Why should your business have an active online presence?    Here are a few amazing statistics I came across in the past year.  These numbers really speak for themselves, don’t you think?

80% of all small businesses use internet to conduct business activities.

There are over 2 billion videos viewed every single day on YouTube.

Here is a little tip for Twitter and Facebook users.  In this post I’ll show you how you can easily setup an RSS feed to post updates automatically to your Twitter account and Facebook pages or profile.

This is very handy if you want to:

Twitterfeed Homepage

If you’re anything like me, you use Twitter not only to connect with people, but also to find new interesting articles and websites that people you follow recommend.   By linking an quality RSS feed to your Twitter account, you can “give back” some of that goodness and suggest content to your followers, without having to do anything. It’s all done automatically.

Sure, you should only do this with a quality RSS feed that you are certain your followers will find interesting so you don’t overdo it.

Here is how to link an RSS feed to Twitter or Facebook:

1Go to www.twitterfeed.com

2Create your new account and login

3Create New Feed by clicking the button in top right corner of the screen

4Define your source RSS Feed – enter the name and RSS URL.

Setting up a RSS feed

5Go to “Step two” – connect the RSS feed to your services. At the time of writing this article, you can link RSS feeds to Twitter, Facebook, Statusnet and Hellotxt.

6All done.  You now have an RSS feed linked to your Twitter or Facebook account and it will post new updates as they come in.  You can also check how many people clicked on your links from the Twitterfeed dashboard.

This is a first post in a “Marketing Superheroes” series. I’d like to feature some of the brands that really nailed their marketing in some extraordinary way.

My personal favourite is Valve and their Steam platform.

Steam store

Steam Homepage

Steam is a  digital game distribution, multiplayer and communications system developed by the Valve Corporation. It is used to distribute games and related media online, from small independent developers to larger software houses.

With over 1,200 games available through Steam, and over 30 million active user accounts, Steam is estimated to have a 70% share of the digital distribution market for video games.

That alone is impressive, but even more impressive is how Valve uses Steam to increase sales and retain their customers.  All the games purchased from Steam Store are also launched through Steam client.  That means every time you go to play your game, you see the Steam online store.  With their special offers, “Mid-week madness” discounts and weekend specials there is always reason for the gamers to spend a little time browsing through the store.

And now Valve have taken this to a whole new level.

Steam Treasure Hunt Competiton

Steam Treasure Hunt - today's objectives

In the couple of weeks leading to Christmas, Valve has announced a special “Steam Treasure Hunt” competition.   The concept is simple. Every two days Steam will announce a new set of four objectives. The competition spans over two weeks so there are 28 objectives in total. Completing any 10 objectives will act as an entry for the grand prize draw – winning 100 games of your choosing.

On top of that every two days, 20 people who have completed one objective will win the top 5 games on their wishlist. Each objective completed acts as another entry into the draw, so completing all four daily objectives will improve your chances.

Steam Store Top Selling List. Amnesia is on weekend special. Mafia II and Magic the Gathering only appeared in the list after they were featured in today's objectives.

The objective sets usually include at least one simple tasks requiring no purchase, one or two in-game achievements in a low-cost game for under $5 and one in-game achievement in a premium Steam game (RRP over $30).    The games that are highlighted by the objectives are usually on a two day special discount to make them more affordable to gamers.  You can clearly see this works marvels because every two days the games with objectives assigned to them move to the top of store’s best-selling list.

The Treasure Hunt competition is such a brilliant concept that marketers can only applaud the minds behind it.  It’s a great way for Valve to:

1. suggest new games to players
2. increase sales of the featured games
3. keep the Steam community interested and keen on coming back to the store
4. get and excellent PR from press and build inbound links
5. get every gamer who entered the competition to log into the store on December 20  (one of the conditions). It’s a perfect way to announce significant news or pitch specials to everyone involved.

Steam store and it’s Treasure Hunt competition is a perfect example of how to leverage your community and use platform and channels you already have in place to boost sales, generate buzz and keep users coming back for more.

Would you like to use social media to work for your business, but struggle to find the right information what social network would be the best starting point for you?  Here are five outstanding social media infographics that put the key data into wonderful visualizations to get the message across in easy to understand format.

Thanks to all the respective authors who put these charts together and to Brian Wallace from NowSourcing.com who collected these in his original post here.

1 – Make Social Media Work For Your Business

Here is a great visualization showing what social media strategies are best suited for different sections of your business.

Click here for full size image

2 – Age Distribution on Social Network Sites

Wondering what social network is more likely to be used by your prospects?   Pingdom.com put together an excellent users’ age overview by social network:

3 – The Conversation Prism

No social media infographic collection would be complete without Brian Solis’ Conversation Prism:

Click here for full size image

4 – The Boom of Social Sites

Focus.com put together an outstanding visual showing both the size and timeline of social communities:

Click here for full size image

5 -Visualizing 6 Years of Facebook

And last but not least – my favourite infographic celebrating Facebook’s recent 6th anniversary – Muhammad Saleem put together this excellent infographic over at Mashable:

Click here for full size image

Your website may very well be the most powerful marketing tool at your disposal. Not only it is your point of contact on the web and the place for your clients and prospects to find out information, but your website also has a huge impact on your prospects’ purchase decision. In fact a whopping 97% of the 200 surveyed buyers—from companies of all sizes—say a provider’s website has an influence on their ultimate purchase decision.

The survey was conducted by RainToday.com and included more than 200 buyers responsible for more than $1.7 billion in professional services purchased, such as accounting and financial consulting; architecture, engineering, and construction services; human resources consulting; IT consulting and services; legal services; management consulting; marketing, advertising, and public relations; and training services.

The influence of professional services websites on purchasing decisions has increased significantly over the past four years. According to the survey, 74% of buyers report the provider’s website holds at least “some influence” over their ultimate decision to buy services from the provider. This is 23 percentage points higher than in 2005 and represents a significant increase in the importance of websites.

It’s clear that having a good, well established website that delivers results is vital for professional services firms. With more and more of our daily activities conducted online, having a good website could be the key to success for many businesses.

With a well performing website you can:

• Establish that you are professional: through professional design, writing, and arrangement of content.
• Establish that you are worthy of consideration: through an overview of your services, your client list, biographies of your professionals, and case studies that show how your helped clients.
• Establish yourself as an authority: through blog posts, publications, videos, and other resources to help build credibility, reliability, and trust. All of these are essential elements necessary to win clients and increase your sales.

Say you have a small website that doesn’t really perform well in search engines. As I described earlier in my post called “Why a cheap $300 website will not work for you“, the best and easiest way to boost your search engine rankings is to add more quality content to your website. The more good content you put on and the more you promote it, the better will your website perform.

So what can you do to increase the amount of content on your website but still keep it compact and easy to use?

Here are a few tips:

1. Add a blog

Adding a blog to your website is a single, most effective way to generate fresh, quality content (see my post “10 reasons why you should start a business blog” to see the full benefits of business blogging). Blog is an easy, cost effective way to get your business visible at the top when people search for your keywords. Search engines love blogs because they offer a large amount of text content that is updated and added to on a regular basis. Because your posts are relevant to your field, you are generating invaluable content filled with the right keywords you need to rank high in searches, just by posting articles.

2. Use drop down menus in navigation

Adding new pages to your web site is great, but make sure you keep your navigation easy to use. Add a drop down menus to your main menu to logically separate the content. Drop down menus work best with horizontal menu bar. You can spread the content to more than one level too. If the layout is logical you can easily have three level drop down menu without confusing your visitors.

3. Use in-text links to offer more information

Not every page on your website needs a link in the main menu. You can easily use only links in your text to link to pages with more detailed information. Use your main menu to link to the important pages and place a link to the less important pages inside the page text. This way you keep your site clean, informative and easy to use.

4. Include “Search” function on your website.

It is important to make your website as user friendly as possible. An essential feature for any website with more than 8 pages is a search function. Search is an easy way for your visitors to find exactly what they need.

If your website is build on a solid content management system, chances are it has a search feature support already built in. Otherwise it is easy to add Google Search button to your website with few lines of code.

5. Use sidebars to publish small blocks of text

You can use the top and side areas of the website to present extra content. For example interesting facts and statistics, latest offers, news, external links – all of these are basically non essential content that you can display in the sidebar. It will give your visitors additional information in non-obtrusive subtle way.

6. Use tooltips to display additional information

If you would like to provide additional information for certain bits of text on your website, you can use special tooltip plugin to do so. Tooltips only show up when user hovers with mouse over the specified keyword which makes them nice and friendly way to display for example definitions or images.

These are just some of the things you can do to make your website perform better in search engines by adding new content while keeping it user friendly. If you do it right, you can add plenty of good content to your site without making it look too big or too confusing.

Of course there is more to SEO than just adding new content and I will try to cover more on this topic in the upcoming posts.

Have you seen any good ways of displaying additional content recently? If so, what did you like about it?

Well the title should really say “Why a small 3-page website is not the best choice for a good online presence” but isn’t that a bit long for a headline?

But seriously, in this post I’d like to highlight the benefits of spending money on a good size professional website rather than doing it the cheap way.

Side note: you may think I’m biased – after all I run a web design studio so it is best for me to sell you the most expensive product right? Wrong! It is in my best interest to provide you with a solution that will best suit your needs. Sure if I can see your business needs a $20,000 complex customized solution I will not try to sign you up for our standard $2,000 content management system just to get the job if it’s not going to work. But if I see you really only need a $1,500 website, I will not try to sell you a $3,000 system to get more money. The bottom line is the solution we give you has to work for you and it is important to me and my team you are fully satisfied with the results. It’s our clients who are behind our success.
But enough about me, let’s have a look at what’s better when setting up a website

So why isn’t a cheap $300 website going to work for you?

Cheap as in small…

When I say cheap website, I’m not talking about the graphic design aspect of how the site looks and feels (although my heart sinks every time I see flashing animated pictures and Comic Sans font). What I mean the the size of the web site – how many pages does it have. Cheap (as in $300 – $500) will usually get you just a basic 3-5 page web site with no ability to make any changes yourself.

Let’s say we compare two websites, designed by the exact same people for the same client. The first website has only 4 pages (Home, About us, Services and Contacts). The second site has about 15 pages filled with detailed info about offered services, more info on the company background and also a blog section. The second site will always rank better in search engines because it has more content and also incoming links generated by the blog.

But I only need a few pages, why is it a bad thing?

At the moment small website may seem like the ideal option for you right? After all you only need a few pages to tell people who you are, what you do and how to contact you. Maybe you think don’t really have that much to say anyway and certainly don’t want to scare your visitors with loads of text.

This is perfectly logical thinking. The only question is … how are your clients and visitors going to find your website?

Search Engines prefer larger websites to the small and simple ones.

Search engines like Google and Bing love content. Even more they love quality fresh content. As described in my post here, good quality content attracts incoming links because people will talk about it. Here is a million dollar advice: publish a lot of good, quality content and you will do well in search engines. It doesn’t get any simpler than that (of course you also need to promote the content but more on that another time).

A three page website may indeed look nice design-wise but in most cases it will not perform well when people search for your product or services. Most websites get their visitors through search engines, therefore it is vital your website ranks high for keywords related to your business. Small websites have hard time showing on the first page in Google simply because they have to compete with all the other bigger sites with more content.

The conclusion:

If you are thinking about getting a website, plan ahead and think how can you make your website useful to your visitors and clients. If you spend a bit more time and resources at the beginning, you will get much better results and ROI than by trying to do a cheap quick fix.

If you already have a website that is not performing too well, there are easy to do improvements you can make that will make a big difference if done properly. Stay tuned for my next post on how to increase the amount of content on your website but still keep it easy to use.

How well does your website perform in search engines?

Should you start a business blog on your website?

What can a blog do for your business?

A blog is a great and easy way to promote your business. Studies have shown us time and time again businesses that do blog have clear advantage over their competitors. To sum the most obvious benefits having a business blog will help your search engine rankings, increase your website traffic, generate more leads from your website and improve your brand visibility.

A quick introduction to blogging

The word blog is derived from the term “web log”. It is a platform for easy publishing of content. A website that’s part online journal and part open forum. Sometimes blog readers can post their reactions to blog posts and other readers can then add their two cents to those comments, thereby continuing the dialogue.

A few facts and statistics

Businesses that blog get 55% more website visitors.

The so-called blogosphere contains blogs on practically every conceivable topic. Every day there are over 900,000 new blog posts. Technorati – a blog search engine – has indexed over 133,000,000 blogs since 2002.

More important for business owners are the business blogging statistics. According to HubSpot – an internet marketing company – businesses that blog get 55% more website visitors, 97% more inbound links and 434% more indexed pages in search engines.

In a study done by marketing research company MarketingSherpa, businesses have found blogs to be 4th most important tool in generating new sales leads. But enough with the numbers and let’s look at the actual benefits of having a business blog.

Benefits of having a business blog

There are so many benefits it seems almost insane not to have a blog these days. Here are just a few reasons why having a blog is good for your business.

1. Create great content

Content is the king! By having a blog you can provide your readers with relevant information that’s related to your industry and products and keep them informed about the latest news. If you publish new posts on a regular basis your readers and customers will keep coming back to your website and they will always think of you first when they need your services again.

2. Search engines love blogs – having a blog will help your search engine rankings.

Search engines just love blogs because they offer a large amount of text content that is updated and added to on a regular basis. Because your posts are relevant to your field, you are generating invaluable content filled with the right keywords you need to rank high in searches, just by posting articles. As other people start linking to your blog posts your website will be accuring the all important inbound links from other relevant websites. As at end of 2009 inbound links and good content are the two most imporant factors in search engine rankings. Blog is an easy, cost effective way to get your business visible at the top when people search for your niche.

3. Demonstrate your expertise

By sharing your knowledge about your industry or services over a period of time you to demonstrate your expertise in your field. Blogging builds your credibility with your readers and potential clients. Your audience will have confidence in you as they can see that your are knowlegeable about your particular industry or product.

4. Low cost marketing – it only costs your time

Blogging is effective low-cost marketing. It doesn’t take much to add a blog to your website or you can use one of many free blogging services like WordPress, Typepad or Blogger.  Once you have setup your blog the only investment required is your time.  Get in the habit of posting blog updates regularly and the benefits you start getting back in return will amaze you.

5. Connect with your audience on personal level

A blog gives you an incredible opportunity to be yourself and communicate with your audience on a more personal level. Most of the materials found on today’s websites is formal and impersonal. People are looking to make a personal connection with those they do business with.

Imagine this: your potential customer is looking at yours and your competitor’s website. He needs to decide who is he going to call first. Who do you think he’s going to pick? Naturally he will call first to the person he feels more connected to. Your blog will help you make this connection and nudge your potential customers to give you a call first.

6. Increase your brand awareness

A blog gives you a great opportunity to buld up your brand awareness. The more a customer hears your name, the bigger chance of remembering it. By connecting your blog with social bookmarking and social networking sites like Digg, Redit, Stumpleupon, Twitter or Facebook you also spread your influence into areas of potential customers you would not be able to target otherwise.

7. Increase the number of leads and sales through your website

Building up brand awareness goes hand in hand with increased sales. As indicated by Business Weeks’ Olga Kharif in “Blogging for Business”, Jonathan Schwartz, president and chief operating officer of Sun Microsystems disovered his blog was a gold mine when his sales people started reporting they were selling deals faster to the readers of his blog. Blog also gives you an opportunity to mention your latest special deals and promotions in a more casual form than your main website.

8. Develop relationships with other bloggers

Once you get into your blogging routine you will discover there are other bloggers like you with similar goals and interests. Start promoting them and they will promote you in return. The whole blogosphere is built of connections and there are thousands of bloggers helping each other out every day.

9. Blog is a central element for online interaction with your customers

Source: BetterBusinessBlogging.com

Your blog will become a central place for all your other online interaction with customers and prospects. Even if you use other channels like Twitter or YouTube to engage with your followers, blog will allow you to bring all of your online activities together. In his brilliant post “Treat your Blog as your online home” Mark White says:

A blog, however, allows a business to bring all of these other elements together, creates a focal point for a community of customers, provides the company with its own social network hub whatever else goes on in the market and allows it to expand on the information disseminated on Twitter, YouTube or iTunes.

10. Develop library of marketing materials

This benefit of a business blog is often not mentioned. As you post your articles and updates you will over time generate an extensive library of marketing materials you can use elsewhere.  Need to print a new brochure for upcoming show or mailbox drop? Look into your blog archives – chances are you will already have some information in your blog therefore saving you time otherwise needed to write new copy for your brochure.

Keep it useful…

Ultimately blog can be a low cost, easy to use, highly effective marketing tool for differentiating your business from the competition and increasing customer loyalty.  All that’s required to run a successful small business blog is commitment, creativity, most importantly, keeping your blog useful for your readers.

Many business owners face the same problem as you do – you know you should spend some time to work on promoting your business but there is always something else that needs to be done instead. It doesn’t go away either. Once you have dealt with one thing, something else pops up. By the end of the day, all the good intentions you had to work on your blog, marketing materials or website are never put to action.

You probably know you should update your website on a regular basis. You are aware that all the studies prove businesses that do blog have significantly higher number of visitors and incoming links.

So what can you do to keep your business running and find time to publish at least one post or article a week?

1. Find inspiration
   The best way to write good article fast is to have a clear idea what are you going to write about. There are a number of resources you could use to get you going. Chris Brogan has published a list of blog topics to get you unstuck (here and here) which I always find to be a tremendous help.
2. Collect ideas
   I also keep a running list of possible blog topics I could write about as a note on my phone. I have it always handy and keep adding to it every time an idea pops into my head. This list became a great tool I use whenever I’m stuck and can’t think of a new blog topic to tackle.
3. Plan your time
   Set aside some time for working on your writing, updating your website or working on your newsletter. Unless you have a set time to do these tasks you will just keep on postponing them. My initial goal was to spend half an hour every day on working on my own website but now I found out it works out better for me to set aside half a day block once a week to work on my blog and inbound marketing articles.

   Choose whichever works for you – be it a set amount of time every day or just half a day on the weekend, but you will need to stick to it.

4. Get on with it.
   Just go ahead and start blogging, post new content on your website, write up an email newsletter. Anything you do will be better than doing nothing. Your website is far more likely to succeed if you publish one average article a week than one finely polished post a month. It’s the frequency and the momentum that counts.

I can almost guarantee if you stick to these few simple rules you will be on a surefire way to improving your website visitor traffic, page rank and increasing sales your website sales.

Where do you find time for blogging and creating new content?