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FTC Shopping Guidelines

One of my favorite discussions is how to develop a strategy for using social media marketing to attract new clients and keep your existing ones.

If you have a blog or a website, are you utilizing search engine optimization to its fullest extent?  With the WordPress platform, there are several plugins available that help you with SEO. One of my favorites is “All-in-One SEO”. With All-in-One SEO you have additional information to fill out at the bottom of the publishing tool where you write your posts. You tell it the title of your post, a short (161 character) description of what your post is about (if you have done a good job with SEO for your first couple of sentences, that wil be your description), and lastly you need to put in your keywords.  If you have researched prior to writing your post (whether in a key word search engine or Google), you will have a list of keywords, and the highest demand words should be entered first and all the rest after that.

Also don’t forget to take the first few sentences of your post and copy/paste them into the excerpt section which is directly below where you write your posts.  This is what people will see if they catch only the excerpt of your post and can be important in getting them to read the entire post.  If you have gone to all the trouble to write a post, you want the world to find it AND read it!

No matter what you are doing or selling - be it a product or a service – you want to attract shoppers, clients, existing customers, readers and advocates. Help your customers be better shoppers and they will tell their friends about you, your product or service. Here is a resource for you to help you help your customers:   an infographic from the FTC on being safe when shopping online.

I was reading a white paper from HubSpot this morning on how people are choosing who they do business with, what they are buying and how they choose to spend their money.  The article I was reading discussed one of my favorite topics: push versus pull marketing. Let’s look at a handful of the stats I read about in the first chapter of this white paper:

You already know that the Internet has changed how we find what we want, connect with our friends and seek advice when making a purchase.

• Today more than half of US residents and more than three-quarters of US adults are online.  More and more of those online people are online with their “smart phones”, becoming mobile as well as online via their computers.
• More than one-third of US consumers spend 3+ hours online every day with another third spending more than one hour.
• Nearly half of direct (snail) mail pieces are never opened.
• Marketers (the big guys in particular) are shifting their budgets away from “outbound” to encompass “inbound” marketing utilizing blogs and social media.

As Craig Davis, Chief Creative Officer for the 4th largest advertising agency, J. Walter Thompson, said, ”We need to stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in.”

Are you using interruption marketing or being what your perfect client is interested in?

About three years ago I met a lovely person who was changing employers and potentially even her career.  She had had a similar career path and interests that at one point I had had.  There were enough similar events & interests that caused us to form a  reasonable bond quickly.  My path at the time was completely different than hers but we were both wondering if where we were was where we should be.

The divergence of our paths led to only occasional contact but social media allowed us to observe our individual progression through our jobs/careers. Recently I saw that her career has taken a u-turn back to the job that is really the passion of her professional life.  I was so delighted that I sent her an email and said let’s get together to talk.

After I meet with her, I am going to tell you about her business.  I think it could help many people I know who are small business owners, especially women small business owners.  So stayed tuned.  we should be meeting within a week’s time so I will profile her business here as soon as we have talked.

Is there someone you admire or think has a business that could change someone’s business/life?  Make a comment below about what you admire about that person/business.

I often wonder how people stay up-to-date on their social media tools.  Several times a month it seems like the Facebook look and feel gets tweaked.  I took a month long class on Facebook  during Q1 2011 and a lot of the information is already out of date.

This month I am taking a class that is easily 40 hours in length, not including my own study time in reviewing what I am learning, on social media tools.  I read at least 10 different newsletters that come to me daily and try to limit my research/learning time to no more than 4 hours daily.  After all, I do have a couple of businesses to manage and a dozen or so authors to return emails to daily.  When I read something new, or listen to a podcast that has something in it I have not heard before, I research it, the person saying it and then figure out how it integrates into my business and my consulting. How can a person who is running a business, writing a book or having a life stay up on all this?

Which tools do you use regularly? Please, share how you manage to stay up-to-date on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the other tools by commenting on this post.

Logo

Recently I was getting ready to order new business cards and realized my business card “look” was becoming, well, dated.

Staying fresh, up-to-date and savvy is important. Ordering hundreds or thousands of business cards, brochures or stationery because of price breaks on quantity may not be a good use of your money.  Being nimble, flexible and timely means being able to turn on a dime, whip up a new look or simply refresh your old one.  Tags lines need a second look while reviewing your business card look…

Branding is a big word in looks these days.  Your “Brand”  is on a Facebook page, your website, your blog, your brochures, your business cards, your personalized license plate. So how do you afford a “freshen” up look or a whole new design?  I have been told by one branding house that it starts at $20,000.  That might be chump change to Coca Cola or Coco Chanel, but to most small business people, that is not going to happen.

I re-found a website today.  I have not used this; however, I have talked to at least one person who has and he was satisfied.  It is called 99 designs. I have a lot of acquaintances and friends who are either brand/graphic designers or web site designers.  There are a handful I recommend on a regular basis.  But for a budget minded individual starting their own shoestring indie business or a struggling entrepreneur who has survived the economic downturn of the past few years and has a tighter budget than their shoestrings, this could be a solution.  I liked what I saw on the website.  I think it is worth considering.  So I had to bring it up as a budget solution.  Those designers that want $10k or $20k really don’t want the person who has so tight a budget that 99designs is a stretch so you aren’t harming anyone when you go that route.  When you are in a better financial position and need a good designer, give us a call here at expected outcomes and we’ll give you a referral to some top notch affordable website or brand designers.