Today on the Your Business Brilliance Podcast show you will learn how to build a business online, the groups of people that you must follow on Twitter, How to find customers on Twitter, How to use LinkedIn to grow your audience and How you use Social Media to get PR.
Listen To The Full Interview with Donna Cravotta
Donna Cravotta  is the CEO of Social Sage PR. Donna works with entrepreneurs, small business owners and teams that are ready to rethink their online media strategy. She’s passionate about helping them discover opportunities, ignite conversations and foster relationships that result in unparalleled business expansion.
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How Do you Build an Online Business
Donna:           "It’s typically a three part approach that I worked with. One is to use very basic simple SEO and keyword strategies. So identify the words that your target market and the media that you would want to connect with are using online. And once you have those words people are already searching for those words. So if you start incorporating that into everything that you do online, whether it be at your website copy, on the backend of your website and social media. Even in talks that you have because when people hear you talk, they’ll go tell somebody else about you on social media but they’re going to use your words."
15-20 keywords that should sum up your business. Why 15-20? It's focused but still gives you enough variety. I look at keywords as something you want to be known for. When used, "You" immediately spring into mind. It's similar to Guy Kawasaki's 3 word mantra philosophy.
How do you find key words that apply to your industry?
Donna:            You can go to Amazon or any online shopping site but in Amazon what I’d like to advise my clients to do is go find a book that you either wished that you wrote or you would give it those are people’s exact words. Those people are usually a good indication of who your target market is. Because they’re reading the book that you would give to a client.
You find those words and you start building them into what you’re doing and you’ll know…you know right away what is the right word. It’s like a little internal download of keywords that you get because you know your business, you know your clients, you know how you can help them. So you get an emotional trigger when you see that right word.
Next you need to be what Donna calls Business Ready.
Donna:            If you have everything on your website this is what’s called business ready. You get everything on your website setup so everything that you have to sell and everything that you do is there. So they go and they can be at their own comfort level. You have your social media brands consistent to match your website, so as they navigate from one site to another, they remember you’ve helped them. Now they want to see what you’re about.
Human beings tend to feel comfortable with consistency. As much as we think we like spontaneous, spur of the moment, trendy, what we really want is consistency and routine. It may sound boring, but consistency = safe, and nature has a safety basis.
How to Follow People on Twitter Strategically
On social media, we tend to follow, like, fan people, but there is a strategic way to follow.
Donna:            I advise my clients to pick up to five influencers' that you are going to grow into in your business, competitors who are just a little…I don’t love the word competitor but somebody who’s in your industry that’s just a little ahead of you and it’s a little bit of a stretch like maybe you’ll be there in a year and see what they’re doing and the media that you want to connect with.
By following people who are ahead of you in your industry, you get to see what they are doing, how they are engaging with in industry and customer and you can emulate their tactic but giving it your own unique perspective. Connect to media personalities that you would want to report on you. See what their interests are and target your tweets that are interesting and eye catching.
Twitter can be used to find customers. Why, because Twitter is used as a cry for help. But you need to be there when they are there.
Donna:           We’ve got another client who helps baby sleep. So she trains babies how to sleep. So she was trying to apply these strategies and she called me up very frustrated and she said it’s not working and I said what time are you going online? And she said 10 o’clock in the morning.
I said people don’t care if their babies are sleeping at 10 o’clock in the morning. You need to be online when they’re in pain. When they’re ready to sell their babies. And she did, she just switched it up and she went on at midnight before she went to bed and within a couple of weeks she saw a difference. And this was less than a year and she debut  on a web TV show for parenting.com.
How to Use LinkedIn to Grow Your Audience
I asked Donna to talk a little bit about LinkedIn. We’ve always understood LinkedIn as the online CV because it originally used to find jobs but can LinkedIn be used for business purposes?
Donna:            LinkedIn has got such incredible search engines and algorithms. Just by having a complete profile, things will start to happen. You’re filling everything out, connecting with people that you used to work with, putting down alumni information because if you went to a college that has been around for a hundred years, you’re not connected to everybody on LinkedIn that ever went to that college. It’s enormous, and the other thing…this is my favourite statistic about LinkedIn and I just recently checked it again just to see if it’s still accurate but people use 10% of the functionality.
So if you use 15% of the functionality you’re ahead of the game. And LinkedIn has some new features that they have just released in the last couple of months and they’re incredibly powerful. One is you could be a publisher on LinkedIn where instead of just publishing a little blur than a link to your blog, you can publish your entire blog on LinkedIn. The whole blog.
Donna has covered two of the three legs needed to build an online business. The first was SEO, the second was Social Media and doing Social Media we covered LinkedIn and Twitter. Now the third element.
As business owners, the Holy Grail seems to be getting PR. PR in newspapers and televisions. We did a previous episode on this into how you can find people to help you to do PR. But Donna talks about a different approach, using social media to connect with the bright people so that you can get free publicity
Donna:            Third piece is the PR and what you do is you use those two things. Both the keywords and the social media strategy to connect with the media that you want to have a relationship with and it works better than a press release.
Donna:            Building a relationship with them could be as easy as re-tweeting their stuff, commenting on a blog post, sharing it. They want to know somebody’s reading this, they want to know somebody cares. They want to look at you and see that they can grow their audience through you so this is where a really solid social media following is going to help you to get media
Links, Resources & Mentions

Donna's Website - www.SocialSagePr.com
Donna on Twitter
Donna on Facebook
Donna on Linkedin

Listen To Donna's Full Interview Below.
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