How Important is Social Media?

July 25, 2010 by dawn billings · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Business for Women, Social Media

Survey Shows Social Media Matters, and It’s Here to Stay

Hey Women Entrepreneurs. If you are not receiving emails from Hub Spot, you need to. They are my personal favorite source for social media up-to-date information. We can’t be experts on everything, so we have to rely on experts on various subjects. Hub Spot is our favorite for social media.

We are experts on face to face marketing with The Heart Link Women’s Network and we are truly excited about how we can help small businesses optimize their presence on the Internet with Trova Business Directories, Trova Small Business Directory and Trova Women Small Business Directory, but social media is a complex beast and we want to provide you with information from many sources to help you keep the business you love in front of your customers. So enjoy the information below.

The fastest-growing private U.S. companies have discovered something that’s taking larger, more traditional companies some time to figure out – social media matters.

Research conducted by the Center for Marketing Research , shows that the Inc. 500 recognizes the critical role social media plays in an online world. One hundred forty-eight companies responded to the late 2009 survey of companies named by Inc. Magazine to their list.

In fact, an incredible 79% of respondents to the nationwide telephone survey indicated social media was very or somewhat important to their business and marketing strategy. Indeed, 43% ranked social media as very important, compared with only 26% two years earlier, a 65% increase.

Clearly, these successful, smaller companies have discovered that leveraging social media tools and technologies plays a valuable role in their business and marketing strategies.

How about your business? Do you consider social media important? What results have you seen from using it?

Dawn is also the architect of the Primary Colors Personality Test

Check out our women networking events and find a networking gathering near you! You will be so glad you did. Also check out - TROVA NOW Women Business Directory, and TROVA Business Directory for all small businesses. TROVA in Italian means “Find”. Would you like for your business to be found easily both locally and nationally? For more information about how to get your women owned business listed for FREE visit: TrovaNow

Tags: hub spot, networking group, Social Media, social media business, women networking, women networking group

6 Ways to Brand your Business with Content

July 2, 2010 by dawn billings · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Business for Women, Social Media

Hey Women Entrepreneurs: The following is a guest post by Corry Cummings, owner of Content Customs.

When companies spend thousands of dollars developing a specific brand name or logo, they do so for a reason. This simple personification of the company’s image is often the one shot that businesses have to give their potential customers a quick and simple view into their business practices, goals and services. A company brand builds trust and credibility as well as focuses on specific demographics to drive traffic.

Why should content be any different? In fact, branding your business with content is a way to show your web site visitors that you are the only solution to their problem. If you are in a competitive market saturated with “only solutions,” you need to, at the very least, use content to show your potential customers why you are their very best solution.

What are the distinguishing features of your services? What do you offer that your competitors cannot match? Are you a small business that can treat clients with personality or are you a super-business that prides itself on speed? Nail down the unique aspects of your business and your brand can be created with effective and interesting content.

1. Avoid Hyperbole In Your Business Content Brand

Some hyperbole is fairly obvious when it creeps from casual conversation into web site content. However, hyperbole can also creep into business content without you knowing it. These are broad statements that any company with a solid business plan could use to promote their services. They may not be as obvious as statements like “I could sleep for a century” or “Making this web site will kill me.” However, they can often be just as detrimental. Consider some examples:

We offer quick and easy customer service that is accessible to everyone.

How? This statement is nowhere near specific enough to brand your business with content. Almost every business could make this claim – and many do. Exactly what about your customer service makes you special? Can you post any specific testimonials or statistics about your service?

Our online order form takes mere seconds to fill out.

Consider whether this is a true statement. If you have multiple fields requesting payment information and order confirmation, this statement is probably not true. It may seem like a very small detail; however, honesty and clarity are always better than sales pitches. Tell your potential customers what information they will need before ordering.

2. Discover the Strengths of Your Business and Use Them

Above all, the content on your web site should have a purpose and it should drive home the reasons why potential customers should buy from you. Perform some research and discover what your business does best. More often than not, such research reveals regional strengths. Without knowing it, you might be the only business in the area that sells a specific product. This could set you up to offer same-day delivery to your region. That is a selling point that sets you apart from your competition. Your content should highlight that aspect of your business.

3. Make Your Content Match Your Brand

Take the image that you want to present to the public seriously, no matter what that image may be. When you talk to another person face-to-face, you have a distinct advantage. You can exchange ideas, ask questions, receive feedback and formulate your pitch based on what you know they want. A potential customer can more easily decide whether they trust you or not when they are actually looking you in the eyes.

However, this isn’t quite as easy with content. You must use your content to express yourself to your chosen demographic in a way that they will understand.

Suppose that you are a business that sells surfboards primarily to an 18-24 college student demographic. Beyond taking social media seriously, your content should be designed to grab their attention and convince them that you are their best choice. Try doing the following in this market:

Use clever and humorous language designed to grab the attention of your audience.
Avoid listing too many facts and statistics. These will often turn your demographic off.
Use simple sales pitches to which college students can relate.
Include personal statements about your experiences with a product.

4. Create Flawless Content

Nothing turns web readers off faster than content saturated with spelling or grammatical errors. Such mistakes show that you did not feel the need to invest much time or money into the face of your business. This can have a detrimental effect on the image of your company’s reliability and credibility. Check and recheck your content for errors and make sure that it stays focused and centered on your main ideas. Follow these steps for error-free and professional content:

Do a pre write. What information will you include in your content? How will you structure your words to be the most effective? What research materials will you use?

Use lists and short paragraphs. Readers will most likely be scanning your content to get the main ideas. Use these ideas as your headers and create content that can be easily summarized.

Check your content for spelling and duplicates. Don’t simply rely on a spell checker. Read your content several times over a period of a few days to catch every error that you can find.

Have someone else read your work. It is best to use a professional editor. However, having a few employees or friends read your work can bring some hidden errors to the surface.

Outsource your content. Sometimes it’s better to admit that you are not a writer and trust a professional writer to handle your content. If you have the funds in your budget and value the image of your company, it is best to make sure that your content brand is written well the first time.

5. Focus on Your Company’s Image

Take into account how you want your visitors to view you as a company as well as how you are currently viewed in the industry. Every piece of content on your web site needs to define who your company is and what you offer that caters to your market’s individual needs. Some key talking points could include:

Character: Who are you? Where do you come from? What are your stances? Be honest and authentic. One wrong move in trying to be something that you are not could destroy your company image.

Personality: Try to highlight the aspects of your business that make you human. Many companies use pictures of their employees to reveal personality. However, it might be a good idea to use content in the same way. Try including personal profiles written in the first person. You can also include quotes from your employees to highlight what they enjoy about working with your company.

Image: Depending on the strength and focus of your content, you might find that consumers begin to associate specific attributes with your business. By focusing on your image, you can quickly delegate your competition into a category that most people would consider bland.

6. Leverage Your Key Content Branding Approaches

Choose some aspects of your business that you can use to create a specific vision of how your company values certain fundamentals of good business. Try choosing from the following when drafting content:

Product or Service Selection
Your Business Experience
Knowledge that You Bring to the Table
Your Credentials
Technology that You Use
Your Resources
Region From Which You Operate
Speed of Your Service
Tools Available to You
Customer Service Value

Never forget that the words you use to express your company are your portal to a prospective customer’s world. You must show them how you can make their life easier, more profitable, happier and more productive. If you can convey this message in all aspects of your content-driven marketing campaign, you can be successful in convincing your customers of how valuable you are to them. More than anything, treat your content with great care. The value of your content to your consumers can create a brand that people want. However, if your content is produced poorly, it could spiral your business into mediocrity.

Corry Cummings is the owner of Content Customs, which is a professional team of SEO copywriters. For more great information about improving the quality of your web content, visit Corry’s Content Writing Blog. You can also follow Corry on Twitter.

Dawn L Billings is an the author of hundreds of articles on parenting, relationships, entitlement and networking, and over 20 books Dawn is an active advocate for children’s issues. As the CEO and Founder of The Heart Link Women’s Network, Trova Women Business Directory and Trova Small Business Directory and The Heart Alliance.com international women’s networking organizations , Dawn is a great supporter of women in business.

Dawn is the architect of the Primary Colors Personality Test

Check out our women networking events and find a gathering near you! You will be so glad you did. Also check out - TROVA NOW Women Business Directory, and TROVA Business Directory for all small businesses. TROVA in Italian means “Find”. Would you like for your business to be found easily both locally and nationally? That is what our new business directories TrovaBusinessDirectory.com and TrovaWomenBusinessDirectory.com are all about. For more information about how to get your women owned business listed for FREE visit: TrovaNow

Tags: Brand your business, networking group, networking women, Primary Colors Personality Test, web content, women networking event, women networking group

Do you know how to Flickr?

June 27, 2010 by dawn billings · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Business for Women, Marketing Tips, Social Media

Do You Flickr?

Hey Women Entrepreneurs, most small businesses haven’t figured out how to promote themselves on Flickr. I know I certainly haven’t yet. The good news about this is that means you can get an edge on the competition if you love to shoot and share photos. In a recent post at the Influential Marketing Blog, Rohit Bhargava offers several useful how-to pointers.
Consider the following:

It all starts with high-quality, non-marketing photography. You don’t have to hire a professional photographer, as you would when shooting images for your website or ads. “Flickr works best when you share more authentic ‘real life’ photos,” he notes. “To take great ones, you may want to upgrade your point and shoot to a real Digital SLR camera with a high quality lens.”
Then you’ve got to go pro. A free account, he argues, will allow you to upload 200 images—but it’s easy to hit that limit and you’ll have less credibility in the community. “If you are going to use Flickr to do any marketing,” he says, “put up the 25 bucks and get yourself a pro account.”
And quickly approve requests for reuse. “Lots of services, bloggers and media are now using Flickr images to power their own stories and media,” he says. The more they use and credit your images, the more exposure your company receives.

The Po!nt: Use Flickr the right way and you’ll gain a competitive advantage on small businesses that do not.

Source: Influential Marketing Blog. Click here for the full post.

Dawn is the architect of the Primary Colors Personality Test

Tags: Flickr, How to use Flickr, networking group, professional networking event, women networking, women networking group, women's networking

The Simple Math of Blog Comments

May 23, 2010 by dawn billings · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Business for Women, Marketing Tips, Social Media

The Simple Math of Blog Comments

You know that commenting on blogs is a great way to extend your presence online, meet other bloggers, business owners, and potential customers, and ultimately drive more traffic to your own blog and website.

But what makes a good blog comment? How do you go about “joining the conversation,” as multitudes of well-meaning people are constantly haranguing you to do? Is there a science to it? An established theorem of blog commenting best practices? What’s a business blogger to do?

Let’s take a simple, mathematical approach to commenting on other people’s blogs.

Add

Add something useful, new, or interesting to the conversation. Easier said than done, to be sure. But avoid leaving comments just for the sake of leaving comments, especially those that add nothing to the topic at hand.

Example: While everybody likes to be agreed with, try to go beyond a simple “I agree” in your comments. What exactly do you agree with? Was one of the points made by the blogger more persuasive than the others? Which arguments were less persuasive?

Added benefit: Blog comments offer a great opportunity to show more of your human face to the readers in your space. A personal anecdote goes a long way in contributing something truly unique and valuable to the conversation that only you can add. Share something of yourself, your background, your expertise.

Subtract

Subtract any gratuitous self-promotion from your blog comments. If you have a truly relevant blog post on your own site, then by all means refer to it, but only after summarizing how and why it is relevant to the author’s post. Avoid talking about your own products and services on other people’s blogs.

Example: If you sell accounting software, and the author of another blog writes about a tricky tax question that your software helps answer, try to answer the question in a simple, layman-friendly way and help the readers of this blog understand the issue better.

Added benefit: You’ve just uncovered a blog post that is dying to be written on your own blog. Write in more detail on your own site about how to approach the tricky tax question, and link back to the article that sparked the idea for the post.

Multiply

Multiply the positive effect of your comments by referring (and linking, where appropriate) to the blogs, comments, and contributions of others. Draw connections and parallels where others have not yet pointed them out. Promote the good work and insights of other commenters, and be specific about what it is you value about their contributions.

Example: If you sell signs and banners, visit the blogs of graphic designers and artists who design for the commercial sector. Talk about what you admire in their designs, and why these principles are important in business signs and marketing.

Added benefit: You might find some bloggers in a related space who might be interested in guest blogging for your site. Adding diverse voices to your blog increases the readability and potential audience for your blog by a surprising amount.

Divide

Divide your attention among blogs in a number of different spaces — not just the one your own blog occupies. What types of blogs do your customers enjoy, when they are not thinking fondly of you and your products and services?

Seek out a number of different worlds that might be of interest to your customers, your partners, your vendors, your friends. Visit these blogs as frequently as you do those in your own segment (if not more), and contribute thoughtful remarks to these conversations as well. Avoid confining yourself to your own little “echo chamber” by frequenting new and exciting different neighborhoods in the blogosphere.

Example: If you sell pools, and write a blog about pools and hot tubs, find some blogs that discuss outdoor home decorating, home gardening, lawn sports, and other related leisure activities.

Additional benefit: These sites might give you ideas for posts of your own: what kind of furniture do you need when you own a pool? What kind of food might you serve poolside this summer? What are some tips for keeping your skin safe from UV rays during the warmer months?

Add, subtract, multiply, and divide. It all adds up to a great business blog, and to creating a strong and helpful presence in the blogosphere that builds your brand’s reputation, authority, and good will.

Post written by Beth Dunn, a member of the Inbound Marketing Consultant team at HubSpot. Beth also blogs at www.bethdunn.org and An Accomplished Young Lady.
Read more: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/5881/The-Simple-Math-of-Blog-Comments.aspx?source=Blog_Email_[The+Simple+Math+of+B]#ixzz0mn9wRH1s