It’s a lot easier now to have an online presence and it doesn’t require a huge investment to get started.  It’s not easy to manage the marketing yourself but it has become so much more necessary than before simply because the economy is so unpredictable these days risking much money is just not an option for today’s small business.

All it takes for you to have a voice online now is a couple of social media accounts (Facebook and Twitter are the best choices for consumer to consumer) and a website.  Ideally the website has a blog and the very best approach for getting your feet wet is to just hop on in and start yourself a free WordPress blog.  Now, a word of caution. The free site there isn’t the best long term option but it can help you learn how to manage a blog and how to use the tools of the trade.

The next step is installing a WordPress site on your own domain.  You can use this for many years as you test to see if your little business venture will work and as a fairly safe place to share your content and engage with your customers.  Once you have a website online, setting up a Facebook page for your business or service is a must.  You can share your latest blog posts there and links to your website.  You can also ask questions and toss out ideas to your clients and prospects.

Do a little exploring, visit wordpress.com and other free blogging sites and take a look.  You will be surprised what kind of creativity you will discover from other small business owners.

Of course this lead to more browsing and shopping on the site.  I quickly realized there were some amazing bargains to be had in buying things slightly used.  This wasn’t a new discovery, I’ve always loved combing yard sales, flea markets and auctions for these kinds of bargains.  What was so cool about eBay is you could keyword search instead of hoping to accidentally discover something you wanted.

After many purchases I started sticking my toe in the water of selling a few things on the site.  My son was playing hockey, we live in Alabama so there aren’t a lot of big opportunities to buy used hockey equipment here.  There also aren’t any places for trying to sell it when you no longer need it.  It became a regular habit to buy and sell everything Tyler used for hockey on eBay.  Sometimes I even sold items for more than I paid for them.

I expanded my selling to pretty much every spring and fall.  Emptying out last years unwanted clutter in the form of a few well-timed eBay auctions.  You see I discovered pretty early on that things sold for a lot more as you got in the 60 day window around Christmas.  A fact not lost on most retail merchants.

Sometime in 2006 or 2007 I stumbled upon  the book Titanium eBay by Skip McGrath.  It is a manual for selling goods on eBay.  I learned  a lot in reading it.  I wish I’d found it many years sooner.  I got it into my head that it might be possible to actually earn a steady income of sorts from a little eBay operation.  You see, I’d always assumed it took a lot of up front resources to do it, that is when I even noticed it at all.

I had a full time job of course and wasn’t really serious about a second income or even a new career path but I did find the idea appealing of having something like this moving into being for my retirement years.  So I opened up a little eBay store.  I called it White Oak Attic, today it is an online thrift & general mercantile.

I wish now I had a clearer idea of what I was trying to do back then but since I wasn’t all that serious about it at the time I just didn’t put much exploration into the marketing side of naming it or even deciding what I would sell.  I will say it is A LOT harder to get anywhere with eBay than it used to be for us little gals (and guys).  I got into eBay in a bigger way right around the time they started to really change things.

Next: The early days of my eBay store…

It is incredibly simple, just login to your Twitter account, in the upper right corner you see your Twitter ID, click it to display the drop down menu, then just click “Leave Preview” and voila!! You are now back to the old, familiar Twitter.

I actually like some of the function of the new Twitter but I think I’ll let it percolate for a while longer before I try it again, let them get a few more kinks worked out and give the rest of the social media universe time to tweek their code to make it work with the new Twitter.

~ Lisa

There was a fantastic line up of speakers and they offered something for everyone – from beginner to advanced.  One of my favorites was Syed Balkhi from WP Beginner.  Practical, usable information for the newbie and pro, all in one presentation. Syed’s offerings are a great place to start if you’re new to WordPress and blogging.  I was also very happy to see Brandon Eley discussing ecommerce and I really enjoyed talking with him at the speaker’s dinner that followed the presentations Saturday evening!  I sat in on Rebecca Morrow’s presentation about SEO (search engine optimization) and I heard from Andrew Nacin about what’s next for WordPress.

Late in the afternoon, after my participation as a marketing panelist with Wade Kwon, Rebecca Morrow and Karla Porter, I learned something about the world of live blogging from Andre Natta, John Hawbaker, and Daniel Ryan (see their bios).  No matter how much we think we already know about using blogs, websites and social media to share information, we can always learn more and it’s always tough to choose the best place to spend your time when attending these kinds of events.

Thanks to the beauty of technology, I can enjoy the presentations I missed in the form of video and review and share those that I did see.  Sometime today or tomorrow (I hope) I’ll have links to share for videos of each presentation.  Why not take a moment to subscribe to my email list to make sure you don’t miss out. Enjoy the presentations I missed right along with me and comment on my thoughts about those I attended after seeing them for yourself!

In addition to some fantastic information from the speakers at these events there is a lot to be learned from conversation with fellow attendees.  In chatting with Kathy Drewien and Stephanie True Moss (at the wonderful, Railroad Park in Birmingham, over pizza and leftover donuts I might add), I learned about a fantastic new online marketing tools and all kinds of other online gadgets that just add to the usefulness of this platform.

My role in marketing strategy consulting is always enhanced by these conversations.  I just can’t say enough good things about the people I meet and the talent that’s shared.  Be sure to look for WordCamp in your area, these events are getting bigger every year and more and more cities are setting up their own.  If your city doesn’t have one, find you some more WordPress enthusiasts and start it yourself!

So how does a person get started with a blog?  Is this something pretty much anyone can do? Is it limited to those with special training and skills?  What are the rules? Where can information about blogging be found?

A great place to start in getting answers to all of these question is to attend a conference about blogging.  WordPress is an excellent, open source, blogging platform that has developed quite a loyal community of users who really enjoy sharing what they know about this powerful tool.  Scattered around the country are annual conferences for such enthusiasts called WordCamp.

Personally, WordCamps have been a great resource for me.  I attended my first one here in Birmingham, AL and have since attended another one in Atlanta just this past January.  As the community of WordPress bloggers (and bloggers in general) grows, so will the number of locations for WordCamps.  The cost to attend is low, aimed at making the resource available to as many as possible.

Next weekend, September 18th & 19th, I’ll be on a marketing panel discussion at the WordCamp here in Birmingham, AL.  The deadline for full registration to attend this event is Friday, September 10th at 12:00pm noon, central time.  Full registration gets you lunch on Saturday plus a WordCamp T-shirt and a full line up of presentations – two tracks – so you can choose which aspect of blogging is the most beneficial to you.  The second day is an open forum where you can have one-on-one discussions with seasoned bloggers and WordPress developers. A chance ask questions or just listen to what others have to say.  Finally, there are the after-parties! Socialize with other blogging enthusiasts at the casual events after the formal events end.  If you miss the registration deadline, feel free to contact me and I’ll see what I can do for you – more than likely we can make room.  We would love to have you join in the fun and there really is something for every level of experience.

Make sure you take a look at the full line up of speakers and check out their websites.  Even if you can’t attend this year’s WordCamp in Birmingham, you can stay in touch by following along with our blogs, and social media channels to find out when another opportunity comes up.  You can also visit the WordCamp website for opportunities all around the world.

UPDATE: Full registration, including the t-shirt and BBQ lunch on Saturday has been extended until Monday, September 13th at 11:55am Eastern!!! So there is still plenty of time to register as I write this

Click on a badge to Register!

Use this code for $5.00 off the cost of registration! wcbhm5off

LinkedIn Learning Center – Straight from the “horses mouth” as they say, LinkedIn’s very own resource for learning your way around.

LinkedIn How 2 Videos - An endless list of video tutorials and video discussions on various aspects of LinkedIn – you’re sure to find what you need here.

Two Fast & Simple Ways to Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile – My very own article, a step by step guide to setting up two simple enhancements to help you practice what I preach toward building market leadership.

LinkedIn Tips – a fantastic lists of links and a summary of how to implement them ~ great stuff!

This should keep you very busy for quite awhile.  If you have any specific questions, please post them here and I’ll do all I can to help you.

~Lisa

Many understand that having their page ranked on page one, or even better, position one on Google is fantastic for gaining business from a website.  What they often fail to take into consideration is whether or not the keywords they rank for have any commercial value.  That’s the first trouble, making sure they are targeting the right keywords. Next comes the offpage optimization techniques and this is where backlinks come into the picture.

A backlink is when another site contains a link back to your website.  There is a lot more to this than simply getting another site to link back to yours. Many may have found this out in their efforts of trading links with other businesses in hopes of building traffic to their website.  Why doesn’t that strategy always turn out so good?

It goes back to two things. First, the relevance of the back link according the keywords the site has been optimized for and second having the right anchor text for that backlink.  What is anchor text? It is the words that have been hyper linked back to your website.  If it is simply your business name or just your site URL (the address to your website) then odds are pretty good this backlink isn’t helping you as much as it could.  The best backlinks consistently carry the keyword(s) your site is optimizing for so that Google will see an ever-accumulating series of links back to you that are relevant to a particular topic.  When they are just random links back to your site in terms of the anchor text used, it just doesn’t pack much punch in terms of helping you achieve ranking for a set of keywords to attract buyers or even prospects for your business.

Anytime you have a discussion with someone in the arena of marketing strategy consulting services, this should be part of the recipe.  As we see a huge shift to online marketing, every business will need to make sure they are getting educated and implementing as much online marketing strategy as possible in order to beat out the competition in their market.

The social media strategy should be founded upon the SEO strategy for your online presence.  It creates a system where many parts are working together, harmoniously, to drive traffic to your business.  Traffic of people that are ready, willing and able to buy your product or service.  This is preferable to a random collection of traffic that is just dropping by to window shop or worse, arriving to your site and just bouncing off without exploring it.  This is an area where a lot of failure is occurring in the social media realm as businesses often don’t take the time and effort to develop a strategy that will attract a specific demographic of followers. Most instead opt for rushing to connect with as many people as possible from any network at their disposal.  The big mistake is in seeking quantity over quality.  A small, one person, operation can get very far along in developing a following of actual paying customers with what appears to be a very small online audience in terms of social media when that traffic is very targeted to what the business provides.  This is a strategy I use for my online thrift store, White Oak Attic and it serves me very well.

If you want to develop your own online marketing strategy, I suggest you read a past article here about identifying the right keyword marketing strategy for your website.  Everything I discuss here on this website are services I provide clients and things I do to promote my own sites. They are things you can do for yourself if time is all the investment you can inject into your business.  Please feel free to contact me if you have specific questions and I’ll be glad to help you.

My experience with social media began with LinkedIn. It was a good fit for my early objectives, to round out a kind of “online resume” and reach the business community with my services at the time (I was 15 years in as a print advertising sales rep for newspapers and magazines).  My experience with social media today is primarily to build a business I really enjoy and for changing my life into something I want it to be. I like the path I finally found, one that doesn’t force me to eat, sleep and breath marketing.

Today, my little Attic has become my career.  Social media COMBINED with Internet marketing is growing this little operation slowly but surely.  I spent quite a lot of money, about $30 or $40 at a time, on the premise of FREE advertising with social media over the past year or so.  An appealing concept since I had no money to invest and because as a marketing experiment, I wanted to see if it could be done – build a business without spending money on advertising. It can, but I goofed in wasting a lot of money on these confounded classes and seminars that could technically be considered advertising since that was what I was trying to do from them.  Now I look for programs where I can learn all I want for free and only pay for things that will pay for themselves ~ win, win propositions.  I have learned many things the hard way concerning social media and online marketing.  Here is the list:

1. A giant following on social media channels, a best-selling book and a lot of useful tips does not = social media expert for businesses. More likely the expertise is at making a profit by selling a book, education program or related social media tool. All fine if you understand that up front but I don’t find many of them mentioning this.  Look for very specific, defined outcomes when you’re asked to pay a fee. For example: “Social Media for Business” is very broad and general, but “How to Grow a Facebook Page for Business” is much more realistic and much easier to assess whether you are gaining something valuable.  The truth is you can learn most of these things online, for free, then invest your money in the TOOLS and SERVICES that actually build something tangible once you understand what you need. An hour or two here and there spent at random events won’t buy you much more than a very broad overview so skip them if you’re already past the beginner stages of understanding how great social media is and setting up your accounts.
2. Social media is just a tool, not a whole marketing plan. A much more intricate strategy is involved in using it to actually make money for most businesses and boy was I surprised at what ended up working…read on.
3. Social media works vastly different than traditional media. Building an audience here isn’t the same as getting people to call you or buy something from you, there is a much bigger objective and if you miss it you will waste a lot of time and money.  Taking the time to learn this has been well worth the time and effort and it is a different message than I hear coming out of most of the well known social media “experts”.
4. Social media serves best as part of an Internet marketing plan aimed at building traffic to a website. Building a selling channel on a social media platform might be nice to have later, but I’d better focus on making sales directly from my website first if I want to stay in business.  When I have the budget for it I can buy those extras since they will undoubtedly contribute to the overall strategy. Spend your time, money and effort in learning how people shop online before you tackle social media in a serious effort.
5. Social media is going to cost me – either time or money. At first it was a lot of both as I struggled to see how it works for an actual retail operation. I wasted a lot of money, one small fee at a time, going to one seminar, chat, discussion and roundtable after the next trying to figure this out only to find I’d learned what was being offered on my own by spending time with it – we all can… I still haven’t heard one “social media expert” do a good job of laying this out.  In many cases (not all) I believe it is because they haven’t seen this yet themselves.
6. When you are a one-horse operation, looking to strike out on your own, the investment is a lot of time. You can’t afford the expense to build it the right way by paying someone; not yet. You can only start folding in services that factor into a much larger plan.  For instance, someone to build your Facebook page or someone to populate your Twitter feed and grow a targeted following for you, someone to set up a blog and/or website for you etc.  You will have an active roll until you have more revenue (then you can start handing out roles to staff or an outside firm). Established businesses are in a much better position to start outsourcing once they understand the full strategy behind online marketing.
7. Take the time to learn.  Don’t run off half-cocked desperately trying to build a mass of followers thinking that’s all you need to get sales. Having a large audience is different from making sales.  I’ve talked to several people now who have great networks and quickly built a gigantic following in social media only to find they just aren’t making any sales.  The flip side, my little engine that could has a very small social media following but my sales are steadily going up (and so is my social media following).
8. Converting visitors to customers is a short or long process depending on how the visitors find you. If my visitors found my site because I met them at a business function and invited them to connect in social media they usually don’t become buyers and often never engage in much of the content.  If I find them through the content on my website, which brings them there because they are interested in what I have on the site I usually get a sale at some point. Does this mean I don’t want my friends and family coming to my website or joining me in social media? No. But it also means I’m not expecting my business growth from this avenue (hint: this is the avenue most are using to build their audiences online – business and personal networks and why most aren’t seeing much profit from it).
9. Myth: A big social media audience means I’ll get more business. I thought this must be so because traditional marketing dictates this logic…more people = more sales.  While having a big audience certainly won’t hurt, it is much more CRUCIAL that the audience be a very particular kind of audience if you hope to increase sales.  For some businesses this is easy but for most it isn’t easy at all. Content comes first, then the audience develops around that content.  If you have a lot of money to invest in paying to have the content built quickly things will happen faster, otherwise – slow and steady wins the race.
10. Build a plan around getting traffic to your website. Don’t set out just to create multiple marketing channels ~ synchronize them to increase the strength of your primary outlet – your website/blog. I run my little store on a blog platform, WordPress, and it costs about $25 upfront to get started, more if you have to hire a programmer but you can get a basic blog up for this $25 and pay for more as time goes.  If you’re on a shoestring budget you are in good company, I started with just an idea, maybe $100 – $200 all told when I count up the nickels and dimes, and have used sales from the store to pay for advancements and the education I refer to in this article.  It is why my site isn’t all that fancy, and I’ve found it doesn’t have to be.

My primary vocation in life has become my little website, hatched half as a lark three years ago and centered on things I enjoy doing.  I would love to hear your ideas that have worked. It’s tough out here for everyone these days ~ pooling resources is a great way to go and we all stay afloat!

One way to do this is by using Google Alerts.  This has been around for awhile but I find a lot of people are still not aware of the power of such a simple tool in making things a little easier.  This feature can help in a number of ways. First, we can set up alerts to monitor our own profiles; our name, our brand, our competitors, etc.  Next, we can monitor industry news which is particularly useful for sales people in keeping in the loop with their clients.  Finally, we can use it to monitor the keywords for articles and news related to our core subject matter.  Previously I’ve posted here about the importance of carefully selecting the keywords – both for SEO (search engine optimization) and to provide a clear focus to keep us on track with our content.  Staying focused is important in an inbound marketing strategy because your audience must be clear in what to expect from you – it is what will keep them coming back for frequent visits and providing more opporunities for you to engage with them.

Simply visit Google Alerts and set things up.  Getting things up and running is pretty straight forward but if you want a good overview, I’ve posted a great video for you here on the topic, explaining step by step, how to set up Google alerts. The video also contains some good tips and advice.

Now, see how you can use what you find to fill your Twitter feeds with useful, timely, engaging Tweets, your Facebook status updates with some of the same and I’m also willing to bet you will be inspired to write a blog post or two out of what you find.  Google alerts are just one way to keep your creative tank full, there’s a lot more to come - sign up for my email updates for monthly summaries so you don’t miss out.

As a general rule, we’re all attending a networking event to promote our products and services and there is an understanding that this kind of talk is to be expected.  How can we engage without seeming self-centered? Master this in real life and the online content building efforts start to get easier since that is the primary concept behind inbound marketing, the strategy for using social media and the Internet for generating business.

Do you sometimes get back to the office after such an event and find an email trumpeting all the great things that can be bought  or recommended to others but not a word about any other benefit for knowing the sender of the email?  Are you tossing a lot of cards you collected into the garbage because you don’t think any of the people are a good prospect for your product?  I believe this is a holdover from our earlier marketing days of interrupt marketing.   The problem comes in when there is no offer to provide help and value first, without the requirement of a purchase.  We also miss some great opportunities to help each other when all we’re focused on is the direct step of making a sale or gaining a prospect.

We can all offer to help each other.  In the social media realm this is especially true.  We can easily share each other’s online content provided it is good content.  Many traditional businesses who either haven’t started  serious efforts to market online or haven’t explored the tremendous differences at work in marketing here are shooting themselves in the foot by ignoring the chance to share someone else’s content.  It is also important to note the different types of connections being formed in online communities (see The Size Surprise, an article that discusses how some social media audiences can be quite large but not very productive for the business, while a small audience can be of tremendous benefit if they are engaging in the content).  Without acknowledging these differences, we miss opportunities.

Many aren’t engaged in social media at all and are still just sending emails to everyone they’ve met explaining all about how wonderful their product or service is without one word about how they can help the person on the receiving end of the message beyond buying or using the offered product.

Networking events can be a great opportunity for promoting the valuable content you’re creating and for building your social media communities.  Explain what you do and communicate the value of visiting your online content.  Send that follow up email and recap the resources you offer, providing the links.  Offer to help the other person share their online content.   This doesn’t mean you must connect necessarily, sometimes it won’t make sense to connect but you can still offer to share each other’s content across your networks to make it available to others.  This also helps you since you’re providing useful content to your audience.  Everyone wins!