At least in our company, we get most of our client’s through Google searches done by companies looking for a blogging consultant or looking to hire a blogger for their company. I ran through our client list to see the number of companies that have contacted us to provide a professional blogger or to consult them on a social media campaign. One of the things that struck me was that a large number of them that had reached us or found us as a result of a Google search.
The conversation that prompted me to look at this in this light was a phone call from a prospective client. We had discussed our services and he was happy with our business model and thought that we would probably do business in the future. He then told that he had a difficult time finding a service such as ours, but eventually had found it through search. He explained the roundabout way he happened upon our site, and I recognized a common theme to his search. Everyone of the other clients had a similar story.
As a small business without a corps of sale people and without a huge marketing budget and a advertising team providing our message, we rely solely upon word of mouth, and being findable. I preach the same to each of our clients. In order for your business to be successful, it has to be findable. It’s nice to see the sermon actually works for me as well.
In the early part of 2005, I became a member of a social network called Soflow. This social network was an early vision of its founders. They could see the future and power of growing one’s profile and gathering contacts for business, and other benefits. I thought that it was such a good idea, I also invested some of my own time and energy to become a moderator of a group within the network called “Blog Buzz”. 
affect on business, including advertising, marketing and PR. The group became 220 members strong and this was before the time of mass invitations we see now with social networks. There were over 150 forums started and some great conversations took place as a result. Many advertisers, marketers and PR people were able to enter into the forum and ask simple questions, difficult questions, and ask for suggestions on growing a blog readership, what platforms were available and what blogs could do and what they were capable of accomplishing. I decided it was important enough of a group to migrate it over and make it a 
consumer had a problem with their product after purchase. They found the blog on the company website or through a search engine, and used the contact page on the blog. They could have also used the comment section of the blog as well, but chose to use the contact form. They explained their problem in the contact page and the blogger was able to immediately help them connect with the proper person to correct their problem or to allow an exchange of the product if necessary. This all seems very common in many cases, but it also provides a great opportunity to show other consumers that you are on top of customer concerns and work hard to resolve their problems if needed. This scenario offered a chance to post an article about the product problem, the reporting of the problem, and any resolution that has occurred as a result. This allows other customers to find perhaps the same problem and use the same process for resolution. A blog can also serve as a great customer service tool, and the resulting service can be used for some very important blog fodder.
The next network I decided to try was 
A couple of days ago, 
Finally, I looked over at the
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