Author: blue edge

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16 Must Have Services for Your Startup

16 Must Have Services for Your Startup

Getting your Small Business to become a household name in today’s competitive market can be quite the challenge. Where do you start? How do you build your audience? And once you have a noticeable audience, how do you build a strong campaign not only to acquire new customers but also to retain them?

At Blue Edge Business Solutions, we have built a list of tools that will make your life easier and get your small business off the ground in record time.

Template Easy to Build Websites

Wix: Wix.com gives its subscribers the tools to build a website from templates.  There are an abundance of templates available for many business categories. Wix allows you to create the perfect website precise to your ideas ranging from a wedding registry to a more complex e-commerce business. Users have the option to host the site for free and use a domain with a wix prefix or pay a few dollars monthly to connect your customized domain. There are many widgets available to customize your website and stand out from competitors. Wix carries a rating of 4.8 stars on websitebuilderexpert.com.

Squarespace: Much like Wix, Squarespace is a website that allows the members to build a free website using their online tools. Squarespace was founded in 2004 and carries a 4.4 star rating on websitebuilderexpert.com. Squarespace gives its members the ability to change templates at any time without losing the content, this is a feature that isn’t available with Wix; however, Squarespace carries only about 40 templates compared to Wix’s 500+. The Squarespace technical support team vows to respond to all emails within 1 hour, which is very impressive.

Monthly cost- both websites carry a pretty similar pricing structure.

Social Media Management Tools

Crowdfire: Crowdfire is a website and mobile app that allows you to connect your Twitter, Facebook, Pintrest, and Instagram accounts under one application allowing for convenience and ease of access. The app analyzes your accounts, allows you to enter information about your industry and then gets right to work, with this service you can setup an autoresponder on Twitter to welcome all of your new followers to your clan. Crowdfire gives you “prescriptions” each day which are recommendations on profiles you should follow, unfollow, like, and retweet. The service understands your objective and sets you up to expand your reach and following, we’ve found this to be most useful for Twitter as Instagram and Facebook severely restrict automated use.

Hootsuite: Hootsuite allows you to manage all of your social media from one place and follow streams for certain keywords of interest to your small business. It’s definitely a time saving app that allows you to post across several platforms without having to log on to each. Hootsuite also provides several tools for collaboration among your team. The app is free but the paid version which allows more features is available for a small monthly cost. Overall a good service that can get you some extra leads by monitoring your stream.

With Hootsuite you also receive free (but relevant) articles recommendations to post as “fillers” in between your posts.

Buffer: Like Hootsuite, Buffer offers social media management tools across different platforms which makes it easy to manage all of your accounts from one place. There is an option for a free version which allows for up to 10 schedule posts per month, more features are available with paid versions that range from $10/month for single users to $399/month for large enterprises.

Like Hootsuite, Buffer offers an auto schedule feature to post your content during the best times for social media release.

The “Pablo” version of Buffer offer an image creation service to enhance your posts.

Business Listings and Webmaster Tools

Google Search Console: You have your brand new website nice and ready, now what? Google offers a free webmaster service which allows you to submit sitemaps and “fetch as Google” to crawl your website faster and make it available for Google searches.

But one of the great things about Google Search console is the data it provides which gives users a clear breakdown of Keywords, Click through Rate, Impressions, and Position, this is information that can help you monitor your website’s success and opportunities.

Google Business: This is a MUST HAVE for any business, Google Places for Business is a place where customers can find your phone number, website, address, and leave reviews. It’s extremely important to engage your customers that leave reviews as Google will use the information listed in this directory as a factor for ranking of your website and Business page. Its super easy to setup and usually takes a few days while you wait for the verification process to be complete (usually done by mail or phone).

Bing Business: The process to verify your Business listing with Bing is almost identical to Google’s even though Bing is not the search engine of choice for many users, we still recommend registering your business through this platform.

Schema.org: Want rich cards, bread crumbs, or structured data for your site? Schema.org makes that easy. One great future of Schema is that you can list your social profiles on your Google business page by installing the right code on your site. Schema makes that easy.

 Graphic Design

Ripl: Ripl is a mobile app to help you create “live” designs for your social media posts, the service is free; however it limits you to the amount of designs you can edit. Most of the pictures provide some type motion design to grab the attention of your consumers. Great concept app but we found it a little limited.

Canva: This is a great resource for those that want to create quick and easy designs for their social media posts. Canva automatically changes the size of the images to make them social media platform friendly. All versions (free and paid) provide access to over 30,000 High Definition images with a commercial license, the images can be edited to include your logo, caption, and make additional edits to best fit your needs. Keep in mind the free version only allows 2 downloads per month, while the paid plan of $9.99/month allows unlimited downloads!

Design Pickle: Design pickle offer unlimited web design services with unlimited edits for only $370/month, the service begins with a 14 day free trial to give you taste of their work. They call themselves your personal web designer and currently have a 9.1/10 NPS rating. There is a portfolio available on their website to give you an idea of their work. If you have a need for lots of designing, we definitely recommend checking out their services as $370/month for unlimited web design work is very hard to beat nowadays.

Customer Relationship Management

Zoho: This is a great CRM tool that offers a lot more than just lead management and follow up, Zoho can help you build surveys for your customers, customized campaigns, projects, and store documents, this is a relatives inexpensive CRM tools that increase your team’s productivity and really kick your small business in high gear.

Sales Force: This CRM tool offers a ton of services but at a cost. Sales Force has been the industry standard for many years and a staple of many large organizations. Most of their services are cloud based and easily accessible by all of your team members regardless where they are. If you’re considering investing in a strong CRM tool, Sales Force is the one for you.

Miscellaneous

Fiverr: This is an open market for anything in the realm of digital services, the prices start at only $5 per gig but from experience it can be a hit or miss, with Fiverr you can buy “gigs” which range from writing, web design, and SEO to Green screen video production. Unfortunately, if you aren’t happy with the work you receive, getting a refund isn’t simple. With Fiverr you pay for your services upfront but your investment will be in the $5 range for most services.

 Freedcamp.com is a website that offers free collaboration amongst your team. This is a site where you can begin threads for discussion, upload files and share ideas. Freedcamp allows you to designate tasks, monitor output, and stay involved with the status of incomplete projects. This site resembles basecamp in many ways, but as the name states, it does not cost you a penny. If you or any of your team members work remotely, this is a great service.

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Digital Marketing Google Mobile News

Cracking the Google 3-Pack

Cracking the Google 3-Pack

During the month of August 2016, Google introduced few changes to their local pack. In fact, it was brought down from 7 to 3. As a result, it is now being called as the Google 3 pack. With the update, people got panicked because it created a tremendous impact on local SEO. However, you don’t need to worry about anything because there are few effective methods, which can be used in order to crack the Google 3 pack. Here is a list of useful tips that you can follow in order to get it done.

First of all, it is important for you to keep in mind that it takes a lot of skills, time and knowledge in order to crack the Google 3 pack. All the business owners out there in the world are keen about it because they want their products or services to be seen by local consumers. But if you don’t have a clear idea about what you are doing, the entire process could be tricky.

  •  Look for more citations

When you are trying to rank your local listing, you need to pay special attention towards citations. Google checks how often your website or business has been mentioned by other resources. The citations are being used by Google in order to validate your business. The citation could be a mention of your business name, along with its phone number and address. It can also contain any other useful information related to your business. The citations could have a link back to your website as well. For Google to count as a citation, information should match with the facts that have been listed on your Google My Business.

  •  Add more photos to the listing

In order to crack the Google 3 pack, you should add more photos to the listing as well. It is a well-known secret that all the customers love photos. When you have a lot of high quality photos on the Google local listing profile, it would look more appealing to the customers. As a result, Google tends to give priority to them when ranking the business in SERPs. From a recent study, it has been identified that customers tend to spend 2.5 times more time on the listings that have featured images.

Last but not least, you need to focus on getting more reviews. Reviews play a major role behind your online visibility nowadays. Customers would love to go through the reviews as well. On the other hand, having more reviews can guarantee effective results to you on search engine results pages. Therefore, you need to encourage your customers to leave reviews as much as possible.

Cracking the Google 3 pack is not simple as you think and the above mentioned tips will assist you to stay away from the frustration associated with it. However, you need to keep up with the local search changes continually in order to make sure that the company information is updated constantly.

Categories
Digital Marketing Google Mobile Social Media

How social media marketing can assist you to market beyond search engines

How social media marketing can assist you to market beyond search engines

The traditional marketing methods, such as advertising on television or radio, distributing pamphlets and door to door marketing are not in a position to deliver effective results nowadays. The lives of people have changed along with the technology. As a result, people refer to get all the information they want through Internet. On the other hand, people have started networking with each other through the internet, which has given life to a large number of social media networks. This has created an ideal platform for the popularity of social media marketing as well.

Most of the people prefer to use social media networks on a daily basis for their entertainment purposes. Even though social media networks were created with the objective of inviting people to connect with each other and share their ideas, business owners have discovered excellent marketing opportunities in them. For example, businesses can have their own channels in leading social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter. They can use those channels to market their products or services. Interested people can follow those channels and get to know about the latest updates about businesses.

As per Blue Edge Business Solutions, a variety of methods are available for business owners to promote their products or services through the internet. Social media marketing holds a prominent place out of them. In fact, it is quite impossible to find a business that doesn’t have a Facebook page. These social media networks have also introduced required facilities for the business owners to promote their products or services at a reasonable price tag.

Recently a large number of companies have started promoting their products and services through social media networks. This has given life to a tough competition in between these companies as well. In order to overcome the competition, they prefer to add more value to their products. On the other hand, the marketers try various techniques to engage the potential customers with their marketing campaigns. Some of the companies even tend to hire dedicated social media marketing experts because they have realized the effectiveness of these campaigns.

Just creating a business profile on leading social media networks won’t do any good for you. You need to use that profile in order to promote the products or services that you offer. In addition, you should have the objective of increase your fan base on a daily basis. The number of fans that you have on your social media profile can directly contribute towards your reputation as well. In the meantime, you need to make sure that your profiles on social media networks do not look dull.

Social media marketing is in a position to create a tremendous impact on your business. You just need to learn how to market your business in the right way at the right time. In order to do that, you need to seek the assistance of a professional service provider such as Blue Edge Business Solutions located in Savannah, GA.