If you are looking at new ways in which you can expand your business reach and do not currently use social media sites, then you may wish to explore this option. Facebook is a popular social media sites that millions of businesses make a success out of.

When you first decide to take the step towards marketing through social media sites such as Facebook, you may be surprised if you don’t instantly receive a great response from it. Facebook can work wonders for some businesses and for others it takes a little more time and often money.

If you are in a business that sells a service or product direct to the public like a beauty salon or homemade jewellery then Facebook marketing can work really well and you may find that you have bookings or orders coming in quickly. You can build up a group of followers by asking friends and family to share and like your page. Another way to build up followers is to run competitions to get more and more people linked to your page. If you are within an industry that is a little bit more specialised or find it hard to promote through friends and family then you may want to consider using Facebook paid ads.

If you are looking for instant traffic to your website them you should think about using Google’s Pay per Click marketing tool. It allows you to create marketing campaigns to advertise your website as a whole or specific products or services. The number of ways in which you can set up your campaign is vast. You can set it up to only target people within a set geographical location, using certain devices or to only show your ads on specific days or times of day. Setting up specifics in your campaign will often allow your budget to go further but you do need to ensure that it is done correctly. One simple mistake in your settings could mean non or your adverts show or that you use your budget up far too quickly with little return.

Although Pay per Click can be expensive, many companies that use it successfully says that it pays for itself and that if they turn it off they notice an instant decline in visitors and enquiries or sales.

You need to be able to know what keywords you should target and this is particle linked to the budget you have. If you only have a small budget then you should focus on more long tailed keywords rather than generic ones.

If you have a website for your business then that is a great way to start online marketing, but it is important that you not only attract visitors to your site but manage to convert them in to sales or enquiries.

It is important to ensure that your site can be found easily. Simple steps such as making sure non www. and www. both show your site will help ensure you do not miss any visitors. Another way in ensuring yor site is easy to find is to achieve good rankings on the search engine such as Google. You can do this in two ways – one, through SEO (search engine optimisation) and two, through paid for adverts on Google Adwords. SEO will take some time to achieve and you may have to work very hard to achieve number one or two positions. Google Adwords can be almost immediate but it can be quite costly, especially if you are bidding on keywords that are very generic or highly competitive.

If you have a website for your business then you may be constantly checking where you are in the. If you are receiving traffic to the site but are not benefitting from enquiries or sales then it may be time to revisit the content within your website and have a look at what is happening when people come to your site from the search engines. It may be that your site is too busy and they cannot find what they are looking for or that maybe you are targeting the wrong audience. All of these issues will result in limited sales and enquiries.

As a business owner or blogger, it can be extremely disappointing to find that your website is nowhere in the search engine results. It may be that you are showing up but not until pages 5 plus which means you will get very little or possibly no traffic.

There are several reasons as to why this may happen which you need to investigate as soon as possible. Firstly, you may have some code on your robots.txt file or in the settings of your website or blog that don’t allow the search engines to crawl your site. If this is the case it means that none of your pages will existing in the search engine results pages and therefore will not show up for any of your keyword or even when your company name is typed in. This is a fairly straight forward issue to resolve and could see your site indexed within a week or two of removal.

Another reason that your site may be no where to be seen is that your lacking SEO (search engine optimisation) or are doing some techniques that has actually caused your site to be removed. SEO is optimising a website to get it to rank high on the search engines such as Google. It involves a number of processes and can take time to work.

Social media can be great for businesses who are looking market their business to large number of people quickly. It can also be a good way of keeping in touch with your existing customers and letting them know about events, sales or product launches etc.

Facebook has become increasing popular over the last decade with over two billion monthly users making it a potentially huge marketing avenue. Many companies are now using social media to marketing their business as they have started to see the potential it has.

Facebook marketing either using the free posting / sharing aspect or the paid for advertising can work well for many industries and different types of business. If your business deals direct with the public then social media is especially important as you can connect with individual users and offer those competitions, special offers and the chance to interact with you instantly. Even if you only do business to business trading, Facebook should still be used as you may be able to reach directors of companies or decision makers as well as it having a positive effect on your website position on Google.

Social media is a hugely popular marketing tool for many businesses and it can very quickly help you establish your brand and start interacting with your customers.

Although social media has many advantages, if used in correctly it can end up having a negative impact on your business, so it is important you understand what you are doing.

You may find that people have started to leave reviews on your social media accounts or that they have mentioned your company in one of their posts. If this happens you should ensure you acknowledge any activity on social media good or bad. If they have put a positive comment on about your company then a quick post thanking them for their feedback and stating that you are pleased they have had a positive experience can go a long way, but if they have put something negative on there then it is important to think carefully before responding. Refrain from nasty or negative comments in reply to a post on social media, it is never a good idea and not only will you upset that person you may find that you get a lot of bad press from the other people reading or commenting on the post too. If you do find a negative comment, reply saying that you are disappointed to learn about their experience and would like to contact them directly to discuss.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and is a marketing strategy that is applied to your website in order to improve the rankings on the search engines such as Google. You can choose to do certain elements of SEO yourself with limited knowledge but you do need to be very careful not to make a mistake which could have detrimental results.

SEO companies can really help turn a business round and bring a failing business up to make it highly successful.

Different agencies may have slightly different views on what is needed to be done in order to push you up the rankings but it should always be based around the search engines ranking algorithm. Ideally to help you choose which marketing agency you should go with, you need to see results that they have gotten for other clients. All good marketing companies should be able to give you this information and may allow you to contact their existing clients for feedback on their services.

SEO is not usually cheap but you can often make back the money you have spent via an increase in sales. To get the full benefit of using an SEO company you need to understand a bit about how it works and work alongside the agency. They will need your help with understanding elements of the business and industry if it is relatively niche.

More and more companies are now using videos as a way of advertising their products and services and often this is seen to show great results. Corporate videos can be a great way to advertise your business as it allows you to share a lot of information in a short time. Some people do not like to read through paragraphs of text but will be quite happy to listen to information given in a video.  When creating a video you firstly need to decide what it is going to be used for.  It may be that you want to introduce your staff and show off your showroom or you may use it to show how a particular product or service works. You have a number of options available to you when it comes to creating a video and these options often affect the overall cost.

If you have a phone with a decent camera then you can of course film a video yourself and upload it to YouTube free of charge, but if you want a high quality, professional video, then you should hire a videographer. They can use a range of techniques such as special effects, editing, fading and music layered over the top.

As a business owner you should have a firm grasp on what marketing is and the different forms of it that you may want to us to help boost your business. Marketing is often split down in to online and offline. Traditionally offline marketing often took precedence but with more and more people using the internet to find products and services they want, businesses are having to get on board with online marketing. Web marketing is the marketing you carry on online and is linked to your website. Some companies that do not have a website still do online marketing by advertising via social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter by advertising on directory sites. This can work well, but is often more effective when backed up by having their own website.
Marketing companies will often have their own views on which elements are most important in terms of increasing their client’s visibility on the search engines and this may vary from client to client even though the overall goal is the same.
If you are going to be taking on your own marketing, it is worth investing in some training and setting aside some time to fully understand what you need to do and how to check your results.

On site search engine optimisation is very important and can help boost your site on the search engine results pages. If you are struggling to get towards the top of the Goole, Bing or Yahoo search results for some of your main keywords then you may want to revisit your on page SEO.
The first things to check is that your meta data is all complete for each page and relevant. Although there are many discussions about how much weight these now carry, it is shown to help to some degree. Make sure that each page has a unique title, description and a selection of keywords. Often Google will use this information to display on the search results page. The meta data should be taken from the content within the page and the title and description should be written in such a way that will entice viewers to click on the link to your site.
You should also be adding regular and relevant content to your site as often as possible. This content needs to be unique so you cannot just copy and paste content from another website and expect to help with your rankings. Having a blog or news section is an easy way to add fresh new content.