Your business homepage is the centerpiece of your online presence. Home pages and corporate “gateways” serve as critical focal points for direct consumer interaction, and they do so even more than social media or mobile apps. Your firm’s ability to successfully communicate with your clients and partners is directly affected by how well your homepage does its job.
Leverage Your LinkedIn Company Page to Build Your Brand
The business connections your firm builds and maintains using its LinkedIn page aren’t the only advantages of having one. Professional venues like LinkedIn also aid general public relations. By providing consumers and others with a glimpse of your insider networking strategies, you can make your firm far more accessible.
Directories still DIRECT business!
Back in the “olden days” of the internet (a.k.a. late 1990’s- early 2000’s), it was easy to get site traffic because, let’s face it, there were fewer websites. In today’s world just about everyone you know has a website – you, your landscaper, your neighbor’s nephew who fixes PC’s in his basement… we’ve all got a little corner of the internet to ourselves, and one of the biggest challenges for a small business is to drive traffic (especially quality traffic) to your own site.
A great way to help in trafficking quality leads to your website, while maintaining control of your corporate brand, is being listed in trusted online directories that prospects may be turning to directly when in need of a your product or service.
Managing Your Professional Identity Online with LinkedIn: What Every Small Business Owner Needs to Understand
“People do business with people, not businesses.”
Today, people are using the Internet to find out everything they can; and not just about the companies, products or services that interest them, but about the people with whom they are considering doing business.
If people were to search your name on Google right now what would they learn about you? Would they find any information at all?
If so, does this information accurately reflect your professional training, experience, associations, accomplishments, interests, and abilities? Do you have a common name that could easily allow you to be confused with someone else? Are you confident that a person reading about you online would walk away with an accurate understanding of who you are professionally?
A blog is not a website (and why you don’t want to learn the way we did)
As you may know, when I am not writing my blog, I am running the Internet Marketing and Web Design and Development company I started in 1994 (AIMG.com). I stay focused on my clients and when I wanted to start a blog I toyed with the idea of having my folks “make” me one. After all, that is what we do.
But then I thought about it some more and decided it might be a good idea to embrace WordPress, as it is a tool that is insanely popular and I get more and more people every day telling me that they have no issue whatsoever with using it as “their website”. Now. I am not here to bash WordPress. Seriously, it would be sort of hypocritical for me to use WordPress to do so. But as a result of what happened to me in April, 2012 I will never consider recommending WordPress to a business owner as their main website and method or corporate communication. After the jump, I’ll tell you why. Warning: post may contain expressions of frustration and some of these sad face things: :(
