Internet Checksheet – January 2010

Is your company taking advantage of the following free products and services?  Call the Arkansas Small Business and Technology Development Center at 501-683-7700 or Jason Young at the Arkansas Hospitality Association at 501-376-2323, if you need assistance with any of these products or services.

Be sure to use the same profile name across all websites if at all possible.  For instance, the Arkansas Hospitality Association is listed as “arhospitality” across most websites.  Be sure you set up correctly the first time because you often cannot change your profile name at a later time.

__ Facebook Fan Page – A Facebook fan page is an excellent way of developing good communication with your clients and giving that personal touch to your communication.  Fan Pages are advantageous for business because they have built in analytical tools and the ability to send targeted messaging campaigns. www.facebook.com

__ Flickr – Flickr is an image and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to host images that they embed in blogs and social media. As of October 2009, it claims to host more than 4 billion images. www.flickr.com

__ LinkedIn Group and Company Listing – LinkedIn is a social network for business professionals.  It offers many functions such as job boards, free resume listing, group linking, and other functionality geared toward business. www.linkedin.com

__ Twitter – Twitter is a free social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. www.twitter.com

__ Twitter Alerts – What are people saying about your company on Twitter?  Find out by using free twitter alert updates at sites such as TweetBeep - http://tweetbeep.com/

Google Services –

Google offers many free services that can be very advantageous for your business.  Google conducts 60% of all online searches in the world, and they want to help people find what they are looking for which includes your business.  All Google services can and should be tied into a single account, especially for small businesses. www.google.com

__ Apps – Google Apps are an online competitor to Microsoft Office.  Google apps include Calendar, Gmail, and Google Docs.  Google Docs allow you to create word documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and forms useable on websites, from any modern web browser.  (Don’t use any version of Internet Explorer with these as it is the slowest and least secure web browser available.  Use an alternative such as Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome.)

__ Alerts – Google Alerts allow you to see what people are saying about your business all over the internet.  Alerts let you know when Google finds something new online about your business, industry, etc.

__ Analytics – This is a free tool for use with any website.  It works by placing a small code snippet in the template of your site and then tracks anonymous usage data as people access your site.  It gives you extensive data about what sections of your website people visit, for how long, from what approximate location, allows you to set goals for driving traffic, and many other helpful functions.

__ Chrome – Chrome is a new web browser from Google that is the fastest and most secure on the planet.  It is based on the same software that Apple uses for their Safari web browser for Apple Macintosh computers and the iPhone.  It is updated automatically and therefore always up-to-date.

__ Local Business Center – Gives you control over the top entry Google shows you when you enter a Google Search result.  The Business Center allows you to enter your contact information, business description, hours of operation, photos, videos, your location on Google Maps, and to list coupons that are listed by your company’s search results.  This is an essential tool for making sure the first thing people see about your business is what you want them to see.

__ Picasa Web Albums – This is a free web photo sharing service that can be used to upload photos of your business to the web.  This service is less popular in the United States than Flickr but useful for Google Image Search purposes.

__ Profile – Google profiles can be another important way for people to find information about your business.

__ Sites – Google Sites allows you to make free and easy to customize web sites.  These sites are typically limited to a single purpose, but can be useful for special purposes such as “brochure” style websites, collaboration among large numbers of people, and for helping local associations and clubs to get better organized.  These sites are used by many for church websites, chamber sites, family blogs, and other uses.  Just explore and see what you think.

__ Translate – Adding Google translate to your site allows people who speak other languages to instantly translate your site into their native language.  While accuracy is not 100%, it is often enough to get the gist of what people would like to know.  This can be especially valuable for tourism based businesses.

__ Voice – Google Voice is a telecommunications service by Google. The service provides a U.S. phone number, chosen by the user from available numbers in selected area codes, free of charge to each user account. Inbound calls to this number are forwarded to other phone numbers of the subscriber. Outbound calls may be placed to domestic and international destinations by dialing the Google Voice number or from a web-based application. Inbound and outbound calls to US (incl. Alaska and Hawaii) and Canada are free of charge, while international calls are billed according to a schedule posted on the Google Voice website.

__ Webmaster Tools – This is a tool for your webmaster that allows them to see which links are broken on your website, detailed keywords and search queries associated with your site, other sites that link back to your website, allows you to upload a sitemap to Google that lets it find new content on your site more easily, and a few other functions that can help keep your site in top operating condition for your customers and to raise your Google ranking.

__ Youtube – Youtube is the most popular video sharing site in the world.  Even if you do not currently have videos with your business to share you should at least make sure to get your preferred username for branding reasons.

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