Apr 25, 2019
If you have been listening to our
podcasts we like to start each episode with an inspiring quote from
an entrepreneur or thought leader from around the world.
This Weeks Inspiring Quote is
attributed to Elizabeth Gilbert who said: “Stop wearing your
wishbone, where your backbone ought to be.”
If this is your first time joining
us on The Social Forge and you are looking for some inspiration,
you can go to the SocialMediaWright website, we will have a link in
the show notes and look for the menu button marked
inspiration.
We have collected between 100-200
quotes from business leaders and entrepreneurs in a great graphic
image that you can download or share on social media.
We also publish a new quote every
morning at 7 AM on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
Topics This Week:
- In our Business Section: Office
Space
- In our Website Development
Section: Images
- In our Social Media Marketing:
YouTube for Business
Business
Section
- one of the first things you need
to think about when starting a business is where will your business
operate
- if you are planning on opening a
retail location or a restaurant where a physical address is
required to sell your wares or your food and beverages this is
paramount to getting your business off the ground
- the old expression location,
location, location rings true as you need to look at facilities
that meet your needs, are affordable and will generate sufficient
traffic that will hopefully lead to sales.
- You also need to assess what is
around you and amenities like parking that may be a necessity to
the success of your business
- if you are a business that
provides a service like a consulting practice, or design practice
or similar type industries where you don’t offer an opportunity for
people to walk in to purchase your products a home office may be an
excellent starting point for you
- Some of our biggest companies can
trace their roots to starting in a garage so there is nothing wrong
with using a home office.
- things you may want to think about
for your home office, is do you have the space to support your
business operations, where do you plan on meeting clients, at their
location, at a mutual location like a coffee shop or will you have
them over to your home
- do you have a team of staff that
will need to work out of your home
- do you have any concerns about
representing your business out of your home, some people do and
some people don’t and that is something that you will need to think
about
- you have heard the old expression
that perception is reality, is that something that concerns you?
would you be just as inclined to hire an attorney who worked out of
their car as you would in hiring an attorney that works out of an
office tower, just something to think about?
- if you are planning a home office
and want some ideas or are looking to make improvements in your
current home office you can check out the Pinterest board Home Offices
for SocialMediaWright. We have over 650 pins related to home
offices and home office organization.
- you would be surprised what some
people can do with bull clips or have you considered using lego
brings to organize things, some people have
- we have pins of large home
offices, small home offices, home offices under the stairs and home
offices found in closets, so if you are looking for inspiration
check that out.
- the other end of the spectrum is
renting a full-size office suite close to amenities but your annual
monthly lease cost could be several thousands of dollars per month,
which for a start-up could be a heavy financial burden to
bear
- especially if the office may not
be used to full capacity for some time, as it can take a while to
secure a client base
- for a long time these were the two
extremes either work from home or rent office space on a yearly
basis
- now, fortunately, there is a third
option which has been growing in popularity over the past several
years that is called co-working
- so if you are not familiar with
the idea, think of a hotel. A hotel room provides you with a place
to sleep, to work, to relax, to use a shower and you can rent it
for the day, a week, a month and some people have actually lived
out of a hotel room
- Co-working is kind of similar but
for a work environment
- With Co-working, you can rent a
desk by the day or by the week. You can have a different desk or a
dedicated desk and many co-working environments also offer offices
to rent varying the prices based on square footage and whether the
office comes with a window.
- Most Co-working environments offer
meeting rooms that can be rented by the hour and offer a host of
amenities including photocopying, beverages and a place to
relax.
- There are a number of major
organizations in the co-working space and a number of independents
so if this is something that you are interested in you can look for
co-working environments in your city or town, look at the prices
and take a tour
- they will be more expensive than
your home office but far less expensive then renting office
facilities on an annual basis
- the locations also provide a
professional appearance which depending on the services that you
are offering could be a reason to think about them, remember that
perception thing.
- on a previous episode, we talked
about Local SEO and I really believe it will become even more
important as more small businesses start to utilize it.
- we are working on our own Local
SEO Guide and Checklists called Meet Your Community and one of the
things you will find with Google My Business when it comes to your
address, is they want a location where people can come and meet
you, which is one of the reasons they likely discourage the use of
a PO Box.
- if you plan on taking advantage of
Local SEO and you weren’t comfortable listing a home address, a
co-working environment may be something you want to think
about.
- I’ve worked in co-working
environments and we are shopping for one currently for
SocialMediaWright. Beyond the office spaces they provide, many
organizations in the co-working space have networking events to
help your business grow, so that’s something else to think
about.
Website
Development
- you have heard the expression that
a picture is worth a 1,000 words
- most websites that I can think of
are made of three types of elements: 1) text 2) pictures and 3)
videos
- last week we talked about mobile
platforms for your website and how speed is an important thing in
the mobile user experience
- one of the things that you can do
to help increase the speed of your website is looking at your
images
- images can sometimes be very large
in size when you download them from the web. If your website is
only going to display an image at 1200 pixels wide and your image
is 5000 pixels wide it won’t have a problem being displayed but the
image itself is bigger than it needs to be which can cause the
loading of the image to slow down your website
- things you may want to consider
when developing your website is determining the maximum size for
images to be displayed in the theme that you are working with and
reduce the image size to correspond to that size to reduce the file
size.
- if you are using a wordpress.org
platform, look at plugins that optimize your images when they are
uploaded to your media folder in WordPress.
- images often have various amounts
of data buried in the image that has nothing to do with the
rendering of the image
- using a plugin to optimize your
image will help strip out this data making for a smaller image file
without compromising on quality
- a program that we use for
SocialMediaWright is called Imagify which works to
optimize our images that we upload to the site.
- you can also set your website up
so it lazy loads your images which means the images that can’t be
seen on your webpage will only load when that portion of the
website comes into view on the display screen. This can help with
page speed loads.
- if you ran the Google Page Speed
Insights we mentioned last week one of the suggestions
might be using newer image compression methods that could play a
role in reducing your image files sizes like JPEG2000, JPEG XR and
WebP.
- -other options you can consider to
work with your images and your website is deploying a content
distribution network or CDN as they are often referred. What a CDN
is, is a website with servers all over the world that have a copy
of your website. That way when someone accesses your website, the
images and the files are served to them from a server closer to
them thereby increasing the speed of the download.
- when it comes to your images, you
want to make sure the file size is as small as possible without
impacting image quality or how you want it displayed on your
website
- there are also options that you
can choose with your website to determine how images will work on
the site which can help increase the speed of the site.
- one of the other things that I
want to mention when we talk about images but it has nothing to do
with image loading but rather getting the most SEO value from your
images
- you see I can show you a great
picture of a lake and ducks on a lake and that is what you see,
what a computer sees is a blank canvas.
- we are not at the point where a
computer can determine what an image is all about but we can help
them out with alt tags.
- alt tags also known as alt
attributes is a line of text that can be added to an image to tell
a computer what the picture is about. This is often a great place
to tie your image back to your page or post when trying to optimize
for your keywords
- so just a quick tip make sure you
complete the alt tags on all your images.
Social Media
Marketing
- at present, the single biggest
search engine on the web is Google, probably no surprise
there
- the second biggest is YouTube.
People turn to YouTube to find answers to questions that they have
and to watch videos of people showing them how to do something or
to entertain them.
- we are going to talk about youtube
today
- in a previous episode, we talked
about some of the tools you can use to create videos for YouTube
and other video platforms
- today we are strictly talking
about YouTube
- it's important to note that
YouTube’s goal is to serve the right video, to the right persons at
the right time
- they have their own algorithms to
decide what video is going to be served up to someone
- if you have watched a video on
YouTube did you see a list of recommended videos at the end?
YouTube is trying to figure out what you like to watch and serve
you up similar type videos
- approximately 70% of YouTube views
come from recommended content by the YouTube algorithm, so you want
to make sure that your video is something people are going to click
on and watch because as they do it, YouTube is measuring the watch time by
user and if people are watching to the end of your videos they will
look at your content favourably and recommend to others to
watch.
- YouTube looks at watch time, which
is the time spent with your content and session time, the amount of
time someone spends on Youtube because the longer they are on
YouTube the more advertisements they can be served and the more
money they can make
- so you want to try and make sure
your videos are things people want to watch because those videos
will signal well to YouTube who will likely serve them up to others
to watch which gains you more views and possibly more
subscribers
- viewers will ultimately decide how
you will rank on YouTube so you want to optimize for people and not
for the algorithms
- its important that you keep an eye
on your analytics. If you find some videos are working and some are
not, get rid of the ones that aren’t because if people start to
watch and leave part the way through that is going to send a signal
to YouTube that there is an issue here. If you have videos that
work, continue to produce similar content and also keep an eye out
on your comments, looks to see what your fans want to see and
provide that to them.
Channel
- so as a business one of the things
you are going to want to set up is a YouTube channel. this will be
your central hub for posting your videos on.
- the channel is comprised of
several components and you can refer to the SocialMediaWright YouTube
channel to see some of these items.
- at the top of the page we have our
channel art, and this image will be seen at the top of the channel
on computer screens, mobile devices and tv when connected to
YouTube
- the dimensions for channel art are
2560 pixels wide by 1440 pixels tall but in creating your image it
should look fine on the tv screen but a part of your image will get
cropped out for computer screens and mobile devices. If you have
words on your cover image as we do, you may have to fiddle around
with their placement to have them shown.
- for us, we found producing an
image of 2560 pixels wide with a maximum height of 423 pixels
allowed us to properly display our words and then we used a black
background behind that image to display when shown on a tv
set.
- in developing your channel, I
would bear in mind that a significant portion of views in the US is
on a mobile device. Think from your own perspective which devices
do you consume YouTube on the most and keep that in mind when
designing your YouTube channel.
- after the cover art, you will have
your name and logo or image that you choose.
- on your channel art, you can have
links to your website or other destinations to a maximum of 5, so
we linked to the SocialMediaWright website, The Social Forge and
our newsletter Wrights Writings. To add your links click on the
Customize Channel button, go to the top of your channel art and
look for the pencil icon. When you hover over it, one of the
options should be Edit Links
- there are two sections on the
front of your YouTube channel, one for Returning Subscribers and
one for New Visitors.
- You should consider creating a
video for New Visitors to let them know what they can expect from
your YouTube channel.
- You also have an About section
that you should fully utilize to show people what you and your
channel is all about, keep in mind that if shared on social media
only a portion of the page will be displayed, approximately the
first 157 characters on Twitter and the first 73 characters on
Facebook so you want to make sure the opening sentences are going
to capture people attention.
- as you create videos you can
create a playlist for any videos that you are doing as a series. we
have a series called SocialSnippets so that has one playlist and we
are just starting a series of videos on Local SEO called Meet Your
Community and it also has its own playlist.
- once you have your channel set up
you need to start to create videos for uploading.
- there are a couple of tools we
have previously mentioned that you may want to check out, one is
TubeBuddy which we use and another
is VidIQ. Both will give you
suggestions as you upload your videos as to best practices that are
likely to help you get views.
- when you go to upload your first
video there are a couple of things that you will need to
do.
- give your video a title, if you
think back to our podcast that talked about headlines, the title is
very important you need to grab the persons attention as they
scroll through all the videos they can watch.
- you're going to provide a
description of the video, if you have keywords that you are trying
to optimize for that are related to the video content then consider
using them in the description.
- select tags for your videos based
on what people are actually entering into YouTube
- make sure you create a killer
thumbnail that is reflective of what the video is about that once
again like the headline is going to grab their
attention.
- select a playlist to add your
video to
- decide on whether you want
immediate release or schedule for sometime in the
future.
Conclusion:
We want to close out every show with
this thought. If you are not bringing value to the party, what are
you bringing? We recognize that you pay us with your time,
listening to the show and we hope that we have been able to offer
you some value in ways to help grow your business.
If you are looking for a place to
share ideas on how to grow your business with other entrepreneurs.
Consider joining the SocialMediaWright Entrepreneurs Facebook
Group. You can find the link on the SocialMediaWright Facebook
page.
If you like the show, please
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back next week until then everyone have a great week.