SpeedieConsulting

There are several tools available that can help you manage your online “presence”, from tools to manage your Twitter account requests and auto tweet on messages. From those to help you manage your many various social media profiles and those simply there to deal with customer support issues or enquiries.

Getting your website to work harder for you is a great way to maximise efforts while minimising time. Talking with potential clients in the last two weeks has reminded me of the real benefits of running a website using Wordpress. Not only do you get a state of the art, updatable, feature rich content management system (for free), you get a whole raft of plugins which allow you to automate some of the more mundane processes.

Now a quick message from the dark side before we continue. Some of the techniques we will discuss can and have been abused. This is not the goal. The goal is to allow you to produce marketing messages or web content and then consistently syndicate them in the right places, all the while building your business in the long term.

Wordpress for example has plugins that will allow you to upload a huge amount of content or convert data files into blog posts, so you “could” build lots of web pages really quickly and then syndicate that across the web. That is a bad idea. What we suggest you do, is have content prepared and then uploaded it so that the content goes live every few days. Making sure the content is unique and not just a churned spreadsheet. In this way, during a lean period or when you get a bit of time you can prepare content, add it to your site and then forget about it for a while.

Other plugins will take a post and notify your twitter followers as soon as it goes live. This is a great tool as it cuts out the little things you will not do consistently. There are other plugins that will notify Facebook too.

Sitemap plugins will automatically update themselves when new content is added and then send themselves off to the major search engines, plus they can create a useful page on the site for visitors too. These are all automatic.

There are tools to auto submit your content to a random selection of social bookmarking accounts. Again this can and has been abused.

The Wordpress RSS feeds that are automatically created and maintained by the system also have huge potential for syndicating your content across the web. We wrote about some “tricks” with Wordpress RSS feeds here:

http://www.speedieconsulting.co.uk/a-couple-of-tricks-with-wordpress-rss-feeds/

As you can see, we really rave about Wordpress. For a small business, we can’t think of another system that can do some much for you automatically and consistently.

Another tool you can and should look into, autoresponders. These are great tools that do a lot of your initial customer contact, support and deal with enquiries. We have written about these before:

http://www.speedieconsulting.co.uk/how-would-you-like-to-have-an-extra-pair-of-hands-to-help-handle-your-incoming-enquiries/
http://www.speedieconsulting.co.uk/using-autoresponders-in-your-business/
http://www.speedieconsulting.co.uk/services/autoresponder-courses/

You can also integrate Autoresponders with Wordpress like we do on our websites.

Finally,  we have been trialling Hummingbird for Twitter and Hootsuite.  Hummingbird is a great little tool as you can set it to search the “Twitosphere” looking for tweets and people who have a  common interest and then sends them a follow rewquest, if they follw you back it keeps the link, if not after a while it will remove it.  This is a good way to manage some parts of your twitter account.

Hootsuite has a huge range of tools  but the one we love is the ability to preload a spreadsheet of tweets and set them to go out at a a date in the future.  So you can set up daily or weekly marketing messages to be published on your twitter account.  This is not to replace your normal activity but gives you a way of being consistent.

Hopefully this ramble has given you some food for thought. Want to share a useful tool that does some heavy lifting in your business? Please share…