Your website, and your message, is the first step to (and most importantly – the foundation of) building an internet presence. We spent a lot of time thinking about how to approach building your message for the Internet in last month’s article Transform Your Message for the Web. Once your message is in place you are ready to start building awareness about your website.
There are many places online that already have groups of people for you to talk to. You need to decide where you want to participate. There are several factors to consider:
- Your target audience.
- Your area of expertise.
- Building Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website.
For this article, the last item – building SEO is what we’re going to focus on today. This will only touch on all the possible ways to reach your target audience online, so use this as a starting point for your research.
Your target audience and area of expertise are critical to effectively find and reach your target audience online. Mindfulness of audience and expertise will support and drive your SEO efforts. In fact they take more upfront time and planning, however that is energy well spent to carry out the strategy you have for building effective online content.
Build Social Network Profiles
The more online profiles you have, the more search engines will become aware of you. When using Google to find a business or person we know, the first page of results will show all the websites (e.g. Facebook, Yelp, Angie’s List and Twitter) associated with the entity or person.
You know your message and it is organized to be clearly stated and shared. With your marketing message in mind, you can build a network of profiles to support promoting your business. The more website profiles you build that link out to the rest of the Internet, the more awareness of your website search engines will have.
Each place you have a presence online helps you. Every profile provides an opportunity to link back to your website which creates increased link juice for your website. Every description uses key words and phrases (which need to be focused toward your message and target audience) that are indexed for search engines to compare what you provide to phrases searched.
Setting up profiles is a finite time commitment. You choose where to create accounts and profiles and fill in the blanks. Once complete, maintenance is minimal. Choosing where to build profiles also helps you manage your time and reach your social marketing goals. (NOTE: Building profiles to have them isn’t good enough. Profiles on sites you will use and engage current and potential clients are the sites you want to have profiles for.
Join the Community
In addition to creating profiles in several places, participating in the networks where your profiles are brings you closer to the community you want to engage. There are two we are going to discuss due to the inherent benefits to you for building an Internet presence and supporting your efforts to create leads online.
What you need for your business is different than everyone else – choosing social networks that support your marketing messages and target audiences for building new business and staying in touch with existing customers is what matters.
Remember, choose a few and consistently contribute when there are applicable discussions to engage people and join online communities you enjoy contributing to.
Want help determining what will be best for you? I can help you.
Building Awareness
Ultimately your role online is to reach potential clients. Remember, a big reason we are online is to reach new clients and fill a pipeline of people to work with so that we constantly have business.
The lead generation opportunity isn’t something you can get overnight. Nor does it work by just having a website and some online profiles. You have to do something with them! Relating this process to another business generating activity, think about postal mail marketing campaigns. Just because we have the postcards doesn’t mean we will build our business… we have to prepare the message, print and mail the post cards (for a while) to generate activity.
Being online and participating in the community allows you to demonstrate your knowledge and expertise. That contribution to conversations and talking about your experiences shows you are approachable and have a great attitude. No one can demonstrate you knowledge or share your experiences like you can.
