Thoughts, Ideas and Observations by Buck Lawrimore, Company President
John Jantsch wrote a thought-provoking blog post this week about 13 steps to what he calls a perfect marketing strategy. The point is, following these 13 thought-provoking steps will help you develop a marketing strategy that is really right for you and your business, not some cookie-cutter formula.
Here’s a link to the full article.
Learn more about marketing strategy on our main website, including an ebook we wrote on the topic, here: Marketing Strategy
We highly recommend the free ebook, “Learning LinkedIn From the Experts,” available at this link:
Download your free copy of @HubSpot’s ebook: Learning LinkedIn from the Experts – http://bit.ly/yoNlYj
It tells all you need to know about maximizing your profile and your network to use LinkedIn to grow your business. Grab your free copy and follow the easy steps.
This free tool constantly monitors your home page for any changes and sends you an alert if one happens. If you’ve ever been hacked, you know how valuable it is to find out right away. If you have not been, expect it to happen and be prepared.
Hackers can cause your website to be delisted by Google and also to send thousands of spam messages around the world from your website. Protect your website! Visit http://www.changedetection.com to learn more. (This is not an ad – just sharing a valuable tool we have found beneficial.)
Charlotte SEO (search engine optimization) involves “optimizing” a website for high rankings in the search engines. This includes a combination of the content and underlying code on a web page, plus links to the page or website “off page” from other websites.
As SEO in Charlotte has become increasingly competitive for search terms (“keywords”) like “Charlotte plumber” or “Charlotte Realtor,” getting and keeping high rankings for one’s business has become increasingly challenging, especially if you market in the Charlotte area.
Today Google and other search engines decide when you enter a search term like “plumber” if you really want a “Charlotte area plumber” or “any plumber in the world.” Google has built a list of companies it considers Charlotte area plumbers, and it lists them at the top of the search results page whether you type in “Charlotte” or not. For competitive keywords like “Charlotte plumber,” only optimized websites are going to rank high. For less competitive keywords like “medical supplies,” non-optimized websites can also rank high if Google has them on their list.
Promote your business with a free listing on thumbtack.com – a new website that helps local customers and clients find business providers. See our listing here as an example: Creative Strategies and Services to Grow Your Business
Nimble.com is a new free online service that lets you integrate your emails, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media accounts in one dashboard so you can keep up with all your who’s saying what to whom.
If you don’t have time for staying on top of that flurry of messages flying around on all those media, just pull them all into your own Nimble.com subdomain and relax.
Nimble will also import all your contacts into one central database, synchronize your activities with Google Calendar and other sources, even track online deals such as eBay purchases.
So give Nimble a try – you’ll find it is indeed Nimble and fun to use.
Google has just announced “North Carolina Get Your Business Online.” Google worked with local partners to design the program, which will help drive economic growth by giving North Carolina businesses the tools and resources to establish a website, find new customers, and grow their business.
Get Your Business Online is an easy and fast way for North Carolina businesses to get online. For the next year, participating North Carolina businesses can go to http://www.americagetonline.com/north-carolina/ to get a free website as well as free tools, training and resources to help their business succeed online. Google is partnering with Intuit to provide its popular Intuit Websites offerings for free including an easy-to-build website, a customized domain name and web-hosting for one year. After the first year the website will cost $4.95 a month.
In recent weeks, Google has made such dramatic changes in how it conducts business that it will affect all of us. As a professional provider of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), we want to explain this in brief, and attach a “white paper” below that provides further details if you are interested.
Basically Google is envious of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn for all their people-social participation. Facebook and Twitter do not want to share their users’ content with Google, so Google has decided to create its own social network. And to tilt the playing field in its favor (many say unfairly), Google is going to give higher search engine rankings to websites and people who play the Google-social game, called Google+, than those who don’t.
Many of us who already use Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, or who do not use any social media, do not “need” another social network to take up our time. But that is not the point. The point is, to get and keep higher search engine rankings on Google (where 3/4 of Internet users search), we have to play the Google+ game their way, or suffer the consequences (lower rankings).
We’re proud to provide search engine optimization (SEO) and Internet marketing services to Randolph OB/GYN in Charlotte. Last year we completely redesigned their website to make it search-engine friendly, then we launched our SEO program. And it worked like a charm!
Practice Manager Nikki Herring reports that almost every new patient they get either comes through the website or calls after first visiting the website. The result? An average of 100 new patients a month for the past 4 months, plus ranking No. 1 or No. 2 in Google for more than a dozen typical search phrases.
Contact the Lawrimore team at 704-332-4344 or through our website to discuss how search engine optimization can help your business get lots of new customers and high rankings in the search engines!