Take a look at www.Facebook.com/OnlineMarketingForBusiness and let me know what you think.

You might find these posts useful if you want to know more about Facebook’s new Timeline

• Make the most of the new Facebook timeline for pages (marketing.yell.com)
• Facebook Timeline – what it means for your business (simplybusiness.co.uk)

Video:- WP Video 1 – How to Add Sub or Add-On Domains

<a href="http://media.uqast.com/flvVideo/5211_3959_Video_1_-_How_to_Add_Sub_or_Add-On_Domains.flv.mov"><img src="http://www.uqast.com/globals/inc/image_output.php?image=http://media.uqast.com/VideoThumbs/5211_thumb.png&amp;cap=http://www.uqast.com/tpl/iqast_new/en/images/player_logo.jpg" alt="WP Video 1 - How to Add Sub or Add-On Domains" width="600" height="338"></a>

More about Online Marketing For Business by Bruce Bird

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Firstly, they are enabling smaller business to get an online presence. Those businesses who thought they were too small or couldn’t afford a website and even if they could afford one they could not afford either the time or money to get their site optimised to appear on page 1.

Secondly, the format they have provided is very simple and does not allow the user to play all the tricks that website optimisers and SEO merchants like to get up to – but from Google’s point of view simply increase and confuse the amount of code that Google has to plough through in order to decide what to make of the site.

So your Places page will get ranked on Page 1 even as a stand alone if you have no conventional website.

Yet when you click on the link you are very often taken to a conventional website – not the Places page.  So what is going on there?

Watch this video for an explanation.

Conclusion

It’s the Places page that is doing the work and gets you ranked on Page 1.  Google has achieved it’s objective of finding relevant information using the nice, clean code and relevance that the Places page provide.  It then allows you to effectively overlay that ranking with your own version of your information as depicted on your website.

Don’t forget, it’s the Places page that is doing the work!

Google wants to provide relevant content relating to your business. This includes customer comments left directly on your Places page or comments left on local directories and review sites. Don’t forget that you don’t own your page – Google does and you cannot prevent this content appearing.

What you can do, however, is make sure that you have comments directly on your page. This will have the effect of pushing further down the page any other content, either comments you would prefer were not seen or on other local websites which may draw searchers away from your page.

So you have several things to do regarding customer comments.

• Firstly, get some. Preferably glowing testimonials from happy customers. If you have happy customers who have already written to you to express their satisfaction then show them how to reach your Page and ask them to put it directly onto your Page. This will serve your human visitors.
• Secondly, make sure that anything that appears there includes those 2 vital ingredients; your business keyword and your location. This gives Google more confirmation that your business is relevant to people searching for your service in your area. To Google these are ‘keywords’ and keywords to Google mean relevance.
• Thirdly, make sure that you set your page to report to you by email every week so that you are aware of customer comments made on your page and are able to go back very quickly and sort out any problem that arises with an unhappy customer. Prospective customers will respond well to a negative comment that is quickly and publicly resolved. It demonstrates that you, the business owner, care about the satisfaction of your customers. It is always a good idea to monitor your business’s online profile using Google Alerts in order to catch what people are saying about you. But that is another aspect for another day.

If you follow these various methods of optimising your Places page you should have no difficulty in getting into the 7-pack on Page #1 of Google. Never mind the fancy bit about ‘optimising’, all you are doing is giving Google what it wants to help index your page – you’re telling it what you do and where you do it. Keep those keywords in every piece of content and Google will have no difficulty in paying you back with a highly visible location on page #1.

That means keywords relating to your business and your location.

So I hope that by now you have got some photos published on your page of your products, premises and people not only to give visitors an idea of what you have to offer but to give Google those relevant keywords and location in the file names and Alt tags.

The file names can’t be read by your visitors but they can see the picture. Google can’t see the picture to work out what it is about but it can surely read the file name and Alt tag. So use these methods to ensure that Google knows what your photos and images are about.

Making Videos for your Places Page

Why would you want to make videos for your places page? There are a number of reasons:

• Because Google is giving you this opportunity for free. Google wants you to publish content that makes your page relevant to the visitor and gives Google more clues by way of filenames and links of what your page is about.
• Because the video you put on your places page must first be published on Youtube (which is owned by you know who..oogle). This is an easy way for Google to avoid having to host your video for you for a second time. The spinoff benefit for you is that each video creates a one-way inbound link from Youtube. Even if you know nothing about online optimisation let me tell you one way inbound links are always valuable.
• Because of the amount of information you can transmit to viewers using a video using written words, spoken words, music and colour. This is simple marketing – communicating your offer to your prospects.
• Because Youtube is a massive social site where people search for things. You may even get traffic coming to your places page from Youtube searches.

Making Videos

Is it hard to make videos? No!

You might hate the thought of being in front of the video camera for any purpose other than making family videos for private use. But who said you had to be on camera?

Use Powerpoint to lay out your story then record your screen and voiceover if you have software such as Camtasia.

Get Jing from www.jingproject.com and use Jing to record the same sort of onscreen Powerpoint up to 5 minutes – for Free!

Use Animoto from www.animoto.com to create fantastic professional looking videos – free up to 30 seconds with great professional music.

And if you are happy to appear in front of the camera then use your webcam or other camera to talk directly to your prospects. People will buy from you after they have learned to know, like and trust you.

Webcam

So video is a great way to do this. Yes, you may put some people off – but those who are with you, warts and all, are definitely prospects for whatever you are selling and you can probably sell more to a highly qualified audience like that than to a larger list of sign-ups who are only lukewarm towards you.

Don’t neglect the video option on your Google places page. It might take a little thought to work out the quickest, cheapest way to create your very own videos. But once you’ve cracked it you will find that it is very easy and incredibly effective. Create your own Channel on Youtube and start cranking out videos about every development that takes place in your business.

The videos you produce for your Places page may just only be the start.

Page #1, and especially the best places on page #1 of Google, means traffic: traffic means clicks; clicks mean leads and leads can be converted into sales. So if you are in business then it goes without saying that you need and want sales and creating your places page is worth doing whatever your circumstances.

Now lets deal with the frustrating situation of finding all the spot in the 7-pack on page #1 already occupied. Despite having completed your places Page you are still not showing in the 7-pack.

First off, a little patience may be required. The inner workings of Google are a vast unknown to pretty much everybody but what is known is that the index and resulting ranking is recycled between several different data centres and over a period of some weeks. So it may take up to 30 days before you see whether you really have a problem or not.

However, don’t sit on your hands and hope for the best. If the 7-pack is full and you’re not in it then that means you have to dislodge somebody else and the only way to do that is if your page is more relevant than theirs.

So you have a little work to do.

What can you do to overcome that situation? For this you need to understand some basics about Google – and realise that as soon as you start helping Google then Google can start helping you.

Google is looking for two things:

• what you do;
• and where you do it.

So it is important that you include these two facts as often as possible in your content. If you are starting from scratch then it is most effective if your website domain name includes these two things e.g. www.electricianinbirmingham.co.uk. However, even if you have a long established company name which does not include these two pieces of information, all is not lost.

If you follow Google’s quality guidelines and complete all the information and Categories correctly then there is, frankly, not a lot of opportunity to get your keyword and location in unless they occur naturally.

However, the additional information, i.e. the photographs, videos and customer comments are certainly available for you to work on.

Make sure that you use all the available space i.e. 10 photos, 5 videos and unlimited customer comments. You may not have sufficient content available to start with but continue to add content over time as you accumulate more.

Optimise Your Photos and Videos

For photos and videos make sure that you name the image file with your keyword and location before uploading it. You can’t change anything once it is uploaded so make sure you do this before uploading. If you already have some images published then simply delete them and replace them with the same photo but properly named.

So and photo previously called ‘Fred working on the last job.jpg’ would be better named as ‘domestic electrician in xyz-town.jpg’. Not only name the file but also ensure that the Alt tag is completed with the same or very similar information in including both your business keyword and your location.

Take a look at this result for an electrician in Bishops Stortford:

Google Places result - electrician in Bishops Stortford

A few weeks ago this company was unfindable on Google when searching for ‘electrician in Bishops Stortford’ . I went down to page 7 of Google before giving up.

Now they are top of the places listing alongside the map (see A). At the same time they remain unfindable in the general search while a competitor who has used the domain name strategy of including the keyword and the location in their domain name is currently sitting at #1 of the general search results – (see B) thus demonstrating how effective is the domain name method.

At the time of writing our example has only had to publish 5 photographs comprehensively named and tagged as I described here with the keyword and location plus 1 video. So you can see that it is not really that hard.

Your places page is a foundation stone for your online presence. Clearly, it would be advantageous for this company to go on to compete for highly ranked places in the general search listing in order to displace it’s competitors. But that’s for another day.

Do let me know what successes you have with your page – or your problems and I will see what I can do to help.