Social Media & Reaching Your Consumer Base

So you are new to the social media world, or you have a small business you are trying to get off the ground.  With so many starting points, what is going to get you the most for your budget.  Also what are your goals and how easy or hard is it going to be to reach them?  Can you do it yourself or are you going to have to hire someone.

Well we can start with the obvious what is your business type and are you really gonna benefit from social media and the tools that are every where today.

Most small business models can benefit, so what is actually out there,  with so many platforms and companies that provide many so things that you can benefit from.  We will use two “fluid” companies than can give you the most.  Before we get there, ask your self this can you stay connected to your phone or laptop 24/7 pushing your company out to the public.   Most people are going to answer NO unless you are in fact a social media presence.

With an ever-changing online environment social media can run your business and bring in more revenue.  Getting to the point here, you have so many things on your plate outside of trying to build a successful business, get your website built, possibly a blog, Facebook, Twitter, Flkr, You Tube, Tumblr, Reddit, and Linked In just to name a few.

The building blocks should roll at the same time for example the “Big 3” your site, Facebook, and Twitter.   Your type of business will come into play here but for the sake of conversation we are going to keep it general.   So you have all three in place what now, how do you reach out to your consumer base, well the first thing is identify your base and find out what drives them.  Next equip your site properly with all the pertinent information and don’t overwhelm the consumer with information make them pick up the phone make them curious.   Also get an auto-responder at the very least and get those sign ups for your newsletter.  Without getting to far off track I will leave that to the next post.

So you have your Facebook and Twitter how are you going to get friends and followers, well that comes back to the old get your friends and family on board to start with.  Hoping that your business is legit that should be pretty easy to come up with the first 20-100 contacts.   Next reaching out with both platforms, is going to take posting accurate content and constant posts that are relevant to what you are doing.  But how can you do that all day everyday, two sources can help you Ping.fm and Sendible.   This will allow you to connect multiple social media platforms and post to all at the same time, this has been around for awhile but when looking at the mountain that social media is becoming it is important to remind the small business owner you can reach the masses.

Do you hire someone?  That is totally dependent on your budget and your knowledge of social media and what it can do for you.   At some point you are going to have to get out there and get a commercial or flyers or billboards depending on your consumers it is completely possible to make it using social media if you are in it for the long haul.   Set them goals see where things are at 6 months what have you achieve is the door opening or is the phone ringing.  With out going to far in depth Below are the two solutions check them out and see how they stack up!!

Check both of them out and see what you think, for all the monies worth our hands go out to Sendible, and for the free knock on your door and say this is what I am doing we will give it to Ping!

On that note we leave you with this>

 

Backlinking & Page Rank

So what is backlinking, in short it is the “art” LOL of creating links to your site and getting the consumer to “click”.  We have done alot of research on backlinks and the Page Rank Algorithm used by Google.

Web workshop describes PageRank as a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. Also, the importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself is. Google calculates a page’s importance from the votes cast for it. How important each vote is is taken into account when a page’s PageRank is calculated.

Webseo depiction of Googles Page Rank explained.

PageRank is Google’s way of deciding a page’s importance.

Here is a link that breaks it all down for you.

The Algorithm is explained here

Below is an exert from a ezine article that we discovered that best describes backlinking.

Backlinking is the process of creating links to your website. Each link means that someone is trying to inform others about some interesting page he has found. Therefore, the number of links is a measure of popularity or reputation of the page. The number and quality on backlinks is the basis of the PageRank algorithm used by Google web search. Google is by far the most popular and widely used search engine. The main reason for this popularity is the fact that it returns relevant results for every possible search phrase. Because of this many webmasters are trying to get as many backlinks as possible.

You can get backlinks on blogs, forums, Web 2.0 sites, website directories, articles or websites of other users. The easiest way to get a backlink is to have some useful content on the website and other users will find it and create a link to your page. This is called natural linking. Other methods mean using blogs and forums where you can participate in discussions and with some caution you can also promote your website. Most forums provide a feature called user signature. This is a short text where you can describe yourself or list your websites. Most blogs also provide place with every post where you can put url of your website. There is only one rule that needs to be respected. Never spam blogs or forums. Be useful and contribute to the discussion. Try to answer some question or offer help to other users. This way it will be much easier to promote your website.

There are two types of backlinks. Some are labeled with the “nofollow” attribute, others don’t have it. This attribute tells Google and some other search

engines not to follow this link and such links also do not contribute to the PageRank of the target page. You will find that most links on blog

s are nofollow. The best approach is to ignore fact this and simply create backlinks wherever there is an opportunity.

Another important property of every link is the PageRank of the page where the link is located. The higher the PageRank the more the link is worth. This means that you should invest some time to find pages with high PageRank where you can promote your website and create backlinks.

There are many different backlinking strategies. Some internet marketers only use blogs and forums, other use article marketing exclusively. The best approach is to try all of them and then decide which method is best for you.