So what is a Blog, and why does my company need one? Well this article should give you some insight into starting a business Blog. A Blog is an area of your existing business website that is constantly having new content added to it, either on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. It provides you with a chance to showcase your companies position within the industry, any innovations or events that are currently being worked on and how your product and services are constantly being developed to solve common problems for your customers.

Your business website is generally somewhat static in content, it is nothing more than sales copy and a way of posting contact information for potential customers. A Blog adds another more dynamic aspect to your website, a constantly evolving feed of information plugging your services or your products and how you are an authority within your industry.

Your corporate Blog should be the hub of your companies Social Media Marketing strategy. By implementing social sharing plugins you can easily allow your readers to share your articles with their Facebook Friends, Twitter Followers, Email Contacts and more, with just a click of a button!

Blogs are also, by default, fantastic Search Engine Optimization resources. By contributing regularly to your company Blog you are creating fresh new content all the time, which Google and other major search engines love. Also, having many pages in your website sitemap with titles that resemble long-tail keywords are great for attracting search engine rankings for a much wider range of key words or key phrases that represent your product, service or industry.

Blogs are also very beneficial as they give your company a pro-active outlook to either consumers and (if your a B2B company) business leads. You see, people like to see companies that open themselves up and allow us to peer inside their thoughts and what they are working on and developing.

I would suggest when developing a Blog to use your blogging platforms multi-user functionality to give personality to your Blog posts, people like to see the real people who are providing the content rather than it being released by the corporation as an entire entity. Perhaps give people from each department within your company an opportunity to write Blog content, this will provide your readers with different information and alternative perspectives.

So now you know just a small portion of the benefits of having a business Blog, why not give it a go! I would always suggest having your company Blog properly hosted and integrated into your existing business website (yourcompany.com/blog or blog.yourcompany.com)

If you need help or advice on integrating your own business blog, email us today! 

Date Of Webinar: 06 June 2012 – 2pm PST

Subject Matter: Local Business Marketing

His Example: His Gym that he owns with his partner.  A high-end gym specifically designed for Women.

His most prominent offline marketing tactic for starup companies was using infousa.com to locate targeted people within the area that would be interested in the services the gym had to offer. He then mailed them with his offer that he had printed at a local printers.

The philosophy behind his offer was to help his potential customers get close to their goal for free (in this case giving 1-month free classes), then to actually gain their goals they would need to become a customer and signup. This way he found that most of the time you didn’t need the hard sell, most people after the month wanted to join anyway because they saw the results already working within the 4 week free trial.

The main product on offer within the seminar was the Instant Customer Software package, along with everything else the owner had produced. Instant Customer basically takes care of a wide range of marketing tasks for you, it is essentially an integrated multi-channel lead capture, follow-up and sales/marketing system!

Some of the main features include:

• Capture
• SMS  Text Messaging
• Email
• Embedded Web Forms
• Lead Page Generator
• Business Card Scanner
• Respond
• SMS Virtual Messaging
• Email Auto-Responders
• Direct-to-voicemail
• Know
• Data Mining
• Social Profile Gathering
• DISC Profile Assessments
• Follow Up
• SMS /Text Broadcasting
• Direct-to-Voicemail Broadcasting
• Email Broadcasts
• Simulated Live Webinars
• Postcards and Letters

So all-in-all Instant Customer is a very powerful marketing and sales generation suite.

Frank Kern used the instant customer marketing suite in this scenario to generate leads for his gym in his hometown. Frank’s flyers and posters offered a 30-day free trial at the gym, including all classes worth $200 +, to redeem you had to text your name and email addresses to a phone number. This is where instant customer comes in, this would then store the name and email in his list and text them back immediately with any kind of detail he wished, or it could use direct-to-voicemail to leave the person a voicemail with the same message.

The benefit of this method to gathering leads is that the customer is being responded to instantly with further information, and we all know if you get an instant response you are more likely to turn that person into a lead.

So the moral of the general webinar was for offline businesses to use offline marketing combined with easy response mechanisms to successfully generate genuine leads.

It was a very informative webinar, I enjoyed both the story and the pitch of the product, however once Frank Kern left the webinar it began to drag on whilst he was getting people to buy the physical product.

The webinar took place on 06 June 2012 at 2PM PST.

Now I have come to realise that I have a specific set of apps on my phone which help me keep linked to the business and the industry when I’m on the move.

These are my most essential iPhone apps for businesses:

• BBC News – Keep in the know about what’s happening in the world, with the BBC News app you can setup feeds that are targeted at your industry so you can keep an eye on stories that could affect your business.
• Flipboard – again flipboard is a very powerful tool to collate all of your info streams into one app, I have Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Dribbble, Smashing Magazine and Industry news amongst others configured to give me a daily concise digest of news revolving our industry and the people involved within it.
• WordPress – the app I am using right now to write this blog post. If your company runs a WordPress blog, use the app to post full-featured posts on the go.
• Notes – good ol’fashioned Notes, you never know when your going to need to write something down
• Facebook/Twitter – both apps are essential to keep your social media communities and following buzzing with hype around your product or brand.
• Fast analytics – a basic app I use to quickly check our Google Analytics account to check unique visitors etc. to our websites.
• Skype – a must have app if you, like me, make many international calls!
• Log me in – I have praised this app before but it deserves another shout out! Basically if your pc is on you can control it from anywhere in the world using your iPhone, I have my laptop, my pc and my mac all accessible from my iPhone at anytime…

The problem with social media is, it is an ongoing effort and requires daily attention. This maybe OK in a larger organisation, however in a small-medium sized company other key members of staff are usually stretched to cover these daily tasks. This can lead to a steep learning curve for the member of staff who may not appreciate having to learn to manage numerous social networking platforms.

There is an alternative however – Social Media Management. A monthly service whereby we, Nine Fish Media, will manage and update your social networking accounts on a daily or weekly basis to advertise your news, offers, events and more!

Our service takes the stress of managing your own social media accounts away, leaving your company and key members of staff to do what they do best – run your business.

We specialise in Facebook Marketing and Management, Twitter Management, YouTube Management and Optimization and LinkedIn Management.

For a complete synopsis of the social media management and optimization services that we offer, please email us today at ben@ninefishmedia.com

Many people tend to avoid meetings in person now mainly because there are so many cheaper and less time consuming alternatives; email, phone, Skype, Facebook etc. But at some point you are going to meet face-to-face, that’s when you need to look as professional as you sound on the phone!

The most critical piece of marketing material that you take with you to a meeting is your business card, it is the key to further contact so it needs to make an impression.

Have you ever had that feeling when you exchange business cards – you get handed a high quality egg-shell like card and your handing over a flimsy piece of paper that feels like you have printed it yourself in the office? It’s an awful feeling, straight away it shows that your standards are lower than theirs in some sense.

This can be a thing of the past with a hard-wearing plastic business card from Nine Fish Media! We can design and print a high quality plastic business card that will leave your clients stunned!

We can print quantities of 100, 500 or 1000 plastic business cards per order!

Contact us to place your order today.

This is where Nine Fish Media can help your business dominate its’ competition by providing a strategic search engine optimization solution.  Our state-of-the-art search engine optimization software has been designed by some of the industry-leading SEO consultants, it provides us with a platform to have complete control over your websites and your businesses success.

Let us here at Nine Fish Media show you exactly how our search engine optimization tactics can boost your search engine rankings and bring mass targeted traffic straight to your website.

For more information on our search engine optimization solutions please call today, details can be found on the contact page.

This is the first post onto the new Blog where we will be bringing you all of the latest in web design news from the Tampa Bay area of Florida.

We are all excited about the prospects and experiences that await us in Florida where we will be providing a wide range of services to local businesses including web design, social media marketing, email marketing, ecommerce website design and a lot more to be announced!

Keep posted here as we have a lot more news and announcements to be posted in the following weeks.