Social Media
There are two types of website, STATIC and DYNAMIC. In simple terms the key difference between the two is that static sites don’t do much since the day they go live and Dynamic sites have content that is always on the go.
Ok sure the owner of a static website can login via FTP and change some text and images etc, but apart from that the website will remain pretty much the same size and won’t really be doing anything of its own volition. Dynamic sites can be linked to databases, social media, RSS feeds etc and the content is evolving all the time, and this new content is building the site with new pages and levels of information. Why would we be interested in this?
Blogging
Blogging sounds like something lazy teenagers might do late at night, tapping out conspiracy theories or discussing recent alien sightings. Well, it is that, or it WAS that …..but it’s now so much more than that, and in a business sense you can look at it in terms of a ‘keyword spreader’. If your website has a blog, it gives you the ability to leave a ‘post’,- basically a new page of content on your website which is date-stamped and full of potentially useful, maybe seasonal information for your clients, and more importantly, juicy keywords for Google.
By the way, when you write a post on your blog you are obviously hoping your clients will be interested in reading it, but essentially you are writing it for Google.
The two main benefits of having a blog are
1) A blog gives your website personality, a ‘live’ way of expressing your passion for what you do, and gives your clients a reason to keep coming back to your website.
2) It enlarges your web footprint (every ‘post’ adds a new page on your website) and allows you to target keywords at different times of year (when you add a post it will be date-stamped so the search engines know who is up to date and who is not) and above all it gets your website up the search engine rankings.
Twitter…..little and often.
Twitter is similar to blogging yet on a smaller and far more frequent scale. The Twittersphere is far more of a community that is chatting to itself all day long, and whereas a tweet is worth just as much as a blog it’s longevity is far shorter so one must keep tweeting! …..for people that like the sound of their own voices this can be very addictive. The key to Twitter though is not so much the quality of your tweets but the numbers of your followers, and building this number up spreads your word, especially using trends (like #glosbiz and #cirencester for example …which would bring up lots of local businesses to that area of Gloucestershire).
Lets take an example. There are two similar businesses in the Cotswold town of Cirencester selling furniture who start up on exactly the same day, with identical looking shops, with very similar websites, ….but the difference being biz 1′s website has a blog and biz 2′s doesn’t. Bob from biz 1 spends 5 minutes every night when he gets home writing up a short post that sums up the day and allows him to tell his clients about new products, special offers, and a variety of information throughout the year. He also quite likes sending the odd tweet and seeing what local businesses are up to. Bill from biz 2 doesn’t like computers and just works an extra 5 minutes in his shop, rarely bothering to even look at his website. As for twitter he thinks it is something to do with birds.
After a year Bill is doing pretty well from walk-in business but as these are mainly tourists he is beginning to get very frustrated with time-wasters. Bob’s shop doesn’t look much busier but his business is going from strength to strength and he couldn’t be happier, he has had interested customers from all over the country who have seen his products online and come down to visit him, and is now setting up an online shop to help make everything more efficient. He has found a really good local, Cirencester based web design company on Twitter that are going to give him a great price for an ecommerce shop. And his discipline at adding posts on his blog has meant his website is now 365 pages bigger than Bill’s website. It is now full of relevant information that people have been searching the web for and consequently found his business from. He is also now sitting pretty on the first page of Google when users type in in ‘furniture Cirencester’ …..so his phone rarely stops ringing. Bill’s business is nowhere to be seen in Google with this search but defends it by telling us that if he types in his business name he comes top……..which if course it does, but this also tells us poor old Bill doesn’t really get it..yet!
