Fast Start 5 Series - Start Looking & Listening

We've heard it all too often from clients & prospects who tell us they 'want no part of Facebook', and 'twitter is a waste of time',and 'who's got time for blogging'?

We'll I'm here to help you get a new viewpoint.

Facebook is exploding and could surpass Google for daily visits in the near future. Twitter is just jamming with all kinds of info and opportunities. There are millions of blog posts added each week. LinkedIn is growing and becoming a must have service for business people.

So today's post on the Fast Start Series is about 'looking and listening'. Before you go charging off into the land of social media it's quite helpful to get a look around, learn the etiquette and listen to what going on in your industry - not to mention what's being said about your company.

#1) go try out Twitter.search.com
Plug in your company's name, your keywords or the main problem you solve. See how many people are talking about your target words. Find your competitors on twitter, who's following them?

#2) Blog search. Go to Google Blog Search and plug in your industry, your keywords, even your name - what do you find? Probably lots of people talking about 'your stuff' ! As you get your website up and running and you begin to seek out linking opportunities to build your credibility and page rank, you need to find blogs where you can comment and hopefully develop relationships and quality backlinks to your website or blog.

#3) SEO Basics. It's about time for a good quick read. Google SEO Basics and start with Googles report. You'll need to understand how SEO works from an 'On-Page' perspective and on 'Off-page' perspective. Much more on this later, but start to build a knowledge base on this important subject as it will be critical to the survival of your website!

#4) PR search. Finding good PR opportunities is another key component in online marketing.
Getting yourself showing up on news articles, blog interviews, even Radio & TV is a HUGE accomplishment. All those articles you see in the newspapers or online don't neccessarily magically appear. Someone likely worked hard to sell a story to the news outlets or media. When you show up with good PR your are percieved as 'the expert' and it brings an additional level of credibility to your efforts. We follow HARO (help a reporter out), HARO sends us multiple updates per day with reporters looking to find info on stories that have deadlines and need immediate help - you can provide that help!

#5) Advanced Search. This will turn into multiple blog posts as it's such a big area. On the social media side, you can dig much deeper into both LinkedIn and Facebook by doing more advanced searches. In Facebook you can look for companies and see who works there that you know. Same goes for LinkedIn. Twitter too can bring you down some interesting search pathways as you investigate who follows who. Then there's Google and Bing. You can find anything you want if you search for it correctly! As you get deeper into SEO, understanding the difference between Broad - Phrase - Exact matches will tell you a lot about how your site is doing for ranking on keyword phrases that drive traffic to your on-line sites.