Internet Toolbox – Don’t forget it if you want to go to work.

Last week I decided to put together an Internet MindMap for clients. This high level diagram identifies the tools and services they should consider in order to get the most from the internet for their business. Apologies if some are obvious/you know already but I do meet business owners every week that haven’t used or in some cases even heard of them.

In this article I have put words to the map.

The map is available at www.johnnybeirne.com.

The areas covered are as follows.

Your Company Website

Build a professionally designed website with the keywords in the key places. Do not be another ‘me too’ website.

Use Google Keyword Tool - https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternalto identify the keywords including the ones your competitors are using.

Monitor traffic to your website with Google Analytics - http://www.google.com/analytics/. Calculate the number of web sales/queries as a % of the number of unique visitors to your website. Ideally this should be great than 1% depending on what you are selling. 

Have a clear call to action on your website e.g. Call Us or Sign Up. Don’t make the phone number hard to find.

Add a blog to your website and write at least one blog post per week. My preferred blogging platform is http://wordpress.org/

Add your business details to Google Places - www.google.com/placesforbusiness

Facebook

Set up a customised business page. Be consistent with your existing look & feel e.g. brand, logo, website, message & advertising. - http://www.facebook.com/pages/

Set up a ‘landing page’ and make that the default under Edit info > Manage Permissions.

Have a ‘call to Like’ on the landing page with a reason/incentive for people to do so.

Ask yourself, why would someone ‘Like’ this page?

Check your page Insights - http://www.facebook.com/insights/

Run a targeted ad campaign – you can target by age, gender, marital status and location. There are a few other criteria to choose too. http://www.facebook.com/advertising/. You can also control how much you want to spend and how long you want to run the ad for. You can choose Cost per Click (CPC) or Cost per 1000 Impressions. An impression is the ad appearing. Cost per Click are primarily used when you want people to take action usually online. Cost per Impression are good value for shear brand awareness.

Twitter

Twitter is useful for network marketing and keeping your name (or business name) ‘out there’. http://www.twitter.com

Use http://search.twitter.com  to find people and topics worth following.

You can set Facebook to update Twitter at http://www.facebook.com/twitter/. There are also a number of ways that you can set Twitter to update Facebook.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is also useful for network marketing and prospecting. You will find the decision makers of 1000’s of companies on LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com. You should also join groups and contribute to the conversations that take place in them.

Blog

Add a blog to your website and share your knowledge regularly. Report on what is going on in your company and in your industry. Connect your blog to Facebook and Twitter with http://dlvr.it (there are others). You can also add your blog to your LinkedIn Profile. Blogs are search engine friendly by default which is also critical.

Network market by contributing via comments on other blogs.

Research/Increase Knowledge

Use Google Alerts to inform you about a particular topic or company including your own i.e. Brand Monitoring. http://www.google.com/alerts

Use Google Reader to subscribe to relevant and informative blogs/websites. You can also add Google Alerts and search results from Twitter to Google Reader.

There are further tools and techniques to use but items outlined above are a great starting point. You should really try to get these in place first. You will be surprised with the positive results.

I have managed to triple the online sales for a client by doing the above.