7 Social Media Strategies for Small Business Owners

Social media is an invaluable and free tool that, believe it or not, many small businesses are not utilizing in their marketing efforts. Less than 20% of small businesses actually have websites that link to wildly popular social media networks like Twitter and Facebook. Most of the small business owners who don’t utilize social media say that they simply do not have time. Other small business owners indicate that they have no clue where to even begin to start a social media campaign. The reality is that you cannot afford to ignore the advantages that social media efforts provide.

Before taking advantage of these opportunities, you’ll first need a website. If you don’t have a business website yet, or are looking for new web hosting, check out hostgator.com for reliable and affordable packages. If you are among the owners not currently using social media to grow your business, you may want to consider attending a seminar such as the Ragan Communications’ 2012 Social Media and Community Managers Summit to expand your knowledge. Through attending workshops, you will learn how to manage your web presence, find the best platforms, use tools to measure content, share your company’s point of view in a more visual and engaging manner, and more.

In the meantime, we’ve compiled some helpful tips from the social media experts at Street Fight and Socialnomics to help you start making the most of this free marketing opportunity, increase brand awareness and generate leads.

Tips to Help Your Small Business Dominate Social Media:

  1. Integrate Social Media into Your Entire Business System: Small business owners should keep track of the traffic their social media networks are directing to their website. By integrating these efforts with such tools as Google Analytics and Omniture, you will clearly see the role social media outlets play in your marketing efforts.
  2. Get Your Timing Right: Tweeting or posting on Facebook during the optimal time of day is crucial. The perfect timing for a restaurant to send out messages with their lunch specials is around 11 a.m., while Happy Hour deals should be sent around 4-5 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays are the best days to post business-related info, as they are not as hectic as Monday or as close to the weekend as Friday.
  3. Give Deals and Discounts to Loyal Followers: A huge reason customers follow their favorite companies online is so that they can hear about special deals and discounts. Offer special promotions, online deals and exclusive discounts on your social media pages to give customers a reason to follow your company and to help generate sales and leads via this outlet.
  4. Their Friends Can Become Your Friends: Folks who have pages on Facebook and Twitter have an average of around 250 friends each. When business owners write posts and respond to customers, they promote social sharing to each reader’s network of 250+ people. By engaging with customers in conversation about your products, you can tap into that network for free.
  5. Check-in Sites are Great for Promotions: Foursquare and other check-in sites can provide an excellent opportunity for cross-promotion and customer acquisitions for your company. Connect with a customer via Twitter or Facebook and thank them for visiting, but also ask them to provide feedback about your company on sites like Google Places and Yelp to get the good word out.
  6. Track Your Social Media Success: It is crucial for small business owners to know how well their social marketing efforts are working. Keep track of metrics and measure your success over a given period. On Twitter, you should know which tweets are getting the most re-tweets. With Facebook, track which posts receive the most “likes.”
  7. Choose the Correct Platform for Your Small Business: Each social media site has a distinct style that may work best for a certain type of message or marketing idea. For instance, Facebook is great for posting photos or a new logo, but the same post lacks impact when used on Twitter. Small business owners should experiment to learn which type of content gets the best results on a certain social media site.

Social media can boost business, even with minimal effort. By following these expert tips, you can get your message delivered free to consumers who can help you get the word out about your product or service.

How Squidoo Can Help Your Business?

Squidoo is a website that allows you to create your own pages on it. Like free website builders, you can put videos, guestbook, images and more on your page without any technical knowledge. So why would you want to use it? One of many benefits is that you can put a page pretty quickly with its easy to use tools. If you know how to write a blog post then you already know how to use Squidoo.

By having your own page on Squidoo will boost your main website’s ranking on the search engines. If your content is compelling you will get many visitors from this high traffic website. The best part is that you can easily update your page on Squidoo with new and fresh contents from anywhere that have Internet access. Which means you can build your page up slowly.
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Why You Need a Website for Your Business?

Having a business without a website is like having a bike with no wheels, you will not get very far with your business. Understandably, many offline businesses have enjoyed much success but the potential for growth with a custom designed website will increase your company’s brand presence.

Promote your business with a website
It will be much easier to promote your business if you have a professional designed website in place. Of course there are many ways to promote your business. One great way is to make business cards and give them out to everyone you meet, even strangers!

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How PHP Dir Submit Can Help You Get More Traffic

If you are an Internet marketer you know how important website traffic is. Search engine optimisation is one of the best ways that can help you to get more traffic. And to do well in the search engines you will need links. The main problem with link building is that it takes time and most people are aware of this. If you have been doing Internet marketing for a while then you know exactly what I’m talking about. So how PHP Dir Submit script can help you? There are multiple ways to use PHP Dir Submit to get traffic your web site and here are three to get you started:

1. The most obvious way would be to use PHP Dir Submit to promote your own websites. You will save time by submitting your website(s) to hundreds of link directories, article directories and social bookmarking sites and the end result is same as if you did the work manually in Firefox or Internet Explorer. If you have your own list of directories you can add that to your PHP Dir Submit site too.
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The Importance of Graphic Design Knowledge in Web Design

Web design is basically a process of coding and graphic design is a much different process. We have logic (coding) on one side and creation (creativity) on the other side. They both play an important role in the creation of a great looking website. Many web designers underestimated the importance of graphic design knowledge in designing websites as a result, they struggle to create “attractive” websites. The visual part of a website can really make a basic brochure type website look more valuable.

Here are some key points that why graphic design does play an important role in web designing.
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How to Find Work For Newbie Freelance Web Designers

With the popularity and profitability of engaging in website design, the competition as a web designer is getting to be tougher and tougher. But when you work hard to pursue your passion, and you are able to market yourself and your skills, you will find that as a freelance web designer, there will always be work for you.

Any newbie freelance web designer will say that the most difficult part of their careers is on the earliest stage when they have yet to establish their credibility as a web designer. Of course, customers will want someone who has an established reputation in website design.
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The Importance of Web Design For Online Businesses

E-commerce is continuously growing with more and more people bringing in their normal transactions from the table to the dashboard of their websites. Since the discovery of the World Wide Web, people from all over the world have found it easier to transact with other people from other countries through the internet. All they need to do is buy a domain name, build a website, buy online marketing tools such as shopping carts and merchant accounts, and of course design the entire online shop.
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2HotDirectory.Com – Bid For Position Directory

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2Hot Web Directory is a SEO friendly and human edited directory that gives you an easy way to bid on links. Our link directory displays links alphabetically, and lets you bid your way to the top of the list. With a starting bid of $1, you are guaranteed a spot in our directory!

Increase your bid to take a top position, and not only will your link list higher in the directory, but you could join our Top 5 Link Leaders on the homepage.

All links in our directory are guaranteed to be available online for at least 10+ years.

Benefits of Links
Links get results. Link popularity is one of the most important factors in search engine performance.

Increasing the number of links to your Web site can get your site listed higher in search engine results, bring more visitors to your site, increase your Google PageRank and improve your site’s overall strength.

Why Buy Links From Us?
This directory will be promoted heavily over the next coming months. We are planning to invest a 4 figure amount on marketing and advertising in the first half of next year!

We are now giving away 50 free $1 links in our directory, if you’re interested in this special one-time offer simply send us your website title, url, your prefered email address and the url that links back to our site.

If the page you link back to us has:
PR0 – you will get a $1 link
PR1 – $10 link
PR2 – $20 link
PR3 – $30 link
and so on .

If you don’t know what Pagerank your site has, you can use this tool. This free offer will end as soon as we reach 50 links!

Email – info[at]2hotdirectory.com
Website – www.2hotdirectory.com

The Best £2 Investment Ever

Today I bought a huge collection of ebooks, PLR articles, scripts, adsense sites and more. There are over 100,000 items in total, most of the materials are 2-4 years old but the information can be still be used today… I hope! And the cost for all that? – £2, now that’s truly a bargain.

So am I going to go through all those materials? Of course not, I bought them mainly because 99.9% of those items have resale rights or no copyrights at all, which means I can use them to crank up the Google ranking of my upcoming (money-making) site, or I could use them to build a list. This “little” investment will save me hours of work, and not to mention that they can be reused over and over again!

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