14 Ideas & Tips To Promote Your Business

Want to test yourself? Talk to a group about the basic, simple principles behind some of your business strategies.

That’s what Tim Eddinger, Josh Pies and I did today at the Victor Chamber of Commerce Social Media Breakfast hosted at Auction Direct USA.

A quick survey showed nearly everyone in attendance using social media. However, only a couple were confident enough to say they were using it effectively for their business.

Recap of the ideas & tips shared with the group. (Geared towards users with a general familiarity of SM sites, looking to add an additional layer to their efforts)

Companies & brands who actively blog, see 55% more website visitors, 97% more inbound links and 434% more pages indexed by search engines than those who don’t (Hubspot)
75% of social media site users spend 25% of their time online
Friends & fans of brands via social network sites are up to 63% more likely to purchase from that brand again.

Quick ideas on how to get started creating content: (Stumped? need something fresh?)

Expert advice – You’re an expert. Tell your unique story and simply explain how you can help make things bigger, faster, cheaper, etc. (This is different from selling – this is how you help)
Leverage testimonials & word of mouth – people trust testimonials. Genuine testimonials are great. Video testimonials are even better.
Interview other influential people – Great way to meet people, build relationships and give your contacts the attention rather than you or your company
Host an event at your business. Simple way to create even more exposure:)
Ask your clients/customers for feedback – When they give it, listen to it and act upon it
Share content – blend the mix between informative & entertaining; always tasteful, yet memorable
Know your intended audience and the content they’re seeking. If it’s not what they want – its basically spam
Check the default security settings for your new profiles. Concerned about what people may see or gain access to? Change your settings or even easier – don’t share it!

Quick links & examples:

Get started quickly using Posterous.com – send an email to post@posterous.com & have your content transformed into a blog. Instantly.
Use free PR servces such as PRLog.com and Free-Press-Release.com Personal favorite: PitchEngine.com; used for the Auction Direct USA Newsroom. (paid version)
Slideshare.net – Share your presentations & PDF’s for added exposure, connections & credibility
Create a LinkedIn.com business profile page – great free & paid resources for business, employee profiles & job postings

Thanks to everyone who made it out this morning!

What else would you share with someone starting out or looking for fresh ideas?

How Will Your Site Be Affected By Google Caffeine?

Google has been hard at work preparing for one of the biggest recent changes in the world of search – Google Caffeine should roll out sometime after the new year.

What is it? Google is changing the criteria for choosing which websites show up when you search for information on the web.

How are they going to do that? Google has added new “ranking factors” that will determine how high your site appears in the results.(This doesn’t mean existing factors will go away)

Why are they doing this? Google wants to remain King of the World. Changes like this ensure they continue providing the most relevant search results to their users.

What are those factors? Here’s a few items shared recently by Matt Cutts from Google.

Site Speed – How quickly a website loads
Broken Links – Links within your site that don’t work or link to pages that don”t exist anymore
Linking to Bad Neighborhoods – Don’t link to spam sites such as link directories/farms or sites known for hosting paid links
On Page Factors – More so than before, an emphasis on unique relevant content, page design, clear navigation, unique page titles, relevant descriptions and keyword density
Analytical Items – Page views, bounce rates, usage/traffic figures, page view time
Social Bookmarks – How many times has the site/page been added to a social bookmarking site

A lot of speculation surrounds the Social Bookmarking element of the future ranking updates. Including social links certainly allows for the relevant popularity factor, yet does raise some questions around its ability to be gamed. (I’m sure Google is light years ahead of me on this element) Social link inclusion also levels the playing field for those online marketers who didn’t have the ability to compete with a large quantity of paid back links.

Page view time is also an interesting factor. I’ve heard the argument about time spent on a page being less important – or even more difficult to effectively measure with the advent of tabbed browsing. Again, I’m sure Google had someone in a very messy cubicle solve this riddle.

What can you do, even if you’re not a search engine optimization consultant?

Plenty…you can help your company by simply paying attention to some of the on page factors mentioned above: Is your site easy to navigate? Are there broken links? Does the page content makes sense and is it relevant?

If you’re involved with these items in a daily basis, you’re probably already busy with this…or will be.

Search engine results placement is a vital key for so many businesses – what else are you doing to maintain your search rank?

How Facebook Got 6 Million Free Workers

Give it up for Facebook and their latest marketing stunt: Vanity URL’s.

Within hours, Facebook wrangled about 6 million people to convert their profile URL from,

this: www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1128085240
to this: www.facebook.com/ericmiltsch

Does this help you? Sure, maybe you feel better now that your name isn’t a number. Personally, I haven’t seen my Facebook profile move up in the search results.

Who does this help? Facebook. They’re hoping everyone forwards their address to everyone not on Facebook. Imagine if half of those 6 million people sends their new URL to 25 Facebook noobs. That’s 75,000,000 new, warm referrals. Imagine if your business got 75mm warm leads. For free.

Want to beat Facebook at their own game? Here’s two ways to make either your personal, or professional brand, just a little different from everyone else. And that little bit can go a long way.

Collateral full movie Shorten your URL using any site that shrinks URL’s with the ability to customize and provide tracking. Several sites will do the trick – for this example I’ll show you what I did using BudURL.com’s service a few months ago.

Radio Flyer divx I changed my original long URL to this: http://budurl.com/fbem. The last four characters signify ‘Facebook Eric Miltsch’

Other examples follow the same naming convention for consistency:

budurl.com/dgem | Digg

budurl.com/dlem | Delicious

budurl.com/viem | Vimeo

budurl.com/twem | Twitter

budurl.com/suem | Stumbleupon

Another easy way is to purchase your own custom domain name and simply forward it to your social profile site, such as: EricMiltschOnFacebook.com or some other variation.

You need to do everything possible to promote your personal or professional brand – put your name(s) first.

We’ll see what happens in a couple of weeks when Facebook Pages can get their Vanity URL’s as well.

13 Ways To Get Quality Followers on Twitter

Let’s define quality twitter followers – everyone wants them. A quality follower for me:

Follows back
Has a full bios with link(s)
Engages and participates
Has a nice balance of self-promotion & re-tweeting
Has positive energy

Keep in mind, my activities center around providing valuable automotive content, among other things, to help consumers. I’m always trying new stuff, always measuring things and just making sure our hits outweigh our misses. Here’s a random list of my activities for @AuctionDirect.

Address people by their names in direct messages
No automatic direct messages
Try to get to know people – I ask everyone to take my twitter interview
End Game full
Promote others when possible; Re-tweets are good, FollowFridays are cool and links to other people’s sites are awesome!
Provide informative, relevant links
Humor which doesn’t attack or offend. (Especially when tweeting from a business account)
Help people and answer quick questions
Acknowledge other people’s awesomeness
Meeting people face-to-face; get out from behind your screen and talk to some of your followers – Meet-ups really help
Don’t RT content from people with say, 350k followers. Odds are a ton of people have already seen it
Don’t to talk about money, sex or religion. (I try not to at least…)
Follow people my followers follow. Birds of a feather…
Don’t complain

Thankfully, most of the people I know do these things very nicely. @JasonFalls is a great example of someone who applies tactful, real-life common-sense to his twitter stream.

Sometimes, people just aren’t interested in automotive content and I can appreciate that. I’m not there to sell to anyone a car; just trying to educate and inform consumers. Its another place I can help change the way people buy used cars.

What are you doing to get and maintain quality twitter followers?

13: Game of Death movie Rocky IV the movie

7 Great Places To Post Your Content

Building great content is one of the foundations for building your online presence. More content creates linking opportunities; more links will improve your search engine rankings.

Here’s 7 sites that are easy to set up, easy to use and best of all, the search engines play nice with them:

Google Knol.
Arranged psp

Assault on Precinct 13 buy

(short for knowledge) Create a bio and simply share your knowledge. About anything. This a great place to create an expanded profile and link to your sites.
Live Journal. This is one of the Internet’s original blogging/journal sites (dating back to 1999) Simple control features, nice templates to customize your appearance and its social networking features make this is a long-standing favorite. Originally created by Brad Fitzpatrick.
Ning. Ning is the most expansive on the list as its actually a community platform – you can easily design and create your own social network using Ning’s template driven platform. Netscape founder Marc Andreesen started Ning to let users create their own networks based around specific interests.
Squidoo. This is a fun, easy to use, interactive set of pages called lenses. Squidoo gets a lot of traffic and plenty of features for users to enjoy: RSS feeds, images, videos, links – plus you can even earn $$ for your content and/or contribute to charity. Another great contribution from Seth Godin.
Tumblr. One of my personal favorites. David Karp whipped up this micro-blogging platform in 2007. Use the stock designs or add your own custom themes; use it for blogging, pics, videos, links and audio files. Follow others & people can follow your tumbleblog to build your own community.
PitchEngine. Perfect for your press release content. Created by Jason Kintzler as a new school method of publishing Social Media Releases. (press releases on steroids.) Add links, tags, images and videos to build a powerful press release.
PollDaddy. High Anxiety film Supercross rip Not necessarily creating new content, rather, letting the new content come to you in the form of online polls. Great for feedback and learning more about – well, anything. Especially useful for creating new content based on poll results.

Not using any of these? Make your own 7 day challenge and you’ll have a whole new level of content sites created within a week.

What are some of your favorite sites?