What can traditional networking do to increase your market presence?
As a small business marketing consultant I come across many types of businesses that have one thing in common; they want to increase profitability in an affordable and streamlined fashion. Marketing is more much more than a single act; its a constant action that builds branding and awareness through effective means of targeting market segments.
But the limits of targeting a market segment are not just limited to ranking at the top of search engines. There are more traditional methods to gain quality business contacts and that is why TW Resource Group joined the LeTip business networking group. Today there was a business mixer in Marysville where many entrepreneurs gathered to share their business specialties.
The many different networking groups offer the small business owner to get their business in front of many people who may need or might know someone who needs the services you offer. Yes, these networking groups require a commitment to attend meetings, mixers, board meetings and training seminars but the long term ROI is immense. The biggest argument I hear from business owner “why not to join” is the time commitment out of their already busy schedules. But if business is to be had by committing a small block of time every week isn’t it worth it?
In my opinion it is. Small businesses can not normally afford a large marketing/advertising budget to generate a long-term source of fresh business. Getting involved in a group that is designed to build contacts as increase the size of a client base is one of the most effective small business marketing strategies.
After joining LeTip TW Resource Group has made many contacts, provided small business marketing proposals and even closed a few deals all in a period of a month and a half. Get involved in local business mixers, professional networking groups and make you and your company known through out the community. The dividends will pay themselves a few folds before you know it.
Take a proactive position to your company’s success and get involved because your success and survival depends on it.
TW Resource Group has joined LeTip
Even though TW Resource Group is an online marketing company it is important for us not to loose site of other avenues to group and expand our business. That is why we have joined the LeTip of Crossroads Connection networking chapter.
I have created a webpage for our group, which can be accessed via the link in the top navigation, since the chapter does not have an official site right now. Hopefully my skills will be showboated enough where the chapter site will be done by TW Resource Group. From my last meeting, Monday May 12, 2008 in Seattle, the regional director was pushing the importance of local chapter presence.
Personally I think the site could be a power if it was Tweaked by TW Resource Group. Ok that is personal opinion but here some food for thought. The current project for Lamb Hanson Lamb Appraisal Associates, Inc has exploded with success. Before completion of the project, which happens next week, they already achieved two commercial real estate appraisal clients. Not to shabby.
So for the time being it is my goal to get the LeTip page on our site to rank on Google for the keyword LeTip. But until that happens it will be all about content generation. I will keep the progress posted here in order to track progress and rankings.
New project maximizes real estate appraisal company’s marketing
This past year TW Resource Group has grown to provide pretty cool services to some awesome companies around Washington. This time is for a Seattle real estate appraisal firm Lamb Hanson Lamb Appraisal Associates, Inc. This is the largest single project done and the strategies use take advantage of the many solid Wordpress plugins to achieve excellent results.
A little about LambHansonLamb.com
Strategy and hierarchy were the two most important items of this site and would dictate how the rest of the framework would be laid out. LHL provides services across Washington state but those terms would be to difficult to target due to scale so and leads generated for broad terms would yield little. So it was decided to geotarget Seattle since it is the largest metropolitan area.
The homepage and navigation where built to maximize presence within the Seattle market; some examples are the residential appraisals, commercial appraisals, agricultural appraisals and litigation appraisals pages. Notice the title tags and page title match and this allows for greater keyword density while not overloading and spamming the main text. Clear and concise titles make a page more indexable and favorable with search engines.
Pairing these two items take more than just a standard site using the Wordpress platform. Plugins are essential and can only be used by a site hosting its own site not like the free versions that a person can get by signing up at Wordpress. Here is a quick list of the plugins:
- Contact Form ][
- SEO Title Tag
- Automatic Update
- Worpress Stats
They are probably the best, easiest and efficient plugins for a Wordpress blog. My thought is never crap up a site with junk that is found on every other website on the web. Let your competitors annoy consumers with advertisements and framework that is junk.
Another strategy built into their site is the static homepage with the - blog posting being placed directly on the /blog/ url. Many Worpress blogs fall short will this one because they are not set correctly under the Options panel. Making this work takes the website from being a blog to the next level, blogsite. Incorporating the traditional static homepage of a Web 1.0 site and adding the Web 2.0 blog feature.
The site is going to be a dynamite in the search engines due the framework construction and the staff utilizing the blog feature. Publishing original content, like what is done here, will grown the site into a Seattle real estate appraisal monster.
Upgrading to Wordpress 2.5
The other day I tried to upgrade from Wordpress 2.1.1, I know…the platform was quite old, to version 2.5. It was all going good until I followed some instruction on a forum which I did not completely understand. After going through the steps, which called for deleting some files, I tried the new install and got a nasty error message on the homepage.
Not what I expected and really got my anxiety level up. The thought of loosing a years worth of content almost made me puke. But fortunately luck was on my side once again. I logged into my BlueHost account and went back into the Fantastico auto installer and low and be hold there was an upgrade to 2.3.3. Crossing fingers I clicked the upgrade link and viola! It all worked, whew…much better. Everything seemed to be in perfect working order so onto try the 2.5 upgrade again but this time using a much different approach, a plugin.
Download: http://techie-buzz.com/wordpress-plugins/wordpress-automatic-upgrade-plugin.html
This plugin automatically backup and upgrades Wordpress with flawless ease. So if you are like me and are not the most experienced on server side upgrades then this plugin is for you. Upgrades are sometimes painful and lesson learning experiences and thanlfully there are solutions to get us through them.
Do not let updates hold you back from improving your blog
Through a website’s lifecycle there will be many updates, changes, themes and links that may change or affect the way the website ultimately functions. These probably seem more common now-a-days since the majority of people using blog platforms increases. From experience themes are the easiest item to install. Just download a theme and install it using a ftp site and then select it from the Presentation tab at the top of the Dashboard.
But unfortunately not all up dates are that easy. For instance, when we customized the urls on this site it affected how the navigation worked as well as links to internal blog postings. Those affects are actually still being felt around here as it takes time to locate and correct all the links.
A blogsite needs to function and be optimized from the very beginning and not be delayed by problems like: blogs on the homepage, dysfunctional contact form, no customized title tags and/or sub par navigation. Here is a quote from Google’s Webmaster Guidelines regarding the use of text versus images.
Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images.
Many updates are unavoidable and are necessary for the long-term success of a website. Browsing the blogosphere for a few minutes will produce a lot of website that are in desperate need of updates.
What a great lead into our next round of blog postings: how to customize a Wordpress blog.