These days, everyone’s on a limited budget — and, in this economy, likely will be for a while. Suppose you are just starting out in Internet communications or marketing or want to scale up. Unless you’re familiar with how websites, blogs and various forms of social media interact, the temptation will be to do it all — put a little bit in each pot and hope something works. A scattered approach, thought, almost guarantees a poor return on your investment of both money and time.
Here are 6 simple steps to help you build your online presence in a cost-efficient way.
1. Define your “product.” Is it a tangible good, is it a service or is it a set of ideas from, say, a research group or association? This will determine whom you are trying to reach — your audience — and suggest how. In this post, we assume your product is a service or a set of ideas.
2. Describe your objectives and measures. If all goes well, what would you like to achieve in six months or a year? Maybe it’s an increase by x percent in leads/inquiries, newsletter or blog subscriptions, or in publication downloads from your website. Don’t give in to the temptation to just count numbers — you want results, not just hits. Be clear and realistic. Take your time. This is a critical step.
3. Start with the basics: a website and a blog. Why are these basic? Your website is your home base — your online office where people go to find out who you are, what you offer and why they should care. Your blog is your advocate — it shows how rich your offerings are, demonstrates the depth of your knowledge, shows you are involved in important ways and suggests how you fit in with the other needs and interests your audience might have. Accumulating blog subscribers should be a key focus because it will allow you to go to them, rather than waiting for them to come to you.
Take a breath here. Get the website bugs worked out and the blog on its way. Do baselines analytics now. You can’t measure progress unless you know where you started.
4. Add the bells and whistles just a few at a time. You may hear that a “good” social media plan includes Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, Google+, e-mail outreach, a newsletter and — well, the list goes on. Do you need them all? Not at first and perhaps not ever. If your audience is, say, thought leaders in a profession, policy makers or even venture capitalists, then LinkedIn and Twitter are the best places to start. Focus on those and on building a solid following as quickly as possible. Even the best-written Tweets/Updates will be useless if not read. Put the cash and the effort there. Don’t scrimp. Expand later, but only later. And again — build in measures.
5. Be consistent and persistent. Keep the blog active, publishing something at least twice a week to start (a quarterly plan makes this easier); each post can go out automatically to your subscribers. (See “But what would I write in a blog?” for brief ideas.) Keep your website current and change some content regularly to keep it fresh. Use your social media sites extensively, with engaging and short posts that link back to your blog or website — your advocate and your office — or to information that is truly useful to your audience.
6. Measure progress! Looking at interim results often is useful. Are you getting any closer to #2? If your blog isn’t being read (or subscribed to) or your Tweets aren’t translating to action — why is that? How can your efforts be tweaker? “Set and forget” isn’t an approach that works well with building an Internet presence.
Remember: define, focus and measure. Investing in outside expertise to at least get started can be very cost effective, particularly in such busy times.
A “free” WordPress site is a viable option for website. Not that long ago, it was suitable only for a blog — different templates were available, but the come-with-it plug-ins were sparse, for example, and the layout very restricted. We used one for over a year for a client who wasn’t really sure about having a blog. Despite the sparse features, this basic WordPress did its job — and the blog continues, now upgraded, integrated into a new website and used with the WordPress widget on LinkedIn, for example.
In this era of influence via social media, nobody wants to be left behind. Still, using all the available platforms can seem overwhelming. Is it necessary?
“Blog” is a word most people have heard hundreds of times — and many of us have even read one or two blogs. Or have we?
The Internet offers a myriad of ways to get out information about scholarly research. Websites are one obvious source; search engines and services are another. But is this enough? In a competitive world, probably not.
Inevitably, even if you’re doing it yourself, getting a new website built and ready takes longer than you had planned. The last few days are likely to be a hectic rush of last-minute fixes of any bugs, correction of typos, completion of internal and external links, and a myriad of other tasks that seem to go on and on ad infinitum.
Nothing is as certain in life as change, and nothing will date a website as quickly as not keeping up with change. We are not talking about redesigning a website here, but about keeping yours fresh and up to date. A stale site is a lost investment.
