Going Social Houston

Deciphering Social Media in Small Steps

marketing

Places To List Your Business Online

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Places To List Your Business Online (more info at www.goingsocialhouston.com)

If you have a business, then your number 1 priority is getting it in front of prospective customers. Vertical Response pulled together a great resource you should check out: “The Top 20 Places Your Business Needs to Be Listed Online.”

It’s vital to get business listed on all applicable online directories. Here’s a guide to the top 20 online directories and links to their sign-up pages:

The list includes some you will know, like Google Places for Business, some you may have forgotten, like the Yellow Pages, and a few that were new to me, like MapQuest. The complete list should go on your “to do” list as a business owner.

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Source: The Top 20 Places Your Business Needs to Be Listed Online | VR Marketing Blog

Image source: kropekk_pl / Pixabay

Free Tools To Improve Your Marketing

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KevinKing / Pixabay

I’m always looking for great (free) tools to help me with online marketing. Here are a few that will interest the bloggers out there (found via LinkedIn):

Google Scholar.
From their website: “Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Google Scholar helps you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research. ”

Open Site Explorer (from Moz).
This tool lets you see which sites are linking to yours.

Blog Topic Generator (from HubSpot).
Lets you “fill in the fields with terms (preferably nouns) that you’d like to write about” so they can come up with a week’s worth of relevant blog post titles for you to use. Very helpful.

There are other tools in the article that you might find interesting. These are just the ones I thought would be helpful to me.

Do you have others to recommend?

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SOURCE: 10 Free Digital Tools To Improve Your Marketing | LinkedIn

IMAGE SOURCE: KevinKing / Pixabay

Create a Social Media Marketing Plan

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Need to create a social media marketing plan? Here are two articles with steps and tips to help you out.

Your Social Media Marketing Plan in 5 Easy Steps || ClickZ

  1. Create Your Executive Overview Business Plan.
  2. Define Your Specific Social Media Goals.
  3. Find Your SMM Voice.
  4. Choosing Your Social Tools Appropriately.
  5. Plan & Execute Content & Delivery.

Five Tips to Reshape your Social Media Plan || David Lee King

  1. Focus on Conversations.
  2. Focus on the Visual.
  3. Focus on Video.
  4. Focus on Next Steps.
  5. Focus on your Customers!

The most important thing mentioned? GOALS! If you don’t have goals in your plan, then it’s worthless. And they need to be SMART goals:

  • Specific – target a specific area for improvement.
  • Measurable – quantify or at least suggest an indicator of progress.
  • Assignable – specify who will do it.
  • Realistic – state what results can realistically be achieved, given available resources.
  • Time-related — specify when the result(s) can be achieved.

Online Marketing Mistakes

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Sometimes trying to do things the easy way just makes things harder in the long run. This can be seen with online marketing, as this article in Copyblogger points out. The article features three mistakes to avoid:

  1. Going with “quick” solutions instead of self-hosted WordPress.
  2. Thinking that Facebook is a valid content marketing program.
  3. Buying all of your traffic from one source.

A friend of mine is dealing with the first — having to transition to a self-hosted WordPress site after going with a “simple” blog solution. Now she’s trying to figure out how to move her site to a custom domain and a self-hosted site that gives her more control over the site.

Short-term “simple” has turned into long-term headache.

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Source: Three Online Marketing Shortcuts that Take Too Long | Copyblogger

 

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