Traffic,Internet Marketing,SEO

The windy city of Chicago is a great location for business expansion. And every entrepreneur knows that a far-reaching online presence will directly impact their profitability. Enter Chicago SEO; and without warning, your online presence takes shape.

However, the fact of the matter still remains that search engine optimization is a largely misunderstood industry. Many business owners (myself included) are wary of those who make hard sells of what they can do for a small business site. We’ve all come across those ads or spammed email campaigns that promise to make your online presence as big as any of the multi-national corporations. All of these exaggerations and creative fabrications aren’t worth your time.

So, this past week, I took the time to interview several Chicago SEO experts, and my findings were really helpful. I’d inquired about why it takes so long to obtain a respectable Google page rank (PR), and other things that Internet newbies would be concerned about. I was surprised to hear that – although many of the schemers make claims – there really isn’t a surefire way to increase page ranking rapidly. I can’t tell you how many so-called experts made these kinds of promises.

In fact, they shared at least three things that will give you a better idea of the length of time it will take to achieve a desirable page ranking.

Firstly, you need to take the time to find out how hard your competition is working to secure a page ranking that gives them the upper hand. This kind of information will include the amount of time and money they are investing; as well as the quantity of their link count, and link growth.

Two: You will also need to find out how long they have been working towards their rank. If their website has been in existence for a few years, they have a considerable head start.

Three: You must also assess how passionate you are when it comes to gaining good page rank. If you are more passionate, you will invest your time streamlining your brand. Hire a Chicago SEO expert, and remember that you’ve got to market yourself if you wish to achieve a notable presence.

And no matter how many experts you talk to (e.g., a Las Vegas SEO consultant or a New York SEO consultant), they should all come to the same conclusion when asked about how rapidly page rank can be achieved. Taking into consideration all of the things that impact your page rank, you owe it to yourself to assemble a team of highly-skilled and reputable SEO and marketing consultants.

Mounting a successful Twitter marketing campaign demands that you plan ahead. You’ll need to formulate a solid plan of action that will form the basis of a long-lasting success. To do that, it’s essential that you take into account your company’s real situation, your market position, and where you’d like to get to in terms of market share. Devise a plan that takes into consideration both your current situation and your attainable goals.

It is certainly possible to be successful with Twitter marketing, but it’s by no means an easy road. Keep your chin up, put your best business sense forward, and arm yourself with a little know-how and you’ll be just fine.

Mounting a successful Twitter marketing campaign demands that you plan ahead. You’ll need to formulate a solid plan of action that will form the basis of a long-lasting success. To do that, it’s essential that you take into account your company’s real situation, your market position, and where you’d like to get to in terms of market share. Devise a plan that takes into consideration both your current situation and your attainable goals.

At the heart of a successful Twitter marketing campaign is the tweet. Without that, you won’t be successful, plain and simply. If you aren’t prepared to post regular and interesting tweets, don’t bother with Twitter marketing. If your tweets are sporadic, you’ll lose followers much quicker than you could ever recoup them and soon you’ll discover that the tweets you do send will be falling on deaf ears.

The reason behind the consistent tweet is this: Customers and clients want to know that you care about them and appreciate their business enough to take the time to stay in contact with them. But don’t look at Twitter as a one-way street! Oh, no! To really be successful with a Twitter marketing initiative you need to get involved. Become a follower of other, like-minded Twitter users and you’ll create a reciprocal relationship that opens up more opportunities to market your business.

One last thing: When promoting your business on Twitter, it’s important to use all of the tools at your disposal, including the services offered by companies like uSocial.net. Take a few moments to subscribe to their newsletter!

In our past issue, we discovered the ways on how you can get people to like your Facebook business page. In this issue, we will talk about how you can take full advantage of promotions, contests, and giveaways to attract more individuals.

Utilizing a social media management site exclusively for promotions, contests and giveaways is a very good way to measure whether these said advertising tactics is working for your business. The site allows anyone to find out the amount of traffic that comes to their page.

This can be a double win situation too because making the promotion exclusive will acquire a new set of Facebook fans which is necessary to the development and maintenance of the company’s social network page. Contests give a touch of enthusiasm to your site.

Now that you know this, let’s move on to how you can implement Facebook marketing and go about making traffic-pulling contests and promos.

The first thing you’d want to do is to be sure that the updates and contest mechanics are only visible to your Facebook users. Be certain that you don’t promote it in your newsletters, social networks or even in the official website. You can however say that the contest is exclusive for Facebook users only. Also, it’s important that the mechanics are straightforward. Complicated mechanics will discourage your fans to join.

As an early warning, contests, incentives and promotions tend to be costly as the applications needed to produce and run it are also expensive. For example, the application Wildfire has a $5 setup fee and charges $0.99 for each day the campaign runs. In addition to that, Facebook has strict rules when it comes to running contests inside their network. Generally, a lot of various contests are not even permitted. You are not allowed to have an official contest posted in your wall.

There are some exemptions though. In order for a competition to be applicable, the business must be able to buy $10,000 worth of Facebook ads in a length of three months.

To be able to cut costs, there are plenty of business applications which can assist you in creating a contest for your Fan page. Contests for Fan page is an application that was created by Wildfire and can help neophytes in developing contests with photo, video, writing and graphical entries. You can also pimp out your campaign as much as you want with these tools. You can change the look of graphics ,control contest mechanics, deadlines as well as the level of response of people in your network. To make navigation very easy, consider placing a contest widget in your Fan Page so the competitors will be able to link instantly to a mini site. There are also other contest creator tools like Vertigo and Strutta.

Part of bringing in many participants is providing a really irresistible reward. A company named Regus, for example, offered a fully supplied workspace for the photo entry which showed the messiest office. See this as a model when coming up with your own contest. Think of prizes such as tickets to the most sough-after concert in town.

A contest that’s managed successfully will definitely generate lots of potential customers to the business. For some small businesses, tasks like these may need a great deal of attention. However, this can be among the list of most efficient techniques to raise business awareness on Facebook.

Be sure to read our next issue of Facebook for Business.We are going to talk about a few tips for making money on Facebook.