BroadVision Marketing Blog

LinkedIn: Two Different Groups of People

You will find that you have two different groupsof people in your LinkedIn network—those that have sent you many contacts and those that have not sent you very many. Here are some suggestions from us at BroadVision Marketing.com.

You need to stay connected to the strong ones by sending them emails, texts or calls every two weeks or so. That way they will continue sending you referrals. You can also send them quality referrals, people who can help your contacts the most. Visit their websites and leave comments (all website owners and bloggers love comments). You could even send them something snail mail. Yes, I did say snail mail.

Topics: marketing, San Francisco Bay Area, Networking, Strong Connections, Weak Connections, Marketing in Petaluma CA, Facebook, Social Media, Marketing Principles, LinkedIn, Business Owner, Jaco Grobbelaar, Leadership

[caption id="attachment_3637" align="alignleft" width="341" caption="Jaco Grobbelaar LinkedIn Profile"] [/caption]

What's in LinkedIn for you if you are not looking for a job or an employee? Why should you network on this site? And why for that matter have you gone to Chamber of Commerce and BNI meetings?

You go to Chamber and BNI events to meet people who might be able to help you improve your business. Or you go so that you can offer your expertise to those with less experience. Perhaps you go to meet people who have a service that you need. When you look in the Yellow Pages for a business, you are not certain you want to pick a business out at random. So your goal for going to the BNI or Chamber meeting is that you want to meet some people either in the business or who know people in the business so you can get references. Perhaps you are the one with the service to offer. While you are there you pass out your business cards to others and collect theirs.

Topics: Social Media, Marketing Principles

Plenty of business people are not using LinkedIn to the best of their ability because they don't know how to make it work for them. LinkedIn reported that it has reached 135 million registered users as of November 3, 2011, up from 100 million the end of March 2011, consisting of people from more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. Why are people flocking to LinkedIn?

Topics: marketing, San Francisco Bay Area, Petaluma, Lewis Howes, Marketing Plan, Facebook, Social Media, Marketing Principles, LinkedIn, Business Owner, Business, social media marketing, Branding, Marketing strategy, Leadership

Wikipedia defines a backlink as: “In basic link terminology, a backlink is any link received by a web node (web page, directory, website, or top level domain) from another web node.”  It goes on to say: “The number of backlinks is one indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page (for example, this is used by Google to determine the PageRank of a webpage).”

The importance of the page has to do with where it appears when someone searches for a keyword, a city, a business or whatever they need information about. The best place for a webpage is as close to the top of the first page as possible. The way is gets there is mainly by the number of times a search engine, say Google, sees the URL. If it only sees the URL once, chances are that the website will be playing in the left field.

Topics: Social Media, Marketing Principles

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="300" caption="The three biggest web search engines (Photo credit: Wikipedia)"] [/caption]

When I started in this business, keywords and long keyword tails were the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) technique that was the most popular as a way to compete. Now keyword stuffing has become frowned upon as a way to get your website at the top of a search.

There are various techniques used for SEO. One way to group them is by using a hat terminology: White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO. White Hat is said to be ethical, while Black is said to be unethical.

Topics: Social Media, Marketing Principles

[caption id="attachment_3476" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Some rights reserved by Armchair Builder"] [/caption]

What does your blog have to do with social media? Only everything. You blog is the piece of you that goes everywhere to prove that you still exist and to help you be found.

Your blog is the most important part of social media that there is. It is the foundation for all else.

In past blog posts we have talked about headlines, content, consistency, comment sections; and, more recently, the fact that your blog shows proof that you exist and that it how the search engines and customers find you.

Topics: Social Media, Marketing Principles

Social media has come to mean an array of activities from your website to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and beyond. But the foundation of all social media is your website and your blog.

With the infinitely vast ways your website can stand out which you can do yourself or spend anywhere from a small amount of money to the big bucks, there is no excuse to not to have the best website you can afford. WordPress is the going concern for the bottom layer of the site. On top of a basic WordPress foundation, you can add different skins that will change the look without changing the computer language at the foundation.

Furthermore, when the foundation gets a makeover, you can safely download the new version without losing what is on the skin above. This way you can keep up with the latest and greatest improvements.

Topics: Using Different Media, Petaluma California, Web search engine, WordPress foundation, WordPress, Marketing in Petaluma CA, Facebook, Social Media, Marketing Principles, LinkedIn, Business Owner, Jaco Grobbelaar, Business, Branding, Blogging, Twitter

[caption id="attachment_3481" align="alignleft" width="122" caption="Some rights reserved by vectorfunk"] [/caption]

The other day I was looking for some information and found a website that addressed my question. To my dismay, the information was five years old and had not been updated. The website was static and for all I knew the business no longer existed.

This is something that I know has happened to us all. It’s frustrating, but more than that if the business still exists, it just lost a return customer.

There are some reasons a business would not keep up a website, adding new blogs and updating the product or service information.

 

Topics: Marketing Plan, Marketing Principles

There is a lot of noise in this world as we all sell our wares on Main Street of the Internet as well as at our brick and mortar establishments. We don’t have the perfect item for just anyone. Some of us sell clothing and others of us are dentists, with many subgroups within each group. A heart surgeon is not the right match for a mother with a two-year old who has a splinter, although he could do the work.

For businesses and customers to make the right match in the old days, businesses bought newspaper ads, which as often as not ended up at the bottom of the bird cage. If a business had enough money, it could sell a commercial on television and go into homes on the three broadcast channels, while most people were discovering or only using cable, except for the evening news.

There are people who miss those days and others who are exploring our brave new world, which is constantly renewing and remaking itself.

The tips I have given to any of you who want to do social media yourself are what are considered white hat SEO strategies. I would never give you any of the black hat ones, because they are very unethical.

Topics: Social Media, Marketing Principles

We have been working on the idea of doing your social media work yourself. I have been telling you uncompromising truths about the process of successfully marketing yourself. These things are what marketing companies like BroadVision Marketing do for companies who don’t have the time, the resources or the desire to do-it-yourself.

The last blog I wrote we were talking about a simple system to tell if you are moving into a better ranking. We decided to use the Alexa number system, which for all its faults does provide a simple measurement of motion.

Topics: marketing, Using Different Media, Uniform Resource Locator, StumbleUpon, OnlyWire, Social Media, Marketing Principles, Business Owner, Jaco Grobbelaar, Business, Branding, Blogging, Yelp