Easy DIY Online Marketing for the Busy Small Business and Entrepreneur

DIY Digital Marketing for Small Business – Lessons learned from a small business owner on getting good content out when you're short on time.  

Here are best practices I've found to supplement your digital marketing quick and easy.  Web professionals can do a lot however your expertise can only be communicated by you.  Here are some great ways to get great content when you're busy and short on time and let your SEO/SEM people do what they're good at.

1. Get a YouTube Channel
   

   

   YouTube channels are easy and free to setup.  If you want a "named" channel like http://www.YouTube.com/HELIACanada , you need to work at it.  Named channels become available when you have over 100 subscribers

2. Use Camtasia for fast easy and professional looking video post production
   

   

   Camtasia is a paid product but the best one we've found for getting great videos done quick and easy.   The key to success is quick.  Avoid perfect.  As you do more, you'll become better at doing video. Focus on volume and being brief.  Video should always be below 5 minutes.  Google tracks how many of your viewers make it to the end of your video before moving on and that's important for ranking.  Learn more at https://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.html or check our http://www.BuyPhonesOnline.ca store for a discount coupon.

3. Use Hootsuite to Pre-schedule your Content Months in Advance
   

   

   Social media is a lot of work.  Hootsuite allows you to do weeks or months of posting in a single sit-down session.  Get-er done and let Hootsuite control your consistent posting to LinkedIn, WordPress, Facebook and other social media.

4. Use the Google News Aggregator to Find Interesting and Important Industry News and Topics
   

   

   Our online strategy is branding.  There isn't a lot of people that do phone systems and we want our audience to identify us as their phone system provider when their need arises.  Google News Aggregator allows us to easily keep up on industry and manufacturer news

5. Use Hootsuite to repost Google News with your comments and Auto-schedule for staggered  future dates
   

   Hootsuite has a great post plugin for Google Chrome.  As I identify articles that have good content and are interesting, I click the Hootsuite button, add my comments and have Hootsuite auto-schedule the post for a future time when I have no content posting and when readership is high. 

6. Focus on Google Reviews, Facebook Reviews, LinkedIn Recommendations, Yelp Reviews and Other Industry Focused Site Reviews
   

   

   Google Searches are focused on local content these days.  Any search from a smartphone or tablet is highly affected by local ratings and rankings.  Focus on having real people leave real reviews on all the various social media review areas

7. Create a Dedicated Reviews Page on Your Website and Repost Your Reviews
   

   

   I learned this from a local realtor.  She said that her reviews page on her site was by far the most visited page.   Since we've added our Review page, I've found the same.  The traffic to review page dwarfs all other pages and is similar to the traffic of the home page.

8. Give Back and Review Your Vendors, Customers, Prospects and Partners on their Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and Yelp Pages.
   

   

   This is about good will.  Take the time to leave reviews for your people in the "real world"  They will see your review and remember you and appreciate you.  No one else does it.  As Jim Morton said "Caring about what others care about is what caring about is all about"

9. Open a Shopify Store to Allow your Online Efforts to be Merchandised 
   

   

   All of this is a lot of work.  We want to see a return on our efforts.  To that end, we've put up a Shopify site at http://www.BuyPhonesOnline.ca .   It has products that we sell and recommend and gives us something to link to without sending our web traffic to a competitor to buy

10. Use Google Merchant to Post your Shopify Products on Google
    

    Google merchant is google's tool for posting product content.  Make sure you maximize your Shopify efforts by automatically reposting on Shopify.

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