Social Media As A Business Tool?

So last week we announced that we have officially started Social Media Marketing.  Stephenie is in charge of this department.  We have been experimenting with Social Media for business for about 6 months.  We have learned the do’s and don’ts.  So the question I get asked a lot is “Why don’t I just have my receptionist do it?”.  Great question by the way because that’s what I would have recommended months ago until I have seen some disasters happen.  First and foremost I know you probably love your receptionist but what if she quit or got mad?  What if she undid every positive thing you have accomplished in Social Media with one post and ruined your reputation?  Well, it’s happened on more than one occasion.  I recommend if the owner can’t do it then it needs to be outsourced to a company that you can trust.  Your Social Media Property is probably more important than your sign out front or even possibly your testimonies.  It doesn’t matter what type of business it is, Social Media is growing at rates that most Online Marketers can’t even keep up with.  We currently maintain 5 Twitter accounts and 6 Facebook accounts.

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Adding Q&A & Responding By Video

We will be offering a question and answer soon that we will answer by video.  You can ask about web design, SEO, Social, and anything online.  We will take the questions in order to what we feel are most interesting.  We look forward to hearing your questions and answering them for you.

Adding blog to technorati.com

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Conquer Local Search – Crawl Before You Walk

We built a website for a church in Flowery Branch GA back in October of 2008.  It was directed towards Flowery Branch a small town compared to the larger cities in the area.  We wanted to make sure we kept the local people local, right.  The site was highly optimized for google searches in Flowery Branch.  We were in local as well as the primary organic section.  With a marketing budget of $0 monthly we quickly got started.  This was a website for a new church without an existing website.  We did things like added a page called “The city of Flowery Branch” and gave listings to restaurants and schools.  In about a 6 month time frame we averaged 788 monthly visitors with 56% of that being new visitors.  The average pages viewed stayed at 5.5 with an average time on site at 4:30.  Those stats are ok and not to many churches will complain about that.  I did!  I know there were bigger fish.  I knew it would be a challenge but I could get us to come up in more popular searches and beat out these mega churches for the searches just outside the small town of Flowery Branch.   Oh, I forgot to tell you we also accomplished a page rank of 2/10 in that first 6 months.

We have been up with our new site geared towards drawing repeat visitors and being optimized for larger results in major local searches around the metro Atlanta area.  This was going to be a challenge because you have church sites that are built extremely well and optimized to the max and you have the old churches that have been around for thousands of years almost and their site just ranks well because it has been around for so long and it’s clean HTML.  While doing this project the second time I have realized that the way we did it was a great process and I believe I will try to accomplish the same process through all of my projects.  By maximizing our local search results and saturating that market we are now able to rebuild and re-optimize our site for broader more popular keywords like “non denominational church gwinnett”.  This search is a popular one and there are probably 40 non denominational churches in Gwinnett at least.  We are not located in Gwinnett so we already have that working against us.  It’s easy when you can tell people on your site that you are in “Gwinnet” but we cannot do that.  So how do we optimize for a county that we do not exist in and not lose our local exposure.  Well it’s very hard but can be done.  We reworded our entire title tags, rewrote some text, dropped Gwinnett in some of the descriptions, and put Gwinnett in the keywords.  Next we will try to add links to the church site were the link text reads “gwinnett church”.  This will boost our relevance for that search.

The most important message here is that when we built the site the first time we were the little guys looking for some exposure and now we are the medium sized guys taking exposure.  As of today we are at 900 hits in the last 30 days on that church site and the % of return visitors are about the same.  That means more people are coming back to the site.  We have increased the return and new visitors. This is a good business model for many SEO companies out there because you can build value in Googles eyes first with the dominate keywords in your local area and then expand.  It works.

Is Your Business Making It?

I have to admit I will probably make someone upset by writing this post.  More than likely it will be a bead collector or local bead store owner.  Then again maybe not.  So I have always drove past this bead store up the street from my house and I have been amazed that all the businesses closing around it this particular store is there everyday.   Why? and How? is what I keep asking myself.  So this morning I pulled a search for “bead store” and I was amazed.  I mean seriously, how much can a bead store make?  There are a ton of bead stores within a 15 mile radius of my house.  I did find the bead store in the Google local section with a decent website that wasn’t optimized extremely well but they were #3.  So I guess a lot of people are searching for beads these days.  So I keep asking myself how in the world are they even still open in an economy that is horrible.  I am not sure what their secret to success is but it has brought me to a conclusion……

When you start a business do what you are passionate about and pay cash.  If you don’t have overhead and you love what you do then you will probably be successful.  I know what your thinking…..They must have some major online presence and maybe a local campaign but I see nothing like that.  They must love what they do and have a great business plan.  I totally believe if they are there today they will be there tomorrow and everyday after that until they decide they want to retire.

Why did I write this blog?  Well, to tell you the truth I wanted to show you that if a bead store can make it with 15 other bead stores around when I search then so can you.  This goes to the auto dealer, the construction company, and all the small business owners out there.  Love what you do, do what you do well, and reevaluate your business plan.

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