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Using Facebook Places to Promote Your Business

August 23, 2010 by basilpuglisi@aol.com Leave a Comment

Last week, Facebook entered the location services game with the release of Facebook Places. Places is very similar to Foursquare, in that the feature allows users to “check-in” to local businesses to alert friends of where they are at any given time.

For business owners, Facebook Places provides a means of promoting your business, increasing visibility and rewarding loyal customers. Each customer that checks into your business is sharing the name and location of your company with hundreds or thousands of online friends.

To register your business on Facebook Places, search for your business on Facebook Places. Click on the link that says “Is this your place of business?” and follow the verification prompts. Once you have claimed your business, you can update the location’s contact information, hours and profile picture.

Once you have successfully registered your business on Facebook Places, consider using Places as an additional advertising platform. Hang signage to encourage customers to check-in to the location. Remember that every check-in spreads the word about your business.

You can also use Facebook Places to attract new customers. Post a note on Facebook informing potential customers that they will receive a discount if they show that they have checked in to your business. Not only does this technique bring in new clients, it also creates viral advertising as customers share the check-in with their friends.

Use Facebook Places to reward loyal customers. Reach out to customers who frequently visit your business and offer coupons or promotions for additional visits or check-ins. Keeping loyal customers happy is an easy way to gain repeat business and ensure positive word of mouth referrals.

Encourage your existing customers to post notes, photos and comments about your business online. Perhaps reward customers who post feedback with special coupons or freebies.

Of course, any marketing plan needs to be tailored to the needs of your business. Claim your business on Facebook Places today, and create a detailed plan that makes sense for your company and your customers.

Need Help? Contact Visibility Acceleration by Puglisi Consulting Group, Inc. 631-932-0019

Is Your Online Marketing Hurting your Business?

August 21, 2010 by basilpuglisi@aol.com Leave a Comment

It seems so simple; you want to open a business, you look for a field where your business is needed, you design a web site by yourself through WordPress or other sources and, voila – you’re in business.

Not long after, your realize that your site is not bringing in much business. Where have you gone wrong? Why is your competitor making big bucks and you are making only peanuts?

Take a look at your site. Here are some common mistakes you should try to avoid:

– Are you really marketing to a niche? People tend to confuse niche with demographics. A niche is a group of people that have a common problem and are seeking solutions. Marketing to stay-at-home moms, senior citizens or baby boomers is marketing to a demographic. Potential customers are the ones who have a problem you can solve, like DIY Solar Panels, Baby Strollers or Green Plumbing. Those clients can come from all wakes of life and all ages.

– Your web site is not up to par. It looks cheap, it has spelling mistakes, you don’t update it for months and you haven’t added new products in the past year. With the saturation of the Internet, one of the requirements of a successful site is constant updates. You want to be seen, don’t you?

– Not having a system in place that analyzes your visitors and captures them. Some people visit a site, plan on visiting it again on a later date, but never do because they forgot, don’t have time now or they lost your address. Having a system of capturing their names and e mail addresses will enable you to contact them, send newsletters and show you are interested in them and in their business. Some of those who forgot about you will come back.

– Not making a long term plan and following the advice of every new guru in the field of Internet marketing. Think about what makes you different and what you can offer that others can’t. Your business plan doesn’t have to be 500 pages long. It is important, however, to make sure your goals are clear and you have a plan and a system to know when your plan is working and when it’s not.

Even if you’ve downloaded all the e books, web seminars and Internet courses about Internet marketing, have you been reading them all? Who’s got the time, you ask yourself. If I’ll be busy reading all those pages, who will run my business?

That is main reason why it is smart business to hire consultants who deal with those issues on a daily basis and make it their business to keep updated on all the new trends. Companies like Puglisi consulting Group (http://puglisiconsulting.com) which can help you avoid all the beginners’ mistakes. Through their company Visibility Acceleration (http://visibilityacceleration.com/#/seo-visibility/4541420003) they can touch and solve all the points mentioned here and make sure you have to ability to see and be seen.

For Small Businesses, Online Visibility is a Must

August 17, 2010 by basilpuglisi@aol.com Leave a Comment

Despite what small business owners think, they might not be doing enough to increase their online visibility.

Online visibility is one of the most important tools in the kit of the small business owner. Whether you operate from a store front, the garage or the bedroom, whether you are in the service industry or selling a product – online visibility is your advertisement. And no business exists without advertising.

A comparative research done in San Diego, California, of 194,000 small businesses, revealed that most of them have a low to medium visibility on the internet. Only a small percentage hit the high mark.

As a business owner, the first step to increase visibility is to have a website. There are rules to what is considered a useful site. It does not, however, always go hand in hand with the aesthetics of the site. Picture is better than a thousand words, they say, but not always in the internet world.

The second step would be to be listed in local directories. The more directories you are listed in, the more people happen to find you.

And that is where the effort usually stops.

In today saturated internet that is not enough. There are ways to increase your presence that go many steps forward. Most of them are not extremely expensive and should be considered your advertisement budget.

Advertising online includes steps to optimize your site for a better search engine placement, so your site will be on the front page of the search engine and not buried in page 35 of Google. (Have you ever been there in your personal searches?)

Advertising on line sometimes means just that. Ads that are placed on result pages of search engines (PPC they are called – Pay per Click), when you pay Google advertising fee only when someone clicks on your ad and goes to your site. It means putting banners and ads inside websites and other solutions as well.

Advertising on line means creating social media pages, and writing on them. It means being present in article sites that link to your site, it means creating a blog and updating it.

Advertising on line means creating videos and placing them in the right places. It means linking all those elements together with everything leading to your business.

Small business owners who have not invested yet in online advertising have the most to gain. The point being is not to be the first, but to be among the chosen few, detached from the crowd.

The shortest and most economical way to achieve all that is to contract visibility experts like Puglisi Consultants http://puglisiconsulting.com and their Visibility Acceleration arm http://visibilityacceleration.com/#/seo-visibility/4541420003. You can do some of it yourself, but the field is developing very quickly and there is so much to learn to avoid costly mistakes. From a business sense – isn’t it best to leave it to the experts who constantly update their knowledge for a living?

Marketing in the Internet Age

August 7, 2010 by basilpuglisi@aol.com Leave a Comment

It used to be simple; you would hire someone to design a website for you, put some pictures, graphs, numbers, and post it on the internet.

As far as you were concerned – your name was out there, your business advertised, you got your money’s worth.

But things have changed. Throughout the years information kept coming in, into this absorb-all, Ethernet. It kept coming in, but hardly going out. The World Wide Web has becomes saturated with websites.

It only got worse when Google followed a business model of ads, PCP, Adsense and more. Millions all over the world started to figure out a way to make money by providing ad space to advertisers. E-commerce was born when people open information websites to link them to businesses for a cut of the sale.

With a crowded marketplace it is not so easy to get visibility. Research shows that most of the searchers on the big search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo etc.) look mainly at the first page of the results. In order to get the clients, you need to be high up on the list, preferably in the first few positions.

How to do that became a highly specialized field. To understand it you have to know how Google, for example, scans the pages of a new website that is posted, what does it see and what it doesn’t. Graphs and pictures are not seen by the scanners for example. While it is true that a picture is worth a thousand words, it is not the case with the logarithms of Google. How those scanners (or spiders in professional language) scan the page is another thing you need to know. Do they start from the top? From the bottom? How do they categorize their scans?

What words, or a combination of words, will bring the most results is another issue. How to place those words so the spiders can read them and categorize your site the way you want it, have another set of rules.

Words matter the most in building sites that will rank high on Google and create the most visibility. Volume of the site – how many pages, is another category. Google is watching very closely and places fines on users that are abusers. That is called the “Google slap”, and when you are slapped, it is not easy to reverse it.

This is what Puglisi Consulting Group (http://puglisiconsulting.com) specializes in, through their Visibility Acceleration (http://visibilityacceleration.com/#/website-visibility/4541419972) company. How to make your site more visible, how to use social media to increase it, how to use e mail campaigns, mobile phones, even old methods of print and radio ads is their expertise. Your website, and your business, will not only be out there, it will increase the visitors, and buyers, coming to your business.

The Marketing Power of the Written Word

August 2, 2010 by basilpuglisi@aol.com Leave a Comment

Using articles as a marketing tool for small businesses, has been known to be a very cost effective way to increase traffic to your site, increase its visibility on search engines pages, and increase sales with relatively small effort and very low cost.

The main objective of your website is to generate clients. And that starts with generating traffic and increasing your visibility on the World Wide Web.

There are many ways of generating traffic and with most of them you keep spending money. Since the internet is such a vast ocean of information, getting visitors to you site, through a ‘back door’, can increase you traffic and what’s more, will convert clicks and visitors to sign ups and sales.

Two things have to be considered when talking about internet advertising; the huge amount of information out there which keeps renewing and updating every second and the short attention span of the reader.

Your site might be the most colorful and eye popping, but it is the content on the page that will make the reader stay. This is the face of your company. A bunch of numbers and specs will not do it anymore.

So, the first way to use articles is to make sure your landing page is tempting.

Renewing the page location on the search engines (SERP) is made up of, among other things, the volume of your site and the new information added. Having a blog on the site and writing in often, is another way to generate a better location on the page.

The third way is ‘the back door’ way, which proved to be very efficient.

Let’s face it, internet took over our lives. It is our key to the libraries of the world and it brings the information back fast. When someone is trying to solve a problem, or make a purchase and types a combination of words, the information that comes back has something to do with the word combination, on top of the words themselves. And what might sit there, at the top of the Google search page, if no other than an article that someone wrote dealing with a similar problem, with the same word combination.

If the title and the sub title are catchy, the searcher will click to read the article – which has a back link to your site.

You’ve created a connection with a highly potential customer.

The more articles of yours are out there, the more exposed your site will become.

There’s an art and a way to those articles to make them affective. You’ll hear talk about mysterious words such as “keywords”, “SEO”, “SERP” and other terms, so you might want a professional write the articles on your behalf.

At Visibilityacceleration.com you’ll find such experts. The mystery will become a mastery of the written word and you’ll see the marketing power of the written article in action.

Promotional Social Interactive – FourSquare

July 12, 2010 by basilpuglisi@aol.com Leave a Comment

Promotional Social Interactive – FourSquare

My reaction to AOL cover story – http://www.switched.com/2010/06/30/testing-times-square-what-is-foursquare/2#comments

FourSquare was developed a short time ago. As a Social Media application it was met with the “So what,who cares” as Twitter and Facebook seem to be the only Social Tools that the masses have taken to.

FourSquare uses Twitter and Facebook to deliver its content and purpose…. WHAT?

That’s right, FourSquare’s update “micro blog” posts to both Twitter and Facebook. However, if you are an avid Twitter user you already can set your tweets to syndicate on facebook.

What does this mean?

Well, this means that FourSquare leverages the followers and friends to maximize exposure, communication and interaction. The interaction is the new “oooohhh” shiny toy. FourSquare is a location- based application that allows users and businesses to interact and promote on a mobile level that Twitter and Facebook are yet to capitalize on.

FourSquare uses locations and has tips and the coveted “Mayor” status. Let’s talk about Starbucks, the location is at, yes you guessed it, Starbucks…. so you go to Starbucks, your favorite location and you “check in here” the mobile application logs you in, detects your location and then lets you “micro blog” or tweet what you want. You get points for checking in at that location and all your friends, FourSquare, Twitter and Facebook now know you’re at Starbucks, even if your tweet didn’t say Starbucks the location and link does. Now that’s direct advertising. In addition to you blasting out your location and hoping someone else nearby sees and decides to stop in and say hello, you can read about tips, deals or specials as posted by that location or other visitors.

Mayor status: Once you have checked into a location, over the course of sixty days, more then anyone else you become the mayor for being the frequent visitor. The Mayor status is an opportunity for the business, i.e. Starbucks by me offers a free coffee or half price Frap anytime the mayor visits the location.

Tips: This little feature can really help you be the winner, let’s say you go to Paces Steak House in Port Jeff, NY. The Tips section can tell you to ask for a “Fun Platter”. This local treat is not on the menu and unless you ask for it they are not giving it to you. The “Fun Platter” is a mix of Steak, Salad, Seafood, Olives, Fresh Clams and more…now without FourSquare Tips you may have missed out on this opportunity.

Visibility by Puglisi Consulting Group

We know why you should know this…..

Using the “No Follow” to generate visitors

July 5, 2010 by basilpuglisi@aol.com Leave a Comment

Using the “No Follow” to generate visitors

The biggest misconception in Search Engine Marketing is the SEO goof of “Do Follow” and “No Follow” and it’s not surprising. Like most people, SEO experts have gotten so narrow in their mathematical equation for site rank they have totally missed a valuable resource.

SEO is just one part of SEM (SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING) in that Search Engine Optimization is one tool to drive traffic to a website. In the business world it’s about traffic. No one cares how they find you as long as you get found. While SEO is a valuable tool, it has fallen short with the algorithmic decision to abandon “No Follow” links.

SEO Experts decided that because search engines like google have taken the value away from links that follow the “No Follow” the Search Engine Optimizers target only Blogs, Text Links and other sources that provide SEO credibility. Any website that has a “No Follow” has developed into a source of no value. This could not be further from the truth.

AOL, Wikipedia and others are better sources for traffic then any “Do Follow” Link in any blog. The SEO process for a website is valuable and worthwhile for anyone in business for the long run, “Do Follow” links support this process, however websites will rarely be able to compete with sources like AOL Small Business and Wikipedia. These sources have proven to be valuable locations to verify and learn, as such, reading AOL Small Business articles and responding to them with positive feedback or add on educational info captures more visitors and higher quality visitors who are more likely to convert to clients or customers. Wikipedia is a top source for information, while academia has tried to undervalue its credibility it has failed miserably. Wikipedia is the source of “two heads are better than one” and so on.

So when an SEO expert starts taking the time to develop a visibility campaign to create and increase traffic, take the time to remind them that you need as many good quality “No Follow” links as you do “Do Follow” links.

Visibility by the Puglisi Consulting Group

What is Visibility Acceleration?

July 4, 2010 by basilpuglisi@aol.com Leave a Comment

Visibility Acceleration is a campaign product line created by the Puglisi Consulting Group.
http://www.puglisiconsulting.com
Visibility Acceleration is defined as an increased exposure of a concept, brand, product or individual to the public.
http://www.visibilityacceleration.com
Visibility Acceleration includes both traditional and digital marketing concepts and procedures. The Puglisi Consulting Group utilizes a big picture management process to provide an all inclusive approach to advertising and marketing under one process. The benefit of using Visibility Acceleration is consistent Brand Visibility across all markets for all campaigns. The concept of one unit managing all aspects of a advertising and marketing campaign both reduces costs and increases the return on investment (ROI).
Visibility Acceleration includes services like:
Website Visibility: More than a web design company, Puglisi Consulting Group provides full service Internet consulting. No one takes a more analytical approach to helping ensure your online success than Puglisi Consulting. Upon request we do extensive, on-going research on your behalf as the basis to our recommendations. Clients who work with us enjoy a well thought out Internet strategy, not just a website.
Social Brand Visibility: is a stage in Social Brand Reputation Management, it is the execution of distribution and viral activity of you brand among the many types of social media.
Mobile Marketing Visibility: It’s an Opt-In, Interactive Marketing and Brand Experience, it does not just advertise it entertains.
SEO Visibility (Search Engine Optimization): Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO), also called “natural” SEO, focuses on achieving a top position on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). This is the unpaid search results, achieved by optimizing your websites content, layout and link building.
SBRM Visibility (Social Brand Reputation Management: With Visibility Acceleration we don’t just manage your site. We manage how it interacts with your visitors, clients, customers, friends and family. Using social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, DiggIt, Stumbleupon, Foursquare and more, we will keep your site on the top of the visitor’s list to find out what’s happening next!
Pay Per Click Visibility: Cost-Per-Click was developed to be based on visitors coming to your website. You can achieve Your 1st page visibility on the “sponsored link” sections on Google, Yahoo, and MSN. We also target facebook with PPC advertising.
Print Market Visibility: There is no one way to increase market visibility. Methods that are proven do not lose their value overnight, and it’s hard to argue that anything is more powerful then old fashion “word of mouth”. In addition to the digital solutions that are offered we get into some of the traditional and nontraditional methods that are not digital.
EMail Visibility: Email is an effective way of driving people to your Web site. Links may be embedded within messages, quickly directing customers to your site. With any luck, this increased Web site traffic will then lead to increased Web site registration. You may then follow up by providing your customers with personalized and targeted content. Email Strengthens Brand Awareness and Builds Customer Relationships Regularly delievered email messages that contain properly titled subject lines and logos reinforce company and product awareness. Email creates an interactive connection with customers and nurtures long-lasting, quality relationships.
Radio Visibility: Advertising spots with radio stations, traditional Radio Advertising utilized a specific radio station for a campaign in formats including over 20 ad clips played over a week in one location or through one medium. Radio Visibility has the advantage of leveraging several sources to target large audiences in a more efficient manner over the course of a campaign that interacts with several stations in a geographic area both traditional broadcasting and digital exposure.
TV/Cable Visibility: Advertising spots with TV/Cable companies, traditional TV/Cable Advertising utilized a specific channel or cable provider for a campaign in formats including commercials played over a week in one location or through one medium. TV/Cable Visibility has the advantage of leveraging several sources to target large audiences in a more efficient manner over the course of a campaign that interacts with several stations in a geographic area both traditional broadcasting and digital exposure.

The Web and You: Your Career & Your Future

June 30, 2010 by basilpuglisi@aol.com Leave a Comment

The internet and world wide web have opened doors and created an information revolution, however it’s not all good!

While companies and organizations spend massive time and resources building their market visibility through their own personal brand, it seems that the mainstream population have missed the mark.

Your existing job and future career may rely on your web presence, especially the one you do not know about. While facebook has gathered members in unbelievable numbers, the most common reason I hear for someone not joining is the scariest of all.

The top reason I hear for people not joining facebook or other social media groups is that they do not want anything about them on the web, this would be laughable if not so serious. The web is full of information and if you know someone on the web then you either are on or will soon be too, willingly or not.

Facebook, Blogs and Websites are content rich, meaning that when someone posts a picture all talks about a job, company, friend or family member it becomes a part of the web. You may not realize it but when you go in for your review and there is a picture of a protest in D.C. and you’re in the background you better be ready to explain it, of course that’s if your lucky.

That picture may have been a complete misconception. You happen to be walking by to visit the nation’s capital and the local newspaper shot off a quick snap and guess what, you’re in it. I hope you know what the content underneath says about that protest that you are now presented in.

A company, organization or future spouse may never tell you, but they are looking. Social Media is one of the biggest players in making or braking jobs and higher managers decisions. They can be negative, but they can also be positive.

The lesson here is to get out there and do something, because if you’re not managing your image online then your letting someone else do it for you.

(follow up article: Your career through web development: Leverage Everything in your Favor)

http://www.puglisiconsulting.com