If you want to increase your customer base, and therefore increase sales, you have to grow your network.

One of the best tools for expanding your business network is LinkedIn.

These simple tips will help you to get the most out of a LinkedIn membership.

1. As soon as you join LinkedIn, create a profile and start inviting people to be your connections. Joining LinkedIn is free. While you can pay for a premium membership that will give you access to more LinkedIn services, you don’t need to pay anything to send invitations and make connections.
2. When someone accepts one of your invitations to connect, you will get an email from them saying that they’ve accepted.  You can use this email to begin a conversation with your new connection, in which you tell them about your business and ask them what they do and how you can help them. As with all networking, always make sure that your connections understand that you want to get to know them better; don’t make them think that you are only using them to get more business.
3. When you have made a connection, look at your new connection’s profile. Find out who their connections are, and send invitations to those connections.
4. Share your contacts with people you trust. If you share your contacts with someone, they will often reciprocate by sharing their contacts with you.
5. Find out who has looked at your profile.  You can send these people messages and invite them to connect with you.  If you are a paying member, you will have access to more information about who has seen your profile, so this is where upgrading your membership can help. Don’t worry about having so many connections that you can’t keep track of them. LinkedIn allows you to export all of your connections onto a spreadsheet.
6. Write recommendations for other people. If you write someone a recommendation, they will usually recommend you in return. Recommendations are great for attracting customers.
7. Join LinkedIn Groups that are related to your industry or to your field of expertise. You can post articles to LinkedIn Groups. This will help to increase your visibility and the visibility of your company. LinkedIn allows you to get in touch with 500 people who belon to any group to which you belong – even people who aren’t connections of yours. Take advantage of this opportunity to let even more people find out about who you are and what you do.
8. Optimize your profile. Your profile is a tool to help you advertise yourself. You can rearrange the items on your profile in order to focus on those things that are most likely to attract business. You can include links to three different websites on your profile, which can also incorporate add-ons from third parties.
9. Set up a company profile, in addition to your personal profile.  You can use your company profile to provide visitors with detailed information about your company. Members of your staff who are LinkedIn Members can link to your company profile. This will enable their connections will find out about your business. Your company profile can include company recommendations.
10. Be sure to update your profile frequently, so that your connections frequently have you on their minds and they remain aware of what you are doing. If you have a Twitter account – and you should – you can connect it to your LinkedIn account so that your Tweets show up on your Linked in profile.
11. Stay on top of your connections’ updates. If you know which projects your connections are working on and what is going on with their businesses, you will be able to communicate with them better.

Many people know that LinkedIn is useful networking tool. However, few of these know how to take advantage of all of LinkedIn’s features so that that they use LinkedIn in the most effective way. By following these easy tips, you and your business will get the most from LinkedIn.

Today we launched a new websites for Crossroads Care Harrogate, Craven & York, a registered charity that carries out caring for carers.

Crossroads Care Harrogate, Craven & York is part of the larger national Crossroads network of charities that cares for people who are caring for people, which means they help people who are caring for someone so that they can have a rest or have some fun.

For instance, if you care for an autistic child you may find that your whole life is taken up with this task and that you’re always tired and don’t get to do anything for yourself, this is where Crossroads Care Harrogate, Craven & York are able to help. They have expertly trained staff who are able to care for your autistic child for a few hours while you take a break to do anything you want.

Crossroads Care Harrogate, Craven & York help thousands of people who are caring for someone with a huge range of ages, conditions and disabilities.

If you care for someone with a disability and feel you have no one to turn to, Crossroads Care Harrogate, Craven & York can change your life for the better.

Facebook is the Number One Internet social network.

If you want to stay ahead of your competitors, it is essential that you know how to use Facebook to increase your Internet presence and to create as much business for yourself as possible.

With Facebook, you can quickly attract huge amounts of potential customers, introducing them to your brand and directing them to your website.

Read on to discover some useful ways to make Facebook work for your business.

Set up a Fan Page

A Fan Page is essential for anyone who wants to maximize their internet presence with Facebook.

Make sure that your Fan Page encourages interaction among Facebook users. For example, you can ask Facebook users their opinions about a new technology or about something that is happening in the news.

The more responses you receive, the more posts that will appear on the Walls of Facebook users, where they can be seen by their Friends, who will then have the opportunity to become your Fans as well.

To encourage interaction on your Fan Page, it is essential that your posts have a friendly tone, and that you post frequently (aim for 2 to 6 posts every day) to keep your fans interested.

Make sure that all of our posts are interesting and relevant, though. Don’t post just for the sake of posting, or you will just annoy your fans and maybe lose some of them.

You can increase your fan base by asking your customers to become Facebook Fans.

Contact the customers on your customer database and ask them to join your Fan Page on Facebook.

You can send an email to customers about becoming Fans on a regular basis.

If you produce a regular newsletter, make sure that each issue includes a request for the reader to become a Facebook Fan.

You can even include links to join Facebook on standard email forms, such as order confirmations.

Once you’ve gained a good number of Facebook Fans, you can use the Marketing section of the Fan Page Admin area to send your Fans emails promoting your website, product or service.  You can easily let all of your fans know about a new development, such as new product or an improvement in customer service.

Install Facebook Social Plug-ins on your Website.

There are several ways that you can tie your website to Facebook and so help your site to go viral.

You can place a Like button next to a product page on your website. This will allow visitors to share that page with all of their Facebook Friends

A Comments plug-in allows users to comment on your site and share their comments on their Facebook Wall.

The Registration button enables users to sign up to your website using their Facebook account.

Set up a Contest

Allowing Facebook Users to enter a contest or sweepstakes in order to win a prize is a great way to enhance your Facebook presence.

You can use the Admin section of your Fan page to email fans with news about sweepstakes and contests.

Advertise Your Business Through Facebook

Facebook Advertising is a great way for you to create a targeted marketing campaign.

With Facebook Advertising, you can target by age, gender or location, as you would with most targeted marketing campaigns, but you can also target by Likes and Interests.

So if you run a local music shop, for example, you can target people in your area who Like specific types of musical instruments.

You can track your clicks with an electronic tracking system, or send users who click on your Facebook ads to a special promotional page.

Payment for Facebook advertising can be based on cost per click or on cost per thousand ad impressions (CPM).

Advertise Your Facebook Fan Page

In addition to advertising your website, you can advertise for Facebook Fans. Facebook Fan advertising can be targeted just like other Facebook advertising.

Facebook Fans are believed to spend 300% more than non-fans, so advertising for Facebook Fans is an intelligent choice.

Be Prepared for Change

Facebook is constantly changing, so it is important to keep an eye out for the latest Facebook developments that can help you with your marketing and social media strategy.

Keep on top of news about Facebook and other Social Media, and be prepared to change your strategy as social media changes.

If you want to make sure as many people as possible read your blog, you need an RSS feed that engages as many people as possible.

Lots of blogs have RSS feeds, but their owners don’t know how to get the most out of them, and they can’t be bothered to learn the most effective ways to use them.

If you want to get the most out of syndicating your blog and ensure that your articles are read by as many people as possible, just placing a Subscribe button on your website isn’t enough.

You must submit your RSS feed to directories and make sure that other people add it to their RSS readers.

One way to increase your RSS feed’s visibility is to use RSS Submit. You can use RSS submit to submit your feed to many different websites and web directories.

RSS Submit keeps all your feed information stored so that you can resubmit your feeds whenever you.

You can use a plug-in that RSS Submit provides to submit your information on forms. This will save you time when making manual submissions.

Have a look at Robin Good’s list of where to submit blog articles and RSS feeds. Robin Good is known for being an expert on RSS.

You have to submit your articles and RSS feeds to these directories manually, and that can take up a lot of time, but the amount of exposure that you get by submitting to as many of these directories as possible will be worth it.

To manage your RSS feeds, try using Google’s Feedburner. With Feedburner, subscribers view your content through Google’s readers. Feedburner tracks your visitors and provides you with statistics.  Feedburner even allows you to use AdSense to monetise your RSS feed.

While submitting your RSS feed to directories is important, it’s essential that you encourage individuals to subscribe. Make sure that your website’s orange RSS button is large enough and stands out enough draw the attention of your website’s visitors.

Since many people don’t use RSS readers and don’t understand how they work, you might even put your RSS feed on a page that explains the benefits of an RSS reader and teaches your website’s visitors how they can use one.

By using the above methods, you will increase your RSS readership and expose more people to your blog.

We are selling our business and marketing domain name, AnalysisResearch.com over at Flippa. The domain would have been used by us as part of an Analysis Research department of York Interweb, but we have since decided to concentrate solely on developing information websites and website development.

AnalysisResearch.com is perfect for any company undertaking any kind of research that employs analytical data.

For more information see the Flippa domain auction here: https://flippa.com/126051-Analysis-Research-domain-sale

Webmasters and SEO companies have been hammering on about Google’s PageRank for years now, which is no surprise when Google’s own toolbar has been teasing us all with it for so long. However, anyone who has created a website in the last six months or so will have noticed that they still have a PageRank of zero or not available. So what are we to do now that we’ve been set adrift in a gradeless society?

Well, first of all, make no mistake – our websites are still being graded, but things have moved on, again. In the very early days SEO was all about link exchanges, with anyone, anywhere, in any niche. Then things moved on so webmasters sought only relevant links from sites in the same, or similar, niches. Then things moved on again when Google allegedly started penalizing link swapping, so the idea of one-way links, three-way links and all manner of ludicrous attempts to affect the system rose to the surface, with ‘experts’ from New England to New Delhi promising to send your website rocketing to the stratosphere. Of course it was all nonsense, always has been and still is. But these services relied on the newbie who, not knowing any better, would believe that spending a few hundred would get their site special treatment.

At this point selling text links was big business, with many websites making thousands every month just from the sale of text links alone. For a while it worked, search results were skewed so that some really awful websites were at the top, simply because they’d bought the right text links. Of course it couldn’t last. The bottom fell out of this when Google announced it would penalize sites suspected of selling links. They did this by reducing their PageRank to zero, or much lower than it was, so that no one would want to buy links from them in the first place.

Nothing too radical had changed after that until now, where it seems Google may be thinking of ditching toolbar PageRank altogether.

So, ‘what are we to do now?’ cry the SEOs and webmasters. The sensible among us and Google bosses would reply, ‘the same as always, you fools, build websites people want to visit’. It’s not that hard really, unless you’re a work-shy fop who’d rather copy other people’s work and use spinning software to try and Google fool make content as fresh like born inside text.

All Google and website users want is a clean, honest browsing experience. So here are some of the things Google will be treating as less important, things that will be of lesser consideration when ranking your websites. They will have some effect. Obviously you may get direct visitors, but their effect on search results will be minimized:

• Blog commenting
• Forum posting
• Social Bookmarking
• Article Submission
• Bulk Directory Submission
• Mass Link Exchange

Of course, some of the above have been reduced in importance for some time now, and some of these things can still have benefits if done properly. Bad examples of blog comments and forum posting for instance are: ‘Hey, great site’, ‘Very informative, love it’ and any other generic terms – especially if you paid some idiot to post the exact same comments on a thousand different blogs and forums.

Social bookmarking can work to get some visitors, but it’s very difficult to do this without being spammy.

Article submissions can work if you’re writing high quality material and sending it to a single, very specific and high quality destination. Like a science article to a respected science resource. However, the days of submitting your article to large directories over and over and getting positive results are on their way out the door.

Bulk directory submissions and link exchanges. Well, what can I say – you may as well set fire to your computer right now and forget all about making it online.

It’s not all doom and gloom, there are still things you can do:

• Guest Blogging in quality, respected blogs – people will respect your work and click through to your website, and tell others about it.
• Link Baiting – this is all about making sure your site has the right content, pages people are looking for, and making sure yours is better than the others.
• Press Releases – good for business websites if done correctly for the right audience
• Working with Social Communities – building a Facebook page, for example, and a large fan base circumvents Google and search engines entirely, creating a whole new source of traffic.

We bought this domain a while ago now: www.tourismtravel.com for quite a bargain considering the owner of traveltourism.com wanted us to pay a quarter of a million dollars for his domain.

Anyway we are now in the process of building up the Tourism Travel Directory as a directory for travel and tourism related websites. Where we are going to differ from most niche link websites though is that were creating a whole page of text for every single page on the site.. so that’s a page for every continent, every country etc. As you can imagine this will take some time. It is, however, very interesting going through all the countries and learning about their unique qualities, cultures and traditions.

As of now the site still has no page rank, so we won’t be getting many link submissions as yet, but once the site is complete the links will be very well placed with a large article for their particular country.

Anyone can also submit unique travel articles in the future with their own links in the articles. We also expect this to be quite a large aspect of the Tourism Travel Directory in the next year or so.

The online counselling service for young people in the Ryedale area, called rite2talk, was launched today by Ryedale Council. The site contains contact information for various helpful organisations, downlodable self-help leaflets and links to useful websites dealing with young people’s issues and concerns.

The site also offers a private chat system where young people can talk one to one with professional counsellors by special request via a personal login system.

rite2talk

After many months of meetings and web design tuition, building two sites for a local osteopath who intended to move to Australia, the project is finally complete.

One osteopath site for adults: Osteopath Sunshine Coast and one osteopath site for babies: Baby Osteopath, and one client safely moved to Australia.

Good luck Roger, you are now officially our furthest away client.

After redesigning our old UK Business Online site we decided it needed a new domain name too, so the whole structure has been redone, including the address, in the hope it will fill up with UK Business Owners’ websites and business articles. These types of niche websites can be good for getting permanent links to your business’s site and, if you have the skills to write compelling articles, they are very good places to submit your business articles with your link included in the text. Links in unique articles are permanant and you only have to pay a small review fee to get them listed. See: Businesses Directory UK