Issue link: https://www.massageandbodyworkdigital.com/i/82405
ABMP MEMBERS CAN ACCESS THE FREE WEBSITE BUILDER IN THE MEMBERS SECTION OF ABMP.COM. ONLINE PROMOTIONS Groupon has set the standard for steep discounts offered to online consumers. Customers love them, and while such deals can entice lots of new clients to a business, it can also be a costly promotion. Still, you can launch smaller, less-costly promotions by offering discounts just to your own customer database. You can control the size of the discount, and you can limit the quantity of discounted services you sell. Gottschling tells of one massage 7. therapist, a TheGiftCardCafe.com client, who sent out an online promotion to customers and over three days generated $5,700 in revenue through online sales. In the previous six months, he'd generated just $900 in online revenue. TO OTHER SOCIAL MEDIA SITES First, be realistic. Yes, Facebook is important, and you can link your Facebook account to your website. Ditto for Twitter. Occasional tweets on massage-related or wellness-related topics can drive business your way. And a YouTube video demonstrating a particular massage technique can tell a powerful and compelling story. "But if you're spending three 8. hours a day doing social media, that's three hours you're not working on clients or doing other business tasks," Craig says. "Realize that this has to fit within a particular business plan. If you're not excellent at what you do, sprinkling some social media juice on top of it won't make it perfect or solve the problem." CONSIDER BRANCHING OUT CONSIDER SPECIAL AND OUTPOSTS No one can be everywhere, whether in the physical world or the cyber world. There are hundreds—if not thousands—of networking sites out there, each offering a slightly different demographic of potential customers. Rather than attempting to have 9. a regular presence on all, adopt what Craig calls the "anchor and outpost" strategy. Spend most of your media time on a few core sites: your website, obviously, plus maybe Facebook or Twitter. But you might develop a small presence on the more obscure sites, your outposts. "You upload your picture and a narrative about your business on those sites, and put your website address there and say, 'For more information, visit my website.' Then, you don't spend a lot of time on the outpost sites, but you've made it so anyone who is on those sites can find you. They just click through to your main site or your anchor site." THE GREAT DEBATE Do you let people post comments about your business or reviews of your work? There's always the chance—face it, the near-certainty—that someone, at sometime, is not going to be happy with you. Should your website help provide a forum for negative comments? 10. COMMENTS: Tough question. If you're going DEVELOP ANCHORS to have a viable web presence, local reviews are important. "You want to register your business with the Google Merchant Center," says Cyrus Shepard, customer education expert with SEOMoz, a company that provides search engine optimization software. Yahoo and Bing have similar services. The more people read reviews of your business on City Page, Yelp, and the like, the greater the chances you'll show up on a Google search. "It's not necessarily the quality of the review, but the pure quantity of reviews that helps you show up," Shepard says. So in the end, maybe that old show business aphorism is true: "I don't care what you say about me. Just be sure to spell my name right." based freelance writer. Contact her at killarneyrose@comcast.net. Rebecca Jones is a Denver-