One way to do this is by using Google Alerts.  This has been around for awhile but I find a lot of people are still not aware of the power of such a simple tool in making things a little easier.  This feature can help in a number of ways. First, we can set up alerts to monitor our own profiles; our name, our brand, our competitors, etc.  Next, we can monitor industry news which is particularly useful for sales people in keeping in the loop with their clients.  Finally, we can use it to monitor the keywords for articles and news related to our core subject matter.  Previously I’ve posted here about the importance of carefully selecting the keywords – both for SEO (search engine optimization) and to provide a clear focus to keep us on track with our content.  Staying focused is important in an inbound marketing strategy because your audience must be clear in what to expect from you – it is what will keep them coming back for frequent visits and providing more opporunities for you to engage with them.

Simply visit Google Alerts and set things up.  Getting things up and running is pretty straight forward but if you want a good overview, I’ve posted a great video for you here on the topic, explaining step by step, how to set up Google alerts. The video also contains some good tips and advice.

Now, see how you can use what you find to fill your Twitter feeds with useful, timely, engaging Tweets, your Facebook status updates with some of the same and I’m also willing to bet you will be inspired to write a blog post or two out of what you find.  Google alerts are just one way to keep your creative tank full, there’s a lot more to come - sign up for my email updates for monthly summaries so you don’t miss out.

Hubspot has posted a great video with very basic steps for completing two fast and simple techniques you can use on your LinkedIn profile to help pass that wonderful “link juice” while you get the many other benefits of being on LinkedIn.

1. Customize your profile URL with your own name instead of the characters automatically generated by LinkedIn.
2. Add custom anchor text to the links to your company, blog, or any of the other sites you might want to use here.

Take a look at the video here, it’s very short.  Then implement those changes to your profile right away! Don’t have a LinkedIn profile? Go set one up, immediately, it is a great tool both for sharing your expertise and learning from others.  Feel free to contact me if you have questions and I’ll be glad to point you to more fantastic, free, resources unique to your circumstances!

First, you will need this tool from Facebook-click this link.  This takes you to the Facebook Markup Language Application (FBML) and you are going to add this to your page. This is accomplished by clicking the link directly beneath the image in the upper left corner of the page. Do this for every page you want to have “customize tabs” ability.

Select the page to which you want to add the application (only one choice unless you manage more than one page and in this case you will have a drop down list of choices).  Now go back to your Facebook page and click the edit page button that appears just under your page logo in the upper left corner.

This takes you to the page management dashboard where you can scroll down the page to add the FBML application to your page.  It will appear at the bottom, under “More Applications”.  Just click on it and it will give you the option of selecting the page to which you want to add it (if you have more than one, otherwise, just one choice will appear).

Click the the FBML Application Logo

You will arrive back on the FBML app page (NOTE: I found in adding this to multiple pages the steps here behave a little differently in repeating them but I could see what I needed – usually it eliminated a few steps from this list I’m giving here).

Once you’re on the FBML app page, click the “add to my page” link directly underneath the FBML page image / logo for this second time.  This will open a new box where you’ll see a list of all the pages that you admin. Just select the appropriate page (there will be only one if you only have one Facebook page on your account).

Back to your Facebook page, again on the dashboard (get here by clicking the edit page link once again beneath your page logo  just as before).  Scrolling down the page this time will take you to the FBML app in your list of applications.

The next step is to customize the FBML app to create a landing tab for new visitors to your page.

Click the  “Applications Settings” links.

…which will take you to this box…

All you need to do here is click the “okay” button, the settings should be just as they are shown here.

You should again be back to your page dashboard, scrolling down again to the FBML application where you will now edit the application by clicking the “edit” link…

This opens up a box that will allow you to set a name for your new customized tab.  In this example, I’ve created a landing page that will encourage visitors who are not already members of the page (fans in the past but since the recent change to “like” I’m calling them members).  I have named mine “Join My Page” and I created it simply by overtyping this text into this section:

Once you have your custom “call to action” message and the box title established, click “Save Changes”.  You can type a message in the box labeled “FBML” as your call to action, but I recommend that you have a custom graphic created (you’re welcome to use the one I made if you like), and store it somewhere online where you can retrieve a link to this graphic.  I have mine stored on my blog in the media library. Here is what it looks like:

To use the graphic option as I have done, just paste this bit of code (provided below the line of red text) in the box as shown below, replacing the highlighted portions with your own web addresses that are storing the image.

Simply copy and edit this line of text, editing the portion highlighted in yellow below with your links:

<a href=”http://www.how2marketingadvice.com”><img src=”http://how2marketingadvice.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/FanButton.png” width=”453″ height=”131″ border=”" alt=”How 2 Marketing Advice”></a>

Here is how it should look on your screen, the yellow highlighted portions should be replaced with the links to the domain where the graphic is hosted and then the specific link to the graphic:

Now, click the save changes box at the lower left on this same screen.

Back on your Facebook page, you can view the tab you just created, *** If you don’t see the tab immediately when you go back to your page, click the right pointing arrows at the far right of your tabs.  This will display a drop down of any additional page tabs you have and you should see it there, just click it to add it to the displayed tabs.*** Just click and drag it into whatever position you want it within the set of displayed tabs for your page.

The very last step is to direct all visitors who are not already members of your page to this tab whenever they click the link to your Facebook page so that this is the tab they automatically land on – a landing page.  Just go back to the dashboard for your page (remember, the “edit page” link, beneath your page’s logo), scroll down to Wall Settings and then click edit:

This opens up another window like the one you see here below, simply click the drop down arrows on the the right ( I have noted them here with red arrows), make the selections as I have done here – of course yours may be different- and click save:

If you want to test your work, log out of Facebook, go to a site that displays a link to your Facebook page or just type it in the browser – it will look just a bit different here since it is going to ask you to join Facebook but a user who is a member of Facebook will have the desired experience, seeing the “like” option displayed which they are being asked to click.  The next time they visit, they will just come to your page, since they are now members of the page and excluded from the criteria established in this step.  Done!

If you found this useful, please pass this information along, become a member of my page, follow me on Twitter and sign up for my monthly updates.

When you are already in business, and I imagine most people reading this will be in this situation, you are going to be starting out with an existing list of keywords developed out of the nature of your existing business that will be possible candidates for 7 or 8 magic words.  By magic, I mean words that fit some very specific criteria.  They should be relevant to your business, lend themselves easily to building content, provide enough search traffic to make it worth your time to optimize for them, have a decent percentage of marketing value and finally the competition for these words needs to be within certain parameters.

Sit yourself down and start hammering out this list and don’t feel pressured to do it in one or two sittings.  This is an important, foundational step and it should get a lot of attention.  Whether or not you put much stock in SEO, this exercise will benefit you in other ways.  It will help you zero in all of your marketing efforts so that everything you produce is centered around a central theme or message using these words as the focal point.  You will need a very long list.  Be sure to include phrases, locality words – everything you can possibly think of that someone might use to find your business online.

Now you’re going to test these words to uncover their value.  You must test them for broad match – typing the words into a search engine without quotes which finds them in any order anywhere on the page, and also for phrase match, the exact phrase, typed inside quotation marks.  This is a tedious process if you do it manually, on your own, so my advice is to find a professional to help you with your SEO.  Make sure the service you choose will do the steps I’ll unpack for you here and hold them accountable by asking for this data as part of the package of services you purchase.

Here is what you want to find out about each word.  Are there enough people searching for it each day to make it worth the time to build related content with it?  The threshold for acceptable traffic will vary from one type of business to the next since there is a wide variance in demand for products and services.  A good general benchmark is 30-60 searches/day on products with a reasonable profit margin, much higher if the profit margin is somewhat low per sale since you will need to produce more sales to make using this word worthwhile.  I use software that generates this data for me – plug in the keywords one at a time and analyze them for these criteria and that is my recommendation to you if you want to try to tackle this yourself.

If it passes the traffic volume test move on to commercial value.  What is the likelihood a person searching with this phrase or word is seeking to buy something?  High probability = pass, low probability = fail, no point in putting a lot of effort into words that generate traffic that isn’t intent on making a purchase if your ultimate goal is to generate sales.  As with the above criteria, a software tool can produce this result for you and most SEO professionals use software so make certain you request this particular piece of data of any professional who will help you with this process.

Your word passes the traffic volume and commercial value test so now you want to know if there are a lot of websites already optimizing for this word.  There are 3 levels of keywords here: Market level words, that is words that over 100,000 websites appear in search results for, Niche level which are somewhere above 30K and under 100K sites, and finally micro-niche level words. Micro-niche level words have 30K or less websites appearing in search results and this is the goal we’re shooting for as the 3rd test to pass.

Now you see why researching keywords manually will be a mind-numbing process.  Putting each of your words through this test cycle, eliminating those that don’t fit the bill (which will very likely be most of them) to narrow down the list. Again, software gets the job done much faster and a good SEO outsource partner will be able to provide this service.  Expect it to be a significant investment since this is hours of work when done properly.

This is a tedious process, especially now that the online world is getting very crowded with competition for pretty much everything.  When you are aiming at local or regional business this can help since your keyword phrase can now be specific to a location and help get that competition to a manageable level (Google has added locality search which will also help).  It can also knock the phrase out of your list if people aren’t searching by locality since the traffic will be lower for that keyword or phrase.

Finally, if all of your best efforts reveal you are in a market level or niche level realm of competition, go ahead and optimize for these words but don’t expect Google and search engines to provide much in the way of site traffic for you. Use them instead to stay focused and keep your marketing messages crystal clear.  In this case you will target social media much more heavily and drive the traffic through some methods I’ll cover in detail in future posts.

If all of this sounds horrifying, the good news is there is plenty of help arriving on the scene. Choose very carefully who will take your marketing efforts online since many are hopping into this arena but few are fully versed on inbound marketing methods.  Contact me for a free consultation and some direction in selecting an outsource partner.  I am a collaborative marketing strategy consulting partner with Hip Brand Group and a certified inbound marketing professional.

For more step by step help see the How 2 category of blog posts and sign up for my monthly email updates for more help and information delivered straight to your inbox.

Whew, that’s a lot of data isn’t it? Some of it may be data you haven’t even realized should be collected. This is one of those propositions in life where the devil truly is in the details. Many attack social media with zeal, applying traditional methods from the interrupt model of marketing and fizzle out quickly when things just don’t turn out the way it was anticipated. Then, it is either concluded that social media doesn’t work or that the return on investment is low. Neither of these conclusions is entirely accurate since social media efforts were applied as an end in themselves rather than tools as a means to an end. The end you want to be working toward is meeting the business goal carefully identified much earlier in this process. Sometimes that can and should be as simple a goal as setting out to build a social media audience of followers – a community.

Now we have all three steps right here for you to follow, but the intricacy of each step will require a lot of time, thought and resources to build. There truly is no once size fits all and there is no hard and fast formula in that the tools continue to evolve almost daily and will require us to adjust with them in developing what formula our individual businesses will follow. It is these subtleties that will offer countless individual, highly customized paths in order to achieve success.

My focus here will turn to breaking down the pieces for you into smaller bite-sized morsels. It is really so much more about shifting your thinking. Once your mind shifts to this newer method of giving away content, promoting that free content and attracting relationships versus the past model of constant “buy my stuff” or “here’s how good we are” and related messages, you will find an explosion of ideas swirling all around you. The process will no longer seem so complex, very big for sure as you start out, but the complexity will begin to fall away.

So, where do you start? Go back to the first step of inbound marketing here on this site. Start thinking about how to get found. Can people find you online? Meet these basic steps first since they are the foundation to this entire process and will be part of the formula from now on as you continue to update content. It will take time or a lot of money to build the foundation. Either you will have to spend the time to create the content volume and set up all of the tools or you will pay for these things to be done for you. A large financial investment equals faster stockpiles of content and channels for spreading it. Here is where the playing field is leveled for small business, even though it will take longer, a committed small business owner has the same opportunity to build this content using their own time and sweat equity and this is where passion to succeed can really make a difference.

You can have the most amazing website in the world, the best product, the best everything but if people cannot find it nothing else in this process will save you as far as Internet and online marketing is concerned. There is an enormous shift taking place even as I type this post. SEO is beginning to move down the list and social media presence and mobile applications move up.

Next week I’ll start posting details about the tools you can use and the intricacies of getting found online. You will learn the details that will allow you to either tackle the process yourself or educate you enough to outsource this task. You must have a clear understanding in order to know what you are buying and how to evaluate the cost of these services. The Internet is changing every day. We must be fluid, change with it and make learning part of our daily routine. It will be nimble businesses that rise to the top in this new world.

Instead, focus should be on converting to some type of action.  In the early days of development, your online efforts should be primarily directed at building an audience.  More than that is often going to be an unrealistic expectation and will lead to your giving up too soon. Unlike the older models of traditional advertising, your presence online is more about building trust and relationships – your interest is in drawing and engaging visitors to you on a continuous basis.  Blasting out nothing but commercial messages all the time won’t achieve this goal.

In the first step of inbound marketing it is all about building remarkable content across many channels online (and also offline to some degree if that is where your customers are).  Driving traffic to all of this content is crucial since having someone see it makes it much easier to convert them in this step to some action.

On your blog AND website there should be an opportunity for visitors to sign up for your email list.  If you believe a large segment of your preferred demographic may still prefer standard mail, it might also be smart to include the option of having material mailed in the conventional manner if possible.  A double opt-in registration system is preferred to make certain you are complying with the guidelines protecting people from Spam.  A double opt-in list means visitors sign up for the email list by typing in their name and email address (and any other information you may have asked for in your form) which is the first opt-in, then the new registrant receives an email from your system asking them to confirm that they registered.  That is the second opt-in and protects registrants someone else signing them up for email lists and adds a layer of protection for you in making sure the communication is wanted by the recipient.

To build trust in asking for this registration, be certain you post your privacy standards for how you will treat this data.  A brief message assuring visitors that you do not sell this list, that it is kept private and what to expect from you can go a long way in whether people will register.  In my case, the auto reply upon registration carries a message that gives a brief summary of how often they can expect to receive an email from me and a brief overview of what kind of information I share. There are some schools of thought that suggest you should email frequently, finding this annoying myself, I think once or twice a month is plenty.  This is an area where you can experiment and gauge results, adjusting accordingly.

In managing email marketing it should be done carefully and a policy should be adapted early that you will use this tool to continue the effort of promoting your remarkable content that will be produced on a continuous basis.  The idea, remember, is to be an asset and resource for your audience.  Instead, most take the approach of the interrupt model here, sending out message after message with commercials.  Including offers is fine, just avoid having the messages be all about that more than once in a great while.  You want to be a helpful resource, providing help and guidance, making life easier.

Here is a list of tools and methods that will be used to encourage and manage the conversion process:

• Product Pages
• Landing Pages
• Offers
• Lead Qualifying
• Lead Management
• Pay Per Click Advertising
• Forms
• Email marketing

Soon I’ll be sharing in depth methods for using each of the above tools and concepts, for now we’ll focus on the basic steps in the strategy of Inbound Marketing. My next post will cover the final step of this strategy and from there we’ll explore each step in much greater detail aimed at helping you start the process yourself or make educated decisions in outsourcing it.

The reality is, for all but a very few, building a useful presence in the social media realm takes time, patience, devoted attention and it requires a clear strategy.  The best way to get business from Social Media is in using it to give away the content you are creating and direct people to useful resources.  Often the resources will be your own content but resist the temptation to use it only to share what you create.  Actually, there are some that believe you should never share your own content through these channels.  My opinion is a to use a blended approach of sharing your own content and that of others. Seth Godin Chris Brogan and others refer to this approach as the Third Tribe and there is yet another set of marketing steps attached to this one concept.

Once you train yourself to think about giving away content, being helpful and resourceful, ideas for content seem to blossom all around you.  The approach we’re using here is to establish that we are market leaders and the “go-to” resource for a particular product or service.

Here is a brief list of the channels we can use for promoting our content:

• Twitter
• Blog
• Facebook Fanpage
• RSS Feeds (not just for your blog – more and more this is being used in other ways and I’ll share more about them in a future post)
• LinkedIn Groups
• Personal LinkedIn Updates
• Building a community – Yahoo groups, Facebook groups, Ning sites, and a multitude of others
• Mobile Apps
• Traditional marketing channels (although this should be limited – the only reason for including it is to make sure a segment of your prospect pool is not entirely left out)
• Targeted email marketing (careful here, it must be done in a particular way, steps will be covered in a future post)

Your interest here is to be social, build relationships and create a network of people who are interested in the content you provide and who may eventually need the services you offer.  If you frame everything on the notion of a win-win philosophy this becomes a pretty easy process to understand.  You will ultimately get business from this method but the community you are building will also gain the benefit of not only your knowledge, understanding and resources but also those of other members of the community.

Social media and all other types of advertising should now be thought of more like neighborhoods where you can share your messages and also visit.  The recipe you end up with here will be assembled from your preferences and the channels that make the most sense for your individual business offerings.

There are numerous facets to the promotional efforts you can employ and it should be understood that this is another step toward building a solid foundation.  Each channel you use to promote your content will require a considerable amount of learning on your part to set up or you can seek the help of professionals to do all of this for you.  Just be certain they understand the entire process of inbound marketing.

The basic structure you use should be pointing your efforts back to your content.  To sum up, we’ve just completed step one of the 3 steps of marketing strategy – getting found online.  Step one involves 3 phases, creating content online to attract ideal prospects, phase 2 is to optimize your online content and applies primarily to your website (other content can play a role in boosting your SEO efforts) and in this post we wrapped it up with promoting the content.

Next, we’ll move on to Step 2 of the Inbound Marketing process – Convertion.  This is the point at which your effort moves closer to generating business.  Once we complete an overview of the 3 steps of inbound marketing we’ll explore the many specifics that go into implementing this strategy.

This is a step in the process that can also quickly overwhelm those who haven’t spent a lot of time learning the ways of the Internet.  There are several facets to it.  Optimizing your content means making it easy for the search engines to find it and serve it up to people who are looking for it online.  On the face of it that sounds pretty simple.  The trouble is there are a finite number of keywords and a finite amount of space available on the front page of search engine results pages (SERP). Everyone cannot be there.  You will be competing for a position on these pages.  This puts search engines, Google being the predominant one, in a position of having a lot of control of your success or failure in getting traffic to your online content.  Google has patented methods for determining which sites rise to the top positions and understanding how they rank sites is limited by the information Google is willing to share.

I strongly encourage you to read a little more deeply into this topic.  Having a strong understanding of Search Engine Optimization (SEO for short) can go far both in helping you develop your specific plans for going forward and save you from wasting money and time in outsourcing this part of the operation.  A lot goes into optimizing a website and/or blog to help you rank higher for the keywords you selected earlier in the process.  Having a clear understanding of what keywords make the most sense, present the best opportunity for success and match your business model is important since it will factor into nearly everything you do online going forward.

Basically, you will want the content you create to be optimized for the same keywords in everything you post online.  Why?  More content on your site related to this set of keywords conveys the message to the search engine that your site is focused on this topic and therefore has the greatest likelihood of providing the most comprehensive information on the topic.  A word of caution here, it isn’t just about slinging keywords onto the page in question.  Google has gotten very sophisticated in evaluating webpages and the days of merely loading the page with a paragraph or so of a rambling string of keywords are long gone.  These practices can land your site at the back of a very long line as punishment.

What does it mean for a site to be optimized?  It means your content should be useful and follow logical order for the human readers but it should also be arranged with search engines in mind.  The page title, headings and content should contain relevant keywords as often as possible.  Another easily overlooked place for optimizing content is in the images your site is using.  Google cannot read what is in the images, only the file name, and alternate text so it is important to consider this when naming the photos used on your site.  Make sure you take the extra step of including alternate text.  Alternate text is what is displayed when the image doesn’t load on the page for some reason and also gives the search engine information about what is presented in the photo.

The elements I’ve mentioned so far are on page factors.  You will also need off page factors and these appear to be carrying more weight these days.  Off page SEO involves building backlinks to your site, that is having other sites linking to your content for the relevant keywords.  In addition to volume of backlinks, the quality of those sites linking back to your content are also examined by Google. The old methods of link farms and trading links isn’t as effective these days.  Basically, Google wants to rank sites well that have valuable content that is well organized and easy to find.  Doing all you can to meet that burden is the best way to get things happening in a natural way.

There isn’t time or room here to cover the vast subtleties of SEO.  Most of us will have to outsource this step.  Before you run out and hire someone to help you I cannot impress upon you enough the need for you to have at least a basic understanding of what it is and the best practices.  Not the most exciting topic in the world to read and study about for sure but  a little extra effort on your part here can carry you a very long way toward later success.

What if you find you are in a business that is highly competitive for the keywords that suit it best?  This is where social media can enter the picture in a big way.  If you find overtaking competition on Google to be unlikely, too expensive or outside your grasp for any reason, you can focus your efforts instead on building an online community using your network and building out from there using Social Media tools.  We’ll cover this step later since you will use it to promote your content whether you are in a postion to compete in the search engines or not.

I mentioned in an earlier post one of the differences between websites and blogs is that Google tends to like blogs more than websites.  The way Google lets us know it likes something is by how it ranks it.  It tends to be easier to rank well for your chosen keywords using a blog than a website.  Most believe this is because blogs are much more dynamic with content being updated more often and that content is likely to contain the relevant keywords if you do a good job at thinking ahead on what your site will be about and those keywords fit the natural flow of things.  If you have both, I encourage you to have the blog housed on the same domain as your website so all the relevant keyword traffic is going to the same place, everything working together to build a solid foundation.

Don’t take the selection of keywords lightly.  Seek professional guidance or spend a lot of time learning the ins and outs of SEO at this early stage in the process.  Future efforts will provide much more profitable results.  Realizing later you did a poor job of picking out the keywords will be a disappointing experience. Remember, this is not going to be a fast and overnight process but it is one that builds continuously the next step relying on the foundation set in place by the previous one.  Doing a good, thorough job in these early stages gives you a strong foundation for the future.

Next we’ll move to a discussion of promoting the content you create and this will get to some particulars about using Social Media as part of the recipe in building an Inbound Marketing strategy.

Getting your head around this will be the first obstacle since most of us are not in the habit of writing, creating video and audio posts etc. that will be publicly viewed.  We’re also not in the habit of making lots of things to just give away free of charge on a regular basis.

The most obvious and fairly easy place to have content on the Internet is on a blog or website.  Websites are much more static than blogs and for that reason are not as easy to manage when it comes to creating content.  If you are a one-person operation you will want to start with a blog.  If you already have a website, you still want to start a blog for ease of use and because Google is a little more friendly to them these days in terms of exposure.

If you’re relatively new to the world of Internet marketing you may not know the difference between a website and a blog.  The short version is a website is much like an online billboard, a place to post information that will stay put for extended periods and a blog is more dynamic, functioning like a running commentary from you to your clients and prospects.  Most companies that have been around for awhile have a website, not so many have a blog.  If you are  more established in business and have the resources you can easily outsource the setup of these tools which brings me to another point.

Marketing on the Internet is about more than merely having a website or even a blog and then doing a little advertising for it by purchasing banner ads or pay-per-click advertising.  It needs to be thought of more as an overall strategy, inbound marketing, and the elements you put in place are all tools that plug into that strategy.  Each recipe can and will vary somewhat as the businesses that use them differ on a wide scale.  What I’m talking about here is an overall framework to follow and then customize according to your needs and ability.

Setting up a blog is not a complex project.  I use and recommend WordPress.  There is the WordPress hosted version, completely 100% free and there is WordPress.org where you can download the software (still free) and install or have it installed on your own domain (some very small expense here) – this is the preferred route since it gives more credibility and you will have much greater control.  There are a host of books, websites and consultants that can foster you along on setting up and customizing a blog and it is a topic I’ll explore in greater depth later on but for now we’ll stick to the basic action of getting a blog.  It is very important to begin this project with the end in mind.  Many install their blog on a free site with the intent of moving it to a self-hosted site (on their own domain) later on and I want to caution against that.  Here’s why.  A big part of getting found online is controlled by Google and the age of your site along with volume of content is a factor.  We’ll talk about in a later post.  Self-hosting on your own domain is not outside your capability even if you are a beginner and you will already be building toward your future if you start out this way.  Again, I’ll cover this topic in greater depth at a later time.

Once you have a blog, getting content out there for the world is not all that difficult from a technical perspective.  Getting disciplined in consistently creating content and sharing it will be the hurdle.  My advice is to start small and build the habits first.  Make it a habit to get on your blog once or twice a week and write a little blog post.  What do you write about?  If you get started with the end in mind the ideal way is to select keywords that will be the core element of everything you will do online.

When you’re already in business, finding keywords isn’t quite as difficult because you’re limited to the scope of your existing operation for the most part.  If you’re just thinking about going in business or have some flexibility in just what goods and services you will offer, spending a considerable amount of time researching the value of the keywords you might use can carry you a long way.  Again, this is another complicated topic I’ll revisit and if you can’t come up with the perfect set of keywords at least be thinking in general terms what someone might type into Google to find your site and try to include these in your topics and conversation with your blog posts.  The point for now is building the habits of creating content.  Quality can be refined over time. Simply think of a common question your customers ask, answer it online in the form of a blog post.  Also, visit around to other blogs for ideas.

Ultimately, your blog (and website if you have one) will be your content factory.  This is where you will “manufacture” your new product – the content that will be shared freely with your intended community.  Next, we’ll continue with this discussion as I dig deeper into how to get found using a blog.

I invite you to subscribe to my monthly email updates in the right margin so you don’t miss any posts.  I encourage you to share this post with others, there is a link above to “tweet” it to your followers.  There is also a “Share” button at the bottom of this post.

This is an excellent opportunity for you to learn, a bit of homework.  Click the share button below.  A whole new world will open up to you.  If you think Social Media is limited primarily to Facebook, Twitter and maybe LinkedIn this will be an incredible eye-opener.  You will want to know about social bookmarking services since this will become a big part of your world as you gain experience with your blog and the whole concept of getting found online.  So try it out, (hint, the site you will visit has tutorial videos for you) just press buttons and explore until you figure it out, nothing will break, I promise and I’ll be talking about this tool and others like it later on in great detail

The key is shifting your thinking toward having the ideal audience find you and your company.  For many of us this new way of doing things is a very tough transition.  We now have to be focused on giving content – at no charge – to attract a community of followers.  The community your interested in attracting are those who might want to buy your product or service.  We’re now building an environment where everyone wins.  The consumer receives guidance and information and you get the opportunity to earn their business by demonstrating your expertise in a particular area.  You’re building a true relationship with your customers and prospects, much like the old general stores of the past where everyone in the community knew the merchants on a personal level.

The concept is simple but the methods for doing it get intricate and a bit complex.  Building a good inbound marketing foundation will take time, patience and dedication.  No drive-by selling here, you must be in it for the long haul.  The good news is this approach means no wasted efforts since each step is a foundational building block to the next and only contributes to the big picture going down the line.

Getting found online involves three steps.  1) create content 2) optimize the content 3)promote the content.  Please note the third step is promote the content, NOT the goods and services you sell.  You will now promote what you have to offer that is free of charge.  Again, this is stating it very simply.  Each of these three steps needs to be unpacked to much more intricate stages.

The next discussion in this category will tackle the first of the three steps to getting found.  Creating content.  There are a number of primary vehicles for doing this online.  Creativity will offer opportunities to add others but we’ll focus on five or so to get the ball rolling.

I invite you to share your thoughts here in the comment area of this post and I hope you will subscribe to the monthly newsletter (in the right margin).  I would like the opportunity to hear more from you within my communities on Facebook and Twitter.

If you found this information useful I hope you will share it with others.

Lisa