Why Web Developers Shouldn’t Ignore Social Media

by Mark Bloom | Apr 24, 2018 | Social Media

Small Businesses Need to Promote Themselves

If you think your business is immune from social media, think again. Companies that ignore social media do so at their own peril. And that includes website developers — whether your business is a booming agency or a small one-person operation.

Despite the recent privacy issues hovering over a certain social media platform, social media in general is gaining traction in the global population. That makes it a prime target for marketing and building brand awareness. Companies that ignore social media don’t take advantage of these possibilities.

People Are Active on Social Media

As a web developer, your clients are most likely other businesses. That’s a broad spectrum, so maybe you target a specific niche:

Small businesses
Medical practices and hospitals
Finance and capital markets
Government projects
Lawyers’ offices
Real estate companies
Local-only businesses

You know whom you’re trying to attract. You should know, therefore, where you can find those decision-makers so you can reach out to them. Since most people spend some part of their day or week on social media, find the right channel and broadcast your message!

Marketing Requires Full Coverage

Companies that ignore social media aren’t reaching millions of potential customers. Physical marketing — on a billboard, in a newspaper or on your vehicle — only reach those people, including business owners, who see it. Unless your business only works with local companies, you’re missing a huge segment of the population.

There are few places to market to a national — or international — clientele outside of the internet. Few people read industry magazines anymore, and if they do, it’s online. Referrals still work as the number one way to land new business, but even that often takes place through social media sites! Effective marketing, as you likely know, requires reaching out on multiple channels. In other words, you must advertise not just through blog posts on your website, but on social media too.

People who buy your services need to see your company name three times or more before it sticks. Multiple channels increase your odds. So, don’t emulate companies that ignore social media and the value it can bring. It’s time to embrace social media.

How to Reach Your Social Media Audience

Business owners, marketing directors and other decision makers for the businesses you target as potential clients are online and on social media. It’s up to you to find them. Several examples to help guide you to the most appropriate platform include:

Creative business owners may be spending time on Pinterest or Instagram. They’re more likely to be young and perhaps looking for inspiration.
More traditional business people — including financiers, lawyers and realtors — likely spend time on LinkedIn. A business-first social media platform, LinkedIn can connect businesses.
Very many people have Facebook accounts, but usage varies, and the accounts are often personal, not professional. Your business can, however, build brand awareness by posting regularly and with smart content.
Twitter also hosts a mixed bag of users, but it’s more business-friendly than Facebook. Twitter has helped numerous industry leaders develop devoted followings. You can too.

Try your hand in your chosen platform. Be consistent. Post interesting and relevant content. Link back to your website. Engage, direct and share. By avoiding the tactics of companies that ignore social media, you can gain an advantage. Good luck!

Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.

How to Use Social Media to Promote Your Blog

by Elle Ray | Apr 17, 2018 | Social Media

Social Media Creates Awareness for Your Blog

Make a splash when you promote your blog on social media!

Whether you write your blog daily, weekly or monthly, you want people to read it. Even if you hire a service like Ray Access to write and edit your blog, it doesn’t do you any good unless it’s being read. Unread blogs — especially when they’re really well written and full of interesting, engaging material — are like packets of vegetable seeds left to rot in the pantry.

To get the most out of these seeds, you have to open the package, plant the seeds in dirt, water them, give them sunshine and nurture them until it’s time to reap the rewards. To allow others to get the most out of your thoughtful writing, you’ve got to promote your blog. You must find places it’ll be found and enjoyed. You’ve got to tout its content … and yes, even its existence!

Start Writing

An important step in marketing through social media is to create good content. Blogs are not ads and they aren’t tools to tout your company, your products or your services. Instead, blogs are a means to drive traffic to your website — where you get to do all those salesy things.

Blogs are intended to create a buzz about your expertise, your trend awareness and your interesting take on the latest news. Blogs should be informative and entertaining. They must implant an idea in your readers’ minds that make them want to learn more about you and your business. (If you don’t have the time, the energy or the ideas to write your blog, contact Ray Access for assistance.)

Social the Heck Out of It

Marketing your blog through social media means more than posting it on your company Facebook page, though that certainly is an integral part of how to promote your blog. In fact, one of the biggest reasons that more small business owners aren’t taking better advantage of social media to promote your blog is that it can be really time-consuming.

It’s easy to set up a few random links to automatically post to your social accounts every time you add new content to your site. It’s quite another proposition to position yourself in front of your target social audience on a regular and consistent basis — can you say daily?

It’s not enough just to share it once and then sit back and wait. Use your social media to promote your blog the same way you use your social accounts: in and out throughout the day, reposting, retweeting, rehashing, renewing and reviving the same post over and over and over. Tease your blog in different ways on various platforms, but get it out there more than once.

Stick to a Schedule When You Promote Your Blog

Just like a daily work schedule that gets you out of bed every morning at 7:00 am to catch a train or make it to your desk by 8:00, so a posting schedule guides your blogging. Write it on the same day of the week and post your blogs consistently at the same time every week. If you don’t have time, assign the job to someone else. Assign the schedules while you’re at it.

Then promote your blog on a similarly rigid schedule. It may seem like the new marketing trends that include social media are more flexible and fly by night, but the exact opposite is true. The more unstructured your platforms are, the more disciplined you need to be about meeting your deadlines and making those posts.

Keep It Friendly

Likes and retweets are signs that you’re someone who offers readers something valuable for their time. You’re providing information or entertainment they want to share. Whether you’re the go-to source for the latest workout or diet plan, or you make your readers smile with charming turns of phrase, you want your blogs to be liked, loved and passed on. So play nice.

When you promote your blog, you don’t want to come off as a spammer, stalking your friends with the same posts all through a single day. Consider the source. For example, you wouldn’t want to post the same blog on Facebook within hours. But on Twitter, the feeds run so quickly that the odds of running over your own blog are remote. Know your platform and then play by their unspoken rules of etiquette.

Short and Sweet and to the Point

One final thought (among many more possibilities) is that you can save yourself a lot of frustration and energy-zapping time by writing really quality blogs. Pull-out quotes from your extensive blog library make for great posts to platforms like Twitter and Instagram. Give Google+ a toot with a little jingle jangle from a blog you wrote last year. If you make every sentence as powerful as possible, each can almost stand on its own!

Add a cool caption to a crazy picture you took of the weather that ties in with an enticing blog you wrote last month about freakish weather-related services you offer. In other words, use creativity to promote your blog through social media. It’s mostly free, but it can take up a lot of time. If done right, though, you may be the next big social hit that everybody else wants to copy. Post that!

SEO 101

by Guest Blogger | Feb 14, 2017 | Social Media

Use Social Networking to Boost Website Traffic

On its own, writing stellar content for your website isn’t going to make you any money. You need to figure out a way to attract potential clients to your website, who can be converted into dollars. This is the ultimate goal of every business.

SEO stands for “search engine optimization,” and it’s exactly what it sounds like. SEO measures how optimized your website is for the search engines that offer it up when someone types in a related search query. SEO is a huge factor in making sure you get traffic to your site — and more specifically, the right kind of traffic, people who are looking for you to solve their problems or answer their questions.

If your website isn’t generating a profit, then you need to ask yourself some hard questions — for example, what benefit does it really have for your business? No need to panic if you’re still waiting for a breakthrough; you’ll find the most important SEO factors below, along with some hands-on techniques that you can put to use right away to increase the traffic to your website. So, without further ado, read on to discover how to increase your website traffic with SEO tips.

Promotion Is King

One way to promote your website is by paying for online ads in hope of snatching a client once they land on your page. This model can be a huge money pit. And as soon as you stop paying for online ads, usually the traffic to your site drops like a rock. It’s also frustrating because it can cost more to lure people to your website than the revenue they bring in. This is the reason to stop paying for traffic and get people to be interested in your website organically. In other words, attract people because of your content, not because of your ads. The most rewarding solution to paid marketing is content marketing or blogging.

While it’s easier said than done to “just create great content,” it’s possible to build on that concept. The truth is that there’s way more to SEO than just writing content. One piece of the puzzle is attracting attention by proactively positioning your articles to be seen by your audience. It’s really no different from dating. You can be the best-looking person with all sorts of positive attributes. But if you never leave your home, you won’t meet other people to date!

The Real Purpose of Content Marketing

Even if you attract a boatload of visitors, it means nothing to your business unless those visitors become paying clients. Getting thousands of likes and shares for well-written content isn’t your number one goal. The real purpose of any website is to support your domain authority — and, let’s be honest, to make you money.

Most of your visitors who become clients typically look for answers to questions about your industry or about your business. For example, they might search for the term: “homes for sale in Asheville” or “best dentist in New Jersey.” It can be difficult to rank for these types of search terms as the competition can be fierce. But by supporting your website pages, linking to them from your blog, you can help them to rank higher.

What Drives SEO?

In the past five years, Google has totally revolutionized how their algorithm works — how they decide how to serve up the list of search results. Many SEO techniques that worked before have had to be abandoned or changed to fit new standards. Today, there are at least 200 factors that affect the rankings of a website. It’s still generally agreed among SEO experts that having inbound links from other websites helps rankings.

Keep in mind that Google doesn’t like websites that it catches manipulating their rankings by creating untrustworthy (or “spammy”) links back to their site. Link-building still exists, though, and it’s a vital part of SEO. But by all means, you must make sure that the links are pointing towards your site from a credible source with a legitimate reason.

After all, Google is right about the value of creating good content to rank your website. What they forgot to tell you is that good content is only one part of the puzzle. Getting other people to link to your articles is the mountain that needs to be climbed. Lacking the endorsement of other websites is what’s keeping your website from being ranked on page one of Google.

Promote Your Content Like Your Life Depended on It

One way to get others to link to you is by creating such amazing content that it gets picked up by others — and it goes “viral.” This approach is known as the hope-and-pray method. Usually, it’s a very unreliable way of running a business.

You can easily turn blogging into a full-time job and write content until your face turns blue. But unless you already have an established group of followers to promote your content or an everlasting bank account to pay for marketing — you need to take the matter into your own hands to get others to talk about you through promotion.

Finding Online Friends with Benefits

Promoting your content through social media is an affordable way of helping others find out about your work. But you’re setting yourself up for failure if you think that social media is all about you. The secret to establishing any friendship is to look out for the other person’s best interest ahead of your own. This concept works both offline and online. One of the best ways to have your content to be picked up by others is to share their content first.

Becoming friends with influencers in social media can be meaningful for your website’s ranking. Be generous by linking to other bloggers with quality content that’s relevant to your topic. Sharing their content with your audience is most certainly going to be reciprocated.

The topic that you write about doesn’t matter at all. As long as it’s related to your industry, it’s going to be fairly straightforward to dovetail others’ references to expand your own article. The three most popular best practices to link out to other websites from your own content are:

Hyperlink from within the content
Provide a list of additional resources
Write a roundup post about a topic

As an example, curate a collection of articles into one round-up article called: “The Best Plumbing Blog Posts” of the past year. It may turn out to be a huge draw. People like a bunch of information in one place; you can put it at their fingertips.

The Key to Making Content Marketing Work

By using content marketing sites and by bookmarking sites you find, your articles can get a boost in the search engines. A favorite content marketing site is Scoop.it. It’s a powerful platform for making your content more visible. As an example, you can summarize content about a topic, add extra perspective to the topic and post it on the page with a link pointing back to the original post.

The key to getting SEO value out of using the above platforms is adding your own comments to create unique content. It’s not enough to copy and paste a link on the page. You can’t just grab a piece of the original content and use it for yourself. To be acknowledged by Google, you still have to satisfy one of their many requirements by creating your own unique content. Using these two content marketing sites may be one of the best SEO strategies you can put to use right away.

Start Ranking Today…

As you can see, there are many different ways to giving your website an SEO boost. Writing content that people crave is one way. Learning how to promote it properly through social networking is another. Doing both will propel your site’s ranking.

There’s no doubt that it takes a great amount of time and effort before you see the needle moving. But by taking one step at a time and coming up with a plan, you’ll end up on the top of page one in a Google search. Start writing today — and start promoting tomorrow.

Get Social: Social Media Does More Than Build Awareness

by Mark Bloom | Mar 4, 2016 | Social Media

Social Customer Service Nurtures Interaction

The old face of customer service: “Your call is very important to us.”

Ten years ago, most business owners didn’t realize they needed a website; almost all have one now. Five years ago, most business owners didn’t understand the value of engaging, targeted website content; the very existence of Ray Access proves that many now get it. Two years ago, most business owners avoided the murky waters of social media; today, many still don’t understand the power it holds for businesses.

Many small to medium-sized businesses view social media, when they view it at all, as a wasteland of Likes. One million Likes, they figure, won’t even buy a cup of coffee in the real world. These businesses may acknowledge that social media can raise brand awareness — after all, a million Likes means that a million people have at least heard of you — but social media campaigns rarely pay for themselves, let alone offer a return on the investment.

Social Media Has Changed

That was then; this is now. Social media is evolving into a forum for business — not just business awareness, but business transactions. Social media is a very public platform where one viral mistake can literally cost millions of dollars… and one viral home run can make millions of dollars.

Today, a whopping 75 percent of the American adult population spends time on social media. And that percentage is growing every year. To give you some perspective, only eight percent of American adults accessed social media sites just 10 years ago. One way that businesses can take advantage of this growing exposure on social media is to reach out to engage its customers.

Social Customer Service

The phrase “social customer service” simply refers to customer service — appeasing complaints, answering questions and solving problems — performed on social media platforms. Every successful business understands why good customer service is crucial to the customer experience. According to the Harvard Business Review, people who have a positive customer service experience are about three times more likely to recommend that business.

The new face of customer service: responsive and timely, even from a cell phone.

Social customer service, then, allows a business to publicly solve problems, which can generate some amazing trust and good will toward that business. Of course, the opposite is true too: a bad customer service experience in a social media context can turn into a nightmare scenario. So the trick to going social with your customer service is to maximize the good results and minimize the bad.

The Nature of Social Media

Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter and all the other social media platforms provide instant gratification to users. Everything is fresh and immediate. That structure has pluses and minuses, and you can use both to your advantage. Here’s how:

Highlighting the good: The ultimate for businesses in social media is a spontaneous testimonial. If you get one of these gems, make sure people see it. Feature it. Keep it fresh by commenting on it, sharing it and re-using it. Make sure your responses are honest and humble.
Burying the bad: If you get a complaint, the best response is to try to turn it into a good experience. Offer to make it right whenever possible, and do it promptly. If you can convert a complainer into an evangelist for your company, that’s a big win. Otherwise, leave the comment alone. It will sink under the weight of other positive posts, by you and your fans, rarely to be seen again.

Interact Honestly

If you want to master social customer service, the first step is to gain a foothold in the social media space. Gain brand awareness. Then use your position to engage your customers and other fans. It’s not a platform for selling, but you can drive more traffic to your website, where the selling happens. Social customer service puts your customers in a good frame of mind to buy from you. All you have to do is play nice.

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