6 Super Useful Steps To Improve Your Online Presence

You wish your target audience knew who you were.

Don’t you?

In fact, you probably think you are doing everything possible to increase your brand online so they can find you.

You may well be on your way to creating a great presence, but in this post I am going to help you out and discuss the 6 steps to create a total online presence for your personal or business brand.

I’m not going to dive into great detail about how to do everything, but I will provide you an outline of tools and sources you can use for online marketing starting today to grow your online presence. So let’s get started shall we.

Listen

So I know this is rather broad, but you need to listen if people are talking about you and your brand. Also, listen to what others are doing in your industry. Here are some steps to take:

1. Create Google Alerts for you, your company, your competition, clients, and industry terms.
2. Create a Feedly account and set up 10-15 industry blogs to follow. We will use these later for social media updates as well.
3. Add Rapportive to your email. This is a Chrome and Firefox extension I use that allows you to see the LinkedIn profile of people you are emailing. Below is an example of what it looks like in your Gmail account.
4. Check out social tools like Buffer and Hootsuite to monitor and post to social media accounts with ease. Here is a great video below to show you how to get started with Buffer.

Optimize Your Content Online

One of the easiest ways to get found online is through search. This only happens if you write content your potential clients are looking for and optimize the content to be found for those searches. This can get complicated, but don’t overthink it. Do the SEO basics and you will be fine.

1. Ask at least 10 customers what they would type in a search to find a business like yours. Also, look back through any old emails where your clients asked you questions. Use those questions to write new blog posts or a FAQ page.
2. Use a keyword tool like Google’s Keyword Planner or one I use KWFinder.com. See an example of KW Finder below.
3. Start a blog and commit to posting on it once a week centered around 5 themes you want to be found for in search. I recommend WordPress to setup your blog.
4. Share your blog posts on LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, Facebook, and Pinterest through Buffer.com which we mentioned above. Do this more than one time as well by adding the Buffer My Post plugin for WordPress. The plugin makes it easy to automatically share your past blog posts.

Claim Your Brand Online

To increase your personal brand presence, you must go and claim online real estate. Even if you don’t think you will use the certain websites much, go and claim your name or brand name. All this will help your SEO and social media marketing

Make time to build out strong profiles, descriptions, and links back to your website on these sites. Most of these accounts will show up first when a potential customer Google’s you. Here are the top ways start:

1. Create and build out profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.
2. Create and build out profiles on WordPress.com, Tumblr, Blogger, and Weebly.
3. Create and build out profiles on Pinterest, Instagram, Slideshare, and YouTube.
4. Add plugins to your blog and web pages that make all of your content shareable in social networks. (Try Sumome.com below)
5. Share your blog posts on these networks (use buffer.com mentioned above.
6. Share two blog posts from Prismatic to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus each day.
7. Join ten active groups on LinkedIn with your optimal prospects in them (This will not be the same as what Linkedin suggests)
8. Find five active Facebook pages with your potential prospects and “Like” them.
9. Put all of your customers you can find in a Google+ Circle.
10. Claim your Google My Business Listing
11. Claim your business location on Foursquare, Yelp, and Facebook.
12. Don’t want to do this yourself? Check out Knowem.com, and get hundreds of social profiles built automatically.

Capture Emails

All the content, promotion and profiles setup are for your potential clients to find you and then start to know, like, and trust you. The easiest way for this to happen is by emailing them weekly. Here are the steps to get started:

1. Pick out an email service provider that offers an autoresponder. I can personally recommend MailChimp, Mad Mimi, and Getresponse.
2. Create a “lead magnet” or reason someone would want to give you their email. You can create an Ebook or a short PDF report. Offer something more helpful than “sign up for my email newsletter”. We offer a Free Local SEO Checklist and a Video Marketing Guide to entice visitors to sign up as seen in the example below.
3. Create an email form and popups on your site. I can recommend Thrive Leads and Sumome to use. People will say they hate popups, but they work so try it out.
4. Now you have collected emails so connect your RSS feed from your website to your email service provider. Everytime you post a blog to your website your list gets emailed automatically.
5. If you really want to automate your emails set up a 52 week autoresponder campaign and set it and forget it. Yes, it will take a day to put all your email content in, but once you are done you now have emails going out for the next year.

Get Reviews, Recommendations, and Testimonials

The most cost effective and easiest way to grow your brand is getting reviews. Make sure you pick 1-3 review sites and focus on getting as many reviews as possible.

1. Setup the top review sites such as Yelp, Facebook, and Google My Business
2. Focus on LinkedIn for B2B recommendations
3. Send a personal note card after meeting with potential clients or networking contacts (hint: this leads to reviews)
4. Print out business cards with the URL and QR code to your personal review website and hand them to everyone you meet. See example below.

Engage

You set everything up and feel good about your online presence. Now it is time to really step up your game and engage with your followers, connections, and friends. Here is what your daily social media marketing should look like (this can be done one time in the morning or evening)

LinkedIn:

1. Message all new connections thanking them
2. Message all profile viewers and politely asking to connect (must use a certain message for this)
3. Congratulate connections on birthdays and job anniversaries (use “Connected App” by LinkedIn)
4. Post a status update 1-3 times that day (hopefully you automated this through Buffer.com mentioned above)
5. Send personalized connection request to 5 new prospects

Bonus: (Once a week re-publish a blog post on Linkedin Publisher)

Twitter:

1. Look at notifications and thank anyone who mentioned or retweeted you
2. Check new followers and follow back who looks to be tweeting regularly
3. Tweet 1-5 times a day (hopefully you automated this through Buffer.com mentioned above)

Facebook:

1. Respond to Facebook invites and messages
2. Write a couple comments on friends posts
3. Check Facebook Groups you are in and engage with members
4. Make sure 2 posts are set to go out on your Profile and Business Pages

Bonus: (Once a week re-publish a blog to Facebook Notes on your profile)

Pinterest:

1. Pin/RePin 1-15 times during the day to your boards and group boards. You can set this up through Buffer.com as well.
2. Follow back any new people or companies following you
3. Respond to messages or group invites

Google Plus:

1. Respond to any +1’s or messages
2. See if you have any new contacts to put into circles
3. Post twice during the day

Rinse and Repeat Daily – Total time 20 minutes (there are definitely more advanced tactics, but I can cover those in a later post)

Conclusion:

Building an online presence will not happen overnight, but if you work on these 6 steps you will be on your way. Do you know some more unique ways to increase your online presence? Comment below and let’s discuss.

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