Blog - Page 13 of 21 - NC Small Business TrainingNC Small Business Training | Small Business Training, Coaching & Resources with Martin Brossman

Free Local Directories are Worth Thousands in Free Advertising

If you have a physical address and are not using the core free local business directory listings, you are missing thousands of dollars in free ad space. Here are the basics about the big ones:

Google.com/places
Just look up your company name and address in Google Maps, and if you don’t find your place, go to http://Google.com/places — if you find it and it says in the upper right hand corner “Business owner?” then you need to claim this listing before someone else does. Click on the “Business owner?” link and use your business Gmail account to fill it out. If you don’t have a Google Gmail account, it is free to get one and only takes a few minutes.

infoUSA.com
This is what I call a feeder directory, used by most of the main directories to obtain their base info. Sometimes people will correct an address or phone number in another directory and in a month or two it switches back. When they update their listing at infoUSA.com it will stay corrected after a short period of time. Scroll to the bottom of the page and select “Find a Business” and first see if you are listed; then go to: “Update My Listing” to add or correct your listing here.

Also you may want to add your business listing to Yahoo or Bing.
For Yahoo go to http://listings.local.yahoo.com/ to list your business after checking to see if it is listed on http://local.yahoo.com/
On Bing go to the “Bing Business Portal (BETA)” site: www.bing.com/businessportal to list your business. First check to make sure you don’t already have a listing on Bing at: http://www.bing.com/maps

If you are a micro, local-owned business let me know the link to your business in the comment area. Learn tips and training by following my Facebook Business page: http://BrossmanOnFB.com

Resources for Starting an Online Business

August 11th, 2011 | Posted by martinbrossman in on-line Business Tips - (0 Comments)

Business networking sites:

www.linkedin.com – must join – business networking group, free for basic service

www.comeoninside.com – on-line free business networking for businesses within your area code

Social networking sites & related resources

Facebook.com – free online community where you can create a business page

Twitter.com – microblogging platform that can promote your business as you give value

www.search.twitter.com – For searching posts on Twitter by subject

Bit.ly – URL shortener with analytics

GooglePlus – google.com/+ free online community by invitation, similar to Facebook

www.HootSuite.com – Manage status updates for several sites at once: Twitter/Facebook/Linkedin

Selling Products or Information Online

1shoppingcart.com—add a shopping cart to your website or open an e-commerce store

Kajabiapp.com—create private membership site for your content and sell access to it

Social bookmarking :

stumbleupon.com, Digg.com, delicious.com, sharethis.com – allows users to bookmark blog posts and share them with others

Blogging Sites:

Blogger.com – Google’s Blogger site – easy to use and can add adsense

WordPress.com – High flexibility blogging resource — can add to your own website

Feedburner.com – Add your blog site to for statistics & distribution

www.blogcatalog.com – Place to list your blog

socialspark.com – place to get others to blog about you or your product

Blog Readers / News Aggregators:

bloglines.com – a program to keep track of blog, podcast or any RSS feeds

feeddemon.com by NewsGator – a downloadable reader

Tracking your presence on the Web

www.google.com/alerts – A free service to keep track of the appearances of you or your business on the Web ( use quotes) || www.trackur.com – a more extensive fee-based version

www.SocialMention.com – Free for finding out about conversations in social media

www.infousa411.com – The directory for many directories!

Directories:

www.google.com/places/ – Free, make sure you claim your listing

www.infousa411.com – The directory for many directories!

Keyword research: gkwords.com and Google.com/trends

E-mail marketing

ConstantContact.com—popular e-mail marketing at monthly rate

Icontact.com— another widely used e-mail marketing service, monthly rate

Aweber.com—opt-in email marketing system, monthly rate

MailChimp.com—send out up to 12,000 emails per month free

Self Publishing

www.Lulu.com, www.createspace.com & www.CafePress.com

Press releases:

www.pr.com and www.prleap.com – free press release sites .

Fee-based services: prsurvival.com, prweb.com, BusinessWire.com and www.prnewswire.com

Video:

YouTube.com – allows for your video to be viewed without paying for the hosting

Vimeo.com – a low cost hosting site for longer videos. http://www.footagefirm.com/

Photo/ Photo Sharing:

Flickr.com – method of sharing photos with friends & family

Picasa (picasaweb.google.com ) – Google’s own photo-share

Photos and Audio: Bigstock.com & iStockPhotos.com / ccmixter.org

Useful Blogs & Podcast:

http://blog.pronetworkingonline.com/ – My blog

www.chrisbrogan.com – Social media guru… has great info on his blog

www.CreateBusinessGrowth.com – Blog about useful info on building your business

www.InquireOnline.com – my podcast with something you can use today.

Blog.lindacraft.com – Linda Craft and Team blog – example of a good business blog

www.marketingpilgrim.com – Andy Beal’s blog

http://usinglinkedin.wordpress.com – Help with using Linkedin

Other:

EzineArticles.com, hubpages.com, www.squidoo.com – place to post or submit articles

www.craigslist.org – Free classifieds & more

Information and services including Social Media Consulting:

www.ignitesocialmedia.com & www.connectiveinsights.com – Social Media www.ProNetworkingOnLine.com (my business site)

Terms to know: Blogs, Podcast , RSS feeds, Blog Reader / News Aggregator,

Social Media, wiki, forum, mashup, social network, widget, vlog, Microblog & Avatar

www.wikipedia.org—a contributed knowledge base where you can look up these terms

List compiled by: Martin Brossman – Martin@CoachingSupport.com , (919) 847-4757 – My latest book: Social Media for Business: The Small Business Guide to Online Marketing – available on-line at TheSocialMediaForBusinessBook.com

On Facebook: http://www.FaceBook.com/MartinWBrossman See all my training at http://www.ncsmallbusinesstraining.com

Facebook for Business II: Turning Your Customers into Your Sales Force

May 11th, 2011 | Posted by martinbrossman in Courses - SM | Facebook Training - (0 Comments)

Prerequisite: Facebook for Business I

This course will teach you how to take your revenue-generating strategies to the next level by converting one-time customers into repeat customers, increasing average order size, and making it compelling for your customers to refer their friends to you.

Topics included:

How to run contests and promotions without violating Facebook guidelines
Using Facebook paid advertising to discover and tap niche markets
Increasing your customer response rate by posting at the right time of day/week
Building custom “landing pages” for people who find your web site via Facebook
Optimizing your Facebook page for the search engines

We will show you how using these simple techniques can regularly generate word-of-mouth advertising. In Facebook II, it is assumed that you already have a Facebook page set up. Sign up today.

Why you cannot use a facebook personal profile as a business page.

April 19th, 2011 | Posted by martinbrossman in Facebook - (0 Comments)

Another question is: Why it does not help your business to use a personal profile as a business page.

First of all using a personal profile as a business page is against the Facebook terms of operation and may at sometime just be shut down with the loss of all your “friends”. See Facebook’s terms of operation: https://www.facebook.com/terms.php
Here are a few of the statements from this page that relates to this:
– “You will not create more than one personal profile.”
– “You will not use your personal profile for your own commercial gain (such as selling your status update to an advertiser)”

To understand the difference read what Facebook says about the difference between a personal and business page:
“What is the difference between a business account and a personal account?”
“Business accounts are designed for individuals who only want to use the site to administer Pages and their ad campaigns. For this reason, business accounts do not have the same functionality as personal accounts. Business accounts have limited access to information on the site. An individual with a business account can view all the Pages and Social Ads that they have created, however they will not be able to view the profiles of users on the site or other content on the site that does not live on the Pages they administer. In addition, business accounts cannot be found in search and cannot send or receive friend requests.”
– From Facebook (see link above)

The benefits of having a Facebook Business page:
– Business Pages allow an unlimited number of that can “like” the page while the personal has a cap at 5,000.
– Pages and posts from Business Pages are indexed by search engines like Google.
– You will be appropriate to your customers and not invading their personal space.
Remember they can be clicking ‘Hide’ and you don’t know it.
– You get more stats and info on which content is being viewed, shared and interacted with to produce better content (e.g. 784 Impressions 1.66% Feedback).
– Your FB business page interacts better with the FB paid ads.
– You don’t run the risk of just being shut down and losing all your contacts.
– You can have several administrators with out giving out your personal password.
– People can check out content on your page before they commit to being liking it.
– You don’t have to spend time approving people that want to ‘Like’ it but you still can remove post or ban people.
– A nice business “Like” button can be added to your business page that show people who are their friends already like you business page and other content.

How can you convert your Facebook personal profile to a Business Page?
Terry Crosby has done such a great job explaining it I am just posting the link to his page for you to read.
http://terrycrosbyblog.com/facebooktutorials/facebook-now-allows-users-to-convert-their-personal-profile-into-a-business-page/

The other way is to create a business page off your real personal page (don’t worry all your content will be protected) by:
1) Sign-in under your personal page.
2) Go to: http://Facebook.com/Pages
3) Pick the best fit and set up your business page.
4) Sign back into the personal page that you used as a business page. Tell your “Friends” a number of times that you are moving over with a link to the new page. If they don’t follow then I will bet they are already ignoring the personal page that you used as a business page and don’t worry about it.
5) Have great content worth their attention.

Let me here from you? What have you learned?
– Martin Brossman NCSmallBusinessTraining.com
Here is my FB business profile if you liked this than please ‘like’ my page:
http://Facebook.com/MartinWBrossman