I remember the days when all you had to do to drum up
business was just make a few phone calls. Do a little door to door or conducts
a neighborhood get together, but then the internet came along. What seemed to
be nothing special at the time had only a hand full of interesting places to
visit online. There was no Google, Facebook, YouTube, fab, blogger, Twitter, Empire Avenue, and many many others.
I remember sporting a pager. In fact I my first cell phone only had a numbers
page and a 10 digit read out on a green screen with black font.
Why I am bringing all this up is to say things change and so
much your business. If you refuse to change your business refuses to stay open.
I eventually upgraded from that pager. To a cell phone and the from the one
line cell phone to a color screen cell phone in 2003 and so on and so on.
My thought back then was that soon everything will be on the
internet and if your business is not on the internet your business will fail.
This is true seeing that most people don’t have phone books anymore and if
anyone wants anything the use their cell phones but even more so if they was to
find a restraint they are going to ask their friends.
I will say this again, “If your business is not on the
internet you have No business”.
Internet changed
everything
Now back in the day when you built a web site you only
needed a few meta tags and you were in business and were easy to find, in a
yahoo search back then. Soon there were
more and more and more people going online and businesses where popping up all
over the internet. Soon there was more complex methods that needed to be done
and tons of hours and money to be spent just to show up on a Google search. The
Fact is this is a huge problem for your business because now your business is
lost somewhere within the millions of search results that come up when someone
puts in keywords that match your business.
SEO
Then came SEO and tons of money and time was spent by you or
your team to spread the word about your business to get your website to show up
within the top 10 in a search result. (I don’t know about you. But most the
time I don’t even go to the second page in the search results because it sometimes
is the same company over and over again.) So how can you be found? How can you
promote your site, much less your business? You can’t go door-to-door any more,
you can’t make cold calls. (People have cell phones and caller ID) So what are
you left to do?
SMO
You need to go where the fish are. Like a hungry person
smelling good food, that person will follow their nose to consume that great
smelling food that is getting them hungry. NO, I’m not saying cook a ton of
great food and make the world smell it. I’m saying you have to first find out
where the people or the majority are hanging out? Second find a way to draw
those people to you.
Facebook seems to be the place to be to find the millions of
potential customers. Not just Facebook, but flicker, twitter, Blogger, YouTube,
Instagram, and many others. This is like all the different lakes that you would
visit to do your fishing. SMO is Social Media optimization. This is where things can get very complicated
if you let it be. Or it can be fun and will help your business grow beyond
anything you can imagine. Granted that
not all businesses need to seek SMO for help in growing their business, but why
wouldn’t you?
How?
I know exactly what needs to be done to catch the fish. And
yes it takes time to fish all the different lakes. But in the end you can fish
all day long but if you are using the wrong bait, line, fishing pool, hooks, or
boat you won’t catch barely anything.
You need to come up with “smell”; the smell that draws them
in to your business. Now granted not all businesses have food or sales things
that smell good. But you need to find out what it is that you can offer your
customer to bring them in.
I can help if you ask. It’s up to you to take the steps
required to make it happen.
To be continued...
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