Small Business Design Resources

Quick Tip: Create a custom username on Facebook

Make it easy for your potential customers to find your small business on Facebook. It’s simple to create a custom username on Facebook for your business page. All you have to do is login to your Facebook account and then go to http://www.facebook.com/username

Choose your page from the drop down menu and you’ll have the opportunity to type a custom username. Make sure to follow Facebook guidelines when choosing a custom username for your business page.

IMPORTANT: You can only change your page’s username ONCE, so make sure to double-check all spelling.

That’s it! Now you have a simple Facebook username to share with everyone.

Small Business Advertising Success with Facebook

There are 500 million people using Facebook. If your small business does not have a company account or Fan Page on Facebook, you are potentially missing out on a considerable amount of revenue. Almost every genre of small business owners, from pet grooming to dry cleaning have a Facebook page to promote their business. Why is taking the time to maintain a Facebook page such a good idea? Great question!

Affordable
Your basic Facebook account is FREE. That makes the price right for small businesses. Not only is it cheap to use, it’s very simple to maintain. You can make a page that simply has a picture, contact information and status updates informing your friends and fans about upcoming specials. Stop by your Page once a week or so to add new friends, answer any messages and handle general Facebook account housekeeping. Take your Facebook account to the next level by incorporating your small business website blog for viewers to read. Update as much or as little as you like. You can allow visitors to post on your Facebook small business website, or turn off the wall function and only post information from the business’s end. You can pay to have your business show up on the side panel of Facebook. The cost varies however, but you can read more here: www.facebook.com/advertising. There is a minimum charge of $5.

Low Maintenance
As mentioned before, using Facebook as an advertising tool for your small business design is great because it takes very little time and money to maintain your page. You could realistically update it once a day or once a month. You’ll get back what you put into it. Another reason Facebook is so great to use to promote small businesses: people will find you! That’s right; you can search for friends and family to add as friends to your page, but others in your area or network will find you on their own. Your time spent on lead generating will be greatly reduced with Facebook.

Remember: Facebook is a great tool to advertise your small business website, but don’t over post. When you’re putting status updates on there more than once a day, people begin to get turned off by over-advertising and will hit the “hide feed” button associated with your content, meaning they will never see updates posted by your business page. You don’t want this, so posting often should mean just a few posts per week. Also, keep your Facebook page dedicated towards your small business, not your personal opinions. A quick way to lose your fans is to post something that has nothing to do with your business. Don’t argue politics or get into debates on your Facebook page, you’ll make yourself and your business look bad; plus you’ll never convince the other party to see your side, so don’t bother.

Use Facebook wisely to promote your small business by incorporating your website blogs, videos and upcoming events related to your business. Enjoy the fruits of this social-networking wonder and benefit from the business a well-maintained Facebook small business Page can bring.

Three Reasons To Add A Blog To Your Website

If you’ve built a well-designed website for your small business, congratulations! You’re already ahead of the competition. Good small business website design is very important, yet browsing the Internet, I often can’t help but notice how poorly designed many websites are. A clean, bold design, easy navigation and high-quality content, along with basic search engine optimization of your website’s copy and title tags, will do wonders for your website and will help you strengthen your brand and establish yourself as a reputable business.

Now to the bad news. Just a decade ago, a great website was all you needed to establish your business online and to impress prospects. But things have changed dramatically over the past few years. Having a great, well-designed website isn’t enough anymore – you now need to have an interactive, social online presence. Customers, clients and prospects expect more these days from their online experience. They have come to expect interaction – they want to interact with you online, or at least have the option to do so.

To enable prospects to interact with you, you need to be active in social media, and one of the oldest forms of social media is also one of the best – blogging. Here are the three main reasons you should add a blog to your small business website – today.

1. Strengthening your brand. A well-written blog transforms your website from static to dynamic. It creates a vibrant website that keeps getting updated with fresh content, which gives visitors a reason to come back and also gives search engines a reason to crawl your website more often (more on SEO benefits in the next paragraph). You can use a blog to provide your visitors with new info, tips and ideas; to create a buzz around your website by posting contests and giveaways; and to give your customers and prospects a place where they can interact with you through voting, polls and comments.

2. SEO benefits. A blog gives you a wonderful opportunity to enrich your website with your main keywords. This is especially important for e-commerce websites that typically have very little content. When search engines are crawling your website, trying to index it correctly, they need to have something to work with – they need text that will tell them what your website is about and what are your main keywords. While your website’s URL and title tags provide search engines with the basic info, a blog reinforces that information and, overtime, can help you to rank better for many different keywords.

3. Your competitors are doing it. Even if you’re not convinced that your website needs a blog, but your competitors are adding blogs to their websites, this should be a good enough reason to add a blog too, especially if you know that customers in your space are participating in social media and reading blogs. If your competitors seem more up-to-date than you are, if their website is more fun and interesting, prospects will not hesitate to choose them over you.

Are You LinkedIn?

Are you familiar with the popular networking site LinkedIn? It’s a networking site, similar to others like Facebook, but this one is geared towards business professionals. 75 million people around the globe are currently registered with the site. Business professionals from all over not only gather on the website to network, they also search for new careers. You can make LinkedIn a powerful tool to help you generate business for yourself.

An attribute about LinkedIn that could benefit a small business would be the referral feature. Clients who enjoyed your services or product can visit your LinkedIn page and leave positive feedback for other potential clients to see. If you have a blog, let your connections on LinkedIn know about it by importing it to your page. You can update your status just as you can on Twitter, so try widgets that allow you to add things to your profile, like your Twitter stream for instance. Cross-combine your social media for maximum results. Use LinkedIn to post information you may already have on Facebook or Twitter and so on.

Your small business design should not stop with just a website. Boost it further by taking advantage of the social networking websites that exist. On LinkedIn, you can connect with people like you as well as people who like what you do. Join groups dedicated to your type of business. Post insightful articles and answer questions on other users’ feeds. You’ll add a personal touch when you respond to potential clients’ questions, plus it helps you by adding a bit of self-promotion for the other eyes that cross it. With LinkedIn, it’s important to make sure you’re keeping up with the site. Updating at least once a week is going to keep your name visible in the feeds of your connections. However, it doesn’t have to be fresh material. As mentioned before, if your website has a blog, make sure you’re posting the blog on LinkedIn as well, to increase traffic.

Depending on what it is your small business has to offer, you can also use LinkedIn to research possible vendors or even employees. It just helps you gain more understanding of their businesses, plus you get to check their credibility, as they might for you. If you’re not already using LinkedIn, consider the benefits it can add to your small business design. You can network with other users and potentially reach a wider audience with your product. Make a profile and be sure to update often. Use a professional picture of either yourself or your company logo. Also, be sure to have any LinkedIn messages forwarded to your e-mail inbox as well. That way, if someone does contact you about your services, you’ll be that much faster to respond.

How YouTube Can Benefit Your Small Business