At least once a year, it’s a good idea to check out what’s happening with your various online profiles. In internet marketing, it’s easy to get so caught up in the day to day of business that we forget about little administrative tasks that, if ignored, could hamper customer experience.
Keep information up to date and ensure your customers and potential customers are getting information you want them to have.
Here are some helpful tips:
Check Your Website
Look through your website and see that everything is up to date. Is there something you could add to update your “about us” page or your credentials? Are all your blogroll links current and without any “error 404” pages? Do you want to move, add, or change any links or advertisements?
You should be looking at your stats as often as possible but doing an overall check-up should involve checking your website statistics thoroughly. Check your statistics and look for anything abnormal along with any trends that could help you plan for your next advertising campaign.
Some marketers do an annual website redesign, in order to stay fresh in their customers’ eyes. This may or may not be something you want to do but at the very least, each of your websites deserves a close look regularly to see if anything can and / or should be changed to improve customer experience.
Check Your Profiles / Web 2.0
Do you have accounts that you’ve neglected to update recently? Have a look through all your main online profiles so that you can check for accuracy and update your profiles, if necessary.
Have a look through your contacts on some of these sites and see if they can be updated. Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and other sites typically have features that allow you to cross-check your address book against the site to see if you can add new contacts.
Check Your RSS Reader
Do you use Google Reader or another RSS feed reader? Check it and see if any of the blogs in it are no longer valid, or, no longer interesting to you and consider cleaning it out. You might want to do the same for newsletter subscriptions that could be clogging up your in-box. Are all those newsletter still interesting to you? If not, you’re saving yourself time by removing those subscriptions so you don’t have to waste moments every week skimming and deleting emails.
Google Yourself
When you Google your name and / or your company name, what comes up? Is the information in that link accurate? Remember that the items on the first two pages of the search engine results for your name or company name are likely to be looked at by customers and potential customers so it’s a good idea to ensure that all these results are as optimised as much as possible.
As internet marketers, our online profiles are a very important part of business. Keeping them updated with accurate and relevant information only takes a short amount of time and helps to ensure the right message is coming across to our readers.
See you at the top of Google!
Sean Rasmussen
SEO Australia Pacific
AussieSEO.com © 2007 - 2010
I find this post to be very true in regards to keeping your customers interested. I only have one website at the moment and I’ve had it less than a month. I am still updating it so I can get the look I want and the message I want portrayed. I’ve updated my about page twice now and change my theme about 5 times. Let’s just say I’m a perfectionist and I want people to be impressed by what they see. I am not only updating my profile but I’m updating my ads from text ads to more image ads to make things look more professional and have my ads pop. However, as long as your site isn’t a headache to look at I really feel your customer service will always set you apart from the rest of the field…but you have to entice them with your website first!
.-= Landon Steffensen´s last blog ..Dog Food: Is It Hurting Your Dog? =-.
I’ve just recently been looking through a lot of my IM notes, trying to clean up & organise – not realising just how many sites I’ve joined for different marketing ideas, tools & services over the last 6-12 months!.. I’ve still not completed my profile on many sites & have often under-utilised their services, but I’m slowly & methodically getting there, learning more as I go & keeping a consistent name, user name & photo wherever possible.
I agree with Landon, the content of the site is really what it’s all about, delivering a quality experience for the reader/customer, but you also don’t want a daggy or dodgy-looking site to mar their first impressions of you or your business. Too plain, or too pushy in either your site visuals, or profile/about me page, could mean people won’t take you seriously, or even worse, won’t feel inclined to trust you. I’ve heard professionals in different industries speak about how customers are often not buying a particular product or service, but are actually buying into YOU or YOUR BRAND. It’s that trust in a person or business/brand that leads to the end sale & it’s all about selling yourself first as the go-to authority! Having a good profile & name all over the net could definitely be the difference between you or the next guy making the personal connections, that ultimately lead to the sale.
.-= Mel Smith´s last blog ..Simple Copywriting Mistakes to Avoid =-.
Hi Sean,
I really need to update my online profiles. Especially my social bookmarking profiles. Some of them I’ve just thrown up and put enough on them so that I can use them. I keep meaning to go back and fix them.
I can’t remember the last time I checked my site for broken links or cleaned out my Google Reader. It’s these kind of mistakes that can hurt my relationships with potential customers and even other bloggers who look at my profile.
So, some maintenance is definitely in order.
.-= Jazz Salinger´s last blog ..Learn and Earn – It’s a Marathon Not a Sprint =-.
Here is another great article that can esily be made into a checklist (which I like)
When it is time to update my online profiles I can:
1. Look through my website and check if everything is up to date
2. Do I need to update the “about us” page?
3. Check website statistics thoroughly
4. Does my site need an annual website design update?
5. Check RSS Reader, is there anything in there that is no longer valid?
6. Google myself. Make sure information in link is accurate.
Recently I went through my free classified adds and updated them all. It was surprising to find a lot of the links were misdirected or out of date, especially for adds I created for items that were on sale. You really have to do this on a regular basis to keep your online profile updated.
.-= Jackie Stenhouse´s last blog ..Anxiety Separation in Children =-.