10 Sites to Extend Your Online Presence – and How to Organize Them

The majority of small businesses don’t plan their online presences. They just happen. This kind of presence is inefficient and ineffective.  Advertisers duplicate efforts in some places, while others offer no benefit.  If we’re agreed that a small business must have an online presence, then the next step is to determine what that presence should look like, and how it should be organized to drive the greatest value. Every part of the advertiser’s presence on the web, should be leading a potential customer further into the conversion funnel.

In a previous post, I talked about the importance of having an online HQ.  From this piece, the rest of the presence will be built.

The small business online HQ needs to accomplish the following things:

1. It needs to have the essential information about the business
2. It needs to accurately reflect the business in both design and content
3. It needs to be optimized for conversion, ie. it needs to sell

In my previous post, I said it didn’t matter what your HQ was, whether it was a full-fledged website, or a social media profile.  I stand by this, as long as the HQ meets the three criteria above, we’re ready to move on to the next step.

Building a good headquarters is a task in and of itself, but even once that’s been accomplished, this is generally where most small businesses stop.  This is most evident when $5,000 are spent on creating a new website, which uses up the entire internet marketing budget for a SMB, and then there is nothing left to promote this site.

An Example of the Failure to Promote the HQ

A colleague of mine uses a classic example, wherein a friend asked him to take a look at the new website he had built for his business.  My colleague looked over the website, was suitably impressed, and then asked, “So, how do your customers find it?”

His friend gave him a blank look.  “Well, the address is on my business card,” he said.

This actually isn’t as bad as it could be, because at least the business owner in this case was promoting the site to existing customers.  Unfortunately, he had invested heavily in creating this site, and had no plan of driving new customers to it.  This is where creating the rest of an online presence comes in handy.

The rest of a person’s online presence will come in the form of outposts. These outposts will exist to provide some value to the user, but ultimately to drive traffic back to headquarters, where a potential sale can be closed.

Suggestions for possible outposts:

1. LinkedIn: If you have a decent sized professional network, your LinkedIn profile is a good place to plant seeds. People in your LinkedIn network may not necessarily be your potential customers, but they know your potential customers.

2. AmEx OpenForum: If you’re a small business, a great place to hang out is the American Express Open Forum.  The forum is dedicated to topics about small business.   Answer questions, and post relevant information, and always make sure to have a link back to headquarters, so that those you help you out can return the favour by sending some leads your way.

3. Forums for your topic: Aside from OpenForum, the internet is full of forums for niche topics. Hanging out in these forums, and offering relevant information and answering questions, all the while having a link back to HQ in your profile is an excellent way of finding exactly the people who are interested in what you’re selling.

4. Facebook: According to some sources, Facebook recently passed Google in terms of total visits.  A lot of people are on Facebook, and so creating a Facebook fan page for your business is quickly becoming a requirement. This is intrinsically sharable, and so your fans will find you new fans, and all of them, should be coming back to your website.

6. Flickr: Many businesses can benefit from posting photos in a public area like Flickr, and then pointing traffic back to HQ. For example, Mark Hayward runs a guesthouse on a Caribbean island, and he has had great success using Flickr to drive traffic.

7. YouTube: YouTube is ideal for creating How To videos. These videos create expertise/build reputation, and have the added benefit of being sharable. Just be sure they point back to headquarters.

8. Twitter:  Twitter is a great way to connect with new people in your industry by using search functions, and just being active in the community.  Don’t carpet bomb your Twitter followers with constant pleas to visit your website (or you won’t have followers for long), but occasionally steering them towards your site especially if something is particular interesting is a good idea.

9. Squidoo: Is a service founded by Marketing rockstar Seth Godin.  You can create a “lens” on Squidoo, that will aggregate content from a number of sources.  You can then take the audience you’ve found from your lens, and steer them towards your HQ.

10. Guest writing: Writing for someone else’s blog, or writing an article for a website, doesn’t pay well, but if you include links back to your HQ, guest writing, pound for pound, will produce the greatest number of leads. Provided of course you were guest writing for a publisher in your niche.

Dealing with the overwhelm

You could go out and create every single one of these outposts (and others), but the fact of the matter is that most of these outposts are useless unless you have the time to donate to them.  You should not be afraid to open & shut down outposts as necessary – you don’t need to maintain all outposts simultaneously.  The one piece of your online presence that must always stay active is the HQ. Everything else exists only to drive traffic to the HQ.

Once you’ve created your online presence, you can apportion your time where you see the best results, and in the end, everything should be trickling towards HQ, and you’re on your way to creating plenty of leads.

It’s also worth noting that I didn’t invent this notion of setting up a main place to call home on the web, and then to create satellite pieces of content.  Here are two takes on the concept of the HQ vs outposts from two very bright guys.

Darren Rowse on Home bases and outposts

Chris Brogan on a Simple presence framework