Work.com Small Business Community Blog

Twitter for Business - A Starter Guide

All this blabbing on about which business and SEO Twitterers to follow, and I realize that first of all, a lot of you busy business people need a quickstart guide to using Twitter, and also some good reasons why to use Twitter, so here you go.

Here's to Twitter not being stupid and boring for you! I'm sure you'll come up with lots of interesting business uses for it. Please let us know usernames of people to follow or great things you've done with Twitter for business.

Twitter for SEO - Starter Follow List

Are you on Twitter yet? Here's a quick-start list of who to follow to learn more about search engine optimization for your business. Following up on my previous list of Twitterers for Business, here is a list of Twitterers for SEO. Follow them to pick up the latest SEO advice for your business, and make sure to add value and increase the chance that they will follow you too by Twittering your SEO tips you've learned as well:

• sugarrae
• dannysullivan
• graywolf
• HawaiiSEO
• rustybrick
• jillwhalen
• seosarasota
• sengineland
• lorenbaker
• Search Marketing Gurus
• jessicabowman
• Aaron Wall
• Greg Boser
• stuntdubl
• sitelogic
• aviw
• kevinnewcomb - Search Engine Watch

If you know other people to follow for SEO advice, or if you are one of them, please add your Twitter handle to the comments.

How to Find the Top Blogs in Your Business Niche

I just checked out the new blogged business blog directory and Work.com community leader Anita Campbell's Small Biz Trends blog is a top-rated blog there. If you are a business looking to participate in conversation with your niche community online, blogged is a great tool to explore what's out there.

ReadWriteWeb lists 6 other ways to identify top blogs in any niche:

1. Technorati blog finder
2. Del.icio.us blog bookmarks
3. StumbleUpon
4. Google Reader Recommendations
5. AideRSS
6. Ask.com Blogsearch

Google's Matt Cutts Gives Tips to Small Business Owners

Matt Cutts of Google gives great advice to small business owners about local search, Wordpress, video, sitemaps, and site setup.

Guy Kawasaki's Alltop.com - All Business News in One Place

Now you can keep track of what's happening in business, all on one web page. Entrepreneur, blogger and author Guy Kawasaki just started a fantastic new business resource for small business owners and entrepreneurs - Alltop.com's small business page, which aggregates the best business news feeds from top business sources around the web, allowing you to get the latest business news at a glance.

You can  preview each story by mousing over its headline, so you can quickly scan top business stories. Featured are headlines from all the greatest business sites, including NYTimes Small Business, Startup Nation, Forbes.com, Entrepreneur.com, Inc.com, Fast Company.com, Work.com (our Guide of the Day feed - thanks for featuring us Guy!).

Congratulations to Work.com guide authors and bloggers whose blogs are also featured - Carmina Perez's Mogulette-in-the-Making blog, Scott Allen's The Virtual Handshake Blog, and Anita Campbell's Small Business Trends.

alltop, alltop.com, guy kawasaki, small business, entrepreneur, entrepreneurs

List of Social Voting Sites Relevant to Business

Besides Bizsugar, the digg-style application which I am finding so sweet, there are many other social news and voting sites that are applicable to various business niches from insurance to real estate. Here are some more social voting and news sites to which your fans may submit your business blog post, article or Work.com guide, or you can scan to get ideas on what to write:

• AMPM Insure Insurance Community - insurance articles
• bizSugar - the hottest business topics
• digg world & business
• RealEstateVoices - real estate news
• Sphinn - internet marketing
• YCombinator - startup & entrepreneur news

As always, please share others you may know of!

bizSugar

Check out bizSugar, a site where you may submit and vote on the best business articles from around the web.

Updating Your Local Google Listing

Mike Buckley, thanks for linking to Carrie Hill's Updating Your Local Google Listing guide on your blog Mine Your Own Business. And Carrie, congratulations on the guide mention!

Carrie Hill is a marketing consultant at Blizzard Internet Marketing, which specializes in online marketing and design for hospitality, travel & tourism industry clients with a focus on increased visibility and ROI. Carrie's expertise lies in the areas of online reputation management, advanced paid search strategies and on-site optimization. Carrie has presented at Search Engine Strategies - Travel and writes a regular column for SearchEngineWatch.com about Small Business online marketing.

New Work.com Members

• Todd Mumford, SEO Visions, Vancouver, Canada, social bookmarking
• Resource Nation (website), which matches businesses to vendors
• Karen Knutsen of BTI Benchmark Control, Hackensack, New Jersey, risk control and knowledge management consultants

Get a Business How-to of the Day

There are now two new ways to get the latest business how-to's, advice, and solutions from Work.com - you may subscribe to the Work.com Guide of the Day feed or you can follow Work.com on Twitter.