Jamie Van Meveren's CIS 170 blog

Social media is the way for an online business to hold the door open for a customer, or ask them about their day. It’s the way to make your company have a friendly, likable face when you can’t have face to face interactions with your customers. It also lets you reach out and find new customers with ease. The first step in making a good online presence for your business is to consider where your target demographic spends most of its time. Are they older, and more likely to access blogs or podcasts? Or are they younger and on microblogging sites like Instagram and Twitter? Its best to find what niche will give you the most success before you pour hours into all social media equally, when you could spend more time focusing on the ones that will bring you back the most customers. Social media makes it easy to advertise promotions or sales to bring in new customers, but its important to be careful that it won’t just draw in one time deal seekers. Its also important to monitor how people a

SEM and SEO are concepts easy to understand, hard to master. To do it effectively, one must constantly review site traffic analytics, see what is actually working, and refocus their efforts. This is important both for free and paid ways to boost your site traffic. One easy free way is to register your business’s local phone number with a search engine. This will make you show up much higher in local listings.   Consider your sites Metadata description carefully, and try to describe your company using only the most relevant key phrases. Also, remember to add metadata to all of your images, especially logos and headers, to describe what is being shown.   Be mindful of your use of keywords and phrases. If used too much, keywords can make your content look fake and damage your credibility. If used too little, you may not get the site traffic you desire. A good solution is to try to organically fit key phrases into your content. Good ones really vary depending on what your site is selling

I personally don’t like buying from unfamiliar websites. If I haven’t heard of it, I don’t want to buy from them. If I'm not searching for the cheapest thing on amazon, I really have to have the brand in the forefront of my mind first. I don’t think I’m alone in this, and as a potential future business owner, it doesn’t work in my favor. Content Marketing is the easiest way to solve this.   People love to learn. If something sparks my interest, I could spontaneously research it for hours. Creating educational content helps people to find your site and brand when they do this. If you have relevant information, they may look to you in the future for further articles. If once every 10 posts or so you happen to mention your own product and how it ties in, they just may so happen to trust your product over similar ones on the market. Think of your demographic and where they most likely spend their time. Some will spend more time reading articles on blogs, some might see you on Insta

Jumping into things without first planning them out is often a bad idea. Visualize someone spending their student loan money on the newest gaming system, someone trying to nurse a mouse back to health only to get an infestation when it escapes, or someone out on their 21 st birthday out getting a face tattoo after a night on the town. All of these scenarios are reversible, but fixing them is time-consuming, painful, and costly. So is delaying launching your site because you didn’t plan it properly and had to scrap it and start over. Avoiding this is as simple as planning things before you rush headfirst into them. Make yourself a sitemap to start. It does not have to be anything fancy. Write out the pages you think you will need on some scrap paper. Draw lines to show what will link from where. What is always going to be in your navbar, and where you are going to put articles? Once you have this basic guideline, you can begin wireframing. This isn’t about colors or typef

Strategizing is important when going into any battle. Today we discuss the battle of creating a successful online business, and five of the weapons we have to achieve success. Credibility:  Make posts and do it often. Be transparent in sustainability practices. Encourage the use of word of mouth advertising among employees. Consider utilizing brand ambassadors. Usability:  If you have different services, or sell to different types of customer, tailor the experience to each of them. Do not make them sit and look for what they need, they will not stick around.  Let them choose what is relevant to them and then show them a customized experience. Visibility: You can’t sell to people who don’t know you exist yet. Use a combination of social media, advertising, email, and SEM to reach your target demographic. Make your presence more than just selling, so they look to you even when not looking to buy. Sellability:  Show customers how the product is going to help them

Online marketing is the best tool for businesses of any size. Big businesses often have many people or teams working on this branch of operations, but even as a small business or single person, much can be done to increase your online presence yourself. You can optimize your website as you create it and create social media to connect to your customer base. As a small business owner, you can connect on a more meaningful level with your repeat customer base, and may have one simple leg up on bigger companies. People trust local. People trust small businesses. It will take time to get brand recognition, and have the same scale as a bigger business, but the word of mouth you get from your community will instill a much easier sense of trust among your first customers. As your customer base grows, you can use analytics to determine who they are. Creating relevant advertisements depends on this information. The best way to view creating promotions or advertisements is to make a sandwich.

Am I making it for my own and only my own consumption? Am I positive I will never ever share it with others? That is the only time I would feel comfortable using copyrighted content. Buying is an option, yes, but it’s really not feasible for a broke college student. For my own personal use, I often try pexels.com for stock images and free music archive for sound. Unsplash, Pixabay, and Canva are good alternatives for free images, and I also use YouTube’s archive of free royalty-free music on occasion.

Proper Netiquette= Hirability. That is as simple as it gets. Sharing things that are inappropriate, politically charged, or rude are sure-fire ways to get turned away by employers. It’s important to maintain a social media presence in our field however, to show potential employers that we are comfortable using it. Many of the jobs available to our class in the future may be helping maintain the social media presence for a company. Going too far in the other direction, and having too much of a presence can seem spammy to others and should be avoided. Like all good things, social media is best in moderation and moderated. Don’t say things online that you would say in front of your mother.