Upgrading Your Small Business Web Presence

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By: Chad Bell

Once upon a time, a simple website with a logo, company blurb, and contact info was good enough to inform customers about your business. Although these aspects are still essential, modern web users are accustomed to a higher standard. In today’s day and age, there are a few platforms that you can leverage to upgrade your company’s web presence and make your business more accessible to your customers.

BLOG

Blogging is an easy way to update your customers on your company. As information becomes increasingly accessible, consumers are placing greater value on the latest developments. More importantly, they want it in a quick and concise manner. When writing blog articles, make sure that you always have the customer in mind. Write about things that pertain not only to your expertise, but also to their interests. For example, I’m writing this article with the presumption that you want to learn more about optimizing your presence on the web.

Once upon a time, a simple website with a logo, company blurb, and contact info were good enough to inform your customers about your business. Although these aspects are still essential, modern web users are accustomed to a higher standard. In today’s day and age, there are a few platforms that you can leverage to upgrade your company’s web presence and make your business more accessible to your customers.

FACEBOOK FAN PAGE

Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Yelp have become staples of human connection. If you are not using these services, then you are missing out on a large audience of potential customers. One of the best ways to enhance your brand recognition is to create a Facebook Fan Page. When a user visits your page, they are presented with the opportunity to promote your brand with a single click of the “Like” button. By becoming a fan, all of their friends will be informed that they have become a fan of your business. Given the power of suggestion, the Fan Page is a great way to make your brand go viral.

TWITTER

Twitter is a great way to keep in contact with your current and potential customers. Remember when I mentioned how blog articles can provide customers with quick updates on your business? Well, Tweeting updates is an even faster way to connect with them. Just keep in mind that Twitter gives you a limit of 140 characters, so you’ll have to get creative. You can engage your followers by offering promotions and discounts, answering quick questions about your products and services, and informing them on upcoming events.

YELP

Yelp is a great tool for consumers to rate and read reviews on small businesses. Users – not owners, determine whether a business appears on Yelp by simply rating and providing some basic information on it. In theory, this “unequal” power distribution is great way to hold companies accountable for providing great products and services. But with periodic allegations of ratings tampering and a questionable review filter system, Yelp has maintained a love hate relationship with the small business community. Whether you love or hate it, the user-review platform is something that you simply cannot and should not ignore. Reading what customers to have to say about their experience with you is a great way to improve the business. And since it’s inevitable that you will receive a few negative comments, keeping a tab on bad reviews lets you know when you should speak your peace with a response. This gives you the opportunity to repair the relationship and continue to deliver great services.

Top 5 WordPress Plugins

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By: Chad Bell
As powerful and full featured as WordPress is in its default configuration, sometimes you need a little (or a lot) more. Fortunately, the WordPress community offers a huge array of plugins to expand its functionality. Even as an experienced developer, I am constantly amazed by the scope of what are available. Almost every time we have needed to extend WordPress in some sort of special configuration, I have found a plugin that does the job. In some cases, the plugin will require a little extra coding to get it exactly right, but it’s usually at least 90% there. Currently, there are about 14,000 (and counting) plugins available.

In this article, I will go over a few of the more useful plugins that we keep coming back to for new projects. This, of course, doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface, but will provide a good overview of all that WordPress plugins offer.

SEO

Establishing your visibility on Google is essential for any website and the SEO All in One SEO Pack plugin helps make sure that happens. While it won’t perform miracles, it will leverage the content you provide to its maximum capacity. What’s great is that while this plugin works great freshly installed, it also offers a wide range of options for advanced users to dig into.

SOCIAL NETWORKING

Just like being found on Google, maintaining a strong presence on social networks and giving users the opportunity to share your content with others is equally, if not more in some cases, essential. Covering all the great social networking plugins would be a series of articles in itself, but for now, I will touch on a few of my favorites.

Follow-Me

You might have noticed that most sites these days have a string of social network icons on the header or sidebar linking to the site’s presence on the these site.

 

The Follow-Me plugin utilizes a simple interface for adding icons and gives you several options for presenting them. It includes all the popular icons of almost every social media platform you would want, but if for some reason you don’t find exactly what you need, you can always create customized icons with some basic programming skills.

Add This and Share This

These tools allow users to share or post your content on their own social network accounts.

 

Studies have shown that word-of-mouth is the most effective method of promotion to consumers:

  • 67% of all consumer decisions are primarily influenced by word of mouth (McKinsey)
  • 90% of all consumers identify word-of-mouth as the best, most reliable, and trustworthy source (NOP World)
  • On product recommendations, 65% of consumers trust their friends, but only 14% trust advertisers! (Yankleovich)

It’s not surprising to hear that people trust their friends’ recommendations the most. So as long as you create compelling content, these share plugins will make proselytizing easier. If you sign up for optional accounts with either of these services, they will provide you with metrics of how often each article is shared and to which platforms.

 

ECOMMERCE

There are plenty of platforms dedicated to eCommerce such as such as Zen Cart and Prestashop. Unfortunately, they are often not suitable for anything but that. For integrating an online store alongside a blog and other dynamic content hosted by WordPress, WP e-Commerce by by GetShopped is the way to go. The free version is very powerful and full featured on its own but GetShopped also offers additional functionality through purchased add-ons for advanced payment processing, special presentation options such as a product slider, and much more.

The plugins that are offered can extend WordPress to do almost anything you can imagine. I have touched on a few that I feel are most beneficial.

What plugins have worked or not worked for you?