Inbound Marketing For Australian SMBs

While your end goal for might be sales, the secret to success for lead generation with social media is to know where it fits into the buy cycle for your business. My view is that it's at the beginning, and should be utilized to build reach, awareness, rapport, trust and authority. So here are my 8 social media tips for small business owners and marketers:

It's easy to get overwhelmed with all the changes to the internet, social media and specifically Facebook. Especially when you're trying to run your business and just keeping up with technology is a job in itself.  

Does your business have a Twitter, Facebook and Linked In Profile? Do you know how it's benefiting your business or if it is at all?

What is your biggest obstacle with Facebook Marketing? Is it not knowing where to start, not convinced it will work for your business, or you don't have the time to test something new?

Recently I was asked on a Linked Group: “Where would you recommend someone start? How much time do you recommend spending working the social media?”

I found this Social Media Marketing article on Foursquare - this one is worth reading and worth sharing.

If you're a busy business person who is interested in learning how social media can help your business but you're overwhelmed by the whole social media thing. Where to start and what to do... then this article is for YOU!

Are you one of the 1,463,130 people who have viewed the Social Media Revolution video by Erik Qualman on YouTube? If not, there's a link to it at the bottom of this article.  I encourage you to watch it, its only 4mins. The stats of social media usage in this video are amazing!

When I asked this at a recent business networking function no hands went up. 

Several years ago I identified the need to optimize our website with keywords so we could rank higher in the search engines.  Through my research in looking for the ‘best' search engine optimization company to employ, I quickly learnt that SEO wasn't something that you do once, it was ongoing and continually changing.  Not only that, the seo experts I was speaking with charged in excess of $1000 with no guarantee.  I decided it was going to be cheaper and better long term, for me to learn seo and make the changes myself.  So I spent a considerable about of time studying SEO until I knew what we needed to do with regards to optimizing the website, headings, page titles, meta descriptions and rewriting the website copy.  But the next challenge I ran into was updating our website.  Our web developer charged $100 p/hr to make the changes. This didn't provide me with the flexibility I needed to upload new content, test and measure results and change offers, calls to action. Also we needed to start a blog, but again the cost factor outweighed any financial benefit we could foresee.  It was frustrating and expensive, to say the least.