The only reason you’re here reading this on this website right now is because you were either given a direct link to it from something on social media or perhaps did a Google search on a few keywords and came across us. You might also be one of the fortunate few who get the emails too!
That’s the name of the game these days; being found! More to the point, being easier to find than, hopefully, your competitor.
It can be quite hard work and, at times, expensive to achieve this, and for us at StartUp Mindset, there would be little point in sharing something like that at this stage of your business.
We are very fortunate that there are platforms out there that have a side hustle which is free and they can count on other arms of their businesses to make money for them at this time. To this end, we can take advantage of their powerful platforms and get our businesses found.
The Coin Flip
The other side of the coin though is that we instead spend time rather than money to achieve this. As a startup I appreciate having so little of this, but you have to decide what works better for your business: spending time or money.
Google My Business
This is the first and fastest way for any business to be found. Think how many people look up things on Google. Google will always favor their products over others, and if your business has a Gmail address, is on Google Maps, or you use a YouTube channel, then you already have a Google My Business account. Now all you need to do is simply go in and fill it out!
You can post about your business on a GMB account just like you can on Facebook or LinkedIn, and they allow third-party schedulers to do that for you as well.
If you use a Google search, then no matter what browser you use make sure you sign into using your email and password (you can always get a password reminder if you’ve forgotten). Check out the link in the section title and get started.
LinkedIn has an excellent and rewarding relationship with Google. I’m sure you’ve noticed that when you put a person’s name into a search you normally find a LinkedIn profile crop up at the top. This isn’t accidental!
LinkedIn has ensured that they get frequently index-linked and crawled by Google every single day. This means as you update your profile and put up articles, it’s submitted in a search every single day as well. Although it’s not a product of Google, you’ll find it’s ranked normally on the first page and certainly helps you get found.
Medium
Have you started using this yet? It’s a great free tool and will be used in the future. I tend to use this alongside paid apps like Missinglettr. It’s Quora on steroids and frankly, in my opinion, more easy on the eye. You can update the notifications to hit you when you’re interested to hear from them. I get mine once a day and there’s some tremendous reads on it. You can follow people (they can follow back) and you get a real chance to reach lots of people if you use the correct tags.
Yoast
This is a little tricky in all fairness! You can only have Yoast if you have a WordPress website and unfortunately they’re not free! It is possible to do a website for next to nothing though as a startup. Depending on where you are in the world, you may also qualify for some voucher scheme or startup assistance. Make sure you speak to your local entrepreneurial network.
Yoast however, once you have the website, is FREE (there is a paid for version of Yoast too). This amazing “plugin” can be added for nothing through your website and it suits most themes. Please make sure you double-check before adding it though as a word of caution.
This tool gives you a fabulous traffic light signal of how effective your search engine optimization (SEO) is and even for readability! If it displays anything but green, it will also highlight areas that it deems needs changing and you can go back and correct it.
In Conclusion
Posting regularly on each of these platforms means you reach your audience faster and more personally. Remember to write content that suits your audience and not yourself! Strategize, plan, execute, and last but not least, monitor the effectiveness. If one isn’t doing it properly for you, then either work harder on it or drop it for something that has a more proven track record for your business.
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