How a Pest Management Company integrates Social Media

Think there’s no place for your company in social media? Think again! Here at JP McHale Pest Management, we integrate social media marketing via blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. Our goal is to generate more traffic to our website and to reach out to other pest control companies and people in our community. Every company has a website, but not every company utilizes the opportunities on the internet to drive traffic to their website. Here at JP McHale’s, we use the following techniques to generate more traffic and exposure to our website:

Blog:
In addition to our pest control website that explains our services, we have a blog where people are informed of pests in the local and nationwide news. We will occasionally post funny pictures or videos related to pests to give the readers a little laugh. This blog helps people understand more about pests; how they act, what environments they are found in, and why they behave the way they do. For example, if suddenly there was an outbreak of a certain pest, we can inform the readers of it right away, unlike a normal website. Through the blog we can interact with other pest control companies. By posting our RSS feed, people can be notified of our updates. We can exchange information with other pest companies to expand our knowledge on pests, and the interaction also give us link exchanges that boosts up our page rank with Google.

Twitter:
Twitter connects people worldwide in a matter of seconds, which produces a lot of opportunity for many people to be in contact with us. JP McHale follows people in our service area and other pest control companies. We organize our followers through TweetDeck. TweetDeck not only allows us to organize our followers, but we can single out tweets with specific words, such as “carpenter ants” or “termites”. By doing this, we can tweet at people who ask a question or are curious about a certain kind of pest, to which we can answer. We will also post a link to our blog post when we publish a new story.

Facebook:
Facebook is the new craze from people in high school, to people in retirement homes. Everyone’s on it. JP McHale has a page that enables people to “Like” us. When people “Like” us, we will come up in their newsfeed whenever we post something on our page. Again, went we post a new blog entry, we can link back to our blog through the Facebook page. Unlike Twitter, we can post photo albums to our Facebook page. The albums we current have are pictures from the field, how to identify you weeds, and how to identify summer pests. This enables users to learn about our company in a casual and friendly way.

There are many other social media sites that companies can use to increase traffic to your site. We feel these are the most beneficial sites to drive traffic to our website.

3 Ways You Should be Promoting Your Facebook Page

So you finally broke down and got yourself a snazzy Facebook page made. It’s been a long time coming and you’re pretty excited. But now what? It isn’t going to do you or your business much good if no one sees it, now is it? You know you should practice what you preach – and trust me, someday soon when I gather a little more time I’ll be putting these to use, as well!

Facebook Promotion #1 – Videos

Everyone knows video is hot. So what can be hotter than a video that you load on your Facebook page that has the “Like” feature embedded right into your video? Give your readers some valuable content and a video like this can dramatically increase your fans – or, umm “likers” Your video has a clear and direct call to action right in the corner. So start creating some kick-ass videos, whether they’re funny, informational or simply entertaining and start posting them. You can put them directly on your fan page. You can also put them elsewhere, like on your site, and link it to your fan page. It will have a watermark logo that takes your visitors to the video on your fan page. The video on your fan page will then have the “Like” button in the corner of the video when their cursor is over the video.

Fan (Likers) Incentives

Give people an incentive to “Like” your Facebook page. One way to do this is with Payvment. Using this cool tool you can create an instant fan discount. It’s also especially handy for creating a store front right within Facebook. Add as many or as little products as you want! Want see an example? Molly Sims has a very attractive storefront. A more basic one can be found on Vanity Shoes.

Email Signatures

How many emails do you send on an average day? If you aren’t including your Facebook fan page in your signature you are missing an opportunity to get your page in front of eyeballs with each and every email. There are two great services you can use for doing this, both of which are free and add a little pizzazz to your signatures.

The first is DOOID. With DOOID you sign up and input your chosen social profiles, websites, contact information and messenger ID’s. Include as little or as much as you want (and they have tons of social sites to choose from). You can choose which information is public and which ones aren’t. Then use the email signature feature to create your badge, which is pretty smooth looking I must say. There are several looks to choose from (more if you upgrade, which is very cheap). Then all you do is paste the code into your email (follow the directions for your email provider). I’ve been using it for a few months and LOVE it. But I do have to say… I updated it and have since not been able to get it work.

Secondly, there is Wise Stamp. This one is a plugin that you use in your browser that automatically embeds itself into your email program. You can customize it with colors, images, fonts, etc… to get the look that you like. I played with it but the link I had wasn’t working. I’m sure it’s something I was doing wrong, though. I’ll probably play with it some more and see if I can’t get it to work some time soon. **Possibly something wrong with my Yahoo email or something, as DOOID was working fine and now I can’t get it to work. Also, when putting an image URL into the plain signature feature of Yahoo signatures itself doesn’t produce the image – just the URL. So… I don’t know right now.

How to Avoid Mistakes in Outsourcing

As a business owner, outsourcing can be a real life-saver, or a real big mistake, depending on how you approach it. Let’s take a look at outsourcing some of the work that you don’t have time to do yourself, and how to go about effectively outsourcing.

Regardless of whether your Internet involvement is an e-Commerce web site, a blog site, or an affiliate marketing web site, you can’t do it all on your own. Many newbies mistakenly believe they can get into an Internet business and make a ton of money with only an investment of their own time and effort. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Here are some of the most common tasks Internet business owners need help with:

• Web site design and maintenance
• Content writing
• Customer service management
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Help desk management

Hiring full or even part time direct employees to handle this work load is not an option for most Internet business owners so they turn to the same method of getting needed help used by large corporations the world over: outsourcing.

Finding the Right Freelancers

The explosion in Internet business has been accompanied by an explosion in the supply of freelancers in all fields. There are a number of Internet web sites that act as market places where free lance web site designers, writers, customer service experts, administrative support experts, and researchers make contact with Internet business owners who need their services.

While this is a terrific source of the kind of temporary help you need, there are some serious pitfalls of which you should be aware. Here are some of the more common ones.

First, if you have owned your own business before, you might be tempted to think of freelancers you hire as employees. Don’t! They are independent contractors and if they are any good at what they do, you are not their only client. While it is a good idea to build relationships with quality freelancers for future work, this does not mean failing to establish delivery dates and project guidelines.

Second, many freelancers are from countries foreign to where your web site is located. In many cases this leads to very low prices, but remember you often get what you pay for. If you are hiring ghostwriters for pennies, the results you get may be barely understandable in the language native to your business. Content filled with grammatical and spelling errors does little to impress your Internet visitors.

Third, do your homework before selecting a free lance web site marketplace. Some are better than others and consequently attract better freelancers. Check online reviews of their services and talk to any Internet business owner you know for referrals.

Fourth, make sure you get work samples from any freelancer you are considering hiring. Try to get samples that relate to whatever task it is for which you are seeking help. If you need help redesigning your blog web site, get links to similar blog sites the freelancer has designed.

Fifth, set a budget and stick to it. In addition, a clearly stated agreement between you and the freelancer specifying project specifications, delivery dates, and payment schedule, is an absolute must.

Finally, don’t be afraid to cut your losses quickly. If you’ve hired a freelancer who doesn’t respond to emails and fails to meet early delivery dates, it might actually be cheaper in the long run to seek another freelancer right away.

About the author: Roko Nastic is writer and editor at WebmasterFormat, website developed to help webmasters build and maintain successful websites. Visitors to WebmasterFormat can enjoy a lot of useful tips, latest news and web hosting reviews.