"UK Small Busines Network" The Free to join Social Business Network

The “UK Small Business Network” is going from streanth to strength, with more people joing on a daily basis. The new Social Network site for “Small Business”.

UK Small Business Network is THE Social Medial site for all entrepreneurs, Sole Traders and Small Business owners in the UK. Membership is FREE and enables you to let the whole of the UK business community know about you and your company. Be a part of the new Social Media Revolution.
Once you have created your profile, you can then upload photo’s, videos, post to the forum and create blogs. Then Invite all your business associates, colleagues and customers to join the network too. It’s fun and informative, and creates business between the members.

Publicise your events for absolutely no cost

UK Small Business Network has a section on the site where you can tell people all about your latest event including time, place, detailed information and a link through so people can book.

Site Sections

Profile Pages - See my Profile Page – Andy Phillips
Members Page - Who’s a member of www.uksbn.com?
Photo Page – Upload photographs of anything you want
Video – Promotional video, events, information videos
Forum - Get your opinions heard
Events – Post your up and coming events to the site
Groups – Start your own group or join a group your interested in
Blog it – Write a blog on your company, industry or yourself
Chat – Use or chat function to talk with other business owners

Take a look at Deena’s website

A new website has been designed for Property Mentor and Speaker Deena Honey www.deenahoney.co.uk. Deena helps people new to the property business get started the right way. Deena’s “First Step Mentorship Program” has proved very successful mainly because it’s unique, there really isn’t anything like this for people who are brand new to property investment.

One of her mentorship students said “Deena’s enthusiasm for this business is boundless, her attitude towards her students is so positive that it is almost impossible not to get excited about your future in the property business”

Business For Life helped Deena get this project off the ground with advice on style and approach. The site is very comprehensive with lots of great advice and information which has been broken down into sections.

One of the sections focuses on what tools a Property Investor requires to ensure success. The “Investors Toolkit” provides in depth information on “Goals”, “Strategy”, “Time Management” and the creation of a “Mastermind Team”.

There is also a section with advice pulled from her own experience such as “How to deal with Vendors” and how to work and negotiate with Estate and Letting Agents. The website will be updated on a regular basis with news, advice, Property Deals and leads for her students to take advantage of.

You can sign up for Deena’s regular and informative newsletter on the site. Business For Life have designed and will implement the newsletter with Deena.

Take a look at the site and if you’re interested in getting involved with Property then Deena’s the best person to speak to.

Take a look at Deena’s website

The document is meant to be a guide to inform businesses how to get the best from Twitter, however the sceptical amongst us could see this as a way for Twitter to get businesses hooked prior to providing a pay to ad scheme. As you know, at the moment, Twitter is not yet monetising the service.

Anyway, the document covers many topics which I think anyone, whether in business or not, should read. It goes through how to get started, learning the lingo and how to use things like Retweets properly, what a Hashtag is, how to use Tweetup etc. It also covers the ideas and concepts around best practice. This section is effect gives businesses an insight into some of the ways to use Twitter for bisiness.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. Photograph: Robert Galbraith/Reuters

The final section is capped of with Case Studies. These are worth going through as this gives you further ideas on how you could incorporate some of the ways other have successfully used twitter to increase their business.

Biz Stone, Co-Founder of Twitter explained “We coordinated with business students and writers to surface some interesting findings, best practices, steps for getting started, and case studies,” He went ton to say “The results demonstrate how customers are getting value out of Twitter and suggest techniques businesses can employ to enhance that value. While this work was envisioned for businesses, it’s also useful for anyone using Twitter so have a look if you like.”

Go to Resourses

1. Twitter 101 – A Special Guide – Online
2. Twitter 101 – A Special Guide – .pdf Slides

Part 1
Design a landing page – This would be written specifically to get the prospect to do one thing, in this instance, lets say it’s to get them to buy a “guaranteed to loose 2 stone in 2 weeks” diet e-book.
The landing page will have
1 – Buy or book now button
2 – enter your details for a “how to eat well” FREE mini e-book

Take a look at our example Landing Page

Part 2
Set up the auto-responder email, this includes the link to the FREE mini eBook download page and 10 reasons why you should buy the book, the email also includes a special bonus item if they order now. Includes a Buy the book now! Button

Part 3
Set up the PPC campaign with a specific budget and time frame, pointing towards the Landing Page.

Part 4
Sit back and let it run, monitoring success or failure and changing or tweaking to get extra sales.

This is a very basic idea of a campaign, but I hope you can see that:
1 – It was broken down, and more specifically, away from everything else you or your company was doing.

2 – It used different elements of internet marketing, together in one cohesive strategy. eBook, Landing page, PPC Campaign and email auto-responders.

It’s simply a numbers game, just the same as everything in marketing and sales, the more you can feed in the funnel at the top, the more sales you’ll get, it’s as simple as that. When I started in telesales, many years ago, my line manager said to me “if you make 100 cold calls and follow the script, I will guarantee you’ll get 7 sales. Do that every day for a week and you’ll hit your target”.

This concept has always stayed with me whenever I embark on any sales or marketing campaign, and it should stay with you as well.

The reason why you should keep this in mind, is simply because begin to adopt the right attitude to your internet marketing. If you try to please everyone then you get nowhere. You can’t sell to every person who views your site; however, you can, and will, sell to some of them.

“Some will, Some won’t, So what? NEXT”

So the first thing to do is to start to get some copy together which would appeal to the exact profile of the type of person you would want to attract.

Always have in mind that all you want to do is for them to enter their name and email address, you are not selling a product, just collecting information. So write your text or copy as it is also called, with that one thing in mind.

Why should they enter their details?
What’s in for them, what are you giving them for the information?

This is the time to think about what you can offer, what would induce you prospect to part with their details. Think about the times when you have entered your name, email address, maybe a phone number. Why did YOU do it? Was it the promise of something which you perceived as valuable?

The sort of inducements could be:
Free monthly newsletter
Free membership if you commit before a certain date.
Free audio or e-book downloads.
Entry into a competition.

Whatever the hook, for this to work it has to be perceived as good value, even better if it was perceived as MASSIVE VALUE!!

This is why one of the main inducements used to entice prospects to enter their details into data capture forms is the humble e-book.

The following example of an Internet Marketing Campaign can be carried out even if you already have a web site, and to be honest, it does not matter whether your website is optimised or written as a sales tool or not. In other words, it is designed to work without the web site in mind.

The Inducement
The first step of the process is to construct your inducement. An e-book, downloadable mp3, free software, anything which has perceived value. This, in itself could be a lot of work to get right, but will be worth it as hopefully, 100’s if not 1000’s of people will be downloading it and if done correctly will write about it in forums and sections (If it’s an e-book) may even be quoted by others. It’s the time to use every ounce of experience and skill in your chosen field.

Landing Page
With the inducement in place you can now set your sites on the delivery. There are 2 main skill sets in play here
1 Web design – The Landing page has to use every piece of search engine optimisation skill here, most important being keyword choice

2 Marketing – The copy or text and layout has to be spot on. Take a look at the section on landing pages on this site for more information.

Market the Landing Page
a) edit a few sections for submission to e-article sites and include your landing page URL at the bottom. You’ll notice I said direct them to your landing page as opposed to your website.
b) Start getting involved in Industry Forums and expertly answer queries and sign it off with your landing page URL.
c) In fact get into anything which will get in front of people, from facebook right through to including the landing page URL on any direct mail pieces and other traditional marketing

So, once you have optimised your landing page as best you can, and the fact that you have been directing traffic to it through printed and traditional marketing, you should be getting a decent amount of traffic to your site. A proportion of these visitors will be either entering their data or purchasing through the landing page.

If they are purchasing, then job done! You should now be looking to nurture these new customers with great service and contacting them on additional products and services.

They may have entered their details to get a copy of an ebook, once they hit the submit button they can be taken to another web page with a download here button which will enable them to download the ebook from your site.

however, they have just entered their details, then this shows they are interested but not as yet converted to a buying customer. So, how can we use the technology of Internet marketing to help make them customers?

Follow up campaign
Using simple technology included in the Internet Marketeers toolbox, we would now be looking at employing a specific tool called an autoresponder.

Once the landing page visitor has entered their details into your data capture form and hit the submit button, you can enable the software at the back end to do 3 initial tasks.

1 Send an email directly to the prospect, using the email address they have provided, which is personalised to them because the software can utilise the information on the form, such as First Name, Last name etc.
This email will be a welcome email from you or your company; it may well have a further call to action.

2 It will also send an email to you, or a designated email address to inform you that someone has filled in the form. Part of your follow up campaign could be to schedule a telephone call to the prospect the next day to personally say thanks and to start a sales dialogue.

3 The third task the software does is to place this information into a database. This is the list building part of the process. Have this set up for long enough and you will collect 100’s if not 1000’s of names, email address and telephone numbers.

Every single one of these can be followed up time and time again.

I hope you can see how using Internet Marketing can increase your marketing reach and more importantly increase sales.

Internet Marketing covers a wide range of marketing initiatives, all, at some point, intertwine with each other. The best way to put together a concise Internet marketing strategy is to break it down into smaller sections; each section will form a part of the overall strategy.

Put very simply Internet Marketing is the implementation of internet based technology to market your company, product or service. This could be as simple as emailing your client list with a new product, right through to building complex multimedia collaborative sites where your clients can interact with you, your company and each other.

As well as the content you produce as a company such as websites and email campaigns, Internet Marketing also encompasses the areas of the internet you join in with or collaborate with. In other words, utilising Social Media as part of your strategy is now such a vital componant of an overall Internet marketing campaign.

The Problem

Most companies focus on 2 main elements of the Internet. Their website and the email system they use. Although crucial to any business today, the company’s website in particular tends to be a static pinprick, lost in a billion other websites. Most of our clients want one, but have little idea, in a multi-faceted internet technology world, how to make the most of it.

Internet Marketing today sees the website as playing a part in an overall marketing strategy and not, as in the past, the only way a company can be visible to potential clients.

Compounding the problem is the lack of importance small and medium sized companies put on optimisation of the website. This sounds like it’s some sort of Dark Art, but the concept is really very simple. Firstly, you have to remember why you need to take optimisation seriously. The art of optimising a website is called SEO or Search Engine Optimisation. So what you are doing is looking at the way your site is written and making it as search engine friendly as possible.

Solutions

To get people to know your website exists you need to be able to market it, as we have discussed within these pages, there is no easy way to ensure your website is automatically placed on the front page of the organic listings in search engines like Yahoo or Google without working on the SEO of the site, and even then, if you’re in a competitive market then you may need a different approach to get people to see it.

All sites have to start with looking at SEO, or optimising the site so search engines index it as relevant to the searchers criteria. With the best will in the world, this will take time and effort. If anyone says they can get you there in a week, be very careful, as some, will use what’s called “black hat” techniques which could get your site banned from the search engines altogether. Further information can be found in our guide entitled 6 ways to SEO your site

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

The other way to get on the front page of the search engines is to pay for it, just like any traditional advertising it cost money, but can be cost effective if done with care and a lot of planning. Warning – PPC can go horribly wrong if not researched well.

PPC is typical of what I said about using different elements in conjunction to put together a Internet Marketing Campaign. Just doing a PPC campaign which points to your existing website can be fatal, unless you have geared your website specifically for this. Most of the time you would design a landing page as the 1st destination whenever someone clicks on your PPC ad link. This landing page could be a specifically written independent site for your PPC campaign or a page within your actual website, again written or designed specifically for the campaign which then directs visitors to the relevant pages within your site  to capture the target audience you want to sell to.

If you’re using a data capture form on that landing page, then you step into another area of internet marketing which is the email auto-responder, which automatically responds from the data capture form with an email containing a thank you note and possibly another “call to action” to edge the client towards a position to purchase.

For more information take a look at A basic Internet Marketing Strategy Model:

Email Marketing

Marketing via email has been going on as long as email systems were first invented. It is one of the oldest forms of internet marketing around, and yet even today many small businesses still do not use this system to its full potential. Some of the reasons I get when I working as a consultant is that the company is worried about being seen a spammers!

There is a very simple solution to this and it’s called permission marketing or opt-in marketing. Very simply all you have to do is ask your existing client permission to email them and it’s not spamming.

Building a list of new and existing clients is crutial to being able to market new products and services to them. To do this it is worth investing in online email marketing products such as Constatnt Contact or AWeber. These enable you to market to literally thousands of people and give you the ability with website data capture to build on this list automatically. If you want to subscribe to our newsletter then click here and you will be taken through to our data capture page. Once you fill this in and hit the “Join Business For Life” button firstly you will be taken through to a thank you page and you will also receive an email automatically informing you that we have received your request to be added to our mailing list. You will then start to receive regular newsletters which carry on you education into internet marketing and other related information to help the small busines owner.

This is internet marketing in action.

Social Media

The last aspect I will mention here is Social Media and how it can be used to drive traffic to you main website or landing page as well as using it to increase your brand awareness. I have written a comprehensive article on social media which should be read in conjunction with this post. Go to Social Media and its use in internet marketing

The first thing I get companies to do is email their clients with either an offer, if appropriate, or ask them for their opinion or feedback. All my new clients who go through this exercise have had good results. In the case of companies detailing an offer, the response has been amazing. Now, understand that the response will not always be as good as the first one, but regular email communication can be beneficial to both parties. In my own emails, I relay information which I think would be beneficial to you as a subscriber. What I am doing from a marketing point of view is simply getting you to look at me, my company, and the things we are involved with regularly every month. I don’t overtly sell anything to you; just let you know I exist.

Your business just needs to eyeballed every so often and you will pick up more potential clients. From my newsletter, I have picked up 3 bits of business for Internet marketing (Web Design) and a company who is looking to put regular events on. When they called me I was told that they had received my newsletters for over a year. So dig out those contact lists and databases and start talking to them again.

To Subscribe to this newsletter simply click on the button below

There has been a decline in newspaper circulation, which has had a knock on effect for the small business. Now many of them are turning away from the traditional print advertisement and looking to the Internet. Many have started to move toward social media sites such as Facebook, UK Small Business Network (www.uksbn.com), and MySpace, Video sites like YouTube and Mini blog services such as twitter. They are also beginning to understand the importance of the blog.

Blogs have been around for a few years now, but it is only in the last year that small businesses have begun to see the light and started to blog them selves.

There are some 9 million blogs out there, with over 40,000 new blog sites opening every day. Over 1500 of these are created by small businesses from around the world.

UK SMALL BUSINESS NETWORK

UK Small Business Network. Just like facebook but for Small Businesses in the UK

As you may know, we started the UK Small Business Network only a couple of months ago and it has grown from nothing to over 110 companies in that short time. I know that business has been done between companies on the site and it grows from day to day. Being able to use social media to promote your business in not a dark art, although it can be a little time consuming. The trick is to get visited again and again. This can only happen if you post interesting and relevant information that people want to read. But blogs are not the only Internet marketing small companies have looked at. There has been a push for some time now to utilise the technologies and techniques that Internet marketers use and apply then to small business marketing concepts. In fact we are in talks at the moment with some top speakers in the field to put a workshop on, which will cover that very subject.

We have seen a steady rise in the amount of calls from small business owners wanting to use landing or squeeze pages to collect data coupled with selling specific products online using nothing but a PayPal account. We have helped many to get these landing pages and micro sites up, and have noticed an increased willingness to try new ideas out and monitor the results. Such as a small car dealerships promoting a landing page so that potential clients could add their name and email to test-drive the latest car, with a prize offered for a convertible for the weekend.

If you are thinking of moving over to internet marketing then take a look at what is out there already, get some inspiration from what others are doing and then form a plan of action and give it a try.

Here are some basic rules to optimise your site. SEO or Search Engine Optimisation sounds like a bit of a dark art, but think of it as a logical step to help search engine spiders find the site, after all they are only pieces of code which have a program looking for certain things.

Lets be clear about what the spiders job is, in fact lets look at what the search engines job is. The search engines are there to provide you with the most relevant pages for your search term/s. That’s is, nothing more. The spiders job is to find all the pages it can, find out what the page is about, and then index it in a database and put some sort of score on how relevant it is to a search term. All we are doing with SEO is making sure we have a better than average chance of being indexed correctly and showing that we are the most relevant site for specific key search terms.

So how do we do that? Find out MORE >>>

So your a Small Business looking to get yourself noticed

Covering a small section of some of the things you can do to improve or even start some Internet marketing techniques to drive more business or to impart your message better, in other words creating better customer dialogue. This is just another way of saying helping your existing or potential clients speak to you.

Customer dialogue, if done correctly will bring more business over time. This is in essence what Internet marketing can do. It can bring instant return or help potential clients to understand your business better, so if they need your service in the future they have already spoken to you and your in constant contact with them so their route to purchase from you is easy. Customers like easy routes.

We will be looking at:

Websites, SEM (Search Engine Marketing), Ways to SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) Your Site, Keywords, Paid Search, Landing Pages, Email Marketing, low cost routes to market your company on the internet. Social Media

Find out more about us >

“Internet Marketing – The Beginners Guide for Small Businesses” FREE eBook

Your FREE eBook from Andy Phillips “Internet Marketing – The Beginners Guide for Small Businesses” is just a click away.

If you thought Internet Marketing was some sort of DARK ART then you would be wrong. I put this eBook together to help Small Business Owners, Sole Traders and Entrepreneurs to get a good understanding of how techniques and attitudes of Internet Marketers can increase your business exposure whilst decreasing your marketing spend.

Download this Value packed eBook with our compliments. Small businesses should be able to take advantage of the Internet the same way big businesses do.

In many ways, Small Businesses have an advantage. To find out more download our FREE eBook.

Download my FREE eBook now!

Plus a whole host of other issues to help increase your marketing reach.