CERTIFICATE OF COMPLETION

All students who finish this program will receive a signed certificate of completion verifying their participation in the program.

Schedule

Session 1: Building A Strong Foundation

Creating Your Business Strategy

The first step in building your online business is making sure you have a clearly defined brand and business identity. Do you really know what makes your business different? Do your customers?

In this first section, we'll identify what makes your business or endeavor unique and sets it apart from your competitors. We'll examine the visuals and language that make up your brand, and evaluate whether your online presence, Web site, and social media presence communicates it accurately.

Through interactive exercises, you'll also learn about search basics and select key words to use for your online marketing, identify target audiences to target, and set specific, quantifiable goals for the remainder of the course.

Assessing Your Web Site

Whether you have a small business, a freelance enterprise, a non-profit, or a blog, this course assumes that you want to increase your web traffic, attracting new visitors while also retaining existing ones.

All your mobile and social media marketing efforts will ultimately direct people to your website and prompt them to take a specific action, so we'll talk about the basics of user experience, examine your site and make sure it provides visitors with a clear path to your product sales, to sign up for your newsletter, leave a comment on your blog, etc.

Copywriting and Building Community

We'll continue improving your website by discussing effective copywriting both for humans and search engines. Writing on the web is different than writing for print, and writing Google-friendly pages, menus, and headlines is an art unto itself.

We'll discuss building community around your site and moving beyond your own site to write articles and guest posts for other sites and publications, raising your own site's profile in the process. The session finishes with a homework assignment: be ready to work on your business strategies and come with them for the next session!

Session 2: Video and Search Engine Optimization

Video Content

With the rise and rise of YouTube and other online video media, no company can ignore this critical communications channel. We'll explore what's needed to create effective online videos, develop shooting scripts and produce our own videos ready to post online and share with classmates and, hopefully, the online community. This is a very hands on section, so be ready to go on camera!

Search Engine Optimization

We'll continue by diving deep into the world of search engine optimization and search engine marketing, and bring more advanced SEO and SEM strategies into play. This section will include individual site SEO audits and time to analyze what you can improve on your own Web pages to increase ranking and traffic. You'll also learn how to use online PR sites like PRWeb for your press releases and practice writing a release.

Session 3: Mobile Marketing, Local and Social Media

Mobile Marketing

We'll explore the brave world of mobile device marketing, including iPhone, Android, and iPad app building options and the critical importance of creating a mobile-friendly version of your website. If your site isn't mobile friendly, you've definitely got a problem, so we'll explore all the possible solutions too.

Google My Business and Local Marketing

Every time you get directions or ask Siri, Alexa or Google for the closest pizzeria, you're bumping into local search. This is a critical part of any retail business nowadays and can help your company drive traffic in a wide variety of ways, from showing up in the Google Search results map to having your car suggest that it's the closest business of its type.

Using Social Media (the Non-Facebook Portion)

This section focuses on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. We'll start by exploring smart ways to work with the LinkedIn community to build your business, then explore Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter, including the use of hashtags, identifying and taking advantage of trending topics, committing to regular updates and interacting with your followers. Social media, after all, is about engagement, not broadcast.

Session 4: Facebook and The Future

Facebook Marketing

In this last session we'll dive headfirst into Facebook and explore different strategies for using Facebook pages, events and advertising for your business. We'll cover how to foster a positive community on Facebook while managing trolls and negative feedback, empowering your team to represent your company, and cross-linking between Facebook and your website content.

But what really works on Facebook? We'll consider the evolution of the platform, mobile versus desktop, and the importance of local business services too.

Search & Social Advertising / Pay for Play

This portion of the course will feature a deep dive into online advertising, from search advertising and online advertising to social media advertising, with a focus on Facebook advertising. Topics will include how to boost posts and how to evaluate whether a campaign is profitable, along with how to set up and run Facebook and other social media and search campaigns and what kind of results to expect.

Managing Over the Long Haul

It's one thing to create new content during our course and something else entirely to manage content and customer relations over the long term. This last section will explore customer relationship management, content marketing strategies, social media strategies and direct marketing. We'll also talk about time management and balancing expectations and deliverables, with an eye to considering ROI and quantifying results while underpromising and overdelivering.

Open Discussion Time

Finally, the program ends with an examination of how the world has responded to your marketing efforts thus far, review your social media work, review any material that people still have questions about and work on a plan for you to take with you beyond this course.

Location

This certificate program will be held live on Zoom.