Author: Bella E. Hussain

Start Your SEO And Internet Marketing

Posted on by Bella E. Hussain


Optimizing your website and marketing online can be a time consuming and exhausting process, especially for a beginner. Some people hire SEO expert to help them with their effort, but that might not be an option if your budget is tight. SEO and internet marketing is not as hard as it looks if you break down your effort into several steps so you can see your progress and know what else to do. This article discusses seven steps to start doing your own SEO and internet marketing.

The first step is setting up your website

It is the central point of your online marketing. Buy your own domain and hosting space. Your own domain will make your website look more professional and your SEO ranking higher. You can hire someone to do it for you, or you can set it up yourself.

Start simple

Use website template and design that is easy to install and navigate. Although fancy websites look interesting, many readers actually prefer simple but informative website. Put in the most basic information about your products and company. Write your shop or service policy as clearly as possible. It is best if you add a Frequently Asked Question section on your website. Do not forget to put in your contact info so that readers can reach you. It is preferable to put in your phone number aside from email address. Some people prefer to speak directly to someone rather than using email.

Take pictures and upload them to your websites

Take the best pictures you can and hire a professional photographer if you have to. If you sell tangible products, this step is especially important since the customers cannot see or touch your item directly.

Start optimizing your website

First, make sure your website is searchable on search engines. You might need to submit your website address to some search engines to speed up the process. Then you should edit your header and title to include relevant keywords that describe your website content and your products. You also need to add these keywords to your content. Avoid keyword stuffing as this is frowned upon by search engines.

Sign up for social networking sites

Start with Facebook and Twitter since they are the easiest to use and most popular. If you use Facebook, create a business page or a fan page. Like with your website, fill in relevant information and make it look as professional and attractive as possible. Add social networking buttons such as Facebook badges on your website.

Invite people that you know

Invite people that you know at first: your friends, family, coworkers, acquaintance or anyone on your friend list. Ask them to spread the news to their friends. Interact with them by posting updates, sale, special offer, or other things. It is important to answer their question and build relationship with them.

Advertise your website or business

The last step in SEO and internet marketing is to advertise your website or business. There are many places to advertise online. You can directly place your ads on certain websites. You can also use Google AdWords or Facebook Ads.…

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Small Business Marketing Strategies

Posted on by Bella E. Hussain


Search engine optimization for local searches requires quite a different approach than what would be used for searches on a larger scale. In this article I’m going to share with you the what’s required to perform well in local search so that your small business marketing stays on target.

Claim your Google Business Listing

Sign into Google Business Listing Center, and claim your listing. You will then be able to appear on the Google Map – which is really something that will help your local business. There are so many mobile devices in operation nowadays – your business needs to be available online for people searching for suppliers when they are on the road. Your business will also be displayed on laptop and computer based searches.

Categorize correctly

To categorize, think about what a person would need to Google to find a business like yours. Think products and services. If you are a bakery, a searcher might use ‘cakes’ or ‘bread’ as opposed to ‘bakery’. Get clear on you categories and use them consistently – don’t overlap.

Consistency, accuracy and currency

Keep all mentions of your business consistent. This means address, categorization, telephone numbers, and website addresses. Google is going to be checking the data that is available. Google works hard at producing relevant result, so make sure it can find you and feel confident that you are open for business. Check data in other online directories such as Yellow Pages and InfoUSA for consistency.

Add a meta description to your site

A meta description is a brief and concise description of your company. It will be displayed in search results under the link to a website page. It counts in search engine optimization and should be written to accompany each page. It should contain your selected keywords (i.e. products, brands and location). It should encourage viewers of a search result page to click into your site. A strong keyworded meta description not only supports your small business marketing efforts, it will help with your search engine results too. Add your telephone number to it too – so that people can call you immediately without even needing to go into your website.

Get customer reviews

Ensure that your business is collecting reviews. If there isn’t an industry review site, then direct happy clients to your Google Business Listing. Google is watching the quantity and quality of reviews in addition to your prospects. Encourage and ask customers for reviews in emails, on business cards and on invoices.

Age of your domain counts

It’s not just about how old your site is, it’s about how long it has left on its registration too. Register your domain name for at least another 5 years. Google wants to know that you are going to be around for quite a while longer yet, and you are not just a fly by night business setup.

Videos and images

Add videos and images to your Google Business Listing. You can add 10 images and up to 5 videos. Also add video and images to your site. Google is looking for credibility and so are your customers. They want to know how your premises you have an establishment of some quality or is it just an aluminum roadside shack?

Link to directories

Get the word out about your business by adding it to directories, like InfoUSA and Yellow Pages, and Google will check to see what coverage there is of a business to determine whether it is a credible business.
Your small business marketing efforts may significantly improve by paying attention to the details of Google Local Business listings. It’s your turn to shine, and to reel in the profits!…

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Creating A Google+ Business Page

Posted on by Bella E. Hussain


Just when you thought you had a handle on promoting your business with social media, Google throws a wrench in your marketing plans by creating its own social media platform – Google+. Despite all the buzz about Google+ overtaking Facebook as the king of social media websites, Google+ really hasn’t caught on yet, especially in my neck of the woods, southern Maine. I recently logged in and it was a bit of a lonely experience. My stream consisted of mostly celebrities like Maria Bartiromo, and Gary Vaynerchuk and, so far, there hasn’t been a lot of interest to join Google+ from my friends, family or business acquaintances. That isn’t to say that Google+ is a failure. It takes time to build a social network and I believe that since Google+ has some great features, it will be relevant in the future.

Why You Should Create a Google+ Page?

The Early Bird Gets The Worm – As Gary Vaynerchuk (the leading social media expert) would tell you, it’s always a good idea to jump on the bandwagon early, making this the perfect opportunity to promote your business using a social media platform that will likely be extremely popular down the road. Joining early will eventually give you an advantage over your competition, as you will already be familiar with the ins and outs of it by the time Google+ becomes popular.

Search Engine Optimization

If for no other reason, join Google+ for your website. Google is still by far the most popular search engine and it understandably gives a lot of importance to links from its own products. Creating a Google+ page gives you one more high-powered link pointing to your site!

The +1 Button

In my opinion, the most exciting feature in Google+ is the +1 button. You may have already noticed this browsing the web. It allows you to share websites you like publicly with others. Whenever you click the +1 icon on a website, your friends on Google+ will see it that you have recommended it. This is another tool that positively affects your website’s search engine ranking.

Starting Your Google+ Business Page

Go to and click on the big blue button “Create Your Google+ Page”. If you are not already a Google+ member, you will be redirected to the main page where you can join. You will need a Google account to sign-up, and if you already use any of Google’s many products such as Gmail, YouTube or Adwords, then you’re covered.

Choose the category that best describes your business and then fill out some basic information about your company.

Next, fill out your tagline, which is essentially one to four keywords that you would use to reference your type of organization and choose an image to use for your Google+ profile.

Subsequently you have the opportunity to share your new page with your Google+ circles, assuming you have some.

Click “Finish” and that’s it, you’re done!
Promoting Your Google+ Page
Make sure to add the +1 button and a link to your Google+ page on your website.

Add your Google+ link on all your other social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook.…

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A Manager Guide to Business Intelligence

Posted on by Bella E. Hussain

Business Intelligence
Once you’ve decided your business needs a business intelligence solution, one of the first things you’re going to have to do is procure a tool to actually allow you to implement that solution. Many companies go to venders and they get lots of presentations, although this approach can be productive in giving you a good general knowledge of business intelligence, many businesses find they can get confused and end up focusing on the specifications and applications of the tools they are looking at rather than the over all results and benefits these tools can provide for their business.

Many organizations have large IT departments which have many of the skills required to do business intelligence, but because you’re mixing raw data with high business requirements, IT departments can sometimes struggle to deliver the solutions. Good resources and good people are needed to implement business intelligence in order to have a good knowledge of the technology. Not only do they have to know the business, the tools and the data, but as it’s quite fragmented so they need to know everything from databases to data mining, performance tuning, business intelligence tools development and then presentation layout, how to format good information so people can make better decisions.

It can be very hard to advise on the first type of data an organisation should look at as this will vary depending on the organisation and what your requirements and needs are. As a very general rule of thumb, the finance area is a good place to start, as the data quality in finance is normally very good, it’s well understood and it’s easily accessible. It may also have a lot of your master data, including customer data, your products and the internal organisational structure of your staff. You’ve then got sales information, which again is a fairly easy area to analyse but it adds more value now because you’ve got more customer and contractual information, you’ve got pipe lines and you’ve got activity in your CRM system. Then you may have a separate sales system which may be combined with finance, and you’ve got your operational systems, which are normally more time based like supply chain management and can be more challenging to analyse. To get real value across the enterprise and bring all that information together is where the longer term challenge comes in, you start looking at profitability and what operational activities are taking place and the costs associated by them to what sales revenue you’re generating to what revenue you’re booking and recognising in finance to get customer product profitability.

If successfully implemented, business intelligence solutions should go on indefinitely. If you give out more information to the business, and you make better decisions the business should evolve, which means you will then want different information, and be looking at different things to make the business go even further. However, in reality an open ended solution wouldn’t be feasible, so an average time frame would be three months to deliver the first information to business users.

With the progression of technology and computers getting faster more and more data is being produced, which in turn means there’s a tendency to get more value from analyzing that data. Speed of thought data analysis and visualisation techniques are evolving all the time this means, unfortunately analyzing the data produced from business intelligence is one area most companies fail at, because most people are going to be too busy actually doing their jobs rather than analyzing the influx of data they’re receiving. Business intelligence can actually get the system to do some of the analysis for you, with predictive analytics and data mining the computer can take some of the rules and the logic a human would use to do data analysis and actually analyse it for you and just alert you to the exceptions.

Another area business intelligence is heading towards is capturing more and more through unstructured mechanisms, for example you may have a blog on a website or a complaint management system online, or emails coming from customers through your service centre and all that data is textually based and has some value in it but is not structured, business intelligence can take that data, give it structure and put it along side your other structured data, which then gives that communication additional value and can contribute towards making your data more profitable for your organisation.…

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To Build Profitable Customer Relationship

Posted on by Bella E. Hussain

Profitable Customer Relationship

It is a challenging time for most business leaders today. Leaders are demanding their company’s grow and so marketers are continually focused on driving their products and services into the hands of new customers. Unfortunately this intense focus on attracting new customers has taken attention away from established or past customers. It is measurably more expensive to attract a new customer than to retain an existing customer. So why do so many companies focus their efforts and their dollars solely on new customers? It is because every organization is committed to growth and growth is associated with building new business. However, in order to maintain continuous profitability, companies must establish and maintain profitable relationships with all of their customers (past, current and future). Business leaders must do four things to have profitable customer relationship.

1. You must continuously be attracting (profitable) new customers in the industry sectors that you have identified in your strategic plan.
2. You must actively retain your (profitable) current customers and re-establish relationships with past customers.
3. You must customize your product and service offerings to better meet your customer’s expectations and needs.
4. Your employees must be continuously trained and rewarded for delivering exceptional customer service.

New Customers

The industry sectors that you have identified for growth in your strategic plan must be implemented throughout your company. Your sales team must have their commission structure designed to reflect (and reward) closed sales in the industries you have committed to pursue. When you are marketing and selling to your new marketplace you need to make sure that the products and services you offer are profitable. In other words, you must conduct a customer profitability analysis at the beginning of the sale, and periodically during the sales cycle. Too many companies focus their marketing dollars on their customers that are the largest revenue generator. Remember profits are revenue minus costs, so you need to make sure all of your customer relationships are producing the results you initially projected.

Current and Past Customers

You worked hard to attract new customers to your business and know you need to continue to work to establish and strengthen the relationship you created. The more you know about your customer’s organization, their buying habits and patterns, their growth plans and their operations, the more successful you will be in designing your relationship programs to meet their needs. The goal is to be so familiar and become so indispensable to your customers that your company is the only one they consider when purchasing products and services.

So many companies offer special pricing, bundled package offers or incentives to attract new customers, while completely ignoring their current customers. If you want to keep your customers from switching to your competitors (to take advantage of their “new customer discounts”) you need to create loyalty (recognization/appreciation) programs, and referral discounts and/or incentives. If you value your customers, then reward them for their continued confidence in your company’s product and services. You might also consider instituting a “frequent user” program. The more business a customer does with your company-they can receive either a discount on future work (or purchases) or a free service.

Reach out to your customers on a regular basis to provide helpful information such as case studies, success stories, testimonials, and new product/service launches. Invite your customers to give you feedback on their needs/wants. The more inclusive you are with your customers, the more they will value the relationship with your company.

Customize your programs. Technology has offered us a myriad of communication vehicles for reaching our target audiences. Technology is a tool to support customer service not to replace it. Always give your customers the option to talk with a human being. I know that having trained customer service specialists can add costs to the bottom line, but think how much business you lose, by not having someone available to visit with your customers when they need help, have questions or have a complaint that needs to be resolved.

In order to exceed your customer’s expectations you must use your technology and marketing savvy to customize your relationship with each customer. Make sure your CRM (customer relationship manager) programs are integrated with your customer contact programs and you are working with your customers to understand how and when they want to be contacted. The more you know about your individual customers and can customize your marketing and sales program to meet their needs, the stronger your customer relationships.

Social media is continuing to revolutionize they way we conduct business. Anyone can quickly research your company to discover your company’s customer satisfaction history. Your company’s reputation is one of your organization’s most valuable assets, so make sure you are doing everything possible to maintain excellent customer relations and continually build a strong reputation for …

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Strategy Selecting New Business Direction

Posted on by Bella E. Hussain

New Business
You’re working out a direction for your new business and have some degree of clarity on what that will be, and how you will execute it. You believe it will be profitable, but you’re not sure whether or not you’ve put the plans together to maximize your profit. Here are a few ideas on how to examine your new business direction through the profit “lens”.

1. Is your new direction powerfully bolstered by playing to your strengths and expertise?

When you build a new business plan where you’ve clearly got the skills and experience, it automatically raises the value of your services. Starting anew, as one of a crowded field of competitors where you don’ have standout credentials, makes closing sales harder, and lowers your potential profitability.

2. Aim for a well-funded niche willing to spend for the solutions you provide.

It’s best when this niche recognizes your specific specialty as uniquely prepared to handle their needs. This will increase your profitability by making it easier and more predictable to close sales. Aim for a target market who has the money, and a willingness to spend it. Position your business so that you’ve got unique ability to solve their problems.

3. Look for a market with a “crying need”.

When working to solve crying needs you don’t have to do such hard work convincing prospects that they need your solutions. They are desperately looking for resolution. There’s intensity to their search and they want their problem solved, NOW, or even better yesterday.

4. Make yours service better, more complete than your competitors’.

Make a point of fully satisfying the client’s needs. Put together your offering to encompass all facets of the prospect’s needs. Go beyond what your competitors do. Make your service distinctive, rising above the competition. This allows you to increase your profitability.

5. Select a target market that values excellence – and deliver excellence.

Clients will pay a premium price to receive excellent results. Targeting those who value excellence will save you from working with those who are underfunded and under-motivated (and can often be a drain on the profitability of your business). Of course, they have higher expectations, but if you’re aiming for the correct target market, that should not be a problem for your business.

6. Look for ways to increase your value to clients.

Combine a product with your service. Create packages of services. Add a new expertise. Combine skills for a new offering. Examine what clients request of you. How can you add value by fulfilling client requests?

7. Let your prospects know that you have solved that same problem they suffer from.

When you have a compelling story to tell about having had the same problem your target market is looking to solve, it increases your credibility and profitability to tell it. It’s even better if you’ve come up with your solution because of your own experience. Make it plain that you want to help others who are now suffering as you once did. The whole story about how you came up with the solution and evolved it through working with clients is a moneymaker. Of course it must be sincere and genuine.

8. Ooze competence.

Competence is valuable and shows up in net profit. Present yourself as a problem solve and be one. This is a singularly attractive trait. Prepare ahead and show professionalism. We are all intensely attracted to the highly competent.

9. Keep it simple.

Everyone has such complex lives nowadays, that simplicity itself lends considerable value. Don’t make it simplistic, but do make your services easy to understand. You want prospects to be able to easily imagine working with you and to be able to fantasize about what that could be like.

When you’re taking your business in a whole new direction, take the time to examine how you can increase the potential profitability of what you are embarking on. Spend that time up front, build profit into your endeavor, and you will take home the money later.…

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Using Google Business Listing Service

Posted on by Bella E. Hussain

Google Business Listing Service
Any company that actively participate in the business opportunities that can be found in the online environment, are aware of the benefits related to search engine optimization. This marketing resource has been utilized by a large number of businesses, in order to expand the potential found with improving search engine results. Businesses utilize keywords in order to be recognized as high value results, in order to obtain the highest levels of recognition, pertaining to any online search. When looking to expand your opportunities that exist with the mobile environment, it is vital that a business utilize the resources that can be found with a Google business listing service.

One of the largest mistakes that many businesses make is found with the expectation that the online environment on mobile devices is the same online environment that can be accessed by any computer. The reality is, these are two unique environments with their own unique resources, generated by companies looking to expand business potential and consumer interest. Simply because your business is able to obtain a high standing on a search engine, as a result of your search engine optimization efforts through the internet, does not mean you will have that same standing when a search in the mobile environment is conducted. In order to achieve this goal, it is important to seek the advantages that are found with Google business listing.

Once again the lessons of search engine optimization can be implemented, when individuals are looking to maximize the potential that exists with searches, regarding mobile devices. While there may be conventional search opportunities that are involved with search engines through a mobile device, there are greater opportunities found with utilizing the various applications that are available with these devices. When a person conducts a search for a specific business, in order to get name, address, and phone number of local locations, how will mobile devices recognize your business? By taking advantage of a resource, such as a Google business listing service, you will be able to accelerate your own efforts to take advantage of this newly generated mobile environment.

While a large number of individuals have occasional access to the Internet at home or in the office, every individual has access to the mobile Internet by utilizing their mobile devices. These devices are constantly carried on them, regardless of where they go, so this environment is always available for consumers take advantage of. The sudden development of this convenient market makes it crucial that a business utilize a Google business listing, in order to incorporate this new marketing strategy into their business plans.…

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How Internet Can Boost Your Profitability

Posted on by Bella E. Hussain

Profitability
In recent months we have witnessed a number of high profile bankruptcies amongst high street retailers. Online shops on the internet have been blamed as the culprit. The fast growing ecommerce industry has brought stiff competition to the high street retailers, who now not only have to compete with other high street retailers but also virtual sellers from around the world, including ultra low cost suppliers from opposite end of the world such as China and India, who offer free or fast delivery to anywhere in the world.

These online sellers are taking businesses away from high street retailers because they can offer the same products to the consumers at much lower prices. They are able to do this because the cost of doing business online is so much lower. The absence of physical store and shop assistants means they can operate without expensive rents, utilities and wage costs. An online shop is accessible anywhere in the world, which gives them access to much bigger customer pools so they can better benefit from economies of scale.

Instead of treating ecommerce as the enemy, traditional retailers should embrace it and think how it can contribute to their own bottom line. The answer is simple. Anyone can set up a website and it doesn’t cost much money to do so. Once your products are online consumers outside of your local market will be able to buy them too. Just think how much bigger your potential market has become. You do not need to hire any shop assistants to attend your online shop and you do not need to pay rent. Therefore any online sales should go straight to your bottom line.

The fact that your online shop can be accessed anywhere in the world, there is plenty of room to expand your existing customer base and grow your top line. Greater sales volume means you can order more from your suppliers and negotiate for lower prices. You can utilize the greater economies of scale to lower the operating cost per order.

As you generate more and more of your orders online, which carry higher profit margins, the overall profitability margin for your business will improve. By diversifying your operation online, you have also reduced your business’s risks by protecting it against sudden shocks to your physical shop such as staff sickness, road works, riots and protests. Should something happen to your physical shop, your sales will continue online thus minimizing any adverse impact on your business.…

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