Expand Your Web Presence

Now that you have identified your sources of targeted traffic and have started creating focused content, it’s time to figure out where and how you will publish your content online. In general, you should publish your content everywhere you can. If you want to get better results online, you need to own more of the internet

Your business presence online can and should be more than just a single website. It may include multiple sites or pages, both on your own domains and on Web 2.0 sites. Your web presence may also include your blog, your customer newsletter, your accounts on content sharing sites, articles you write, listings in online business directories, and customer reviews – both good and bad.

So how do you figure out what goes where? You return to the online objectives that should be familiar by now. Remember that everything you do online must focus on one or more of the following:

• Traffic
• Relationships
• Conversion

You have already created (or outlined) content for these specific purposes. That makes it fairly simple for you to decide where to publish your content – you match each type of content to the type of online property best suited to its purpose. Of course the various Web properties have multiple purposes, just as your pieces of content do, so your purposes will overlap. These categories aren’t meant to be exclusive – they are only to guide you.

Web properties that build traffic

As we noted earlier, one of the biggest factors in search page ranking is the number and quality of backlinks to your page from outside your site – particularly from sites with higher authority. Publishing your content on high-traffic sites increases your chances of being seen, and can create high-authority backlinks to your own properties. Some examples:

Web 2.0 sites, such as Squidoo and HubPages allow you to create individual pages, each focusing on a narrow topic. Publish some of your high quality, relevant content on keyword-specific pages with links to your primary website and your other online properties. Make sure you include all of your contact information, along with a customer contact form. These Web 2.0 properties have a lot of authority and are favored by the search engines. Your Squidoo lens or HubPages hub is likely to show up sooner than your primary web pages in the search engine results, and with higher ranking – at least until you start building some of your own authority.

Content sharing sites, such as Flickr and YouTube are good places to host your images and any videos you create. Not only do you preserve some of you server’s bandwidth, but you expose your content to a huge community of users – people who otherwise would be unlikely to find you. You should create company accounts on these or similar sites. When you sign up, remember to incorporate your keyphrases into your member profiles as well as your content tags, captions and descriptions.

YouTube in particular has tremendous potential for building traffic, for a couple of reasons. YouTube’s search engine has recently overtaken Yahoo!, MSN Live Search and Ask.com in search volume, and is now second only to Google. More importantly, YouTube recently started offering sponsored results, a pay-per-click program similar to Google AdWords that allows you to bid for placement of your video at the top of the search results.

We mentioned Ezine Articles earlier as a potential source of content. You can also write and submit your own articles, which exposes your content – including your author profile and backlinks to your site – to a potentially huge audience.

Web properties that create relationships

Your primary website and your blog are the web properties best suited for creating and maintaining long term customer relationships. Unlike the Web 2.0 sites or content sharing sites, these are sites you own. Your website and your blog should be on your own domain (yourcompany.com) and on your own hosting account. Your website is virtual real estate – one of your few business assets that will actually appreciate in value. You should treat it accordingly.

Some recommendations regarding domain names and hosting:

• Register yourcompany.com, yourcompany.net, yourcompany.org, your-company.com, yourcompanyyourcity.com, yourcompanypainting.com, etc. – any variation of your company name that you would not like to see in the hands of an unscrupulous competitor. Domain registrations are cheap insurance – you shouldn’t pay more than $10 per year if you do it yourself.
• If you have somebody register your domain names for you, make sure you are listed as the registered owner.
• Make sure your domain registrar has an easy administrative interface that allows you (or your representative) to freely set up domain and email forwarding, change name servers, etc.
• Buy your domain registrations and your web hosting from different companies.

You may or may not want to participate in the technical administration of your sites. Most business owners I deal with would rather not be bothered. But even if you have zero intention of ever having anything to do with domain registrations or hosting or uploading content or anything else remotely techie or geeky, you should never give up administrative control over your own sites and domain names. No matter who your technical administrator is, insist that you be kept up to date on all account numbers, names and passwords required for full access to your sites, for your own protection.

Your customer newsletter is another perfect vehicle for building relationships. A regular email newsletter is a powerful way to stay in touch with your customers and potential customers. You will probably want to use a permission-based email marketing service like AWeber¹⁸ or Constant Contact¹⁹ to ensure good email deliverability, and for their advanced list-building and tracking tools. Your e-mail list is another very valuable business asset. Maintain ownership and administrative access to your list just as you do for your sites and domains.

Your Web presence also includes, whether you like it or not, customer reviews on consumer review sites such as Yelp and Kudzu and Angie’s List. You don’t have any control over what somebody may say about on one of these sites (other than keeping your customers satisfied). But you should at least monitor your presence on consumer review sites, and take advantage of any opportunity to respond to reviews, good or bad. Also take advantage of any opportunity to create a free business listing. If it turns out that you get any kind of traffic or if you begin to build any sort of community on these sites you might consider investing in a paid listing as well.

Web properties for conversion

The “conversion” most business owners are looking for (other than a direct sale) is a phone call or email from a potential customer requesting an estimate – that’s your main purpose for being online. That conversion is usually triggered by a call to action on your website or on one of your landing pages.

But don’t overlook other opportunities to publish your contact information online. Listing your business in online directories can be the quickest, simplest, most cost effective way to expand your web presence and get contacts from prospective customers. People who use online directories are often already in the mood to make a phone call.

The major search engines all offer some form of mapped local business results, which often show up in the number one position in the organic search results. Go to Google Local Business Center, Yahoo! Local and MSN Live Search Local Listing Center to list your business. Some points to remember when setting up your listings:

- Use keyphrases to describe your business. Your position in and within the local listings is determined partially by keywords.

- Always include a link to your website.

- Include a photo if you can.

- See if any reviews are listed. If so, get some satisfied customers to post positive reviews for you.

- Include a call to action – “Call now for a free estimate” is more effective than simply listing your phone number.

Other directories are not as important as the search engines’ local business results, but they often get traffic from the search engines. Some examples that often show up near the top of the search results are internet yellow pages like Yellow Pages Online and Superpages, and business directories such as City Search and Best of the Web Local. There’s no need to list your business in every directory immediately, but you should get to them all eventually. Start with the ones that show up when you do your competition analysis.

Your goal should be to constantly expand your web presence. Look for opportunities that cost you nothing and don’t require frequent updating. Claim every bit of virtual real estate you can, as long as you can identify a business purpose and an online objective.