Archive for October, 2011

Steve Breault, Co-Founder, S.E.M. Masters

There are people who do not like to mix their business relationships and personal connections together on Facebook; which is really the best option for people who are looking to improve their business connections. If you are in that category of people, Facebook Fan Page might just be what you need to keep a following of your personal connections separate from your business dealings. Facebook is a social networking site that offers businesses the distinctive opportunities to relate with existing and potential customers.

Creating and maintaining a Facebook Fan Page for your business is an innovative way of building a large network of followers often with a wider demography. It is a means of advertising your business online for free and it gives you the platform for communicating with your existing and potential customers directly with the benefit of getting a firsthand feedback of what is the current needs and wants within your business market sector. As one of the beneficial internet marketing services tools, Facebook has the potential of affecting your business positively.

How to make a Facebook Fan Page a success: Here are some useful suggestions for making your Facebook Fan Page grow your business:-

Connect with your website and other networks and make your fan page informative: Use RSS feed to integrate your fan page with your website or blog and make sure it gets a stream of quality and fresh content regularly to serve as a resource and means of providing useful information to your followers. Also, you can connect with a movement or networks of people within your business sector and offer support so that they too can connect with you and hence drive traffic to your fan page. You can even integrate media that will benefit your customers in your Facebook fan page.

Look for ways to make your fan page interactive: Once you build up your fans to a level, they will begin to interact and you can get feedback from them but before you reach this stage, you can deliberately make people participate through competitions or by offering a free give-away or making them to vote or just creating a way for them to engage themselves in beneficial activities in order to sustain their interests in your page.

How to create a Facebook Fan Page: There are a few simple steps involved when you want to create a fan page for your business and here are the steps:-

1. Use the URL http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php to get started with creating your fan page. This page gives you six categories to choose from and they are: local business or place, company or organization or institution, brand or product, artist, band or public figure, entertainment and cause or community.

2. Select the option that is appropriate for you. If you own an online store, select ‘’brand or product’’ and from the drop down menu, select the brand or product that applies to you.  From here, you will be able to complete your Facebook Fan Page within 5 minutes or less and get it published live including uploading pictures and business logo.

Steve Breault, Co-Founder, S.E.M. Masters

We are living in an age when technological breakthroughs have transformed the way we do things which includes the way we use our mobile phones. The benefits of mobile websites for business should never be underrated. Early-on mobile phones were large and cumbersome yet people got very used to having a phone that gave them access to friends, family and business instantly.

Today, our cell phones have become smaller and are  loaded with more functions making them look like mini computers, hence people can do a lot more with their smartphones than just making calls or sending text messages. Additionally, there are millions of people, and still expanding, all over the world who have smart phones so that mobile websites have lots of benefits for businesses which can’t be ignored by internet marketing services experts and every entrepreneur who has a business on the internet. Here are some of the numerous advantages of having mobile websites for promoting a business.

A mobile website makes a business easily accessible with the aid of mobile phones: Gone were the days when people turned to yellow pages to find a business and gone were the days when web surfers used online search on their computers to find the information they wanted. Today, majority of people have smart phones with which they go through their emails when they are not at their computers – which most often happens because people seldom sit at home nowadays. Imagine if such people get to your email and tap your business link but it fails to work on their mobile phones because your website is dominantly flash, chances are that they will close it and move on to something else and I know you wouldn’t want that to happen. So, mobile website is a must when it comes to people accessing your website with smart phones.

Mobile websites provides instant marketing, more information and it is more responsive to search results: Smart phones have limited screen space where mobile website pages are displayed; hence, the reason the website design is done with the aim of utilizing maximum information in the minimum space available thereby making more information about your products and services available on a page and search results more responsive.

A mobile website can be used as a companion site that links and directs traffic to your other business sites or your social networking sites: You are providing a complete online experience to your potential customers and customers alike when you have a mobile website version of your business website. This is simply true because you can create links to the main page of your business website and other websites like your social networking sites that provides information about your products, services or your brand through seamless integration.

If a company that does not have a website or online presence as at today is practically working to fail, then if your company does not have a mobile website it is potentially working to lose customers to your competitors who are more connected to the customers in the real world with higher speed mobile website and having the advantage of showing up more in search engine result pages.

Steve Breault, Co-Founder, S.E.M. Masters

There are many entrepreneurs who own businesses and have invested a great deal of time and money in a bid to promote their businesses online, but have neglected the offline promotion potential.

Here lies a great opportunity to generate a lot of traffic that can become paying customers of your products and services. Although the Internet has come of age, yet the whole world is yet to completely revolve around the World Wide Web. Here are some proven ways you can do offline promotion of your business with the aim of increasing traffic to your website and business.  To ignore some of these methods would be the death to your marketing efforts.

1. Use Auto license plates: It is not uncommon to find yourself staring at the license plate of an automobile in front of you while you are stuck in traffic. The auto license plate of your car is the right place for your website URL to be ingrained discreetly accompanied with a short slogan or tagline with the hope that someday, someone who was once behind you in traffic will be your next customer.

2. Buy and distribute bookmarks imprinted with your business name and website URL: Books are common in most homes. Why can’t you get your company name and website URL imprinted in a bookmark and distribute bunch of bookmarks by handing them out one-by-one to everyone you meet?

3. Setup a postcard marketing campaign: It is most certain people will read their postcards first when they sort through their mails before they care to read any other item. Grab this advantage and get your business promotion messages out on postcards.

4. Use printed flyers to drive offline traffic: Though we are in a modern age yet flyers are still relevant as means for offline marketing campaign. Print and distribute a bunch of flyers all over your neighborhood and town and use incentives to get recipients to act NOW.

5. Car and refrigerator magnets are also relevant for the offline promotion of your business: Car and refrigerator magnets have always been relevant as means of promoting a business offline. People use their refrigerators very often in a day and with your company refrigerator magnets conspicuously displayed on the refrigerators of many homes, you can be sure your business URL will catch the attention of many people while eating their meals, paying the bills or doing a host of other things because refrigerators are usually placed in the kitchen where most of these activities are carried out in a home.

Car magnets work just like the refrigerator magnets. The promotional results of custom made car magnets could be imagined if you consider how many eyeballs will see your business name and website URL when you ride in your car just leisurely within the neighborhood and everywhere you go.

6. Use promotional items like t-shirts sweat shirts, caps, coffee mugs, luggage tags-for people who travel frequently etc., all work well for offline promotion of a business. Print your company URL on many of these items and give them out to as many people as you can.

Steve Breault, Co-Founder, S.E.M. Masters

Are you wondering why your website has yet to gain the desired traffic through search engine result pages despite your entire efforts even though you have expended many months trying to get it right? You must understand the need for your efforts to be well directed at appropriating the three important SEO tools which are quality content, quality backlinks and targeting the right keywords. Content is king when it comes to Destin SEO Services , but backlinks from quality and relevant websites carry heavy weight in the search engines.  To ignore either would spell death to your SEO efforts.

Why backlinks and quality content are very important for your SEO efforts: If you have decided to put your business on the internet, it is imperative for you to make some crucial decisions. The first of these decisions is your website design, then the content and afterward comes the marketing of your business website. Realize that you will not gain traffic for your website just by putting up a well-designed webpage even if you have paid an experienced website designer the most money to design the best looking website for you. Proper SEO techniques will always be needed for the search engines like Google, MSN, Bing and Yahoo to index your website. Search engines use artificial intelligence with very elaborate algorithms to scrutinize every website they come across either through crawling when the website is submitted to the search engine or simply by following a link from another website to yours. Either way, backlinks and quality content are needed to make your SEO efforts succeed.

What your website will gain when you regularly post quality content: Fresh and quality content on a website helps make your website valuable and a reliable source of information to visitors. The more useful information web surfers get from your website through quality content, the higher the traffic it will gain and Google will give much importance to it which translates to a high ranking placement for your website in search engine page reports. With quality and fresh content, your website will attract more readers, it will improve its chances of getting valuable links naturally to its content and search engines will rank it high because Google and other search engines like original and quality website content.

Importance of quality backlinks to your SEO efforts: A website that has a number of backlinks from reputable websites stands the chance of being reckoned with by search engines. A backlink to your website offers online users the opportunity of visiting your online business when it is clicked on in another website. The more quality backlinks your website enjoys the more overall popularity it will have among search engines and its visibility to many potential customers when they search the internet for information relevant to the content of your website. Internet marketing services professionals and Destin SEO Services experts uses press releases, article submission to article directories, social networking and blog posting to get quality backlinks needed to show how important a website is to search engines and hence have a better placement in search engine page results using the most ethical method.

Steve Breault, Co-Founder, S.E.M. Masters

WordPress blog has become the leader over traditional HTML website because Google loves WordPress since it is good at creating and optimizing search engine friendly content.  Besides being easily indexed by Google, a WordPress blog is one of the best Internet marketing strategies available today and many internet marketing services professionals have discovered the uniqueness of WordPress in assisting the growth of an internet based business.

While you will need to upload your website pages every time you post new content on a static HTML website, WordPress allows you to add and update your website content without experiencing any user difficulty even if you are a newbie. Every time you update or add new content, the subscribers of your WordPress blog will receive your posts in their email and there are many other substantial benefits that cannot be overlooked when you use WordPress as your business website. Here are some reasons why WordPress is the best website for your business.

WordPress offers your business great theme options, enhanced features, creativity and great Content Management System (CMS): WordPress offers your business great theme options, enhanced features and plugins from which you can select your preferred option for your chosen niche market or any other specific needs. WordPress also offer you excellent and powerful content management system (CMS) that allows your website to store things like images, audio and video files and even PDF files easily and it helps you upload any of these files to your website without any complications. If you choose to be creative or productive in publishing your posts, WordPress features helps your creativity with many useful features. The numerous plugins WordPress offers will help you achieve the goals of your online business whether they are short or long term goals.

WordPress offers link and integrates your business with social media networks easily and it offers in-built RSS feed for content syndication and for traffic generation: Social media networks offers online business owners great opportunity because many internet web surfers who are potential customers of your online business are users of social media networks in their efforts to connects with friends and family. WordPress provides your business the needed link it requires to social media networks and helps it integrate well without any hassle thereby making your business to be seen and known in the social loop in a very creative way where it matters most through the numerous plugins and widgets you can choose from. The in-built RSS feed it provides helps your website attract more traffic at no cost to you when compared to the traditional HTML website where you will have to pay a website design professional in order to create the RSS feed for you.

It is far less expensive to have your business website built with WordPress than having a static HTML website developed. With the in-built SEO application in WordPress, your Destin SEO services expert and in fact, you can easily incorporate all the page details needed to make your website rank well in search engine result pages.