How to Build Relationships with Influencers

November 22, 2015 by  
Filed under Featured Articles, Front Page

 

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Building relationships or strategic partnerships with industry influencers or thought leaders in your niche will help generate targeted traffic, and build powerful organic links and social signals to your website. It also allows you to build a reputation as an authority figure yourself in the proces. As you do so however, don’t make the mistake of ignoring everybody else. Everyone in your niche can add value in one form or another to your business.

 

Who Is An Influencer Or Thought Leader?


As Andre
Hospidales, who offers SEO services through his website, SEOSocialGeek.com put it, “a thought leader is someone who is widely recognized and respected as a leading authority or expert in his niche industry”. A great example of a thought leader is Neil Patel of Quicksprout. Neil is one of the most influential people in the digital marketing industry, and any one of his blog posts can generate thousands of readers within hours of release.”

Thought leaders are extremely active on social networks, especially Twitter and Google+, and spend a lot of time blogging and curating high quality content.

By interacting and communicating with a thought leader you are:

  • developing a mutually beneficial relationship with a highly influential entity. By interacting with them you are increasing your credibility and reputation.
  • you are obtaining expert insight into your chosen field.
  • you are able to obtain a professional opinion into your product and will be able to make changes to your product or business for the better.
  • they will have contacts that they will undoubtedly wish to share with you, if you make it worthwhile for them.

Within any social network, influencers and thought leaders hold the key to accessing a large group of people (typically their followers and connections) or as connectors (allowing you to connect to people who matter and whose followers will significantly amplify your message). Social influence is determined by a wide variety of engagement factors, including likes, retweets, number of followers, mentions and quality of followers. Thought leaders can also help your content be discovered by other influential people, who then share it with their followers. Leveraging thought leaders in this way helps to amplify your website’s “social signal,” which will make it easier to index and rank in Google’s search index.

It is critical for you as a business to be able to first of all identify what type of influencers you have in your network and second what their area of interest is. Engaging with thought leaders can make the difference between your content being seen by a few people, and truly going viral.

 

How to Find Influencers


Ultimately, the goal is to find individual influencers and the online sites where they are spending their time. Start off by identifying the most popular pieces of content in your niche that has been shared on the major social networks. One of the quickest ways to do this is by using a free tool by socialcrawlytics.com.

Social Crawlytics is a free tool that allows you to identify top content (based on social shares across the major networks) related to any particular niche. Essentially, you can use this tool to dig through leading industry blogs or competitors to find which content has been shared the most.

Behind the top performing content you are able to gather are the influencers that are getting their curated content seen by others within the industry. They are the people you should be building relationships with.

Topsy:

A quick way of identifying thought leaders is by using another great free tool, Topsy. Topsy is a social search tool that you can use to find exactly who has shared any given URL via Twitter (and Google Plus). You can also take a look at ‘influential users’.

Alltop:

Another great place to start looking for online influencers is by using the Alltop tool. Alltop aggregates the top blogs on a number of different topics. Top bloggers from most niches can be found using this free service.

LinkedIn Groups:

For some industries, LinkedIn groups is a great place to hunt for influencers. You’ll find that the organizers and active members within these groups are often influential.

Here are a few ways to build relationships with influencers:

  • Start the process by listening to the conversations that the influencers you are targeting are creating and contributing to. Your goal should be to become part of those conversations.
  • Look for every opportunity to provide assistance to an influencer. For example, promote their content, cause and products. When you provide assistance, you build credibility, trust and social capital.
  • For every six pieces of content shared through your social media channels, four should be pieces of content from your influencer target that are also relevant to your target audience. This means that 67 percent of the time you are sharing content that is not yours, and calling attention to content from your influencer group. One of the pieces of content you share should be original, informative content that you have created. When you share influencer content, they notice. And since you are sharing this content without asking for anything in return, those influencers may reciprocate by doing the same for you some day.
  • Engage with influencers by making sensible and meaningful comments on their content. Make sure that your comments demonstrate your knowledge and add real value to the post. Contribute to their Facebook pages and LinkedIn Groups
  • Share relevant content directly to the social influencers to increase the likelihood of it being picked up by and featured on major sites.
  • Message them when appropriate.
  • Create content for them.

 

 

 

Small Business SEO: Google My Business Or Pay For Performance SEO Pricing?

April 30, 2015 by  
Filed under Featured Articles

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Small business SEO is the cornerstone of every small business marketing campaign. Organic traffic from Google can mean bank for your business. It can be a game changer.

Search engine optimization pays for itself. Think about traditional advertising — you pay for ad placement and hope to get results. If no new business rolls in, you’re back at square one.

The difference when it comes to small business SEO is that the investment you make continues to keep paying you back long afterwards. That’s the reality of ranking for a profitable keyword. When someone types in what they are looking for and finds you, what else can be better?

Used in tandem with on-page SEO, it’s a powerful strategy to add to your marketing arsenal.

Google My Business: Is It Good For SEO?

Google My Business is a free tool by Google aimed at helping small business owners manage their online presence easier. It combines Google Places and Google+ pages with Search and Maps to make updating your business information with Google a breeze.

Does it help your small business SEO campaign?

Sort of.

While it is important to optimize for your local market, Google My Business will not build links to your website or help you with on-page optimization. And those are the two areas to be concerned with the most.

What You Need To Know About SEO Services Pricing

Affordable SEO can fall into four different categories:

  • By the hour
  • By the project
  • By retainer
  • Pay for performance

SEO Services Pricing (Hourly):  

Hourly SEO pricing is typically the most expensive. This is usually reserved for SEO experts who work with an agency or are training a team or business owner over a set amount of hours. This is almost never a good option for small business owners because SEO takes time. A well optimized SEO campaign can still take around 3 – 6 months.

SEO Services Pricing (Project-based):

Project-based SEO pricing can be a good option for specific tasks. Say you need to train your in-house team or you want a consultant to lay out a strategy for you to tackle on your own. Projects typically fall into SEO audits, link building campaigns, or creating the actual strategy.

SEO Services Pricing (Monthly Retainer):

Monthly SEO packages are the norm. With this level of service clients are outsourcing strategy and execution. It’s very normal for monthly small business SEO services to require a contract of up to 6 months to a year.

SEO Services Pricing (Pay for Performance):

 Pay for performance SEO focuses on bringing results first.

 No money upfront. Here an SEO service provider will work to promote higher rankings for their client, and once that customer starts ranking for their keywords, they then would begin paying for the service.

Not too many companies offer this level of small business SEO service. Most SEO companies stay away from this pricing model because it makes them really live up to what they say. If a customer does not rank, they don’t pay. It’s for this reason that companies that offer pay for performance SEO truly must understand Google and how to rank websites because if they don’t, they don’t earn any money.

Which means they wouldn’t be in business for long.

Keeping Small Business Websites Beautiful

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Keeping Small Business Websites Beautiful: making a tough job easier with updated Content Management Systems

by| Thomas Swanson|Content-Manager & SEO Consultant at SmallBox Web Design

http://www.smallboxweb.com/

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. I’m not sure how to tweak this old saw to make it express the import

ance of replacing outmoded Content Management Systems for small businesses with Web 2.0 solutions…but the analogy is there. To use another slightly corny metaphor: if your small business is still fiddling around with graphics and updates on a static HTML or ‘brochure-style’ site, you may be polishing the brass on the Titanic. That ship has sailed.

The economic downturn and the slow crawl to recovery has been a galvanizing and sometimes frightening time for most of the small businesses that I’ve talked to in the past few years. Sales tend to decrease as the personal incomes of your clientele takes a hit, credit is harder to come by, assets and holdings get soaked as the market jackknifes. On the other hand, downturns can concentrate talent, passion and commitment just as they tend to force innovation.

During this last downturn there has been a kind of revolution in Content Management Systems that has been especially critical for Non-Profits and small businesses. This shift in the way that websites are managed has been about putting the power to control a company’s web-presence into the hands of ‘normal’ managers and employees—not just tech-guys and web-contractors.

As envelope-stuffing and e-mail blasts become less effective as stand-alone strategies for small companies to capture business, search engine optimization as well as fluid, easy-to-use, easy-to-update websites become more important.

Updates to CMS on small business websites can also dramatically change daily operations , transforming daily struggles into smooth, almost automated side-work. One company told us that we’d shaved off half of the hours previously required to manage their registration and reduced in half the number of phone-calls and e-mails that they received about their outreach program. Nora Spitznogle, the Director of Operations at Second Helpings, confessed that at the start of the project she, “couldn’t tell the difference between a wire-frame and a wire-hanger,” but she explains that Smallbox took the time to make sure that she was comfortable with the process. By the end of the project, her ability to manage and update the Second Helpings site had definitely been ‘revolutionized.’

How does this CMS transformation work in laymen’s terms?

Try to imagine the difference between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ models of page and content organization and being like the difference between a collection of numerous Microsoft Word Documents and a single Microsoft Excel Document. If minor thematic or informational changes need to be made in your collection of Microsoft Word documents, you’ll need to change them one by one. You might have to hire a guy to do this. Either that, or you’re likely facing an organizational nightmare that’s going to suck hours out of your work week and take a toll on your psychic-energy and morale. If you change one cell in an Excel document, on the other hand, the corresponding changes that need to be made happen automatically. By rough analogy, this is kind of the way that Web 2.0 works for you.

At our web-design business we have to wake up and go to work in the community every day just like everyone else. Small business is an important part of the culture and quality of life in the community that we belong to. Part of our job as web-designers is to help you make it easier to make life a little better. A new CMS for your website is likely to be a part of that process as our century speeds up.

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