1. Facebook

The first on my list is Facebook.  People are checking Facebook as much as they are checking email.  This means that you have great opportunity to connect with your social network in real time.  Facebook provides you a place to ask questions, share ideas, handle complaints, build your brand authority and listen to your customers or “fans”.  You can setup a business page or group which will be different from your personal page.  Here you will be able to discuss your company concept, lead people back to your website, pull in your blog posts, share photos and engage your customers. Make sure you maintain your branding through your avatar and photos to maintain your brand consistency. Adding in “applications”, such as Social RSS, will allow you to pull in other media so dig around and find some useful tools that make keeping up with your social profiles much easier.

2. Twitter

The second big dog on the list is Twitter.  To Tweet or not to Tweet.  That is the question.  To truly leverage Twitter, you’ll want to learn and use a few more advanced tools. This includes desktop and mobile Twitter clients like TweetDeck , Seesmic , and Tweetie . Desktop clients give you more flexibility and more control over your Twitter strategy than you’ll have on the Twitter website as well as letting you update and engage your followers much quicker and easier.  These third party applications will allow you to group followers and perform specific searches to find topics of interest.  You can also monitor what your competition is up to.  Utilize the ability to alter your Twitter design to reflect your brand always maintaining that synergy.  Remember, when you are using Twitter think of it like a party or social gathering.  You wouldn’t just walk up to people and spitting out what it is that you want them to buy or hire you for.  Social media is about being “SOCIAL”.  Keep your blatant advertising to a minimum and engage people with similar interests to boost your fan base.  Developing these relationships is what will bring them back.

3. LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the third social platform of choice.  Here you can make professional connections, participate in interest groups where you can engage other LinkedIn users as well as drive visitors back to your website.  You can post your blog articles to your LinkedIn profile automatically which makes keeping fresh information out there much easier.  To fully capitalize on this social platform make sure your profile is completely filled out as well as having some good recommendations available for visitors to read.

Utilize your social platforms to drive visitors, consumers, followers and fans back to your “hub” or your website.  Your website is where you really sell your brand and tell the whole story.

The Brevard/Transylvania Chamber of Commerce hosted its annual business expo, complete with a carnival atmosphere, providing an opportunity for local businesses and non-profit organizations to meet each other as well as members of the general public.

Participants and organizers were pleased with the turnout.

Roughly 50 businesses and other organizations had booths at the event, which featured clowns, door prizes, food and beverages and a festive atmosphere.

Read the rest of the article by Mark Todd, The Transylvania Times Staff Writer

Once the website is setup, and the customers start rolling in, you will want to make ongoing changes. These could be very small, such as changing a phone number, or adding a news item. New products, or shifts in business direction, will necessitate larger updates to the site. Chances are, though, you will still be happy with the design, and it’s just the text that needs to be changed.

While the web design house did a great job, you don’t want to have to go back to them for every change. A hundred small changes in a year will leave you both frustrated, and is not economic for either party.

This is where a content management system (CMS) comes in. Sitting behind the scenes, it gives you the ability to maintain your own site.

No website larger than a few pages should be without a CMS to manage it.

What is a CMS?

A content management system is a software package specifically designed to manage a website. It is installed by the web designers, but intended to be used by you.

First off, it provides you with a simple, non-technical way of updating your content. This is typically (but not always) done via a web-based interface that works much like Word does.

Just point-and-click, type in the new words, and hit save. Your site is instantly updated.

Equally easy is adding new pages, deleting old ones, or restructuring the site to match your new business model.

The CMS also automates menial tasks, such as applying the same page layout and appearance across the site. Menus and other navigation are also automatically produced.

Along with the many other administrative tools, this leaves you to concentrate on the words, and not on the technology.

What are the benefits?

A content management system makes life much easier in many ways:

• You are no longer dependent on the web designers making changes for you.
• Changes can be made any time they are needed, day or night. This is increasingly important as your business comes to rely on the website as a communications channel.
• All the technical details are simply handled by the CMS, allowing anyone to manage and update the site.
• Multiple staff can keep the site up to date, instead of being restricted to just one person. The CMS will track who is doing what, avoiding potential confusion.
• You can even ensure that each staff person can only update the sections of the site they are responsible for.
• The CMS ensures that all the pages are consistent in design, and will build all the menus and other
  navigation for you.
• The many other powerful features of the CMS allows the site to grow in sync with your business.

And the cost?

The good news is that a lightweight CMS, suitable for a modest-sized website, is not expensive. It can be as low as a few thousand dollars, or simply a complementary part of the web design project.

Of course, if your site is larger, or has complex requirements, the cost of a matching CMS will also grow. After all, you get what you pay for.

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1. Who is your target audience?

Defining the target audience and their needs is an important first step in building your website and a critical element to increasing the loyalty on your site. Who are the people that will use your website? Engineers that require technical data or students looking for specific information for a term paper project? How do they like to receive and use the information they collect on the Internet? Is the visual impact more important or less important to effectively delivering your message? How can your site help satisfy the needs of your target audience? You can see that knowing your target audience is much more than figuring out the demographics like gender, age, education level and income.  Define your target audience and get to know them better than your competitors. After all, the only sustainable competitive advantage is the understanding you have of your customers that your competitors do not have.

2. What are the objectives of your website?

Is it already obvious to you why you need a website? For many companies it is not so much a clear strategy as it is wanting to keep up with the Jones’. “Our biggest competitor has a website and we don’t want to seem like they can do something we can’t.” If this is your reasoning for embarking on an e-commerce initiative, you need to take a step back and consider what a website could offer your customers that is of true value – rather than to forge ahead with no direction.

One of the most basic reasons for building an online presence is that a website serves as one more tool for communicating with your internal and external audiences cost-effectively and conveniently. Cost-effective in the sense that the Internet has allowed small, capital-limited businesses the chance to look a lot bigger than they really are – opening the door to an expanded marketplace. Small businesses are no longer restricted by their location and ability to touch the customer personally. Now, with an online presence that delivers targeted communications you can drive in traffic and connect with customers that would have been cost-prohibitive to reach using traditional marketing tools.

There are many reasons why your company should have a presence on the web. However, the only ones that matter are those that are customer-focused. This alternative channel of communication saves time for the visitor and permits her to access the information at her convenience. It also provides the ability for your company to capture information on your site visitors to build customer profiles and better serve your customers.

3. What does a visitor expect from your site?

If you have already developed a good understanding of your target audience, realizing the expectations of your site visitors becomes second nature. However, it is important to take the customer’s perspective to adequately define what your visitors expect from your site. Most Internet users will expect ease-of-use of your site as well as relevant information that makes their lives easier. These expectations go hand-in-hand with the assumption that your site will download quickly and look good. The average Internet user will wait no more than eight seconds before jumping to another page or stopping the transmission if the page is too slow to open.

Beyond these basic assumptions, depending on your business and target audience, some users will want to be entertained and be dissatisfied if the entertainment value does not meet their expectations. Others will look for ordering information, services, and company information. The expectations will vary from person to person, but if you have defined your target audience into the smallest segment possible, you will be able to meet your visitors’ expectations in both content and design of your website.

4. What do you want the visitor to leave with?

Once you have a solid understanding of what your site visitors expect from your site, you need to determine what it is that you want the visitor to leave with after visiting your website. Are you attempting to reduce the sales cycle time and want to ensure that your customer’s questions about your product’s performance and specifications are answered? Or are you looking to improve your brand image and need to find ways to enhance your offline brand online? Depending on your goals, you will want to develop different strategies for different goals.

5. Why should someone return to your site?

Is there any good reason that a visitor should bookmark your site so that he will return again? If not, what needs to be improved within your site plan that will encourage repeat visits? Although this question is last in this article, it is equally important to targeting the right audience. Whatever the objectives and reasons are for creating an online presence for your company, if you are not driving people back to your site, your website efforts are in vain. After all, why spend the time and money on developing a site if its only purpose is to keep your competition up to speed on what you are doing and how you market your business? In addition to this think about how you can encourage interactivity on your site to really engage your audience and bring them back.

Laying the foundation of your site by answering these five basic questions prior to building your site will allow you to develop an online presence that meets your business goals and encourages visitors to return to your site. The key to getting off on the right foot is to complete your homework prior to launching your web initiatives. Because the Internet is in a constant state of change, those of you who have already created your site can easily take a step back and apply these five areas to your existing site strategy to ensure a solid foundation that meets your customers’ expectations.

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Local search is not a huge traffic driver, but it is a good starting point for SEO: statistically, about 70% of the users use a local search engine or directory when they look to purchase products or services. Local targeting enables businesses to go specifically after their “ready to buy” consumers. Local listings give visibility without having to spend a fortune on other search engine marketing campaigns (like pay per click, sponsored listings, etc.).

The two main e-mail programs are designed for two major purposes. Promos are short, to the point e-mails with flashy images. These typically encourage the viewer to take immediate action. Immediate action can be a wide variety of things such as make a purchase or download something now. The other e-mail program are newsletters which push out much more information to boost your viewers trust and increase your credibility. By offering good quality FREE information to your viewers about your niche market they will view you as the authority on the topics thus trusting you when it comes time to make a purchase. This program works on a long term basis. You can mix the two programs but keep in mind the intended goal when hitting the send button.

Who should I send my e-mail campaigns out to?

Consider every contact point with your customers as an opportunity to gain their e-mail address and permission to send them your e-mail campaigns. Offer incentives that are exclusive on your e-mail campaigns to give people a reason to sign up.
There are e-mail address lists that you can buy but I would highly recommend staying away from them, in most cases they are scams and if they are selling lists to you that means the addresses have been bombarded with other e-mail campaigns. Just stay away.

How often should I send out a campaign?

The rule of thumb is to send out an e-mail campaign at least monthly and no more than twice a week. If you wait longer than one month your target audience might forget why they signed up in the first place and if you are slamming them with daily campaigns they will most likely get fet up with them and unsubscribe.