Why profile build online?

Over these past few weeks I have been asked by my clients why online communication networks such as a blog, a Twitter account, a Linked In account and Facebook pages are a good idea. Without getting in to too much nitty gritty I have tried to highlight some of the main reasons:

Good reasons to have a blog:

Better Search Engine Rankings
Search engines (particularly Google) reacts favourably to new and subject specific content. If you are blogging about your subject specific services, products and/or industry – it all helps with your search engine ranking – especially because search engines love new and original content.

With a blog you can provide that type subject specific content. You can target the buzz words (keywords) that you want the search engines to recognise and get the search engines to ‘crawl’ your site more regularly as you keep updating and adding blog content.

Establish Expert Status
When you are selling a product or service, especially when you work for yourself or represent an SME, it is a good idea to build your personal profile (or personal brand) as someone with knowledge and experience – someone who knows what they are talking about ... OK - an Expert.

If your customers and potential clients see you know what you are talking about you are much more likely to increase your following and your sales and customer loyalty. A blog is an excellent tool to share interesting information which is relevant to your business.

Point Traffic to Your Website
I would encourage people to link their blog back to the relevant pages on their website. Whilst you are updating content on your blog and people have found your comments on your blog, it is sensible to provide a link to your main website so they can see more about your business.

Widen Your Target Audience
As much as I would encourage your blog to be within your industry subject, there are often ways to expand your topics – ie topical news, forthcoming market events, client stories etc ... With your blog you can write about related topics and reach an audience that might not naturally engage with your specific products and services. For example:

• Graduates and interviewees may be interested in personal branding if it was related to job interviews and promotion.
• Leadership and training providers might engage with a new audience if they were to comment on the leadership attributes of current news story politicians.
• Career and life coaches might provide their view point in to recent civil unrest and the community engagement currently being undertaken by local and national officials.

Linking Up
Others will link to quality blog content. As with your website, the more links you have the higher up the search engine results, which help drive traffic to your blog. If your website is ‘on of many’, having a blog with original, interesting content can help your business profile.

Increases Business Activity and Customer Perception
By updating your blog regularly you remind people you are there, you are busy and you are open for business. It is easy to update a blog and regular articles will help people to recognise you as that expert (in your sector).

It has been reported that 52% of buyers have said that a blog influences their purchasing decision.

Get help
Once you have a blog you don’t have to write everything yourself – you can invite guest writer to write for you. In blogging terms this is very popular as both side benefit. You get blog content and the writer gets promoted on an external source and I would offer links back to their (and your) website.

Be Audience Brave
If you activate the comments facility on your blog, ask questions and carry out polls you can start to work out what people think of your industry, your products and services. You may have seen this facility already on some blogs and be worried about open complaints and/or criticism, but if you openly apologies and address negative comments you can convert these. You can turn negatives in to positives and increase customer loyalty and respect for you, your products and services.

Keeps Your Audience Updated
With a lot of websites it can be difficult to build a relationship with your customers. Your blogging can be a little more ‘chatty’ – ie have you got some examples of client usage. Have you just launched a new product or service. Do you have some news about your business – fundraising, sponsorship etc. If people engage you are more likely to make more sales.

Good Reasons to Tweet (on Twitter)

• Opening up a Twitter account is quick and easy – the hardest thing is coming up with a unique name that people (followers) will be able to find you with.
• From an online point of view Twitter allows you to link to your website. It also is a great vehicle for pointing followers to your updated blog and other items of interest – and thus build your profile as an expert in your chosen field.
• Twitter is a great way for you to follow others in your sector, to retweet sector related items of interest and build an online social network of contacts.
• Google uses tweets to help to index contents faster and having another online profile linking to your website is not going to hurt your personal profile.
• With Twitter you have just 140 characters (including spaces) to put your comments and insights over. If you are unsure what to write go to other people on Twitter that you have an interest in and see what they write.
• NB: Don’t fall in tot the trap of telling people you are having a coffee, that you have a hangover or anything else that is of no value to your business and/or personal brand.
• NB2: People ask me how much to tweet. Social media experts would say several times a day for the rankings – however do yourself and your followers a favour and although I am keen that you tweet regularly, only tweet relevant and interesting items.

There are a few other areas of Twitter – but the above are the main points – the rest we will cover in a later blog.

Good Reasons to get Linked In

• To start with look at Linked In primarily as an online contact directory. This platform has been highly adopted by the business community and is a good way to link up with contacts and use as a referral vehicle.
• You can link back to your website, your blog, your twitter account etc. You can use your account settings to update your profile with your twitter feed, and link with Facebook. All good stuff for search engines.
• Your Linked In account gives you the opportunity to put together a history of your experience, your key achievements and can act as a shop window for you as an individual.
• There are many other areas of Linked In – these are the first points and I would recommend, if you haven’t already, you set up an account, use an appropriate photo of yourself and update the information.

Reasons for Facebook

• Many see Facebook as more of a ‘social’ social network. There are a lot of people who have accounts and use it for family, friends etc. As you can only have one account on Facebook, for business it is suggested that you use the ‘add a page’ facility to build your business page.
• Facebook tends to work better for consumer facing businesses. It is a great place to gather immediate feedback and comments.
• Search engine Bing uses Likes as a ranking sign for logged in Facebook users.

There are many other areas of Facebook and indeed other online platforms including About.me, and Google+. Currently from a business point of view, start with these (as well as your website) and you will be well on the way to influencing your online business profile.

If you would like to find out more information or if you think I might be able to help with anything shown above, contact me at contact@lippymarketing.co.uk or visit the website at www.lippymarketing.co.uk

Get a Clear Head Shot

Over the past, what must be now, six months, I have seen about loads of online discussions entitled, something along the lines of 'How important is your headshot/personal avatar?'

And as much as I understand why people get all huffy about - people shouldn't make assumptions - and you can't read a book by it's cover - and all those other great phrases of insight ...

We are (as far as I am aware) human, and as humans we make judgements and assumptions all the time, with and without knowing it. We just can't help ourselves.

It is an evolutionary trait - We judge everything by its appearance.

• We choose better looking fruit, veg, food stuffs, because that is what we are programmed to do. Anything else might not taste good, or worse, be bad for us.
• We make the majority of a decision - ie if we like someone or something - just by looking at it/them.
• We judge the intelligence, background, social skills, personality, status of people when we look at them - without thinking about it. We can't help it.

But let's get real. When talking about online avatars and headshot photos, perhaps we should just be sensible. People have profiles and online accounts to network, comment, build profiles etc .... they are there, one way or another, to be judged - so I suggest we all get over ourselves, work with human nature and put up a good clear headshot of yourself. To not do it suggests that you are hiding/
scared/lazy/dodgy.

Anyway, perhaps the question shouldn't be - 'How important is your headshot?'. Perhaps it should be - 'How do I want to be percieved?'. Having a photo of anything, yourself, or nothing will, whether you want it to or not, communicate an image and message to your online audience. Live with it!... or better still, work with it!

To find out more visit the Lippy Marketer website at www.lippymarketing.co.uk or email thirza@lippymarketing.co.uk

Paranoid Marketing

I was with a client recently who (quite rightly) was "just checking" what they should be doing online - and by that they of course meant their website and other 'social stuff' as they put it.

It has to be said that there is certainly an interdependency between SEO (search engine optimisation - ie where you or your business comes in the results from a search on Google, for example) and social media for better business promotion. Social media (eg Facebook, blogs, Twitter, Linked In etc) go hand-in-hand with SEO.

I whole heartedly recommend using social media and online tools and promote yourself and your business, AND YOU SHOULD REMEMBER: as much as you might feel that your Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, and Twitter, are yours, you don't own them. The online businesses do, so use them to support and promote but please make sure that you aren't making these sites the centre of your success.

Here are a few tips from Penny C. Sansevieri (@bookgal) to help you :

• Website: You should always, always, always have a website. I know some authors who use Facebook as their websites. Big mistake. I know other authors who get a website that doesn't belong to them, meaning they are part of a community of free sites they don't own. If the community decides to stop doing websites and goes away, guess what happens? So does your content.
• Smart Social Media: One of the things I really recommend is that you centre all of your content around your website. That's partially why I suggest linking your blog and your website to Facebook and Twitter. The content starts on your site and gets funneled from there, rather than in reverse.
• Other ways to promote: Consider other ways to promote your stuff that isn't tied to your online accounts directly. Interviews on (other) blogs, white papers, webinar events. Yes, you are still putting stuff out there on other sites, I'm not saying not to. I'm saying that you need to make sure that whatever content you put out there is reflected on your site as well.
• Duplicate content: There's a problem with posting huge amounts of duplicate content online, but unless you are pushing hundreds of pieces out a month, I doubt you have anything to worry about. However, the flip side is that you want to make sure you have copies of all the content you put out there. If you're uploading a video on YouTube, don't delete it off of your computer because you think it's "safe" on this site. It may very well be, but if you lose your page or YouTube gets bought (again) and morphs into something else, you're in trouble.
• Website... more: When I talked about having a website, I'm not just talking about having a one or two-pager. I mean have a robust site packed with content. Make sure that you have a blog, and you might consider adding a resource section, etc. All information about your books should be on the site (don't rely on Amazon to house this for you) and be sure that any ordering information is on your site as well. Wait! You might ask, is Amazon in danger of going away? Not likely. But as they've shown in the past by pulling down books and buy buttons without warning: they are Amazon and can do whatever they want.
• Traffic: So, the nitty-gritty of promotion is what? Sales, right? Sure, and exposure too (though I think you should target exposure first, then sales, but that's another article). If you're sending all of your traffic to social media sites, guess what? Your website traffic is probably pretty low or non-existent. If you send traffic to social media sites guess who benefits? Well, certainly you do in the way of exposure, but long-term this isn't a good plan. Let me explain why. If you aren't promoting your site as the center of the universe, and instead pushing people to social media sites, then your website isn't getting those super valuable incoming links from blogs, websites, etc. that you are promoting yourself to. As a result, your site will sink in Google rankings. That means if you lost one or more of your social media sites, you could certainly pick up the pieces and start sending people to your site, but that will be a long, hard haul. Better to focus on that now and gather that traffic, along with the buzz you create in social media, so you aren't caught with a zero starting point if anything happens.

You might think that the moral of this story is a slightly paranoid "trust no one" mantra but it's not. It's about protecting your stuff and being a smart and savvy author. While there are no guarantees in anything, you need to be smart about all of these wonderful, free, not-owned-by-you social media sites. You might do a fantastic job of driving traffic, fans, and likes to various pages. But the reality is that you should focus on what you own, your website. I love my social media sites and yes, it's a widely known fact that I'm addicted to Twitter. Yet they aren't the center of my online universe, my website is. Yours should be, too.

Great advice from Penny!

If you have any comments, or want to contact me - email me via thirza@lippymarketing.co.uk and visit our website at www.lippymarketing.co.uk