Social networking doesn’t happen in a vacuum. You really need to get out there and be social. To that end, I think steering people from your website to your blog, your blog to your Facebook account and your Facebook account to your Twitter account is a great way to help grow that sphere. Directing people to your other social sites is pretty easy with badges and widgets. One that I like is the Twitter Widget.

The Twitter Widget as I have on the right hand side of my blog offers a peek into what you are doing on Twitter. It displays your latest few posts right there for anyone to see. You can opt to either display the box on your website or on Facebook. You can also personalize the appearance of your Widget box and you can choose whether to display your posts, your favorite tweets, search results for a certain keyword or your favorite tweeps.

To get it go to www.Twitter.com/widgets

• Then select whether you want a widget for your site or Facebook.
• Select the type of widget you want.
• Then personalize your preferences and appearance, and even the size.
• Click Test Settings.
• Then click on Finish and Grab Code.
• Post that code to your website’s homepage.

Pretty easy but it gives you yet another way to be social. Have fun with it.

One of the things I do for clients who hire me to write their press releases is submit it to online press release submission sites. When you submit to these sites you usually have the option to submit for free or to pay to have upgraded service. This could mean that your press release gets looked at and approved in a speedier fashion or it could be that you get to add hyperlinks or it could mean preferred placement. It all depends on the online submission site and the level of service you are willing to buy.

That’s the key. You’ve already spent money for press release writing and for someone to actually take the time to submit it to each online submission site and now you are looking at paying to upgrade the ranking of your press release. Are you willing to spend your money for one of the premium press release submission services or should you stick with the free press release submission?

For the most part, I think the free online press release submission service is sufficient for most small business needs. I say that because for the most part your announcement probably won’t be Earth shattering. I’m being honest here, not in any way trying to make small of your company but let’s take a look at your marketing goals. If you are a small or mid-sized business, more than likely you are announcing something like a new product line, an additional store, new employees, maybe some awards you’ve received. Your target is a slim slice of the Internet pie, the slice that can use your products, the slice that needs your product but may not be aware of your products. Your target is not everyone on the Internet.

Since you have a target audience it should make the most sense to actually target them, right? So while you do want to get your name out there as much as you can, you want to spend your money on efforts that actually directly reach your target demographic. I don’t believe online submission sites do that effectively. You can pay to have your press release moved up to a higher position but you are still filed under a category that may be a little vague and may be hard to find you.

Getting your press release out there is still effective however, but as part of your overall marketing campaign. It will still help you turn up in search engines — even if it’s a free submission — and help people who are searching via your keywords, find you.  After all, that organic traffic is ultimately what you want, right?

The way people use the term public relations often varies significantly, I’ve found. Some businesses  will talk about their public relations plan and will instruct their employee to do ad buys, others will be referring to press releases, others will talk about putting flyers on cars.

Public relations is just that, getting word out to the public about your brand. That can be anyway you see fit. The operative word here is “relations” and you need to build them. And that is specifically what public relations is about.

Often I get clients who ask about how their public relations plan will translate into increased sales. While there are all sorts of metrics to measure that, the focus really is on building relationships with the public, with customers and building name brand recognition. After that the sales will come and they will be repeat sales because they will be coming from loyal customers.

How does social media fit in to that? Social media is another way to reach those customers. Whether your customers are solely online or mostly off you should include social media as part of your overall public relations campaign. It’s simply another way to increase your relationships with customers. And it’s a free way at that.

What different ways are you reaching out to build relationships with your customers?

Image: Francesco Marino / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

If you are Tiger Woods or Jesse James and you’ve just had an affair, that bad publicity will probably only mildly tarnish your image but on the flip side it highlights that badboy image. If you are a former Disney starlet looking to drop your good girl image let a few sexting incidents or nude pictures taken on your cell phone leak and the hubbub is actually good for business.

Most businesses don’t operate in the same realm as Hollywood hotties. Negative publicity can be bad for business, so monitoring your brand becomes crucial. And the easiest way to monitor your brand is on the Internet. At the very least you should be doing a Google search of your name and business name. Set up Google Alerts to let you know when your name has been mentioned in cyberspace. You can also go over to Social Mention Alerts and do the same. If you aren’t participating in social networks (first of all shame on you) then you should at least be monitoring them.

You can search for your name on Twitter via keyword or hashtag.

Backtype.com and Cocomment.com can help you keep track of comments that mention your brand on blogs.

Yahoo!Pipes will email you alerts about what you are interested in.

Sites like Boardtracker.com and Boardreader.com will keep you informed of comments about your brand left on message boards.

Google Sidewiki is a toolbar that allows web surfers to leave comments that are attached to your website and can be seen by anyone else with a Google Sidewiki toolbar when they visit your site.

If you are tracking comments and you find something damaging is being spread about your brand how do you manage it?

Try to address any negative comments by engaging the person who made the post. You want to make that person feel like their complaint is being addressed and other readers to see that you are addressing it, but you don’t want to start an ongoing finger-pointing war or you risk damaging your brand further. If the comments are serious consider addressing the issue offline.

If there are many negative comments it can be useful. Analyze the comments to see if there is a common thread. Maybe there is a failure in your customer service department. Or maybe a defect in one of your products. Finding that commonality and fixing the problem you can then go back and publicize the fact that your customers spoke and you listened.

Heading off bad publicity can help you keep customers loyal and all it takes is a little monitoring and prompt attention to diffuse negative matters.

I was recently working on a blog I started for a client of mine. Since it’s new it has a small readership as of yet. And so logging in to the admin area and creating posts is kind of a lonely feeling. There is something cold and strange about it, and so I am always happy to get back to this one, and even more so to my personal blog These Are the Salad Years. It’s not just this client’s blog. I also have another client like that, as well as another blog I’m starting for my other business venture.

It’s strange to just put something out there in cyberspace. It’s strange to log in to your Dashboard and feel like you are a one man show. But it also reminds me of the early days of both my blogs. It’s normal to question why you are even bothering to blog. Whether your website will even draw traffic and why anyone would even care. But that’s simply a hurdle to get over. Every blogger out there–every single one, including the biggies–started out feeling like they were simply dumping their thoughts into some void. Maybe they didn’t hold that belief for long, but I guarantee that with those first keystrokes in that very first blog post that’s what they were thinking.

There is only one cure for that lonely feeling: be social. Yeah, seems obvious huh, but how often are you social? Is it enough? If you still have that lonely feeling and you’ve been blogging for some time, then you aren’t being social enough. Getting out there will do two things: first it will take the lonely out of you, and two it will drive traffic to your site.

Every blogger has felt the way you do about your early blog efforts, but what separates the big guys who aren’t lonely from the newbies who are, is their persistence and their level of social networking. So get your post done and get out there already!

You probably know how to measure ROI for your business. That’s pretty easy it’s black and white, numbers and dollars. But what about social media? The problem with such a new marketing concept like social media is that it’s difficult to measure. Excuse me, it’s difficult to get the industry to agree on a method to measure ROI.

What happens then is that you get people trying to complicate things in order to present themselves as the all-knowing social media experts, pitching extensive services and strategies and coming up with titles that just don’t mean a thing. On the other side, you’ve got small and mid-sized businesses befuddled at the whole thing.

It really doesn’t have to be that complicated. For sure, measuring ROI hasn’t been easy. You don’t get immediate sales results with social media. You get business-customer relationships. And isn’t that really what it’s about anyway. I mean if you get the relationship you get the client, and their loyalty. In the end it adds up to dollars and a whole lot of sense.

Small and mid-sized companies, do need to incorporate social media marketing into their budgets. Perhaps the mulit-team, multi-level social media strategy approach is good for big corporations, but for many more businesses a streamlined approach to social media is preferable.

When looking for someone to manage your social media campaign ask yourself a few questions. Are they simply selling you on what they think you need or are they asking you what your goals are?

Do they suggest that there are areas you don’t need to be in? This is important because not every business thrives in every area of social media. Some industries work better with Facebook than Twitter etc., some industries really benefit with press release creation and submission, while for others it wouldn’t be the best place to focus energy.

Do they want to tie you down with a year-long or longer contract? While it does take a long while to see results of your social media efforts, you may decide earlier that it’s just not for you. And while that may not be the best decision, quitting early still should be your decision to make.

In the end your ROI will be apparent when you see lots of activity on your social media accounts, a marked increase in links/visits and comments to your site, and ultimately and eventually an increase in dollars in your bank account.

Image: luigi diamanti / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

It’s great to want to keep up your professional image. In offline marketing that’s the norm. But this is PR 2.0, it’s the next evolution in marketing your business and trying to use the same techniques you use offline in your online marketing efforts comes across as dated.

The internet is a different world. While you of course want to come across as professional and established and successful, you also want to come across as approachable, down to earth and accessible. Because that’s what the internet calls for. It’s OK to bend the rules a bit in your online marketing efforts. When creating your online presence let down your guard a bit. Don’t be afraid to do something a little wild or silly, or better yet–cutting edge.

The most viral videos and the most retweeted posts are the ones that cause a pattern interrupt, they snap people out of their routine and hand them the unexpected. It gets attention.

So step out of the box and let people get to know the face behind the corporate logo.

It’s tempting to think that simply submitting your link to every directory you can find and exchanging links with anyone willing will help your site ranking. In truth, it does take some finesse and a little work. Some sites can even hurt your ranking.

Of course because Google’s algorithm is kept more secure than Fort Knox we can only speculate as to what best practices are for improving your page rank. And speculation is closely related to opinion, and opinion, well everyone has one. So there’s no real consensus on some strategies but here are some generally accepted tips to help your site.

Reciprocal links: Previously it was common practice to exchange as many links as possible and it would help your site’s ranking. That doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. More valuable are one-way backlinks–links coming from a site to yours. These links carry more weight than reciprocal links. Especially if the link to your site is coming from a highly ranked site. The theory it seems is that if a site is referring to your site all on its own then your site must have some value. Also valuable is if the link is in the block of text and not in the blogroll.

But reciprocal links aren’t necessarily bad. there are just better ways to spend your time building links. So don’t overdo it. If there is a relevant site, go ahead and exchange links, otherwise don’t waste your time hunting down webmasters.

Don’t exchange links with irrelevant sites: If you are in the pet grooming business don’t exchange links with gaming sites. Stick with sites that are complimentary to yours and that you aren’t in direct competition with. If you are a pet groomer an exchange with a dog trainer can be a good match.

Google may hold a grudge if you submit to a link farm or a page with nothing but links. On the other hand, you can locate a few important directories–these are usually the paid ones–and submit your site there.

Use Social Media networking sites: And make sure they link back to your blog. Set up accounts with Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube at the very least, as well as other sites like Digg, StumbleUpon or Delicious and make sure they link back to your site. You can also integrate your RSS feed.

Link to your own pages within your site: Yes you can get backlinks to yourself by linking pages. But make sure the links are relevant, linking from one related article to another. Speaking of linking your pages, when you use hyper links in your posts or web copy make sure it’s a keyword and not a “click here” text link to help with SEO.

Finally, create your own buzz: It’s great when articles published on the web link to your site so why not create your own articles? Rewrite some of your existing web content and submit the articles to a web article directory like EZineArticles with a backlink at the bottom.

Chances are you are good at something that is not writing. You are a marketer, a sales person, a business owner, a corporate something or other. Writing is a necessary element to what you ultimately want to accomplish, but it zaps your time and pulls you away from your other money making activities. Or maybe you just really don’t like to invest your time in article writing. That’s OK because I happen to love article writing.

I love it so much I’ve spent the last 15+ years writing articles as a reporter and journalist. I’ve written articles on such dry subjects as politics, technology and crime, I’ve covered subjects like health and the environment. I’ve written entertainment and lifestyle articles and I’ve covered the colorful world of the arts, and even tackled sports writing. In short, I’m a well-rounded writer.

And so I thought I’d devote this post to pimping out my writing abilities. For a short time I’ve decided to get competitive and slash my regular rates on article writing, press release writing and blog content to $5 a piece for articles or blog posts of 350-500 words. Press releases are only $15 for a one-page release. Sure you can find these services for less, but often the quality isn’t there. I don’t sacrifice quality just because I’ve lowered the price. I hate for this to sound like a sales pitch, but I am only doing this for a short time because of the amount of effort I place in each article I write.

If you are looking to outsource your content needs I can help you. Having worked in the print industry I’m great on deadlines and able to write well-researched articles quickly and on time. Whether you need a press release, articles written, web content, blog posts or social media posts I can provide prompt written material that is accurate yet entertaining.

Check out these published clips:
Coat of Arms Advertorial
SeaGlass Candles Press Release
Orcutt Summer Boot Camp Press Release
EZine Articles How Twitter Can Help Your Business
Ezine Articles Using Sidewiki As Part of Your Social Media Plan
Newspaper Article — Rhythm of the Night
Newspaper Article — Next in Line

Contact me if you have other needs and I can provide you with a quote.

Here’s to your marketing success!

Shelly Cone
Owner
Beach Betty Public Relations
beachbettypr@verizon.net

Oh and one more thing, I am still committed to providing you with informative posts on how to grow your business through public relations and social media, don’t let this one shameless self-promoting post scare ya!

Probably the most common question of all questions on the Internet is “How do I get more traffic to my site?” Hands down. There is no higher question. And theories abound, some of them work and some, well frankly, are a waste of time. Some of them are free and some will cost you.

If you are a smaller business trying to handle your cyber pr campaign yourself you are looking for a way to increase traffic and keep it affordable. So here are a few ways to increase traffic to your site without affecting your bottom line.

1. Get a blog, add content and update frequently
You may have a website already and that’s great, but search engines love blogs. The constantly changing content encourages bots to crawl and index your site often. Customers and clients will find new and valuable information that keeps drawing them back. It also gives your company a more personal site. I tend to think of a traditional website like a veil, sure it provides information, but it’s static and there’s no depth and I feel like the company is somewhere behind that website I just don’t know. A blog on the other hand can give a little more personality, even if it’s just the style of writing.

2. Use social media
Create accounts on YouTube and Facebook and Twitter and Stumble and Digg and update them regularly. This works two-fold. Yes you’ll be more in touch with potential customers and clients, but also, you’ll be creating “outposts.” These outposts are your presence in cyberspace and the more your brand is out there and the more outposts you have the more people will find you and the more you will come up in search engines. Ultimately these outposts can drive people to your site.

3. Employ article marketing to get the word out
You are in a great position for this because you are obviously an expert in your field. Write some articles and submit then to article marketing sites. These sites will allow you to include a link to your site. These article marketing sites usually rank high in the search engines helping your site out since the article includes a link to you. Also these sites allow others to use the articles and since the articles include a link back to you you benefit again by more incoming links. For instance if you have a landscaping business or sell gardening supplies you can write articles on gardening and have them link back to your site.

4. Use blog and website directories
Do a search for any and all blog directories and website directories and forums in your field and join and list your site there. Again this will create more incoming links and those links will help you in website searches.

5. Guest post on other sites
Identify the “biggies” or expert bloggers in your field and ask them if you can write a guest post. Make sure you are ready with an idea, or even a finished post and any photos and ask them if they’d like to run it as a guest post. Give them a time frame to get back to you in and hold off before you submit to other bloggers. A well-placed guest post can bring you in front of thousands of targeted customers. Just make sure your site is in its best shape when the traffic starts coming your way.