There are many powerful online tools today that can help you reach out to your buyers. By using blogs, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and other publishing platforms, you enhance SEO and drive customers to your web pages.
Why Maintain a Blog?
One of the best ways to connect with your audience, blogging can serve as your online megaphone for sharing all of your best ideas and solutions that you know your customers care about. We recommend creating a blog pipeline 
where you maintain a list of topics and create content ahead of time. That way when you are at your busiest you’ll be able to refer to your pipeline and publish relevant, fresh content on the fly. One of the biggest mistakes that bloggers make is starting a blog and then only updating once a quarter. Your blog should ideally be updated once a week, but the minimum is once a month.
What Is SEO?
Search engine optimization is the result of employing various methods for achieving high rankings for your website in search engines. When your buyers search for your products or services, ideally your website should be the first one they find. Search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing, display links to your website and other online entries based on keywords, relevant content, links other online sources.
The following is a list of recommended online tools for managing your Internet outreach. They are designed for to achieve a variety of tasks, but most of them enhance SEO as well.
| Google Analytics – Helps you monitor activity on your web pages gauging the effectiveness of your online strategy, | Google Blog Search – A way to see who’s being blogged and what people are sharing about you and others. |
| GoogleAd Words – These are pay-per-click (PPC) key words that when entered into search engines, can lead directly to your web pages. It’s easy to set a monthly budget. | Google Alerts – Emails are sent to you when Google finds new results that match your search term. A useful way to monitor what people are saying about you and your business. |
| Google Places – “Place Pages” that help people make decisions about where to go for various services and venues, such as restaurants, hotels, movie theaters, etc. | Google Profiles – Create a public profile to display the information you care about and make it easy for visitors to get to know you. |
| Social Media – Use social media to drive traffic to your website. Examples are Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. | Social Media Tags – Tags for bookmarking your various pages. An example is del.icio.us. |
| RSS Feeds – These can be made available to your readers who want to subscribe to your blog and have your latest updated assembled into one place, e.g., a Yahoo or Gmail account page. | Squidoo – Allows users to create “lenses” or pages that act as flyers or overview articles, that gather everything you know about your topic of interest. |
| Landing Pages – Can be used to share your problem-solving knowledge to specific buyers. This allows targeted content and a way to gauge effectiveness of various ad campaigns. | News Releases – These feature key-word rich links and can be emailed to your customers or forwarded to area publications including traditional media. |
| Local Listing Sites – Examples are AOL’s Patch.com and Yahoo’s Yelp.comYelp.com. | White Papers – Published thought-leadership content. |
