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Small Business Help – How do you get traffic to your blog

February 4, 2012 By Amanda 2 Comments

If your small business uses and relies on blogging for awareness or sales then one

Traffic to your blog? you could use a bullhorn... READ MY BLOG

of your most pressing issues is how do you get traffic to your blog. Apart from great content that includes keywords that your customers are searching for, your blog needs ‘backlinks‘ to push your website up in the search engine rankings. This gets more visibility, which should result in more traffic. Using social media can be cost effective in how do you get traffic to your blog. Warning though, social media can drain time that could be used more effectively. Most businesses are familiar with facebook and twitter, in this article by SANDIPAN MUKHERJEE we share some get tips on channels of social media to get traffic to your blog.

How do you get traffic to your blog using social media

…. We promote our articles for two reasons – Traffic and Backlinks. Time is something which depends from person to person. Most of us are part-time bloggers; so time is a constraint for us.

So we must select methods in such a way so that our aim of getting traffic and building backlinks are satisfied and at the same time, we do not invest too much of time.

Today I am going to share with you some proven methods which will satisfy the above needs.

Social Networks

Apart from Facebook and Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn are two other social networks which can used for article promotion.

Google+

Google+ is the new social networking site of Google. It is new compared to Facebook and Twitter. However, it has huge potential. It started on 28th June 2011 and so far has 90 million registered users according to Wikipedia.

Google+ has a new concept of “Circle”. Circle! What is it? The concept of Circle gives us the opportunity to create different groups like friends, family, etc.

So you can create a Circle and add people who like the niche of your blog. You can now promote your articles to that circle. This concept is very useful as you are not sharing it with everyone and thus will not be considered as a spammer.

Google has introduced the “+1” concept something similar to the “Like” concept of Facebook. If you share something on Google+, people can +1 it. Thus it gets virally promoted. For example, if your friend +1 your post, it gets shared with his friends, who can again +1 it and so on.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is another popular social network and is the world’s largest professional network. It has almost 135 million registered users according to Wikipedia.

Bloggers should promote their articles in LinkedIn. This may not be helpful in building backlinks, but can be useful for getting traffic.

Video Promotion

Video promotion can also be useful in promoting your articles. Creating videos is not a problem these days. There are a lot of online and offline softwares available on the internet for creating videos. Just create a video that contains the summary of the article. Also try to create them with catchy titles. This will attract visitors.

I recommend you to go for YouTube only for Video promotion.

You Tube

You Tube gets millions of views everyday. So why not conquer this huge traffic bank. Create some videos and share them on this site. It is not necessary to create a video for each and every article. Create one or two videos per week and add the link of the article in the description part. If visitors like your writing style and content, they will bookmark your blog and visit it again and again.

There are some advantages of video promotion. Videos gets indexed quickly in the search engines. Also people like to watch videos rather than reading the articles. If they like the content of your video, they will definitely visit your blog to read the full article.

Blog Communities

Blog communities can play an important role in article promotion. Here you will find many like minded people. Blog Engage and Blokube are the recommended ones.

Blog Engage is a very popular community of Bloggers. I started using it from August 2011. Believe me it is an awesome community. I promoted my articles in this community and received good amount of traffic. Not only that; my blog became a Page Rank 1 blog within 2 months. I give the total credit for my success to this community.This community is highly recommended.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking sites help you to get traffic as well as build backlinks. There are a number of social bookmarking sites on the internet. But I recommend you not to waste time in all of them.

The recommended ones are Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit. These 3 sites are very popular.

One of the biggest things to remember is the time commitment in liking/stumbling/ linking/sharing/goggle+ ing your posts. Once you have done your part you really want friends, customers, associates to do the same to really get your blog post visible in the top rankings on the search engines, so more traffic. It is true that you can get get into a routine of doing so quite quickly, your time may be better served elsewhere. This is how to get traffic to your blog by using social media.

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Filed Under: Small Business Social Media Tagged With: Google +, how do you get traffic to your blog, small business help, small business marketing tools, social media for small business

Good Customer Service Skills – Training is key

February 3, 2012 By Amanda 2 Comments

For those in the front line of a business, good customer service skills are key

good customer service skills can be like a band aid

when faced with irate and disgruntled customers . It could be as a simple as a customer having a bad day, health or family issues. An easy turn of phrase can totally change the mood of the customer and in this respect front line staff could be seen as therapists or nurses dispensing band aids. The actions and reactions of the employees really can make a difference, and one of the key things in my opinion, is for the staff to realise and keep in mind that it’s not personal. Here are some examples of how training in good customer service skills can help your business.

Good Customer Service Skills – Training is key

A masseuse working in a resort spa will have more pleasant customers than a lost luggage agent at a busy airport. If your customers are sitting in a chair at your hair salon, they’re likely to be more relaxed than if they were sitting in an examination chair in a dental office.

That’s why so many customer service training programs fall short of desired results. Over the last decade there’s been a dearth of frontline training that focuses on enhancing customer experience. The premise is that we are now in the experience economy. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Small Business Customer Service Skills Tagged With: good customer service skills, small business, small business customer service skills, small business help

Small Business Management – More on Cash flow Management

February 3, 2012 By Amanda 2 Comments

There must be something happening in the universe. No sooner had I written 2 posts at entry level on small business cashflow than I found this great article written by David Bracken in the UK stressing the importance of not overlooking cash flow management. Now I know I am not a lone wolf howling into the wind. In fact I consider this so important that I have reproduced nearly all of the article below.

Small Business Management – Cashflow

Successful entrepreneurs usually concentrate their efforts on three key areas: vision, people and cash. Much advice and attention is lavished on the exciting work of developing and articulating a vision for the business: the grand strategies for world domination, or on ideas for hiring, managing and motivating a great team. The boring numbers bit about managing cash-flow too often takes a back-seat. However, to succeed in business, you must first avoid failure, and all businesses fail in exactly the same way: they run out of cash.

By having an accurate forecast, you will be able to judge your expenditure carefully, manage your working capital and seek additional funding in good time. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Small Business Administration and Mgmt, Small Business Start Up Help Tagged With: cash flow management, small business, small business cash flow, small business help

Small Business Help – why cash flow is important

January 31, 2012 By Amanda Leave a Comment

In our last blog we looked at what is meant by cash flow. Here we have some reasons why cash flow is important to your small business.

Small Business Help – Why Cashflow is important

Cash flow enables you, the business owner, to plan for those times when sales are not steady. Building up a sufficient flow of cash to ensure your business is able to account for times of the month that expenses are higher than others can take time.

The interesting thing about cash flow is that we tend to not pay attention to it until suddenly we are behind on all payments and don’t know when the next sale will happen to cover the debts. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Small Business Administration and Mgmt, Small Business General Help Tagged With: small business, small business cash flow, small business cashflow, small business help, why is cashflow important

Small Business Help – What is meant by cash flow

January 31, 2012 By Amanda Leave a Comment

What is meant by cash flow? If you are new to business you may not understand some of the terminology or jargon often used by commentators of business and financial advisers. Here is a nice easy to understand definition of what is meant by cash flow.

Small Business Help – What is meant by Cash flow

Simply put, cash flow is the money coming in to a business as well as the money going out. This includes everything from sales dollars to expenditures for office supplies.

By understanding the true importance of cash flow, small business owners and entrepreneurs will be far more ahead of the game.

At the beginning of the cash flow cycle, nearly every business starts out with – you guessed it – cash. But from that point on, the central purpose of the business is to convert that cash into other kinds of assets or to extend it with liabilities and ultimately turn it back into cash again. Only this time, more cash than the business started with.

This process continues repeatedly throughout the life of a business.

The concept of cash flow can be defined in different manners. Cash flow is any kind of income or expenditure that affects the cash accounts. A cash flow must be strictly, financially liquid cash or finances that can be stored in a bank account or in the form of currency.

Cash flow can be broadly divided into two categories, inflow and outflow.

The cash inflow, or just cash flow, is generated as a result of financing and/or sales.

The cash outflow is a result of many factors such as purchases, investments, salaries and any other expenses.

Please leave a comment if you would like greater clarification on what is meant by cash flow. We will also cover why this is important in other articles.

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Here is an example of a cashflow budget

Filed Under: Small Business Administration and Mgmt Tagged With: small buisiness start up, small business, small business cash flow, small business cashflow, small business help, what is meant by cash flow, what is meant by cashflow

A Social Media Strategy required to stop distractions

January 28, 2012 By Amanda 6 Comments

Having a Social Media Strategy for your small business will help you stay on track with whatever social media channels you choose to use. It is all to easy to become distracted flitting from one avenue to other without a clear direction of what is best for your business.

Here are 3 points from an 8 step plan from Richard Mullins on his recommendations for a social media strategy.

A social media strategy for your small business

1. Investigate

Start out by investigating the social space and trying to work out how it could add value to your business. Listen to what people are saying on social networks like Twitter and Facebook, and perhaps even put a basic listening tool in place to see what it can do for you.

2. Implement and integrate

Now that you have a rough feel for what is happening in the social world, you can begin thinking about the software tool set. If you’re running a bigger business, you’ll need something far more robust than a basic tool like Tweetdeck. You should be looking for a single tool that allows you to listen to social conversations, take part in the conversation, measure your results, and manage the workflow (for example, the content approval process) across your team. Ideally, the tool you use should support integration across your social tools and data, as well as with other customer communication channels, such as email and mobile marketing. It should also be able to grow along with your needs. For example, Co-Tweet is a comprehensive Web-based social media engagement, management and reporting solution that helps companies of all sizes engage, track and analyse conversations about their brands across the most popular and influential social communities.

3. Listen and measure

You need to decide who and what you will listen out for. This can include multiple objectives – from hearing what the market is saying about you and competitors, to what the community is interested in. You also need to turn these factors into quantifiable metrics. To prove the value of social media marketing, you have to compare it to other channels. This means that you will need standardised key performance indicators (KPIs) – such as frequency of mentions, sentiment allocation, traffic, reach or influence (friends, fans etc.) – to make it easy to compare social media channels with each other and with other channels. There are tools such as Social Analytics from Adobe that allow marketers to start measuring social media, sentiment and it’s relationship and impact on a business’s broader online environment.

Check out the rest of Richards steps for more detail on his social media strategy. If this is to hard for you to implement at this time, simply take note and revisit when it suits you. The more you read and digest on social media, the more it will become second nature rather than completely overwhelming.

Let us know how you aregoing, do you have any tips to share?

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Filed Under: Small Business Marketing Ideas and Tips, Small Business Social Media

What is Good Customer Service? It starts with treating your staff well

January 26, 2012 By Amanda Leave a Comment

Good customer service, here’s further proof that in business is business and people are people all around the world. The issues that you face are the same for millions of other small business owners. One effective way of differentiating your business from the others is good customer service.

Good Customer Service starts with treating your staff well

So many businesses rely on the customer’s being vocal about their dissatisfaction to rate their service that they are missing the big picture. It’s not about reacting to those who complain — it’s about having the best customer service you can, all the time. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Small Business Administration and Mgmt, Small Business General Help Tagged With: good customer service, small business help

Running a Small Business – you can’t do all things well

January 25, 2012 By Amanda Leave a Comment

There are many facets to running a small business and many owners think that they can do it all. In the early stages you may have too, there simply isn’t the resources to pay for experts in each discipline. But there is a cost to this. By trying to do too much we can end up with doing nothing well. Do not consider that you can’t do everything a failure on your part as I have been there done that & got the extra large T Shirt. The first step could be getting a mentor through a local business agency. Go through your strengths and weaknesses and identify what you need help with.

Here’s some advice from Jay Goltz who has owned and managed many businesses. He and now speaks,writes books and is published in the New York Times, writing in this instance for American Express on running a small business [Read more…]

Filed Under: Small Business Administration and Mgmt