Google Alerts is a free service by Google where you receive email updates about keywords of your choice as and when they appear online – in news, blogs, websites etc. Google Alerts help you keep track
of your industry, your competition and most importantly the websites that talk about your company. BusinessInfoguide.com has a comprehensive article that suggests 10 ways of getting the best out of Google Alerts for your business.
#1. Personal name, Business name, Domain name – Set alerts for these to know about who is talking about you, your business where.
#2. Blogs – If you blog or submit articles to other blogs, you can keep track about where your articles are appearing.
#3. Industry & Competitive Research – You can know about the current happenings in your industry and know what your competition is upto.
#4. Client Research – You can create alerts to find who is looking for the services you provide. You can also keep up with the activities of your existing or potential client
Not only do you get to network with prospective clients who are looking for services you offer, it is an important search engine marketing tool as well. Search engines index, categorise and rank a well documented blog. But the question “How to Find Content for your Business Blogs?” remains. Cynthia Trevino has outlined some ideas here that could be considered.
# 1. Look for what the competition is writing about.
# 2. Pick up topics from networking sites.
# 3. Ask your customers about their problems and offer solutions.
# 4. Ask your sales team about frequently asked questions.
# 5. Share your passions and once in a while, blog about your personal matters.
“Good quality content is just another basic business requirement these days. It’s not a nice-to-have. Especially for small businesses without large marketing budgets. Writing compelling, interesting, helpful content and posting it online can help you to be more “findable” when buyers are searching for solutions.”
For further insight into blogging, you can also read this.
Your website gives the first impression about your business. It is a reflection upon your company’s personality. While, simplicity is the key, it is difficult to strike a balance between looks and purpose while designing a website. This blog post in Small biz bee offers five tips that can help you create a website that brings
“If you leave your website’s look and feel strictly to the designers, be prepared to get a beautiful, sexy, artistic site that does everything but make you money.”
No matter which business you own, Internet Marketing is here to stay. But how do you implement it? Russ Henneberry has outlined four options you can consider.
It is true that you can learn all the techniques required to top the search results. However, back linking to get optimized results for your website is a time-consuming process and time, as we know, is something all small business owners are short of. So, managing the entire online marketing process on you own is not very advisable for small business owners. Hiring an in-house search engine optimization specialist is an option. However, this involves a lot of costs and is economical only if you have enough volume to cover the costs incurred. I recommend all small businesses to outsource, specifically to low cost countries, not because we are an outsourcing company, but because I genuinely believe that outsourcing gives the best possible output with the minimum cost of time and resources. In Russ Henneberry’s words,
Outsourcing is a wonderful thing for small business. It allows us to have the best of both worlds – we don’t have to do it ourselves and we don’t have to pay the expense of having a full time employee. If you do your homework on your online marketer and have some good discussions about risk tolerance and expectations you are on your way to online marketing success.
If your website is going to drive business to you it is going to cost you one of two things: time or money. There are no “magic bullets” that will bring business to your website for a small amount of money and little investment of time on your part.
to learn and the technical background to execute, you can hire this employee for a lower salary and get them some training.If the prospective employee is able to show you actual work they have accomplished and provide you with some idea of the results, you will surely be looking at a higher salary or hourly wage for that hire.
If you plan to let them learn through “trial by error” you could do irreversible damage to your website and your online reputation and waste a tremendous amount of time and money.
If your business is not at the very end of its life, you should absolutely be putting Choice #4 out of your mind as a possible alternative. The web will continue to grow as the marketing medium of choice for small and large businesses alike.
Network solutions blog has a nice post about how doing volunteer work benefits small businesses. It’s a good view on doing business itself because your personal network is an important part of what your bring to the table for your business. It also talks about the criteria to choose the voluntary organization. To all this I would add, do the work with the intention of doing good. Business will happen anyway.
As a small business owner you are probably so busy growing and managing your business, satisfying your customers, or other attending to other important considerations that the mere idea of taking time to participate regularly in a volunteer project in your community sounds ridiculous. However, performing community service can be a great way to enhance your business profile, establish
