Nail Your Company About Us Page: 5 Tips

1. There is a story

Of course, your marketing efforts, aim to provide relevant and engage content proves your customers that you are clearly a great resource and your about page is no exception. You can tell a story, but please don’t bother to write a novel. Keep it simple. You can reveal when the company started, who started it and what is the purpose behinds that? In fact, many customers enjoy looking at photos and relevant milestones. Be sure to have these included. You can list some of your awards, stats, and any important articles written about you in the press so that definitely adds credibility and personality. Do not be shy, just show who you are and share what you have accomplished.

2. Personality Plus

How can you show that you’re well liked without trying too hard? All you need to do is to show some personality on your company profile by reaching across the great divide that is the Internet and show there is a pulse of real, live, cool individual behind your company. You could do some awesome behind-scene videos.

For instance, Zappos and Google are well known for being awesome, wild, and fun so their “about us” sections reinforce this; that represents their culture and the way they approach their work and it grows the connection between company and their millions of customers.

3.  It is all about them

 Obviously, people want to do business with people, not even close to “corporate machine” and the power of images is undeniable. Be sure to have pictures of your executive or leadership team and include their twitter handles so it may encourage some great followers. It is great opportunity to put faces to name to prove your people that you are a real deal. If that suits your business, then it is okay for you to play around with the pictures so that it reflects your personally, which may bring a positive energy to your clients or customers. 

4.  It is not buried treasure

Do not bury the link to your about us page at the bottom of the homepage because it is one of the most visited pages of any company website, so if you really want to make it easy for people to find, then you should put it in the main top navigation bar because it is deal to get your clients or customers to notice.

5.  Remember Search

Please always include your keywords so that way your people will find you based on what they search. It could be the products or services you offer. Link those keywords to their specific product sections of your website.  This way will give your website a boost when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). 

Six Steps to a More Marketable LinkedIn Profile

LinkedIn is a great social media platform for entrepreneurs, business owners, and professionals.  Does that mean you’re going to grow your connections? No, it may not always help you to build your network.

But there is a way to tune yours up with just six simple steps:

Step 1. Revisit your goals.  LinkedIn is about how you market yourself or your company. You sometime got lost as you strongly worked through the mechanics of finishing up your profile and get your resume completion task.  From what I believe, do not bother to define yourself and it is not exactly as important as what you hope to accomplish, so you better off to think about your goals and what you desire to achieve into keywords. Why keywords? Keywords are how people find you on LinkedIn.

I bet you that the first thing you come up with a new keyword is probably one of million people came up with that keyword. You need to think differently. You need to make it exciting and intriguing.  You need to be more specific about the job or goals you have. The important of all, uses a keyword tool to find general terms that you believe it could attract a broader audience, so from there you simply dig deeper to target your niche by identifying what company might search for.

Step 2. Layer in your keywords. The headline is an essential factor in search results, which means that you have to ensure about picking an important keyword and having it appears in your headline.  I want to make it clear that “important” does not mean that one keyword has the most searched! Pick what keyword that reflects your goals and niche. When you do this, be sure to work through the rest of your profile and replace some of the vague description of skills, education background, and many more with keywords.

Step 3. Strip out the clutter. Maybe you have changed your jobs six times before you reached age 26. That experience is only relevant when it relates to your goals. You need to go through your profile and eliminate everything that doesn’t support your business or goals. For instance, if you are a marketer, but you were a software programmer, that is a distract because both are not relevant. Otherwise, it is okay for you to keep your previous jobs in your work history, but please limit each job title, company, and a brief description of duties.

Step 4.  Reintroduce your personality.  I have emphasized on focusing on keywords and eliminating clutter is very important, yet in the process your individuality probably got lost. Simply way to make it a little enthusiasm and flair by describing yourself as something that is specific and targeted so that says nothing about you as a person. It is all about what you believe in. Share why you love what you do in your profile. Reveal what you hope to accomplish. Describe companies you worked for or projects you completed. Share your results.

Please remember that keywords are important, but it only helps potential clients find you. Keywords are not going to get you hired. It is you that get yourself hired. They hire people, not keywords. Remember that!

Step 5. Take a hard look at your profile photo. When you follow someone on Twitter. What is the firs thing you do? Check out who they are or their photo.

Let’s say that a photo is similar to a logo concept. Take a good look at your current photo. Does that reflect who you are as a professional or does it reflect a hobby or something else? Does it look like a businessman? Frankly, a good photo does flatter, yet it can mislead to something else. Maybe you end up meeting your customers or clients, they might feel disconnected by photo they have seen and in reality.

Now you only need to find your photo that reflects how you will look when you meet a customer or client, not a photo that shows how awesome you are. The best profile photo does not have to be your favorite photo. Be sure to find a photo that it strikes a balance between professionalism and approachability, making you looks good, but also real!

Step 6. Get recommendations. As a customer here, I just couldn’t resist reading reviews about restaurants, movies, products, and many more. Why? Reviewers have already experienced while I haven’t. Reviewers tend to be more honest because they are real customers. Don’t get me wrong that there are some reviewers who aren’t exactly honest, but the point is that I trust them based on their experiences. Let’s get back to the LinkedIn topic, get yourself many recommendations so it helps your potential clients to feel confident that you are a great candidate and more intrigued to you.

Increasing Website Traffic: 6 Steps to Guest Blogging

You might have wondered how much this guest blogging consumes your time? It doesn’t have to be difficult or overly time consuming. You simply follow these six steps to get started:

1.     Social channels link

All you need to do is to set up your social channels: Google+ profile, Facebook page, Twitter account and LinkedIn profile. The important of all, you need to make sure that your website has all links to your social channels and that your social channels link back to your website. Many people have no idea how powerful this social media is today. This will increase the traffic to your website quickly if you only follow this.

2.      Great content on your website

Frankly, how great your writing style is or how beautiful your writing or whatever it is that appeals your fans will not help. You need to have a great content on your website that intrigues or amazes editors of well-known websites. An author, Jayson Demers notes that your article should include:

• Helpful, insightful or interesting information.
• Perfect spelling and grammar.
• Subheads to break the article into more easily consumable segments.
• Appropriate text formatting (bullet points, italics, bold, etc.).
• Images

Here are some ways to come up with ideas for topics to write about:

• Visit question and answer websites like Quora or Yahoo Answers and search for your industry keywords to see what questions people are asking. Then answer those questions in-depth with your article.
• Visit other blogs or publishers in your industry and see what they’re writing about. Can you give a different or unique spin on something they wrote?
• Think about common questions your customers have and compile those into an article.
• Give your opinion on recent industry news.
• Write about a problem you recently faced and how you solved it.
• Analyze proprietary, original or unique data and publish your findings. Or analyze existing, publicly available data in a way that creates new insights or conclusions.

Read more: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/226266#ixzz2QfADr6ww

These bullet points will shift the way you write, which means that may end up getting more fans! I am pretty sure that is what you want, right? If you do, all you need to do to give it a shot!

3.      Develop your connection

This one is quite difficult to identify sites or any connections for anyone who might be able to help you to get your article noticed or get your article published.

In fact, Google’s Adwords tool to research the keywords is a great tool! It can help you to identify all keywords that may get you article noticed by readers or bloggers. You can search for some keywords that you can peruse the top ten pages and keep track of which website appear to be content published instead of having these companies that sell a product or provide a service because they normally do not accept guest authors or bloggers.

You can also do some search queries so you can find some publishers such as the keywords (blogs, submit post, guest blogger, guest column, and many more).

4.      Outreach

There are countless ways to contact editors throughout social channels – LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook and reaching out via social media. You can also find an editor’s email address or the contact address on the website.

When you contact them, please let them know about yourself as in a business owner or a writer or whoever you are and that you’d be honored to contribute to their website. You could share your goals for contributing such as to build your reputation as an expert while providing all useful education and things that benefit content to the community and provide links to the best article you’ve written.

5.      Writing and sharing now

When you start to receive positive responses, so continue working with the editors on acceptable topic pitches, formats write the articles and send them back. This way grows your relationship with the editors, which may impact on your future with them. If you haven’t heard anything from them, then you can contact them to see what is going on.

Once your article is published, share your articles throughout your social channels and please share your appreciation to the editors for publishing them. From there, you can record your article URLs in a spreadsheet. Do this method repeatedly so that will build links to your other published articles so that will make your articles rank higher, which means that you will get more exposure and visibility.

6.      Be sure to stay on the top of the process

If you are rising to the top, then you will need to be sure that you continue throwing some new topic ideas to new publishers. Keep track of all the publishers with whom you work in a spreadsheet and set a formula to figure out how many days it is been since your last post was published at each one. You can easily identify some posts that have not published for a while so you can reach out and offer to write another article. You will definitely build your authority, credibility, and a great working relationship with each publisher.

Zappos – the website’s most popular shoe store!

Zappos is clearly one of the great success stores of the past few years. In fact, you are fully aware that there are countless e-commerce companies normally receiving millions of dollar when they started a company. Zappos didn’t begin with fancy investors when they started a company! They just knew what to do. There are some lessons from Zappos that I believe it will benefit you in the future.

What is Zappos Anyway?

This company started out selling nothing, but shoes. From there, they expanded and entered a new marketing by selling clothing and other items in the same way that Amazon did the first thing was just an online bookstore, then expanded to more options. Now they became the all in one online supermarket. Zappos is obviously far away from what Amazon has accomplished, but they are definitely on the right path to where Amazon is today.

What does this mean? You need to start out with a specific product that defines your company instead of selling countless products to customers. Why? It’s better off to sell a specific product to customers, so customers will know where to buy the next same product. If they want a shoe, then they come to your company. If they want a book, then they come to your company. The main reason is that they noticed your company is specialized in this product, which means your company is more likely to have all good shoes or books.

Interesting fact is that the name Zappos was chosen specifically to allow the company to expand beyond the shoe market. Let’s guess the first domain name they created? Maybe thezap, zapp, zapposen, or whatever it is? No, the first domain name was called shoesite.com, but they came to realization that they have to come up with something more generic that would allow them to expand. They created a word based on the Spanish for shoes (Zapatos).

Whenever you strive to set up a new business, always be sure to think of many names that you could come up with, and figure out which one you believe it will help your company to expand. Name defines what company is all about.

The Zappos Difference 

There are many things that have made Zappos so popular. It is known for doing things in a way that puts people before profits. For instance, Zappos always ensure that customers come first and always right. Zappos allows customers to return the product with a full year, which has really attracted customers. Zappos even surprised some customers by delivering them the product within a day or two days! Zappos have been ranked as one of the best places to work in America and customers continued consider them as being one of their favorite companies!

If you own a company now, maybe it is time for you to start out with something difference in your company. You could change the way your company treats customer or the way your employees do. You will definitely see a big change if you do these.

A Philosophy of Treating Customers Like Human Beings

Zappos has proven countless companies that they should treat their customers like king or queen! Zappos will make sure that their customers are fully satisfied.  Zappos designed the website content that it is simple and easy to navigate the website so customers can find the product quicker and easier! Zappos normally replies their customers quickly when they ask a specific question that are related to the product they want. A customer tends to change preference in a shoe quickly, which means Zappos has to answer them quickly before a customer changes his/her mind about the product. Zappos will listen to what customer says. When a customer says something that they do not appreciate, then your company has to give what this customer wants, so that way this customer can be satisfied or more appreciated, which means this customer is more likely return to your store. That is what Zappos has been doing.

Treating Employees Right

                       You cannot expect to have your company to follow what you want. If you want them to follow what you want. Do you want them to respect your belief? Do you want them to feel motivated? Do you want them to feel excited when they come to work at your company? You can do these if you do what Zappos has been doing!

There is a reason people love working at Zappos! There’s nothing to do with cherry attitude or a positive energy. In fact, Zappos recognizes that their employees are people too. Zappos simply open and fun about how things are done and they allow people to explore their passion, even going far as to encourage people to learn more during company time. For instance, Zappos did host some events or contests that their employees can involve in to get to know others more in the company. Zappos wants to make their employees to feel that Zappos is their second home. Zappos also wants to get their employees to feel comfortable working with others in the same department.

From there, employees will ensure that they do the job at their best so they can continue being part of the company because they cannot afford to leave the company they truly love. Now your company should do the same by creating a culture or getting all employees to feel that they are important or get them to get to know others more. That way will increase their motivation to work and respect the company’s belief.

There are many things that you can really learn from Zappos or other companies’ belief that has made them successful. What you need to do is to identify all problems you have in your company and figure out how to improve these problems. When you improve these problems and please be sure to create more ideas that can make things more excited for your company and employees. You have to respect customers and employees, then they will return the same to you. Customers are your power to make your company successful, but how to increase the power from customers? You will need to treat your employees right and find multiple ways to get your employees to love working at your company. That way your employees will be more committed to make sure that your customers love your company.

Viral Marketing – Why is it important?

“Viral marketing, viral advertising, or marketing buzz are buzzwords referring to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks and other technologies to produce increases inbrand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales) through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of viruses or computer viruses (cf. Internet memes and memetics).” – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_marketing

I hope wikipedia’s definition of viral marketing helps you to understand the concept of it. However, I want to share a short fact about Godaddy.com’s viral marketing. Godaddy.com made a risk choice, yet it was the smartest move ever I’ve seen in my life. Why? Godaddy released a video of a nerd man making out with sexy lady and close-up of their make-out motion on SuperBowl! Yes, believe it or not. Superbowl is not the only well-known football, it is also well-known for awesome commercials! Over a million people were truly shocked and speechless by the commercial video Godaddy made. It triggered the anger out of people who opposed to this video. At that point, when it has triggered the anger that has also boosted their motivation to do something about it. What is something? People could write a blog. People could post a video. People could share their opinions on social media sites such as FaceBook, Twitter, etc. People will talk about it with their friends in flesh. They talked how bad this commercial video is. They degraded Godaddy.com, but they didn’t realize how much they have helped Godaddy.com’s in a different way. What does this mean? People didn’t realize that they were heavily advertising or giving a free link that directly to GoDaddy.com. As in result, over a million people ended up clicking on link or going to GoDaddy.com for a specific reason – they want to know what is that company and why did they produce a disturb commercial video? From there, they didn’t realize that it is a domain/host website. They noticed how great this company provides these services and features that might meet people’s need for business or personal or other reason. GoDaddy.com earns more revenues by doing this. That was a clever viral marketing move because the higher risk it is, the higher reward it is. GoDaddy has obviously noticed how high risk this is, but it will not harm GoDaddy’s reputation as long as GoDaddy satisfies customers’ needs.

Why is it important? It increases the traffic to your website. It helps your company to get recognized more in the community or the world! It can increase company’s revenues. It can get more attentions from other companies. It can make a difference in company’s future. Before you excitingly start working on it, I am pretty sure that you think it is easy method to develop a viral strategy. In fact, it is not easy. There are over thousand companies that they have attempted doing some viral marketing. Some didn’t work. Some worked. Some damaged company’s reputation. You have to be careful. You have to be wise. You have to take time to think about everything. Everything could be what, how, why, when, etc. For instance, what video should company produce? How can that company make customers or new customers to share a video with others? What is approriate? What is not approriate? What is ethic thing to do? What is the best choice? I will make it simple for you. There are many things you need to be sure before you begin produce it. Whatever you do is represent the company you work for. This viral marketing can easily get you fired if you accidentally produce something that may damage company’s reputation.  It is risky move. If you don’t give a damn about it, then you should take it. If you ended up making it successful, you will definitely see yourself at somewhere better in the future because you are what every company wants.