Facebook has fast become a major social networking website for meeting other business professionals in Las Vegas and it is also quickly becoming an essential marketing tool to help market your Las Vegas business or company. If you don’t already have a personal page, create a facebook page right now. Once you create your facebook profile page, be sure to add a fan page for your business.

Reasons Why You Need a Facebook Fan Page:

1. It’s 100% Free – in these times, this is an invaluable and no-cost way to market your business products and services.
2. PR – You can publish articles, links to your blog/s, website or any interesting or helpful articles to your fan page that can help you communicate with people in your network and your fans and help keep your business in their mindshare.
3. Fan page is public – this means that major search engines such as google, bing, and yahoo! can index the page and your page can come up in their search results.
4. Personalized URL – upon reaching 100 fans, you can register for your own custom facebook URL (i.e. www.facebook.com/yourcompanyname)
5. Viral Marketing – when you post content to your fan page, it’s automatically added to the pages of all the fans that follow your fan page.
6. Applications – you can choose from dozens and dozens of apps that can help interact with your fans including photo galleries, polls, RSS feeds from your blog or presentations.

Social marketing and social networking is very important for Las Vegas businesses to participate in, now more than ever. As I always say, if you are not participating, your competition is.

For this reason, I have compiled a list of links to all of the top social networking websites. You should sign up, fill in your profile information as completely as possible, and log in occasionally to participate, find and add friends and share information and gain exposure for you company and its products and services.

• Social Networks in the Yahoo! Directory
• Social Networking God: 350+ Social Networking Sites from Mashable.com
• Top Social Networking Sites for Entrepreneurs
• Social Networking Websites Review 2009 – TopTenReviews
• List of Social networking websites – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Top 20 Social Networking Websites – Work Exposed the Blog

Your website can be a valuable sales tool and lead generation tool, especially in a tough economy. I’ve compiled several ways in order for you to increase website traffic to your Las Vegas website.

• Ensure META tags (title, description, and keywords) are as targeted an accurate as possible. These are tags that are in the back end of the html code.
• Ensure you are listed on the major search engines – make sure you are listed on the Top 10 Search Engines
• Make sure your content is up-to-date, accurate and gives a visitor a reason to return – keep a clear call-to-action on the home page.
• Clearly define the benefit that your products and services present to your potential customer.
• Focus on your content and make sure you write about one topic per page, don’t cram several topics on the same page.
• Ensure your website has a links and/or resources page. Helpful links are valuable to visitors and external links to big website increase your search engine ranking as well.
• Social Networking, sign up for free social networking websites, create a rich profile, add friends and communicate what you are up to… friends and colleagues can be your best advocates.

In addition to the above, check out some great articles and resources on increasing website traffic:

• How to Increase Website Traffic – wikihow.com
• Increase Traffic to Your Website – Web Traffic 101 -seologic.com

Viral marketing and adverising is a non-traditional “word-of-mouth” online and internet marketing tactics and strategies that utilize your social networking to raise awareness for your company or business. It can be a very powerful marketing tool as your website or business information can get passed through social networking onto others, from consumer to consumer.

Here are some articles that explain the concept of viral marketing for your Las Vegas business or company:

Tips for Optimizing Viral Marketing Campaigns
By Brady Brewer, ClickZ

Viral marketing, or “refer-a-friend,” email campaigns have received a lot of attention in the media recently. These campaigns, which encourage recipients of promotional emails to forward the messages to their friends, have garnered both positive and negative reviews from consumers, privacy advocates, and industry pundits. read more.

Viral Marketing Articles, Online Viral Marketing Tactics – www.geocart.com

Everything that we’ve been taught online and off says that we should prevent rather than spread viruses…right? Well, when it comes to creating a buzz about your online business, spreading a virus—or more accurately—leveraging the power of viral marketing, could be just what the doctor ordered. read more.

Viral Marketing Ideas – Out of the Box Viral Marketing Tactics – palmerwebmarketing.com

If I were to rank the effectiveness of each marketing avenue for most businesses I’ve worked with, here’s how they stack up. Word of mouth, Email Marketing, Organic SEO, Paid Search, Display Advertising… read more.

As a resident of Las Vegas myself, I have visited many Las Vegas restaurants, hotels, casinos, bars and entertainment venues of one sort or another in my spare time. Your spare time to relax can also be an opportunity to meet people within the Las Vegas community and talk, take interest in others and talk about each others careers and businesses. Consider this advice when you’re away from the office, always think about marketing yourself and your business.

The following is a list of places that I frequent where I have directly met people through casual contact that have led to making strong business relationships, new leads and new business:

• Starbucks Coffee on Village Center Circle in Summerlin
• Las Vegas Athletic Clubs
• Vintner Grill in Summerlin
• The Artisan Hotel
• Red Rock Casino, Resort & Spa
• Sapporo
• Einstein Bagel
• RoadRunner Las Vegas
• Agave Mexican Restaurant and Bar

Managing your company’s computer network here in Las Vegas can be a time consuming and confusing job: adding computers to your network, configuring a wireless network, ensuring your computer network has the proper security and maintaining and backing up your company’s valuable data. If you do it yourself or have a non-qualified employee managing your computer network, you may be in for more trouble than it’s worth.

As a marketing professional, I recommend outsourcing all of your server, computer, email and IT support to a professional local Las Vegas company. We work closely with NetEffect, based right here in Las Vegas.

About NetEffect

NetEffect of Las Vegas provides a wide range of computer and IT support and consulting services for small and medium businesses in Southern Nevada. Our cost-effective IT solutions let you focus on running and growing your business rather than wrestling with technology. We operate seamlessly with your business, and provide you and your staff with knowledgeable, friendly engineers. We’re your virtual IT department.

NetEffect is your single point of contact for all technology-related solutions. We can meet your IT needs regardless of your industry. If you’re looking to outsource your IT role, then look no further. NetEffect will provide you with an efficient solution to manage all of your IT needs.