The Social Forge Episode 9: Office Space, Images and YouTube for Business
If you have been listening to our podcasts we like to start each episode with an inspiring quote from an entrepreneur or thought leader from around the world. This Weeks Inspiring Quote is attributed to Elizabeth Gilbert who said: “Stop wearing your wishbone, where your backbone ought to be.” If this is your first time joining us on The Social Forge and you are looking for some inspiration, you can go to the SocialMediaWright website, we will have a link in the show notes and look for the menu button marked inspiration. We have collected between 100-200 quotes from business leaders and entrepreneurs in a great graphic image that you can download or share on social media. We also publish a new quote every morning at 7 AM on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Topics This Week: In our Business Section: Office Space In our Website Development Section: Images In our Social Media Marketing: YouTube for Business Business Section one of the first things you need to think about when starting a business is where will your business operate if you are planning on opening a retail location or a restaurant where a physical address is required to sell your wares or your food and beverages this is paramount to getting your business off the ground the old expression location, location, location rings true as you need to look at facilities that meet your needs, are affordable and will generate sufficient traffic that will hopefully lead to sales. You also need to assess what is around you and amenities like parking that may be a necessity to the success of your business if you are a business that provides a service like a consulting practice, or design practice or similar type industries where you don’t offer an opportunity for people to walk in to purchase your products a home office may be an excellent starting point for you Some of our biggest companies can trace their roots to starting in a garage so there is nothing wrong with using a home office. things you may want to think about for your home office, is do you have the space to support your business operations, where do you plan on meeting clients, at their location, at a mutual location like a coffee shop or will you have them over to your home do you have a team of staff that will need to work out of your home do you have any concerns about representing your business out of your home, some people do and some people don’t and that is something that you will need to think about you have heard the old expression that perception is reality, is that something that concerns you? would you be just as inclined to hire an attorney who worked out of their car as you would in hiring an attorney that works out of an office tower, just something to think about? if you are planning a home office and want some ideas or are looking to make improvements in your current home office you can check out the Pinterest board Home Offices for SocialMediaWright. We have over 650 pins related to home offices and home office organization. you would be surprised what some people can do with bull clips or have you considered using lego brings to organize things, some people have we have pins of large home offices, small home offices, home offices under the stairs and home offices found in closets, so if you are looking for inspiration check that out. the other end of the spectrum is renting a full-size office suite close to amenities but your annual monthly lease cost could be several thousands of dollars per month, which for a start-up could be a heavy financial burden to bear especially if the office may not be used to full capacity for some time, as it can take a while to secure a client base for a long time these were the two extremes either work from home or rent office space on a yearly basis now, fortunately, there is a third option which has been growing in popularity over the past several years that is called co-working so if you are not familiar with the idea, think of a hotel. A hotel room provides you with a place to sleep, to work, to relax, to use a shower and you can rent it for the day, a week, a month and some people have actually lived out of a hotel room Co-working is kind of similar but for a work environment With Co-working, you can rent a desk by the day or by the week. You can have a different desk or a dedicated desk and many co-working environments also offer offices to rent varying the prices based on square footage and whether the office comes with a window. Most Co-working environments offer meeting rooms that can be rented by the hour and offer a host of amenities including photocopying, beverages and a place to relax. There are a number of major organizations in the co-working space and a number of independents so if this is something that you are interested in you can look for co-working environments in your city or town, look at the prices and take a tour they will be more expensive than your home office but far less expensive then renting office facilities on an annual basis the locations also provide a professional appearance which depending on the services that you are offering could be a reason to think about them, remember that perception thing. on a previous episode, we talked about Local SEO and I really believe it will become even more important as more small businesses start to utilize it. we are working on our own Local SEO Guide and Checklists called Meet Your Community and one of the things you will find with Google My Business when it comes to your address, is they want a location where people can come and meet you, which is one of the reasons they likely discourage the use of a PO Box. if you plan on taking advantage of Local SEO and you weren’t comfortable listing a home address, a co-working environment may be something you want to think about. I’ve worked in co-working environments and we are shopping for one currently for SocialMediaWright. Beyond the office spaces they provide, many organizations in the co-working space have networking events to help your business grow, so that’s something else to think about. Website Development you have heard the expression that a picture is worth a 1,000 words most websites that I can think of are made of three types of elements: 1) text 2) pictures and 3) videos last week we talked about mobile platforms for your website and how speed is an important thing in the mobile user experience one of the things that you can do to help increase the speed of your website is looking at your images images can sometimes be very large in size when you download them from the web. If your website is only going to display an image at 1200 pixels wide and your image is 5000 pixels wide it won’t have a problem being displayed but the image itself is bigger than it needs to be which can cause the loading of the image to slow down your website things you may want to consider when developing your website is determining the maximum size for images to be displayed in the theme that you are working with and reduce the image size to correspond to that size to reduce the file size. if you are using a wordpress.org platform, look at plugins that optimize your images when they are uploaded to your media folder in WordPress. images often have various amounts of data buried in the image that has nothing to do with the rendering of the image using a plugin to optimize your image will help strip out this data making for a smaller image file without compromising on quality a program that we use for SocialMediaWright is called Imagify which works to optimize our images that we upload to the site. you can also set your website up so it lazy loads your images which means the images that can’t be seen on your webpage will only load when that portion of the website comes into view on the display screen. This can help with page speed loads. if you ran the Google Page Speed Insights we mentioned last week one of the suggestions might be using newer image compression methods that could play a role in reducing your image files sizes like JPEG2000, JPEG XR and WebP. -other options you can consider to work with your images and your website is deploying a content distribution network or CDN as they are often referred. What a CDN is, is a website with servers all over the world that have a copy of your website. That way when someone accesses your website, the images and the files are served to them from a server closer to them thereby increasing the speed of the download. when it comes to your images, you want to make sure the file size is as small as possible without impacting image quality or how you want it displayed on your website there are also options that you can choose with your website to determine how images will work on the site which can help increase the speed of the site. one of the other things that I want to mention when we talk about images but it has nothing to do with image loading but rather getting the most SEO value from your images you see I can show you a great picture of a lake and ducks on a lake and that is what you see, what a computer sees is a blank canvas. we are not at the point where a computer can determine what an image is all about but we can help them out with alt tags. alt tags also known as alt attributes is a line of text that can be added to an image to tell a computer what the picture is about. This is often a great place to tie your image back to your page or post when trying to optimize for your keywords so just a quick tip make sure you complete the alt tags on all your images. Social Media Marketing at present, the single biggest search engine on the web is Google, probably no surprise there the second biggest is YouTube. People turn to YouTube to find answers to questions that they have and to watch videos of people showing them how to do something or to entertain them. we are going to talk about youtube today in a previous episode, we talked about some of the tools you can use
