Increasing Your Online Visibility Using Business.com | How-to Guides for running your business from Business.com

Are you great at what you do — whether it’s filing business taxes, choosing the best pizza oven, or customizing ecommerce shopping carts — and want more people to know you as a guru? One of the best ways to increase your good reputation and spread the word about what you have to offer is to share your expertise — and content-based marketing is a huge trend. Writing a Work.com how-to guide can help introduce yourself to a business audience and promote yourself as an expert. Join experts such as Anita Campbell, Scott Allen, and Aaron Wall who have already written their own guides!

Writing a Work.com guide may:

1) Enhance your reputation
2) Improve your search engine rankings
3) Increase the chance you’ll be linked to around the web
4) Increase the chance you’ll be talked about in the blogosphere
5) Help drive traffic to your website
6) Supplement your own marketing efforts

Action Steps
The best contacts and resources to help you get it done

First of all, choose the right guide topic, title and keywords

Guides with "hot", current, or viral topics tend to be talked about and visited often, so choose your topic wisely. When writing your guide, keep in mind the way business owners would look for your topic in search engines. What keywords and terms would they typically use? The most important ones need to be in the guide title, with the secondary ones in the subtitle and intro and throughout your guide. If you really know your topic well, you've heard how people talk about it, whether offline at a trade show or a retail store or your office; or online at an industry forum, an email list, or your blog. Getting into the mind of the business owner will help you not only do well in the search engines, but also write a useful guide that has the potential to become popular.

I recommend:

To find the best keywords to use in your guide, try these keyword tools: Overture, Google Keyword Tool, Wordtracker, or SEO Book Keyword Research Tool.

Hint: Take a look at some guides that do well in search engines: Doing Business in Second Life & Starting a Pool Hall. Try Googling them...

Another hint: Guides that explain a complicated topic simply, are witty, or provide insider details that are hard to find anywhere else tend to be popular.

After publishing your guide, let people know about it

How do you let people know about your guide? First of all, email your guide to your colleagues, clients, and friends. If your industry association has a website or email list, ask them to link to your guide. If you have your own site, link to your guide from it. Add links to your guide in relevant discussions and blog comments about your topic, and put your guide URL in your email signature. Also, add your guide URL to some social bookmarking and aggregator sites -- remember to tag your guide in a relevant way. If you're a member of social networking sites, you can often add several links to your profiles so you can let people know about your guide, particularly at business networking sites such as LinkedIn. And of course, if you have a blog, blog about your guide, and for maximum effect use Technorati tags in the body of your post so people searching on Technorati can find your guide.

I recommend:

Here's where to search for blogs about your guide topic: Technorati.com or Google Blogsearch

Here are some social bookmarking sites to add your guide to: del.icio.us, digg, reddit, stumbleupon

Here are some online business social networks which have profiles where you can add your guide URL: LinkedIn, ryze, Intuit's JumpUp, StartupNation

Join or create an email discussion for the topic of your guide at Yahoo Groups

Start a MyBlogLog community based on your guide topic

Also try: Yahoo 360, Squidoo, your university website, library and regional business resources pages, Gather, flickr - be creative! If you're really creative, do a podcast interview about your guide topic and submit it to podcast directories (you can link to your podcast from your guide!) Or take photos that illustrate your guide topic, post them on flickr, and link to your guide from flickr and to your flickr photos on your guide. What about video? I'd love to see the first guide that actually links to a YouTube video

Check back frequently to see how your guide is doing

Did you know that Work.com has a top guides and experts section, where you can check to see how many pageviews your guide has received? The top 20 most popular list is often referred to in blogs as a measure of what entrepreneurs and small business people want to know, so making it to that list will magnify your visibility. The top 5 most popular guides automatically show up on the Work.com homepage. Other notable guides are often spotlighted on the Work.com homepage or blogged about in the Work.com Community Blog.

I recommend:

Check often: Work.com Top Guides & Experts, especially the Top 20 Most Popular and Top Experts pages.

Keep updated on what the wider web is saying about Work.com

Any time you find a blog post where someone discovers the usefulness of Work.com, it's your chance to comment and mention your guide -- or get new ideas on what to write about in your next guide!

I recommend:

Anita Campbell: Be an Expert Using Work.com

Small Business Trends Radio: Increase Your Online Visibility Using Work.com

Aaron Wall: Market Timing in New Verticals

Jessica Bowman: Add Work.com to B2B Link Building Campaigns

ClickZ: A Small Business Site that Works

c|net: Skip Business School--Work.com Puts Best Practices Online

http://del.icio.us/popular/smallbusiness

Technorati: Work.com search

Google Alerts

>>Work.com Community Blog: A great place to keep updated on Work.com references around the web, the most interesting guides & experts, and business trends

>>Subscribe to Work.com Community Blog Feed

Tips & Tactics
Helpful advice for making the most of this Guide

The more relevant and useful links are to your guide, the more your guide will continue to be linked-to virally - so make sure any links you add are super relevant.
Updating your guide will allow it to show up in the top 5 newest guides list on the homepage, which may garner it more views...
If you don't have a blog already, consider starting one on your topic. A blog in conjunction to guides can nicely complement each other and add to your web presence. Search Google on "Starting a Pool Hall" to see how Brian Rollo dominates the top results with both his Work.com guide and his blog on starting a pool hall.
Writing a suite of guides that deal with aspects of a larger topic helps establish you as the go-to expert on that topic, as well as making it easier to find you!
Need suggestions for viral topics? Make sure to read the Work.com Community Blog, where you'll find tips on what to write about - click the links to the blog and its feed above the Tips & Tactics header. Also see what's popular on the top blogs which you can find on sites like Technorati.

More Featured Listings

Use Social Networking to Generate Leads
Increase your Twitter presence and generate leads. Engage your target audience across social media. Create your own Cost Per Click Campaign Today!
PPC Program
Webpartner.com

Start Your Online Marketing with Dotster
Dotster can help with SEO, Local Site Promotion, and Email Marketing. Find out what we can do for your business today!
Domain Names | Hosting | Email | SSL Certificates
Dotster.com

Self-Service Web Site Promotion
Reach 90% of Internet Users. Target by Geography or Audience Type. Pay Per Click. View Detailed Reporting. Build Your Campaign Now!
BidPlaceSB.com

Site Promotion
Search engine positioning services, including organic search engine optimization and full service PPC management to move your site to the top.
www.customermagnetism.com