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Archive for January, 2010
The path to success is no longer labeled
posted by By Geoff Boucher @ 1:00 AM
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Hunting for a record deal won't cut it anymore. Modern bands are focusing more on the Internet, looking for film soundtrack opportunities and piggy-backing album sales on designer T-shirts.
One in a series of occasional articles
One in a series of occasional articles
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Killer Campaigns: Making Emotional Connections
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 10:28 AM
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Killer Campaigns: Making Emotional Connections
We live in an age of clones: somebody makes a very profitable
movie about vampires, and the next thing you know we’re all
inundated with movies, television shows, books, blogs, websites,
and every form of blood-sucking permutation you can imagine.
CSI begets CSI Miami, which begets CSI New York, which begets
NCIS, which begets NCIS Los Angeles, which is just about as much
as anyone can take. If something is successful, you can be sure
more of the same will follow.
Despite the occasional success story, most clones either fail
completely, or never live up to the success of their
groundbreaking predecessors.
Most of the copycats fail because the clone-masters behind them
don’t understand why the original worked, and as a consequence,
they clone all the wrong elements. This is as true of commercial
presentations as it is with broadcast programming.
Cloning a successful format is not the same as Slipstreaming.
Clone marketing is just rote copying of technical elements
without any reference to why the original worked, whereas
Slipstream marketing takes a familiar idea and plays off it like
a great jazz musician reinterprets an old standard.
Kleenex “Let It Out” Campaign:
Recognizing The Emotional Value Proposition
What is more generic than facial tissue? A consumable paper
product that you use once and discard; it is the very definition
of a commodity, and as we all know commodity-sales are primarily
based on price. Enter Kimberly Clark, one company that has
managed to turn their commodity product into the industry
standard to the extent that the commodity itself has become
known by Kimberly Clark’s designated brand name – Kleenex.
The Kleenex, “Let It Out” campaign is just one example of a
company that recognizes that in order to turn their commodity
product into something of higher value, they have to link it to
what we refer to as “an emotional value proposition:” the
implied psychological or emotional connection between the
product and the consumer.
The original series of Web videos was housed on a dedicated
video microsite. The series of videos showed a casually dressed
interviewer with an engaging personality asking people to sit
down on a couch in the middle of a busy street to chat about
some significant emotional moment in their lives. Some people
talked about their children; one woman even discussed Katrina
and the impact it had on her. People cried, and people laughed,
until tears came to their eyes, at which point, the interviewer
handed each person a Kleenex: Kleenex and emotions go
hand-in-hand. Let It Out, the concept was brilliant.
The following version was created for television; it is a
compendium of clips from various videos, and as good as it is,
it doesn’t have the same emotional power of the Web video
versions that concentrated on each person’s emotional response
to the interviewer’s questions. It’s good, but not as good,
but it does serve to illustrate the point. Unfortunately the
individual videos are no longer available.
Kleenex “Let It Out” TV Commercial
(http://videos.sitepronews.com/video/687/Kleenex-Let-It-Out-TV-Commercial)
Everything in the commercial works: the interviewer’s manner
and personality, the visual imagery of the couch in the street,
and the memorable music message. It’s all good, very, very
good.
On The Other Hand…
Rogers Communication Inc. is a large Canadian communication
company that provides digital cable TV, high speed Internet, and
mobile phone services. Their primary competition would be Bell
Canada.
In order to promote their new Home Phone service Rogers
initiated a series of commercials featuring a man on the street
interviewing people passing by, asking them to compare their
phone service to their competitors. They used a red and blue
couch in the street with the red side of the couch representing
Rogers and the blue side representing Bell. They handed each
person a blue phone and asked them to call a friend or relative;
then they handed the person a red phone representing Rogers, and
asked them to call the same person. Then the interviewer asked
them to compare the service, which according to the commercial
was the same. The difference of course was in the price.
Anyone who has seen both campaigns could come to only one
conclusion, and that is the Roger’s commercials were patterned
after the Kleenex, “Let It Out” campaign. Did it work? Take a
look.
Rogers Home Phone Campaign
(http://videos.sitepronews.com/video/688/Rogers-Home-Phone-Campaign)
On a very superficial level, the commercials are eerily the
same, both have a couch in the street, an interviewer, and a
passerby; but on an emotional and psychological level, they are
as far apart as you can get.
Kleenex tied the use of their product to people’s most personal
feelings, their response to emotional reminiscence, while Rogers
relied on price only. Their service isn’t better, it’s the
same; it’s just cheaper so the ad says. The Kleenex interviewer
is courteous, interested, and responsive, while the Rogers
representative is glib, and a bit smarmy.
The Technique and Why It Worked
The Kleenex campaign works for all kinds of reasons, the most
important of which is that it engages the audience with an
intriguing visual presentation that resonates on a psychological
level by providing an emotional value proposition associated
with their brand. On the other hand, Roger’s value proposition
is price.
You may say, price is important, but pricing tactics are a
dangerous game. Competitors aren’t just going to sit back and
let you drive them out of business. If you fire a price missile
across your competitor’s bow, you can bet they’ll respond, and
that’s exactly what Bell did.
Whoops!
By not understanding what Kleenex had done in their campaign,
and not following Kleenex’s precedent by associating their
brand with an emotionally resonant value proposition, they laid
themselves wide open to a slipstreamed response by their
competitors, who created a campaign that riffed on their
imagery, and one-upped them with an alternate price comparison.
Rogers Advertisement
(http://www.sitepronews.com/images3/rogerscouch.jpg)
Bell Advertisement
(http://www.sitepronews.com/images3/bellcouch.jpg)
Conclusion
If a commodity product like facial tissue can become a major
brand by employing marketing strategies that emphasize their
emotional value proposition, then so can your product or
service. Delivering a marketing message based on it’s
underlying emotional value is a better strategy than price and
feature selling, a tactic guaranteed to be short-lived. Features
are forever being added and prices are continually under
competitive pressure, but emotional relevance is sustainable.
For many companies, it is very difficult for them to see the
emotional value their offering brings to the table, but the
conceptual basis of any effective marketing campaign starts with
discovering that underlying human connection your product or
service has with its audience.
Website Traffic Generation Planning and Methodologies
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 10:23 AM
Friday, January 29, 2010
Website Traffic Generation Planning and Methodologies
Real Estate internet marketing is like any other kind of
marketing, you’re trying to reach a niche market and must
plan accordingly. You have to start by identifying your
target market in order to develop your message conveying
exactly the kind of high value business proposition which
your niche will respond to.
The first steps are to:
1) Identify your target market; start with geo targeting
and work with the demographics from there.
2) Decide how you want to be perceived by this target
market and decide how you’ll foster this perception.
3) Identify and refine your value proposition.
Once you’ve done this, the next step is to develop and
distribute your value proposition, making sure that your
value proposition is perceived by your target market
exactly as intended. In marketing, shaping consumer
perception isn’t just the most important thing: it’s
everything.
You have to start by positioning yourself to be perceived
in a specific way; from here, you’ll need to maintain,
develop, grow or alter this market position as you deem
necessary.
The real challenge is putting these principles into action:
Driving Traffic
There are some important principles of traffic generation
you need to understand in order to be successful at
bringing visitors into your website.
There are both principles and rules of traffic generation;
principles have to do with your approach to the task and
the rules are the practical nuts and bolts of driving
traffic. You need to have an understanding of the larger
picture before you can successfully put the practical
techniques into action.
What you’ll usually see a lot of is the techniques alone.
While this is still valuable information, you probably
won’t get far with these techniques if you aren’t versed in
the underlying principles of traffic generation.
These are the most important principles of traffic
generation:
* Traffic generation isn’t a black art – it’s something
which largely relies on common sense and methods which
can be replicated with consistent results.
* The reason people usually fail in their traffic
generation efforts is that they don’t truly commit to
making traffic generation techniques a fully integrated
part of their business strategy.
* You need to create a plan for driving traffic. Think of
it as a road map; follow it, but remember that it’s not
carved in stone. Your plan can and should evolve to
reflect your real life experience and results.
* Continually test and track the results of your traffic
generation efforts – and adjust your plan accordingly.
* Set goals for yourself and as you meet them, raise the
bar; traffic generation is a process, not a single
objective.
* Don’t be discouraged if you don’t see results
immediately.
* Remember that driving traffic begins with building your
site – Why is this? Because your site should be built
from the ground up with visitors in mind. Look at other
sites in your industry to gain an understanding of
patterns of visitor behavior.
See what these other sites are doing; don’t hesitate to
take a page from your competition’s playbook if you see
something which is working for them.
This is where things can become challenging; it’s something
like standing in Grand Central Station at rush hour with a
megaphone, trying to be heard above the noise of the crowd.
The goal here is to get the attention of your target
market and get them to come to your site.
All business is arbitrage. You’re taking something which is
cheap (to you, at least) and exchanging it for something of
higher value – buy low, sell high.
For example, SEO and other free traffic generation
strategies essentially trade your time for traffic which is
of higher value to you; this value may be measured directly
in monetary terms or in other means (for instance, as
signups to a list). The same is true of paid methods of
driving traffic like PPC advertising; you’re paying what
you deem to be a small amount for something else which you
see as more valuable.
If you’ve been reading carefully so far, you may have
noticed that I haven’t said a word about being indexed by
the search engines; that’s because this falls under the
heading of techniques, not the principles of traffic
generation. While you do of course want to be indexed, this
isn’t your primary objective – and it’s something which
will happen naturally as you work to drive traffic using
other strategies.
Don’t lose sleep over the search engine crawlers; they will
come sooner or later. Remember that even once your site is
indexed, it’s no guarantee that visitors will follow.
Focusing on being indexed is losing sight of the forest for
the trees. This will happen anyway as a side effect of
using other traffic generation methods. What you should be
focused on is getting targeted traffic to your site. For
instance, if you exchange links with another site (or even
a directory) relevant to your industry, the search engine
crawlers will follow these links when indexing this other
site and voila! Your site will be indexed.
What you need to do is to let the web know that your site
is there while simultaneously driving targeted traffic. The
best way to do so is to create links to your site from
other sites; not only do these result in your site being
indexed, but back links are great SEO and of course, they
can generate traffic directly through visitor clicks.
Here are a few things you can do to start driving traffic
almost immediately:
* Whenever you add new content to your site or blog,
submit this content to the social bookmarking sites
(Digg, Technorati, etc.). Make an effort to give your
posts attention-getting titles so that people will be
interested in reading your content.
* Post comments on blogs which have a similar audience to
the one you’re trying to reach. Don’t post comment spam;
write real, thoughtful comments and include a link back
to your own site.
* Start contributing to forums and message boards relevant
to your industry.
* Create an RSS feed for your site or blog and submit this
feed to directories.
* Write articles on your niche topic and submit them to
article directories.
* Join link exchanges
* Build a linkwheel; create blogs and pages on platforms
like HubPages, Squidoo, Facebook, etc. and link them to
each other in a web ring-style structure. This helps
the search engines identify the topic of your site and
will improve your page rank as well.
These techniques can start driving traffic to your site
very quickly; if you implement all of these methods and
follow the basic principles of traffic generation, you
really can’t fail at bringing in targeted traffic.
So why do so many people fail at traffic generation?
Because they don’t stick with it and follow through; far
too many website owners give up after a few days or a few
weeks, saying that it’s just too much work for too little
result – instead of analyzing their efforts and figuring
out what is and isn’t working for them.
So how about search engine optimization (SEO)? Here’s what
you really need to know about:
1) Focusing on search engines rather than your potential
customers is always a losing bet. If you’re putting all of
your energy towards keeping up with the search engines and
their constantly evolving algorithms, you’re losing sight
of your visitors.
2) Optimizing your site for very competitive (i.e. popular)
keywords means fighting an uphill battle with no guarantee
of success.
3) Generally speaking, you’ll do best with long tail
keywords; these require far less work in terms of
optimizing your content. Long tail keywords are also very
effective at attracting targeted traffic. The effort you
put into optimizing your content for long tail keywords
will bring you much better results than the same amount of
time and effort spent optimizing your site for popular
keywords.
4) Offsite optimization is just as important (if not more
so) than on site SEO. Back links can do wonders for your
traffic; but remember to keep all of your efforts focused
on visitors, not search engines whether you’re working on
on-site or offsite SEO.
5) Base your traffic generation strategy on visitors and
the search engines will follow.
6) As you develop and implement SEO techniques, always keep
in mind how people actually look for information online -
that’s why long tail keywords are so important. It’s a lot
easier to rank high in the search results for long tail
keywords. Being in the top 10 on Google for several long
tail keywords will bring you a lot more traffic than being
on the 10th page of results for a highly competitive
keyword (which is where you’ll start out if you’re very
lucky if you choose to go this route).
Remember that it’s a long way to the top; be patient and
enjoy the view on your way up. Stick with it and you’ll
eventually have more traffic than you know what to do with!
Web Design For Beginners
Define your audience and their needs
Defining the purpose and objectives of your website should be your first step. Focus on what you want your website to achieve. Create a profile of your intended audience and try to understand their needs and tastes, and design the site with them at the forefront of your mind at all times.
Take a look at competitor websites to gain an idea of what works and what doesn’t.
Easy navigation
In order to make your content easy for your intended audience to navigate, make sure the links to the main sections of your website are easily visible from each web page. You want to invite people to view as many pages of your site as possible, so make it easy for them to find each page.
A good way to help you visualise the structure of the site is to create a flow chart of the whole website on paper. Think about think about how your users might structure the information within the site to help them find the information they need easily.
Try to keep the information on your first page a general overview so you don’t bog people down with too much information. They can then click on the (clear and easy to use) links to view more information about the topics that they are interested in.
Layout
Most web pages have a common structure consisting of a header and footer, a horizontal navigation bar along the top and / or a vertical navigation bar down the left of the page and a central section for the main content.
This structure is based on simple, easy-to-understand layout principles.
If there’s a lot of content, split it up into several different pages so your viewer doesn’t have to digest too much information on one page.
Keep text simple and to the point, and make sure grammar is correct – check and check again to avoid looking unprofessional. Text is more difficult to read on screen than in printed media, so it’s crucial get your message across in a succinct and easy to understand way.
You should always keep your text blocks relatively small. Huge paragraphs are more difficult to read and may make your audience lose interest quickly.
Stick to 2 or 3 different fonts at the most – and make sure they are ones generally found on most computers. San serifs are easier to read on computer monitors so stick to these for the main text, and make sure your text is large enough for everyone to read.
Bullet points, lists and relevant photos can help to break up the text.
Learn the basics of html
Learning the basics of html – even if you are using WYSIWYG software Front Page or Dreamweaver – will help you gain an understanding of how a web page in built, and deal with problems you encounter using the software. A good beginner’s guide to html can be found at: http://htmldog.com/guides/htmlbeginner/
Try and stay away from tables, and create the pages using layers (divs) and cascading style sheets (CSS).
Tables mix ‘presentational’ data in with your content, which makes the file size of your pages unnecessarily large, as users must download this presentational data for each page they visit.
But by using structural markup to create web pages, you can keep the actual content of your page separate from the way it is presented.
Table-based pages are also much less accessible to users with disabilities and viewers using mobiles and PDAs to access the Web.
And to change the layout of the site, all you need to do is change the style sheets; you do not need to edit the pages themselves at all.
For more info about the advantages of using divs and CSS over tables, take a look at http://www.hotdesign.com/seybold/index.html
Using colour
Creating a balanced colour palette from which to choose your website colour scheme will help you to create a professional looking website. Bright clashing colours scream amateur.
If you are creating a website for a company with a logo, start here. Upload the logo to your host server and go to a colour palette website such as (http://www.colorhunter.com/) to create a palette, from which you can choose colours for the main banner, buttons and text rollovers etc.
And keep things simple and uncluttered – empty space makes colours stand out and text easier to read.
Optimising photos and images
Don’t use a graphic just for the sake of it – make sure there’s a reason for it’s presence, i.e. it improves the user’s understanding and experience. A site full of unnecessary graphics looks amateurish, and it can be an obstacle for accessibility tools such as screen readers.
Make sure the photos and images you do use are clear and well optimised to reduce file size and increase page loading times. One sure sign of an amateurish website is a page with a huge image that takes forever to load. And your viewer will probably click away from the site before they even get a chance to see it.
Creating clear, professional looking graphics
GIFs are really grids made of tiny pixel squares. Data about every pixel is saved (so it’s lossless), and you can save up to 256 colors. Pixels may also be transparent.
A GIF may contain more than one frame, so it can be animated.
It is a good format for saving images with fewer colors, like charts and small graphics, images containing text, and drawings.
JPEGs are a good file format for images with millions of colors, like photographs, drawings with many shades, images containing gradients etc.
For more information on optimising images for the web, have a look at this tutorial: http://inobscuro.com/tutorials/read/35/
Design tips:
a.) Use design to highlight functionality. For example; using gradients on button also helps make them seem more ‘button like’, different coloured mouse over text draws attention to links.
b.) Be wary of animation and sounds unless they serve a specific function. It is difficult to concentrate on reading what’s on your site when there are things flashing on and off and flying around the page. And visitors with slow connections may resent that you wasted their time by forcing them to load animations and sound files against their will.
Some recent research does indicate that visitors assaulted by blinking ads are more likely to leave the site immediately, and are far less likely to bookmark the site, return to it, link to it, and recommend it.
c.) Don’t use images as a web page background. Image backgrounds scream “amateur”, because it’s mostly amateurish sites that use them. They take longer to load and the text over the background image is usually difficult to read.
d.) Design the webpage including all elements within it for your audience. For example, create a chilled out mood for a massage / therapy website using colours like lavender and blue. Use darker, more restrained, stronger colours for a more traditional finance website.
e.) If your business doesn’t already have one, make a logo for your site, display it at the top of every page, and add a link from it back to your homepage. It will make your site look more professional and create a sense of branding to help people remember your site and recognise it as yours.
Going ‘live’
Hosting
When it comes to hosting, cheapest is not always best. For a small-ish ‘beginner’ website you shouldn’t need much bandwidth (unless you’ve not been following the ‘image optimisation’ guidelines!) But I wouldn’t recommend hosting your website with the cheapest offer available until you have checked that they can give all the support you may need as a newbie.
I would always recommend looking for a local contact telephone number on the website of the hosting company you are considering using, and ringing it to make sure there is an actual person at the end of it.
Ask if you can get technical help from this number – they may only communicate via email for technical support. If they give you another number, ask how much it costs per minute, and ring it to make sure there is someone at the end willing to help you as a beginner should you have any problems connecting to their server, uploading your files, or sorting out your email accounts.
You should also make sure email accounts are included in the cost, and, if you have any dynamic elements such as a search facility or enquiry form on the website, check that the server will support the PHP or ASP etc needed to allow this facility to work, and if that is included in the hosting price quoted.
Ftp
You can download free ftp software to upload your new website to your new hosting space from Filezilla (http://filezilla-project.org/) or Smart ftp (http://www.smartftp.com/), or you could try a free trial with Cute ftp (http://www.cuteftp.com/cuteftp/).
Search engine optimisation
Although professional web designers have the optimisation of the website in mind from the start of design and development, as a newbie, you have to take it one step at a time! So now you’ve designed, built and uploaded your website, take a look at some of the ways you can now begin to optimise it for search engine ranking:
http://www.seomoz.org/article/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-optimization
http://www.seo-news.com/archives2009.html
10 Tips to Grow Your Business Using Online Video
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 10:15 AM
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Lacking any information to the contrary, many businesses still think that all they need to do to get new clients is to put their name and face in the Yellow Pages or online social directories, get some professional looking business cards, a website and Voila! It’s the old adage “build it and they will come”.
Trouble is, that’s what their competitors are doing also and in this day and age, it’s just not enough.
Does Your Business Stand Out Online?
Most advertising on the Web follows a time-honored format, although some might call it a time-worn format as it does little to differentiate itself. You can bet that a high percentage of this advertising will be ignored and the money spent on it will be wasted.
So how does a company stand out from the crowd online?
Thanks to an oversupply of similar text, claims, and presentation – coupled with a short 21st century attention span – your website has less than ten seconds to move a visitor to action. If it doesn’t, that visitor will click away to another site, and then another. Therefore, it’s critical that you find a way to break through the noise your competitors are making. But even that’s not enough.
Statistics show that even the best-looking websites generate conversion rates of under one percent, so for every 100 visitors you do manage to get, less than one will call or email you.
Sound bleak? Thinking of redirecting more of your advertising budget back to the Yellow Pages? Don’t. You’re on the right track – you just haven’t leveraged all the power available to you online.
One-to-Many Communication. One-on-One Feel.
Most websites are little more than electronic versions of Yellow Page advertising. For the most part, they don’t encourage interaction beyond the obligatory “Contact me for more information” plea. These sites don’t encourage trust any more than their print counterparts. They don’t give visitors the warm-and-fuzzy feeling that a face-to-face meeting would.
But they can.
Searching for a local service provider online can be a daunting prospect, but even more daunting than the search is deciding which provider to use once you get to the page, especially since most websites promise the standard good service, competitive pricing and high quality.
So how does a business differentiate itself from the sea of competition? Web video makes this possible on a grand scale.
Thanks to rapidly improving technology, it’s easier than ever to add that warm-and-fuzzy, face-to-face element to your site, replicate an in-person interview, and offer your visitors an opportunity to check you out before picking up the phone. With Web video, you can present an interview that addresses all the questions and concerns of potential clients. You can keep them on your site longer and give them insight into the “business behind the business.” In a way that wasn’t possible even a few years ago, business owners can now speak directly to their audiences and showcase their personalities and areas of expertise. This is especially helpful if you are a professional service provider.
Any business that relies on conveying trust-ability will benefit from this type of web marketing. Really, it’s one-to-many communication with a one-on-one feel. It’s the perfect ice breaker and an efficient means of generating the interest and trust needed to compel potential clients to make an appointment and do business.
A high-quality Web interview placed strategically on your site is a huge timesaver for you and prospective clients because you reach a wide audience in minimal time. Potential clients get the information they need to pre-qualify – and pre-sell – themselves before they call.
Online video delivers some of the best ROI of any advertising medium today and if set up properly, is actually ranks higher than text now by the major search engines like Google. Short of spending valuable face time with a potential client (often times a poorly qualified potential client) there is simply no better way to forge a personal connection with them. With that in mind, here are 10 tips to help you get the most of your online video marketing efforts.
10 Tips for making the most of Online Video
1. Make sure your video is professionally done.
This is an absolute must. The whole point here is to establish credibility and trust, but you’ll do the opposite with a poorly executed and produced video. Yes, many of the videos you find on sharing sites are mediocre at best, but that is changing rapidly as companies begin to see the value of promoting themselves in this manner. In fact, a recent Permission TV survey found that 67% of 400 hundred top executives intended to focus their online marketing efforts on video in 2009. The rush is coming – find a personable, engaging interviewer and a top notch production crew to really stand out.
2. Submit your video to as many outlets as possible.
While YouTube is the clear leader here, there are many other video sharing sites worthy of consideration. Here are some others you won’t want to pass up:
• Google Video, http://video.google.com
• Yahoo! Video, http://video.yahoo.com
• Daily Motion, http://www.dailymotion.com
• MySpaceTV, http://vids.myspace.com
• MetaCafe, http://www.metacafe.com
• Revver, http://www.revver.com
• Veoh, http://www.veoh.com
• Blinkx, http://www.blinkx.com
• Break, http://www.break.com
3. Embed your video on the front page of your site.
Don’t hide what’s going to become one of your most effective selling tools on a dusty inside page. Get it out front. Customers and search engines will love you for it.
4. Find out what search terms your potential clients are using and put them in your video’s title.
If you don’t know what words clients in need of your services are typing into Google and other search engines, get professional help or use some of the resources featured on this page. Once you’ve identified these terms, use the most popular in your video’s title.
5. Make your tags and descriptions SEO-friendly, too.
Most video sharing sites let you tag videos with keywords and post a short description, so get the most out of these by sprinkling in the search terms you’ve identified.
6. Don’t forget your thumbnail.
A thumbnail is a still shot from your video that appears along with search results. Don’t waste this opportunity to present yourself in the best light possible – choose a key moment from your video, preferably one where you’re smiling as you speak with your interviewer.
7. Link back to your site.
Put your URL near the top of your video’s description. You’ll get a higher search ranking and potential clients will quickly learn where to go for more information.
8. Interact with your viewers.
Most video sharing sites allow viewer comments. Use this opportunity to answer questions, respond to comments, and further promote your business.
9. Consider a pay-per-click campaign.
Natural search engine optimization, while effective, takes time to bear fruit. In the meantime, you might want to jump start the process with a pay-per-click campaign that gives you a sponsored search listing. You can learn more about PPC advertising at www.google.com/intl/en/ads, sem.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/searchenginemarketing, and http://advertising.microsoft.com/search-advertising.
10. Add new content often.
Search engines look for it and so do potential clients. Keep your content fresh and up-to-date and keep visitors coming back for more.
With an ever-increasing stream of competition, it’s more important than ever to stand out from the crowd. These days standing out means maximizing your online presence and leveraging the technology to present the unique advantages of you and your firm. There’s no better way for a growth-oriented business to build a solid and secure future than by using effective and affordable online video.
Use these free resources to get a handle on the terms that potential clients are using to search for you right now.
Wordtracker, http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com
Google AdWords, http://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Keyword Discovery, http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html
KwMap, http://www.kwmap.net
Google Trends, htttp://www.google.com/trends
In addition to design, a business website should offer the right features for its users. Although professional web design is important, usability of the website is crucial to its success. A professional website should be rich with features and allow customers to interact with the business.
Customer expectations have evolved with time. When internet users visit a website today, they expect the website to offer a certain level of interaction. With the popularity of second generation websites, popularly known as Web2.0, it has become common for businesses to offer a range of interactive features on websites such as videos, podcasts, and many ways in which customers can offer their feedback. Many of these features are easy to implement on a website and most web design companies and professionals will offer them as standard features with their websites.
Businesses can benefit from this trend by offering interactive features on the company’s website that are easy to implement. Building an effective web presence is vital for any company today and the company’s website is its greatest marketing tool. Improving the interactivity of the company website can help increase conversion rates and improve brand loyalty and recognition.
Discussed below are some the top interactive features that are easy to implement on your website. It can add value to any website.
Newsletter Subscription
Collecting email addresses of potential customers is vital for direct marketing or sending newsletters. Most websites offer an automated system for subscribing or unsubscribing to their mailing list via their website.
Commenting on articles
This is commonly found on blogs. Allowing users to comment can be useful in many ways. In addition to feedback, it also allows the content to build with user generated content. It should only be added to relevant sections of the website.
Most Recent Posts
If you have a blog, then you can display a list of 10 most recent posts from your blog on your main website. It can add value to your website especially if your blog and website target the same niche.
Google Map
An interactive Google Map can make your website interactive. Google map can be used in many ways. You can use it simply to display an interactive map of your location or you can use one of its built in features such as distance calculator, etc to add more functionaility. It is also possible to custom applications for your website using Google Map’s powerful development API.
Most professional web design companies and freelance web designers today will be able to work with this technology to add to your website if required.
Google Custom Search feature
Google’s custom search feature has become popular with websites in recent years. Google custom search allows websites to implement search functionality on their website using Google’s powerful search algorithms. It is possible to restrict the search to your website only or include other partner websites in your searches. Ad revenue generated by Google using your custom search feature can be shared so there an opportunity for generating revenue on your website.
Related Articles
This can improve the readership of your website by providing users with content that are related. It is relatively easy to implement on a website and can be automated or work by assigning manual tags or keywords.
RSS Feed
RSS is a commonly used format for sharing content on the web. By offering RSS feed of your website content, you make it readily accessible to millions of internet users who use feed reader applications to find information on the internet. It also makes it easier for users to subscribe to website updates by email. RSS feeds also make it easier for users to share content on other social media sites.
Social bookmarking
Social bookmarking has become quite popular on the internet. Millions of users use social bookmarking to organise favourite content and share it with others. It also helps in promoting your website and can generate massive traffic. A website should offer a shortcut for adding the web page using leading social bookmarking accounts.
Latest Content Tab
A list of latest content from relevant sections of the website can improve the usability of the website.
E.g. List of the Latest Articles, News and Jobs can be displayed at the side of a website; similar to what is found on leading blogs and portals today. This offers better utilization of space and adds interactivity.
Feedback forms to gather information
Feedback forms are still an effective method to collect response from website users. It is used by many websites. The form should be customized to the specific needs of a website.
Survey/polls
Surveys and polls on website is another also important and widely used to collect information from customers. This feature is now standard with most leading CMS or blog platforms.
There are many features that can make your website interactive and more effective. Websites designed by a professional Web Design Company or designer will most likely include a range of interactive features to start with.
2009 saw a lot of exciting changes and additions to the world of online marketing and search engine optimization. Some important events that took place were the launch of BING, announcement of Google Caffeine, the merger of Yahoo and Microsoft search. 2010 will see real time web emerging which will become more popular than the traditional methods of optimization.
Following is the list of pointers to get your website on top, reach out to potential customers and ensure brand visibility in 2010.
1. Decrease Webpage Load Time. Google’s Matt Cutts recently hinted that the load time of a website may affect its ranking in the search engines. That is, the faster a website loads, the better its chances to rank well for its niche keywords. Website load time is touted as the next big step towards improved rankings. The pre-requisites to a good webpage load time are; reputable web host and fast internet connection.
2. Get Listed in Google Local Search. Getting listed in Google Local Search ensures brand visibility in front of visitors from the nearby places. It has been proven that the number of visitors to a website increase exponentially when listed in local search results. The reason being, a customer will always prefer to purchase a quality product which is easily available in his or her vicinity rather than order it from another unfamiliar city or state.
3. Get Involved in Social Media. Social Media is the flavor of the season and in 2010 organizations are going to actively engage in conversation and social networking and reach out to their potential customers. Social Media Marketing is a must for every organization as it helps create brand awareness and build relationships with consumers in the highly competitive market. Micro targeting and Personalization will be the keywords in 2010.
4. Optimize Your Website Mobile Users. With and ever increasing number of people tweeting and using Facebook from their mobile devices, a lot of organizations are now finally paying attention to how their websites appear on mobile phones. You can have your website appear on the mobile under the same URL or have a special domain for the same. The most common way is to have the domain name as mobile.websitename.com.
5. Apply Web Analytics to its full potential. There are hundreds of web analytics tools in the market which provide a mountain of data pertaining to the visitor’s usage. Some of the most well known web analytics tools are Omniture, Google Analytics and Yahoo! Web Analytics etc. Web Analytics tools can answer the “how” but not the “why”. That is, you can find out how many visitors checked the product catalogue webpage, but not the answer to, why the visitors didn’t place an order for the product. Organizations need to dissect the data from web analytics tools and successfully apply its learning’s to enhance their visitors experience and in turn increase sales revenues.
In 2010 companies must go beyond organic search engine optimization by integrating social media marketing and optimizing their websites for mobile users.
Marketing Results: 7 Crucial Stats You Need to Track Your Marketing Success
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 10:05 AM
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Marketing Results: 7 Crucial Stats You Need to Track Your Marketing Success
You may feel as though you’re on a hamster wheel when it comes to measuring your marketing. You run, run, and run some more, but don’t seem to be getting anywhere. That feeling is perfectly natural if you’re not measuring your ROI (Return on Investment) with your marketing. For years, I’ve been on this hamster wheel myself, without a system that I liked to help me measure my marketing results. Numbers and statistics have never been my strong suit, and even though I got A’s in most of my math classes, it took every brain cell I had to do so. 
Late last year, I finally determined what was important for me to track in my marketing, and now have created a system so that I can track my marketing from week to week. Whether you set up your system in a document or spreadsheet, you’ll be amazed at the power that you feel when you view the numbers from week to week and can spot trends developing or problem spots that need a solution. I was amazed to discover that when I started paying attention to my weekly stats, I actually found myself engrossed, fascinated, and excited! Now that I am tracking these numbers, I know exactly where to spend my time and efforts to receive the highest and best rate of return.
Here are 7 statistics that I track in my weekly marketing tracking system:
1. Number of marketing activities. I now list by name and amount of the total number of marketing activities in which I engage each week. This number includes article submissions, direct mailings, direct contacts (in person or by phone), press releases, and programs given. I’ve noticed that the higher the number, the better the rest of my marketing results for the week.
2. Web site stats. I’m primarily seeking the number of unique visitors to my web site each week. However, it’s also important to know what keywords visitors used to land on your site as well as what sites referred the visitor to your site. I don’t keep a separate log of this info, but do have a weekly Google Analytics report emailed to me with this information. Google Analytics is a free web tracking program that’s easy to install on almost any site.
3. Blog stats. I want to know the number of people who read my blog this week. Now, this is a difficult stat to measure, as blog readers use any number of RSS readers to view blog posts or subscribe to my blog via email. So, I have also installed Google Analytics on my blog and look at those results to determine the number of unique visitors to my blog in any given week, which I interpret as number of blog readers.
4. Ezine stats. My weekly ezine serves as my primary connection to my list. I track how many new subscribers I gain each week on that list, my open rate for each issue of my ezine, the number of clickthroughs for each issue, and my total number of ezine subscribers.
5. Social networking connections. I’m not in a contest to acquire the most connections possible for all of my social networking sites. I believe it’s the quality of the connection (i.e. relevance to your target market) rather than the quantity of connections that will be most useful for you. What I’m primarily tracking here is that I’m making a slow and gradual increase in the number of my connections on Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin.
6. Product and service sales. I note how many product sales I have made each week as well as how much revenue I have earned in the services and consulting side of my business. Because my primary product is my membership site, I probably have many more product sales (i.e. memberships) than many of you who sell information products as an income stream in your business.
7. New clients. I get a number of requests from potential clients each week, but never tracked those in any meaningful way. Now I know how many inquiries have come in, how many have become new clients, and which inquiries need follow up at a later date. This system always keeps me in motion and in front of new client prospects.
Measuring the results of your marketing activities is crucial to your success, and anyone can do it. Start to evaluate your marketing activities to empower yourself to make those strategic decisions about how and where to focus your efforts going forward so that you can achieve the level of success you desire.
Internet Marketing – Misconceptions That You Must Consider
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 10:00 AM
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Internet Marketing – Misconceptions That You Must Consider
Internet marketing is seen as a get rich quick scheme by many newbie marketers because of the ease and convenience linked to the world-wide-web. This is however misleading, as the success that you achieve whether online or off line, is directly linked to what you put in.
It usually takes much time, tribulations, steep learning and also some failures before you will succeed in the internet marketing world. It is advisable to take heed of the following misconceptions.
Cash will flow in very quickly
Internet marketing takes a substantial amount of work. Spend lots of time learning the ropes, but do expect the odd failure along the way. Your success is entirely up to you and you usually reap what you sow.
You will not make any money
Life is an issue of balance, and your input towards any business venture, will determine the output. The supreme goal for internet marketing success will only be reached by consistently applying yourself in a disciplined manner. If you are prepared to learn and accept the occasional failure whilst learning from your mistakes and apply that knowledge, the money will come.
Anyone is suited for internet marketing
If you adopt the attitude of telling yourself there is nothing to this, you are already starting of on the wrong footing. A venture such as this takes a lot of discipline and you must be willing to learn. Have an open mind get rid of your preconceived ideas and be willing to embrace new thoughts as they come up.
It is too difficult
Have you ever taken a deep look within your self to discover where the true potential lies? Is there a potential internet marketing guru waiting to come out? What do others need that has not been created yet? The answers to these questions are only the beginnings of your ability to differentiate yourself from the crowd.
It will only require a few hours work a day
This is possible but in the beginning, long hours are not unheard of. You must be prepared to spend up to 18 hour days in front of your computer. The compensating factor however is that at some point in the future you will be able to automate most of your efforts.
It takes many years to learn online business
This is not true and if you apply yourself in a diligent and consistent manner, your learning can be accelerated without compromising on the quality. Study hard, read newsletters and articles, join online forums and listen to those who are already successful within the internet marketing field.
Internet marketing is a real and authentic business venture, but be prepared for the many skeptics and other people who will look at you in a funny way.
They react in this manner because of not seeing you leave your house at 8 in the morning and returning at 6 every evening. Remind them that you are just as exhausted from working and researching all day as they are from slogging in the workplace or office all day. If you work on your business model and ignore the misconceptions, then you will succeed.
Link Building in Online Marketing: Tougher Than It Sounds
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 9:52 AM
Friday, January 22, 2010
Link Building in Online Marketing: Tougher Than It Sounds
You probably don’t need to read the latest advice from the online marketing consultants to figure out the basic idea behind link building. Without links, your site won’t develop authority. Without authority, it won’t move up on the search engines. But even the most savvy online marketing consultant would have to admit that doing that is just not as easy as it sounds.
More is Not Better in Link Building
Just going out and getting a bunch of links won’t necessarily help your site. You need quality links to get higher search rankings. But sometimes figuring out what makes one link better than another is tough. This is where you do need to keep up with what the online marketing consultants are recommending or you may just be wasting your time.
Targeted Anchor Text is a Must
When you start pursuing links on sites, you need targeted anchor text. However, you don’t want to use the same text everywhere. Google will notice that in a bad way. You want to use two or three different phrases and the proper name of your website. If you can’t get anything but an image link, make sure the site owner puts your anchor text or the name of your site in the ALT tag of the image.
Pay Attention to Links In and Out
Google looks at the site where your link appears and decides how much benefit your site gets back. A site with a lot of inbound links passes more authority to your site. At the same time, being linked on a site full of low-quality, outbound links probably won’t help you much.
PageRank Isn’t Everything
Don’t be one of those site owners who sees nothing but PageRank. A site with high PageRank can still have low link value. This is especially true of sites that sell links. Steer clear of sites that use phrases like “sponsored by” or “paid for by.” Google may not let that site pass PageRank at all. Move on. They’re not worth your time.
Concentrate on Site Relevance
Let’s say your site is about red widgets. You get a link on a site about purple doohickies. That link isn’t worth as much as one on a site about red widget management. Make sure you’re pursuing links in relevant places and look at how those places are optimized. If a site owner gives you a choice of having a link on a page titled “About Us” or one with the title “About Red Widgets,” which one do you choose? The link on the optimized page, “About Red Widgets,” has more value.
An Online Marketing Consultant Checks What’s Not Obvious
Take your cue from the pros and check sites in ways that aren’t obvious. For instance, in any search engine, you can type in “cache:” followed by a site url and find out if the site has been indexed and when it was last crawled. But what do those dates mean?
Chances are good that if the site hasn’t been crawled in 30-45 days, it’s not a good place for a link. But some domains have more value than others. For example, links from .edu domains are better than from a .com, but .info is worth less. All these factors should be weighed in judging a site’s worth in your link building efforts.
Does Social Networking Matter?
We’ve all seen the little link bars under blog posts and in forums asking people to Digg or Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, or StumbleUpon. Do you need to try to get links in places where social networking can happen? Yes. Alone those links may not have a lot of value, but Google is increasingly looking at the “active Web” in determining site authority.
It’s time consuming, but participating in forums and social sites and getting blog owners to run your articles with your linked anchor text included can be worth your time. But remember, relevance is a basic rule in online marketing consulting.
Are You Getting Clean Links?
When you get a link on a site, do you go look at the page’s source code? Is there anything extra in the “href” tag on the link? Is the site using redirect code? Is there a “nofollow” in the site’s meta data? If there is, the link is useless to you. It won’t pass any authority to your site because that code tells the search engines not to follow the link. Make sure you’re getting clean links.
When you’re on a tight budget and trying to develop your site and get higher search rankings, it can be a tough decision to work online marketing consulting into your thinking. The Web used to be pretty much a do-it-yourself place. That all started to change in 2004 when people began talking about “Web 2.0.”
It’s harder than ever to judge quality link building in the new world of Web applications and social networking. You can do it, but try to stay up to speed on what the online marketing consultants are recommending as good strategies. The Web is changing all the time. Good link building takes time and effort; you don’t want to waste those any more than you want to waste money during hard times.
The next 10 online trends in 2010
It’s never been harder to keep up with the latest web trends – with the expansion onto mobile platforms, the growth of social media and the need for start ups to be aware of new SEO techniques.
As a result, we’ve assembled a team of web experts to help you and your business keep on top of the most important trends on the web. Constructing a mobile website, creating social media campaigns and selling online are just some of the challenges businesses will face during 2010.
Here are top online trends for the next 12 months.
Mobile web
Every web-savvy business knows smartphone use is on the rise. But few are actively developing for mobiles by creating websites specifically used for handheld devices.
As more and more mobile users flock to gadgets with larger touchscreens and internet browsers, such as the iPhone or Google Nexus One, the mobile space will become bigger and SMEs need to get on board. If your website isn’t accessible through a smartphone or app, users will give up and go somewhere else – losing you traffic and potential sales.
Ovum analyst Nathan Burley says the number of people taking up smartphones instead of traditional handsets will require businesses to develop mobile websites.
“In our view there are two big trends that will occur in 2010. That is mobile broadband and the adoption of smartphones, and the impact of those two things on the industry. This is changing the way people access the internet, and that is in mobile.”
“The big change is that these smartphones are allowing people to use tools in the same way a laptop did in the past, which is opening more users to the internet on the go.”
Chris Thomas, chief executive of SEO firm Reseo, says 2010 will be “the year of the mobile”.
“I think mobile search is definitely here. Google is throwing a lot of money at mobile, and it’s going to be really interesting to see how businesses leverage that.”
SEO
Using search engine algorithms in order to get your site on “page one” has been a tactic used by online businesses for years. But SEO experts say the process of getting a website known will become even harder in 2010 with the rise of personalised and real-time search.
Social network Twitter sparked a trend when it designed the first popular real-time search engine. When users search for a term, the site would update that search with new “tweets” as they were being made.
Google has recently introduced a real-time search function of its own, complete with indexed tweets, while Microsoft Bing has made a deal to show tweets in search results. But Thomas says while 2010 will see a rise in real-time search traffic, businesses shouldn’t be too keen to pursue a dedicated real-time search strategy.
“I think people are still trying to figure out what to do with it. Perhaps if there’s a trending topic, such as Copenhagen or climate change, that’s where we could see real-time do some work because there’s an opportunity for someone selling solar panels to come in, using a message like “stop climate change” via solar panels or something. There is some real potential there.”
“This is where it could go, but it’s such an active industry, with optimisation and SEO changing. But I always say to our clients, stick to your knitting and don’t do anything silly.”
Jim Stewart, chief executive of Stewart Media, says real-time search will continue to grow but businesses need to be aware of the more subtle changes Google is making to its search algorithms.
“All of the normal SEO things still apply, even though Google is going forward with things like personalised search. That will surely play a part, but you still have to get on the front page at all before you get into someone’s personal search results.”
Stewart warns Google will be updating its speed-check feature, through which the engine checks how fast it takes for a user to connect to a website. If a business has any downtime, it could affect search rankings.
But Stewart also says Google could potentially lose its place as the top search engine, as users could migrate to other offerings or be wary of the company’s search power.
“I don’t believe the search engine is providing as relevant results as it did this time last year. I’m sure they know it, but it doesn’t seem to be working as well. I’d also love to think that people will begin to start using Bing more and more, but it has to become a better search engine before that happens.”
“The other thing is privacy. A lot of people already are pretty wary of Google and privacy issues, even to the point where Eric Schmidt said if you’re doing something on the web you don’t want people to know, then maybe you shouldn’t be doing it.”
Social Media
Facebook and Twitter were the standout social networks from 2009, and their popularity will surge in 2010 with both introducing new features, including paid accounts for business.
But businesses need to pay attention to the trends on these sites. Creating a social media strategy is no longer optional, it is vital to the health of a company and its ability to tap into an online user-base.
Some experts say if you aren’t engaging online, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to gain new customers and fans who will effectively market for you if given enough reason.
Thomas says 2010 will be the year in which businesses must jump on social media or risk being left behind by the competition.
“If you don’t have a Facebook fan page you should get in, and if you’re in a community-minded space, where you can offer things like competitions and such, then you’re set.”
James Griffin, founder and chief executive of online reputation management company SR7, says this year will see the rise of analysts who will begin to convince businesses to study, track and move operations into social media.
“Analysts will be versed in understanding and using social media, the quantitative and qualitative reports will empower businesses to implement researched social media strategies and gather market intelligence.”
Online retail
More and more Australian businesses are selling online, but compared to the US we have a lot of catching up to do. Online spending has grown from 1% to 3% of overall spending over the last 10 years, compared to the American equivalent of 7%.
Hal Pritchard, founder and chief executive of online kitchenware retailer Everton Online, says 2010 should be the year in which businesses start to realise they cannot operate without an eCommerce offering.
“The whole market in general is maturing. I think some of the people who didn’t want to do it originally are now deciding they have to do it, because if I count the number of competitors I have now compared to last year, there’s certainly a lot more out there.”
Pritchard says the biggest trend emerging in Australia is the growth of free shipping, which has allowed retailers in the US to stand out from the crowd.
“Freight is getting lower and is free in some places, which I suspect is going to be a general trend as competition hots up. Margins will get even tighter, and affording these things will be difficult, but I think it’s one of the things that are happening.”
“We seem to be following the US as we progress, and we’re less far behind and I think that free freight is the next thing. But it’s not just about that, it’s about pushing the boundaries and staying on the edge, not just having a good website. The people who can innovate and stay ahead will do well.”
Advertising
The internet advertising industry continued to grow in 2009 and will do the same in 2010, but the next 12 months is expected to see the ongoing development of mobile advertising.
Last year the Interactive Advertising Bureau forecast the online ad market to pass $2 billion by next month, representing a 27% increase from 2008. While the downturn forced spending down in 2009, it’s safe to assume that figure will rise in 2010.
The mobile advertising scene is fairly new, so naturally few SMEs are actually investing in the sector. But Apple’s recent acquisitions of Quattro, along with Google’s purchase of AdMob, shows the big players are serious about the mobile space.
But Thomas says businesses should think about advertising on prominent sites such as social networks, in order to keep up with the market.
“In the last 12 months we have started various campaigns using Facebook ads with quite good success, and it’s getting better. Businesses should be taking advantage of the solid targeting available through sites like Facebook.”
“We’re certainly seeing more advertising on Twitter. You have sites now which are allowing companies to hire someone with a million followers to tweet their messages. I mean, it’ll cost you, but the return on investment of that tweet could be huge.”
YouTube senior product manager David King says the growth of viral content, pieces of media published online which gain popularity in a short amount of time, are opening businesses up to new advertising models.
He says if a business finds a piece of content it created on a YouTube video, it can choose to place an in-video or AdWords advertisements rather than claim a copyright violation.
“These advertising structures are really geared towards taking control of what users upload. It’s only relevant if you’re uploading content, but if you are a small business and are doing that, this could be relevant for you.”
Reputation management
Most businesses are at least operating a website, but even those rejecting the online space need to be aware of how fast rumours and allegations can fly in the digital age. Several companies have had their reputations tarnished within hours from the activities of either rogue employees, or a botched advertising campaign.
Griffin says businesses need to control their reputation by monitoring what people are saying about them.
“The answer is, companies have been pushed into conducting a social media marketing campaigns without research and without adequately addressing the risk factors associated with social media.”
“2010 will see companies embracing the need to address the inherent risks of social media, with enterprises moving towards a scientific and empirically based approach to managing risk.”
Last year, Domino’s Pizza landed itself into trouble when two employees posted a video of themselves handling food unhygienically on the internet. Cotton On experienced backlash on Facebook when it continued to sell baby clothes with slogans such as “They Shake Me”.
Griffin says businesses can avoid such catastrophes by carefully monitoring who is talking about their brand, and being ready to address any situation as quickly as it appeared.
“The many and varied social media ‘fails’ of 2008-2009 will see companies and institutions take a measured, risk-based approach to these platforms.”
“Auditing, monitoring and analysing social media platforms along with risk mitigation strategies will become standard fare for those companies looking to protect and enhance their brand on social media platforms.”
Marketing
While mobile advertising may be taking awhile to heat up, many businesses are developing new and interesting mobile marketing campaigns to draw people into their stores.
Google has developed a system whereby users take a picture of a barcode with their mobile phone and use the search engine to find information. Closer to home, Hoyts Cinemas currently runs a promotion where movie goers with Bluetooth activated on their handsets sometimes receive discount offers via text messages when they walk into a lobby.
But it isn’t just big companies which are using mobiles for marketing. Peter Shipman, who owns a casual Mexican restaurant in the US, bought ads in university newspapers to advertise a barcode sent through text messages used to claim discounts.
US company Jagtag is now developing a technology used to identify barcodes through camera phones, when it is then sent via text message in order for the user to receive a discount code.
Thomas says this year will see a number of companies bring mobile marketing strategies to the forefront of their campaigns.
“There are going to be some really good creative ways people will start to get customers in store, and sending messages out like that… providing they don’t break any spam laws.”
“We’re going to see these companies start to realise how much activity is occurring through mobiles, and then we’re going to see them respond by commissioning campaigns of their own.”
Thomas also says a number of companies will begin to commission mobile apps, especially on the iPhone, purely for marketing purposes. Whether this will gain them revenue or purely open their brand to a new audience, the mobile apps market will become part of an online business’s marketing strategy in 2010.
Content
The growth of the internet has allowed businesses to publish content of their own, including blogs, pictures and even videos. King says SMEs should think about creating some sort of content on YouTube or similar sites such as a tutorial, and see a fan base grow.
“There are a lot of smaller to medium sized businesses which have really operated with a focus of specifically gearing themselves towards publishing on YouTube, and they really make a go of it – and we give them a global audience to do so.”
But King warns businesses they must be generating useful content, without the appearance of a blatant marketing pitch, and not be scared of entering a new area where they might not have experience.
“As these things become more commonplace, consumers love them, but unfortunately businesses which have been relying on older business models do not. I really think they need to get over that a little bit. Ultimately the consumer is right, and they are going to spend their time the way they spend it.”
“Businesses need to really stay focused on that consumer experience and not get hung up on the comfort of the way things used to be. The more businesses can try and anticipate where things can go as opposed to stopping it, I think that’s the best place to be for them.”
Open Source
Once upon a time, businesses wouldn’t trust open-source programs in favour of branded, more trustworthy software solutions. But now open-source has given SMEs a way of operating high-end programs without substantial costs.
With popular programs such as Mozilla Thunderbird, Open Office, WordPress and Joomla now gaining notoriety, organisations are beginning to realise open-source programs aren’t just technically inferior rip-offs, but legitimate alternatives.
A number of organisations, including the British Government and the French police force, have openly supported open-source, while Gartner research from late-2008 indicates the majority of businesses in the Asia/Pacific region took up open-source in 2009.
And with the development and popularity of open-source Android operating system continuing to grow, open-source is likely to play a major part in a business’s IT strategy in 2010.
Cloud computing
Two years ago “cloud computing” was viewed by many businesses as a buzzword with no particular meaning, used by tech-heads who didn’t quite know what they were talking about.
Now, using cloud services has become an essential for businesses. Whether they are backing up their data or using a piece of software hosted on external servers, cloud computing is now a part of everyday operations for many SMEs.
Cloud services have branched out into three main categories: applications, also known as software-as-a-service, infrastructure, used for data backups, and internal service providers for businesses with customised apps and programs.
Analyst firm Gartner recently named cloud computing as one of the top strategic technologies for 2010, saying it could be exploited in a number of different ways to customise programs and apps to a particular company’s needs.
“Using cloud resources does not eliminate the costs of IT solutions, but does rearrange some and reduce others. In addition, consuming cloud services enterprises will increasingly act as cloud providers and deliver application, information or business process services to customers and business partners.”
.htaccess is a file that you can create using Notepad in Windows (or any text editor) to add some additional functionality to your website and server. It is usually supported by all Unix/Linux web hosts which use the Apache server. This tutorial will help you create the file and use it on your site.
Note 1: .htaccess is the full name of this file, to create it using Notepad load it up, add text to the file, then go to File > Save As. Then click the drop down menu saying Save As Type and select All files. Then in the filename, type in .htaccess and it will save it.
Note 2: You may not be able to view it in your FTP program after uploading so investigate how to switch on the -a command with the filters in your FTP client, or SSH to the server and use the ls -a command to view all the files.
.htaccess files affect the directory they are placed in and all sub-directories. That is, an .htaccess file located in your root directory (yoursite.com) would affect yoursite.com/content, yoursite.com/content/contents, etc.
The .htaccess file will allow you to include the following features in your site:
* Error Documents
* Password protection
* Enabling SSI via htaccess
* Deny users by IP
* Change your default directory page
* Redirects
* Prevent viewing of .htaccess
* Adding MIME types
* Preventing hot linking of your images
* Preventing directory listing
I am going to go through each of these and tell you how to do them!
Error Documents
These are very useful and allow you to specify a page that the user goes to if there is an error. The most useful way you could use this is with the “404 Page Not Found” error. You can provide the user a list of common links, a link to your homepage, an e-mail address or whatever you feel like!
You create this in the .htaccess file by including the following command, replacing the value in [square brackets]:
ErrorDocument [number] [path to document location]
So, for example, the Olate 404 page is done like this:
ErrorDocument 404 /errors/404.php
Instead of directing users to a page, you can display some HTML instead:
ErrorDocument 404 “Page Not Found
Return to the homepageHowever, it is better to use the page as you have more control. You can find a list of error codes here.
Password Protection
You can protect a specific directory with the .htaccess file by doing the following:
1. Create a new file called .htpasswd in the same way as we created the .htaccess file above.
2. The .htpasswd file uses the following format for storing username and passwords:
username:password
There must be no spaces on the line before username, either side of the colon or after the password text. If you want several people to have access to the protected space, with each having a different login, you can add as many username/password lines as you wish making sure each one is on a separate line.
username can be any text or name but should not contain any spaces.
password should not be entered as plain text because this file could be viewed. Use the following link to get an encrypted version of your password: http://www.euronet.nl/~arnow/htpasswd , then use the encrypted version as the password for the username.
To simplify the process, a tool now exists that can create your .htpasswd file entries for you which you can then cut/paste into your own .htpasswd file: http://users.plus.net/htpasswd/
3. Now you need to add this to the .htaccess file. Note: the example given is for the www server, it is different for the CGI server which is explained later:
AuthUserFile /share/isp/plusnet/www/uu/username/htdocs/directory/.htpasswd
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName EnterPassword
AuthType Basic
require valid-user
The first line is the full server path to your .htpasswd file and will be different for each webspace (note: the path should be entered on the same line as AuthUserFile). To get your correct path for AuthUserFile just replace uu with the first 2 chars of your username, username with your username and directory with the name of the folder/directory you want to password protect. The .htaccess and .htpasswd files should then be put in directory. Note: if you put the .htaccess and .htpasswd files in the root of your site (htdocs on www server), it will password protect the entire site and ask for a username/password each time someone visits so it is not recommended to protect that one. Just place it in the sub directory you want to protect.
You can replace the EnterPassword text of AuthName with whatever you like, this is what is displayed in the login box when you acces the protected area. If you wish the message to have spaces in it, enter it within quote marks, such as “Enter The Password”.
The above example shows the path to use for your www webspace. To find the path to use for your CGI server webspace do the following:
* use telnet (or similar app) to connect to your cgi server shell e.g. telnet plus.net
* Enter your cgi username & password to the login and password prompts
* At the shell prompt ($) enter pwd followed by the return key. This will show your current working directory which is the root of your cgi webspace.
* Use that information + the name of the directory/folder you want to protect as the path for the AuthUserFile line.
E.g.: /files/homeX/username/secret/.htpasswd where X could be 1, 2 or 3.
Once you have created your .htaccess and .htpasswd files and copied them to the directory/folder you want to protect you should test the folder protection via a browser. Enter the URL to the protected webspace (e.g. for www webspace if you put the files into a directory called protected, it may be something like http://www.username.plus.com/protected ). You should then be presented with a login screen where you must enter your username and password. If it works, entering a valid username/password will give you access to the folder, invalid username/password should not allow access to the folder.
If the above fails, check you have created the .htaccess and .htpasswd files correctly and that you have copied them to the correct place. If you used FTP to copy the files to your webspace (www or cgi) make sure you transfered them as text and they have gone into the correct folder. Or ftp them as htaccess.txt and htpasswd.txt and rename them to .htaccess and .htpasswd.
Enabling SSI Via .htaccess
If you cannot use SSI (Server Side Includes) with your host, you can try and enable it via the following command in the .htaccess file:
AddType text/html .shtml
AddHandler server-parsed .shtml
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes
The first line tells the server which files it should parse as having SSI. The second line adds the handler that actually parses the SSI files.
SSI is already enabled on the PlusNet homepages server so you do not need to use the above code. However, to allow SSI in your .htm pages then use the following lines in your .htaccess file to avoid problems:
AddType text/html .htm
AddHandler server-parsed .htm
Deny users by IP Address
If you want to stop a specific user from accessing your site, then include the following:
order allow,deny
deny from 123.45.6.7
deny from 12.34.5.
allow from all
Replace the IP addresses with the addresses you want to block. Or, as on the second “deny from” line, you can specify a section of the IP address, which will block all hosts whose IP addresses begin with a matching address.
Note: This features does not work on PlusNet servers.
Change your default directory page
This is a command which allows you to specify a file that is to be loaded as your default page whenever a directory or url request comes in, that does not specify a particular page.
DirectoryIndex filename.html
This would cause filename.html to be the default page of your site, so www.yourdomain.com would not go to index.html, but to filename.html.
Note: This features is disabled on all PlusNet servers except the HTML server (www.username.plus.com).
Redirects
If you change a section of your site structure, why leave people with a 404 when you can just redirect them?
Redirect /olddirectory/oldfile.html http://yoursite.com/newdirectory/newfile.html
If the user tries to access the old file, they will be redirected to the new file.
Prevent viewing of .htaccess file
To stop people from viewing the .htacess file in your site, include this line in the file:
order allow,deny
deny from all
Adding MIME Types
If the server is not setup correctly to serve certain file types, then you can change that with this line:
AddType application/x-shockwave-flash swf
Preventing hot linking of images
To stop people from using your images on their site while the image is still on your site (stealing valuable bandwidth), add the following to the .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?mydomain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg)$ – [F]
Replace mydomain.com with your domain name and the gif|jpg with any other file extension, such as gif|jpg|swf
Preventing Directory Listing
Sometimes, if you have a directory containing files, but not an index file, then the server will display the entire contents of that directory. To prevent this from happening, include this:
IndexIgnore *
The * is known as a wildcard and means all files. You could just block the gif and jpg files for example:
IndexIgnore *.gif *.jpg
That basically sums up the major functions you can use with .htaccess! I hope you have fun with it!
Google Caffeine And The New Ranking Factors
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 1:55 PM
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Google Caffeine And The New Ranking Factors
By Titus Hoskins (c) 2009
Google Caffeine is the name given to Google’s “Next Generation”
search engine, which it will use to rank and index all the pages
on the wonderful world wide web. According to all indications,
this is not just another one of Google’s infamous Updates, but a
major “Overhaul” of its index and algorithm – the complex formula
and calculations Google uses to rank all web pages, including
yours.
If that doesn’t sound ominous enough, according to Matt Cutts
(Google Spokesperson) one database is already showing Google
Caffeine, and the full blown version will be released after the
holidays. The reasoning behind this – Google doesn’t want to
upset webmasters and site owners during the lucrative holiday
buying season. In the past, other major Google Updates have come
around this time of the year, most notably the “Florida Update”
which severely affected many web sites and webmasters.
Recently, Google has been more aware and much more generous to
webmasters by being more open and forthcoming in regards to how
it indexes its pages. This time around, webmasters were even
given access to a beta version of Caffeine which Google released
last summer (’09) where webmasters could check to see how well
their keywords and site would fare in this new search index.
This beta site (www2.sandbox.google.com) has now been taken down
by Google.
Like any professional search engine marketer who works online, I
was constantly checking my sites and keywords in Google’s new
search engine. I have drawn some conclusions from what I have
observed, but please be aware it is often very foolish to draw
conclusions and make predictions from your own small sampling of
results. You can end up with egg on your face very quickly,
especially when you consider Google is probably still making
adjustments and refinements on Caffeine as it analyzes the
results.
However, there are certain ranking factors that even Google is
telling us about, mainly “Site Speed” or how fast your site
loads will play a part in how its ranked. We have also heard a
lot about “Broken Links” and if your page or site has them, then
it will probably be ranked lower. Of course, linking out to “Bad
Neighborhoods” will probably still not be a good practice, if you
want higher rankings within Google.
It should not come as a shock or a surprise, that “Over-All Page
Quality” will play a greater role in how well your page ranks.
Keep in mind, Google is like any other company putting out a
product, if that product doesn’t have a high standard of
quality, it reflects badly back on everyone concerned. Google’s
SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) are the key to all their
online revenue, they must do everything in their power to keep
that product fast, relevant, current and above all high quality.
Therefore, expect “OnPage Factors” to play a much greater role
in Google Caffeine. Quality unique content, page design, good
navigation, title, meta tags, description, keyword density, alt
tags, page views, bounce rate, traffic numbers, time spent on
page, and the number of social bookmarks may play an increased
role in achieving high rankings. A perfectly optimized keyworded
page, with the keyword in the title, description, meta tags, alt
tags, on the page… will probably get you ranked higher in
Caffeine, as well as most search engines on the web.
This may be pure speculation on my part, but one of the areas
Caffeine will be addressing or incorporating is “Social
BookMarking”, that is the number of social bookmarks a page
receives will determine how high it is ranked. I also believe
one of the major reasons these bookmarks will become much more
important has to do with the whole nasty issue of link buying.
Now, the integrity of Google’s index is not in question, but any
savvy marketer or webmaster knows any individual or company with
deep pockets and huge resources can buy their way into the top
spot. Despite Google’s attempt to stop it, link buying and
keyword positioning, is a thriving industry on the web. Rightly
or wrongly, money and unlimited resources will get you or your
company to the top in organic search, regardless of which search
engine you’re targeting.
All moral and ethnical issues aside, the small webmaster and/or
online marketer is stuck right in the middle, with Google on one
side and these major multinational competitors on the other.
Looming on the horizon is Google Caffeine, a new sheriff in town!
What New Rules Will This Sheriff Bring?
The major question here is this: has the importance of
backlinking been downplayed in this new index in favor of the
keyworded domain and onsite content and optimization? Has there
been a major shift to listing more quality content rather than
relying on the number of backlinks a site is receiving, even
from important related themed sites? The major problem and
question to Google is this: if links can be bought, how do you
keep your organic results democratic and fair, which was the
original intention of Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they
started Google in 1998.
One Possible Solution is Social Bookmarking.
Will we see an ever growing importance of social bookmarks and
links in this new index. It is quite easy to buy 1000 links, but
getting 1000 or 10,000 “re-tweets” is a little more difficult.
Similarly, getting two or three thousand “diggs” may be a little
harder to pull off. Same goes for Del.icio.us bookmarks,
Facebook fans… well you get the picture. Will Google’s use of
these new social sites make Caffeine faster, more relevant, more
current and most importantly of all, can it bring some democracy
back into their index?
Of course, nothing in Google’s new index will be that cut and
dry, that black and white. Other ranking factors such as age of
site, past history and reputation, traffic numbers, authority
branding… will all play a role in whether your site gets
listed on that all important first page. However, on page
factors may play a greater role – title, meta tags, description,
keyword density, alt tags, page views, bounce rate, time spent
on page, and the number of social bookmarks may play an
increased role in achieving high rankings. Website speed or how
fast your site loads may also be a new ranking factor.
Underlying this whole issue is the fact which many experienced
webmasters/marketers already know, Google’s SERPs are not a
one-trick pony anymore. For very lucrative (monetized) keyword
phrases, Google’s results are broken up into Five categories…
Info listings, Video listings, News Listings, Shopping Listings
and Corporate Listings. Forget Caffeine, this is probably the
fairest move Google has made in the last few years to make its
SERPs more democratic.
Another even more puzzling issue for me concerning Google
Caffeine is how much emphasis or ranking power will it place on
“Keyworded Domains”, domain names which have your keyword or
keyword phrase in them. Will these domains be ranked higher?
Webmasters and marketers for years have been telling us we
should always pick domain names which have our major keywords in
them. Just common sense really, someone searching for “brown
widgets” will more likely than not find that item at a domain
called brownwidgets(dot)com or brownwidget(dot)com. The major
SEO reasoning, all your backlinks will inherently have your
searched keyword in the URL, thus bringing it up in the
rankings.
Against this whole backdrop, everyone has to realize the web
itself is evolving, new sites like Twitter, FaceBook… have
changed the whole cyber landscape. Likewise, the web user is
also changing and becoming more web savvy in how they use the
web. Will search engines, not only Google, take a back-seat role
in how we find stuff on the web? As major sites are branded into
the web user’s psyche, will these users go directly to these
sites, by-passing the search engines altogether?
As the web evolves, keyworded domains will become more valuable
and this value will be reflected in the quality of the site. If
you’re making thousands or even millions from your keyworded
domain, you can afford to invest in quality content and design.
Cream rises to the top. Gradually, as these domains become more
valuable, they will probably be snapped up by marketers and
companies who know just how to exploit them. Thousands upon
thousands of keyworded domains will probably be bought up by
multi-billion dollar corporations who finally realize what the
web has to offer. This new evolved web will probably be much
more narrower in scope and very topic specific.
In the “Next Generation” Web the Re-Direct Shall Be King!
Will the role of the search engines, whether it be Google or
Bing/Yahoo, become less and less important, as savvy web
searchers go directly to a site by typing in the keyworded
domain to find what they’re looking for on the web? Cutting out
the middleman may just become a world wide passion as big
multinational and fully funded corporations snap up all these
valuable and lucrative keyworded domains. Will we see these
domains grow in importance and the search engines take more of a
back-up role? Human nature dictates we always take the fastest
route to our destination and the web will be no exception to
this rule.
Have all the smart people at Google figured this out already,
and designed the new Google Caffeine to reflect the growing
importance of the keyworded domain? Of course, we can only
speculate when it comes to just what Google is planning and
doing with its next generation search engine, but will onsite
factors and your domain name play a greater role in their
organic SERPs?
Regardless of what the new sheriff actually does, when the dust
finally settles on all these latest developments, the keyworded
domain will probably be standing tall, watching the sun rise on
a brand new day.
Website Traffic Generation Planning and Methodologies
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 1:51 PM
Friday, January 15, 2010
Website Traffic Generation Planning and Methodologies
By Duncan Wierman (c) 2009
Real Estate internet marketing is like any other kind of
marketing, you’re trying to reach a niche market and must
plan accordingly. You have to start by identifying your
target market in order to develop your message conveying
exactly the kind of high value business proposition which
your niche will respond to.
The first steps are to:
1) Identify your target market; start with geo targeting
and work with the demographics from there.
2) Decide how you want to be perceived by this target
market and decide how you’ll foster this perception.
3) Identify and refine your value proposition.
Once you’ve done this, the next step is to develop and
distribute your value proposition, making sure that your
value proposition is perceived by your target market
exactly as intended. In marketing, shaping consumer
perception isn’t just the most important thing: it’s
everything.
You have to start by positioning yourself to be perceived
in a specific way; from here, you’ll need to maintain,
develop, grow or alter this market position as you deem
necessary.
The real challenge is putting these principles into action:
Driving Traffic
There are some important principles of traffic generation
you need to understand in order to be successful at
bringing visitors into your website.
There are both principles and rules of traffic generation;
principles have to do with your approach to the task and
the rules are the practical nuts and bolts of driving
traffic. You need to have an understanding of the larger
picture before you can successfully put the practical
techniques into action.
What you’ll usually see a lot of is the techniques alone.
While this is still valuable information, you probably
won’t get far with these techniques if you aren’t versed in
the underlying principles of traffic generation.
These are the most important principles of traffic
generation:
* Traffic generation isn’t a black art – it’s something
which largely relies on common sense and methods which
can be replicated with consistent results.
* The reason people usually fail in their traffic
generation efforts is that they don’t truly commit to
making traffic generation techniques a fully integrated
part of their business strategy.
* You need to create a plan for driving traffic. Think of
it as a road map; follow it, but remember that it’s not
carved in stone. Your plan can and should evolve to
reflect your real life experience and results.
* Continually test and track the results of your traffic
generation efforts – and adjust your plan accordingly.
* Set goals for yourself and as you meet them, raise the
bar; traffic generation is a process, not a single
objective.
* Don’t be discouraged if you don’t see results
immediately.
* Remember that driving traffic begins with building your
site – Why is this? Because your site should be built
from the ground up with visitors in mind. Look at other
sites in your industry to gain an understanding of
patterns of visitor behavior.
See what these other sites are doing; don’t hesitate to
take a page from your competition’s playbook if you see
something which is working for them.
This is where things can become challenging; it’s something
like standing in Grand Central Station at rush hour with a
megaphone, trying to be heard above the noise of the crowd.
The goal here is to get the attention of your target
market and get them to come to your site.
All business is arbitrage. You’re taking something which is
cheap (to you, at least) and exchanging it for something of
higher value – buy low, sell high.
For example, SEO and other free traffic generation
strategies essentially trade your time for traffic which is
of higher value to you; this value may be measured directly
in monetary terms or in other means (for instance, as
signups to a list). The same is true of paid methods of
driving traffic like PPC advertising; you’re paying what
you deem to be a small amount for something else which you
see as more valuable.
If you’ve been reading carefully so far, you may have
noticed that I haven’t said a word about being indexed by
the search engines; that’s because this falls under the
heading of techniques, not the principles of traffic
generation. While you do of course want to be indexed, this
isn’t your primary objective – and it’s something which
will happen naturally as you work to drive traffic using
other strategies.
Don’t lose sleep over the search engine crawlers; they will
come sooner or later. Remember that even once your site is
indexed, it’s no guarantee that visitors will follow.
Focusing on being indexed is losing sight of the forest for
the trees. This will happen anyway as a side effect of
using other traffic generation methods. What you should be
focused on is getting targeted traffic to your site. For
instance, if you exchange links with another site (or even
a directory) relevant to your industry, the search engine
crawlers will follow these links when indexing this other
site and voila! Your site will be indexed.
What you need to do is to let the web know that your site
is there while simultaneously driving targeted traffic. The
best way to do so is to create links to your site from
other sites; not only do these result in your site being
indexed, but back links are great SEO and of course, they
can generate traffic directly through visitor clicks.
Here are a few things you can do to start driving traffic
almost immediately:
* Whenever you add new content to your site or blog,
submit this content to the social bookmarking sites
(Digg, Technorati, etc.). Make an effort to give your
posts attention-getting titles so that people will be
interested in reading your content.
* Post comments on blogs which have a similar audience to
the one you’re trying to reach. Don’t post comment spam;
write real, thoughtful comments and include a link back
to your own site.
* Start contributing to forums and message boards relevant
to your industry.
* Create an RSS feed for your site or blog and submit this
feed to directories.
* Write articles on your niche topic and submit them to
article directories.
* Join link exchanges
* Build a linkwheel; create blogs and pages on platforms
like HubPages, Squidoo, Facebook, etc. and link them to
each other in a web ring-style structure. This helps
the search engines identify the topic of your site and
will improve your page rank as well.
These techniques can start driving traffic to your site
very quickly; if you implement all of these methods and
follow the basic principles of traffic generation, you
really can’t fail at bringing in targeted traffic.
So why do so many people fail at traffic generation?
Because they don’t stick with it and follow through; far
too many website owners give up after a few days or a few
weeks, saying that it’s just too much work for too little
result – instead of analyzing their efforts and figuring
out what is and isn’t working for them.
So how about search engine optimization (SEO)? Here’s what
you really need to know about:
1) Focusing on search engines rather than your potential
customers is always a losing bet. If you’re putting all of
your energy towards keeping up with the search engines and
their constantly evolving algorithms, you’re losing sight
of your visitors.
2) Optimizing your site for very competitive (i.e. popular)
keywords means fighting an uphill battle with no guarantee
of success.
3) Generally speaking, you’ll do best with long tail
keywords; these require far less work in terms of
optimizing your content. Long tail keywords are also very
effective at attracting targeted traffic. The effort you
put into optimizing your content for long tail keywords
will bring you much better results than the same amount of
time and effort spent optimizing your site for popular
keywords.
4) Offsite optimization is just as important (if not more
so) than on site SEO. Back links can do wonders for your
traffic; but remember to keep all of your efforts focused
on visitors, not search engines whether you’re working on
on-site or offsite SEO.
5) Base your traffic generation strategy on visitors and
the search engines will follow.
6) As you develop and implement SEO techniques, always keep
in mind how people actually look for information online -
that’s why long tail keywords are so important. It’s a lot
easier to rank high in the search results for long tail
keywords. Being in the top 10 on Google for several long
tail keywords will bring you a lot more traffic than being
on the 10th page of results for a highly competitive
keyword (which is where you’ll start out if you’re very
lucky if you choose to go this route).
Remember that it’s a long way to the top; be patient and
enjoy the view on your way up. Stick with it and you’ll
eventually have more traffic than you know what to do with!
20 Tools for Tracking Social Media Marketing
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 1:29 PM
Thursday, January 14, 2010
20 Tools for Tracking Social Media Marketing
By Merle (c) 2010 MerlesWorld
(http://MerlesWorld.com)
Social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter make it easy
for people to come together and share opinions, experiences and
thoughts on a number of topics. Smart companies understand this
and are using the power of social media to connect and inform
their customers, and potential customers. Referred to as “Social
Media Marketing”, it’s a smart way to open the lines of
communication between you and your prospects.
Social media activities run the gamut from Blogging, micro
blogging sites such as Twitter, social networking communities
such as LinkedIn and Facebook, video and music uploading sites,
discussion forums, photo sharing and more. With so many
different sites and ways to participate, it can be difficult to
keep track of all your efforts.
Participating in social media doesn’t take a lot of money, but
it is very time consuming and businesses want to know that all
of this investment in time is paying off. Before launching a
campaign, you should have a firm grasp on what it is you’re
trying to accomplish. Is it increasing website traffic? Getting
more ezine subscribers? Having more people download your free
ebook or whitepaper? Or maybe you just want to work on your
company’s brand image. Whatever it is, you need to have a plan.
As the old saying goes, “If you don’t know where you’re going,
you’ll never get there”. Have your game plan intact before
getting started in marketing yourself, or your company with
social media.
There are many different forms of social media, so it’s
impossible to use them all. Pick three or four, and funnel the
majority of your efforts there. Even if you won’t be working
them all, at the very least you should claim your name or
company name on as many social services as possible. You don’t
want to find out later that someone has the user name that you
want. If you need to see if your chosen user name is available
try http://Namechk.com which checks dozens of social media
networking and bookmarking sites all at once to see if it’s
available. Claim your name now so you won’t end up being sorry
later.
So how do you monitor all the buzz? How do you monitor your
brand and protect your hard earned reputation? I thought you’d
never ask. There isn’t one fool-proof method but there are many
services and tools out there that will make it easy to see who’s
talking about you online. Some are free and others will make you
pull out your wallet.
These “online reputation management” tools, as they’re often
referred to, will help you to define keywords or phrases you
wish to track and then watch for any mention of your company
name, products, or services. It’s important to defend and monitor
your online reputation. Similar to High School reputations,
protecting your image online is the name of the game, and just
as in real life, everyone has one to maintain.
Let’s take a look at some of the measuring and tracking tools at
your disposal:
1) http://BackTweets.com : A search engine for Twitter. See
who’s tweeting your links and more. Can also sign up for email
alerts of new findings.
2) http://Addictomatic.com : A little different than the others,
you type in a keyword, topic or phrase and out it goes searching
the top blogs, news sites, Google, Technorati, Ask, YouTube,
Flickr, Digg, Topix and more. You’ll be given a personalized
results page to bookmark with everything it finds related to
your topic.
3) http://Buzzoo.net : All about Internet buzz, it tracks
several different websites to bring you what’s “hot” right now.
4) http://Surchur.com : Search for the latest and greatest on
topics that are popular right now. Type in a keyphrase and it
searches blogs, social news sites, photo and video sites for
your chosen topic.
5) http://Commentful.Blogflux.com : This service watches for
comments on blog posts, Digg, Flickr, and others and notifies
you of any findings.
6) http://AlertRank.com : A better way to organize and sort
Google alerts. Get a daily report emailed to you in a
spreadsheet format of what it finds.
7) http://BoardTracker.com : A search engine for forums only.
Monitor discussion boards and be notified by email when a thread
matching your search terms is discovered. Free to use.
http://www.google.com/alerts : I’ve been using this “secret
weapon” for years. Simply type in your name or company name and
receive daily emails of results found. They do the work, you
receive the links. Free and nice.
9) http://BrandsEye.com : An online reputation management tool
with a real-time, concise overview of your online reputation.
Multiple levels of services and pricing available. Starting at
$1.00.
10) http://Twazzup.com : Another Twitter only search engine.
11) http://SiteMention.com : Type in your url and find out
what’s being said about you. The results returned are gathered
from Google Blog Search, Twitter, FriendFeed, YouTube, MySpace,
Digg, Delicious and many more.
12) http://Brandwatch.net: This service tracks your brands,
companies, even the competition. Sign up for free weekly updates
on any brand. Their detailed reports break down what sites like
you, your most talked about features, weekly summary of all
blogs and forum activity. Very similar to the old “press
clipping” service.
13) http://Trackur.com : A tool that scans many websites,
including blogs, news, image and video sites, forums and
notifies you of any mention of your brand, products/services.
Easy to use and affordable. Prices vary depending on need, a
personal account is only $18.00 a month, corporate account
$88.00 a month with other options also available. Try a
“personal” account free for 14 days.
14) http://FiltrBox.com : This one searches online news sources,
Twitter and others to find out what’s being said about you or
your company. Pricing is based on the number of users, but there
is a free version that provides “5 filters” and 15 days of what
they call “article history”.
15) http://SocialMention.com/alerts : Just like Google Alerts
but for social media. Enter your keyword phrase and email address
to be notified of any new findings. Searches blogs, microblogs
like Twitter, bookmarks, comments, events, images, news, videos
and more.
16) http://BlogPulse.com : A search engine that searches only
for data posted to blogs. Enter your keyword, hit submit and
off it goes to gather results.
17) http://BackType.com : Billing itself as a “conversational
search engine” they index millions of conversations from social
networks, blogs and other social media.
18) http://sm2.techrigy.com : Industry insiders claim this to be
the leading social media monitoring solution online. Choice of
free or paid version. Free is limited to five searches and 1,000
results. There are three paid professional levels: Gold, Diamond,
or Platinum.
19) http://ReputationDefender.com : This paid service finds out
everything there is to know about you online, and if negative
information is found they try to have it removed. Different
types of plans are available such as “My Reputation”, “My
Privacy”, starting at only $14.95 a month.
20) http://Topsy.com : Topsy will track your tweets that have
been retweeted so you can find out who’s been sending you all
that “link love”. Type in your Twitter user name and you’ll be
amazed at what you find.
If you’d like to track incoming traffic from your various social
media profiles, an easy way to do it using Google Analytics can
be found here http://Tinyurl.com/kuc9rL
Just as there are many ways to market your company using social
media, as you can see, there’s a multitude of tools and services
at your disposal to track and see if all of that hard work is
paying off. Smart companies realize the importance of social
media in their marketing efforts and are utilizing it on some
level. How smart are you?
10 Tips to Grow Your Business Using Online Video
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 1:23 PM
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
10 Tips to Grow Your Business Using Online Video
By Diana D’Itri (c) 2010
Lacking any information to the contrary, many businesses still
think that all they need to do to get new clients is to put
their name and face in the Yellow Pages or online social
directories, get some professional looking business cards, a
website and Voila! It’s the old adage “build it and they will
come”.
Trouble is, that’s what their competitors are doing also and in
this day and age, it’s just not enough.
Does Your Business Stand Out Online?
Most advertising on the Web follows a time-honored format,
although some might call it a time-worn format as it does little
to differentiate itself. You can bet that a high percentage of
this advertising will be ignored and the money spent on it will
be wasted.
So how does a company stand out from the crowd online?
Thanks to an oversupply of similar text, claims, and
presentation – coupled with a short 21st century attention span
- your website has less than ten seconds to move a visitor to
action. If it doesn’t, that visitor will click away to another
site, and then another. Therefore, it’s critical that you find a
way to break through the noise your competitors are making. But
even that’s not enough.
Statistics show that even the best-looking websites generate
conversion rates of under one percent, so for every 100 visitors
you do manage to get, less than one will call or email you.
Sound bleak? Thinking of redirecting more of your advertising
budget back to the Yellow Pages? Don’t. You’re on the right
track – you just haven’t leveraged all the power available to
you online.
One-to-Many Communication. On-on-One Feel.
Most websites are little more than electronic versions of Yellow
Page advertising. For the most part, they don’t encourage
interaction beyond the obligatory “Contact me for more
information” plea. These sites don’t encourage trust any more
than their print counterparts. They don’t give visitors the
warm-and-fuzzy feeling that a face-to-face meeting would.
But they can.
Searching for a local service provider online can be a daunting
prospect, but even more daunting than the search is deciding
which provider to use once you get to the page, especially since
most websites promise the standard good service, competitive
pricing and high quality.
So how does a business differentiate itself from the sea of
competition? Web video makes this possible on a grand scale.
Thanks to rapidly improving technology, it’s easier than ever to
add that warm-and-fuzzy, face-to-face element to your site,
replicate an in-person interview, and offer your visitors an
opportunity to check you out before picking up the phone. With
Web video, you can present an interview that addresses all the
questions and concerns of potential clients. You can keep them
on your site longer and give them insight into the “business
behind the business.” In a way that wasn’t possible even a few
years ago, business owners can now speak directly to their
audiences and showcase their personalities and areas of
expertise. This is especially helpful if you are a professional
service provider.
Any business that relies on conveying trust-ability will benefit
from this type of web marketing. Really, it’s one-to-many
communication with a one-on-one feel. It’s the perfect ice
breaker and an efficient means of generating the interest and
trust needed to compel potential clients to make an appointment
and do business.
A high-quality Web interview placed strategically on your site
is a huge timesaver for you and prospective clients because you
reach a wide audience in minimal time. Potential clients get the
information they need to pre-qualify – and pre-sell – themselves
before they call.
Online video delivers some of the best ROI of any advertising
medium today and if set up properly, actually ranks higher
than text now by the major search engines like Google. Short of
spending valuable face time with a potential client (often times
a poorly qualified potential client) there is simply no better
way to forge a personal connection with them. With that in mind,
here are 10 tips to help you get the most of your online video
marketing efforts.
10 Tips for Making the Most of Online Video
1. Make Sure Your Video is Professionally Done.
This is an absolute must. The whole point here is to establish
credibility and trust, but you’ll do the opposite with a poorly
executed and produced video. Yes, many of the videos you find on
sharing sites are mediocre at best, but that is changing rapidly
as companies begin to see the value of promoting themselves in
this manner. In fact, a recent Permission TV survey found that
67% of 400 hundred top executives intended to focus their online
marketing efforts on video in 2009. The rush is coming – find a
personable, engaging interviewer and a top notch production crew
to really stand out.
2. Submit Your Video to as Many Outlets as Possible.
While YouTube is the clear leader here, there are many other
video sharing sites worthy of consideration. Here are some
others you won’t want to pass up:
� Google Video: http://video.google.com
� Yahoo! Video: http://video.yahoo.com
� Daily Motion: http://www.dailymotion.com
� MySpaceTV: http://vids.myspace.com
� MetaCafe: http://www.metacafe.com
� Revver: http://www.revver.com
� Veoh: http://www.veoh.com
� Blinkx: http://www.blinkx.com
� Break: http://www.break.com
3. Embed Your Video on the Front Page of Your Site.
Don’t hide what’s going to become one of your most effective
selling tools on a dusty inside page. Get it out front.
Customers and search engines will love you for it.
4. Find Out What Search Terms Your Potential Clients are Using
and Put Them in Your Video’s Title.
If you don’t know what words clients in need of your services
are typing into Google and other search engines, get
professional help or use some of the resources featured on this
page. Once you’ve identified these terms, use the most popular
in your video’s title.
5. Make Your Tags and Descriptions SEO-friendly, too.
Most video sharing sites let you tag videos with keywords and
post a short description, so get the most out of these by
sprinkling in the search terms you’ve identified.
6. Don’t Forget Your Thumbnail.
A thumbnail is a still shot from your video that appears along
with search results. Don’t waste this opportunity to present
yourself in the best light possible – choose a key moment from
your video, preferably one where you’re smiling as you speak
with your interviewer.
7. Link Back to Your Site.
Put your URL near the top of your video’s description. You’ll
get a higher search ranking and potential clients will quickly
learn where to go for more information.
8. Interact With Your Viewers.
Most video sharing sites allow viewer comments. Use this
opportunity to answer questions, respond to comments, and
further promote your business.
9. Consider a Pay-Per-Click Campaign.
Natural search engine optimization, while effective, takes time
to bear fruit. In the meantime, you might want to jump start the
process with a pay-per-click campaign that gives you a sponsored
search listing. You can learn more about PPC advertising at:
http://www.google.com/intl/en/ads,
http://sem.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/searchenginemarketing, and
http://advertising.microsoft.com/search-advertising
10. Add New Content Often.
Search engines look for it and so do potential clients. Keep
your content fresh and up-to-date and keep visitors coming back
for more.
With an ever-increasing stream of competition, it’s more
important than ever to stand out from the crowd. These days
standing out means maximizing your online presence and
leveraging the technology to present the unique advantages of
you and your firm. There’s no better way for a growth-oriented
business to build a solid and secure future than by using
effective and affordable online video.
Use these free resources to get a handle on the terms that
potential clients are using to search for you right now.
Wordtracker: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com
Google AdWords: http://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Keyword Discovery: http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html
KwMap: http://www.kwmap.net
Google Trends: http://www.google.com/trends
Google Matt Cutts on Site Speed and the Caffeine Update
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 10:36 AM
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Man’s battle vs. the rat goes high-tech
posted by By Jeff Spurrier @ 1:00 AM
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Mousetraps aren't just a snap anymore. Some try to kill humanely. One will even send an e-mail of a kill.
It's hard not to admire the common house mouse, Mus musculus . Upon setting up a new home, it neatly separates kitchen, bedroom and toilet areas. It has evolved to make its own vitamin C, and it's sensible enough to fear not only black lights (possibly because a mouse's urine has a fluorescent glow) but also rats (Musicide is common).
It's hard not to admire the common house mouse, Mus musculus . Upon setting up a new home, it neatly separates kitchen, bedroom and toilet areas. It has evolved to make its own vitamin C, and it's sensible enough to fear not only black lights (possibly because a mouse's urine has a fluorescent glow) but also rats (Musicide is common).
Comments Off
Old TVs, cellphones and other electronics don't belong in the trash; they should be recycled.
If all the Consumer Electronics Show coverage this week has you scheming to buy the new Google smart phone or a 3-D home theater system, you aren't alone. Americans have an insatiable appetite for the latest and greatest gadgets.
If all the Consumer Electronics Show coverage this week has you scheming to buy the new Google smart phone or a 3-D home theater system, you aren't alone. Americans have an insatiable appetite for the latest and greatest gadgets.
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Google Matt Cutts – Removing Old Content
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 10:13 AM
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Search Cheat Sheet: This is a quick guide to the operators and restricts supported by wave search.
Keywords
about:[keyword] — finds waves which have [keyword] occurring anywhere. Same as [keyword].
title:[keyword] — finds waves which have [keyword] in the title.
caption:[keyword] — finds waves which have an attachment where [keyword] occurs in the caption.
————————————————
Status
is:read — finds all read waves.
is:unread — finds all unread waves.
Note: you cannot currently do a search like “-is:read” by itself and get reliable results due to an outstanding restriction on megastore queries
is:mute — finds all muted waves.
is:unmute — finds all waves not muted
is:active — currently the same as is:unread.
is:note — finds all waves which have you as the only participant and contributor
————————————————
Participants
from:[address] — finds waves from the participant identified by the address. Special case of from:me identifying waves from yourself.
by:[address] — same as from:[address].
to:[address] — find waves which are a dialogue between you and the participant identified by the address.
with:[address] — find waves that have the participant identified by the given address explicitly listed.
owner:[address] — find waves by person, that they created.
only:[address] — finds waves to which only the participant specified by the given address contributed.
————————————————
Date Search
Currently, there are a few restricts:
past:[date term] — finds all waves in the last period.
previous:[date term] — finds all waves in the period before the last period.
before:[date term] — finds all waves before a certain period.
after:[date term] — finds all waves after a certain period.
which can be combined with date terms:
day
week
month
year
So you can have past:week, past:year. There is also support for
past:N[date term] where N > 0. So you can have past:3days (today, yesterday, the day before yesterday).
Also you can have
past:Ndays
past:Nweeks
past:Nmonths
past:Nyears
Finally, you can abbreviate days, weeks, months and years to a single letter (d, w, m, y). Thus you can write
past:3d
past:2w
————————————————
Folders
in:[folder name] — find waves in the folder with the given name. For example, in:inbox.
in:[search name] — find waves in the saved search with the given name.
is:unfiled — find waves which have not been moved to a user folder.
is:filed — find waves which belong to some user folder.
————————————————
Attachments
has:attachment — finds waves with an attachment. This changed from “is:image”.
has:document — finds waves with an attachment which is a document. (coming soon)
has:image — finds waves with an attachments which is an image. (coming soon)
caption:[keyword] — finds waves with an attachment with caption containing [keyword].
filename:[keyword] — finds waves with an attachment with filename containing [keyword]. (coming soon)
mimetype:[keyword] — finds waves with an attachment with mimetype containing [keyword]. (coming soon)
————————————————
Tags
tag:[tag name] — finds waves with the tag [tag name].
————————————————
Gadgets
has:gadget — finds waves which contain a gadget.
gadget:[keyword] — finds waves which contain a gadget with name containing keywords. e.g. chess, fridge, map, risk, sokoban.
gadgeturl:[keyword] — finds waves which contain a gadget with urls containing keyword.
gadgettitle:[keyword] — finds waves which contain a gadget with a title containing keywords.
————————————————
Expressions
foo & bar — match waves with foo and bar.
You can use AND, or skip the operator altogether, as the logical and is the default.
foo | bar — match waves with foo or bar (or both).
foo OR bar — match waves with foo or bar (or both).
-foo — match waves that do not contain foo. (There is an outstanding bug that causes searches with only negative terms to fail. To get around it, use to:me -foo)
“foo … bar” — matches waves that contain the exact phrase “foo … bar” (There is an outstanding bug for live search not working with phrases)
foo & (bar | -baz) — matches waves that contain foo and either bar or do not contain baz.
————————————————
Phrases
“[multiple terms]” — match waves with one or more terms in sequence:
“hot dog” catches waves with the terms hot and dog in sequence. This is also required for other operators such as in:”new inbox” where say “new inbox” is a saved search.
————————————————
XML Search
tags:subtag — find all waves which have this combination.
tag:[tag] — find all waves which have this .
attribute:[value keyword] — finds all waves which have < …. attribute=value …> where keyword is a token in value.
————————————————
Wave ID
id:”” — find a wave with a specific wave id.
————————————————
Zero Inbox
If you want to zero inbox, you can hack this temporarily by saving a search “my inbox” with the query:
in:inbox is:unread this:week. You can then use the menu option “Mark as read” in the wave panel.
Alternative zero inbox: in:inbox is:unread past:7days -is:mail
————————————————
Saved Searches
A search can be saved using one of two methods:
Create a search in the search box and then press the Save search button at the bottom of the Digest panel.
Add a search using the searches Add button on the Navigation panel. Then add the search query and name of the search in the Saved Search popup panel.
Saved searches can be edited and managed using the pop-up menu which shows when hovering over the saved search in the searches section of the Navigation panel.
————————————————
Filters
Filters are saved searches which also have an action to apply to all waves which match the saved search. The actions supported are
skip inbox – removes the wave from inbox. Whilst this wave continues to match the search, it will continue to stay out of the inbox. Skip inbox will shortly be renamed archive.
mark as read – Whilst the wave continues to match the search, it will be marked as read.
————————————————
Folders
You can add a folder by using the Add button on the folders section of the Navigation panel. A folder is added by typing the folder name in the text box given and hitting enter.
Folders can be managed using the pop-up menu that shows when hovering over the folder on the Navigation panel.
Add folder – A subfolder can be added under the current folder.
Rename – rename the current folder.
Delete – delete the current folder.
————————————————
On the Google Search Bar, enter one of the Google Commands below and replace www.LinkWebServices.com with your website information.
· Cache:
o Description: Displays cached version of the site
o Example: cache:www.LinkWebServices.com
· Cache + Keyword:
o Description: Displays cached version of the site and highlight the specified keywords
o Example: site: www.LinkWebServices.com Keyword Here
· Link:
o Description: Displays the number of links back to the specified page (backlinks)
o Example: link:www.LinkWebServices.com
· Related:
o Description: Displays all web pages that are “similar” to the specified web page
o Example: related:www.LinkWebServices.com
· Info:
o Description: Displays all web page information for the specified page
o Example: info:www.LinkWebServices.com
· Site:
o Description: Displays all pages of the specified site that are indexed on Google
o Example: site:www.LinkWebServices.com
· All In Title:
o Description: Displays all pages that contain all the specified keywords in the title
o Example: allintitle:www.LinkWebServices.com
· In Title:
o Description: Displays all pages that contain any of the specified keywords in the title
o Example: intitle:www.LinkWebServices.com
· All In URL:
o Description: Displays all pages with the specified URL
o Example: allinurl:www.LinkWebServices.com
· In URL:
o Description: Displays all pages with the specified URL anywhere in the address
o Example: inurl:www.LinkWebServices.com
Link Web Services: http://www.LinkWebServices.com
Web University: http://WebUniversity.LinkWebServices.com
The Web Store: http://www.LinkWebServices.com/mm5/merchant.mvc
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