Fairy Blog Mother

I have a good friend whose business is doing extremely well. This is very good news, and I was intrigued to know her secret.

It all boils down to interaction, updating and communication with her customers through social networking and her website. I know this website is all about blogging, but she has accomplished the same concept within another form of social media, in this case Facebook.

Using social media is all about being social. It means coming down to the same level as your customers, understanding how they think, what they want, what they do, reacting to their input, appreciating their stories, joining in with them so they get them to know, like and trust you.

Only then can you selectively start to talk about your business in their terms, acknowledge their problems, offer suitable solutions in the form of free top tips, set up a competition, post up new ideas and observations, promote a special offer and provide information about new products and services. All this should be done in the customers’ point of view, beneficial, helpful and definitely without any hint of sales.

Being young and dynamic my friend has amassed several hundreds of Facebook followers, and having a brilliant business brain she understands she needs to regularly respond to them. She gets her staff to check her Facebook Group daily, and personally interacts with her friends’ messages, questions, comments and general postings.

She communicates like any other Facebook-user, posting up pictures of her successes, and tags testimonials from ecstatic customers who are happy to show off what she has done for them. It is the sharing element with each follower on an equal level that makes her so accessible, approachable and social.

And then she applies this concept to her website. (Now we have an affinity with blogging.) It is updated daily with suitable material gathered from her Facebook Group, plus more professional material about her business and what it offers. Here she goes into more detail about the services she provides, the products she uses, her weekly special offers, her chosen product or service of the month and the newest testimonials she has collected.

It is the daily updating of her website that causes it to firmly occupy its No 1 slot in Google, which confirms why the majority of her new customers find her through it. It is almost like she treats her website like a blog, which of course stimulates the search engines to regularly visit it to find out what’s new. Most websites aren’t visited for several weeks or even months, since they hardly ever change their content, but a dynamic website like this one would attract a lot of attention from spiders, hungry for new stuff to index. And they would have probably been boosted through links from her Facebook Group, which is also regularly crawled for the same reasons.

So this is why I recommend blogging for the same results. Blogs are easier to update than websites, due to the platform they are written in, and can create steady traffic back via links to your website. But it is the regularity of the updating, the relevance of the content, the succinct usage of popular keywords plus an understanding of the audience by producing material they want to read, that will really make a difference in the end.

Fairy Blog Mother

One of the things I mentioned in my last post was RSS, or Really Simple Syndication.

Some people ‘get’ RSS, and there are others that don’t. It took me a while, partly because of the word ‘syndication’. Myriam Webster’s Learning Dictionary’s definition is: “to sell (something, such as a piece of writing, comic strip, or photograph) to many different newspapers or magazines for publication at the same time”.

It’s the words “at the same time” that is the crux. By using RSS, you are able to publish your posts not only in your blog, but in many different places simultaneously. Everyone who has subscribed to your blog (sort of like a magazine) will have requested to receive a copy of your latest post delivered to their inboxes or their search engine readers.

It doesn’t have to be your subscribing readership, you can use RSS to deliver your post to other media where it will be read by new, different, uninvolved, exciting people. This is a brilliant way of exposing your post to a myriad of potential subscribers, if not followers, even if it is in passing.

This is where your headline comes into play – that is why I’ve been stressing it needs to be catchy, informative, intriguing, educational, pertinent, inviting – it must strike a chord with its potential audience immediately or the opportunity will be lost, especially in social media where the pace is so fast.

You can get a RSS URL (special domain name for your blog’s RSS feed) from Google Feedburner, but most blogs provide a simple version automatically. It depends what you want to do with it.

The simple version opens the facility for you to bookmark the post – something I find unsatisfactory because you have to make the effort to click on the link to find out the latest contribution.

The RSS URL not only sets up the subscription service, but allows you to activate posting applications throughout social media so you can ‘syndicate’ (publish immediately in several places at once) your latest post automatically to an alternative audience who wouldn’t get the chance to see it otherwise.

It also means you don’t have to actively go around all the social media sites you are connected to, pasting up your post’s URL manually every time you publish, saving you time, inconvenience and not forgetting their access details.

And if you schedule your posts to publish to a more appropriate or convenient time, they will automatically appear when you’re busy doing something else more profitable. (I have a scheduling your posts e-course for that too!)

Of course this blog is meant to be a resource, so you can find out more by using the search facility, or by clicking on the following links: RSS Simply Explained, Setting up a RSS feed, and How to use Feedburner to feed into Twitter – enjoy!