The secret success formula for Social Media is:

You want to be building up trust by providing MASSIVE value to your customers and prospects. People always will do business with those people who they Know, Like and Trust. Therefore, you need to become the trusted advisor for your niche. Hint: This isn’t as hard as you think.

You can start off by asking yourself the question “What is worth $100 that will be of benefit to my ideal customer?”

Typically, it will be an eBook, an audio, or a video that teaches about the benefits of your product/service and educated the prospect.

After this, you want to start GIVING IT AWAY FOR FREE. I know, this sounds like a terrible business strategy giving stuff away for free, but work with me here. From the mind of your prospect, if they are given something thats valuable for free from you, they are more likely to come back to you for more information, right? Right.

So….that’s when the next step comes in, you get to just keep stacking the value to them. Get their information through a lead capture page to get another piece of valuable content (another $100 or $200 worth of value) and give them this in exchange for their email address/phone number/etc.

All you really need to do is teach them. Educate these people and they will love you. This will also eliminate some headaches with bad customers because you will naturally be attracting good customers.

A potential buyer will buy from you much more readily if they feel they know you and can trust you. By giving away good information that they are looking for and can use, you are taking a large step in building trust. Blogs are an excellent example of giving away good content. For example, if you are a Chiropractor, write about all of the areas of health that often trip your customers up. Why do they come to you? What questions do they have? Answer those questions on your blog. You could write about “7 Things Your Chiropractor Isn’t Telling You”, and explain all of the things that people should be aware of when going to the chiropractor.

Some people are hesitant to give their best content away. They have learned over the years to protect their information so that they can offer it to only their paying customers. This is no longer a strong strategy. With information flowing so freely, if you hoard yours, no one will ever know you are out there sitting on great information. A better strategy is to freely share information. If you demonstrate you are an expert in a subject I am looking for, I will be far more likely to come to you for further assistance if I need it.

What type of content do you give to your community? Can you improve it?

Lately, people have been flocking to the Internet to find everything from the top restaurant in an area to a place where they can buy a ferret. Everything and anything is online and that means that your business should be too. Because of the internet, marketing has reaches levels and niches have been developed that were impossible to access only a few years ago.

Various search engines and websites have been created and are now applying different methods to better serve both business owners and customers. Different online applications have made these methods of marketing and searching a very effective way of attracting new clients and returning customers.

One of the current best options is Google Maps

There are more people searching for businesses online than anywhere else and through Google Maps your business will be able to reach the millions of Google Maps users, quickly and easily, specifically with Local Business Center. So it’s important to make sure your business listing can be easily found on Google and Google Maps. With the use of Local Business Center, it is easy to create a great listing; all it takes is a few minutes, some pictures of your business and some captivating copy.

With Local Business Center, you can control your listing and speak for yourself. If you already have a website, your business probably already appears on Google, but even if it does, you should still claim your listing and check to make sure that the details are accurate and thorough. Your improvements will start appearing as soon as you verify them through the Local Business Center.

So how do I do this?

1. Go to http://www.google.com/local/
2. Type the name of type of search you want to be classified in. “dentist Buffalo, NY”
3. The google maps listing will pop up and you can see all the businesses
4. Fill in the information

The cool thing about this is that this is saving you a TON of money on getting ranked on the search engines. It’s basically like being listed FIRST in the Yellow Pages back when the Yellow Pages were effective for advertising (You’re not still using the Yellow Pages are you?)

After filling in the location make sure to fill in your main phone number. Google will contact you through this number for verification. They will call within 5 minutes so be ready.

If you have a website address, key it in with http:// at the beginning. Then you should write a business description that emphasizes what your business is all about making your business unique or better than your competitors. You want to have captivating copy with this that will entice a viewer to want to come into your door today. Create a clear call-to-action or a coupon for coming today.(Tip: have them say “I found you on google” for a 15% off deal. That way you can track it)

Next step, include your hours of operation and payment options. This information is useful for both repeat and potential customers. Then you should add more details to make your business stand out. You can also add relevant information that doesn’t fit anywhere else. Information such as delivery zone, house specialties, return policy, or anything else that you would like to share. In marketing, you would want to catch the attention of as many potential customers as you can.

You can also add an image to help your listings stand out in Google Maps search results. You can use snapshots, logos and images. If you have videos on YouTube, you can place them directly in your listing as well.

Finally, verify your listing, if possible do it by phone. If you have easy access to the phone number on your listing, choose phone verification. You can either choose to be called now or in 5 minutes. Google will call you, and once you enter a Personal Identification Number (PIN), your listing will be immediately verified. A Thank You notice will appear in the window

If you are not near the phone or have a voicemail system, you should choose postcard verification. Google will send you a card with a PIN for you to enter before mailing it back. But it will take a coupe of weeks to complete.

If you would like us to do this for you, we can.

Contact Chris at 607-425-1270 with your information and it will be a $200 charge. Chris will come to your business if you are near Buffalo, NY for pictures and to help create a simple video as well as handle writing the words to cause your viewers to come to your store.

Five Situations Where You Should Use Nofollow for Linking

According to Wikipedia.com RSS is

“RSS (most commonly expanded as “Really Simple Syndication”) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format”

Basically, it is a way for the viewers of your website to receive updated content from your website without you having to tell them directly!

If you are starting to think that “this could save me some time” then you and I are on the same frequency here! You’ve got that absolutely correct and that’s what I’m here to help you understand even more.

An RSS feed is a text-based headline with a link, and usually a short summary of your posts. If you’re interested in reading the whole article, all you would have to do is click on the RSS feed link, and you will be directed to the full article, simply and efficiently. Think of an RSS feed as being pulled and delivered to you, as opposed to you reaching out to find it.

RSS can be a useful addition to a marketing arsenal in several ways:

• Drive traffic to your content. Be sure to promote your top stories on the relevant pages to encourage further reading, as visitors haven’t entered your site through the home page.
• Increase e-commerce. Target product information feeds to meet customer needs and interests. As with email marketing, where a product is pushed to customers, ensure presentation, promotions, and timing are relevant. Leverage existing offerings on your site, and you may not need additional creative development. A regular content schedule is important. To keep RSS users and attract new ones, develop special RSS-only promotions.
• Extend advertising and branding. Readers perusing your headlines on a regular basis helps keep your brand top of mind. Further, branding can be incorporated in the way feeds are written. From an ad perspective, you can wrap branding into an RSS reader or buy advertising on RSS feeds using a service such as Pheedo. If your advertising, whether video, audio, or static, is engaging, consider using links to encourage users to view and interact with it.
• Distribute corporate communications, press releases, and investor relations content.

If you are new to SEO, you may be wondering what in the heck is a backlink and why do I even care?

Backlinks have become so important to Search Engine Optimization for offline businesses that they have become one of the building blocks  to building a successful e-commerce website. In this article, we will explain to you what a backlink is, why you need to have backlinks to your website and how you can start to get these without getting in trouble with the search engines!

What are “backlinks”?

Backlinks are links that are directed towards your website from another website. Also knows as Inbound links (IBL’s). The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website. Backlinks are important for SEO because some search engines, especially Google, will give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query. This ultimately ranks your website higher.

When a search engine is calculating the relevance of a website in relation to a keyword, one of the things considered is the number of quality inbound links to that site. Therefore, you need to be careful when buying backlinks as some of these will not be relevant to your site, which just wastes your money and I don’t want that to happen to you (I’ve lost a lot of money learning this the hard way).

You need to have quality inbound links and these sites linking to yours need to have content that is related to your website, causing the search engines to recognize this and rank you higher.

Relevant backlinks

By having relevant backlinks to your website, google and the other search engines basically are giving you a high five for doing a good job, putting you towards the top of the search engines. If you only have irrelevant websites linking to yours, google could care less and won’t rank your site where you want it to be.

For example, if a person like you has a website about sewing, and you received a backlink from another website about sewing, then that would be more relevant in a search engine’s assessment than a link from a site about car racing or cooking. The more relevant the site is that is linking back to your website, the better the quality of the backlink.

How Should I Go About Building Backlinks?

Search engines want to see websites building up natural links slowly over time and not just 50-100 in one or two days (this is what most people do when you hire them. This is “black hat marketing” and is frowned upon by the search engines so be careful).

While it is fairly easy to manipulate links on a web page to try to achieve a higher ranking, it is harder to influence a search engine with external backlinks from other websites. This is one of the reasons why backlinks factor in so highly into a search engine’s algorithm. Lately the search engine’s criteria for quality inbound links has gotten even tougher to crack. Webmasters are getting smarter trying to achieve these inbound links by deceptive or sneaky techniques, such as with hidden links, or automatically generated pages whose sole purpose is to provide inbound links to websites. These pages are called link farms, and they are not only disregarded by search engines, but linking to a link farm could get your site banned entirely. You do NOT want that to happen, do you?

Another important reason to achieve quality backlinks is to entice visitors to come to your website. You can’t build a website, and then expect that people will find your website without you pointing the way. You will probably have to get the word out there about your site.