Starmark.com

You’ll notice that our website has changed – evolved, really. We’ve extracted the single most important part of our former site to be the forefront of our new portal. Call it a blog or a communication vehicle, call it whatever you like. For us, it is an online hub for information, trends and passion. This is a thought provoking space where you’ll learn about important industry movements and what fuels our passion and the passion of our clients.

This is the next step in Starmark’s digital journey and we invite you to come along for the ride. Really, tell us what you think. Feel free to send me an email with your thoughts and ideas at jmcclelland@starmark.com

Sincerely,
Jeff McClelland

If your company sells products or services online, you can increase your visibility by offering discounts to relevant associations, trade organizations, and people with popular blogs or enewsletters. Approach these groups and offer a discount on the purchase of your product or service to their members and subscribers. For example, if you sell Italian kitchen cabinets, a builder’s association or interior design blogger might be interested in offering their members a discounted price.

Continue reading ‘Promote yourself in bulk with group discounts’

Link building involves anything you do to point hyperlinks back to your website or blog from other websites. One of the easiest (and totally free) ways to accomplish this is to leave a comment on someone else’s blog. When doing so, you will be prompted to enter you name, email address and a URL. It’s not hugely important what your comment states. An elaborate display of your expertise is not required, although your remarks should be positive and intelligently worded. The URL field is where you really bring it home – literally. Through link building tactics like this, you can increase traffic to your site, create awareness and add credibility.

Continue reading ‘Blog comments are key to getting your URL out there’

In your industry, you’re an expert on something. And people want to read about it. Perhaps it’s “event planning,” if you’re a restaurateur. Or it could be  “saving in a recession,” if you’re in the financial industry.” Whatever your area of expertise, the Internet has forums that allow you to share your knowledge with the world.

Squidoo.com and Hubpages.com make it easy for people like you to compose articles on interesting topics. Within this community, you can also create a personal profile about you, your business and your accomplishments. Both of these sites allow you to create content related to your business and expertise. And if done in a thoughtful, compelling way, and updated or new content pages added (they are called ‘Lenses’ in Squidoo, and ‘Hubs’ in Hubpages) can create quite a following that could lead to new customers for your main business.

Continue reading ‘Market yourself as an expert on Squidoo and Hubpages.com’

Search engines love blogs. From a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) perspective, the structure of a blog – constantly changing content, lots of linking between pages, content that’s categorized and grouped – is very well suited for SEO. And from a corporate social media standpoint, corporate blogs give your company a platform to talk about company news, but also display another face to your  audience.

Continue reading ‘Create a blog, it's not for everyone, but it may be perfect for you’