Online Consulting

Planning For The Future By Succeeding In The Now

Online Consulting, Social Media Advisors

Technology is constantly changing. New social networks are being born each and every day. Companies develop new gadgets that now allow us to do things we never thought would be possible ten years ago.

Look at mobile phones for example: Ten years ago we carried around brick phones that allowed us to make phone calls and that was it. The craze back then was to buy a phone that came with the snake game installed. The thought of your phone allowing you to search the internet, give you directions, or update a social network was unheard of! Social networks didn’t even really exist.

While over the past few years we have made great strides in technology allowing us to do more things than ever before, it has also caused an addiction in many to finding “The Next Big Thing.” The minute a new social network launches everyone rushes to sign up and be a part. They spend countless hours trying to understand this network and how they can use it to give them some level of value. Unfortunately though, we spend too much time searching for the next hot buzz that we forget about current and present.

Focus On Now

Scott Stratten – @unmarketing
Instead of trying to figure out “what’s next” in social media/business/life, be great at what we have now.

If we spend too much time looking for new things and no time using what is working now, our business will start to fail. What works for your business right now? Is it blogging? Twitter? YouTube videos? If your business has had tremendous success with video, don’t suddenly abandon video because some expert mentions a new network that will revolutionize how we do business. It’s ok to be curious of new things, but they shouldn’t be the main focus of your business.

Want an example? Look at Google+. It launched with great fanfare and was the Buzz (pun intented) everywhere you turned. Everyone was talking about how this was the social network to destroy Facebook for once and for all. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not saying Google+ is dead, but it has definitely lost it’s steam with the masses.

Bill Gade – @TopSEOranking
Google+ Pages Won’t Save Search Giant’s Social Network, Slate Says: Traffic-analysis firms have consistently rep… http://t.co/106mHObX

I’ve got a profile and business page there & will continue to test things out on the network. But, I spend probably less than 5% of my work week there in comparison to Facebook, YouTube & Twitter which get about 45% of my time. My blog gets about 45% of my marketing time with the remaining small fraction testing new products & services. It’s pretty simple to understand why I run my business this way as my site is by far the biggest generator of income for my business. Until I see something take it’s places as the main income generator, I will stick with this plan.

So in closing, if you are only out chasing new rainbows that may land you on the pot of gold on the newest adventure, it’s time to take a step back and work on what is generating income for your business presently. Focus on business of today more and less on what might come to be. While the future is important to your success, if you don’t put more thought into the current, there may be no future.

Is Your Website Mobile Optimized?

Custom WordPress Sites, Online Consulting, Social Media Advisors

According to Google, mobile traffic queries are up over 4 times those of a year ago. More and more people are surfing the web from their smart phones every day for things. There should no longer be a question of whether or not you need a mobile version of your website.

Having your website mobile optimized means that it will load quickly & easily for any mobile device. If it takes more than five seconds for the page to load, consumers are likely to leave and move on to another site. Also, the amount of data required to open a non-mobile site can turn those with limited data packages away from becoming a regular online customer of yours. If you have images inserted, they need to load properly and I shouldn’t need to pinch or zoom to view the items on a page.

Google believes that mobile sites are becoming so important that they recently launched an initiative to help people determine if their site is mobile optimized. HowToGoMo.com offers you the ability to test your site, learn more about mobile websites and even get help if needed. Here’s a quick demo on how it works:

When you finish the test you will get a brief summary and also the ability to either email or download a Full Mobile Report. Also, if your site does not do so well in the test, they have some great developers available to assist you in building a mobile optimized site for your business.

As someone who uses WordPress and also builds Custom WordPress Sites, I install a plugin called WPTouch onto all the sites I build that helps turn them into a mobile optimized version for when your site is viewed on a smartphone. It is super simple to set up and can be done in less than three minutes. It will make your site look fairly similar to the way mine did in the video demo above.

So, go try HowToGoMo.com and see how your site ranks in their results. If you need help turning your WordPress Site into a mobile optimized version, just ask!

How Long Tail SEO Can Grow Your Online Business

How To Blog, Online Consulting, SEO

Long Tail keywords are so important to your online business and how it is found in the search engines. If your business has been struggling to be found online, this may be something you want to look into. While you may think that you need to be page one for your main business terms, what you are missing is that it is normally much more difficult to rank at the top of the rankings for these high competition keywords.

However, if you focus on long tail keywords in your site, you will find yourself having a much easier time getting to page one of Google as the competition is normally much less. So, as I shared in the video, if AppliancePartsPros.com focused only on the keyword “appliance parts” in their site SEO strategy, there is a good possibility they would not have had my business the other day. But, because they took the time and wrote content about a specific part as small and inexpensive as it may be, it brought them in a new customer.

As a new customer that had an exceptional experience, I know that if I ever need another part for a small appliance, I know where I will start my search. I also know that whenever I hear someone mention needing a small appliance part, that I will send them over to their site. My guess is that it probably took them a few hours of writing on the specific part & model number to gain page one rankings on Google for the keyword. So in terms of investment, I would say the return has been great.

So, if you are trying to figure out ways to help your business online, maybe it is time to start writing about long tail keywords and let others fight over the highly competitive ones. If you are not sure how to implement this type of strategy into your business, let’s schedule a personal coaching session today to discuss this further for your business.

Using Automatic Sync Programs to Post Across Multiple Social Networks

Facebook For Business, How to Use Twitter, Online Consulting, Social Media Advisors

As many of you probably know, in addition to presenting at conferences as a social media speaker, that I also do a good amount of social media consulting with individuals and small businesses. As we begin discussing how to use Facebook for business, the ins and outs of Twitter, how YouTube can grow their business, and several other platforms, I almost always get asked the question of how can they automate this content so that they can write it once and have it syndicated to all platforms.

I understand the thought that by using a syndicator, it will spread your message across all the platforms quickly and make life easier for you. But, what you are missing is that this is probably one of the most ineffective ways to try and build your business online.

One Size Doesn’t Fit All

Each social network operates slightly different than all the others out there. For example, Twitter gives you 140 characters and you must include the @ symbol if you want to have it mention someone specifically. When this publishes over to Facebook for example, your friends see messages like this: “That was very funny @jb140 @210consulting.” which makes no sense to them if they are not using Twitter. Also, the frequency you tweet is more than likely going to be more often than you would update your Facebook status. In my case, I might tweet 25-30 times a day. I don’t want all 25-30 of those showing up in my Facebook stream.

Also, Twitter limits the length of your update to 140 characters, so you may be abbreviating words or using online jargon to make your update. Do I really want that going over to a platform like LinkedIn in which it’s main purpose is a social network for business professionals? Needless to say, updates on LinkedIn that say “Way to go, @JB140, that is a definite #fail. I prefer cheddar cheese #FTW” does not always portray the image we would want on certain networks.

Because I See It On 4 Places Doesn’t Mean I’ll Read

One of the reasons I am writing this post is because of a post I recently saw on Google+: The person wrote: Sync Google+ to Twitter, Itenti.ca, & Facebook. I started reading the comments below and asked why would you want to do this though? And needless to say I then saw them along with many of their other friends that I follow had already set this up. So, when I went to their Twitter account, Facebook Profile, or Google+ account I saw the exact same status update. For those of us who have connected with someone on multiple platforms, I see this becoming a problem. You can actually annoy people by putting the same stuff all over the place all the time.

Take the Time, Post Individually

If you want to say the same sort of message on all the various networks, that is perfectly fine, simply copy/paste the message across and customize it to fit the platform. For example, as I mentioned the other day for my Facebook Page, I try to ask questions more than making statements. I found this to be more beneficial. So, I take that same statement I might have just made on Twitter, paste it to my Facebook Page and alter the text to turn it into more of a question. If I want to post it to LinkedIn, I would do the same type of thing customizing it to the audience on that network.

To do this literally takes you an additional 18 seconds or so and will increase your interactions immensely. I tested syndicating my content across all networks for a three month period of time and had almost no business come from it. When I changed things to manually update I almost instantly saw an increase in all aspects of traffic, interactions, and engagement from my online community. For me, I’ll spend an additional 3-4 minutes doing this to see improved results. Also, not everything I share on one network is necessarily worth of being posted to 4 other platforms.

So, before you set up your account to share your content across multiple platforms consider whether it is a help or a hindrance to your business. If you don’t agree with me, I’d love to hear why in the comments below!

How To Effectively Spam a Facebook Event To Your Friends

Facebook, Facebook For Business, Online Consulting

Over the past few days I’ve noticed more an more issues on Facebook with those I am connected to. For the longest of time things seemed to be going well. Then all of a sudden there seemed to be another mental lapse on how to use Facebook for business properly. I wrote yesterday about how to successfully tick off your fans on a Facebook Business Page. Well, this morning another common issue I have noticed on Facebook started running rampant again… people spamming you with events.

We have all had the invitations to a friends event on Facebook at sometime. I’ve heard that there are roughly 3.5 million events created on Facebook each month. If you are like me, you probably feel like you get invited to half of them. In my case though, I seem to be constantly invited to events that are nowhere near applicable to me. For example, today I was invited to an auction in San Clemente, CA. Curiosity got me, so I checked Google Maps, it’s only a mere 2,549 miles from where I live in South Carolina. No matter how amazing and awesome that house may be, the likelihood of me coming across the country to attend this event is almost zero. The same holds true for many more of the 1,300 other people invited to this event.

In fact, many wrote on the event wall complaining about being invited to an event they had no interest in attending or zero chance of traveling across the country to attend. I explain this whole situation a little better here:

So, before you invite everyone you know to your next Facebook Event, take a little bit of time to sort through those you are about to invite. Ask yourself this question: Will this person I invite be glad I sent the invitation or annoyed that I am sending them spam. If the answer is the latter, maybe you should refrain from sending it to them. Just because you invite over 1,000 doesn’t make your event more successful. Instead, inviting those who are likely to attend is a much better strategy to help you use Facebook for Business more effectively.