If you go through the following 10 steps, you will gain clarity, save time and reduce social media overwhelm.

1. Be open-minded and change the traditional way you communicate with customers, employees, investors, partners, the media, etc. As an entrepreneur, it is important to create a social mind-set for relationship marketing, networking, engaging and collaborating.
2. Educate yourself and become familiar with all the categories of social media and how they can be integrated together as well as the entire marketing mix in order to leverage and maximise your efforts.
3. Pinpoint existing resources that may be needed for social media (employees, time, budget, tools, etc.).
4. Determine if you have weaknesses in your business that may potentially hurt you online (i.e., poorly designed website or no website, bad customer service, weak content, negative comments from customers, etc.)
5. Determine if you have strengths in your business that you can leverage online (i.e., available content such as videos, e-Books, or brand lovers who are already talking about you, etc.)
6. See what your competitors are doing with social media. Just observe and takes notes; do not be a copy-cat.
7. Identify your target audience, and determine when and where they hang out online.
8. Set clear goals and objectives. Goals are general statements (i.e., “We want to leverage social media to improve customer service”). Objectives are more specific and measurable (i.e., “By December 2010, we want to triple traffic to our website and increase sales by 20 percent”).
9. Decide what you want to use social media for (i.e., prospecting, recruiting, customer service, etc.) and how you want to engage your online audience. Do you want to use social media for communication, collaboration, education, entertainment or all of them?
10. Based on what you came up with in the last nine steps, select the social media categories and tools you want to use (social networking, video, podcasting, photo-sharing, blogging, etc.).

There are many more factors to consider before putting together a strategy; however, if done properly, these steps will give you a clear picture of the social media landscape and help you determine whether social media is right for your business or not.

1. Keyword Research & Selection

Keyword research and selection is the process of determining what keywords to target for a given site. For example, a website selling short-term apartment accommodation in Barcelona, Spain could target ‘holiday apartments Barcelona’, ‘Barcelona apartments’, ‘holiday let Barcelona’ or any one of a host of other permutations. Working out what keywords, if targeted, might result in interested customers finding the site falls under ‘keyword research’.

Once the list of possible keywords is formed, there must be a decision to narrow the selection down to one or a number of keywords over the others, in order to be cost-effective. Among other things, this could be based on, for example, how often that keyword gets typed into search engines. Obviously, there’s less reason to target a keyword that is not searched for very often.

Another consideration is the popularity of that keyword in your industry. Targeting very popular keywords will give you a lot of competition, and it could take a lot of time and money to rise to the top. Targeting a ‘secondary’ keyword will mean limiting how successful your SEO can be (because the most popular terms are searched for the most), but it will also mean less competition from other businesses on that keyword, and therefore a higher ranking.

2. Competition Analysis

The SEO process is very competitive, because every step up the rankings for a given keyword for one site means a step down for another, probably one with a very similar product. Competition analysis is the process of examining one’s more successful competitors in order to determine how they have achieved their results, both in searches and overall. This starts with a detailed examination of their site, and continues with the use of tools to analyze things such as the backlinks (i.e. links from other websites) that the site has. Having this information can greatly help to inform the marketing plan of your own site.

3. Site Structure

How a website is set up is an important factor in determining how search-friendly it is. What templates (if any) were used to create it, whether the URL is static or dynamic, internal navigation – all these things and more affect search rankings and need to be examined and possibly tweaked to improve results.

4. Content Optimization

It seems obvious, but the content of a website is crucial because (drum roll) it’s what people come to the site to find. If the content on a site turns them off, they will leave the site very quickly. If they like the content, they will stay and may spend. In addition to this, however, content affects search rankings.

Content optimization is the process of producing and modifying content to improve how well it ranks. It involves structuring pages so that they are as friendly as possible to search engine ‘spiders’, while still providing information that humans will like.

5. Link Building

In SEO, links are king. How many other sites link to the target site is a crucial factor in determining how well it will rank. The reason for this is because sites that are linked to by a lot of other sites are, on average, more likely to be useful, trustworthy and liked than sites that are not linked to as much. So it makes sense for search engines to rank site with more inbound links more highly.

Link building, then, is simply the process of getting more backlinks to the site, however this is done. This could include, for example, paying to have the site listed in a directory service, issuing a press release about the site, starting a blog about the company and inviting people to write on it, comment on the blogs of people who comment on your industry, and so on.

6. Social Media

Social media is things like forums, blogs, and message boards. Social media is used in SEO to get the word out about a site in communities that are most relevant to the product. For example, a site selling a weight loss product could target weight loss blogs and post messages that mention the product, hoping to drive traffic to the site. This can be a useful tactic especially when the market for the product is overcrowded and the only meaningful search times are very popular.

7. PPC

‘PPC’ stands for Pay-Per-Click. A PPC advertising campaign involves placing advertisements with a search engine such as Google. The placer of the ad selects keywords that determine where the ads appear. The ads then appear on web pages that contain the relevant keywords. The placing entity pays only for ‘click-throughs’ to the target site. PPC campaigns are used to simply to generate sales, and also for keyword research.

8. Statistics Analysis

Statistics analysis involves examining statistics from the site in order to look for ways to improve sales. Perhaps chief among the relevant statistics is examining the rate of ‘conversions’, in other words the how often someone visiting the site results in an actual sale. There are a number of tools for gathering statistics about a site.

9. Conversion Optimisation

Conversion optimisation is simply, as the name suggests, the process of modifying a website to increase the rate at which visitors to the site actually become customers. This often involves modifications such as structuring the layout and design of the website pages so that they are easy to read and understand.

10. Keeping It Up

This final step is simply the process of ensuring that good rankings and conversions are maintained. This is important because the world of SEO is very dynamic and competitive, so there will almost always be competitors in the same industry seeking to increase their rankings for the same keywords.

Your website is an investment in your business and therefore you would want a return on that investment. There for, to ensure a good ROI (return on investment), it makes good business sense to invest the time and money into your website – making it work for you.

ROI is a comparison between how much you invest, the return on your investment and how much you gain on the investment. Take the potential increase in sales and deduct the cost of the investment. This gives you the net gained. Now, divide the net gain by how much you invested. This gives you the ROI.

Take all the investments you want to make into your business (including investing in your website) with the projected ROI on each investment. Sort the list with the items with the most ROI at the top of the list.

While making your list keep in mind that fixing up or creating a website is a one time initial investment to improve sales while hiring a salesperson and/or buying link traffic will be reoccurring expenses.

Now don’t cheap out on the budget for the website. This is an important investment in your business and just as with everything else for your business, you want to make a good first impression to help land the sale. Focus on adding features and information that enhance the website, not just glitz and glamour, to improve the website ROI.

Your website is a 24/7 salesperson and has much more potential of attracting clients than a salesperson who you pay commission or a salary to!

There are some specific areas to look at to improve website ROI: