PowerBand Graphics LLC – Custom Websites, Cutting Edge Graphics

I’ve been considering this topic for a while because it’s something that has come up with clients and friends from time to time. I recently read “Crush It” by Gary Vaynerchuk, it’s a quick read about the importance of branding yourself as a business and person using social media like Facebook and Twitter. I was impressed at how many points he made that were relevant both to entrepreneurs and graphic designers. At one point he even highlights the importance of having a professionally designed website. I won’t get into that here but I think his main message is important for businesses.

Branding yourself using social media can be a crucial way to drive business and create new venues for you to interact with clients.

The thing is (as he describes in more detail), places like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube are great but you can’t just create an account and expect sales from it the next day (or even over the course of initial months). You have to spend a lot of time building relationships and creating a community. This doesn’t happen overnight. Social media works best when you are not shouting out your daily specials, it works best when you create a genuine face to your company. Let your sales and merchandising staff have an individual voice. Train your marketing team in customer care basics. If you are a one-person show, even better, people love being able to put a face to a profession and humanizing yourself is never a bad thing in this corporate world. Networking online is the same as networking in the real world, you recommend and follow people and products you trust, they in turn do the same for you.

The idea is that you are best at what you do, right? For whatever reason you decided to strike out on your own and build a business that does things different than anyone else. There should be a reason clients choose you so prove it to them! Being an expert in your field is what got you where you are today and letting people tap into that expertise allows you gain their trust and increase your value in their eyes. Soon people will be falling over themselves for your opinion and your business. So keep it simple: work hard, be sincere and treat people with respect. You’ll have social media down in no time…

Another month has come and gone which means another Strictly Business cover! It’s been a busy month but I’ve got new blog posts and updates on the way. The featured business on this issue is TCW Construction with the photo once again provided by Shane & Sunny Photography.

You may have heard the terms SEO and SEM thrown around a bit while looking to promote your business online. They refer to Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing. This is the practice of leveraging search engines like Google, Bing and Ask.com to advertise your company. It’s a big subject and important for small businesses to consider. SEO and SEM aren’t the same, they have important differences that I’ll outline.

I’ve worked with enough marketing departments and created enough websites that I realize how important it is to have knowledge of these methods. SEO and SEM have become buzzwords that companies (both legitimate and fraudulent) use to lure individuals in with the promise of cheap guaranteed web traffic. As a lot of things with marketing your business it requires a lot of work and there’s no silver bullet.

Search Engine Optimization is the process of increasing the volume of traffic to your website by organic search results. By organic we mean this the traffic you get when someone types in a keyword into a search engine like Google and your business appears in the results. This type of success in search results is ideal because it is the result of automatic indexing by search engines and is free. Free is good and free marketing is even better. This is not always easy to achieve and there are a lot of factors to take into account when you want to increase your page rank. Unfortunately you can’t just flip a switch and have your business fall under the first page, it’s hard work and there’s a lot of competition to do the very same thing.

Chief among the factors to consider is having a well coded, semantically correct website with relevant content that search engines can index. Having your website built correctly and the code laid out in a way that search engines prefer goes a long way to your first step on the road to SEO. Having other websites link to your site can also increase your page rank. There are also things you can do wrong that can negatively affect your ranking and even get you delisted. This is known as “Black Hat SEO” and it includes things like hiding text by coloring it the same as the background.

Let’s get back to content. Content is huge. If you aren’t providing relevant information to your business then your business will have that much more trouble getting indexed. Search engines LOVE freshly updated information, that’s one of the reasons blogs have gotten so popular. Not only is it a fantastic way to connect with your audience but having constantly updated relevant information is GOLD for search engines.

Now let’s move on to Search Engine Marketing. This is the process by which you pay for your presence online. There are a couple different methods to do this. One is called Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising, these are the text ads you see on search result pages usually off to the left or right of the search results. You set a budget and you get charged only when someone clicks your ad. These require consistent monitoring and upkeep to make sure you are getting the most of them but can be very beneficial to your online presence. Paid Inclusion is also a method to increase your page results and involved paying a fee to be included in search engine indexes. Paid inclusion is provided by most search engine companies, the most notable exception being Google.

So there’s some basic information for you to mull over. It’s a lot to know and there’s plenty of information that I haven’t even begun to touch upon but it’s good for any small business owner to know more. Search Engine Marketing can be a daunting and exhausting task but the benefits are worth it. Your website is the lifeblood of your business, it’s crucial that your prospective and current clients be able to find you. Go ahead and shoot me a message if you want to know more.

Hey everyone, once again I’ve been working with the good folks at Strictly Business creating cover designs for their publication. This month I had the good fortune to create Lincoln and Omaha’s covers. The theme was “Going Green” so we decided to take a different approach and create a more illustrative design, highlighting multiple businesses. Feel free to comment and look for the magazine if you are a small business owner or just curious.