Growing A Strong Business First Impression

They say that first impressions are made within seconds of meeting someone face-to-face. You take a look at them, get a sense of the vibe they’re sending out and make a snap decision whether they’re a potential friend, partner or you might just decide to write them off entirely.

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Using Social Media To Fit Your Business Style

Chris Brogan wrote a post the other day about connecting your Twitter profile to LinkedIn. His take was that it’s annoying, and you should only be sharing some of your Twitter stuff.

There are a ton of folks that say you shouldn’t be tweeting about what you had for breakfast, or how silly your cat is. Doing that means you’re not using Twitter right.

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Monitor Your Link-building Provider To Keep Your SEO Rank

No time to build links to your site? Hire a link-building provider and then you don’t even have to think about inbound linking. Wrong, bad link-builders will likely set you back further then where you are now in respect to link-building and your trustworthiness with the search engines.

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Capitalize On Social Trends To Gain A Competitive Edge

“Qualified”, “showing intent to buy”, “high conversion rate” and many other phrases are used to describe search engine marketing.  As a $16 billion industry, Search Marketing including SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC ads (pay per click) represent a substantial opportunity for small businesses to connect with customers at the moment they are looking for products and services to buy.

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Increasing Your Social Media Champions Through Employee Relations

I was flipping through a copy of Fast Company when I saw another one of those quotes. You know the kind I mean, where the CEO talks about how treating the employees right ensures that they treat the customers right. Some of them are just saying what people want to hear, but this particular quote was from David Pickens, the president of the highly successful Olive Garden chain of restaurants. Pickens summed it up nicely with, “It’s very difficult for the experience of the guests to exceed the experience of the staff.”

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How To Optimize Your Business Site For Local Results

The goal of the next several posts is to demonstrate an organized approach for optimization of a local website. While other facets of local SEO are important such as content development, link building, and optimizing map listing, this series will strictly focus on the complete process of improving a website’s ability to capture locally targeted traffic through organic searches.

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Using The Social Media Rules Of Engagement To Attract New Business

What follows is a modified excerpt from Engage!, the complete guide for businesses to build, cultivate, and measure success in the new Web.

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Add Content To Your Site On A Consistent Basis

Not many things inspire such dread in my clients as when I remind them they need to be adding content to their site.  If you aren’t a writer naturally, it can be painful to have to produce content on a regular basis.

It’s important though and not just because I said so (although that should be a good enough reason! LOL)

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Building Business Relationships And Conversations With Social Media

In a recent analysis of social media use by large and small corporations across several sectors we found that less than twenty percent have buttons showing where else they have content.And many of them don’t carry a consistent branding and message through their blogs, Facebook pages and Twitter feeds.

If you are not yet vigorously active on Facebook, take another look at what they are up to: depending on whose stats you believe Facebook is either right behind Google nipping at its heels or has already surpassed them in terms of traffic.

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Why Is Social Media Important For Your Business?

I took part in a really interesting panel discussion last week in London about social media, one that presented two sides of the business argument to the audience – for and against.

Social media for corporates: essential channel or unnecessary distraction on May 12 was hosted by media intelligence company Precise and supported by CorpComms magazine. My fellow panellists were Paul Charles, COO of Lewis PR, Peter Morgan, director of communications at Rolls-Royce (engines not cars), and Georgina Wald, corporate communications manager in the UK for Domino’s Pizza. The moderator was Helen Dunne, editor of CorpComms magazine.

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