Podcast: Play in new window
This podcast discusses the ” One stone,Multiple birds internet marketing strategy”
Welcome to Webmaster for Hire’s CyberBulletin Podcast. Get the power to increase your business’ web impact.
Elizabeth Varian: Welcome back to Webmaster for Hire’s CyberBulletin Podcast. Elizabeth Varian here. Today, I’m going to be talking about One Stone, Multiple Birds Internet Marketing. We’re going to tackle as many strategies with a least amount of effort so that you can use your time more wisely in promoting your small, midsize, and even large business.
On the internet, we know we’ve got to be constantly updating many different locations. You need to be posting quality content on your blog for SEO and for frequently returning visitors. On minimum, you should be doing one article a week and it needs to be a complete quality article. You can’t just grab content from another site. You used to be able to, but there was a hummingbird roll-out out about 2010-2011 that said, “No more, you have to have quality content.”
Then you have to send out a monthly e-newsletter for people who don’t know you and signed up on your website. For your existing clientele and following who know you, you need to keep in front of them to remind them that you are still in existence. And by the way, here’s new products and service offerings and reminding them you are the expert so that they don’t go anywhere else, because they forget you existed.
You need to be posting to all of your social networks — at minimum, Google Plus, Facebook, and Twitter — to link back to your site. So that you get your social network followers on to your website and keeping in touch with who you are. In addition to that, a lot of people don’t know that there are websites called Web 2.O sites. These are trusted sites that getting a link back to your site not only helps search engine optimization, but these are sites that other people are visiting on a regular basis. By adding content to these sites, it helps promote your business both on their sites and bumping your rankings in the search engine.
Sites that we call “Web2.0” sites are like Reddit, Tumbler, Live Journal, Plurk. There’s several of them out there, I think we’ve got at least 23 that we follow. If you are solo entrepreneur, small business that has one person maybe who does your internet marketing, a midsize business … So like we have a hospital we work with, we have one marketing person that we deal with that hospital. She has maybe two other people that helps her with her online marketing. She can’t, with those two people, touch everything on a regular basis.
You’re social networking, you need to be at least once a day going in. Most of us can’t do that, but you could be going in once a week. Then once you get on your Facebook, then you’re spending an hour or more there at minimum. Then on Twitter, now you’re following, commenting, re-tweeting, answering direct messages, etc., and becomes time-consuming.
What we love and one of the reasons that we love WordPress, is that it helps you to touch all these pieces on a fairly regular basis and to also supplement your existing departments. So like larger corporations, they will have a social networking department that deals with all their social networks. They’ll have someone dealing with their emails. They’ll have someone taking care of their SEO, but bringing it all together and supplementing that, this Multiple Birds, One Stone Marketing will do that.
What is it? How is it that you can touch all these pieces and get value from it? WordPress was originally created as a blogging platform. It wasn’t initially created to be a website platform, but many of us have found the benefits of WordPress when we develop sites to become a site. It does have pages on it and if it’s done right, our customers can take over and add it and delete after we build the site.
They can do what we can do without knowing all the code that we know. That was the first reason we like WordPress, but because it was built initially as an RSS feed or a blog, excuse me, that means it has what’s called “an RSS feed.” What is that mean? RSS is Relay Syndicated Feed. It’s a way that your post can be pulled in to other sources. The benefit of that is everybody is starting to use that feed to help promote your blog post outside your site.
For example, we talked about your email newsletter. If you are using a program like MailChimp, Constant Contact, Benchmark Email, iContact or any of those programs, they have what’s called an “RSS email.” They actually use those letters that’s why I’m continuing to use it so if you go look it up, you know what to look up and what letters to see. What is that mean? With WordPress, you would put in your website name, slash, and then the word “feed” and that should bring up what’s called “XML code.” That’s basically the actual feed. That’s why I don’t want to get too technical.
By taking that link, creating an RSS email campaign in one of those email platforms. What it will do is grab all of your blog posts since the last time the email went out, anything new added, and send them out to your customers or your email subscribers, your newsletter subscribers. It will have a big title, a short excerpt, and then a “click here to read more.” It comes what they call a “digest format,” so you would have title, excerpt, read more. The next title, excerpt, read more.
If you create the habit of creating one blog post article per week and you add it to your blog post with … kind of a side tip here, with WordPress, you can add all four in at the same time and schedule them to go live every Wednesday, Thursday, whatever day you choose. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursdays are usually the better days. They’ll go live each week. Then, if you set your RSS email in one of the email platforms to go out at the last of the month, all four of those articles will be sent out to your subscriber list who may not have visited your website in a month. All of the new articles.
To read the full article, they have to click the link to read it. You want to make sure the articles that you post to your blog are absolutely relevant to those who are reading your newsletter, which you want anyways. If you’re talking about your service or your product, that will help you. Consistently updating your blog that way will help you in search engine optimization. Because as you talk about various aspects of your service offerings, your products, or your industry, you’ll get those keywords that people are searching for. So that’s two birds at this point, with one stone.
The stone is the blog. One bird is adding to the blog. So blogging, that’s one strategy. The second bird is emailing and all you’ve done is add written one article. You’ve hit two birds with that one article stone. Hopefully, that makes sense.
The next one is your social networking and your Web 2.0 sites. That same article, there are several plugins in WordPress that will allow you to auto-post out. Now, you have to take the time and it is very time-consuming to go in to each of different sites and setup a profile. You want to optimize the profiles, your social networking. Let’s say Facebook; you want to have that cover photo so if someone lands in your Facebook page, that they get that image that captures their attention right away.
You want your profile image setup so that any time you comment, post, share, like, whatever, that post gives recognition to you and your business. You want to go in the “about” section. You want to complete the very call to action description, short and long, that talks about the benefits of your service or business or products.
You want to make sure to add email address, web address, phone numbers and now, Facebook has call to action. You want to add those. Every social network, Twitter, same photo but it’s different sizing. LinkedIn, complete your profile if you’re a service professional as much as possible. If you’re doing YouTube channels, any kind of social network out there; Instagram, Google Plus, anything. Each one, you want to take care in the beginning and set them up as complete as possible so it doesn’t look like it’s just blank and all you’re doing is tossing articles.
You want it to look legit and it’s very positive for you to take that time to set it up. Once you set it up, these plugins out there are fairly easy, again, time-consuming but you can adapt them in with what they call an “API.” Again, not going to get technical. They basically, you have to have Facebook open and your WordPress open. Once you get that set up so that Facebook allows your site to post to it, what happens is you now have your third bird with that one article stone. Actually, you have your fourth and third bird with that one article stone.
Once that article is published on your blog, it now instantaneously goes to your Facebook page. Some of them may take up to an hour, but that’s very rare but for the sake of argument. Typically, within five minutes. Your article goes live, it is posted to your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, your Reddit, Live Journal, Plurk, Tumblr, whatever you ‘ve set it up to. Then you’re actually getting more than four stones, you’re getting the Tumblr stone, the Reddit stone, the Live Journal. All these stones, and all you did was have one article go live on your blog.
One of the biggest questions I get regarding social networking and auto-post is, “Does Facebook diminish how many people can see an auto-post?” They have historically shown that less people see the auto-post. Having a post out there so when people land on there and the handful of people, the percentage varies, used to be 16% of your followers. They keep changing their algorithm so I don’t know what it is, the second, but you’re at least posting out there. Most of you aren’t even posting even out there.
I say, as a supplement to your daily means, follow this, that, and the other. Most of the time, people are pulling in industry articles from other sources so you’re driving traffic to those sites while appearing as an expert. This allows you to publish your own information and makes you the expert, and gets the traffic to your site which is what social networking should be about.
Hopefully, this helps make sense of how you can touch all the pieces that you need. All the birds that you need to hit with that one stone and saves you time, supplements your existing department or helps out your one marketing person, that’s working with you so they can use their time more valuable to truly promote your site. If it sounds complicated or you don’t have the time to do it, of course, you can give us a call at Web Master for Hire at 561-822-9931. Find us online at www.webmasterforhire.us.
Thank you so much and I look forward to sharing more podcasts as we go forward.
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