If you’re one of the small local businesses trying to move your marketing online, this article is for you. Perhaps you already have a website, a blog, and even a page on Facebook. If you do, great! You’re making progress. Depending on whether you are doing the work yourself or hiring it out, you may have missed the opportunity for some of the best free advertising you can get — listings in some of the larger online directories… the ones that count. (Being in a bazillion small meaningless link-farm directories doesn’t help and you want to stay away from those!)

The biggies:

• Google Places (aka Google Local)
• Bing Local
• Yelp
• Manta (click “Add Your Company”)

If you’re a restaurant you should also be in:

• Urban Spoon

Entering the data into these sites will be a bit repetitive, but that’s okay. Different search engines serve up results from many different sources and you want to make sure you’re included in the ones that matter. This is a really basic list, there are lots of other good, solid directories, but folks just starting out should worry about these first.

Most of these sites also offer upgraded ‘paid’ listings or other features. For now, just stick with the basic free listing, you can always upgrade later. Ideally these listings will include a link back to a website, but if you don’t have a site, put up a page on Facebook and link to that.

When provided with the opportunity to enter a description about your company you are writing for both a human audience and computers. For the humans, it needs to be well written sales copy that tells the potential customer what benefits you offer them. Why should they come to YOUR business and not the guy down the street? For the computer audience (search engines) you need to make sure to include your primary keywords. Those keywords are likely what your customers are typing when they sit down to find you online. Give it some thought, and ideally, do some keyword research at Google’s keyword tool. It does make a difference: the search engines are smart, but they may not be able to tell the difference between “dog sitter” and “pet sitting service”.  Customers are more likely to type in ‘air conditioner repair’ than ‘hvac service’, which is industry jargon that the general public doesn’t use. Part of the challenge is writing for this dual audience, AND making it fit in the limited amount of space. The great part is, this information can be re-used over and over, including on your own web site!

Check out the latest post on Inspired Magazine for a great article about WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS). They cover the pros and cons of using WordPress to manage your website content, feature some WordPress websites from some movers and shakers in the business world, and they round it out with a list of favorite plugins. (though I think they missed a gem: Widget Logic, which lets you customize which pages each widget will or will not appear on.)

One of my favorite things to do when I see such a hot blog is to open the source code and hunt for the plugins. I love to see what the big boys are using.

The Inspired Mag site has a pleasing design; note how they prominently display the number of followers and subscriptions they have… with all the tools to jump on the bandwagon and follow them right there in the same area. Who doesn’t want to be friends with the popular kid on the block?

I’m actually surprised at the number of ads: more than a third of their site is devoted to them. But I guess if you’ve got a page rank of 5 you can get away with it.

No matter which blogging platform you are using, experts agree that it’s a valuable way to connect with both your existing and future customers. So you might be asking yourself:

“What’s the best way to get readers to follow my blog?”

You need to make it as easy as possible for your readers to follow your blog; fortunately most blogging platforms come with built in tools and plugins to do so. The two most common ways to stay connected to your readers are:

1. RSS feeds
2. Email

RSS Feeds

RSS feeds are simple to use (both as a blogger and as a reader), but some people don’t like them. I personally subscribe to most blogs I follow using RSS and have them fed straight into my iGoogle page (organized by tabs for different topics). The default for most blogging platforms is already set with RSS feeds turned on.

If you’d like to track your subscribers, I recommend using Feedburner (a Google product) to process your feeds.

Email Distribution

With plugins and services like Feedburner, distributing your blog posts via email is really simple. You’ll need to consider whether to distribute whole posts or just excerpts. If you distribute whole posts you will find that your traffic drops off; people don’t need to come to your site anymore. Excerpts then, in my opinion, are the better choice. Your readers get a teaser via email and can click the link to read your complete posts and they get the full benefit of your site (comments, sharing options, related posts, etc.) while doing so.

I’ve tested several plugins for WordPress to add email functionality. From an ease-of-use standpoint, Feedburner wins out, followed closely by a plugin called “Subscribe2″ by Matthew Robinson. Finally, for a full-featured, completely customizable solution, MailPress is hard to beat. Not only can it process your post subscriptions, it handles your forms, and has an auto-responder function in addition to many other features. It’s much more complicated to set up (especially when creating a custom template), but the functionality and controls are outstanding.

Other Considerations

In addition to automatically alerting your subscribers when you make a new post, it’s a good idea to install a plugin or script that will automatically post a link to the new content on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin. There are many choices for plugins that offer this function. I prefer two of them: Status Updater (By Francesco Castaldo) and Su.pr, which is a StumbleUpon product. Each has their pros and cons, but the biggest benefit of Status Updater over Su.pr is that it can post a link to a fan page, and not just a Facebook profile. Huge difference! Su.pr offers more ways to promote your site and your posts, as well as tracking information about those links. The Su.pr advantage, to me, is using it for custom tiny URLs — much nicer to have http://computerdesigngraphics.com/PZta than http://tinyurl.com/yktexsf. These two plugins each have a lot going for them. Tough decision! I’ve not had much success getting them to play well together, but with the latest updates to these popular plugins, it may now be possible. (I’ll post an update if I can work out the logistics.)

Got your attention, didn’t it? It’s not really a secret, it’s just that so many people simply skip it, or don’t use it well, that you’d think it was a secret.

Free and Easy Marketing that Everyone Can Use

Are you looking for a set-it-and-forget-it way to keep your company information in front of your contacts? One that’s FREE? Piece of cake!

Your email signature is the perfect opportunity to not only make sure your contacts have information about how to contact you, but it’s a quick way to share links to your web site, your social networking pages, and even a YouTube video channel. Don’t stop there, though… A one-liner about your business that get’s people interested (referred to as your “talking logo” by John Jantsch in Duct Tape Marketing) should also be there.

Every modern email program has some sort of a “signature” option available. Once you set it up, the signature is attached to every email you send out. Most programs even allow you to have multiple signatures. In the case of the Mail app on my Mac, I can have multiple signatures for each email account.

Email signatures should be either text or html. There should be no graphic attachments in your signature — your logo can, and should, be embedded as HTML. The one requirement is that the logo or other graphics must be hosted on the internet somewhere. The “somewhere” can either be on your own hosting account, Flickr, Picasso, Photobucket, etc.

Here are some samples of email signatures that I use:

Valerie Cudnik

(757) 271-4602

www.computerdesigngraphics.com

Be our fan on Facebook

Valerie Cudnik
Computer Design Graphics
www.computerdesigngraphics.com
(757) 271-4602

regards,

Valerie Cudnik

List your garage sale for free | Get free maps of garage sales in your area

Valerie Cudnik
Visit My Web Sites: Computer Design Graphics – Garage Sale Finder – Dolly Domestic

contact | XXXX@cox.net | (757) 271-4602

facebook - valerie.cudnik | twitter – valerie_cudnik | linkedin – valeriecudnik

These particular signatures serve various purposes. For instance, the last one is my personal email signature — thus the photo of me and Opal. I’ve just updated it and the Computer Design Graphics (html) version with my social networking information. The logos and graphics help maintain my brand for my various ventures. The last, personal, signature has a bit more formatting; email programs have issues with cascading style sheets (CSS), so I used inline CSS to create the dotted underline beneath the links.

Look for tutorials on how to create these in various email programs soon.

Did you know that a blog can double as a website? This website is, in fact, run entirely in WordPress, as are 95% of all my clients’ sites.

I’ve got a great offer for you! I’m setting up self-hosted WordPress blogs for free during the entire month of February. 28 days of bloggy bliss.

Here’s the deal:

1. Get your free blog by February 28, 2010 by going to this page, reading through it, and signing up for a free blog.
2. Tell your friends to do the same.

Free blogs. Seriously.

But remember, THE FREE BLOG PROMOTION ENDS ON FEBRUARY 28, 2010. No exceptions! So get one now before the deal and the month runs out.

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