The challenge for many small businesses is to obtain a high quality, professional Web presence that is affordable and easy to keep fresh with new content. On top of that, business owners are hearing that if they blog, tell stories and keep people aprised of what they are up to, they will help increase their chance of being found through search engines.

So how do you maximize your Web presence without breaking your marketing budget?

For most small businesses, building your Web site in WordPress will help you achieve what you are looking for. You can get a quality web site that is easy to update and maintain, support all the multimedia features you want to keep it interesting, while having the ability to add a blog if you are ready to take that step.

I’m still finding small business owners are confused as to what they truly need when it comes to the Web. What is necessary is a place you can call your home base. This home base is where you should be directing everyone through your calls to action in your marketing campaigns. This one place should tell your prospect why they want to do business with you. And, this one place should have everything you need to keep your visitors engaged. You should strive to combine your Web site and blog into one Web property that does it all for you. If you have two separate sites – one for your static Web site and one for your blog – you risk splitting your traffic between the two and you may just find yourself

If you are starting to develop a social media strategy, be sure this Web presence is solid so that when you point people to it from your LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or Google profile, you will be proud.

Why WordPress?

[/caption]I have finally moved all of my client’s Web sites to WordPress and have trained them on how to update their content. This has liberated many of them, helping them keep their Web site up to date with news, events and content that attracts their ideal clients. In my opinion, the following are the key benefits for building your Web presence in WordPress:

• It is easy for anyone to add, change and update content – This is a real benefit to businesses that sell services. Sharing your expertise through articles, a blog or other types of content keeps your Web site interesting and up-to-date and helps you demonstrate how you help your customers.
• The developer community has built an enormous number of quality plugins  – This enables you to include complex features, such as embedding video, audio, image galleries, flash, and secure email forms without having to know how to write code. This reduces development time, thereby reducing the overall cost of building the site. In my experience, if I search for “wordpress plugin xyz feature”, I usually come up with a plugin that does what I want.
• The business can grow their Web presence as needed – Start with a web site using only the page template and add a blog when you are ready for that option. Businesses don’t feel like they have to know everything about how their site will look to get something done. They can add new areas of pages (if the theme is set up to accomodate), change content and add the blog without a major redesign.
• The site takes less time to set up – The structure of the site can be set up in a much shorter timeframe than developing a web site using html. If the business owner has the time or another resource, they can enter the content themselves, reducing the overall cost of the site to create.
• WordPress templates extend the design capability – You don’t have to have just one page template for the whole site. You can create different templates and apply them to pages to create a customized look for various sections.
• WordPress sites are search engine friendly – You still have to ensure other SEO (search engine optimization) techniques are used, but the structure of the site (page names/categories/tags) are all used to help the search engines index the site better. Two plugins that help with this is All in One SEO Pack and Google Sitemap Generator which creates an XML sitemap supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.
• Your site can be mobile ready with a simple plugin – By installing the WordPress Mobile Edition plugin, you can support mobile devices such as iPhone, Blackberry Storm and other powerful smart phones without a lot of additional development. Mobile support has become a must for all web sites now given the number of people who access the Internet from their mobile device.

The following sites are all created with WordPress. These examples illustrate the creative sites you can achieve using this platform. In addition, even though these sites are a tad complex, they all support mobile devices.

So the bottom line is this: small business owners – take the plunge and get your web site built on WordPress. Many Web developers can do this for you. Find someone who understands the online marketing world and can help you set up a Web presence that helps you grow your business.

For a really comprehensive discussion about building a WordPress Web site, read the blog post Guide to Your First WordPress Web Site by Jerry at Web Hosting: Secret Revealed.

Slides 3 & 4:

Let’s discuss what marketing is all about. To me, marketing is educating your customer about why they should do business with you. Marketing is helping the customer realize the value you provide by eliminating a problem or satisfying a need.

Good marketing will attract your ideal client, retain existing clients, encourages referrals and helps you avoid price wars.

Marketing is not specifically advertising, sales or public relations. These are strategies that you could select as part of your overall marketing plan. Marketing is also not your Web site or blog, a brochure or a business card. These are tools of marketing to be used to effectively build awareness for your products and services.

Slides 5:

A marketing plan gives you direction and clarity on how you will market your business. By following a plan, you are also more likely to be able to measure your results. You won’t be reactive in your marketing, spending money and not following through. The plan will help you define what you do, why you are the best, who needs what you do and how to attract them. Another key point of the marketing plan is that it will help you determine the overall budget so you can allocate sufficient funds to successfully follow through.

Slides 6 through 15:

The key parts to the plan include:

• Define your vision and goals - What do you want your business to look like in 5 years, 3 years and 1 year? Answering these questions helps you frame your marketing plan to ensure you are moving in the right direction. If you don’t want to build a large firm with multiple crews, your marketing needs to focus on things that drive enough business that you can handle yourself or with a subcontractor if need be. Once you have your vision, your goals are developed to help you reach your 1 year plan.
• Identify your ideal client and how you are different from your competition - Who do you want to work with, who would benefit from working with you and how are you better than others that do what you do? Not all customers will be ideal and understanding why helps you avoid customers that drain you.
• Develop your core message - What problems does your ideal client want fixed or what needs do they wish to fulfilled? Speaking to your customers on how you can help them enables you to develop a relationship that establishes trust. When a customer trusts you, they are more likely to do business with you.
• Create your brand identity - What image do you want to project? Your image should align with your vision, values and goals so it does not send a conflicting message to your customers. Once you have established your brand image and identity, use it consistently throughout all of your marketing efforts.
• Determine your marketing strategy, tactics and budget – What activities will you use to build awareness of your business? Understanding your customer and how they purchase your type of service will help you determine what will work and what won’t. Think about all the ways you can reach your customer, how much it will cost both in terms of money and resources and select those that you know you can implement. If you plan out for 6 months to a year, you can manage your budget more effectively and find the time to work a tactic completely.
• Create sales tools to support the tactics and build your database of prospects and customers - What supporting materials do you need to help you sell your services? Web site, blog, brochures, business cards, signs, promotional items (pens and apparel) and other items can be designed to help you get your message to your customer. Wait until you’ve determined your strategy and tactics to avoid creating sales tools that are not needed, thereby wasting valuable budget.
• Execute, track and measure results – Are the activities you are doing working? Take on only the activities that you can complete and measure. Working a strategy half way only sets you up for failure.

This is a really brief overview of how to develop a marketing plan for your business. I’d love to hear from home services professionals about whether you have a marketing plan and if so, how it works for you. What types of activities are the most successful and which did not work at all.

Type #1 – Endless Sales Pitches

If your Twitter stream looks like the image below, well I’m not interested. Any type of multi-level marketing scheme that claims I can make this much money sounds like a scam to me. The URLs in each Tweet is suspicious as well. Where’s the conversation? How are you getting to know me and what my interests are? Unfortunately, I have manyof these to pick from but there’s not enough room on the page for this.

Type #2 – Thanks for Following, Buy My Product

If your auto direct message (auto-dm) looks like the image below, you will get unfollowed. If you send me a sales message the first time you speak with me, how do you know what I want? I am not looking for a “get rich quick” scheme nor am I interested in starting another business. I’m plenty busy and love what I do.

Type #3 – Numbers are Everything

What’s wrong with this picture?

I’m not sure if the account holder is at fault or those who auto-follow! How can someone who has never twerped a tweet have almost 2000 followers?

Type #4 – The Valley Girl

For those who know me, I’m sure they can figure out pretty quickly why this person wasn’t top of my list to follow back. Like, IDK like I’m like sooooooo thrilled . Oh please. Save me.

Type #5 – Gimme More Followers

Like with all social media tools, the number of followers, connections or friends you have tends to indicate your social media “power”. However, it is very easy to get followers on Twitter, so the numbers aren’t necessarily the best measure of the value of a Twitter user. I get amused by what I sometimes see in an email I get from SocialToo that gives me a list of my daily followers and those who unfollow (they do more but this email is a nifty feature). When the same person follows and unfollows me within the 24 hours that the email comes out, it gives me a very blatant clue to what this person is after – connections not relationships. Go figure.

Type #6 – Extreme Adult Content

Ok this one also goes without explanation. I do like their creativity around their bio to try and capture some of us who may not look at their actual tweets. Newer tools like Tweepular and Tweepler enable me to see not only your bio but also your last tweet or two. I wonder what SEO means to this person? In any case, I don’t think this person got their target market quite right.

The moral (pun intended) of this story is if you want to get to know me and establish a mutual relationship, this is not the way to go about it. I am pretty open to connecting with people who care about the relationship and how we can both benefit each other in some, maybe tiny way. I may not Tweet a lot each day, but I read, absorb and understand what makes those I follow tick. So by all means, please do follow me on Twitter. Just know that I want to get to know you.

Update: yes I know there are 6 – I added a bonus but forgot to change the title.

Arnold Palmer Memory Book (click to enlarge)

The United States Golf Association (USGA), of which I have been a member for years, launched a tribute to Arnold Palmer for his 80th birthday. It seems like just yesterday that I kept score for Arnie when one of the first PGA Senior Tour event was held at my home course of Marlborough Country Club. In honor of his birthday, the USGA is creating the Arnold Palmer Memory Book. According to an article on Mashable, the site is powered by private label social network provider KickApps.

The site allows users to share their personal memories of Arnie, telling stories via pictures, video or text. Stories range from professional golfers sharing their memories to sports fans reminiscing of their 30 seconds of fame. I shared my memory of Arnie during that tournament in 1982 when we were called off the course due to thunderstorms. While we were waiting out the storm in a neighbor’s basement, he was sitting next to me and, well the picture tells a thousand words. At the time, I didn’t know that this picture was taken until they gave it to me.

I have kept that memory of Arnold Palmer tucked away for years and am thrilled to be able to share it not only with Arnie through his social media birthday card, but also with everyone who has interest and cares about someone as special as him.

Given my involvement in social media and my love of sports, it is nice to see pro sports using all types of social media to engage fans, increase viewership of events and provide a means for us common, everyday athletes to participate in major events.

Myth 1. Social media sites are free

Reality: This statement is not a myth but a gross understatement of the value of social media. There is a significant cost in time which is an issue if small business owners do not know how to use these tools to market your business as you will spend a lot of time and get nothing in return. But, nothing of value in this world comes for free and you need to invest some type of resource – time or money – to get the most out of them. Think of social media as a channel in which you are able to communicate your value to your ideal client. You must spend time meeting people in these social media sites, building relationships and hearing what they have to say. As Gary Vaynerchuk (@GaryVee) pointed out in his keynote presentation for the Social Media Success Summit, it takes sweat equity to be successful using social media.

Myth 2. Social media sites are a great place to find new customers

Reality: Social media sites are a great place to meet new people and build strong relationships. Will these people ever become customers? Not necessarily, but the reputation you develop on social media sites goes a long way to building a brand that attracts your ideal client. Establishing quality, compelling profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter help you get found more easily by those who are looking to acquire the products and services that you offer.

Myth 3. You need to be on all the big sites

Reality: To make the most of your time, you should select the social media sites that make the most sense for your business. For most business owners, LinkedIn is a must. Some of the niche social networking sites mentioned in the article that are targeted at business owners such as Intuit’s Small Business Community may make more sense now if you are catering to a demographic that for the most part is not on the more “cool and trendy” sites. But I would highly recommend you establish your personal identity on the major social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr now and take control your online identity and reputation rather than letting it develop through what others say.

Myth 4. Social networking sites are for marketing

Reality: Saying social communities are not for marketing is like saying networking and word of mouth will never get you business. Unless you are one of the many who think marketing equals pushing your message into the face of everyone which is frowned upon in both online and offline networking venues, social communities are great for networking and developing relationships and ultimately creating visibility for your expertise. And remember, great customer service increases the value of your brand in the eyes of your customers which helps strengthen your credibility. The key to networking (both online and offline) is utilizing the VCP model: visibility + credibility = profitability. You can easily educate your prospects and customers on the value you offer by the value you provide those you interact with on social networking sites.

Myth 5. Social networking is the future

Reality: Social networking sites are a means to an end, not the end game. Although the platforms will shake out technologically (as does every technology), getting comfortable with social networking sites to develop your personal brand will not go away, even if the platform changes. Believing that social networking is a vanishing trend is dangerous and there are many business owners utilizing these channels to market their businesses successfully.

Marketing using social media should be part of your marketing plan and not a replacement for other more traditional marketing efforts. Newsletters, seminars, partnering, and yes, the telephone, are all ways to have a conversation with your customer. But ignoring social media is not a strategy for success. The best way for most small business owners to market their business is to get involved in social media now as it is a process and not getting the process started is basically suicide. Why give your competitors an edge, making your business anonymous and relinquishing control of your future?

What do you think: Myth or Reality?

The first thing you learn about being involved in a social media community is that you don’t need to respond immediately, but you do need to respond in a timely manner. A few months ago, I wrote a post on setting up your social media system, so that you can make time for marketing using social media.

So what I recommend is you take advantage of one of the most useful features of an email client – the ability to set up filters – so you can make your social media system more productive. If you haven’t found that feature in your particular client, look for it and then set up filters to move these notification emails into the appropriate folders. In Microsoft Outlook, you can find this feature under “Tools / Rules and Alerts …”. In Gmail, you’ll find the filters under “More actions / Filter messages like these”.

My preference is to have separate folders set up for Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn as I have also set a priority on how I manage these emails coming from these three social media networks. You may find that filtering all social media emails into one social media folder is sufficient, especially if you are just getting involved in social media. Once again, the choice is yours based on how you work and what type of time you have to dedicate to vetting Twitter followers, answering Friend requests on Facebook or accepting connections on LinkedIn.

Once you set these up, you then can set up specific times in your day to puruse these folders and take action. You will find you are much more productive this way rather than being reactive to every email that comes in.

Social media has added a new, powerful set of tools to your marketing toolbox, making it easy to meet, network and develop relationships with people online that was once out of the reach of many small business owners. More importantly, social media is making it easier to meet new potential clients and market your business. But how you integrate these tools into your marketing plan will make the difference between a successful marketing strategy and an overwhelming exercise. Whether your business targets consumers or other businesses, social media is going to impact on your marketing and ultimately the success of your business.

On Wednesday, May 13th and Wednesday, May 20th, I will be hosting a two part tele-clinic that will provide practical advice on how to select the right social media tools for you to connect with your target audience and get noticed. 

For only $60, you will get:

• Two 90 minute sessions (3 full hours)
• The recordings of those sessions
• An ebook on LinkedIn

I also decided to add one more bonus! If you register for the tele-clinic and you can’t make the live sessions, in addition to getting the ebook and the recordings, I will also provide you with direct access to me via email to get your questions answered. Once you have listened to the recordings, if your questions aren’t answered you can email me with them and I will personally answer them for you. There’s absolutely no risk!

Registration

We’re only one week away. Register by clicking on the “buy now” link above or visit Get Connected. Get Found. to get more information on what we will cover.

Back in February, I wrote about two amazing WordPress plugins that made implementing a rotating flash header easy to implement. In this post, I want to talk about more nifty WordPress plugins that helped me implement a membership area on the Web site. This area is used by the  condominium association to communicate with the owners of the properties, providing updates to documents, minutes to board meetings and information on social events.

Once again, I needed to find some WordPress plugins that helped me implement some type of protected area on the site. Through my search, I found two very powerful but easy to use plugins – Member Access and MemberWing Membership site plugin.

Based on the features needed for the site, I ended up selecting the simpler of the plugins, Member Access. This plugin allows you to select what pages or posts on the site need a password to access. You can set the default as open to all and selectively protect the different pages until the member signs into their subscriber account. Once the member signs in, all the pages are accessible to them. This is just what I needed for this site.

Another membership plugin I found was the MemberWing Membership site plugin. And although I didn’t select it for my client’s site, I’ve saved that one for future use for me and a few of my clients. If you need to create a member’s area where you want to charge for content, Memberwing is what you want. It is very easy to set up and use, gives you four levels of access, users can register themselves, put in a credit card number and gain access to the content without your intervention. So check these membership plugins out.

Simplifying the User Experience

I also wanted to make it simple to manage the community of owners so I implemented another plugin called Register Plus, which allows members to register themselves while enabling me to customize the registration page and ask for information from the person wanting to register. Register Plus only supports WordPress 2.5+ but we’re at 2.7, so no worries there. It allows you to add a custom logo, password field, invitation codes, disclaimer, captcha validation, email validation, user moderation, profile fields and other features that help you create a user community on WordPress. We set it up so that the accounts need to be approved by the management company, but this has cut down on the administrative needs of the site. As owners sell their properties, the new owners can register and the administrator can remove the accounts for those who are no longer owners. Before, I had to create user names and passwords for each of the owners and change them when properties were sold.

All was well and fine when I was testing the site, but when actual users were starting to register themselves, I needed two more plugins to remove the last two challenges and simplify things for users (and for me). Peter’s Case Insensitive Login removes the case sensitivity for those logging into the site. I’ve had this issue with many of my clients thinking “debra” and “Debra” are the same and email me when they get an invalid user login. I most likely will add this to all my client’s sites so they no longer have this problem.

The Peter’s Login Redirect enables me to send the users to the member’s home page of the site when they log in rather than the WordPress dashboard based on their roles, which for the owners is “subscriber”. This very useful plugin removes the confusion for the user and puts them at the area on the site where they belong.

I absolutely love the flexibility and power of WordPress as you can tell, and these plugins made something that was once project for a very skilled developer very easy to implement. My thanks to these developers who have contributed to this community.

Hi there,

I hope you are well and I’m sorry for bothering you…I found you online and was intrigued.

I’m currently researching business opportunities/ideas with the hopes of finding something I can do from home full-time.
Your business sounds interesting – could you tell me about yourself and how well you’re doing in your present business?

Thanks so much!

Of course, I’m thinking that this person needs to do a little homework on their skills and passions to decide which business to pursue. Although the email did cause me to think about it a bit, I have received legitimate messages similar to this one. So, not wanting to ignore the person, I sent the following response:

Hello Amber,

Working from home is a wonderful thing for some, not so good for others. I happen to love it because it gives me the lifestyle I want.

However, I spent many years working in corporate America to gain the experience to start my own marketing coaching and consulting business.

Before you start a business, make sure you know what you’re good at and what you love to do. Then starting it will be much easier.

Good luck

So what did I get back?

Thanks for the information. I’ll get back to you.

In the meantime, check out this social networking site… http://www.dirsbiz.com/

So this person succeeded in getting me to respond to the email, but unfortunately that’s all that happened. However, I did check out the directmatches.com web site and found a report spam form which I filled out with this person’s affiliate link.

Needless to say, this type of marketing for a social networking site runs counterintuitive to social networking. Truly, this type of marketing will not help this business succeed.

Marketing Lesson

Don’t use this type of underhanded, bad marketing tactic. With all the talk of authenticity, building relationships and social networking, these types of behaviors will only hurt your business. This is analogous to a Twitter follower sending back an auto-direct message saying “Thanks for the follow. Find out how to make $20,000 a month in affiliate sales. Visit my xyz.com site”.

To build your business, you need to develop and nurture relationships, educate your prospects and customers about why they should consider doing business with you and give more value than they expect. That’s good marketing.

There’s a lot of conversation about the term personal brand. My favorite personal brand is Bono (no surprise here), but Tom Brady, Madonna, J. Lo, Manny Ramirez, Britney Spears and many other celebritites all have personal brands – some good and some not so good at times.

As small business owners in the social media world, it’s not about creating a celebrity-like image but about establishing your reputation and managing how you are perceived by others, especially those who may want to do business with you. Building and nurturing a consistent reputation for what you are good at (your differentiation) is something you should strive for to make finding your ideal client that much much easier.

And as much as some folks don’t like the term personal brand, there is a brand component to your online (and off-line for that matter) reputation that needs to be managed. When creating your online presence, develop your personal brand consistently across all of your social media profiles so that it can work to establish your credibility and authority. Here’s a checklist of things to do to help with your consistency:

Picture

For some reason, some people just don’t want to put their picture in their profile. Social networking is about developing relationships and people want to see a real person and get to know them. If you are trying to develop a relationship that results in brand loyalty for your business, use a good picture that shows your real personality.

The picture does not have to be a professionally taken picture, but it should project your professionalism. Don’t put on a business suit if you’re style is business casual and your typical client relates better to a more laid back style. Remember your brand should be the real you, not something made up because you think that’s what people want to see.

Have several pictures taken so that you can choose the best one. Use it on your blog, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to increase recognition of your brand across platforms. Sign up for a gravatar so that your picture shows up in comments on other blogs if that feature is supported.

Name

The name or identifier you use should be the same one for all of your social networking websites. If you want to build a professional brand reputation, don’t create something cute. Keep it relative to you and your business. If you have a common name that has most likely been taken, use a combination of your name and business name or add a middle initial if that makes sense for you. Decide before you sign up on something that you think would work across the social media universe and try to keep it consistent so you begin to be recognized.

Profile

Take advantage of LinkedIn’s business oriented profile format to write a complete profile description using relevant keywords and then copy that description or pieces of it to all the other social networks, tailoring it to the audience. Since LinkedIn is the more business-oriented social network, they provide ample space to fully describe who you are and what you do. Setting one social network as the hub for your personal and professional information prevents you from writing something different for each network you join.

Actions

If you write a blog and update your status regularly, stay true to your discipline and expertise. Focus on how you help people and what’s in it for them. Build relationships, connect people to others that are beneficial to them, answer questions in your area of expertise and did I mention focus? I’m stressing focus because I’ve noticed recently on LinkedIn that there are people who have “best answers” to questions in 50 or more categories that are totally unrelated. Can they really be experts in that many diverse categories? Did they really answer them all or had someone else answer the questions for them (if so, not very transparent)? What is their strength? Who are they marketing to? Being a Jack of all trades and a master at none comes to mind. Pick your targets and focus on your strengths. It will draw people to you who need your expertise.

When you are participating in social media, you are establishing your reputation whether you know it or not. Make it a conscious effort and nurture the personal brand that is truly you.

How well do you manage your online reputation? Share your tips and tricks in the comments below.

U2 photo credit Phil Romans.