Sunday, March 1, 2009
As a web
freelancer, I often get people asking me about their small business websites.
As much as I sometimes have trouble making time for these small sites, the
online marketing part of these projects can be both fun and challenging. The
excitement of a small-business entrepreneur when he starts to see his site rise
on the search engine results is very satisfying.
For a couple small business sites recently, I was tasked with setting up their sites on a major CMS platform and performing the initial search engine optimization. I thought I would share my experiences here. Some of these are quite obvious, but I find that keeping these small basic tasks in mind really help build a good platform for online marketing. When you follow the rules and build the site reputation methodically, you should find that the site has a lot of "staying" power - the popularity of the site rarely decreases.
1.
Have a marketing plan
It's
important that any marketing project has a plan. In the case of a small
business website, the plan does not need to be comprehensive, but it is well
worth doing some research. Some tips:
- Spend a long time surfing and
reading the competitor's sites
- Do a lot of searches so that you can
see what kind of results are available
- Pick the keywords that you think
people will use to find you
If you're selling a physical product, it is very appropriate to market locally and try to make sure your search engine rankings are very high for your local area. Google runs country-specific sites (like www.google.ca and www.google.fr), and adding a city name to the keywords usually filters results down further. Focusing on the local search engine traffic really helps narrow the focus and get you off to a good start.
2.
Create a sitemap
This is
basic stuff, but having a sitemap can really help search engines like Google
find and categorize the major pages and categories of your site. A sitemap acts
as a list of all the major pages of your site, and so it acts as a jumping
point for search engines to find all those pages.
In Joomla,
there is an extension called 'XMap' that creates nice sitemaps based on your
site structure. It also allows you to upload copies of your sitemap to Google
Webmaster Tools.
Useful Links:
3.
Measure your success
Anytime you
start even the smallest marketing effort, it is important to be able to measure
your success. Without the ability to check your results, you have no way to
know what works right and what does not. One thing I set up early on for
most web projects is integration with Web Analytics applications. In most
cases, being a Google fanboy, I find that Google Analytics works really well
for measuring traffic to your site.
I also
downloaded a copy of the freeware/adware Link Popularity Checker. This tool
allows us to see the relative ranking of the site and the leading competitors.
This is immensely handy in determining where competiting sites are more popular
- for example, if competitor A has a much higher ranking, you can see that it
is due to a large number of search results in MSN. You can drill down into
those results to see what they are doing to achieve that.
Useful Links:
4. Two
online references per week
I started
this early on. Every week, I try to post two references about the new site on
any site I can, paying close attention to the sites that help the most. There
are many sites where you can showcase your work - this is an easy option,
discussion forums that are related to the particular industry are even better.
Ideally you should get yourself within a community related to the industry. It
doesn't take a long time, and I was able to very quickly push my small sites
above their local competitors. In reference to the application mentioned above
(Link Popularity Checker), you can see the different sites that the competitors
have posted to, and do the same.
Don't be
tempted to post too much, you may not be spending your time wisely. Post a few
each week, and measure the success of those posts.
Don't be
tempted to fight dirty and join too many "spammy" sites - these will
hurt your search engine ranking much more than they will help.
Useful Link:
Conclusion
I recently
read an article about the early days of a leading social networking site. They
would make personal contact with everyone that signed up for their service. In
this day and age of quick web searches and globalization, I think we tend to
forget about the importance of making regular efforts to build your online reputation
and tweak your marketing efforts. Good luck!
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Most
large corporations have Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs that benefit
the developing world. Small businesses
can also do their part.
If you
run a small business, Serebra Connect gives you the opportunity to do something
good for the world, while saving money and helping your business. Although Serebra Connect is open to freelancers worldwide, buyers of services
can choose to provide an income for a skilled person in, for example, Kenya or the Philippines.
In fact, you don’t even need a business. As an individual, you can implement your own Individual Social Responsibility program by, for example, outsourcing a small task, such as designing party or wedding invitations, to someone in a developing country.
Like
other initiatives with a strong social responsibility element, such as the
micro-loan platform, Kiva, Serebra Connect places an
emphasis on helping people who have the skills but lack the opportunities to
use them.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
While
technology has brought the world closer together, people in developing nations
still face difficulties finding education and work opportunities without
leaving their home countries. The company that created Serebra Connect, Serebra Learning Corporation, uses new technologies to deliver high-quality training
to people in developing nations through its easyLearning program.
Although
education plays an important role in alleviating poverty worldwide, access to
work is equally important to help improve lives. Through Serebra Connect,
Serebra links education to income by creating work opportunities for skilled
people around the world.
It was
the idea that someone in a remote place could earn money in, for example,
Manhattan, without leaving their home, and the link between training and jobs,
that brought Serebra Connect to the attention of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI). The CGI is a project of the
non-profit William J. Clinton Foundation that brings together global leaders
from a variety of backgrounds to realize change and find solutions to the
world’s most pressing challenges.
Serebra
attended the 2008 CGI Annual Meeting in New York as
