Increase your traffic with a Press Room on your website

by Sarah Santacroce

In a previous post I have showed you how to increase your online visibility with Press Release Marketing.
The strategy consists in sharing your press releases on online press release distribution sites. It is a very good approach to get your brand noticed on Google.

In this post I would like to show you the benefits of having a press room on your own website. But first, let’s define a “press room”, or also called a “news room”: A press room is a designated page on your website where journalists and other curious minds can discover the latest news about your company.

So why should your website have a press room ?

Reason #1: Increase your traffic

Besides your blog, your press room is the only other non-static page on your website.
If you update it regularly, the search engines will love to come back and reference your page.
You can also share your Press Releases through Social Media and increase traffic to your site this way.

Reason # 2: We are All Journalists Now

Before web2.0, press releases were just for journalists and only big company changes were announced to the press. Today press or news releases can be used even by small companies, and the whole wide world has access to them. By distributing your press releases you will be reaching out to a huge audience and who will be curious to see your updates and visit your website.

Reason #3: Be perceived as an expert in your field

By submitting great content you will boost your site’s "authority" and be perceived as an expert in your field. This is critical in order to increase your site's overall visibility in search results and thus deliver real traffic. So, don’t miss the opportunity to turn your site into a trusted resource that will drive deeper, longer term relationships.

What has to be on your press room page?

1. Your complete contact details
   
   
2. Your latest press releases, as downloadable pdf documents.
   
   
3. The logo of your business, as downloadable image
   
   
4. Photos of you, as downloadable image
   
   
5. Photos of your products, if you sell any
   
   
6. Audio and/or video clips for the time-starved reporter, directly embedded on your page
   
   
7. Links to your Social Media presence (Facebook page, Linkedin Profile, Twitter etc.)
   
   
8. News Feed for Automatic Receipt of Press Room Updates Make it easy for those who are interested to get press releases and other news hot off the press via an RSS reader
   

I hope these points have convinced you to go talk to your webmaster ;-)

P.S. Just a heads up that some change is in the air concerning my website and blog. Sometime this summer I will ask you to update my RSS feed. But for now you can still subscribe here.

360 Entrepreneurship Summit for Women Entrepreneurs

This is a guest post by Anna Persson, Founder of the 360 Entrepreneurship Summit

Anna has a solid background in women leadership development and extensive experience in the field of international conference planning and management. Before starting her own company, she worked over five year as Conference Director and Sponsor Account Manager for international business conferences in Europe with focus on women’s leadership evolution. But Anna’s true passion is connecting people to bring ideas into projects and actions, to activate team spirit and to make partnerships and joint ventures happen. Read Anna’s personal invitation to the one summit you don’t want to miss this year.

It’s a pleasure for me to invite you to join 360 Entrepreneurship Summit in Malmö Sweden 16-18 September 2011.

The 360 Entrepreneurship Summit designed for both experienced and new business owners alike and you can expect high level of training, practical and hands on content and of course great networking opportunities. For 3 days you will have access to a Mastermind group of internationally renown, inspiring keynote and workshop presenters delivering leading edge strategies, tools and resources to strengthen your business results! This is where you get the answers to your questions and you’ll be able to walk away with the strategies and the tool kit you need to accelerate your business. The 360 Summit presenters have helped hundreds if not thousands of women create, develop and grow their business and they are here to do the same for you!

Women today, represent one of the largest market opportunities in our lifetime both as producers and consumers, and a strong European network of committed, talented women represents an unlimited creative and economic force. And it all starts with you!
So what are some the reasons for creating a conference for entrepreneurs and small business owners?

Build valuable connections and expand opportunities - Relationship is one of the prime factors for doing business with each other and we want to do business with people we know, whom we like and trust. The summit will allow for truly developing and deepening contacts and you will meet with a large number of extraordinary business women who are serious about doing business in the “spirit of mutual benefit”

Promote yourself and your business - As an entrepreneur and small business owner it’s crucial to keep a high profile in business letting people know you exist. Creating rapport, getting to know your potential joint venture partners and potential clients is so much easier when having a face to face contact.

Personal development, improving and learning new business skills - If you want our business to grow you need to grow with it, and it’s necessary to keep up with a number of things; how to be a conscious and successful leader, develop a strong brand to attract business, get the social media working for you, not you working them, how to protect your intellectual property and also learn and adopt a health so you can stay on fire without burning out.
My aim is that 360Entrepreneurship Summit will give you lots of new business opportunities and connections, supporting your business development and strengthen both your business results and enhance your personal growth. And I really want you to feel welcome, inspired and included.

Maybe you don’t know just how important entrepreneurship and Small and Medium sized Enterprise is to the economy. Well, SME’s are true back-bone of the European economy, primarily responsible for wealth and economic growth, next to the key role in innovation R&D. I’ll share some interesting facts with you. The EU non-financial business economy counts over 20 million enterprises, where over 99% are SMEs. They provide 2/3 of the private sector jobs and contribute to more than half of the total value-added created by business in the EU. Even more intriguing the fact that 9/10 SMEs are micro enterprises where each provides work for two persons in average. So if it’s something we should support and encourage it is the development and growth of entrepreneurship and small business!

See you in Sweden 16-18 September!
Anna

For more information visit 360 Entrepreneurship website www.360entrepreneurship.com or join 360’s Facebook page: www.facebook.com/360Entrepreneurship.

Get more website traffic with Flickr

by Sarah Santacroce

Photo: courtesy of Veronique Goy

When I asked my list subscribers this Monday what they would like me to blog about, several people asked me to write an other post on how to increase their website traffic. So that’s just what I’m doing :-)

This time I take a closer look at Flickr, a photo and video sharing website which is owned by Yahoo. If you are a local business, especially one that sells products (handmade bags, homemade birthday cakes, designer clothes or whatever it might be) or even some services (manicure, relooking, photographs or any other service that has an end product that shows nicely on a picture) Flickr HAS to be part of your Social Media Marketing Strategy. It is highly indexed and will increase your search engine visibility and hence drive more traffic to your website.

It’s easy to start working with Flickr. Just go to Flickr.com and create an account. Remember to use your company name for branding purposes.

A couple of things to boost your visibility (Search Engine Optimization):

• Titles: Use your keywords to create strong and descriptive titles for every picture. Think about unique ways to motivate users to click on your image.
• Descriptions: write descriptions with the user in mind. Put yourself in their shoes and think what would make them click on your photo.
• Hyperlinks: Add hyperlinks in your descriptions to relevant pages on your website
• Local place names: If you are a local business that only sells locally (no online sales) make sure you use local search keywords for communities you are targeting (for example, Lausanne, Switzerland, Suisse Romande) in your titles, descriptions, tags, and hyperlinks.
• Tags: Tag each photo with descriptive, searchable keywords. Include place names in the tags to attract local searches.
• Profile: Search Engine Optimize your Flickr profile page and Flickr photo "sets" with search-friendly titles, tags, fun and informative descriptions, and links.
• Flickr Groups: You can join relevant groups and post your photos there to get even more exposure.

Of course you will also want to use your Flickr photos and share them on other social sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin. Flickr makes social sharing very easy, all the buttons you need are right next to every picture.

Oh, did I mention that Flickr is totally FREE (unless you want to go Pro, then it’s $24.95 per year).

One last tip: If you are in the music, entertainment or art business, make sure you check out www.webdoc.com. It’s a very cool new tool for rich expressions. You can use pictures, videos, sounds, and apps to create your own mini-webpages for example for a concert, vernissage, exhibition etc. and share it all over your social network. Have a look and let me know what you think.

Vanity urls for Facebook and Linkedin profiles

by Sarah Santacroce

“Vanity is my favourite sin.” Al Pacino

This short post is not really about vanity or even less about Al Pacino. It’s about personal branding and using vanity urls for your marketing. I want to show you how to get your personalized url for your Linkedin profile as well as your professional Facebook page.

But first, let’s quickly look at why it’s important:

• it’s part of your branding
• it’s easier to remember www.facebook.com/simplicityadmins then www.facebook.com/123034980348mmm7
• it’s easier to communicate on written publications
• it just looks better !

So, let’s start with the vanity url for your Facebook page:

Before all things, you will have to get 25 “Likes” on your page. Facebook only allows “usernames”, as FB calls them, for pages with more then 25 people.

Once you have reached the magic number, you want to choose a username for your business.
Then you go to http://www.facebook.com/username/ and check if the name you have chosen is available for your page. If yes, congrats, if no, choose another one.

Your username for the vanity URL must be at least five characters long and be all alphanumeric characters (A-Z, 0-9).

A word of caution: Don't go for anything funny or cute. Play it straight. According to Facebook, "Once it's been selected, you won't be able to change or transfer it."

That’s all there is to it, really.

Now let’s have a look at your Linkedin Profile:

Select the “Edit Profile” tab, scroll down a bit and next to the “Public profile” link click on “Edit”.
On the new page, scroll down a wee bit and find the box that says “ Your public profile URL” (see picture below).

You then click on “Customize your public profile URL” and choose the name you like, preferably the same that you have chosen for your Facebook page.

If you would like to see if your username is available on all other Social Media sites, have a look at Namechk.com. It tells you at one Glance which names are available for which site.

E-mail Marketing basics

by Sarah Santacroce

If you are a Small Business owner who is still using Outlook for their e-mail marketing campaigns, don’t be ashamed. You are not alone. There are so many entrepreneurs who are in the same situation as you: pulling their hair because they just don’t know how to keep their e-mail lists and campaigns organized.

If I can give you one advice though: Outlook is not the answer for e-mail marketing campaigns. Here is why:

• Outlook doesn’t apply to the CAN-SPAM Act
• You could be penalized if you send e-mails to people who didn’t agree to receive them
• Your Internet Service Provider might flag you as a Spammer
• People cannot automatically unsubscribe from your list
• You will be bombarded with “Out of Office”, “Undeliverable” and other annoying messages
• You cannot track who opened your messages
• It’s an administrative nightmare !

You see, you really need to get things under control and switch to a system that has been specifically designed to handle mass mailing of commercial e-mail campaigns. You need to use a service that will help you verify that people want to be on your list, will help you easily remove people from your list when they no longer want to hear from you, and will give you information about email bounce rates, email open rates, link click through rates, and much much more.

And don’t worry, this service won’t cost you an arm and a leg. Some providers even offer a limited service for FREE. For more information about E-Mail Marketing tools, please read my previous post “Newsletter Marketing – Available Tools”. In this post I focused on newsletters, but the same applies for traditional e-mail marketing campaigns.

Now it’s your turn ? Which tool are you using ? Share your experience in the comments below.

Traditional versus 2.0 media attention

by Sarah Santacroce

On Friday I assisted a conference entitled “How to attract media attention”. It was lead by a journalist and there were 3 panel speakers. A tv journalist and two small business owners who testified their success by getting media attention.

It was an interesting morning, but…

what bothered me is that they never mentioned the new way of submitting press releases: online ! The whole discussion revolved around how to attract a journalist’s attention. But let’s face it: a small business or individual entrepreneur, which is not in a absolute trendy industry that everybody wants to read about (such as biodegradable shopping bags like the ones that one of the panelist’s company designed) or has a close friend who’s a journalist, has very little chance to be featured in the local newspaper or on tv.

That’s why I couldn’t resist and got up in front of close to a hundred people and mentioned that they should not forget to submit their press releases also ONLINE (of course I made a complete fool out of myself because I hate speaking in public and get very nervous, but that’s ok, I made my point :-)

So here is just a quick reminder of why you should submit your press releases online (even if you have little hope that a journalist will pick up your story):

Online Press Releases

• reach a huge audience of potential clients who search for your company online
• get excellent ranking on Google since they are a non-static part of your website
• increase traffic to your website
• create a back link, increasing your page ranking again
• create “buzz” about your company

So don't forget: submit regular online Press Releases !

For more information about Press Release Marketing read my earlier post “Increase your Online Visibility with Press Release Marketing”.

Content Curation with Google Reader

by Sarah Santacroce

How do you stay informed ? How do you learn the latest news about your industry ?

If you are already know RSS feeds and how to aggregate them in to one single place to get your daily information boost then I suggest you skip the reading this time and go directly to the second video where Mari Smith gives you some more tips on content curation.

If you are new to RSS feeds and their aggregation, let me give me some more information on that subject.

What is a RSS feed ?

According to Wikipedia, RSS (most commonly expanded as Really Simple Syndication) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format.

Where do I find RSS feeds ?

Most websites or blogs with non-static, regularly updated content provide you with an RSS feed to get their content regularly. Just look for the orange RSS icon.

What can I do with these RSS feeds ?

RSS feeds are like news subscriptions. Every time your selected blog publishes a new post, it gets automatically sent to your feed reader.

What is a feed reader ?

According to Wikipedia, a feed reader is a “is a Web-based aggregator, capable of reading Atom and RSS feeds online or offline.” In other words it is a web application which gathers web content such as news headlines, blogs, and podcasts in a single location for easy viewing.

How does Google Reader work ?

In this post I am going to focus on Google Reader, since that’s the tool I chose for mine and my client’s feed aggregation.

Google Reader let’s you organize all your feeds into one place. You can create different folders, just as in Windows Explorer. It looks a bit overwhelming at the beginning, since the more feeds you have, the more content you will receive. But the nice thing is that you don’t have to read it all. You can just look at the titles, decide if it’s interesting to you and if not, keep on scrolling…

Watch this short video if you want to learn how to add your rss subscriptions to your Google Reader:

Still, it’s a lot of content, who has time to read it all ?

As I mentioned before, you only read the items that seem of interest to you. I usually read mine early in the morning, and one more time after dinner. And if you are travelling a lot, I also recommend the Google mobile apps for your phone. Information on the go… There is also a “star function”, the possibility to mark articles for later with a little yellow star.

“I thought I had to create my own content, so why do I have to spend all this time reading other people’s stuff ?”

Content = knowledge. The more you read about your industry, the more you learn. And the more you learn, the more you can then teach others. In order to be seen as an expert in your industry, you will want to stay informed about the latest trends and tendencies. You might also remember the 20/80 percent rule in Social Media: for 20% of your own content, share at least 80% of other information (blog posts, videos, whitepapers etc.).

If you are not a big fan of Google’s products, watch this video where Mari Smith shows 7 other tools for content curation.

Now it’s your turn ? Which tool are you using ? Do you have questions about content aggregation? Post them in the comment section below.
Oh, and please subscribe to my RSS here :-)