Filter’

You do not want your boss to know that you have partied last night or your mom to know that you bunked your class. Filter them. Do not go overboard and ‘unfriend’ them. It can be humiliating for the person on the other end and embarrassing for you. Avoid unfriending people unless and until it is highly essential.

1. Use your smileys appropriately.

Do not smile all the time or wink at situations where you just wanted to smile. Many do not understand that a wink is used only to refer to ‘tongue in cheek’ moments.

1. Hashtags on Facebook

Many who do know the purpose of hashtags use it unnecessarily like its use on Facebook. Unlike in twitter and Instragram, hashtags will not act as a link on Facebook. Your post with a hashtag on facebook may appear like a replica of your tweet or give the impression that you have no sense of hashtags and social networking sites.

1. Do not Preach on Facebook

At times, the wall seems to be the sadness venting point for many sad people and we all have atleast one friend who falls in the category. One who feels he/ she is the most unlucky one on the planet and wears on their sleeves, suicidal instincts. Sharing your feeling is fine but venting out all your sadness is not. All that you are doing is baffling people regarding how you expect them to react.

Summary: In our process to tether with social networking sites, we all encounter some embarrassing moments like revealing too much of information or poking our nose into things where we are not supposed to. Knowing to use them appropriately and understanding their features will enable you to avoid these embarrassing moments.

Convonix is a leading internet marketing firm which offers Social Media Marketing as a major part of its service offering. We continuously keep revising our Social Media Strategies, undertake a lot of research work and share the knowledge gained in the process for webmasters benefit.

Getting Online

Although many businesses start online in the modern day, there are many local businesses that begin offline before moving online to begin expanding. With the presence of social media so prominent in the modern world, it can be tempting to operate a page on Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest instead of spending time actually having a standalone website.

Social Media

People and businesses love social media because it is free, and they have an audience of potentially millions of people to whom they can connect on a daily basis. Over 70% of internet users are active on social media, so it certainly seems like a sound strategy.

Having a strong social media presence can open up your business to many potential customers who would ordinarily never find you. We would always recommend a strong social media presence, however this should never be as a direct replacement or used instead of a standalone website.

Why a Standalone Website?

Having a website will enable you to develop and measure the true success of your business and loyalty of your customers. Having 11,928 likes on your Facebook page might look great, but is it really bringing any money in?

If you are on a social media site only, what if they are down or they go out of business one day, and that is your only connection with online customers. There are also considerations to be made with regard to the demographics that use certain social networks. If you have a strong Facebook presence with a product targeting men over the age of 40, you aren’t going to get very far. A website takes all of this out of the equation, and leaves you dealing with “the internet” as a whole.

Making the Decision

If you want to present yourself as a professional company, you should always, always have your own website. Even if it is a very basic set up with only a limited number of pages, if it presents a professional image for your company it will help build revenues and make you more successful in the longer term.

Use a website as the basis for your online presence, then use social media to extend out from here. You can then use the likes of Facebook and Twitter to interact with customers and direct relevant traffic to your site, rather than spend time targeting, and probably annoying, a lot of people who are nonplussed or uninterested in what you are offering.

This article has been written by the Bough SEO content team. Bough SEO are one of the leading seo marketing agencies in the UK.

There was a time when any strategies to encourage your readers to share your content with others were very limited indeed. That usually meant extremely slow growth of website traffic. Not anymore. Today we have social networking sites and a host of other tools that make it very easy to give incentives to your readers to share your content at all times.

The advantages of getting people to share your content with their friends and relatives is rather obvious. The viral effect alone can very easily spin beautifully out of control and give you millions of hits in an instant. Even as you read this, there are sites that have grown from a handful of visitors to tons of traffic all in a flash and it is thanks mainly to some article or content that just went virally out of control spreading across the World Wide Web like wild fire.

It is so easy to share content through social media

Currently one of the most effective strategies to encourage your readers to share your content with others involves linking your website or blog to your social networking site so that when somebody leaves a comment it is immediately visible on social media. Chances are high that a fair number of those who see the status update and end up taking a look at your content will also leave a comment and in the same way it will get seen by many others. This is a very simple and yet extremely effective way of getting your readers to share your content with ease.

However there are a few very important things you need to put into place for this to work well for you. To start with the social networking site account that you will link to your website content needs to be positioned in such a way that followers and friends to that account are already expectant of the kind of information that you will be sharing. It will not be as effective if a social media account that is known for being strongly pro-abortion for instance suddenly being linked to rabidly anti-abortion sites and articles. You will just confuse your readers and all likelihood lose them. You may need to open a separate account from your usual one and build up the desired image so that you also attract your highly targeted audience.

A Facebook Page Can Be Powerful

You can also create a Facebook page for your website and share regular updates based on the content on your site. One huge advantage of a fan page is that it does not limit you to the number of members you may accumulate. A Facebook account has a limit of 5,000 friends but a Facebook page can have millions of fans and still growing. Imagine the kind of impact every time you share a status on your millions-strong fan page about the latest article you have posted?

Conclusion

Using the strategies to encourage your readers to share your content with others that have been listed here, you will quickly notice the impact it has bringing in multitudes who would have otherwise had no way of finding your site.

Guest post by Ludwing Hernandez, young web entreprenuer, great writter about work at home techniques.