I have been using Ping.fm now for a while to manage my social media broadcasts. Ping.fm allows me to send the same message to many different platforms from one single application. It is fast, easy to use and FREE. No up sells to get the full functionality or pesky little emails each week offering me more stuff for just $14 a month.

I like to be left alone and allowed to use an application for what it was marketed and designed for without all the up sells. Apps like Ecademy, FastPitch and SocialOomph are fast becoming huge pains in my life with all their marketing invasion into my inbox.

My tip for this week is simple. Ping.fm have added a function application that sits on your iGoogle page and allows me to ping from my browser home page. No hassle, no fuss, just ping and all my chosen platforms are updated. Give it a try. Convenience at its best and you know how I like convenience.

A few weeks ago we started advertising and running a series of workshops on Social Media. We have had some good responses and enjoyed good attendance. This has presented us with two problems to over come. How do we present social media workshops at a location that does not offer super fast ADSL for both the presenter and the participants and how do we keep the costs down so every business owner has a chance to attend without having to sacrifice salaries at the end of the week.

Simple solution, we have converted an area of our home office into a training room. We now have enough room for 25 people, both wireless and wired 4Meg ADSL Internet, projector, screen and plenty of room for networking and socializing on the pool deck. The kids are hacked off for the loss of their playroom but compromises need to be made.

Our next in the series of Social Media workshops is Friday and Saturday this week, with more in the coming weeks. Register here to secure your seat in our new training room.

Every day I encounter more business owners who seemingly refuse to take on the additional duty of building their business through the use of social media and web tools. Some are still operating in the ‘hope’ phase of growing a business with comments like “I have a good product and a flyer, we now hope that people will come and buy”

The days of print and static websites are over. Catch a wake up for your business before it is too late… oops time actually ran out late last year.

You, as a business owner should be spending dedicated time each week developing and growing relationships online to drive traffic to your interactive website and converting visitors to customers. This is not a difficult task, using free applications and easy to learn techniques you could have a social media strategy up in no time at all. It will require that you to get out of your lazy routine of ‘hope for business’ and get interactive. If you are keen to learn the basics join us this Saturday for our now very popular Social Media series. Register here, space is limited, so might your business’s future.

Congratulations to all those who read this blog. We have just doubled the amount of unique readers that we achieved last month. December was also double November so we have certainly set a trend. Many thanks to all of you who read our posts each day and provide valuable feedback and comments.
February promises some interesting additions to this site with a new page of  Business Opportunities and a listing of  Business Resources.We are also increasing our frequency of some of our workshops next month with additional Social Media and business related sessions.
Please add your email to our subscription and add us to your Google reader list so you don’t miss out.

Having a web presence is not as easy as having a website. The next  5 functions added to your site will get you better ratings, readership and responses.

1. Implement SEO. Develop a way to monitor and manage the visits to your site. Use Google Analytics or another tool that provides you with enough information for you to see what is going on. Adjust things and monitor the responses. Check your grading with sites like webgrader.com and make the recommended adjustments.
2. Build a contact list. Capture as many visitors’ details as you can from your site. Ask them to signup for newsletters, workshops, downloadable articles or free tools. Save their details to use for mail shots and product launches.
3. Use custom landing pages for different projects. Develop different landing pages for different functions. Do not just expect visitors to always go to your home page and then have to find their own way to the correct info.
4. Get involved in Social Media. Add your business to Facebook fan pages or groups. Create Twitter teams and LinkedIn groups. Start conversations and invite people to these pages and your website.

Distribute your content. Use Social media to replicate your blog articles and press releases to different platforms and applications. Either post the full article or just a headline with a link back to your site.

Using Twitter to promote your business is a new concept in South Africa with very few success stories. Most small business owners have an account and can tweet a few times a week but fail to capitalise on the full opportunity that Twitter offers. Here are some guidelines taken from an article written by Lisa Barone.

Start by building credibility with your followers (no matter how few) Do this by answering common questions, share insight, pass on interesting links/posts and chat about your business. Chat about your industry. Promote any events, mention awards won, break the news.

Market Your Business. Talk about company values, offer discounts, coupons or special offers to customers who find you via social media. Show your human face, talk about what you’re doing and direct traffic to your site.

Learn to Listen. (www.search.twitter.com) Track conversations about your industry. Track your keywords. Find out who is talking about your industry and ‘follow’ them.

Grow Your Online Network. Follow people you know and people who are talking about what you know. Follow those who follow you.

Promote your Business website. Tweet about your blog posts and articles. Ask questions, even if you know the answers. Write comments in a form that require a response from your readers. Use topical events to steer people back to your website.

Twitter is all about having a conversation. It needs to be fun and interesting. Stay away from robot entries and autobots to care for your tweets, these just chase people away. Link your Twitter to other applications such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

I have had a huge amount of people come back to me about this Social Media thing that we are doing and ask me why do they need to bother about all this stuff if they have a website already. Some even have Facebook and LinkedIn accounts and consider themselves top of their game.

Lets just take a step back and look at it again. If you have a business and a wonderful brochure website and business cards and even full colour brochures, the chances of growing and keeping up with the way marketing is going is minimal. The trends for 2010 are so fast that to be offline for just a week could drop your business off the search page potential customers are looking on. Your web presence has to do three things for you all the time:

1. Build relationships through social medial platforms such as Facebook Fan pages, Twitter Teams and LinkedIn Groups.
2. Gather contact information about those who visit your sites through magnet contact forms and subscription forms
3. Convert qualified contacts into sales through your predefined sales funnel

If your web presence is not doing all of these for you on a daily basis then please be honest with yourself and take the step to learn some new skills this year. Those who remain static will be left behind.

We are already investigating mobile platform videos for small business marketing purposes. The social media bus has left, run to catch up or be left behind.

The world is changing, each day we are seeing the web based technologies come closer to reality in South Africa. Our Cell phone technologies are getting better, better online banking is just over the horizon and Skype has opened its doors to us for landline calls.

Ok, do the maths here with me. Forget the one month free promotion, that is just to get us hooked. But for just 11.44 Euro which is today R125 per month I can get 400 minutes of free landline calls per month. 400 minutes is over 6 ½ hours of calls. Does this make sense or am I missing something? For any small business this has to be the best news this week. If you then add your other branches and clients on to normal Skype you have an online network of communication for the price of a burger meal for two.

We wait for Telkom’s response.

This one is for all those new to computers, either born in the BC ages (before computers) or those of you younger than 30 who just think computers where always here and never thought of what life was like in the mid 1900’s. Take a few minutes to educate yourself and see where it all began. One cold stormy night back in 1957 and little man stood up and said “Me think, I will do the computer thing….yes good idea… world domination in just 60 years”

We are continually looking for ways to improve our Social Media offering to our members and will soon be releasing a series of workshops and posts on the various methods to set up and create a well balanced social media platform for both you and your business.

Before then we want to share a gem with you on how you can measure the effectiveness of your current website in regards to SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) this includes all sorts of  measurements against various elements of your site. The score is out of 100 and can even be matched against your opposition businesses. A great tool to use, easy report to read and prompts easy to understand actions to improve your score. Click here to measure your website.