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SEO or Search Engine Optimization is always a myth to Small and Medium Business Owners (SMES) and most home-based business owners too. And to add matters worst, SEO service always come with a premium price tag that SMEs and home-based business can’t really afford it.

Main reason for this is because SEO naturally needs 3 months or more to see results on search engine pages. If your field is competitive, it may take even longer to appear for your keywords to appear. So, if you want to get on the web fast without paying a premium price for SEO services, you may want to consider the 4 practical diy seo tips that I going to share with you.

1. Think for your customer. Build your website that surround your customer needs and not “I SELL THIS”, “I SELL THAT”, “MY SERVICE IS THIS” and “MY SERVICE IS THAT” kind of website. This is easily achieve because you already know the problems what your customer are facing. Just sprinkle their problem keywords in your website will do the trick.
2. Meta Tagging. This may need the work of a web designer. You may hire a free lancer to do it for a few minutes of quick job. Meta Tagging is actually for the search engine to know what website and keywords that your site is. So properly word out the description and keywords will help search engine to find your website more easily.
3. Change your static website to a wordpress blog. If you have not, is time to change now. The benefit are more significant than your static website. People now want interaction and they want more content. They want more information on your products and services before they will want to start do business with you. So having a blog, will not only increase your interactive between your customer, you will also harness the internal structure of a blog to boost your ranking in search engines. With proper tagging of your blog, you can easily climb up the search engine ranking more faster and people will find your blog easier.
4. Check for broken links. Search Engines don’t like broken links. They will discount or penalized your website with broken links and thus, lower your ranking.

So, now you have it. 4 simple practical diy seo tips that you can start doing. You can start from point number 4. As this is much easiest to go into and fix it.

See ya.

Hi, in my previous post, Go Niche Social Media Networking I touch base on why there is a need to GO NICHE when comes to Social Media Marketing nowadays. But in this post, we shift the focus to mainstream social media sites and talk about the bad side of what’s really is that and how it can drastically affect your business.

So, what is main stream social media sites and how ‘BAD’ it is?

They are sites that are popular for internet users worldwide. As you probably know that, the most popular Social Media networking site is facebook, then myspace and many others like video sharing sites like youtube. These sites are so so popular that millions of people went online just to connect with each others. So, if you are in use Social Media networking site to promoter your business or service or product, you have to do extra 10% more of your competitors in order to see any return for your time and effort.

And how does it actually affect your business?

With so many business owners, big, small and home based, it is actually now quite hard to stand out of the noise in main stream social media site like facebook. While it actually helps your business if you have a group of loyal followings, but there are still many business owners like you, are into it. So, that makes them your direct competitor. It may see “all calm and friendly” on the surface, but in fact, it’s a dog-eat-dog scenario in mainstream social media sites.

Long gone was where you create group, build relationship, have them opt in or direct them to your website and track sales, now, you have actually to do something remarkable or 10% extra than your competitors as most user are used to the groups invitation and the advert that blast out to them in social media networking site.

This greatly affect your business ROI. If you do not plan well, you will be the same league as your competitor. Nothing much. Nothing remarkable. And you will not build brand, credibility and relationship with your audience. So, you have to do at least 10% extra of what your direct competitor does and have an open mind of other strategies that may work for your business.

Yes go niche!

This is the way to go now and future for your business. Whether you are a business owner, an affiliate marketer or property agent, it is a wise choice now to go Niche Social Media Networking sites.

Why is that so?

It is because mainstream social media networking sites like facebook are too crowded and too much noise. In order for you to rise up on top of noise, you will need to do something really remarkable to have attention of your prospect or audience.

Yes, last few years back, it is easy to market in sites like facebook and friendster, but as more and more people are coming in to gain a share of a pie, your prospect or auidence better known as your customer are really confuse because of the constant ‘noise’ they are having inside.

As they say, go to where your buying customer are. Right?

In fact there are many niche social media networking sites that are very responsive. This is due to the nature of human. If you are interested in something say, music, you will surely hang out on some music niche social media networking sites more than you do on facebook. And because of the audience in niche social media networking sites, as a business owner, you already has a group of eager buying customer.

The only step left is to connect with them in a friendly environment. I’ve compile 3 mainstream niche social media networking sites for you below.

Enjoy

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Travel Niche

Tripwolf
tripwolf is the social travel guide and trip planner for you and your friends. It offers advice and recommendations by locals and experienced travelers - tripwolf trip gurus - to make your travel experience all the more memorable.

CityTherapy
CityTherapy is the new online platform. The site brings together the 4 pillars of city living, the people, the places, the events and the trips in one connected social network.

TripTouch
TripTouch is a website for independent travelers who want the best from their trip. TripTouch is centered around your location and your personalized travel tastes. Plus, they bring you information, services and a lively community.

Real Estate Niche

Rottenneighbor
Rotten Neighbor is the first real estate search engine of its kind allowing you to rate and review good and bad neighbors before and after you move so you can make a smart real estate decision.

YourStreet
YourStreet is a vibrant community of homeowners, buyers and renters sharing inside knowledge about their local neighborhoods. Track local real estate conditions in your area - what’s selling and what’s not. Connect with neighbors across the country and find out what a neighborhood is really like.

Hubbuzz
Hubbuzz is an apartment search by neighborhood website. In addition to finding apartments, users can search neighborhood profiles, photos, interactive maps and user generated blogs and events.

Music Niche

ThinkMTV
Think is your community where you, your friends, and your favorite celebrities can get informed, get heard and take action on the issues that matter to you most.

SoundPedia
Listen to music online, share videos, meet users with the same interest as your and much more.

Phling
Listen to music while mobile, review and submit song ratings, browse each other’s phling! profiles, discover new music, and exchange your views on what’s hot and what’s not!

This is a showcase of how powerful Domination Control is for your business. Below shows a screenshot of how my website come in 3rd just by using only one method of Domination Control.

Like the result you seen here, then you will want to know more how Domination Control help in your business.

Now, What Would It Be Worth To You If Your Services, Products and Website are having multiple listing in Google as seen on the left?

Well, you may think it may be impossible. But in reality, it is possible.

In our today’s economy, every sales counts. And let’s face it, in business, it is the survival of the stronger. And it is also logical that, the more share you have in your market, the more you will earn and you also are being seen as the “only-person-to-be-trusted and go to”.

Let’s illustrate this a bit more.

Imagine, you are running a local dentist business and your forte is in comestic dentistry. You know that there your competitors may be doing well and some of them are well-known. So, if you have a service for Braces, you may want to capture your market online by targeting people who wants to do braces. And by using Domination Control, you can easily having multiple listing in Google and control your Braces customers online by directing the flow that you want them to go.

By doing so, not only will you increase your credibility online but also you will probably save up to 75% of your paid search cost. Not only that, since we know that many people are going online now to look for information and services, you can even save up on your traditional print.

So, if you want to own multiple listing in Google, control the flow of your audience and build up trust, reputation and credibility using Social Media (with a twist), then you should be interested in How Domination Control will help you to reduce cost and increase your online market share.

Find out how Domination Control will help you.

What?

Say that again!? What are you saying?

Well, if you don’t accept the above sentence, then stop it right here. But if you sort of accept it, continue to read because what I’m going to share is a change of mindset to what you are doing now, will give a boost in your business.

First of all, why customers complain?
They complain because of several things. Mainly are the services you rendered to them is not good or not they expected. Or if the products is not what you claim is working for them.

Secondly, where will your customers complain?
They will either go to an authority that settle dispute among consumer and businesses or they will go online. This is where it gets tricky. Some will go to forums, some goes chatting, some just drop comment in social networking sites like facebook. And, as you know, bad news travel fast.

And this is probably the last thing business owners want to hear about their service or products. But if you look it in the other way, it is a gold mine for your business. This is sort of survey that is free of charge and you get to the heart of their problem.

This is where you will want to sit down with your sales team and think how to improve or rectify the problem rather than stopping all negative comments outside. After rectifying, post the solution online for the customer and offer him or her a gift or whatsoever.

This not only will stop the customer from complaining further but also people will treat your business differently. Because you act professionally and give what the complained customers want.

Thus, not only you know how to go forward in improving your products or services with customer complain, you also begins to extend your market share with other people seeing you in action by offering back something to the complained customers.

So, don’t wait till the complain gets bigger, get on the ground floor and mingle around with your customers.

Know what they want become their friend and show them what you can do for them.

Well, you probably have heard about Google wide range of products. But have you heard about Google Local Search and Google Maps?

Google Local Search as its name suggest is result returns to you pertaining to where you currently located at. While Google Map is just a map with lots of functions and cool stuffs. So, when both of these combine, you can really boost your business exposure listing with the keyword that you want to rank for.

Let’s take adsighted.com for example -this small consultancy provides social media marketing and search engine optimization and consultancy for local businesses. So naturally, in order to increase exposure, we put our address and names into google map. You can also create a discount coupon and state your operation times.

So, let’s say a person who wants to search for services like social media marketing, your business location will probably come up on the first listing of google search. (But that of course, there are many factors being consider too by the search engine). Below shows a picture of exactly how I rank in search engine using Google Local Search with Google Map.

If you have not put your business into google, it is high time to do it now. And remember to tag it properly of what your products and services are. If you are not sure, please feel free to contact me to have it set up for you at no extra cost.

Contact Your Social Media Marketing Consulant at 9099 5904 & look for Jeffrey.

If you had seen my previous blog post on Do Singaporeans Twit Twitter? and Does Twitter Make Business Sense here? We talk about startling Twitter users statistics in Singapore and why business owners are hesitatant in adopting Twitter into their marketing mix.

In Does Twitter Make Business Sense here, I talk about the education here in Singapore about why business owners are not using Twitter. But what I did not share is how SMEs can use Twitter as a marketing tool to promote their products and services.

Let’s dive in and see how Twitter can actually help SMEs to increase their bottomline and slash advertising cost. Plus some innovative way in using Twitter.

Well, Twitter is basically a SMS boardcasting tool where you will ‘boardcast’ out what you find, do, eat today. But for SMEs, this prove to be a very powerful tool. Last time we had sms software for us to mass sms out to our subscriber, but we need to pay either a monthly cost or yearly cost which will eat into our cost of running business.

But for twitter, not only this tool is free to use, but it will help do alot of marketing for you to your targeted audience. Some of the marketing promotions that you may consider doing will be,

• Contest
• Promotion
• Launch of new service or products
• Information of update of swine flu
• Information of your booth number
• Information of your contest winners

As you can see from above, that is not the whole list of what Twitter can and will do for your business. There are much more than meets the eyes. Talk to your marketing guy to see how you can go about using Twitter.

If your company does not have a marketing guy to consult, you may want to contact me on how to set up a Twitter account correctly and how to use Twitter to full effect for your business.

Just give me a call at 9099 5904 to set up a appointment.

Do they or do they not? View more below.

As economy is heading nowhere, as of time being and with social media on the rage, does twitter really make sense to local business here? View twitter business sense video below to find out more.

vid from Razor Tv