Are you using this clever Facebook strategy to boost your B2B sales?
Most of us have developed at least fair skills at Google searches, but for many small business owners there may be a search platform that will pay far quicker dividends than Google. I’m talking about Facebook. Searching Facebook is, in many ways, the same as searching Google – at least for people, places, and keywords. The only thing you need to keep in mind is that you’re searching within the community of Facebook users and the content they create. If what you are searching for is buried somewhere within Facebook, there’s a good chance you’ll find it. If you’re in the B2B sector, you can get a lot of valuable information and connect with businesses easily using Facebook search. Here’s how it’s done: Search for the type of business that interests you, Select “Pages” and “See All,” Click to and examine the each business page to determine your level of interest, Note contact information and other details, such as the size of the business’ following, and Use Facebook Messenger to directly contact the business, if appropriate to your strategy. Let me show you For my illustration, I did a search for “restaurants in Florida.” That’s a pretty huge category. You can narrow it down significantly by using search terms like “restaurants in [city name}” or even “restaurants near me.” Note that Facebook, like Google, makes suggestions as you’re entering your search terms. I could have searched for “mom and pop restaurants in florida.” The first search results page that Facebook delivers includes a wide range of categories. For the most part, you’ll want to drill down to business Pages. However, there might be some cases when you’ll want to see “People” or see posts by your friends. Discovering your friends’ activity within your search criteria could be extremely valuable. For example, you might find that you have a friend who could make an important introduction for you. You might also uncover a Facebook Group related to your search that you should join. However, going to the full list of business pages will probably be the way you most often navigate from the initial search results page. Once you start examining each business page, you can glean a wealth of information. For example, if the page has a lot of followers, you can estimate how big it is and consequently what kind of budget it has for your product or services and perhaps even the likelihood that it needs what you sell. Basic information such as a phone number, business hours, and website URL are also listed. For many retail businesses, you’ll be able to see when they are the busiest, so you can avoid making contact during those hours. Also, take a few moments to scroll through posts. You might discover the name of the owner or manager and you’ll also start to get a feel for the “culture” of the business. You might find shared areas of interest, which you can use to build rapport. One of the biggest benefits of using Facebook business pages is your ability to send a quick note via Facebook Messenger to the business. Don’t jump into an immediate sales mode, but use it to introduce yourself or your business and compliment the business you’re making contact with. Use Messenger to build a...
read moreGet 100s of blog topics with one word and one click
For anyone tasked with the care and feeding of a blog, the single biggest problem in the long run is brainstorming worthy topics. Further, in the perfect world, the topics you cover in your blog would coincide with the topics people are investigating on the Internet. When those two areas overlap, you increase your ability to reach people through organic search engine inquiries. This can be especially powerful if you create content that Google uses in what we call search engine “position zero,” and giving you a chance to earn that position is the goal of this article. However, let me first take a moment to explain position zero. Often, an explanatory paragraph will appear at the top of Google search results, above “regular” listings of website pages. Below is an example when I searched Google for the best time to plant grass seeds. I’m sure you recognize this kind of information that often appears at the top of search result pages. It can take different formats, such as recipes and visual galleries. But the kind we’ll be discussing are generally short paragraphs or numbered lists. Now for the strategy: If you write blog articles that answer questions people ask on Google, you can get a chance to be listed in the coveted position zero. There are two basic strategies you have to follow to have a chance at this: Have your blog written in a way that tells Google you are answering a specific question, and Know the questions people ask. Writing and organizing your article Google publishes concise answers in these snippets. In other words, you can’t take five paragraphs to answer the question. You can take more space to expand on your answer, but you need to state the question and give the answer very succinctly. My grass seed example, comes from a page that answers several questions about planting grass. The question appears at the top of the page as a link to the answer below – where the question is asked again and answered in a short paragraph: If you want the chance to grab one of these spots, repeat a question word-for-word, and then answer it in a short paragraph. It must be clear to search engine crawlers that you are answering a specific question. Finding relevant topics For content, your goal is to write articles that answer questions that are often asked on Google. Perhaps the easiest way to do this is to do a keyword search at Answer the Public. Enter just one solid keyword or keyword phrase on this website and you’ll get a long list of questions you can use for blog topics. Below you’ll see the results when I entered the keyword “travel.” One thing I really like about this site is that you can download your results in a comma separated file so you can bring the questions into a spreadsheet. Once you do that, you can mix up questions on a variety of keywords related to your industry and then create a content calendar for your business. I have some final advice and a couple of warnings for you before we leave the topic. First, if you are primarily a local business, where appearing in local searches is your bread and butter, don’t put a tremendous...
read moreThis week in small business: Get ‘into the zone’ and take your productivity to the max!
This week’s collection of curated content reveals the connection between respect and productivity, how attention management will get you “into the zone,” and what keeps 22 successful entrepreneurs inspired to keep on keeping on! Leadership, management, and productivity Lynn Tesoro, Co-Founder and CEO of the HL Group is the focus on this installment of Laura Emily Dunn’s Women in Business Q&A. Need to hook up with a WordPress developer? Matteo Duo will show you the ropes. Victor Lipman makes some great points on the links between respect and productivity. Anyone who manages others needs to know these things. The same old productivity strategies don’t work anymore, says Maura Thomas, so it’s time to get “into the zone” via attention management. Marketing and sales Ivan Ivanov gives a good run down on the important differences between driving traffic to your site via search engine optimization and social media marketing. Ignite Visibility CEO John Lincoln goes point-by-point in this piece on how to start a social media marketing strategy. If you have a blog, you need to see Joe Goers’ eight simple ways to improve your SEO results. Christine Yodsukar gives us five practical social media marketing tips that will improve sales. In her Entrepreneur article, Emily Richett explains how having just a few loyal fans can make a big difference. Entrepreneurship, startups, and innovation Overnight success takes a while, and Paulina Guditch makes this point very well in her Forbes article, Why You Need To Dedicate At Least Four Years To Your Startup Idea. Need some gas in your tank? Nina Zipkin talked to 22 successful entrepreneurs to find out what inspires them to keep...
read moreCybercrime: Discover how many times your luck has run out
Are you feeling lucky today? No, that’s not the right question. The better question is: Are you feeling brave today? I say this because luck has nothing to do with the outcome of what I’m going to ask you to do, however, you’ll need pretty steely nerves to take my dare. (Faced with potentially bad news, many people just turn their backs or plug their ears.) Here’s what I’d like you to do: Head over to Have I been pwned, and no, that’s not a typo (I’ll explain in a moment), Next, enter the main email address you use on the Internet, then go back in time and enter some of your older email addresses. Have I been pawned will show you if your email, password, and other pieces of personal information have been stolen through one or more known data breaches and distributed on the dark web. Please note that the database here only includes information from known data breaches. Unfortunately, these breaches often happen without the responsible parties knowing for months or even years. An unsavory ‘stuffing’ Now let’s put your results in perspective. When cybercriminals get their hands on your information they start a process called “credential stuffing.” This is simply taking the addresses, usernames, passwords, and “stuffing” them into logins around the web. They have programs that do this automatically so they can stuff thousands of login credentials into thousands of websites in a matter of moments. So if you use the same email address/username and password to log into Disqus that you use for your bank, the bad guys can hack your bank account. (By the way, I specifically mentioned Disqus here because in October 2017 they announced a breach that exposed 17.5 million login credentials. When did the breach occur? Back in July 2012. Thank you Disqus .) How to protect yourself I hope that you’re sufficiently terrorized at this point and perhaps even thinking about never using online services again. However, we know that that’s not the answer and fortunately there is a good solution to this problem: Password managers. As you probably recognize, credential stuffing only leads to successful hacking when people use the same password on multiple websites. And, if you’re trying to keep track of your passwords by some old-fashioned system, such as depending on your memory or sticky notes, you tend to rely on one or two passwords. With a password manager, every site you frequent can have its own password and trust me, a password-manager-created password will be much longer and more “unguessable” than anything you can come up with on your own. I just asked my password manager to create a password 12 characters long and here’s what it gave me: grj7defK/YPz. I personally know many extremely Internet-savvy experts who still aren’t using a password manager, so that makes me think that among average users, password manager usage is minimal. Believe me, once you adopt one, you’ll wonder how you ever survived without it. Okay, now for the origin of the word “pwned” as I promised above. In the online gaming world, when someone loses, they say that he has been “owned.” However, because P and O are neighbors on the keyboard, this often results in a typo creating the word pwned instead of...
read moreJoin me for magical mystery tour of website analytics and SEO!
Do you like a good mystery? If you do, come with me on a little journey. I won’t take much of your time and along the way we might solve an online mystery you’ve experienced. I was reviewing a list of websites that had referred visitors to my site and I found that a few visitors had come from a Yellowstone area travel website. I recognize most of the referring websites on the list, and of course sources like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are always at the top. But I wondered why and how were visitors coming to my site from this travel website. I clicked on the link to find the backlink to my website. I examined the page and found nothing; there was no link to my site from this page that presumably sent visitors to my site. I wondered how are people traveling from a Yellowstone area travel website to SusanSolovic.com if there is no link connecting the two sites? After doing a little research I found the answer: the Yellowstone area travel site hadn’t sent any visitors to my homepage. Zero. Zip. Nada. The “statistic” in my analytics that told me a couple of visitors had come from that site was plain wrong. My analytics had been “gamed.” But what is worse is that I fell into the trap set by these bogus “visits.” I clicked the link back to the Yellowstone travel page in my attempt to find the reference to my website. In other words, while I originally thought the travel site had boosted my visitors, I had, in fact, boosted the visitors to the travel site; the Yellowstone site had pulled the old switcheroo on me. The folks at the Yellowstone travel site may not even understand the situation. Here’s what I believe has happened: The good people leading tourist groups at our premiere national park probably signed up with an agency (right now there are some based in China that are doing this) that promised to increase their web traffic. The agency then makes various websites (and Google analytics) believe that traffic is coming from the Yellowstone site. Finally, a curious website owner (like me) clicks on a link within analytics to find the referring link. Ta-da! The Yellowstone travel site has one more visitor to its homepage. This is one black hat SEO tactic that is being used today. There are others done by agencies that will send ghost visits to your site that will register on Google analytics and make it look like your traffic is surging. Unscrupulous website owners will then use this increased traffic to make their site look good to advertisers. That’s not what the Yellowstone travel site was doing. I believe they just wanted to pull more visitors into their site. The problem is that the kind of visitors that come by a tactic like this are not interested in the product or service the website sells. It’s better to have 10 qualified prospects a day visit your site than 1,000 random web surfers who end up on your homepage through some digital slight of hand. This situation can be avoided if you remember some universal truths: There is no such thing as a free lunch. You have to earn qualified prospects. When it seems...
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