Website Promotion Strategy

Online marketing is a must for any local business. Since 2010, study after study has shown that when most people are ready to spend money on just about anything, they start looking for it online. They may research cars for sale at local dealers, check out menus when deciding which pizza to order, or look for a new dentist. Google has become especially adept at returning local results for general queries. A shopper who searches for “prom dresses,” for example, is likely to get links to local shops selling prom dresses even if they don’t enter the name of their town. That doesn’t happen by magic, though. If you want your local business to be one that pops up when folks in your town are looking for your products or services, you need to do a little setup on your end. These 10 steps can help ensure that Google – and other search engines – knows where you are so it can tell people where to find you.

Have a Website

Silly as it seems, some businesses rely purely on directory listings and Google+ pages to establish an online presence. Your website is essential. It’s the only place where you have complete control over all of your content. While social media platforms and review sites are important for online marketing and publicity, your own website should be the hub of your Internet marketing strategy.

Write an Onsite Blog

Blogs are awesome components of an online marketing strategy. They can become the vehicle for many of the other online marketing tactics that will guarantee your business is listed whenever people are looking for services you provide.

Maintain an Offsite Blog

A blog on your website is great for attracting people – and search engines – to your website, but offsite blogs are also valuable for local SEO. A blog on WordPress.com or Blogger.com can link back to your website, talk about your products and generally provide information that leads people to discover your business. And every one of those links coming from that blog to your website helps boost your visibility with Google searchbots.

Put Your Address on Your Website

You need to tell Google where you are, after all. While you’re at it, grab a Google Maps snippet to post a map and directions to your business on your website. It’s a nice service for your customers, and helps Google pinpoint your location.

Reference Local Landmarks and Events

Use that blog to talk about local landmarks and happenings. The more you connect your website to the local scene, the easier it will be for search engines to figure out where you are.

Set Up a Facebook Page

People increasingly connect with local businesses through Facebook. Set up your page, and try to post status updates at least a few times a week. Master Hint: Share your blog posts – both onsite and offsite – on your Facebook page. It links back to your blog, giving it a boost in credibility, which in turn makes links from your blog to your website more valuable.

Grab a Google+ Page

While fewer people use Google+ for socializing and sharing, it has a valuable social media marketing purpose – Google tends to give more credibility to businesses that set up Google+ pages. It’s a great place to post business hours, specials, photos of your business and more.

Claim Your Profiles

Check out the various review sites and business directories. Many of them build generic pages for local businesses based on databases. If you claim your business profile, you’ll usually get to customize it with your logo, your own photos, your menu and more features. You may even be able to respond to positive or negative reviews left about your business.

Start Tweeting

Twitter has come of age. Connect a Twitter account to your website and blogs, and be sure to make connections between it and other social media accounts. A good social media promotion strategy incorporates the best features of each platform. For Twitter, that means engaging directly with customers, tweeting links to your website and sharing your blog promotion posts via tweets.

Get Professional Help

Writing blog posts is a time-consuming effort, but it doesn’t have to be your time. Check out our blog writing services and social media promotion services to see how we can help you improve your business visibility and results.

Are you bogged down trying to figure out what to post on your business blog? It’s a pretty common feeling. The fact is that few business owners are natural writers – that’s why we offer a highly customizable set of blog writing packages to get you started. If you want to write and post your own stuff, though, one of the first things to consider is your style. Deciding on a distinctive voice and style for your blog posts makes it stand out – and contrary to what you might think, actually makes it easier for other writers to add content if you later decide that you don’t have time to do blog marketing justice. While there are lots of blogging styles out there, these five are among the most common for local businesses.

Business and Industry News

Professionals – lawyers, accountants, doctors and dentists, to name a few – will often benefit most with this blog marketing style. The tone is business-like and informative, and the posts consist of industry updates and news about your business and your profession. Check out some of the most popular law firm sites for an idea of how this works to attract visitors and make it easier for Google to index your website.

Tips and Tricks

Does your business offer a service or a useful product? Blogs that offer tips and tricks on specific subjects are nearly always popular, as evidenced by the popularity of LifeHacker.com. Fit your tips and tricks to your business expertise – and remember, you are the authority on your business. It’s a great way to gain credibility and recognition while increasing visitors to your main website.

Featured Products

If you sell products, a blog that allows you to feature them can work to your benefit. Post about new products in your inventory, about best-sellers and about loss leaders that you want to highlight. This type of blog also works very well for restaurants and sandwich shops. Post once or twice a week, or post a daily special to see your sale soar.

Local Perspectives

Small business owners can reap spectacular benefits from increasing their visibility with other local businesses. A blog that frequently talks about local issues and events is a great way to network with other business owners and customers in your area. Pepper in links to your website and products to increase your visibility to Google, too.

Showing Off

If you deal in a visual product or a service with visual results, show off your stuff. Florists, photographers, garden shops, restaurants, landscapers – these are just a few of the businesses that benefit from showing off their best work.  By including a portfolio – or building your blog around it – you can give people a sample of your work to help them realize just how great you are.

Do you sell mostly to other businesses or are your customers to be found among the general public? B2B selling and B2C selling have traditionally used very different types of marketing. If you’re selling widgets used in machinery, for example, you’re not going to take out an ad in the Sunday papers no matter how cheap it is because, frankly, you’re paying for a lot of eyes that have no need for or interest in your product. If, on the other hand, you’re selling organic baby food, it would be downright silly to pay for space at a tech trade show. You might run into a few new parents there, but overall, most of the visitors have no real interest in baby food, organic or otherwise. What does all this have to do with hiring a blogging service?

Everything! Blogs are an ideal place to soft-sell your products or services – but it’s important that the blogs match up properly with your business. It’s important that the blogging service gets the difference between blogging for B2C and blogging for B2B, and that they take the time to get to know your business so the writing represents you properly. This, for the record, is why we recommend a blogging service over an article writing or content writing service. When you sign up with a blogging service, the writers will generally be writing for your blogs on a regular basis. They’ll be able to maintain a certain voice, style and level of expertise. More importantly, the person managing the blogs for you knows what’s been posted recently and will avoid writing the same article over and over in different words. They’ll be posting content that will be valuable to your potential customers – and to do that, they have to understand the difference between content that’s valuable to other businesses and content that’s valuable to consumers.

We get that difference. Because we’re a full blogging service, the content we post for you will be aimed squarely at your ideal customers. If you’re selling organic baby foods and products to parents, your content should focus on things that concern parents of young children. Some sample posts might include “How to Introduce New Fruits and Vegetables to Your Little One” and “Cloth or Disposable – the Case for a Diaper Service.” If, on the other hand, your company sells organic baby food by the case to grocers, the blog posts would focus on sales trends, grocery displays and ways to boost sales of organic baby products in store.

Working with a blogging service is a sure way to improve your search engine visibility and attract more potential customers to your website. Talk to us about our blog packages and how we can help your business.

When you engage a blogging service to supply content and manage blogs for your business or personal website, you’re getting years’ worth of experience wrapped up in great writing. Our writers aren’t just expert writers – they’re expert bloggers. They understand how to attract readers and what kinds of posts are most likely to get shared and re-shared with others. Over the years, we’ve developed a sixth sense about the kinds of information that people want to read and the best formats for that information. These are some of our favorite blog formats and what they can do for your business.

The Top Ten List

People love ranked lists. Whether you’re writing about the five most popular dental procedures or the top ten baby names (perfect for a baby specialty store!), someone is looking for that information. You can name top 10s, five faves or any other number – for some reason, people also really love lists of SEVEN – no matter what number you choose, list posts are among the most sharable of all.

Why It Matters: When people share your content, you get more visibility and credibility. Shared Facebook posts are great clickbait, bringing people to your website or blog in droves.

How to Posts

How to posts help establish your expertise and authority. They offer the single most important thing when it comes to content: valuable information. They’re evergreen – people will always want to know how to take your baby’s temperature or change the font size in Microsoft Word or brush your teeth the right way.

Why It Matters: When you provide valuable information that helps people, you generate good will and make people like you – and people like to buy things from people they like.

Tips

If there’s one thing people like even better than full-blown how-to posts, it’s a bunch of tips on how to do everyday things better and easier. That’s the whole premise behind the wildly popular Lifehacker website. No matter what your business is, you’ve got special expertise and tips to share with your customers.

Why It Matters: From tips on reducing gas mileage to tips on how to clean your carpet, people will eat them up – and visit your site when they need your services.

Our blogging service will provide you with a mix of different kinds of posts that are best suited to your website and your services, and if you need help or advice on how to use them to promote your business, we’ll be happy to share some tips and how-tos to help you out.

Our blogging service does a lot of business with solopreneurs – professionals who are in business for themselves, professionals like lawyers, doctors, dentists and accountants. What do all of those professions have in common that makes a blogging service an ideal investment?

They’re Busy, Busy People

Ask any professional who is running a business about the hours they work. These are the men and women who would kill for a 40-hour work week. They have to make time for their clients, professional development, community work and all the outreach they do to find new clients and patients. Many of them also write as part of their jobs, if only to document every single detail of their professional day. The last thing they have time to do is write blog posts.

They’re Reputation Is Their Livelihood

The product that professionals have to sell is their expertise, and their livelihood literally depends on establishing that expertise with the public and maintaining that reputation. Our blogging service specializes in maintaining blogs for various professional specialties. Posts to your blogs will always be relevant to your business and your specialty, carefully fact-checked and professionally written.

They Don’t Have Time for SEO

In a digital world, word of mouth is no longer enough. The fact is that most people start their search for a lawyer, dentist, doctor, accountant or other professional on Google, even though there are so many “registries” for professional searches. They understand the importance of search engine optimization, but most have neither the time nor the inclination to get into the nitty-gritty of building links, researching keywords, figuring out the best plugins and handling search engine submissions. They’re already using all the hours in their day.

They Understand the Value of Specialization and Outsourcing

Luckily for them – and us – they understand the value of outsourcing work to a specialist. After all, many of them work in professions where it’s all about specialization. An orthodontist thinks nothing of referring a patient to a dental surgeon for an extraction so he can focus on what he does best. They treat a blogging service the same way. It’s all about making most effective use of their time and outsourcing work to the right specialists.

Our blog writing service is the perfect match for busy professionals who don’t have time to write blog posts every week. We’ll create and maintain up to two blogs for you, post twice weekly to them and handle all the logistics of SEO, building inbound links and search engine submission so you can have the benefits of a professional blog without the extra hours of work.