VISIBIITY = OPPORTUNITY
As of this writing, there are over 1.8-billion people who use the Web to find something.
Visibility equals opportunity. No matter how great or unique you think you are, if your prospective audiences or customers can’t find you on the Web, it’s like you don’t exist.
Here’s a basic formula you can consider adopting to get you star-ted with creating a visible pre-sence on the Web which may result in generating more opportunities for yourself or your business in terms of media queries, possible leads, new prospects and business opportunities.
CREATE YOUR OWN BLOG
Start a blog. It’s the basic building block and a jump off point for getting your message out to the world. A blog is far less expensive to build, design, maintain and update than a traditional static website that may cost you thousands of dollars.
Keep in mind that a blog is a search engine magnet. When you post consistently and constantly, the search engines tend to index your content more frequently. Also, using keywords relevant to what your target audience is looking for gives your content a good chance of being in the top results in searches. You become visible and searchable on the Web.
There are many blogging platforms each with pros and cons. For example, if you’re a newbie, WordPress.com is a good place to start. If you’re a techie, WordPress.org is another alternative but if not, then TypePad might suit you better.
It would also be good to remember just these few things BEFORE you start:
1) There’s more to promoting yourself by blogging than first meets the eye. The more preparation and thought you put into your blog, the higher your chances of success will be. Once you’ve done the prep work behind building the ‘physical’ site of your blog, all you’ll really have at that point is a potentially powerful marketing tool for creating a highly visible presence on the Web.
2) Content is King, that is, content that is so compelling that it draws visitors like a magnet. Write stuff which makes your blog come up in a way that it becomes a resource that people like to talk about and share it with others. Viral appeal is the thing to go after – something to recommend, something to remember, something to link to all because your content gives people a reason to. It is not enough for people to know ‘where’ to visit. You need to give them the ‘why’.
3) Some websites are liked while others are loved. But the most successful are needed. When writing content, aim to get your blog known for the right reasons (quality content) and by showing rather than telling. Demonstrate your value and expertise by getting your blog known for doing good things for them. There is tremendous value in being the source, tool, service or expert.
4) Simplify things, especially needlessly complicated things. Also, more than anything else, blogs written in this fashion attract attention precisely because of that.
GET SMART USING FACEBOOK
With nearly half a billion users, you’ve got to have a presence on Facebook. So there’s not much debate about this especially from a visibility point of view. The surge of social networking in 2009 has seen social traffic begin to rival search traffic and the giants of the Web, including Google, are paying very close attention to this trend. Just imagine, nearly 45% of social sharing on the Web today is now driven by Facebook (Twiter has about 29%) and that percentage has the potential of getting even much bigger!
How do you do it? It’s rather simple really. Syndicate your blog on your Face-book page.
Facebook has three standard profile page apps (see images below). The first of these – the ‘Note’ button, virtually pulls your blog content into your profile page and ensures your deeper content is front and center for people who land on this page who aren’t familiar with your blog. The other two apps – the ‘Like’ and ‘Share’ action links allow for more dissemination of your content over the net-work.
The combination of these three Facebook apps on your profile page alone is one savvy tactic that can drive many qualified prospects back to your blog home base.
LEARN TO USE TWITTER FOR YOURSELF
You want to make sure your message is on a popular micro-blogging platform like Twitter.com as well.
It is estimated that there are some 40-million Twitter updates every day with Tweets showing up in real-time search results.
Using tools like http://search.twitter.com and Twitter management clients like TweetDeck and HootSuite also enables you to search and follow keywords that are critical to having your content show up using tags when your target audiences do their search on the Web.
To make life easier for you, learn to use plug-ins such as Twitter Tools on WordPress or automation services like twitterfeed or SocialOomph to make sure your blog posts and announcements are being fed to your Twitter stream on an ongoing basis.
RELATED POSTS: | Genie in the Bottle | How To Use Facebook For Business |
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Learn more about what the author of this blog does in the field of social media, information, communications and technology through Digital Summit.
good one karl …i was pleasantly surprised to see that my nephew..jack who is a born genius by the way also clicked and like your piece…small wwwurl
) ill be down there to visit you in 2011…