Top tips for small businesses using social media

We’re all on Facebook these days, and probably Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and others too! I probably generate as much business now via social networking as I do through submitting proposals, and I have a number of good friends who also operate small businesses very successfully via social networks. However, breaking into the social networking world can be a little daunting at first.

Getting into the networking flow is about more than just setting up a jazzy page and waiting for the ‘likes’ to arrive. It’s more about getting into a ‘like ladder’ or some other way of boosting your page’s like count. What you need is real, honest ‘likers’, followers or connections who are interested in you and what you do. Here are a few things I have learnt over time about social networking that might just help you if you want to take advantage of social media for your small businesses.

Have high quality content

Whether it’s a sentence on Twitter, an article on Google+ or a shared news story on Facebook, you need to keep working hard at putting high quality content on your social media channels. If you are writing something, make sure your words are well formed, grammatically correct and spell checked, and if you aren’t too hot on the written word, get a good content writer to produce some social media pieces for you.

Different words for different audiences

Most social media channels can be linked together so that whatever you write on one gets copied across all networks. In some cases this can be a great time saving exercise , but you also need to make sure you are producing different content for different audiences. Your tone, length of pieces and focus should alter slightly depending on where you are posting:

•           Facebook: A ‘fun’ social media site, where content should be kept short, informal and is ideally accompanied by pictures.

•           Google+: Because you can create ‘circles’ of contacts, you will be able to target your posts specifically at potential customers, previous customers, peers or friends, so you can pick your content based upon who will see it.

•           LinkedIn: A professional network where longer posts and a more formal tone works better.

• Twitter: A great place to make industry contacts and to promote sales, promotions, new blog posts or special offers. Posts are only a sentence long, so practice keeping it short and getting everything you need to say into a few words. 

Schedule posts for maximum impact 

You might find you are most available to write posts or blog entries in the evening, but if none of your target audience are on line to see your update, you could be wasting your time. Facebook has a simple scheduling function built in for fan pages, or you can use apps like HootSuite to schedule updates and posts for many days into the future and at times that you know the most people will be online.

Be prepared!

Once you have got your all singing, all dancing social networking pages set up, you need to be prepared to manage these accounts effectively. There is nothing worse than commenting on someone’s post, asking a question on their wall or directly messaging them, only to get no response for several hours, days or possibly even not at all.

If you don’t have the time yourself to manage these accounts and posts, then employ a content writer or social media manager to do this for you.

So, off you go, and reach out to the world on social media for yourself! It takes a little practice and tenacity to get your accounts the exposure you desire, but it is, without doubt, the cheapest and most effective way to market your products and services to a huge online audience. 

5 Key Ingredients for Website Success

It seems these days that everyone has a website. The corner shop has a website; the school has a website; hell, even my mother has a website. With so many places to find information out there, how can you ever be sure anyone is going to find your site?

Here’s the good news.

You don’t need a) a degree in IT, b) to spend thousands on SEO or c) a magic wand to create your own perfect website that will reach the people you want it to in just the right way. Poorly thought out websites with a disastrous user interface will only be damaging for your brand, your reputation and the sanity of your users, so here are my five key ingredients for creating a successful site.

1.      It’s all about the content

“Oh she would say that – she’s a content writer”

True, I am, and also true, I would. But, even if it is in my blood to harp on about the importance of credible content, it has never been more important than it is right now to populate your site with USEFUL and UNIQUE content. Many business owners prefer to spend hours poring over pantones and templates to make their site look pretty, but then seem to sling on some half-hearted content as a bit of an afterthought.

Getting some well thought out, well written content onto your site is an essential component of any web development plan, and without this key ingredient your wonderful website is doomed to failure. If you can’t do it yourself, put your money where your mouth is and get a decent content writer to help you.

2.      Say ‘yes’ to SEO

Don’t shy away from SEO just because it seems to be incredibly complex. It’s not. Trust me, I’ve met a number of SEO managers, and not one of them would survive a round on the Weakest Link.

SEO (or Search Engine Optimisation) is the process by which we get Google and Co. to notice our websites exist. Not only that, but by thinking a little about the content we put on our sites, we allow Google to correctly index our sites, which in turn determines the position at which our site appears on search results for particular search terms.

You could spend thousands on SEO, getting one of these high powered agencies to submit 10,000 article directory entries for backlinks and sending out daily press releases about your business. But to be honest, unless you are trying to compete with PepsiCo for the top spot, there really is no need. Smaller businesses and start-up companies can fare very well with some basic DIY SEO, a great deal of which really comes naturally.

Think about the words people will type if they are searching for your type of business. If I was starting up a floristry business in Bath, I would hope people would search for ‘Bath florist’, ‘flower delivery Bath’ and ‘flowers in Bath’. By identifying these key search terms (known as ‘keywords’) I could then make sure these are included here and there on each page, just where they most naturally fit. You only need to mention each keyword two or three times per 500 words for Google to notice, so concentrate on building top quality text and just let the keywords form naturally within the content.

Aside of keywords, other good practices include the use of H1 and H2 tags to draw attention to certain words or phrases, making sure all the pages of the site can be reached within 2 clicks of the homepage and developing meta tags for each page to help the indexing process. Most importantly, do not copy and paste any content from other sites, or even from other places on your own site. Every word of your content must be ORIGINAL and UNIQUE, otherwise Google will slap you down and you’ll suddenly find you are on page 386. If you don’t have time to generate your own high quality content, get yourself an SEO content writer to help.

3.      Think about the user experience

Take some time to view your site from the user’s point of view. How does it look? How easy is it to navigate? What can you tell about the business from the first page or two?

Sometimes, when you are deeply involved in a project, it can be hard to see the wood for the trees. In this case consider getting a fresh pair of eyes to help, or maybe even 30 pairs. There are lots of online focus groups available to test your site, some of which cost as little as a few pence per tester, and these can provide lots of worthwhile feedback in terms of the user experience often picking up on things you would never have noticed yourself.

4.      Make some noise!

So, now you have your wonderful website, classy content, sizzling SEO and useable user interface, you’re all ready to go.

But still you have no traffic.

So… make some noise! Tweet it, Facebook it and LinkedIn about it all over the place. Get that address book out and email all your old contacts, schoolmates and relatives. Don’t stop there either; ask these people to share / retweet / forward on the news that your NEW website is live, and you’ll soon start to see the hits you want.

Consider joining some industry specific forums, or reading industry related blogs. Here you can leave (subtle) comments and links to your site, which will not only help to drive highly relevant traffic to your pages, but will also help with some powerful SEO juice from the backlinks.

5.      Keep it fresh

The hardest thing about creating a successful website it definitely the effort it takes to keep it there. Unfortunately, building a great website is not like making a cake - you can’t just dish it up and walk away. Websites need to be constantly refreshed, updated, tweaked and twiddled with to keep them at the top of their game. If Google thinks your site hasn’t been updated for a few weeks, you will plummet hundreds of ranks overnight, with the more recently updated sites overtaking you.

One of the easiest ways to keep things fresh and delicious is to start your own blog or news page. Make it a regular part of your working week to update this part of your site, ideally daily but as a minimum around 3 – 4 times per week. Use links in your blogposts or news pieces to other areas of your site, or other places in the blog, and make sure you shout it out every time you put something new on there to stimulate more traffic and hopefully a bit of social media sharing too.

If this all sounds a bit too much like hard work, get a content writer to manage your news feed and / or blog. Contact me to find out more about choosing a good content writer, and let me know your own key ingredients for creating a successful website.

Stranger danger

Today my blog post will have a more serious and sombre air to it. Four days ago a little girl from a neighbouring community was let out to play with some older children at 7pm while her Mum cooked tea. They had both just got home from a parents evening at school. A vehicle approached the playing children and the driver’s side door opened. Someone called the little girl over, and according to her friend, she willingly got into the vehicle through the driver’s side door. She has not been seen since.

The little girl’s name is April Jones. Now the whole world knows her name.

Far be it from me to see any sort of silver lining in a big black cloud like this, but for me personally this has certainly given me a wakeup call. Since Monday I have talked about stranger danger with my children more than I ever have before. I think sometimes, especially for those of us living in rural communities, we take our children’s safety for granted, and have become a little complacent about the warnings we issue to them. With this in mind, I wanted to share my thoughts on teaching our children about stranger danger.

What is a stranger?

This came out in a conversation with my 6 year old last night. He knows for sure he shouldn’t go with a stranger, but did he know what a stranger actually was?

The short answer is no.

He was of the impression that a stranger would be someone he didn’t know (correct) who looked evil (erm) and who definitely wasn’t a woman (wrong) who probably drove a van (probably a nod to the situation with April). I realised at this point that the definition should be made clearer. Here’s my take on who a stranger is:

• Someone they don’t know
• Someone they don’t know VERY WELL
• Someone they know but who doesn’t have permission to talk to them
• They can be smart, scruffy, male, female
• They can have a van, a sports car, a motorbike, or be on foot
• They might have sweets, puppies, video games, anything

I think some of these points should be emphasised to our children, particularly point 3 – ‘Someone they know but who doesn’t have permission to talk to them’. It seems like April may have known the person who picked her up, so sometimes we need to warn our kids against people they think they know. My son said to me “but I could get in a car with so and so’s Dad?” and I had to say, “No, not unless I have told you already they are picking you up.”

At the end of the day, we don’t always know the parents of our kid’s friends particularly well, and in a child’s eyes it could be that someone who has been hanging around the school gates chatting and showing them cool stuff on their phone is no longer a ‘stranger’. As parents we need to drill into our kids that unless we have specifically made arrangements for them to be picked up by someone else, then EVERYONE is a stranger.

Stranger danger rules

This is what I’ve told my kids:

• Never accept a present, toy or sweets from a stranger
• Never accept a lift from a stranger
• Never go anywhere with a stranger
• Never go anywhere on your own without telling me or a teacher
• Never go close to a car if someone is asking directions
• Tell me, or a teacher, if someone has spoken to you who you didn’t know
• Stay with your friends if you are out playing
• Never play in dark places
• If someone is following you, knock on a door or go into a shop for help
• If you think you are in danger, run towards shops, pubs or places where there are lots of people

YELL, RUN, TELL

We had some great fun last night practicing our yells! How loud can you scream?

These are the golden rules for stranger danger. I would rather have my children yelling and running away from a new teaching assistant or one of my friends they don’t recognise than the alternative.

People your children know

It’s sad but true that children are more at risk from people they know than they are from complete strangers. 66% of paedophiles are known to their victims, compared to the 34% who are genuine strangers. So how do we protect children from people they already think they know? Here are some ideas:

• Password? – Have a code word or password so anyone collecting your kids from school or a club must tell them the password before they get into the car.
• Trust and tell – Encourage your child to talk about adults they know. If they seem uncomfortable in discussing someone in particular, or become distressed around them, then trust your own instincts and keep them away.
• Setting boundaries – Talk to your children about what is and is not acceptable in terms of physical contact. Kissing relatives and friends may be OK, but is it OK to kiss a friends Mum or Dad? What about cuddles?
• No secrets – Instil in your children that no grown up should ever ask them to keep a secret from you. It may start quite innocently (“here, have some pocket money, but don’t tell your Mum”) but that can evolve into keeping things like cuddles, kisses, inappropriate touching and worse a secret. Because the child has already built a circle of trust with the adult, they will feel more and more distanced from you and less able to open up. 

I’d love to hear how your children understand ‘stranger danger’ and what things you tell them. After all, we want our children to grow up confident and comfortable, but it is also our job to protect them.

Finally, let’s all hope they find April safe and well today and that she is reunited with her family as soon as possible. Keep your kids safe people.

5 things a freelance writer should not do

OK, so I’ve been in this game for almost 4 years now, and have learned a thing or two about the industry. I’ve found plenty of lists of things a freelance writer should do, but not so much advice on the things to avoid. Here is my own take on how to survive in the freelance writing world, whilst still retaining a modicum of sanity.

1.      Don’t take it personally

If you’re a new freelance writer or copywriter, chances are you’ll get knocked down more times than Chumbawumba. Take it with a pinch of salt when someone tells you that you’re not good enough, or when you have to write 50 bids just to get one fairly uninspiring job offer. Things will come right, and you’ll find your own niche eventually.

2.      Don’t lose self respect

If you’re serious about being a freelance writer, you need to have some respect for the skills that you have. When you see a job advert asking for 50 articles for $50, just say no. Don’t be drawn into proposals for articles that the client will pay ‘between £5 - £20 per topic, depending on the quality’, as they will invariably find a reason to pay you the bottom end of that scale. Agree a price and make sure they stick to it.

3.      Don’t lean on addictive substances

What’s your poison? Coffee? Cigarettes? Mines coke… the sort that comes in a 2l plastic bottle, not the class A substance. Take care of yourself and try to avoid getting hooked on anything as a habit. We writers spend long enough sitting on our backsides without pumping ourselves full of rubbish too.

4.      Don’t work for idiots

Easy enough to say when you have a full book anyway, but even if you’re struggling for work, don’t demean yourself by sticking with a client who makes your life hell. Demand a fair price for the work you put in, and if they are too inept to give you a decent project proposal that you can understand, demand that they pay you for your time rewriting or reviewing an incorrect piece.

5.      Don’t become a hermit

Pressing deadlines, money worries and a downward spiral of loss of self-esteem can all add up to freelance writers spending rather too much time at the computer and very little in the outside world. I’ve learnt the hard way that the best and most efficient work is done after a bit of fresh air, exercise and (dare I say it) human company.