Header

Facebook for Business: A few tips for Businesses using Facebook

February 3rd, 2011 | Posted by martinbrossman in Facebook - (0 Comments)
Heather OA Facebook Business page can be a great way to stay connected to your customers.
Here are a few things to keep in mind when creating and managing your page.

DO NOT:  use a Personal Profile as a Busienss page. It is against Facebook’s terms of use and you will at some time in the future will be shut down and lose all your friends. If when you look down the left side and all you see is  “Friends” and do not see a window that says “People Like This” then you have broken the rules of this free service.

If you have a Facebook business page: even though it looks like people can see your personal page from your business page, they can not. It is only connected that way because YOU are the adminstrator. Make sure to build a personal profile then a business page and understand the “administrator” private info is protected from the busienss page.

An easy way to create a business page: Create a personal page with your real name. After signing in go to any Facebook business page, like mine: http://Facebook.com/MartinWBrossman and scroll down the page looking to the left. After all the images are going you will see the words “Create a Page” and create an appropriate page from here.

How to find your business page after you create it: Sign in to your personal profile. Click on the word in the upper right hand corner that says, “Accounts” then “Manage Pages” and you will see it there.

A few more things to keep in mind when you set up a business page on facebook:

• Choose the page name carefully. It cannot be changed once you have more than 25 ‘fans’
• Remember that facebook is still the internet. Choose words that would be relevant ‘search words’
• Choose a photo not just a logo. This is a social network. People want to connect with people.
• Don’t set up a page unless you are willing to go there and post at least once or twice a day
• Decide what you will offer before you start. Think about what topic(s) are relevant to your business, that people will find value in. (ie. a Real Estate Broker might choose investment info, community info, latest trends,etc)
• Commit to finding/posting an article or video each day on that relevant topic.
• Make sure that you have contact information on your page, and remember that a lot of people still prefer to use the phone.
• You won’t receive notifications when people comment like you do with a personal page, so you have to go to the page and check it often!

Above all, remember that most people avoid advertisements whenever possible (think of all the ways people avoid TV commercials!). Focus on how you can add value in a way that is relevant to your expertise. People buy from those that they know, like and trust. Be personable and use photos and video whenever possible.

Share your tips on Facebook or what was useful to you.

Created by Martin Brossman – NCSmallBusinessTraining.com and Heather O – FacebookandBeyond.com.

Email Marketing Resources and Tips

January 25th, 2011 | Posted by martinbrossman in marketing - (0 Comments)

email marketing

A few resources for learning about email marketing. Remember with email marketing you still have to earn the right to stay in your customers attention or your email will not be opened. The content needs to be relevant to your customer, clear what they are reading from the first line, clear who it is from and provide value worth their time. What is important to your customer beyond what you sell? Why should they take the time to ready your email if they already are overwhelmed by email? Value, Relevance and a personal tone is important but not sloppy. Look as how your email look if you remove all the graphics for many email services do that and how it look on a smart phone. People don’t want more emails but they do want useful information that is relevant to them.

A number of email marketing sites:

– Constant Contact – 1st choice for small business users for ease of use and integration of social media for business.

– Mail Chimp – Lets you have 1000 contacts and send out up to 6,000 emails per month FREE and work with Eventbrite. Very good for micro-businesses and groups with a very limited budget.

– awebber – a professional high capacity email program used for high volume ‘list building’ by many top email marketers.

– iContact – A competitor to Constant Contact with equal features, just not as much support resources.

– Swiftpage – It’s big plus is it fully integrates with ACT contact manager.  Reliable with a number of useful features but very challenging to use. See these Swiftpage demos for more info.

These are two GREAT resources for email marketing tips and tricks.

http://www.theemailguide.com/

http://ducttapemarketing.com/

The Constant Contact Learning Center is second to none and the user community is huge.

http://www.constantcontact.com/learning-center/index.jsp

http://www.constantcontact.com/community/index.jsp

Useful on-line posts about email marketing:
Top 7 Email Marketing Trends – Tips for 2011

8 Email Marketing Tips – from CRM.com

How To Avoid Getting Your Campaigns Accidentally Junked – from MailChimp.com

Increase your Open Rate -Opt-in Marketing

A number of posts on email-marketing-report.com about the best time to send emails

Examples:

Restaurant email marketing example

Natural Skincare email

Business trainer announcing an event

How do you use e-mail marketing and what resources do you find useful?

Compiled by Martin Brossman and Brian Walker who offers eMail Marketing Magement.
See Martin’s class on the topic: Marketing Your Business Through E-mail

Blogging and Websites with WordPress

December 16th, 2010 | Posted by martinbrossman in Blogging | Wordpress - (0 Comments)

 

The two key components to understand when using WordPress:

1) The “Page”: Pages are the closest to the original fixed web pages but easier to edit. This is where you post the content that does not change as often. Examples of this would be About Us, Contact, Services. Pages – and the ability to set the home address to one of them (for example, About Us)  is one of the biggest things that makes it possible to use WordPress as a web site instead of ‘just a blog.’ Here is the Home page of this site: http://www.ncsmallbusinesstraining.com

and

2) The “Post”: The “Posts area” is the “Blog” component of the WordPress website and allows you to add current content on various topics easily. This has been part of WordPress since it started, and is usually the default page you see when you set up a simple WordPress site. Here is the “Posts area” on this site. Posts can be styled numerous ways – recent first, undated, set up to look like articles.  http://www.ncsmallbusinesstraining.com/blog/

You can find Post and Page in your Dashboard (also called the Admin Panel) that can be found on by signing in to your own wordpress site by typing /wp-admin after your website address in the browser bar to get the sign-in and password.
Here is the sign-in for this site, note the URL at the top after clicking on:
http://www.ncsmallbusinesstraining.com/wp-admin/

To setup WordPress so it looks like a website with a home page instead of the blog section:

1) Sign-in to your Dashboard
2) Create two pages: one page that you want to be your home page (i.e. Home or Welcome) and a page that you want to store the blog section (i.e. Blog or Articles)
3) Go to: Settings>Reading

3a) Under “Reading Settings” see these options: Front page displays change from “Your latest posts” to “A static page (select below)”
4) Pick the page you want to be seen first as the “Home Page” from pages you already created (Home or Welcome) and then the page you want to be your “blog” from the pages you created (see step 2). Make sure to select “Save Changes”.
5) Now just look at your site and see how it looks

Getting a API Key:
For some plugins you will be requested to provide an API key on the hosted WordPress. To get that you need to sign up for a WordPress.com account if you have not already and go into the area from the Dashboard: Profile / Personal Setting then look for “Your WordPress.com API key is:” copy that numbers/letters. This link may work if you are signedin to wordpress.com:
http://dashboard.wordpress.com/wp-admin/users.php?page=grofiles-user-settings
and to directly get a API key: http://akismet.com/wordpress/

If you notice the bottom of your WordPress pages you may notice that people can post a comment. If you don’t want that to show up (most people don’t) then just go into the page from Dashboard and scroll down till you see: ”

Few Examples of WordPress Websites:

ycorpblog.com – Yahoo

www.thefordstory.com – The Ford Story

electronicsblog.sel.sony.com – Sony

www.samsungusanews.com – Samsung

www.benjerry.fr/blog – Ben and Jerry

dalesgoldbergcpa.com – CPA Company

www.gowerpower.com – Gower Power

NCSmallBusinessTraining.com – Small Business Training with Martin Brossman

www.assistantangel.com – Assistant Angel

www.elsmithconsulting.com – Consulting site

A few tips on creating Pages and Post so they can get results:

  • At the bottom of each Page and Post answer the questions: What action do I want them to take next? and make sure you state that clearly. e.g. Give use a call? How have you use (the item) in your business?
  • At the end of each Post also have a link to the home page.
  • Have a relevant picture or video on each Page and Post to make it more interesting to view and keeping them on the page longer.
  • For ever photo added make sure to include the relevant keywords so Google can index that photo in the “alternate text” area.

To contact the instructors:

Michelle Gower GowerPower.com

Martin Brossman ProNetworkingOnLine.com

,

Gift Ideas: A Few Reasons to Buy Local for the Holidays

November 27th, 2010 | Posted by martinbrossman in buy local - (0 Comments)

Gift ideasWhy buy local for the Holidays?

Looking for Holiday or Christmas gift ideas? Why not buy from a local merchant and help your local community as well?

I asked a few people to share reasons to take advantage of quality products from local merchants in your area and I want to share what they had to say:

“Buying local is a great way to strengthen our community on a smaller scale. As a pebble ripples through a pond, then can the positive effects of our stronger base community to ripple out and help others. One of the educational pieces I give my clients is to make sure you are strong, healthy and practice self-care so that your personal resources are set before you help your families. If our community is strong, then we can cause our own ripple effect within and outside ourselves.”
– Nancy Campbell www.campbelllmbt.com

“People should buy local to help support the local businesses that they like to frequent. We are seeing so many shops and restaurants closing down because they just can’t make it in this economy. How disappointing is it to go to the mall only to find your favorite store gone!

Online shopping does make shopping easy; however, consumers should consider calling a store directly and ordering over the phone instead (usually for the same deal). This will help even the bigger name stores stay in business here in Raleigh. If you have found a certain something on-line, do an Internet search to see if the product is available locally. You would be surprised how many items are made and sold right here in North Carolina. Google and Yahoo of course are good resources, but not all small business are listed or come up on the first page of search, so I would encourage consumers to ask their friends (tweet it, Facebook it or e-mail). I had a neighbor looking for a good dentist the other day. She received so many responses simply by sending an e-mail to a group of friends.

Buying local means to keep as many dollars right here in North Carolina as possible. Independent shops do keep more dollars locally; however, big name stores are equally important to our community (ordering on-line from a chain that is present in NC does not count as shopping locally if it doesn’t directly affect the sales at the local chain). Bottom line: consumers should try to shop at a variety of stores and buy local when they can.”
– Terri Voltz http://www.electricbeanz.com”

“You should support your local businesses because otherwise you’ll be paying the government for your neighbor’s unemployment and welfare checks, food stamps, and health care. If you support these local businesses, you enable them to remain in business, which means people stay employed and the debtload of the country and your state can be reduced. Plus, shipping costs are lower. :)”
– Marie-Dolores Anderson www.pamperedchef.biz/mda

“Consumer spending drives 70% of the economy. But when we shop at the big chain stores the dollars we just spent are overseas before sundown.

When we shop at local family owned stores 68 cents of every dollar returns back to our community and when we buy American Made at these stores every penny supports the growth of our own economy! Yep, the economy and the end of this recession is up to each and everyone of us. So get to work, find the “right gifts” for this holiday season… those that are American Made!

Here’s a few great resources to start with!  Links: http://www.FindAmericanMade.com ,  http://www.AmericanStyle.com , http://www.AmericanCraft.com”
– Wendy Rosen – www.americancraft.com

How can you find local businesses? Just search Google Maps ( http://maps.google.com/ ) for what you are looking for and the area you are in. Like “Toy Stores near Raleigh, NC” and you can tell which are local owned vs big box stores. Also make sure your own local business is listed here.

Lets hear your reasons to Buy Local and If you have or know of a local business that has gift ideas please share them too! Please share this with anyone you know and here is a short URL: bit.ly/buylocalgifts

To see more comments, check out the replies to this questions on LinkedIn and inSide919:

Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/answers/marketing-sales/advertising-promotion/viral-marketing/MAR_ADP_VMM/756219-548650

inSide919: http://inside919.ning.com/forum/topics/why-buy-local-for-the-holidays

Related post: Five Reasons for Buying Local

Thanks! Martin Brossman http://NCSmallBusinessTranining.com

, , ,