Small Business Help – Website or Facebook Page or both

Is it time to look at the question, does my business need a website or facebook page or both? Can we do away with the traditional website and only be on facebook? There are actually a small number of businesses that have not bothered with a website have only a facebook presence. One young business owner I know of, that deals in Chinese takeaway food, insists that it’s target market does not bother searching on the internet, but uses facebook as a search engine. Their market is very much continuously on the go and uses facebook via their mobiles.

The detail that they would show in a website can be easily replicated in facebook. Maps, address, phone number, description of the business, opening hours, current specials, it’s all there and further tabs or pages can be added via 3rd party applications. You can also add a page to gather email addresses or phone numbers to add to your customer data base. Have you noticed these business fan pages with the extra tabs? If not, find some to see how they differ. For other businesses now there are even e-commerce shops on facebook. Tabs with business information, coupons and products including detailed descriptions and payment options which can be processed right inside facebook. So website or facebook page or both? [Read more…]

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

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

how do you  get traffic to your blog

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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