So when you are building those social pages out there, remember that your goal is to leverage those sites to drive traffic to YOUR site, not to those sites. If your social space contains too much information, or more information that your “real” website then you are hurting yourself.

Some things to consider:

1. Your goal in the social space should be to push your information out to where your users are and by doing that draw them back to your site. If you post everything on Facebook (for example), then why would your Facebook fans bother to come to your site?
2. When you create content on social sites you are building the social site, not your own. Their site, their users, their ads, their control. Again… leverage that tool, don’t build your business on it. Put YOUR content on YOUR site, under YOUR control, with whatever other message you want those users to see.
3. When a user sees ALL of your information about a given topic on a social site, and therefore doesn’t bother to visit YOUR site, they may miss other items of interest that you’ve spent time developing (look to the right for an example). So don’t leave them out there, bring them home.
4. Lastly, remember that trendy, social type sites come and go. Their popularity may be huge this month, but six months down the road it may fall off when the next new site comes along. So if you have all this great content, and “followers”/”fans”/”peeps”, and posts on your “wall” telling the world how great you are… and it’s all out there on your Tripod account… what do you do when the next thing comes down the road, rebuild it all? Conversely, if you are pointing all those things towards your own site then you can just go with the flow… and when the next big thing happens you just draw customers from that site as well.

So keep building those social pages. Reach out to where your current, and new, customers spend their time. Just remember that your goal is to bring them back to your site and build those pages and posts accordingly.

© FeO for FeO Consulting, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: inbound linking, SEO, Web 2.0

You’ve built your website. You’ve pasted it on everything that goes out of your office or business, from letterhead, to receipts, to email signatures, to business cards. Your “www” is all around you. But that’s just it. It’s all around YOU. But your customers only see it when they need something from you (you hope). How can you engage your clients in such a manner as to stay on their proverbial radar?

Back in “the day” you would gather your client’s email addresses and every so often send out a mass email about your latest product offering. Or perhaps an actual mailing using the good old “direct mail” method. Maybe you did some cold-calling. Whatever it took to get your message in front of your clients, you did.

And all the while, your website is sitting there. Waiting. Hoping that one of those customers, or perhaps even a new customer, would stumble by and go bananas over this great new product/service/idea/annoucement (you did put this great new product/service/idea/annoucement on your webiste, didn’t you?). If we could only figure out a way to put the information on your site and then instantly inform your customers, and potential customers, of this information. Well, perhaps we can, and it’s Really Simple.

Over the course of the next few posts I’ll be exploring just how to do that. We’ll be talking about things like “Web 2.0″, and RSS, and a bunch of other terms (some of which I’ll make up as I go along, just for entertainment value). So stay tuned…

© FeO for FeO Consulting, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: RSS, SEO, Web 2.0