HubPages is a content distribution website where anyone can sign up, create content and publish it. The goal of the website is to have its users create extremely valuable content that is accessible to everyone on the Internet.

Publishing your content on HubPages is often better than publishing it on your own domain because HubPages has an extremely high page rank and is very well regarded by Google. In other words, content published on HubPages is much more likely to rank in Google than content published on your own website.

Interact with Your Readers

Try to establish yourself as an expert in whatever market you are trying to target.

One of the biggest benefits of HubPages is its active community element. If you produce good content, people are going to come to your HubPage and comment and ask questions. Respond to those questions. Don’t just put up pieces of content and let them sit there.

Build relationships with your readers. Those relationships can often turn into other business opportunities — clients, guest blogging opportunities, joint venture partnerships, and so on.

Aim to Raise Your Profile Score

Your profile score is determined by HubPages and is essentially a ranking of how high HubPages thinks the quality of your content is. If you have a profile score of 75 or higher, all your links in all of your HubPages will become DoFollow links.

Before you get to 75, any links from your HubPages with a score of 40 or below will have NoFollow links. In other words, your links won’t count in the eyes of Google unless your content actually gets scored highly.

To get your profile score above 75, produce a lot of original, high-quality content. As more and more people find your content useful, your content will get a higher and higher ranking. Do it consistently and in a short amount of time you will have a HubPage score above of 75.

Use Social Media

HubPages makes it very easy to use social media to promote your content. Each piece of content will by default have Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, Facebook and Twitter buttons.

Use your own social media accounts to promote your content. If you are active on Reddit and have a high karma account, then post it from your own account to help give your HubPages a boost. In time, you won’t need to do this as your readers will do it for you, but in the beginning, this can really help give your HubPages a leg up.

Promoting your small business using HubPages is a matter of building a strong audience on HubPages by interacting with your readers, as well as by getting search engine traffic. Make sure you are getting credit for your HubPages work by getting your profile score to 75 or higher.

An online business can only go so far if it is not actively seeking new customers and prospects. In order to accomplish that, many businesses are turning to social networking as a means to engage potential customers online. While it is true that social networking does provide some of the best and smartest ways to engage potential customers online; however, it is also smart to look at other tactics.

Games/Applications

Many businesses are realizing the value of creating a useful application for mobile devices. By making the application available for free, they are engaging new potential customers.

For example, an information website on coffee makers might create a mobile application that helps buyers buy the right coffee. A professional coach might create an application that helps users create their vision of the ideal business. These applications don’t have to cost much to create either.

Quizzes and Questionnaires

For some reason, people enjoy completing questionnaires and taking quizzes. They like to share their opinion and to see where they rank against their peers. You can engage your potential customers online by publishing fun and/or interesting quizzes. There are many services that enable you to publish a quiz on your blog or website for free. You can also glean a lot of valuable information about your prospects from these quizzes and surveys. And don’t forget about social networking. There are thousands of quizzes on Facebook and it is quite easy to create your own.

User Feedback

Whenever you receive user feedback, comments, or interesting information from your prospects and customers, share it with your audience. For example, if you receive a comment from a customer on Facebook, thank them for the comment. Publish it on your blog, website and/or email newsletter. You might also consider publishing an article or blog post that relates to the comment. When you embrace your feedback, you begin to build a community. Your prospects feel as though you are listening to them and responding, and it can be quite powerful.

Ask Questions

Start engaging your audience both on your blog and via social networking, but also ask questions. Ask them what their biggest problem is, what they think about the latest controversy, how you can help them live a better life, and what makes them feel happy and fulfilled.

Asking questions will not guarantee that you always get an abundance of responses, but people will take notice. They will respond and you will engage. You will also learn a lot about your audience.

Exit rate and bounce rate are two metrics that sound very similar, but in reality are very different. They can both be used to gauge how well you are doing in terms of content quality and user behavior. Here’s what each of these means.

Bounce Rate

Your bounce rate is the number of people who leave your website without visiting any other page. Since it is measured on a page level, you can see your bounce rate from any particular page. A high bounce rate on a page generally means users aren’t satisfied in some way. It could be that the content isn’t good enough or that your navigation structure is confusing. It could be any number of things.

The bounce rate won’t tell you exactly what to fix, but it does give you a good idea of whether a page is working or not. Generally a bounce rate of 55 percent or higher is considered quite bad. If it is over 50 percent, that means over half of your visitors are simply leaving your site. On the other hand, anything 35 percent or lower is considered stellar.

Exit Rate

Your exit rate is the number of people who leave your website from that particular page. A high exit rate doesn’t necessarily mean users aren’t satisfied. For example, if you have a step-by-step guide, it is only natural that users will leave your site at the last page of your guide.

Your exit rate can be used to compare the effectiveness of different kinds of pages. If one content page has a drastically different exit rate than another page, you might have to seriously look at the higher exit rate page.

Some Examples

Just to clearly illustrate the difference between bounce rate and exit rate, here are a few examples.

Example 1: A user comes to your website and leaves without clicking a link. That counts as both an exit and a bounce from that page.

Example 2: Someone came to this page from another page on your site, then leaves your website. This counts as an exit, but not a bounce.

Example 3: Someone comes to this page from another page on your website, then goes to another page on your website. This is neither a bounce nor an exit. It will count as an exit from the page they leave from.

As you can tell, though these two metrics are related, they aren’t the same thing. The bounce rate can be used to identify weak pages, while the exit rate needs to be treated a little more carefully. When using exit rate as a metric, make sure to determine why a page’s exit rate is low or high, rather than just looking at the number.

People from all age groups and walks of life are posting and interacting on Facebook. It is a great place to help build your business brand, increase awareness and drive traffic, yet many business owners just don’t know how to use Facebook effectively.

Just like in face-to-face interactions, you get only one chance to make a good first impression on Facebook. Here are some tips to help you.

Your Public Profile

One of the rules of Facebook is that you shouldn’t use your personal profile to market a business, as that is what Facebook Fan Pages are for; however, many people still use their public profile to market their business. The problem with this tactic is not that you are breaking Facebook rules, but rather that many people combine their personal and their business interactions.

They post personal information on the same wall that they publish business information. This doesn’t give your followers a consistent voice or brand and is confusing. And you probably don’t want a potential customer’s first impression to be something personal that you posted.

Too Much Information

Separating purposes for your Facebook profile is the first way to make a good impression. Create a separate business profile and a separate personal profile for interacting with friends and family.

On your business profile, make sure to keep it strictly business. Anything and everything you post online is there to stay. Post something personal or share too much information and you could offend people, turn people off, and lose potential customers. Make sure you are not sharing too much personal information with your business followers.

Instead, focus on providing the type of information your readers and prospects will find valuable. The more value you provide them, the better impression they will have of you. Now, that doesn’t mean you can’t share personal information; however, it needs to be related to your business.

For example, “I just tried out a new cookie recipe. Received rave reviews from the PTA. Pictures and details are on my blog.” This is a great personal post for someone who owns a cooking website or blog. It is personal, but it also provides information and drives traffic to their website.

Stay Positive

Unfortunately, many people use Facebook as their personal complaint board. They complain about clients, about other marketers, and about situations. This isn’t a great way to make a first impression, nor is it a good way to keep followers interested. If you must vent, don’t vent online. Stay positive and you will always make a good first impression.

Facebook is an exceptional business building tool. Create a plan for using Facebook that includes a personal voice, brand, and content strategy. Before posting anything, ask yourself how it benefits your audience.

When Twitter was first taking off, it was believed to be a tool mostly for consumers. Today, however, business executives are becoming more and more aware of Twitter as a tool to build business-to-business (B2B) sales. Twitter isn’t just important for interacting with consumers. It’s also crucial for interacting with brands, potential clients and competitors.

Here are a few big ways Twitter can impact your B2B sales.

Actively Projecting Your Brand

Your brand doesn’t have to be a passive thing. Twitter is perhaps the only avenue where blasting out your brand regularly is not only accepted, but encouraged. You can’t email your potential clients every day without repercussions, but you can tweet every day, keeping your brand in front of potential clients, while actually building rather than burning goodwill.

Networking Your Way to New Contacts

If there is someone in your space that you want to meet, Twitter can be a great way to get around the red tape. It can be very hard to meet someone in a crowded seminar or to get through their secretary, but if you have their Twitter handle, you can start to build a connection on the social network that can then develop into an offline connection.

Start by following them. Retweet their tweets and @reply to any requests from them with helpful resources. Get on their radar and eventually, when an opportunity arises to introduce yourself, do so and they will likely know who you are.

Find Their Pain Points

Twitter can be a powerful way of keeping track of exactly what is going on in an industry. You can use it to figure out what your clients are up to, what your competitors are up to and what your clients’ competitors are up to.

Let’s say a competitor of a big potential client launches a new product. It stands a good chance of taking a big chunk out of your client’s business. That could be a stellar opportunity for you to come in and offer to help. It may or may not result in immediate business, but that offer for help will definitely turn into goodwill that can later turn into business.

Use Twitter to keep your finger on the pulse of the industry and identify the pain points of potential clients.

Tapping into B2B Events

B2B events will often have their own Twitter feeds, which can be a very powerful way to participate with your ideal target market. For example, let’s say Convention A is having all their participants tweet to #conventionachat.

By participating actively on #conventionachat, you can build up a brand for yourself among potential leads at an event. Start doing this a few weeks before the event. By the time the actual event rolls around, a lot of people there will already know who you are.

These are a few ways that Twitter can affect your B2B sales. Twitter isn’t just a tool for consumers, but can be a powerful tool for building goodwill and gathering intelligence for making B2B sales.