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Engaging your audience is a large part of staging a virtual event.

Let your audience determine your content. Make your content interesting and cover popular topics. Find out what your audience likes to do both on and off line. Produce your event so that the content is familiar and comfortable to them.

Promotion

Once everything is in place, event planned, sponsors on board, your twelve week time line gives you plenty of time to publicise your event.

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There are many online business owners who have valuable solutions they could provide given the right Internet marketing. With ineffective Internet marketing in place their ideas simply fade away, leaving them wondering where they went wrong, when the web names they admire have made the big time. Entering the market in the beginning, the webpreneurs that we know and admire, had it all their own way by being first in the market. Now, the webpreneurs of today, need strategies in place to help them find their niche and to market to their target audience.

Without a business plan, how can you, or any one else involved with your business, judge where you are? You can have the best business coach in the world, be motivated and have a fantastic idea but a plan makes the difference between disappearing into the darkness or becoming a shining light in your niche. With business plan in hand, you and others involved with your business can time-line and measure your progress. You can tell when you are ahead in your game or dreadfully out of alignment and therefore need to alter your website to regain your audience and customers.

Business plan:
There are several different ways to create a marketing plan to promote your online presence. Your local Chamber of Commerce may offer free or discounted business planning and development resources to members and non-members or you can try the do-it-yourself way with Marketing Plan Pro by John Jantsch ,powered by Duct Tape Marketing.( It is a simple, practical marketing plan software that makes it easy to plan and carry out the marketing activities you need to grow your business.) Another approach is to find a coach or consultant that specialises in creating marketing plans.

Marketing:
With a business plan in place, now is the time to activate your marketing. If you find yourself without the resources to put the plan into action, use Duct Tape Marketing principles to get things moving until you can hire additional resources. A virtual assistant or online business manager may be an alternative. Paying per hour reduces the costs but gains you experienced help for putting your business plan into action. With a business plan in place, all those involved in moving your business forward are aware of your goals.

Steady as you go:
Now you have a plan in place, you have identified the resources to implement; now it’s time to set off. If you have limited resources, aim for a slow, steady approach and find a rhythm that works with your available resources.

Measure:
The results of your marketing plan and strategies need to be measured and assessed for effectiveness on a regular basis. Do you have an e-newsletter or e-mail signup on your site? How many are subscribed? Or unsubscribe? Aweber and other e-mail/e-newsletter programs generally have reports so you can tell how well different campaigns have worked. Google analytics tracks site visits, page visits and time spent on your site so you can analyse how well each page is working. In the beginning, don’t try and track everything but be aware that the information is there when you are ready. With your reports and knowledge gained from these, you can develop consistency in your marketing to build and grow your business.

The Guide to Search Engine Optimisation for Small Businesses: Part 3. Guest post by Nichola Stott.

In this third part of a series guide to search engine optimisation, we’re going to look at keyword research. Keyword research is possibly one of the most important (if not the most important) foundation of an optimised website.  You may also wish to read the other posts in this series, which are the introduction to SEO and technical SEO factors.

Keyword Targetting

Search engines, such as Google, Bing and Yahoo! use crawlers to retrieve information about all the information on the web. Complex weighted algorithms are then applied to determine which websites are relevant matches to a keyword search. Although these algorithms are sophisticated, and the crawlers are numerous and frequent; they are still not human, so we need to be clear and concise when constructing web pages so that the words people would use when searching for the products and services we offer appear in content, meta data, title and image tags.

To help you with keyword targeting there are a number of tools you can use. The important things to think about are:

Depending how much volume and competition there is on a keyword, you may prefer to choose a less competitive term. If a term is less competitive, then you will stand a better chance of ranking for that term, possibly in a shorter time too.

As an example if I offer a “virtual assistant” service, the term is highly competitive according to Google External Keyword Tool. It may make sense for me to also target “virtual assistant UK”, which is less competitive.

Free Tools for Keyword Research

Google

Spyfu

Wordtracker (offers free trial)

In part four, we’re going to take a look at where and how to apply your keywords in site content, in site meta data and in your HTML tags (such as title and image tags.)

About the author: Nichola Stott is a highly regarded search and social media professional with over a decade of experience in online communications. Nichola is director and co-founder of theMediaFlow, a search and social media agency; and is a regular conference speaker and contributor to online industry media including Econsultancy, SEO Chicks and State of Search. You can contact Nichola on linkedin  or twitter.

In this second part of The Guide to Search Engine Optimisation for Small Businesses we will be looking at technical SEO considerations, to help you market your online business in the search engines. If you would like to start at the very beginning, you may wish to check out the introduction “What is Search Engine Optimisation?”

Objective: Our objective is to ensure that our technical set-up and foundation is optimal, so that anything we build on top of that can be more easily found and indexed.

To read the complete article click here

About the author: Nichola Stott is a highly regarded search and social media professional with over a decade of experience in online communications. Nichola is director and co-founder of theMediaFlow, a search and social media agency; and is a regular conference speaker and contributor to online industry media including Econsultancy, SEO Chicks and State of Search. You can contact Nichola on linkedin  or twitter.

Guest post by Nichola Stott, The Media Flow.

The Guide to Search Engine Optimisation for Small Businesses – Part 1.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the practise of ensuring that your site is built, and marketed in such a way; that search engine crawlers can more easily identify and rank your site, for the type of content and business you offer.

Why is this important?

Search is one of the most common online activities, and often the greatest driver of visits to any online business or blog, providing your site is optimised correctly. In fact the global search market place drives more than 100 billion searches a month, and as a region Europe drives the highest percentage of these global searches, according to leading global digital measurement company comScore.

During the course of this five part series, we are going to be looking at the fundamental areas of search engine optimisation, which are technical considerations; site building considerations, and site marketing considerations. In the final fifth edition, we will be looking at myths and common misconceptions, including practises to avoid, as well as credible sources for further reading.

In today’s post we’re going to look at the current state of the search engine market place and the very first steps…

Historically there used to be a number of different search engines, including Alta Vista, Alltheweb, Ask Jeeves, Hotbot etc. As Google began to rise in popularity and search became an extremely profitable business, due to the sponsored listings served with natural listings there was a lot of acquisition and consolidation in the marketplace. Yahoo! bought Alta Vista and Alltheweb, a number of partnerships were struck whereby the most popular search providers now power the search engine on popular online destinations, e.g. Google provides the search on AOL.

Today in the UK, Google has around 91% of the search engine market share, Bing and Yahoo! have around 3.5% each, Ask has 1% and the remainder is made up of a number of smaller search engines combined.

What this means is that to work smartly, any small to medium online business should focus on ranking well in Google first and foremost.  Additionally, tracking your appearance in search engines should be limited to Google, Yahoo! and Bing.

As a first step, you should ensure that you register for Google analytics, to help you monitor and track all traffic to your site, so that you can chart your progress. Secondly, you should also verify your site in Webmaster tools, which will help you to analyse how Google sees your site and also identify any errors.

Both of these Google tools are freely available to help you monitor and improve your traffic and website. We will be looking in more detail at these and other freely available tools, to assist you in optimising your website, throughout this series.

About the author: Nichola Stott is a highly regarded search and social media professional with over a decade of experience in online communications. Nichola is director and co-founder of theMediaFlow, a search and social media agency; and is a regular conference speaker and contributor to online industry media including Econsultancy, SEO Chicks and State of Search. You can contact Nichola on linkedin or twitter.