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Hi Kara,
As you have seen your primary website and your blog are the web properties best suited for creating and maintaining long term customer relationships. However, there are many ways to expand your web presence:
1. Know your target audience - this should be first and foremost - who do you want to reach? You have to know what you want and tailor your marketing strategy after that. Where are your customers spending the most time on your website? What are they most interested in? A great way to capture this data is with Google Analytics. You can figure out what pages, links, videos your audience is paying the most attention to, and even how long they stay on each web page. This is a great tool to use to tailor your plan for gaining more presences - these are the areas you'll want to focus on. Just as a heads up, if you are trying to capture lost customers or your business has experienced sales deficit and you want to boost its income, you have to look into the other areas of your business before you begin promoting it. You want to make sure that before you gain more customers, and grow, that you have most of the bugs worked out or your growth will quickly become unsustainable - this would speak to your other question about hiring more quality workers for a low price.
All of the other ideas I have listed below should be based off of what you find from this. Most start-ups that I've talked to that have failed have identified this being the key step they missed. Do your homework and it will pay off in the end!
2. Re-evaluate your keywords : Think about what keywords people would actually type in a search engine to find your brand. This will help you become more prominent in search results. You can evaluate and select keywords by using a keyword research tool like Wordtracker.com, which will tell you which terms people use when they search for services like yours. This tool gives invaluable data in the form of a “100-day count,” which reveals how many times a specific term (keyword) or combination of terms (keyword phrase) was used in all Internet searches in a period of 100 days. Importantly, it also provides a “competition” count, showing how many times the term appeared in competing Web sites. You can also pay Google (Google AdWords - see #4) for key search words, although this can be a little pricey.
3. Social Networking: You have already done this with Facebook but take advantage of what else is out there. Join social networking sites to help you facilitate face to face networking by connecting with people from all over the world Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google Plus. Start a page on Facebook and connect it to your blog. Your blogger contacts can like you on Fb and then their friends can see what you're about.
3a.Participate in Social Bookmarking: Popular instrument for users to share certain Web pages with other users who have similar interests. A key characteristic is ranking, which reflects how many people recommend certain Web pages by bookmarking them. Highly ranked pages get good results with search engines. Tagging, by which you assign keywords to help collaboratively classify pages, is another characteristic of many of these sites. An example of a social bookmarking site is Digg, where users select, share and discuss articles and videos and bookmark the pages when they find the content valuable. It can also facilitate network building, since you can invite contacts to track URLs that you are recommending and vice versa. Write an intro about your company and submit it to one of the Top 10 Social Bookmarking sites: www.netscape.com; reddit.com; digg.com; www.furl.net; www.stumbleupon.com; ma.gnolia.com; de.lirio.us; myweb2.serach.yahoo.com; www.simply.com.
One of the biggest factors in search page ranking is the number and quality of backlinks to your page from outside your site - particularly from sites with higher authority. Publishing your content on high-traffic sites increases your chances of being seen, and can create high-authority backlinks to your own properties.
Example: Web 2.0 sites, such as Squidoo and HubPages allow you to create individual pages, each focusing on a narrow topic. Publish some of your high quality, relevant content on keyword-specific pages with links to your primary website and your other online properties. Make sure you include all of your contact information, along with a customer contact form. These Web 2.0 properties have a lot of authority and are favored by the search engines. Your Squidoo lens or HubPages hub is likely to show up sooner than your primary web pages in the search engine results, and with higher ranking – at least until you start building some of your own authority.
4. Advertise your videos more in areas other then your website (again if through your homework this is an area you find to be interesting to your target audience). Some pod casts or Youtube videos to advertise on your Facebook account, twitter and blog. Content sharing sites, such as Flickr and YouTube are good places to host your images and any videos you create - You expose your content to a huge community of users - people who otherwise would be unlikely to find you. Create company accounts on these sites, when you sign up, remember to incorporate your key phrases into your member profiles as well as your content tags, captions and descriptions. **YouTube recently started offering sponsored results, a pay-per-click program similar to Google AdWords that allows you to bid for placement of your video at the top of the search results.
5. Incentives for referring and/or first purchases of new customers: Offer something for free or at a discounted rate to create some incentive for people to look, buy and more importantly refer friends to your site.
6. Customer Reviews: Encourage your users and costumers to share publicly what they like about your site, certain products and even videos. You should monitor your presence on consumer review sites, and take advantage of any opportunity to respond to reviews, good or bad. This will inevitably create a free business listing - If you get any kind of traffic on review sites or you begin to build any sort of community on these sites you might consider investing in a paid listing as well.
7. Customer newsletter: You may already have this, but I wanted to mention it because it is a great vehicle for building relationships. A regular email newsletter is a powerful way to stay in touch with your customers and potential customers. You will probably want to use a permission-based e-mail marketing service to ensure good email deliverable, and for their advanced list-building and tracking tools. Your e-mail list is another very valuable business asset. Maintain ownership and administrative access to your list just as you do for your sites and domains.
Your business presence online can and should be more than just a single website. You want to be consistent in how you portray your brand. You want to find your niche, find something that makes you un-able to be imitated by competitors and clearly display this to your customers. I think you have done a great job of this so far. You have an idea that is really unique and versatile, but we need to go to the users to see what is really going to make you grow and most importantly sustain that growth!
As you have seen your primary website and your blog are the web properties best suited for creating and maintaining long term customer relationships. However, there are many ways to expand your web presence:
1. Know your target audience - this should be first and foremost - who do you want to reach? You have to know what you want and tailor your marketing strategy after that. Where are your customers spending the most time on your website? What are they most interested in? A great way to capture this data is with Google Analytics. You can figure out what pages, links, videos your audience is paying the most attention to, and even how long they stay on each web page. This is a great tool to use to tailor your plan for gaining more presences - these are the areas you'll want to focus on. Just as a heads up, if you are trying to capture lost customers or your business has experienced sales deficit and you want to boost its income, you have to look into the other areas of your business before you begin promoting it. You want to make sure that before you gain more customers, and grow, that you have most of the bugs worked out or your growth will quickly become unsustainable - this would speak to your other question about hiring more quality workers for a low price.
All of the other ideas I have listed below should be based off of what you find from this. Most start-ups that I've talked to that have failed have identified this being the key step they missed. Do your homework and it will pay off in the end!
2. Re-evaluate your keywords : Think about what keywords people would actually type in a search engine to find your brand. This will help you become more prominent in search results. You can evaluate and select keywords by using a keyword research tool like Wordtracker.com, which will tell you which terms people use when they search for services like yours. This tool gives invaluable data in the form of a “100-day count,” which reveals how many times a specific term (keyword) or combination of terms (keyword phrase) was used in all Internet searches in a period of 100 days. Importantly, it also provides a “competition” count, showing how many times the term appeared in competing Web sites. You can also pay Google (Google AdWords - see #4) for key search words, although this can be a little pricey.
3. Social Networking: You have already done this with Facebook but take advantage of what else is out there. Join social networking sites to help you facilitate face to face networking by connecting with people from all over the world Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google Plus. Start a page on Facebook and connect it to your blog. Your blogger contacts can like you on Fb and then their friends can see what you're about.
3a.Participate in Social Bookmarking: Popular instrument for users to share certain Web pages with other users who have similar interests. A key characteristic is ranking, which reflects how many people recommend certain Web pages by bookmarking them. Highly ranked pages get good results with search engines. Tagging, by which you assign keywords to help collaboratively classify pages, is another characteristic of many of these sites. An example of a social bookmarking site is Digg, where users select, share and discuss articles and videos and bookmark the pages when they find the content valuable. It can also facilitate network building, since you can invite contacts to track URLs that you are recommending and vice versa. Write an intro about your company and submit it to one of the Top 10 Social Bookmarking sites: www.netscape.com; reddit.com; digg.com; www.furl.net; www.stumbleupon.com; ma.gnolia.com; de.lirio.us; myweb2.serach.yahoo.com; www.simply.com.
One of the biggest factors in search page ranking is the number and quality of backlinks to your page from outside your site - particularly from sites with higher authority. Publishing your content on high-traffic sites increases your chances of being seen, and can create high-authority backlinks to your own properties.
Example: Web 2.0 sites, such as Squidoo and HubPages allow you to create individual pages, each focusing on a narrow topic. Publish some of your high quality, relevant content on keyword-specific pages with links to your primary website and your other online properties. Make sure you include all of your contact information, along with a customer contact form. These Web 2.0 properties have a lot of authority and are favored by the search engines. Your Squidoo lens or HubPages hub is likely to show up sooner than your primary web pages in the search engine results, and with higher ranking – at least until you start building some of your own authority.
4. Advertise your videos more in areas other then your website (again if through your homework this is an area you find to be interesting to your target audience). Some pod casts or Youtube videos to advertise on your Facebook account, twitter and blog. Content sharing sites, such as Flickr and YouTube are good places to host your images and any videos you create - You expose your content to a huge community of users - people who otherwise would be unlikely to find you. Create company accounts on these sites, when you sign up, remember to incorporate your key phrases into your member profiles as well as your content tags, captions and descriptions. **YouTube recently started offering sponsored results, a pay-per-click program similar to Google AdWords that allows you to bid for placement of your video at the top of the search results.
5. Incentives for referring and/or first purchases of new customers: Offer something for free or at a discounted rate to create some incentive for people to look, buy and more importantly refer friends to your site.
6. Customer Reviews: Encourage your users and costumers to share publicly what they like about your site, certain products and even videos. You should monitor your presence on consumer review sites, and take advantage of any opportunity to respond to reviews, good or bad. This will inevitably create a free business listing - If you get any kind of traffic on review sites or you begin to build any sort of community on these sites you might consider investing in a paid listing as well.
7. Customer newsletter: You may already have this, but I wanted to mention it because it is a great vehicle for building relationships. A regular email newsletter is a powerful way to stay in touch with your customers and potential customers. You will probably want to use a permission-based e-mail marketing service to ensure good email deliverable, and for their advanced list-building and tracking tools. Your e-mail list is another very valuable business asset. Maintain ownership and administrative access to your list just as you do for your sites and domains.
Your business presence online can and should be more than just a single website. You want to be consistent in how you portray your brand. You want to find your niche, find something that makes you un-able to be imitated by competitors and clearly display this to your customers. I think you have done a great job of this so far. You have an idea that is really unique and versatile, but we need to go to the users to see what is really going to make you grow and most importantly sustain that growth!
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Verneda Lights advised on 12 Jan 2012
Internationally recognized writer, graphic designer, & visual artist, Experienced Business Strategic Planner & Public Speaker
The marketing strategy for all businesses is detailed by the marketing plan. According to the John Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Center of the University of Norther Iowa, the components of the marketing plan are:
1) Situation Analysis (which includes an external analysis such as what's going on in your nation, region, state, city, technology, environment etc.). The Situation analysis also includes customer analysis (who is the ideal customer), internal analysis (what are your resources and positioning with respect to your competitors, etc).
2) SWOT analysis (detailing of Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities for and Threats to your business.)
3.) Marketing Goals and Objectives (What do you want to accomplish).
4.) Marketing Strategy (Product, Price, Placement, Promotion & Distribution).
5.) Implementation (Detail how the sections of the plan will be carried out).
6.) Evaluation and Control. (How will you know if the plan is successful, where it falls short, and how it can be made better)
7.) Executive Summary: Written last and includes the major talking points of items 1-6. When writing the plan up, the Executive Summary comes first.
You can read more about marketing strategy here: www.jpec.org Information on how to write a marketing plan can be found here: articles.mplans.com
A good way to expand your expand your web presence and client list at the same time is to set up a small web site and start a blog. You can add an email sign up sheet to both the website and the blog, or you ask visitors to sign up for a news letter. Many web hosting companies include the ability to add forms to your web pages for free.
1) Situation Analysis (which includes an external analysis such as what's going on in your nation, region, state, city, technology, environment etc.). The Situation analysis also includes customer analysis (who is the ideal customer), internal analysis (what are your resources and positioning with respect to your competitors, etc).
2) SWOT analysis (detailing of Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities for and Threats to your business.)
3.) Marketing Goals and Objectives (What do you want to accomplish).
4.) Marketing Strategy (Product, Price, Placement, Promotion & Distribution).
5.) Implementation (Detail how the sections of the plan will be carried out).
6.) Evaluation and Control. (How will you know if the plan is successful, where it falls short, and how it can be made better)
7.) Executive Summary: Written last and includes the major talking points of items 1-6. When writing the plan up, the Executive Summary comes first.
You can read more about marketing strategy here: www.jpec.org Information on how to write a marketing plan can be found here: articles.mplans.com
A good way to expand your expand your web presence and client list at the same time is to set up a small web site and start a blog. You can add an email sign up sheet to both the website and the blog, or you ask visitors to sign up for a news letter. Many web hosting companies include the ability to add forms to your web pages for free.
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