Original post by, Justin Herring -Founder & Head of Digital Marketing at YEAH! Local

You wish your target clients, customers, or patients knew who you were.

Don’t you?

In fact, you probably think you are doing everything possible to increase your brand online so they can find you.

You may well be on your way to creating a great presence, but in this article I am going to help you out and discuss the 6 steps to create a total online presence for your personal or business brand.

I’m not going to dive into great detail about how to do everything, but I will provide you an outline of the online marketing tools and sources you can use starting today to grow your online presence.

Resource: Download a PDF of the 6-Step Guide

Listen

So I know this is rather broad, but you need to listen if people are talking about you and your brand.

Also, listen to what others are doing in your industry.

Here are some steps to take:

• Create Google Alerts for you, your company, your competition, clients, and industry terms.
• Create a Feedly account and set up 10-15 industry blogs to follow. We will use these later for social media updates as well.
• Add Clearbit Connect to your email. This is a Chrome extension I use that allows you to see juicy details about the people you are emailing. Below is an example of what it looks like in your Gmail account.
• Use AeroLeads to find emails and phone numbers while searching on LinkedIn.

• Check out a social tool like Buffer to monitor and post to social media accounts with ease. You can also create social media images quickly with a tool like Stencil.

Optimize Your Content Online

One of the easiest ways to get found online is through search.

This only happens if you write content your potential clients are looking for and optimize the content to be found for those searches.

This can get complicated, but don’t overthink it. Do the SEO basics and you will be fine.

1. Ask at least 10 customers what they would type in a search to find a business like yours.

Also, look back through any old emails where your clients asked you questions.

Use those questions to write new blog posts or a FAQ page.

2. Use a keyword tool like KWFinder.com (easiest and best keyword research software)

See an example of KW Finder below:

3. Start a blog and commit to posting on it once a month centered around 5 themes you want to be found for in search.

I recommend WordPress to setup your blog and you can find a variety of themes at MyThemeShop or codester.com

4. Share your blog posts on LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, Facebook, and Pinterest through Buffer.com which we mentioned above.

Do this more than one time as well by adding the blog post to Buffer.com scheduled to go out 15 times over the next month.

Claim Your Brand Online

To increase your personal brand presence, you must go and claim your online real estate.

Even if you don’t think you will use the certain websites much, go and claim your name or brand name.

All this will help your SEO and social media marketing.

Make time to build out strong profiles, descriptions, and links back to your website on these sites.

Most of these accounts will show up first when a potential customer Google’s your name or company.

Here are the top ways start:

1. Create and build out profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

2. Create and build out profiles on WordPress.com, Tumblr, Blogger, andWeebly.

3. Create and build out profiles on Pinterest, Instagram, Slideshare, and YouTube.

4. Add plugins to your blog and web pages that make all of your content shareable in social networks. (We recommend Social Warfare orSumo.com)

5. Share your blog posts on these networks (use Buffer.com mentioned above)

6. Share two blog posts from Feedly to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn each day.

7. Join ten active groups on LinkedIn with your optimal prospects in them (This will not be the same as what Linkedin suggests)

8. Find five active Facebook pages/groups with your potential prospects and “Like” or “Join” them.

9. Claim your Google My Business Listing

10. Claim your business location on Foursquare, Yelp, and Facebook.

11. Don’t want to do this yourself? Check out Knowem.com and get hundreds of social profiles built automatically.

Capture Emails

​​​​All the content, promotion, and profiles setup are for your potential clients to find you and then start to know, like, and trust you.

The easiest way for this to happen is by emailing them weekly.

Here are the steps to get started:

1. Pick out an email service provider that offers an autoresponder. I can personally recommend and have reviewed ActiveCampaign andGetresponse.

2. Create a “lead magnet” or reason someone would want to give you their email.

You can create an Ebook or a short PDF report.

Offer something more helpful than “sign up for my email newsletter”.

We offer a Free SEO Audit to entice visitors to sign up as seen in the example below.

3. Create an email form and popups on your site.

I can recommend Thrive Leads and Sumome to use.

People will say they hate popups, but they work so try it out.

4. Now you have collected emails so connect your RSS feed from your website to your email service provider.

Everytime you post a blog to your website your list gets emailed automatically.

5. If you really want to automate your emails set up a 52-week autoresponder campaign and set it and forget it.

Yes, it will take a day to put all your email content in, but once you are done you now have emails going out for the next year.

If you sign up for ActiveCampaign I can send you my 52-week automation example to load in your account.  Just email me with your details.

Get Reviews

The most cost effective and easiest way to grow your brand is getting reviews.

Make sure you pick 1-3 review sites and focus on getting as many reviews as possible.

• Setup the top review sites such as Yelp, Facebook, and Google My Business
• Focus on LinkedIn for B2B recommendations
• Send a personal note card after meeting with potential clients or networking contacts (hint: this leads to reviews)
• Print out business cards with the URL and QR code to your personal review website and hand them to everyone you meet. See example below.

​​​​Engage

You’ve set everything up and feel good about your online presence.

Now it’s time to really step up your game and engage with your followers, connections, and friends.

Here is what your daily social media marketing should look like (this can be done one time in the morning or evening)

LinkedIn:

• Message all new connections thanking them
• Message all profile viewers and politely asking to connect (must use a certain message for this)
• Congratulate connections on birthdays and job anniversaries
• Post a status update 1-3 times that day (hopefully you automated this through Buffer.com mentioned above)
• Send personalized connection request to 5 new prospects

Bonus: (Once a week re-publish a blog post on LinkedIn)

Twitter:

• Look at notifications and thank anyone who mentioned or retweeted you
• Check new followers and follow back who looks to be tweeting regularly
• Tweet 1-5 times a day (hopefully you automated this through Buffer.com mentioned above)

Facebook:

• Respond to Facebook invites and messages
• Write a couple comments on friends posts
• Check Facebook Groups you are in and engage with members
• Make sure 2 posts are set to go out on your Profile and Business Pages

Pinterest:

• Pin/RePin 1-15 times during the day to your boards and group boards with a tool called Tailwind.
• Follow back any new people or companies following you
• Respond to messages or group invites

So let’s get started shall we.