I’ve got my small business online. Now what do I do? Here’s some advice from Bruce Freeman, who writes the Small Business Professor column for Scripps Howard News Service.
Freeman: Many entrepreneurs have imposed on friends, relatives and the son of the neighbor to get them online without thinking about the ongoing life of the website. Miranda Tan, CEO and founder of MyPRGenie Inc., a public relations, social media and marketing platform, offers these tips:
Keep it current. Your website is a living, breathing presentation of you and your company and it needs to be kept up-to-date, infused with new information and looking appealing.
Make the news relevant. The content need not always be about your company or yourself. You should post news about your industry or your region as applicable. Remember, the goal is for it to be entertaining or informative for your audiences.
Promote your company and yourself. Don’t get so interested in making the site flashy that you forget your main objective — most often, to provide information to prospects and move them toward a sale. Make that process quick and easy.
Include video. Whether you shoot it with your cell phone or a professional video set-up, video tells a story better than anything else. Be sure to incorporate at least one customer case study on your home page.
In terms of the tools to get this done, chances are the person who built the site would be glad to post information, and update the content and graphics as needed.
Second, your chief goal is driving traffic to your site. Be sure the web address is listed in all your communications, including LinkedIn and Twitter. Third, you can take advantage of easy-to-use low cost sites like ours, that have built-in features for posting news, selecting a distribution list and sending it out to your desired audience.
With the use of any full service-marketing platform, it is easy to maintain and update a newsroom, your social networks and media such as photos and videos. These web platforms provide you with simple, easy-to-follow instructions. Often search engine optimization is bundled in, which automatically increases your online exposure without any additional steps.
Bottom line. Connect online in a dynamic, ever-changing and informative way and your audience will come back. To paraphrase Field of Dreams, if you only build it, they won’t come. But if you energize it, they will.
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