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March 4, 2012 By Leave a Comment

What is an E-Commerce Site?

Most people refer it as a shopping cart on their website, however the actual shopping cart is only part of a true E-Commerce platform – which is really required to actually conduct business on the internet (ie. sell your product online). To conduct e-commerce,  you also need a merchant account, a payment gateway, the shopping cart technology, distribution channel management, affiliate/reseller technology, email marketing and autoresponders for new and past customers – just to name the major components.

When considering how to open your new online business, one must truly evaluate the likely need for most of the above mentioned solutions to really conduct business online. You need to get a merchant account or payment system like Paypal and you’ll need to enlist a payment gateway, the major one being Authorize.net which I highly recommend.

If you want to develop, build and manage your own e-commerce site, I’ll just go ahead and give you my secret. 1ShoppingCart.com

That’s it… I use it myself and if you’re a “roll up my sleeves” kinda person and want to do it yourself, there is no better, cheaper solution out there and they have the training videos to tutor you through the process. Of course, if you want a truly complete solution, you’ll want your website and content management system (ie. blog platform) developed and built as well and then integrated directly with your E-Commerce solution like 1ShoppingCart.com

Building this as a complete solution and getting everything working and integrated is not easy and most business owners simply hire experts liks us to complete the work for them. If you want to inquire about us doing the development and build for you, please use our Contact page or call Lane directly at 813-438-2428.

Here’s more on what Wikipedia has to say about E-Commerce…

Electronic commerce, commonly known as e-commerce or eCommerce, consists of the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. The amount of trade conducted electronically has grown extraordinarily with widespread Internet usage. The use of commerce is conducted in this way, spurring and drawing on innovations in electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, Internet marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems. Modern electronic commerce typically uses the World Wide Web at least at some point in the transaction’s lifecycle, although it can encompass a wider range of technologies such as e-mail, mobile devices and telephones as well.

A large percentage of electronic commerce is conducted entirely electronically for virtual items such as access to premium content on a website, but most electronic commerce involves the transportation of physical items in some way. Online retailers are sometimes known as e-tailers and online retail is sometimes known as e-tail. Almost all big retailers have electronic commerce presence on the World Wide Web.

Electronic commerce that is conducted between businesses is referred to as business-to-business or B2B. B2B can be open to all interested parties (e.g. commodity exchange) or limited to specific, pre-qualified participants (private electronic market). Electronic commerce that is conducted between businesses and consumers, on the other hand, is referred to as business-to-consumer or B2C. This is the type of electronic commerce conducted by companies such as Amazon.com. Online shopping is a form of electronic commerce where the buyer is directly online to the seller’s computer usually via the internet. There is no intermediary service. The sale and purchase transaction is completed electronically and interactively in real-time such as Amazon.com for new books. If an intermediary is present, then the sale and purchase transaction is called electronic commerce such as eBay.com.

Electronic commerce is generally considered to be the sales aspect of e-business. It also consists of the exchange of data to facilitate the financing and payment aspects of the business transactions.

Filed Under: Featured, Internet Marketing Tagged With: , , , , ,
March 3, 2012 By

Affordable Internet Marketing Strategies to Improve Website Traffic

Here are some great strategies for you to research if you are on a quest to find affordable internet marketing strategies to improve your website traffic! Use the links in each of the titles below to read the full content if it interests you! Improve Website Traffic With 5 Little Known Secrets To improve website traffic is one of the major challenges on the Internet. Here are 5 ways to help you improve website traffic that are easy to implement.   Improve Your Website Traffic with SEO Services Tweet Search Engine Optimization ( SEO ) is the key tool for the website owners to get more traffic to the website. Optimization of a website is.   Capture Your Audience – Improve Website Traffic | Think Big Blog Capture Your Audience – Improve Website Traffic. Posted on December 21, 2010 by admin. When you’re flipping through the channels on your television, what causes you to stop on a particular program? What catches your eye? …   And here are some great videos with some tips and strategies to improve your site traffic!   Improve Search Engine Rankings – Web Content Development www.webbizideas.com – The first step to increasing search engine traffic is to develop useful, relevant, and helpful web content that you can use as link bait. This SEO “content” can be in the form of a web page, an article, a blog, a video, a tutori… How to get Free Traffic Without Google: Traffic from Twitter nickstraffictricks.com These are all great tips and strategies. My goal here was to give you a short blast of information and ideas on how you can boost your website traffic. There are plenty of other ideas and tactics I use as well but don’t have the time to go into now. If you feel like you need some help or would like to consider hiring someone to assist you with your efforts, please feel free to call me at 813-438-2428 or use my contact page for other contact information.
Filed Under: Featured, Internet Marketing
March 2, 2012 By

How Can Internet Marketing Help Businesses Grow?

Internet marketing has opened up a whole new  vista for advertising and spreading the word. It has emerged as one of the best ways of putting across your ideas to your target customer. Most people tend to believe that merely having a website ensures that people are actually accessing it quite frequently. This, however, is far from true. Just having a website isn’t enough. You need to spread the word in various ways for your website to be a known one for a particular product or service.

How Can Internet Marketing Help?

Most commonly, prospective customers use search engines for attempting to find what they want. They type in the keywords in the search engine and look for desired stuff. SEO or “Search Engine Optimization” articles are the best way to make your ideas known. There are several advantages of internet marketing.

The most positive aspect is that someone who is looking for a particular product or service is more likely to have a positive impression of your related offerings, when they come across your website.

The very fact that they are looking for something ensures that they need it and are prepared to spend for it when they find the one which impresses them. Therefore, internet marketing is the best way to find customers who have a specified need and are looking forward to fulfilling them.

Also, if they are using the search engine to look for a particular product or service, you can make the most of the undivided attention they are bestowing upon this search. You do not need to try gimmicks to attract their focus. They are already into the process of buying and all you need to do is to impress them so that they decide in favour of your product.

All the other forms of marketing do not enjoy this privilege.

Useful Tips

Internet marketing can surely help your business grow, but there is a proper way of doing it. You need to follow some useful tips for ensuring a positive response in your favour. Some of them are:

* The first thing to remember is that when people look for a product or service online, what they are actually looking for is help. The best thing to do is to offer guidance, do not attempt to sell right away.

* Try to provide some free assistance in the form of a video or an e-book, which will establish a bond between you and your prospective customer. The customer might be driven towards trying your product, as a result.

* Post sales, you must maintain good rapport with your customers and assure them the best of services, should they need any. If they face any problems while using your product, you should be readily available for providing the necessary assistance. This is a great way of creating positive reputation and ensuring repeat customers.

* Try to maintain your relationship with the customers through mails etc. This is a good way to ensure lifetime commitment.

If you really want to lay hands on some useful information pertaining to internet marketing, visit www.adwords-media.co.uk. You are likely to come across expert guidance regarding SEO and other related aspects.

Filed Under: Internet Marketing Tagged With: ,
March 2, 2012 By

Growing Your Business With the Internet and Social Media

Social media and well designed blogs are a key part to any inbound marketing strategy.

Here are 6 ways they help grow your business:

  1. Quick to Start. You could launch a Facebook page today or get a blog going in a few days. Facebook is free. Posterous.com, WordPress.com and many other hosted blog platforms are free and easy to start and use.
  2. Low Cost. You can get started in social media and blogging for very little or no money. They are among the most cost-effective methods of reaching your audience.  With a minimal investment of ~$500, you can outsource the building of a custom blog site for your business! Affordable Internet Marketing can be accomplished!
  3. Instant Interactivity. Both blogs and social media can give you nearly instant market feedback – good or bad. We get all kinds of feedback through the comments on our blog; people also leave reviews and other comments for us on Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media channels.
  4. It’s the Search Engines, Silly. Surveys indicate that 90% or more of people begin their purchasing process in search engines. Blogs and social media make it more likely that your prospects will find you online when they search. I’m still amazed at how many businesses still don’t have a web or blog site. Nearly every professional (like attorneys, doctors, financial planners, insurance agents, etc) should have a blog site where they can demonstrate their expertise to prospective clients!
  5. Inbound Marketing.  We’re big fans of inbound marketing at Think Big Enterprises… after all, you found our site, right? Outbound marketing is telemarketing, direct mail, email blasts to cold prospects or lists you purchase, TV and newspaper print ads – all the things that buyers (like you) block out and throw the cold shoulder to.  Social media strategies and blog sites are necessary inbound marketing tools.
  6. First Mover Advantage. For blogs and social media, there is an advantage to moving first. If you don’t jump into the conversation, your competitors will (if they have not already, and they likely have) and then you’re fighting an uphill battle to become influential in these online conversations. Start now to claim that first-mover advantage. Don’t keep waiting… social media is NOT going away! Facebook is continuing to develop into a business tool. You may not like it or “be into it” but you can find someone on your team (or outsource to us) these tasks to build your business!
  7. Automate It. I’m a huge proponent of automating as much of my business as possible. Some tasks and relationships cannot be automated. However, most business owners are shocked at how much of their business process/processes can be automated, at least in part. The more you automate, the more predictability you inject into your business and the more money you can save. Money and time saved = greater efficiency. Greater efficiency = greater profitability and more time for you to spend doing what you love to do. Social media marketing can be automated in large part and it can be outsourced.

How are you using social media today? Are you using it?  Learn how you can build a successful inbound marketing strategy that combines social media, blogging, lead conversion, and marketing analytics.  Social media is an affordable internet marketing strategy! Really, for a couple hundred dollars per month you can at least get the conversation going and nurture it monthly with your customers and prospects!

Get a complimentary Inbound Marketing Assessment from Think Big Enterprises. Just use this link to fill out our marketing assessment form and we’ll contact you and give you an hour or so of our time to help answer questions and try to give you ideas and strategies to use to build your business.

Filed Under: Featured, Internet Marketing Tagged With:
March 1, 2012 By

5 Must-Measure eCommerce Blogging Strategies

blog salesIt’s critical to have a goal in mind before writing a single word of a blog post. For eCommerce sites that thrive through online sales, goals of each post should be different than for a B2B blog’s goals. Great blogs set tight goals for each post, and tailor their content and calls-to-action to each post’s specific goals – blogs on eCommerce sites are no different. Tailor your eCommerce blog content, set up the blog to sell your products, and measure your results fanatically.

1. Grow Blog Subscribers and Reach

 Every publication needs readership. For eCommerce sites, your blog readership is your customer base: past, present, and future. And particularly if you sell products that have an engaging backstory, use case, or associated cause, using posts to gain subscribers is a worthwhile goal. Specifically, contest or giveaway posts can be useful for this goal. These types of posts can require visitors to subscribe to the blog, tweet about the post, and add a comment to the blog to enter the contest. In turn, these posts can really spike your subscriber numbers. Metric to watch: Track email and RSS subscribers in a chart that has a postdate overlay; see which posts and contests are most popular in growing your readership.

2. Generate Immediate, Same-Day Sales

 This is the most enticing blogging goal for eCommerce businesses but is likely the most elusive, too. Same-day sales are difficult to generate from content-rich (i.e. non-promotional/sale) blog posts – let’s be honest! However: as you grow your blog’s readership and each post is immediately presented to a larger readership, you can leverage your ability to place product links and promotions in front of your growing tribe. Metric to watch: Ensure your blog analytics are integrated with your eCommerce funnel to track blog-to-transaction visits. Track same-day sales for products promoted and linked from your post.

3. Attract Inbound Links

 Another attractive goal for a blog post, but not specific to eCommerce. Create remarkable, strong-minded, or novel content about your products or industry to better position yourself for sharing and inbound links. The impulse of many eCommerce bloggers is prejudiced against this goal; “it doesn’t showcase my products” or “it doesn’t apply to my products” are common objections. A touch of outside-the box-thinking can go a long way, and examples like BlendTech’s Will It Blend? are fantastically creative positioning of a potentially dull product. It's also important to note that blog posts are much more interesting to the online world and therefore much more linkable than product or category pages, too. Metric to watch: Track links from net new domains as well as new/additional links from previously linking domains. Track referral traffic and sales from these links over time.

4. Improve Long-Tail Organic SEO

 For eCommerce sites specifically, blogging provides a useful way to rank for longer-tail searches that product or category pages can’t or won’t rank for. As an example: a blog post title like: “Perfect Candy for Mom: Tasty Dark Chocolate Christmas Bark” will help improve long-tail keyword rankings over a product page that is optimized around “dark chocolate bark Christmas candy”, because blog posts let you target a more diverse group of keywords. You should look to expand the keyword footprint of your products with varied post titles and other on-page SEO. And as mentioned above, blog posts are by their nature more likely to attract links than product pages; this nets you positive SEO effects for the blog pages and the linked pages from your blog. Metric to watch: Understand which specific page(s) rank for which specific keyword(s). Track traffic on these keywords to those pages over time.

5. Generate Long-Term, Lagged Sales

Blog posts are persistent - they stick around over time and continue to attract traffic, links, and attention (one of HubSpot's most popular blog posts is from mid-2007!). Create a well-SEO’d article today and it will attract traffic over a very long period of time in the future. If you are setting up your eCommerce blog posts for conversion, it will drive traffic and sales through your product pages for years to come. Metric to watch: Just like with same-day sales, ensure your blog analytics are tightly integrated with your eCommerce funnel. Track sales generated from products or categories promoted in your post and calculate a conversion rate from years of traffic. Vary your eCommerce blogging strategies, determine the best content-audience fit for your products, and measure, measure, measure. Now get writing, promoting, and selling!
Filed Under: Internet Marketing Tagged With:
February 29, 2012 By

4 Metrics to Measure Your Best Leads

In my last post, I reviewed 4 ways to segment your leads using your marketing software (like HubSpot) integrated with your customer relationship management (CRM) system. Now let's jump into how to measure those different segments to identify the best ones! What does "the best" mean?

4 Metrics to Measure Your Best Leads

1. Conversion Rate to Opportunity

Lead Quality - Conversion to OpportunityOne key metric is the percentage of leads that convert into a qualified sales opportunity as tracked in your CRM. You might find, for example, that your email newsletter leads convert at a lower rate than your other offers and that your free product trial converts at the highest rate.

2. Conversion Rate to Customer

Conversion to sales opportunity isn't the end of the game - you want to see how those leads convert into customers. You might find, also, that an offer that has the best lead to opportunity conversion rate may not have the best opportunity to customer conversion rate. Lead Quality - Conversion to Customer

3. Average Rating

Lead Quality - RatingSometimes you need qualitative feedback in addition to quantitative feedback. Have your sales team rate all the leads coming in to see commonalities in the leads that your team rates as their favorites.  

4. Rejection Rate

Lead Quality - Rejection RateNot every lead is going to be a great fit. Are you generating leads that immediately get thrown out or "rejected"? Measure this rejection rate and see where it crops up the most - maybe you find that leads generated through Paid Search (PPC) have a higher rejection rate than organic sources like Organic Search and Social Media. Rejected leads take up the time of your sales team to actually review but decide not to call. Bonus Tip: Work each of these metrics into a sales and marketing service level agreement (SLA) to set expectations with your sales team and measure your progress over time. Identifying your best leads according to these metrics and setting an SLA will help you figure out where to invest your marketing resources and improve your smarketing productivity. How do you measure your leads? Please share your strategies or successes in identifying and prioritizing your leads.

Try HubSpot Free for 30 Days

See how HubSpot can help you better generate and track your traffic, leads and customers. Get a 30-Day Free Trial of HubSpot Marketing Software.
Filed Under: Internet Marketing
February 29, 2012 By

What is Internet Marketing & How Does it Work?

What is Internet Marketing & its Importance to Your Business?

Posted by jparedes on June 2nd, 2011 | Edit

With the boom of the Internet as a rich resource of information and a key player in communication, it is no wonder that companies want to tap into its potential to market their products. This is precisely what online marketing is all about.

What is Internet Marketing?

Simply put, internet marketing is the marketing of products and services using the Internet as its medium. This new form of marketing is one heavily favored by companies looking to market their products or services because of its relatively lower costs.

Marketing via the internet definitely costs less in terms of information dissemination. It also has the added value of having a wider audience not constrained by physical geography or location.

In the past, companies have relied heavily on print, television and radio to get their messages across. These came at high prices and carried with it such restrictions as limited time and audience base.

This is why online marketing is becoming more and more popular these days. As the internet continues to grow in scope, size and influence, so does the importance of Internet marketing. Many companies in fact, have been revising their marketing strategies to incorporate this new and more powerful medium.

New marketing strategies are emerging to take advantage of the Internet’s expansion, so much so that companies are competing for online space and presence. They are trying to increase traffic to their companies’ homepages in order to beef up their businesses.

Tools of the Trade in Internet Marketing

There are several ways to make online marketing work for you. One very popular tool is the use of keywords to increase your ranking in search engines.

It is important to note that because of the sheer size and availability of information on the Internet, most customers rely heavily on search engines and companies need to position themselves well in the results rankings of these search engines in order to direct traffic to their website.

Thus, companies must find the right keywords to associate with their product or service so that their customers can find them online. Low quality keywords could translate to low rankings and low earnings.

Many companies also make use of SEO or Search Engine Optimization techniques to optimize their web content for the kind of information customers are looking for. Keyword optimization and research is one such technique.

Another commonly used marketing strategy is website design and content. A website with rich content and a user-friendly interface is attractive to customers and will definitely be an advantage in terms of marketing your product.

Further Your Knowledge in Internet Marketing

There are many other ways to make internet marketing work for you, but these basic techniques should go a long way in helping your company grow into a success. Just follow these important steps how to take advantage of internet marketing and always take note of the key factors for you to be able to achieve your goal which is the success of your business.

Learn more about Internet Marketing from the expert and unfold dozens of facts that will surely give you the upper-hand in marketing your business online. Just email Jaime Paredes at jparedes8(at)gmail.com. You can also find his contact information on the contact page at http://www.Jaime-Paredes.com. Start now and bring your marketing strategy into the next level. Learn more about SEO, PPC or Social Media, and you won’t be clueless about topics like Internet Marketing.

Written by jmarmanlolo

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Filed Under: Internet Marketing, work Tagged With: ,
February 28, 2012 By

Catch and Release

I love fishing. I have been oddly drawn to it since I was an adolescent. Some people enjoy being in the mountains, on a beach, or in the desert, but for me there’s something about being near a stream that brings peace. The type of fishing I love the most is fly-fishing for trout. Since [...] No related posts.
Filed Under: Internet Marketing
February 20, 2012 By

Branding 101: Color Choices for New Marketing Designs – Logos | Flyers | Brochures

Branding 101: Color Choices for New Marketing Designs – Logos | Flyers | Brochures What colors should be used in the design world for marketing ? Your brand creates an emotion?  The question is, is it the right emotion to positively influence your audience?  The following information will give you some insight as to which colors may work best to achieve your marketing goals through visual communication. Here’s a list of frequently used colors and what emotions are generally associated with them:
  • WHITE — White is associated with innocence, purity, peace and contentment. It’s considered clean and sterile. It’s cool and refreshing. White can have a calming, stabilizing influence.
  • BLACK — Black is the ultimate power color.  It suggests strength, potency, authority, boldness, seriousness, stability and elegance. It’s distinguished and classic, great for creating drama. Black has more weight than other colors. Too much can be ominous.
  • Gray or Silver — Gray can be associated with conservative qualities and considered traditional. Business-wise, it symbolizes high tech and suggests authority, practicality, earnestness and creativity.
  • GOLD — Gold suggests wealth. It’s considered to be very classy.
  • BLUE — Blue is the favorite color of many businesses. It suggests sanctuary and fiscal responsibility. It inspires confidence. It is the most popular and second most powerful color. Darker shades are authoritative. Dark and bright blues represent trust, security, faithfulness and dignity. Paler shades can imply freshness and cleanliness, although they can imply weakness.
  • RED — Red stimulates many kinds of appetites. Red commands attention, alerts us and creates a sense of urgency. It’s considered the sexiest of all colors. Red symbolizes heat, fire, blood, love, warmth, power, excitement, energy, strength, passion, vitality, risk, danger and aggressiveness. Financially, it’s associated with debt.
  • YELLOW — Yellow is the sunshine hue and is a spiritual color. Yellow represents a warning, but it can also bring happiness and warmth. The most preferred yellows are the creamy and warm ones. Bright yellow can be irritable to the eye in large quantities. Yellow speeds metabolism. It’s often used to highlight or draw attention.
  • GREEN — People associate green with the color of money, as well as nature. Olive greens are associated with health and freshness — a good choice for environmental concerns. Green suggests fertility, freedom, healing and tranquility. Green represents jealousy. Businesses use it to communicate status and wealth. Green is a calming, refreshing color that is very easy on the eyes.
  • BROWN — Brown is associated with nature and the earth. Dark browns represent wood or leather. Brown and shades of cream are associated with warmth and coziness. Brown suggests richness, politeness, helpfulness and effectiveness. It is solid, credible, mature and reliable. Light brown implies genuineness.
  • ORANGE — Orange is associated with vibrancy and the tropics, as well as warmth and contentment. It can instill a sense of fun and excitement. It implies health. It suggests pleasure, cheer, endurance, generosity and ambition. It can make an expensive product seem more affordable. It appeals to a wide range of people, both male and female.
  • PINK — Pink is considered to be a very feminine color. It represents gentleness, romance, well being and innocence.
  • PURPLE — Purple represents royalty and luxury. In darker shades, it’s considered a wealthy color. It suggests spirituality and sophistication. In paler shades, such as lavender, it’s feminine and romantic.
When choosing your color choices for your next graphic design project, make sure you consider your marketing goals and the emotion you want your audience to experience Related posts:
  1. Why Using LinkedIn is the Best Social Media Outlet for Small Businesses
  2. LinkedIn – A Guide for Businesses
  3. What is Branding?
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Filed Under: Branding 101: Color Choices, Featured, Marketing Strategies
February 20, 2012 By

LinkedIn – A Guide for Businesses

LinkedIn – A Guide for Businesses Companies that reduce their sales and marketing budgets in this tough economy—as most have– are doing exactly the wrong thing. While many are trying to cut their way out of the recession, the companies that are thriving in this economy are growing their way out by investing more in sales and marketing. And by capitalizing on new trends, such as social media and technology, to reach out to their customers. Everyone hears about the growth at Apple.  But far too few of us hear about great growth stories of start-up companies in non-tech industries that use today’s sales tools to change the game and steal sales leadership from traditional competitors. Jefferson Financial, which moved its headquarters from New York to Louisville, created dramatic, rapid growth using Twitter and LinkedIn to take on industry giants like Schwab and B of A’s Merrill Lynch.  Readers should take this story to heart, because it shows the kind of success small and medium-sized businesses can have when they break out of traditional thinking and invest in new sales tools while stalwarts remain stuck doing the same old thing with diminishing results. Jefferson National leveraged its technology to help financial advisors grow their practices. By hosting financial advisor webinars on how to use Linked-in and other social media to gain referrals from existing clients it created a loyal, growing set of distributors and happy clients. [Source: Forbes] According to the Ron Volper Group’s recent analysis of 125 companies (including Jefferson National), 80% of companies that were successful in the 2008-2010 down market (as measured by meeting and exceeding their revenue and earnings goals and capturing market share) recognized that customer buying behavior changed, and altered their sales and marketing approach while their less successful peers kept doing “more of the same.” Let’s face it: Too many of us spend a lot of time actively ignoring  technology advances in  our marketing plans and LinkedIn is one you really don’t want to continue ignoring. We don’t intend to, it’s just not as flashy as some of the other social networks. But if you haven’t checked out the business social networking site lately, it’s time to stop ignoring LinkedIn and go back. Because the site has added a host of new features in recent months that have helped transform it from a static resume site to a full-blown business networking site that SMBs (small businesses) will want to take advantage of. Today, LinkedIn has over 131 million users ranging from students to freelance contractors to CEOs of major international companies. Where Facebook is all about gaining as many followers as possible, LinkedIn is more about connecting on a professional basis – the heart of networking for small business. One feature small business owners want to specifically be aware of is the ability to create company profiles on the site. By claiming and building out your profile, SMBs will be able to increase your company’s prominence on the site, help prospective employees find you, and use it as your own personal recruiting network. If you’ve ever had to hire locally, you know important this is. So how can small business owners take advantage of this new feature? Here are five easy tips to get you started. 1. Create/Claim the Page Your first step to creating a rocking LinkedIn company profile page is to create and your claim your page. By creating your page you give your brand an outlet to highlight your products or services, keep followers updated on what you’re working on, show career opportunities within your organization, tell your personal story, and highlight various aspects of your company. To get started, perform a company search to see if you’re already listed on the site. If you are, it’s a simple process to claim your profile. If you’re not, once you’re in the search feature you’ll see an option on the right-hand side of the screen to add your company. Select that and claim your company page. Once you’ve added your company (or have found an existing listing), it’s really important that you take the time to fill out the profile in its entirety, including:
  • Your Company Overview
  • Company Product & Services pages
  • Information about Career Opportunities
The more information you provide, the easier it will be for like-minded prospective customers to find you, AND the more likely it is LinkedIn will show your company for prominent search queries. 2. Get Your Employees Using LinkedIn The more involved you can make your company with LinkedIn, the bigger payoff you’re going to see. For more information on how to use your employees to create a rockin’ social media presence, check out a recent Blueglass post entitled 8 ways employees can improve your company’s LinkedIn presence where writer Kerry Jones discusses, in impressive detail, what steps SMBs should take to maximize their exposure. I won’t ruin the post for you, but she mentions things like:
  • Taking advantage of the activity field
  • Properly highlighting the teams skills & expertise (and why this is so important)
  • Including customized links
  • And lots more
If you haven’t used LinkedIn much in the past, that post is a really great primer to get any business up to speed. SMBs can really increase what they’re showing up for simply by showing employees how to set up and use their own profiles. 3. Follow Relevant Companies Another thing SMBs may not know is that with the creation of LinkedIn brand pages, you can now follow companies of interest. For example, maybe you want to follow what your vendors are doing. Or companies that you’re considering partnering with in the future. Or people whose radar you want to get on for media opportunities. Or to hire down the road. This feature allows businesses to do stay up to date on what other businesses are doing, who they’re hiring, what they’re working on, etc. If you like your social media with a high amount of signal and very little noise, you may prefer to follow a brand on LinkedIn instead of on a more socially-inclined site like Twitter or Facebook. 4. Build Followers To Your Page Obviously if you’re taking the time to build a brand page, you want to get people follow that page. Doing so will help you increase your visibility and authoritativeness with relevant users. Without that following, all the work that you’re doing on LinkedIn may go relatively unseen. Encourage people to follow your company page by:
  • Using your profile to share exclusive information about your company and/or articles and news pieces relevant to your audiences’ interests.
  • Highlighting your brand’s LinkedIn page on your Web site and in all company information (in email newsletters, direct mailings, etc)
  • Following the LinkedIn pages of other companies in your neighborhood/industry with the hopes that they’ll follow you back and you can create a local referrer network.
  • Participating in industry-relevant LinkedIn discussion groups and let them know about your business (without spamming them).
5. Stay Active Unfortunately, you can’t simply create your LinkedIn page and then step away. Even though LinkedIn is a business social networking site, it’s still a social networking site. That means you’ll still need to be active there to develop a real presence and following, and keep the relevance of your company profile Being an active site contributor means making sure you’re using your page to share information via your status updates, participating in relevant discussions, joining and being active in groups, acting like resource in Linked Answers, and otherwise be a good site member. If you don’t keep up your site investment, you’ll lose all the goodwill you’ve created. Related posts:
  1. Why Using LinkedIn is the Best Social Media Outlet for Small Businesses
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Filed Under: Featured, Marketing Strategies Tagged With: , ,
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