Small Business Web Design, Local Internet Marketing, Local SEO, Online Video, Training | LOCAL Na8ion West Palm Beach, FL

The difference between a local consumer and a local job seeker is the product they’re researching online.

Finding good employees is one of the biggest challenges any company faces and just like selling your products and services locally you have to position your company to attract new employees.

That’s why your local online marketing plan needs to include your job candidate. There’s a term in the recruiting industry to describe the majority of candidates – passive candidates. Because they’re not looking for jobs they’re tough to find – and even harder to woo away.

When Shannon isn’t helping me with Local Na8ion she’s VP Interactive at the largest recruitment marketing ad agency in the U.S.. Shannon’s pet peeve is when companies spend millions on a new consumer campaign and fail to include the job candidate in the process. Your current and prospective customers that you’re trying to reach with your marketing are also candidates that could be your next best hire. Think about it, many of us choose or reject the companies we consider for employment based solely on how we experience that companies brand or product.

You just have to make small adjustments to your marketing strategy to include job candidates. Make yourself a careers page. When you run online or print ads include a link to your careers page and make sure there’s a careers link right on your home page. That way your consumer or B2B marketing gets people thinking of you as a preferred employer, not just a product or service. Check out this interview of Shannon on using social media for recruiting on Bill Vick’s XtremeRecruiting.org. Use examples of Shannon’s career’s web site projects for Discover, BofA, and Fedex as illustrations of the content you want to include on your small business careers web site.

I’ve talked a lot about WordPress but I haven’t explained why it’s better than all the typical offerings pitched to small companies (products from Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google, YellowPages.com, CitySearch, and others). Today I’ll do that in just 200 words. To accomplish my goal I’ll just hit the highlights and leave further explanation for later posts.

• It’s the tool the Pros use and there is good reason for that
• Offers you tremendous SEO out-of-the-box – this means FREE search engine marketing
• Easy to write and publish new content with no need for technical knowledge
• It can be a web site, a blog or both
• People like me all over the world are showing you how to use it – for free
• For less than $100 a year you can get an equivalent web site and blog for what you’d pay a designer or programmer $2-$5K for
• It’s really free, (called open source) only pay for web hosting
• Infinite design and feature customization
• Access to WordPress community of contributors numbering over 10,000 to assist with design, programming, training or consulting (size of community drives competitive pricing)
• Geek stuff under the hood helping you without you needing to know Geek

QuickTime, iPhone or iPod Download.

In our session today, Episode 10 (run time 9:54) we cover how to get your small business web site and blog hosted and activated with our recommended web host MidPhase using a method called auto-install (also called a one-click install). In our next video how-to session we’ll cover how to select a FREE or Pro WordPress design for less than $100.

You may want to watch my previous posts on this topic where I have covered the reason why we recommend WordPress for your small business web site and blog. We also covered how to select a WordPress host which includes a useful web resource where you can read independent reviews on WordPress hosts.

By clicking on my link to MidPhase and then entering my discount code “GOTAPEX-ROX-01″ (no quotes) during the order process you’ll get three months of free hosting plus your domain name FREE for life. Make sure your MidPhase order confirmation page reflects the discount. The package should come out to less than $72 in total hosting costs for the year (12 months) at which time you’ll renew for the next year. Disclaimer: I receive a small commission if you sign up with MidPhase that helps me defray the cost of delivering Local Na8ion. Even if I wasn’t paid this fee we’d still recommend MidPhase because we’ve used them and they’ve lived up to their marketing claims.

I also mention in my video today that you should pick up a copy of WordPress For Dummies by Lisa Sabin-Wilson. It’s the perfect desk reference and self-paced study guide to help you learn WordPress. Grab a copy of WordPress For Dummies today.

Let’s recap why we recommend WordPress for small businesses in the first place.

From my Jan. 28, 2008 post “We Recommend WordPress for Small Business”

“It’s FREE, easy to use and update, has more built-in Local SEO Goodness than any comparable product, and you can use it to power your regular web site, not just a blog.”

and

“Did we mention that WordPress has an active community of over 10,000 contributors? They’re busy year-round making new theme designs that you can use on your site (most are free to use) along with adding specialty features and functionality (called plug-ins in WordPress) that do everything from power a job board, help you run a newspaper, or make the SEO goodness in WordPress even better.”

I hope you enjoy today’s video and as always, let me know your questions and comments.

Julian Seery Gude
editor Local Na8ion
Where you are is where it’s at

I am a happy midPhase affiliate and use and recommend their service. The majority of products and services I recommend do not pay me. But on the rare occasion where I’m both very satisfied with a product/service AND they have an affiliate program I will happily use it! If you’re interested in an alternative to midphase that is faster (also more expensive) try MediaLayer’s AppLayer hosting -it’s awesome!