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Niche Marketing Strategies
Niche marketing is essential for any good internet marketing campaign. Niche marketing is easy enough almost anyone can drill down to the micro niches where money can be made, but some people aren’t doing necessary niche research before hand. The key components to finding these money making micro-niches is proper research and careful selection. So how do you select a niche? Here’s 3 simple niche marketing strategies.
1. Follow Your Strength
Remember in school when you had to do a presentation and the teacher was assigning topics and you got stuck with one you weren’t exactly happy to do research on?
Don’t relive those feeling with picking your niche. Select something you are passionate about or at least would enjoy doing research on. It’s important to select a niche you have a natural strength in because following a strength will give you leverage and make your work seem less like work.
Selecting a niche you have no interest in will reflect to your customers or clients. Lack luster enthusiasm or information about a niche will equal lack luster sales.
Though, when you have a strength in a particular field it shows through not only in your writing and the amount of value but it helps give you an edge over your competition because you know where to find your target audience and exactly what their looking for when it comes time to market to them.
2. Look to Mainstream Media
Turn on the TV, open a magazine, and watch talk shows. You can get a ton of ideas of profitable, hot niches just by flipping through a magazine while standing in the check out line at the supermarket or studying television commercials during your favorite show. You can even log onto Google Trends to see what the latest trends are online.
There are many clues beyond the internet which will indicate good niches. Many of the advertisers you see in magazines and TV also operate affiliate programs so be sure to check out advertisers you’re interested in.
3. Do Your Keyword Research
Keyword research is essential when selecting a niche marketing or any other type of marketing. Do not skip researching potential keywords to target. Research a possible niche with a keyword tool and investigate if your niche will be profitable.
Does it get a fair number of searches per month? Are there more searches than there are competing websites? Also, see if there are advertisements running along the side of the search results of your main keyword, that’s another indicator the advertisers may very well be making money in that niche.
Look for indicators in a potential niche will be profitable. Keyword research can be fascinating, but be sure not to get too involved with research or you might not get anything done.
Niche research can be fun and it should be like anything else you do online. Not only is it fun and relatively easy, but finding the right niche can also create a nice part-time or full-time income. Just remember follow your strength, look for hints of profitable niches from the real world and always do your keyword research with proper keyword research tools. With those three niche marketing strategies in mind you’ll be your way to becoming a niche marketing wizard.
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Antivirus Protection from the Power of the Cloud
posted by Web_University @ 8:00 AM
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Antivirus Protection from the Power of the Cloud
Computer netbooks offer an affordable entry into portable computing especially for buyers with tight budgets.
Basically, netbook users do not want to be frustrated by a slow computer while browsing the Internet or when sending or receiving email. In addition, these lightweight computers are most often used to surf the Internet and many people may not be aware of precautions they need to take to protect themselves against online threats.
Sophisticated netbook users often shut down critical security programs to boost speed of their computer. Despite its sophisticated cloud technology security, anti-virus and anti-spyware for netware must be light on the device’s memory, and run in the background, providing comprehensive, up-to-date protection against online threats without slowing down the system.
In-the-cloud computing technology has been compared to the early proliferation of electricity. Homes, towns, and businesses did not want to rely on their own source of power. They began connecting into a greater power grid, supported and controlled by power utilities. And so along with this utility connection came time and cost savings, in addition to greater access to, and more reliable availability of power.
In-the-cloud computing has evolved through a number of phases including grid and utility computing, application service provision (ASP), and Software as a Service.
Delivering computing resources through a global network was a concept rooted in the sixties by.C.R. Licklider, who was responsible for enabling the development of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network in 1969.
Furthermore, much like what we call cloud computing today, Licklider’s vision was for everyone around the world to be interconnected and accessing programs and data at any site.
Since that time, cloud computing developed progressively, and since the Internet, only started to offer significant bandwidth in the nineties. That’s why there are other key factors that enabled cloud computing to transpire. This includes the maturing of what is known as virtualisation technology. This is universal high-speed bandwidth and software interoperability standards. This is why cloud computing for the masses has taken time, with the most recent being for Web 2.0.
The industry analysts appear to all be in support of next generation cloud computing, also known as private clouds, public clouds, and hybrid cloud environments. The latest technology called cloud computing is transforming today’s computing for a better future in the clouds.
This exciting new in-the-cloud-client content security infrastructure, is designed to block Internet security threats before they reach users. It’s protection while reducing reliance on time-consuming signature-downloads. By combining Internet-based or “in-the-cloud” technologies with smaller, lighter-weight clients, users will have immediate access to the latest protection wherever and however they connect – from home, or when on the go anywhere.
Cloud technology helps automatically stop viruses and spyware before they reach your computer, so it won’t slow you down – it’s a whole new way to protect your computer.
This means that real-time updates keep your PC protected from the latest online threats. This Internet security technology is light on your system resources so your computer runs faster.
Seven Things You Never Want To Say To A Potential Customer
posted by Web_University @ 8:00 AM
Monday, May 2, 2011
Seven Things You Never Want To Say To A Potential Customer
Unless your goal is to scare potential customers away, never say these seven things to them.
1. Never say to a potential customer: We don’t accept credit cards – Your customers expect you to accept credit cards – when you tell them you can’t – you immediately disappoint them and give them a big reason not do business with you!
These days, most businesses do qualify for a merchant account from their bank or at the very least qualify to open a WorldPay account. (We’ll cover that in another article.)
Bottom line – you are not really in business unless you can accept credit card payments.
2. Never say to a potential customer: Please allow 28 days for delivery- When your customers are ready to buy, they usually want the product immediately.
If you tell potential customers they have to wait 28 days before they can get the product, most will go somewhere else to buy. Even if customers have to wait just a few days, or in some cases, a few hours (i.e. to access to a subscription web site or download an eBook/Software item), they will often go away without placing the order.
Bottom Line: To avoid losing customers, make sure your products are available for immediate shipment. Be sure to offer next day shipping when possible. And never offer products that require customers to wait 28 days for delivery.
3. Never say to a potential customer: No questions allowed! – Often customers will want to speak to you before placing an order. But if you don’t include a phone number in your ad or on your website, it is like saying ‘no you can’t call us and ask questions!’
Not having a phone number where customers can reach you before the sale often discourages the sale itself.
Bottom Line: Always include a phone number in all your ads, web site, press releases, and sales letters.
4. Never say to a potential customer: We aren’t interested in your call – Incoming calls to your business should always be answered – either by a live person, or by a professional voice mail system.
Never let phone calls go answered. Doing so immediately causes doubt in the customer’s mind. They begin to wonder, “Is this a real business? No one seems to ever answer the phone. Maybe I should place my order with another company.”
In my office I have a voice mail system to answer all incoming calls that Nadine and I can’t personally answer. When we are out of the office during business hours, we forward our office phones to our mobile phones. This allows us to take business calls whenever they come in, wherever we may be.
The same is true with fax calls. Potential customers expect you to have a fax machine – all real businesses do. If a potential customer wants to fax you a question, a sales order, or anything else, you want to be able to receive the fax.
Bottom Line: Make sure your business phones are answered. During business hours the phones should be answered by a real person, and a voice mail system after hours. If you can’t afford a voice mail system and stand-alone fax machine, then configure your computer to answer your phone and receive incoming faxes for you.
5. Never say to a potential customer: We don’t have a web site – these days, customers expect you to have a web site. And they expect to see information about your company, your location, the products you offer, support materials, and more at that web site.
If you don’t have a web site, your customers might find a competitor who does.
Bottom Line: Almost all businesses should have a web site. The website should have a professional design, be easy to use, and provide the kind of information potential customers will be looking for.
6. Never say to a potential customer: Sorry, I don’t have a business card – it continues to amaze me how often I am asked for a business card by potential customers who I come in contact with in non-business environments.
For example, recently whilst I was buying a new car, the salesman asked about the kind of business I ran, and after hearing the explanation he said, “I know someone looking for that kind of software. Give me your business card and I’ll pass it on to him.” And he did, and we got a call from someone who may turn into a customer.
Bottom Line: Make sure you have business cards with you wherever you go. You never know when you might find a new customer. (Make sure your business card has your name, your company name, your web site address, your email address, and a brief description of the kinds of products or services you offer).
7. Never say to a potential customer: Yes, our product can do everything you ever wanted. That can’t possible be true – no matter how great a product or service you have, it can’t do everything.
If a potential customer asks about features your product doesn’t have, be honest. Tell them that you haven’t included the feature, but it is a good suggestion and you’ll consider adding it (if that is possible).
Whatever you do, don’t mislead potential customers about what your product can and can’t do. Be honest about it – customers do appreciate honesty. You can avoid disappointing customers by being clear about what your product can or can’t do.
Bottom Line: Better to lose a sale than to create a disappointed or angry customer. If your customer is looking for a feature that you don’t include in your product, tell them so.
Breaking Down the New FTC Endorsement and Testimonial Rules in Layman’s Terms
posted by Web_University @ 8:00 AM
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Breaking Down the New FTC Endorsement and Testimonial Rules in Layman’s Terms
Over the last several months, I’ve had numerous individuals e-mail me complaining they didn’t fully understand the new FTC Endorsement and Testimonial Rules, and how it applied to them.
That’s not surprising, since government rules and regulations at both the state and federal level are notorious for not being written in layman’s term.
With that in mind, I decided to write an article about the new FTC rules in language I’m sure everyone can understand. Let’s get started:
On December 1, 2009, new FTC regulations that govern the use of endorsements and testimonials to promote products went into effect.
FTC regulations now require all endorsements to disclose any “material connection” between the vendor and the advertiser.
For example, suppose you are an affiliate marketer who owns a website that provides reviews of products that you promote. If your reviews about those products are favorable, by law, you must disclose the fact that you are receiving a commission from the sale of those products.
These new rules apply even if you receive a free or complimentary product and are asked to review it. Under the new FTC rules, you not only have to disclose the fact you got the product for free, the onus is on the vendor who provided the product to make a sincere effort to insure you make that disclosure.
In addition, under the new rules, advertisements featuring consumers that give the impression that his or her experience with a particular product or service is “typical” when that is not the case will be required to clearly disclose the “real” results that consumers can generally expect.
In other words, if you don’t have clinical data to prove or substantiate the type of results you claim consumers will generally achieve with your product, the FTC now offers you two alternatives — either furnish such data or stop using “success story” testimonials altogether.
To be fair, the FTC clearly states, the new rules are administrative interpretations of the law, intended to help advertisers comply with the Federal Trade Commission Act; they are not binding law themselves.
That means any law enforcement action challenging the allegedly deceptive use of testimonials or endorsements, the Commission would have the burden of proving that the challenged conduct violates the FTC Act.In closing, while the burden of proof may indeed rest with the FTC, you also don’t want to give the Commission a reason to come after you either. I can assure you, a fight with the federal government and all its vast resources is a fight you can do without.
How to Satisfy Small Business Clients?
A lot of us web business gurus tend to miss something important: Most money changes hands in the real world, not online. Depending on who you ask, U.S. online sales total $200-400 billion annually. Not bad, right? Sure, but the total of all transactions in the economy works out to $14 trillion or so. Online sales, impressive as they are, only account for two to three percent of the total economy at best.
Most of my clients are small businesses with fewer than 100 employees. One thing the proprietors have in common is that they do not spend much time online. Whether the client is a dentist or a pet groomer, the only thing they care about is that their online presence brings warm bodies in their doors, preferably warm bodies with credit or insurance cards at the ready.
Those of us who spend a good portion of our lives tilting the plane of cyberspace in favor of our clients’ businesses tend to lose sight of the real world. You know the one – the one you can actually smell. Conversely, our clients tend to regard cyberspace as a distraction or a frivolity because they are caught up in the day-to-day drama of running their businesses.
My clients and I live in different worlds. I actually have paying customers whom I’ve never met in person and, quite frankly, I don’t care to meet them. All I care about is that their checks clear and that they are pleased with the results of my efforts. For their part, all they care about is the influx of business that occurs after I “do my thing.”
So what is my “thing” and how do I do it? There are elements of the secret sauce that I simply will not reveal without being paid a handsome sum, but I will give you a basic sketch. In fact, I’ll give it to you step-by-step:
1. Listen to what the client wants in the real world but tune out what they say about the web because they generally don’t know what they’re talking about. I always bring the conversation back to the real world. “So Fred, the flashy website with all the nifty widgets and gizmos sounds cool, but the ultimate goal is for the phone to ring, or perhaps I’ve misunderstood…” They know what they need in the real world, but you are the expert when it comes to web design, SEO, social media, PPC, video marketing or whatever else you’re going to do for them. The only exception to this rule is when they have a very specific business need for a web application that will streamline their operations. If a physician tells me she wants patients to be able to schedule appointments and pay their co-pays through the website, that is precisely what I give them.
2. Talk turkey early in the game. Ask straight-away about their budget, and tell them what to expect within those constraints. If their budget is $500 a month, show them how you will generate an extra $2,000 in sales for them each month. The worst thing you can possibly do is promise them the moon if their budget will barely buy a dead Soviet satellite. A lot of times, I gain clients by offering to do a small project on a small budget so that they can get a taste of the potential before committing to a bigger campaign.
3. Design a custom plan and never – ever – use a cookie cutter. Small business people are often visionaries. Learn as much as you can about their philosophy, their customers, their products, and their plans for the future. Build a web campaign around that. Make it about them, not you.
4. Execute the plan. You’ve done this a thousand times. You know it will work. Now do it.
5. Track the results. This one can be difficult. I can say with total honesty that every single client I have ever worked with has seen an increase in business within a very short time of my efforts. I can also say with honesty that they often chalk it up to coincidence. That is to their detriment when the contract period is up. It feels awful, like you’re pulling the rug out from under them. The funny thing is that they do not chalk the resulting decline in business up to coincidence and often come begging at that point. Best to avoid this, however. Track results. Show them how their increased website traffic or video views correspond to increased sales. It makes the renewal process much more pleasant for everyone involved.
This deserves an article of its own, but it needs to be said: Getting warm bodies in the door is not the same as gaining maximum exposure. SEO does no good if the site tells the wrong story. Viral content can be effective, but only if the message is clear and the target market reached. Helping small businesses is all about delivering the message that the business owner wants to deliver to the people that want to hear it.
Remember that while you and your client inhabit different worlds, one thing you do have in common is that you want the same end result. Focus on achieving that, and everyone will be happy.
How To Find The Perfect Price?
How To Find A Price That Sells Lots ….
How do you decide the best price for a JV product?
I’ve read a lot of very complicated, scientific theories on this. And I’m not sure any of them work. So here I’m going to run through a few very simple tips which I think you will find very useful.
Firstly, you need to know the economics of your business. You’ve got to know the price of your product and all your other overhead costs – like mailing, fulfillment and your partner’s JV commission. And you’ve got to add on a little bit …. well preferably a lot …. as a profit margin. It stands to sense that your perfect selling price has to be at least what all those amounts add up to.
Now what about the price in terms of marketing pull. Well, although it seems logical, charging the lowest price you can afford to charge is probably not the best strategy. You have to understand a bit about your product and your customer to know how price pushes their buying buttons.
To give you an example: I’ve seen modern art for sale in fashionable, posh-part-of-town art galleries at $250, $350, $500 and even more. Presumably someone must buy them, because those sort of upmarket businesses seem to do very nicely thank you. Then again, I’ve seen much the same thing up for sale in discount stores for $15 …. but they just sit gathering dust for months. You see, there’s something about the fashionable gallery environment that attracts the higher spending customer and persuades them to spend more on what they want. It’s just the same for lots of other JV-related products.
With every product there will also some level of price resistance. Together with various price points which the customer is happy to buy at. In the information manual and DVD business the first price point might be $29.95 – a point where sales drop off if you go beyond it. However, once you pass that point there might be no significant difference in sales conversion rates between $39.95 and $79.95. That means that if you can’t price it at $29.95 you might as well price it at $79.95! There are other variables of course, such as the exact contents of the package, but many times it works like that.
Every product or service has its own range of price points. You have to take some time to find out yours.
What about ‘full pound’ prices – $30 versus $29.95 or even $29.99. This is one of those great marketing talking points. Often I find that a price ending in .95 works better than .99, .89 works better than .95 and odd pound figures almost always outsell even pound amounts.
If you sell on installment terms or finance you might not headline on the total price at all. I have seen lots of courses sold on offers such as ‘3 Monthly Payments Of Only $27.89′. In these cases, it’s important to get the installment price right rather than the total price. (Which in this case is a totally bizarre $83.67, but you might well find that it works very, very well.)
I will, however, make this very important point: The skimpier the sales job you do the lower you cap your price. And if you’re very limited in terms of time and space then the price gets a lot more important.
Try this great technique for seducing your customers! If you think your price seems a bit high and you want to make it look fantastic value then consider using price comparisons, like this ….
In top brand designer stores you’ll probably pay $180 to $200.
In popular discount stores you may pay as little as $49 to $69.
But our direct valued-customer price is just $27.97.
OK, so let’s try and summarise the secret of great JV pricing in just four simple points:
* The economics of your individual business decides your lowest possible price.
* Knowing your product and your customers will tell you how little they would like to pay – and also how much they will pay.
* Know your individual price points. Testing will help. If you can’t stay within one price point you might as well push your price up to the next one.
* How you present price can make a difference.
Twitter Case Provides Critical Lessons in Administrative Security
posted by Web_University @ 8:00 AM
Thursday, April 28, 2011
SaaS-eCommerce Sites: Twitter Case Provides Critical Lessons in Administrative Security
In June, 2010, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) settled charges that Twitter’s micro-blogging site had engaged in lax security practices that amounted to “unfair and deceptive trade practices”.
While previous cases brought by the FTC for lax security procedures focused on lax electronic controls, the Twitter case focused on lax administrative controls. Webmasters of SaaS and ecommerce sites who fail to learn and apply the critical lessons of the Twitter case do so at their peril.
- Twitter Case Facts – Two Hacks
The FTC’s complaint against Twitter alleged that lax administrative controls for data security permitted at least two hackers to acquire administrative control of Twitter resulting in access to private personal information of users, private tweets, and most surprising – the ability to send out phony tweets.
Here’s how the hackers got access to Twitter. According to the FTC, hacker no. 1 was able to hack in by using an automated password guessing tool that sent thousands of guesses to Twitter’s login form. The hacker found an administrative password that was a weak, lowercase, common dictionary word, and with it the hacker was able to reset several user passwords which the hacker posted on a website that others could access and use to send phony tweets.
Hacker no. 2 compromised the personal email account of a Twitter employee and learned of the employee’s passwords that were stored in plain text. With these passwords, the hacker was then able to guess the similar Twitter administrative passwords of the same employee. Once into Twitter, the hacker reset a user’s password and was able to access the user information and tweets for any Twitter user.
- Twitter Settlement Lessons
The FTC noted that Twitter’s website privacy policy promised: “We employ administrative, physical, and electronic measures designed to protect your information from unauthorized access.”
Focusing on Twitter’s administrative controls (more accurately on the lack thereof), the FTC alleged that Twitter failed to take reasonable steps to:
* Require employees to use hard-to-guess administrative passwords that they did not use for other programs, websites, or networks; * prohibit employees from storing administrative passwords in plain text within their personal e-mail accounts;
* Suspend or disable administrative passwords after a reasonable number of unsuccessful login attempts;
* Provide an administrative login webpage that is made known only to authorized persons and is separate from the login page for users;
* Enforce periodic changes of administrative passwords, for example, by setting them to expire every 90 days;
* Restrict access to administrative controls to employees whose jobs required it; and impose other reasonable restrictions on administrative access, such as by restricting access to specified IP addresses.
* The FTC settlement included (among other things) the requirement that Twitter set up and manage a comprehensive data security policy that will be reviewed by an independent auditor periodically for ten years.
- Conclusion
The FTC represents consumer interests to prevent fraudulent, deceptive, and unfair business practices. Privacy and data security have been high-priority issues for the FTC, as evidenced by the 30 cases brought over the last few years for lax data security practices.
In its investigations of data security cases, the FTC looks at 2 standards:
* What the FTC considers as “standard, reasonable” security procedures, and
* What a website’s privacy policy promises to consumers regarding data security.
If the website’s actual data security practices do not measure up to either of these standards (a worst-case scenario would be the failure to measure up to both), the FTC concludes that the website has engaged in lax security practices that amount to “unfair and deceptive trade practices”. A complaint and costly lawsuit may follow.
The reason that the FTC publishes the results of its settlements is to provide lessons to others regarding what the FTC regards as an “unfair and deceptive trade practice”.
Do you know if your site measures up to the two standards?
The Eternal Debate: Apple Mac vs. PC
In this world where technology rules, no business can survive without a computer. Not only that, but it is also necessary that computers are updated to keep up with new technology being released every year. So which computer is the best for your office based business?
When buying a computer, the main thing to realize is what you will need in terms of the business requirements, then do a little research to find out what suits your requirements best.
Not wanting to be simple, but we have to start somewhere!
So, there are two different types of computer processors, PC and Apple Mac. PC stands for Personal Computers and is the term used to refer to all computers that are IBM compatible. Most software available on the market, especially games software, is PC compatible though because the PC is so common; it is also beset with virus problems while Apple Macs do not encounter the same degree of problem areas.
Apple Mac computers are for the most part well designed and look more stylish than the majority of the business targeted PCs on the market. A Mac is widely used by designers and photographers and most computer savvy users believe that the Mac is a much better computer, with improved audio and video software compared to a PC. This isn’t to say it is best for you business, as individual company needs do vary. For example if you are storing lots of images on your computers, a Mac may sound like a good option though if you don’t intend to edit the photos or do not particularly need to see those images in such high quality, then a standard PC with a good processor and lots of memory may suffice.
Though the Mac is easier to use, it can be difficult to train up employees that have been used to using a standard PC. It is worth noting that a lot of computer experts are only experts in PC and only a few specialize in Macs.
Though it is seldom that Apple Mac breaks down, when it does, it can be difficult to find someone to fix it and it can be expensive visiting the Apple stores for repairs, so these computers don’t always allow for a small budget.
There are many more software programs available for a PC; this may be the reason that so many companies take this option. And with personal computers being available at most office suppliers, it makes it an easy all round option – Mac’s are generally only sold by stores authorized by Apple and there aren’t many specialists that deal with them, hence the price.
We couldn’t possibly tell you which computer is best for your office based business, though we hope that you carry out good research and spend your budget wisely!
Taking Action on Parked Domains
Internet marketers and business owners who invest in dot coms tend to purchase the “org”, “net” or “info” variations and misspelled versions to prevent competitors from using them. These parked domains may be worth thousands of dollars someday if developed into thriving websites using an affordable site building service.
* Benefits of monetizing
Maintaining a huge collection of names is a cash outflow that can be costly when you consider the renewal registration fees that you have to pay for them annually. Balance the outflow by monetizing them to promote cash inflow. Here’s what you can do with them:
* Increase their resale value
Keyword names and those with suffixes other than “.com” don’t always sell well, if at all, in the resale market unless these point to active and thriving websites. Your strategy should be to build and develop multiple websites, generate traffic and sell products on them so you can easily resell them in bulk when you’re ready to unload these names.
* Start a business
Sell your own items or promote affiliate products on your sites. With sales automation tools, your websites can turn into passive income streams so you can earn while aging your domains.
* Build and lease
Offline businesses and traditional brick and mortar establishments often need websites with relevant keywords and visibility to jump start their entry into the Internet. You can fill this need by activating your domains, building sites and optimizing them with your target niche in mind and then offer to lease them for a few years and give them the option to buy the site and name at the end of the lease period.
* What you need?
You will need the following to monetize your parked domains:
1. Website
2. Content
3. Traffic
4. Products and
5. Enough time for aging
If you’re an Internet marketer with advanced skills, aging websites is something you can do on your own, but could be overwhelming when you’re looking at a vast collection of about 30 to a hundred names.
If you don’t have the time or the skills for aging your own websites, why not follow the lead of domain experts who outsource this task and use a reliable service to do it for them? An experienced outsourcer will take care of building, adding content, optimizing and feeding fresh articles to your sites for you to get the best return on your investment.
Improve Online Reputation Management with Proactive PR
posted by Web_University @ 8:00 AM
Monday, April 25, 2011
Improve Online Reputation Management with Proactive PR
Practicing online reputation management is a must for any public relations professional who believes his or her company may face a corporate crisis in the future. As our news gathering and reporting moves online, online reputation management is becoming more important. Now, news stories and blogs are being indexed by search engines, and many times, if a company makes the news, that can sometimes be the first item found in the search engine rankings.
Proactive PR is important for online reputation management, because it means you are creating positive search engine results, which can keep negative search results from ever appearing. You can focus on positive content-generating activities, rather than putting out fires via reactive management.
Here are five ways to improve your online reputation management:
* Start a blog
Fill it with as much positive information as you can find. News releases, product and service descriptions, customer questions, employee interviews, and anything else you can think of. The more content you can create, the better your online reputation management efforts will be, because you will have a central location you can direct people to.
* Create a Twitter profile and a Facebook page
Fill your networks with customers, journalists, and anyone else who would have an interest in your company. Answer customer care questions, link to your blog posts, and be a valuable resource to anyone you interact with on these networks. An important part of your online reputation management will be to create positive relationships with people. This way, if something ever does go wrong, you’ll have a group of people who are willing to support you, or at least forgive you.
* Use your own face and name on your company’s social media profiles
While this may not be possible for a large corporation, it’s crucial for a small business. An important part of your online reputation management will be to put a personal face on your corporate brand. People will be able to relate to your company more easily, which will make your online reputation management efforts much easier.
* Join a niche social network for your industry
Start communicating with people on the network, especially answering questions and providing information. You can help your online reputation management by becoming a trusted resource among your industry peers and customers. Form relationships with people on the network, make referrals to people inside and outside the network, and work to become a regular, well-known presence in the group. If there is a crisis that hits the media, you may end up finding allies in your industry group who will speak favorably about you.
* Good online reputation management includes effective search engine optimization
Do all of these other steps with an eye toward SEO. Your ultimate goal is to win all searches on the big three search engines; Google, Bing, and Yahoo; which will help keep negative entries off the front page. If you’re already sitting on top of the mountain, it will be harder to unseat you. But if you aren’t even on the front page when an incident blows up, you’ll have a hard time getting to the front page let alone the top of the results. And the longer you wait to begin, the harder it will be.
It’s important you begin your online reputation management efforts immediately. If you ever find yourself in a crisis, and the news results hit the search engines, it’s too late to start thinking about online reputation management. You’ll be playing catchup for days, weeks, and even months later, trying to overcome every news story, blog entry, and tweet that other people have been posting while you’re still setting up your first Twitter account.
The key to online reputation management is to do it before you ever need it, and to create a positive online brand. Follow these five steps and you’ll be ahead of the game.
Protect Your Business and Your Sanity – Back Up Your PC Data
Disasters happen, no matter if it’s in “real life” or in the business world. When it comes to protecting the physical assets of a business, many companies and private professionals have insurance to cover themselves and their businesses. But here’s an important question: What are you doing as a business owner to protect one of your most valuable assets – the information stored on your computer?
Digital assets can be the single most valuable part of a small business, both for small storefront and office-based companies, and also SOHO (Small Office / Home Office) practices. In the Information Technology (IT) world, that information is called “mission critical” data. Are you doing the basics to protect your critical business information? For my money, backing up that data is the easiest way to create a simple, effective disaster-recovery plan. one that lets you sleep comfortably at night, without worrying about lost business information.
I’ll talk about all the different kinds of information stored on a PC that should be saved and backed up. Every computer stores huge amounts of information. But don’t worry! Only a small percent is the kind of data that needs to be saved on a regular basis. I’m talking about information that changes on a day-by-day basis. Think about it: new clients are being added to your records every day, or additional inventory arrives on a regular schedule. All kinds of important records change every day, including financial records, customer files and more.
The good news is, Windows-based computers store all this information in one central folder. Folders are the containers the computer uses to store information. Storage devices such as the internal hard drive contain numerous folders and sub-folders, and each of those can be used to store program information or what’s called “User Data.” In a word (or two), user data is the “stuff” you create. No matter if it’s a document you typed, a pictures transferred from your digital camera, or a song downloaded from an online store, its’ all “user data.Any PC folder can contain more folders, or files, or both.
In the newest version of Windows, (Win 7), all the user data you create is stored in a folder called Users. To find it, click the Windows “Start” button, then look at the upper-right portion of the two-column layout. Usually, the upper most right item will either be your user name, or some other name that was put there when the computer was first started. You might see a name like Owner or Administrator. Under that one folder, you’ll see all the various sub-folders in your user account. Inside, there are folders including Documents, Music, Pictures and others. Documents are the most important “chunks” of data to back up, but you may also need to save additional folders such as Pictures, Music and others.
Coming up in a future article… where are all these important files to be backed up located?
5 Ways to Grow Your List
The quality and quantity of your opt-in email list will greatly affect the level of success you, as an internet marketer enjoy. Whilst beginners complain that they can’t get enough people to subscribe to their list, professionals are always looking for ways to refine their lists and improve quality by cutting down on quantity. Whichever approach you take, the bottom line is that you still need to constantly grow and cultivate your list – here are five ways to start building your list today.
* Make Your Opt-In Form Highly Visible
Many internet marketers only place their email opt-in form on their homepage, assuming that this is the most popular page on the site. This is a mistake for two reasons – firstly, not everyone will arrive on your website’s home page (they may land on a splash page or a content page) – secondly, only having your opt-in on the home page simply limits its visibility. For these reasons, you should aim to have your opt-in available and highly visible on every page (or at least the majority of pages) of your website.
* Provide Something of Value
Too many times, we see different websites offering the same cheesy, low value PLR (Public Label Rights) eBook in return for an opt-in. Whilst you may want to use a PLR product as a base to work from, and perhaps to gain ideas, you really should try creating a freebie that is both unique and that resonates with your site as a whole. By this, I mean, at least ensure that the colour scheme and graphics match up with that of your website. Most importantly though is that you provide something unique and of value. Taking a weekend off to put your own eBook together will pay huge dividends down the line. If you’re not a great writer, hire a ghost writer and provide them with the raw information.
* Create Referral Incentives
Create an additional product (eBook, audio recording, etc) that your current subscribers can receive in return for referring three or five friends to your site (or opt-in page). You may want to display this offer upon initial signup (as a sort of up-sell), or promote it in your auto responder series. Either way, make sure its appealing, useful and of high quality. Getting this trick right can equate to a ratio of about 1:1, which means that for every signup, you are assured of another signup free.
* Create a Contact Us Add-on
This tactic is particularly powerful, but needs to be implemented ethically. On your contact us form, create a checkbox that reads “Also sign me up for your newsletter” or something similar. What’s important is that you ensure that this checkbox is not checked by default, as that is unethical and will ultimately just lead to a lot of unsubscribes.
* Hold a Competition
This is possibly the oldest trick in the direct marketer’s book, but is nonetheless still incredibly effective. Hold a competition with a decent prize (possibly one of your products or services), and allow people to enter by opting in to your competition list. Provided that you market the competition well (and offer a desirable prize), you should receive quite a few opt-ins. When implementing this tactic, consider the average value per lead, and then work out a marketing budget for the competition using that figure.
More than anything else, growing your opt-in list is a long term process. Commit to the process, continually research new ways to grow the list, and have a little patience – All of these traits will pay off in the long term.
Top Three Advantages in Tapping into the Freelance Market
posted by Web_University @ 8:00 AM
Friday, April 22, 2011
Top Three Advantages in Tapping into the Freelance Market
When a business is opened, the first thing that the owner does is search for employees. That, at least, is the standard move as more employees mean more manpower to finish the projects and get jobs done. Times are changing though, and nowadays both employers and employees are getting to know and understand the strength and promise of the freelance and the contractual market.
So what exactly are the strengths of this part of the labor market? Several reasons exist, but the top 3 advantages are:
Cost – Freelancers are paid on a per project basis. Business owners just have to determine who to hire, and then agree on the fee that is to be paid for that project. Most contracts end upon delivery of the project. There is no training cost, no hourly fees computed, just the raw contract. Also, work materials are not a problem as the freelancer usually has the basic materials required to finish the job. The business does not have to provide permanent office space and hardware.
Time – Again, freelancers are paid on a per project basis, or at least most of them are. Since this is the case, it is extremely beneficial for them to finish projects as soon as possible so that they can go ahead and attend to other jobs. The more jobs they finish, the more income they earn.
Quality – This has never been a problem in the freelance industry. Even though speed is essential, freelancers still make sure they deliver quality work as they need to build a strong customer base. A strong customer base means more opportunities for jobs, translating once again into more income for the freelancer.
At times, certain business projects require a third party to look into it in order to make it improve. This is also an advantage that one gets when using freelancers. Freelance employees have a huge amount of experience as they work with different people on different projects. Some are even exposed to various cultures as they can work with employers from different countries. This would allow them to contribute new ideas to whatever projects they work on, and employ strategies that they have developed.
With the advantages stated, much is to be gained by employing freelancers. There are still positive points to having in house employees, but the fact that there are freelancers that are readily available should never be discounted.
The Effect of Spam on Business
Spam, or junk email, is one of the largest frustrations for Internet users. For businesses, this frustration adds up to dollars lost and spent trying to prevent it. Reports estimate that spam costs U.S. businesses more than $71 billion in lost productivity annually, which equates to $712 per employee. I’m sure most businesses, especially in the economy’s current state, can think of a better use for those dollars.
The thing that makes spam a unique, and subsequently the reason it increases every year, is that the cost of email is placed on the receiver rather than the sender. With traditional direct-mail, a person or company spends money on every piece sent. Think about the amount of junk mail you receive every day at your home and business. Now imagine if each piece of mail did not have a hard-cost for the sender — we would all need much larger mailboxes.
Spam can also hurt the reputation of your business as well. It is all too easy to “spoof” or fake the email address that an email shows it is being sent from. You certainly do not want customers and clients to receive junk or malware emails with your company’s name in the sender’s address bar. Spoofing email is, unfortunately, very easy to do as it exploits a level of trust that the basic email protocols use. I’m sure when these protocols were initially developed no one envisioned the future of email to be what it is. While there is no full-proof method to prevent email address spoofing, newer methods such as SPF records and the Sender ID framework are working to reduce it. It is important for businesses to put these new safeguards in place, as the sooner the adoption rate increases, the sooner more mail servers will start enforcing them.
Fortunately there are several hardware and software products that can be deployed to protect your business from spam and the security threats they bring. Depending on your email infrastructure, a dedicated-hardware solution may be the appropriate solution. For others, a third-party Software as a Service (SaaS) solution may be a better fit. Don’t worry if you don’t have existing personnel to put these solutions in place, a full-service Managed IT provider can help.
With the number of spam emails being sent increasing every day, it is important to make sure you have the necessary solutions in place to protect and prevent spam.
The Greatest Lies Ever Told About Internet Business
posted by Web_University @ 8:00 AM
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
The Greatest Lies Ever Told About Internet Business
Starting an Internet business can be tough. Especially if you have never owned your own business in the past. Not only that but your family and friends can discourage you from ever starting your business!! They will tell you, that only a few people ever make any money and it is a HUGE waste of time!
Sadly, though they may be half right. Unfortunately, only 2% of the people who ever start an Internet business will make any money whatsoever. The people who do make money online are not any more skilled that us…NO! Instead they were fortunate enough to know the 5 great lies of Starting an Internet business.
1. Starting An Internet Business Is Expensive
An Internet business can actually be started for ZERO cost! That is why this is the very first great lie of Internet business. When you are getting started in your online business you can start with something as cheap and simple as affiliate marketing. Affiliate Marketing cost you nothing to get started, and your only job is to drive traffic to a website that you don’t own. Then once people purchase a product from that affiliate website, through your link, you get a commission. And here’s the best part: There are MANY free ways you can learn about to drive traffic to a website.
2. You Can “Get Rich Quick” With An Internet Business
Many people have a “Get Rich Quick” mentality when they first start their Internet Business. These people think that having their own Internet business is easy and does not require any work. Do not believe this because it is a fools hope.
Often times the people you see who are “overnight successes” on the Internet, have spent months if not years perfecting their business. Very rarely will someone truly be a “overnight success”, and when that does happen, it is almost all luck. So the bottom line here is, your Internet business is exactly that…..a business! Treat it like one, work diligently on it, and never give up. Success takes time.
3. You Must Know HTML, Programming And Graphic Designing In Order To Start Your Business
I have to admit that this is one thing that held me up a little personally. I am NOT a tech savvy web guru by any means. In fact, I could not put together a web page if you held a gun to my head. However, what I found was that there are people who are willing to do this for you…..for cheap!
Sites like Elance, and Odesk are sites where you can hire people to do all of this work for you. And here’s the best part, it’s really cheap! Most of the bidders at Elance and ODesk are from India and will be willing to do the programming work for you, for as little as $6.00 per hour!
4. You Don’t Need To Know How To Sell Anything
Think about the logic in that statement above. It doesn’t make sense. Of course, you need some salesmanship abilities! How on earth do you plan on selling things on the Internet without being able to sell? Now don’t panic, if you don’t currently know how to sell. This is all stuff that can be taught. However, you must go into your Internet business with the knowledge that you will need to learn how to sell.
5. You Don’t Need To “Build A List”
Have you ever heard the phrase “The Money Is In The List”? Building a list is essential to having success with a Internet business. Without a list, you won’t make any money! Building a list is important because it builds your list of people that you can market and sell to! Not only that, but you can sell to the same people multiple times.
The 5 great Internet lies listed above are all things you must know and accept. You have to be smart in order to really achieve success that you could possibly imagine.
Success is like enlightenment. It is a path and not a destination.
How Will You Handle Customer Support for Your Site?
posted by Web_University @ 8:00 AM
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
How Will You Handle Customer Support for Your Site?
There are many ways to deal with customer support at your website. Which method you choose will depend on how large your company is, what your customers want, and what you feel most comfortable with.
One of the classic ways of handling customer service and support is via telephone. This is often the preferred methods for customers, because they can usually get their problems resolved much faster than they might using other methods.
Unfortunately, providing telephone support probably isn’t realistic unless you have the staff to handle it and your product or service is selling at a price that covers the often huge additional cost of staffing an inbound call center. If you’re a solo operation, phone support may well be out of the question. So what other options are available to you?
The two major alternatives are e-mail and support ticket systems.
Email support lets you answer support requests in your own time, but it may upset some of your more impatient customers. There will always be people who will fly into a rage if their email isn’t answered within 5 minutes, even at 3am on Sunday morning!
The other problem with e-mail support is spam. If you make an e-mail address available for support it won’t be long before you’re starting to receive significant qualities of spam and ultimately the e-mail address can become completely unusable. Even with spam filters installed it’s difficult, even bordering on impossible, to stop at least some spam coming through. The last thing you want is to have to spend more time deleting spam than helping your valued customers and that’s exactly what can happen if you’re not careful.
On the plus side, e-mail is easy to handle for both the sender and yourself. It’s easy to set up standard replies for commonly asked questions and it’s also possible to reroute e-mails to different addresses should the need arise (e.g. when someone hasn’t received a shipment and you need to bring this to the attention of your shippers).
An alternative to e-mail that is well worth considering is a support ticket system.
More and more people are starting to turn to support ticket systems, or help desk software as it is often known, to handle their support requests. Although this is generally one of the best methods for the companies that use them, they can be troublesome to the customer.
Many help desks require the user to register in order to submit a request. This takes time out of the customer’s busy schedule, and may annoy them further if they’re already upset about something related to your product.
Some of them even require the user to verify their email address before they can log in to submit a request. This could be particularly upsetting if your server happens to take longer than a minute or two to send out the confirmation request.
Customers can be very impatient, especially if they haven’t received something they paid for or if they have a problem with something they did receive. Once people reach their maximum tolerance level, the hassle will usually no longer be worth it, and they’ll ask for a refund and that’s obviously something you don’t want to happen.
Support ticket systems do have some advantages and these can easily outweigh the downsides.
Ticket systems are an excellent way of managing the support work-flow. They keep everything in one place and make it very easy to see all the previous messages relating to any support issue. This is useful for both the customer and yourself as it saves having to search through old e-mails (some of which may well have been deleted) to find previous correspondence.
Ticket systems can also help you to get a real handle on what the major issues are. In an e-mail support system it’s easy for this to be hidden in the deluge of e-mails whereas in a ticket system it is usually possible to categorize incoming tickets so that matters pertaining to a specific subject can easily be monitored.
Ticket systems also usually offer far more robust reporting than a standard e-mail system. This makes it easy to see how many tickets are opened/closed each day and who dealt with them.
Another benefit to ticket systems is that they can avoid the issue of non-delivered e-mails. The problem of valid e-mails not arriving at their destination is one that all companies face on an increasingly frequent basis. By providing a ticket system that people can view whenever they like means you don’t have to rely solely upon e-mails getting through.
No matter which method you choose, it’s important to respond to requests as soon as possible. Due to the very nature of the Internet, people expect immediate gratification. Since the Internet is available 24/7 in most places, people tend to think Internet businesses are also open 24/7 and that is rarely the case, even with very large companies such as Microsoft and Apple.
These expectations may be unrealistic, but that is the reality you face as an Internet marketer. Some people will expect you to be available at all hours of the day, even on weekends or holidays. You can’t alleviate this problem completely, but by dealing with incoming support requests as promptly and efficiently as possible you will go a long way to satisfying the needs of the vast majority of your customers, and that is what’s important.
The Internet is a Dangerous Place for your Data
posted by Web_University @ 8:00 AM
Monday, April 18, 2011
The Internet is a Dangerous Place for your Data: Debunking the Myth
We’re always being warned about the many perils and dangers lurking in the deep dark recesses of the Internet. Those of us with children are constantly being urged to protect them from ‘Stranger Danger’ and Cyber bullying on chat rooms, instant messaging and social networks. According to the media, dating websites are full of predatory strangers waiting to murder us or empty our bank accounts. Scams, Identity Theft, Spam, Spyware, Adware, Malware, and Computer Viruses: the list of hazards goes on and on. It’s not just a web, but a veritable labyrinth full of pitfalls and hidden traps for the unwary.
So it stands to reason that a web-based, or SaaS system, for applications such as Document Management and Project Planning and Time Reporting, must be inherently unreliable, and the Cloud must be a bad place to store your data, right? Wrong! Entrusting your personal or business data to an outside company is a risky undertaking, isn’t it? Not necessarily!
To entrust your irreplaceable, confidential data to an external agency is a leap of faith, no doubt, and obviously you must choose your SaaS system very carefully. Choose a well-established and reputable service provider, however, and your data will actually be more secure than it would be on your own company’s data server. It’s not the Internet that is dangerous: it’s the people who use it, and the way that they use it. You wouldn’t hire a nanny for your children without checking out her references. You wouldn’t go on holiday and leave your house with the doors and windows open and unlocked. You wouldn’t leave your wallet on the bar counter while you go to the washroom. You wouldn’t lend your Credit Card to a stranger. At least, I sincerely hope you wouldn’t do any of these stupid things…
The beauty of SaaS is that it frees you up to access all your projects, files and folders any time and anywhere in the world, and sorts out all your security issues at the same time. It’s much more secure to use a SaaS service, when traveling or working from home, than it is to rely on portable storage devices such as laptops, CDs and data sticks, which are easy to steal, easy to lose, and are regularly left on trains, buses and in taxi cabs.
Still worried that the Internet is a dangerous place for your company’s confidential data? It’s very prudent of you to be aware of Internet security issues; we all know about the risks of hackers, viruses and Internet fraud. In order to fully benefit from the advantages of having your projects and documents online, you need to ensure that they are fully protected from hardware failure, good old human error, and from cyber attack. Look out for SaaS systems which offer additional security features for controlling file access and permissions. These will allow you to decide who can access your data, and also to control the level of access they are granted.
Any reputable SaaS provider will be ISO20000-certified, and will regularly back up all your files and folders. All data transmitted via the internet should be fully secure and encrypted. Your data should be stored in a secure server environment equipped with fire protection, climate control and using multiple internet connections with a range of internet providers. Before you sign up for a new SaaS system, check out that these safeguards are all included. With a reliable SaaS system in place, and all your security controls set up, you can relax and let your service provider take care of day-to-day chores like file back-up and data encryption. That will leave you free to spend more time doing what you are good at – running your business!
The Beauty of Reviews: Good and Bad
I was taught, way back when I was in sales, to ask for a report card from clients ESPECIALLY when you think it’s going to be a bad one. This gives you a chance to address the issues with the client, let them know you are listening and concerned, and turn those issues around. Plus you get extra points for being proactive.
Many companies that are reluctant to dive into social media tell me that they are afraid of their brand being “out there” for public criticism — whether it is deserved or not. Reputation management is one of the key objectives for which SMM (social media marketing) can be used, and that same “report card” lesson applies.
No one can debate the benefits that a good review or customer comment can provide to any business. But a bad review, or blog/Twitter comment, can be just as useful if it is addressed correctly and in a timely manner. Below are some tips on how to make lemonade out of that potential lemon of a review.
Assess the damage
-Take some time to figure out what kind of comment it is, how it’s intended and where it’s coming from.
-Is it constructive criticism? If the customer truly caught a problem and is bringing it to your attention, that’s a very good thing.
-Is it seemingly well intentioned? The tone, message, or verbiage may be cutting but is the intention good — to help you as a business owner recognize a problem and address it.
-Is it venting after a frustrating experience? The venting might be volatile and angry, but if it’s ultimately helping you recognize a problem, it’s still a good thing.
-Does it sound just hurtful? You know pure anger when you hear it. You may then decide whether or not to respond.
Decide how you are going to respond, but whatever it is, respond quickly.
-Be sure to respond directly and personally (in tone) and don’t hide behind corporate speak.
-Stay proactive, positive and productive.
-Don’t ever be defensive, that never helps anything.
-If criticism identifies a real problem, cop to it, offer information on solutions that are already in progress, or at least offer some info on your intention to address the issues.
-If reviewer discussion is too hot and you do want to respond and find that it is appropriate to respond, then take it off line. Provide an 800 number or email address or just your business phone number and invite the commenter to call to figure it all out.
When NOT to react
-If you are too angry – chill for a day or so. Reacting in the heat of battle will never result in anything positive
-If the reviewer is angry at the world, not necessarily your business
-If the review is spamming or trolling, just looking for linking or trackbacks – just ignore it. This is one of the artful aspects of good PR, knowing when NOT to make a mountain out of a molehill.
Even a bad review can be good. Remember that mantra of social media connect/create/engage. The secret sauce is transparency. A bad review addressed is a very good thing. Don’t be afraid to have your brand out there, it’s all good.
How To Skyrocket Your Perceived Value?
It is of great importance that your visitor “see,” the bargain within your offer. There are ways to enhance this perception. People often observer Sales pages with a “what is in this for me,” mindset. Your offer needs to clearly show them what is in it for them.
When someone does form their first impression about your site, would you not want it to be a good one? When we present our product or service to visitors, it is vital that they see the value within as important to their desire to prosper themselves.
Here is where our USP should stand out from the crowd, giving us a keen edge over competitors. This “Unique Selling Proposition” should grab their attention and hold it – all of the way to the conversion point, whether it be to buy, or to opt-in for a newsletter.
Whether it be a capture page, where they enter their email address, or reach for a credit card to purchase, this USP is a critical point in the process in getting conversions.
How does one create a perception of value to first time visitors? In the world of sales online, everyone is clamoring for their attention flashing buy now or click here messages.
To stand alone in the crowd, and be the “first choice” in the mind of “lookers,” one has to offer “more for less,” – greater value, – a unique selling point, that compels them to chose your product or service over the many others.
This is the very reason your USP must compel them to see the greater bargain your offer has over other competitors. The way you present an offer unto visitors is of great importance. You have to “show,” them what greater value your offer contains.
Once they are looking at what you have to present, it is then of utmost importance,to have your sales copy capture prospect’s full attention. To do this, you have to be unique. You want them to transition into a qualified prospect who is a perfect position to order now.
To get them from where they are now, to the desired conversion point,(what you want visitors to do next) you must continue to position your offer in a way that flames their desire. If their attention is distracted from the momentum once started, you could lose their interest, and there goes the sale.
To keep their focus on tract, the elements of persuasion must continue to drive them forward, keenly interested, all the way to the “order now” button, or the “enter email,” conversion point.
To meet this objective, the perceived value they began with must be inflamed with focused precision. This enhances the very thing which caught their eye in the beginning.
These proven marketing methods, press their emotional “hot buttons” triggering their need to fulfill their want. This is done through positioning the perceived value in such a way, that increases the prospects interest, all the way to the point of the “how much” question.
When this is done correctly, even high-end or products or services, can be moved without objection to price, for indeed the prospect has already made up their mind.
The “I’ve got to have this, or I need that,” hurdle, has already been jumped in their thinking. They have been “sold.” They move to the “buy now” button, and proceed without hesitation.
Good copywriters know exactly how to reach each objective in the sales process. Good solid copy begins by first grabbing visitor’s attention, it then directs them into the body copy, and quickly shows them why they are in the right place. They then “know,” they are going to get exactly what they want.
If It is interesting, flows freely, is personable, and engaging, it becomes winning copy because it is not “hyped-up. It shows them perspective, and insight about why this offer is so much better than competitors.
It is punchy, clear and concise. By the time they hit the “order now” button, they are completely happy – and happy with their buying decision, feeling like they have really gotten a great deal.
Fatal Webinar Mistakes That Cost You Money
posted by Web_University @ 8:00 AM
Friday, April 15, 2011
Fatal Webinar Mistakes That Cost You Money
Webinars have become a low-cost way for people and companies to promote their products and services. I have certainly used them and attended many webinars on a variety of topics. However, I have noticed that many webinar organizers, hosts and panelists, create a variety of mistakes that reduce the effectiveness of their program.
1. Requiring too much information. I don’t mind giving my name, email address, and company name when registering for a webinar. However, I don’t like giving my address, telephone number, and five other details. I know that you want to collect data but the more information you ask for, the less likely I will register for your program.
2. Ask mandatory questions. Most technology allows the person hosting the webinar to ask registrants several questions when they register. However, making these questions mandatory can work against you, especially if the question is irrelevant. Many people will refuse to answer these questions and will chose NOT to register for the webinar. Carefully consider which questions should be mandatory.
3. Unfamiliar with the technology. A fatal mistake many people is to familiarize themselves with the webinar technology shortly before the program begins. I admit to include myself in this category. A few years ago I agreed to deliver a series of webinars for a client and unfortunately, my contact person was unfamiliar with the technology. As a result, we had several glitches and problems that reduced the overall effectiveness of the program.
4. Using a speaker phone. I recently attended a webinar and it appeared that one of the panelists spoke from a speaker phone or computer microphone. This created a vacant echo which became distracting whenever she spoke. It is critical that you have a good connection to the call and many companies suggest that you use a landline to ensure that you have a good connection with minimal interference.
5. Poor PowerPoint slides. Death by PowerPoint! My belief is that webinar slides should reinforce your key point, not make them. Too many people use too many bullet points or try to cram too much information on a single slide. Improve your effectiveness by creating a better PowerPoint show. Check out Slide Share for some great examples on how to create an effective presentation.
6. Taking too long to get into the program. I have attended countless webinars where the first five to seven minutes is absorbed by self-promotion, introduction of the presenter or guest expert, or information that was irrelevant to participants. Although sponsoring companies want adequate airtime, it is essential that you manage their expectations and keep the introduction brief and concise.
7. Too much promotion. Many of the webinars I have attended have been a thinly-disguised attempt at selling a product or service. I certainly understand the importance of generating sales but if your webinar is promoted or sold as an “educational” session and you spend most of your time talking about your product or company, I am going to quickly disengage.
8. Failure to deliver high-quality content. A webinar should deliver value for attendees. Unfortunately, too many programs give “here’s what you need to do” information without explaining how to actually apply the concepts. It is better to delve deep into a topic than offer three dozen ways to improve without providing substance.
9. Failure to deliver value. This ties in with the previous point. A successful webinar provides high value to the participants, regardless of the price point. Enough said.
10. The webinar is too long/short. The length of webinar is irrelevant. What’s important is the value that is delivered
during the program. You can’t stretch a short program into a long one and an intense, lengthy session cannot be condensed into a short webinar. Whether you are the host, organizer, or guest expert, make sure that you allot the appropriate amount of time for your particular program.
11. Not allowing questions. Many people who attend webinars have questions and they want to have the opportunity to ask them. Increase the value of your webinar by giving participants time to ask questions and allot time for these questions so that you don’t have to race through the last five of six minutes of your presentation.
Webinars can be an effective marketing vehicle and a great way to generate sales leads. Improve your results by avoiding these common webinar mistakes.
How To Skyrocket Your Perceived Value?
It is of great importance that your visitor “see,” the bargain within your offer. There are ways to enhance this perception. People often observer Sales pages with a “what is in this for me,” mindset. Your offer needs to clearly show them what is in it for them.
When someone does form their first impression about your site, would you not want it to be a good one? When we present our product or service to visitors, it is vital that they see the value within as important to their desire to prosper themselves.
Here is where our USP should stand out from the crowd, giving us a keen edge over competitors. This “Unique Selling Proposition” should grab their attention and hold it – all of the way to the conversion point, whether it be to buy, or to opt-in for a newsletter.
Whether it be a capture page, where they enter their email address, or reach for a credit card to purchase, this USP is a critical point in the process in getting conversions.
How does one create a perception of value to first time visitors? In the world of sales online, everyone is clamoring for their attention flashing buy now or click here messages.
To stand alone in the crowd, and be the “first choice” in the mind of “lookers,” one has to offer “more for less,” – greater value, – a unique selling point, that compels them to chose your product or service over the many others.
This is the very reason your USP must compel them to see the greater bargain your offer has over other competitors. The way you present an offer unto visitors is of great importance. You have to “show,” them what greater value your offer contains.
Once they are looking at what you have to present, it is then of utmost importance,to have your sales copy capture prospect’s full attention. To do this, you have to be unique. You want them to transition into a qualified prospect who is a perfect position to order now.
To get them from where they are now, to the desired conversion point,(what you want visitors to do next) you must continue to position your offer in a way that flames their desire. If their attention is distracted from the momentum once started, you could lose their interest, and there goes the sale.
To keep their focus on tract, the elements of persuasion must continue to drive them forward, keenly interested, all the way to the “order now” button, or the “enter email,” conversion point.
To meet this objective, the perceived value they began with must be inflamed with focused precision. This enhances the very thing which caught their eye in the beginning.
These proven marketing methods, press their emotional “hot buttons” triggering their need to fulfill their want. This is done through positioning the perceived value in such a way, that increases the prospects interest, all the way to the point of the “how much” question.
When this is done correctly, even high-end or products or services, can be moved without objection to price, for indeed the prospect has already made up their mind.
The “I’ve got to have this, or I need that,” hurdle, has already been jumped in their thinking. They have been “sold.” They move to the “buy now” button, and proceed without hesitation.
Good copywriters know exactly how to reach each objective in the sales process. Good solid copy begins by first grabbing visitor’s attention, it then directs them into the body copy, and quickly shows them why they are in the right place. They then “know,” they are going to get exactly what they want.
If It is interesting, flows freely, is personable, and engaging, it becomes winning copy because it is not “hyped-up. It shows them perspective, and insight about why this offer is so much better than competitors.
It is punchy, clear and concise. By the time they hit the “order now” button, they are completely happy – and happy with their buying decision, feeling like they have really gotten a great deal.
The Pitfalls Of A Web Site With No Calls To Action
posted by Web_University @ 8:00 AM
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
The Pitfalls Of A Web Site With No Calls To Action
A potential customer has just opened up your web site. They see a fancy introduction that grabs their attention. The little video sparks a laugh, and they stay on your site to find out more about your business. After getting through all the fancy animations, he or she is greeted with a beautifully-crafted home page with killer copy that keeps them reading all the way to the end. After the novelty of the menu animations and the gorgeous background wears off, your customer sits – thinking.
He or she has no idea what to do next.
They could click on the “About Us” page to learn more about your company. They could visit your blog and see the latest news and opinions from you. They could look at your portfolio or list of services. The web site design looks great and has some great catch phrases, but the marketing message is getting lost and the visitors don’t know what to do next. Now what?
The problem: no call to action. You led your customer to the water, but you did not tell him to drink. No matter how much you lead a customer, you have to make it very clear to them what they need to do next.
The following is a list of things you can do on your web site immediately to improve the conversion rate on your web site:
Make it simple. If you want the business, tell them to give you their contact information or tell them with a graphic to buy your service.
Make it valuable. Offer a free gift or consultation just for contacting you.
Make it clear. At the end of every page content, you should include a simple statement.. Call Us Today For More Information – 555-1212. This tells people they can call you immediately for more information. Calls to action are one of the most important aspects of marketing and really need to be incorporated on every single page of your web site, not just the contact page.
One simple call to action that no one really takes advantage of is your contact phone number. For whatever reason, web designers started created web sites with a phone number only listed on the contact page with a link at the bottom of the web site in extremely small font type.
Some corporate web sites don’t even list their phone number at all. When you consider how many people call companies for more information about their products and services, the fact that they don’t have a phone number blows my mind.
Statistics show that people read web sites from top to bottom left to right. The best place to put a call to action? The top left of your web site. Very few companies put their phone number in the most effective place on the web site.. the top left. If it’s not there, the next best place is the top right. Your phone number should be on every page of your web site listed very visibly.
One of the most common features of a web site is a contact form. This also happens to be one of the main standard calls to action. On the contact page of every web site, there should be a form people can fill out to get more information about your product or service. In our experience, companies that have a form located on the homepage see a lot of response from that page as well as the contact page.
Without the call to action, your customer is lost, and so is your sale. You need to find a professional web design company to discuss your corporate web design and ensure that your customer will know what to do when they visit your site.
Maximize Your Sales Online With These Ten Tips
posted by Web_University @ 8:00 AM
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Maximize Your Sales Online With These Ten Tips
These ten steps will help you to make more sales online. Use some or all of them, depending on the type of Web business you operate.
1. Increase your page rank in Google (SEO) Search Engine Optimization
To do this, it is important to know how to write clear, concise articles and page content that will draw fresh visitors. Write interesting, informative articles, and post them in the article submission sites. Include in the article a link back to your site. Hyperlinks are best, for when they click these, they will create incoming links. This will create back links. They will serve to help increase your sites visibility to search engines, and help improve your sites overall optimization.
2. Link Exchange
Find sites, which are related to your product/service, and get them to exchange links with you. (Sites that are getting good traffic are best.) When people click your direct link, it will help to build even more incoming links to your site. The more incoming links you have, the better your site will rank in the search engine results.
3. Search Engine Submission
We have all seen the ads (submit you site’s URL to 80,000 search engines here). While it is wise to submit your sites URL to the major search engines, some of the smaller engines are quite obscure. Get your URL listed in all of the most popular search engines. Do a search on “search engines,” and find the ones which will best serve your interests.
4. Optimize you Keywords
Use tools like Google analytics, and find keywords that are used most often in search queries. It is important to have the right number of keywords in your site. Avoid “keyword stuffing,” for to do this proves to be harmful to you sites page rank. It can even cause penalty, or “blacklisting. Some sites have even lost their domain over such issue.
5. Avoid duplicate content
While there may be many other sites having content relevant to your sites objectives, it is not wise to copy and paste this information. Search engines will find such, and flag them as spam. There are many software applications that search and find such pages. Many try changing the words around, or adding words here and there, but this still, will not result in having new or fresh content. Google and other search engines will find and flag such. To avoid these pitfalls, use only fresh new content for your Website.
6. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing has become a boom to many who understand how to create pages that get good rank in search results. You promote other peoples products through your web site and earn up to 60 to 75% commission per sale. Click-bank and Amazon, earn hundreds of millions of dollars per year, in e-book sales alone. You can get your share of this pie by creating great page content, then promoting their latest best seller. Many affiliates create multiple pages, optimize them, and then sell the hottest products selling on-line.
7. Adsense Earnings
When you have a page that gets a good rank in the search engines, you can earn cash per clicks by having Adsense ads of various types placed on a page, which is relevant to the ads. You get paid every time someone clicks through the ad. This is where having lots of targeted, high-quality traffic comes in. The more traffic, the more clicks, the more money.
8. Pay-per-click
I would not advise one who is just beginning to start with a huge budget with pay-per-click. This is where you use Google Adwords to send traffic directly to your site. Because you are paying a good price for every click, it is important to send them to a sales page that is converting well. To use Google pay-per-click advertising, you in effect pay them so much per click (70 cents to $10 per click) depending on the market value of the word, and they give you a sponsored link that shows up when someone chooses keywords you have bought.
This listing displays in Google search, on the right side (or on top) of the generic search results. Since you only earn when someone buys the product/service – it is vital to know exactly what you are doing, in this, or you could lose your shirt.
9. Adsense Marketing ‘with Affiliate Marketing’
One can really earn while they sleep, once they figure out how to incorporate Adsense along with affiliate marketing. This is having a huge site, getting tons of clicks. This type of high profile Web site earns money two different ways. The Adsense placement ads earn cash every time someone clicks them (whether a sale is made or not) and the affiliate links within the site, make money every time someone clicks through the ads and makes a purchase. Having a Web site like this takes research and testing on a regular basis, but it has the potential to earn big bucks for the owner.
10. Super Affiliates
Super Affiliates have an established Web presence, when you click keywords they have bought, their name comes up in Google search results listing as page one – number one results. It takes some money as well as time, to reach this status. Several examples of Super Affiliates are names which are easily recognized such as: Amazon, Click bank, or Google. They have incorporated so many keyword phrases into their paid searches, they have top placement in all of the search engines. To get near the top, where they are, takes total optimization, and hundreds of thousands of back and incoming links.
Be sure that the content on your Website is class “A” Web copy. Have rich, clear, concise information, which your visitors will be glad they found. Have every page optimized for targeted keywords, and get sales copy that will pay you!
The Psychology Behind a Successful Business Owner
posted by Web_University @ 8:00 AM
Monday, April 11, 2011
The Psychology Behind a Successful Business Owner
Business owners have to do much more than offer a quality product or service today. With a market that continues to increase in competition, thanks to the global ramifications of the Internet, successful businesspeople will also be characterized by certain qualities that get them noticed in their industry.
If you thought psychology classes were strictly for the health care professionals, think again. There’s plenty of psychology that goes into the effective running of a business, particularly when joint venture marketing comes into play.
* Relationship Building
Successful business owners must know how to form relationships both with potential customers and prospective JV marketing partners. Relationships with joint venture business partners must be professional, but they must also inspire trust and creativity between the two of you. When a JV marketing partnership is healthy and thriving, both businesses benefit.
Make sure your communication with your partner is used to build up rather than tear down the other individual. Offer positive feedback and show enthusiasm for your joint business venture. When you make others feel good about their contributions and their relationship with you, they are more likely to stick around for the long haul.
* Networking
Networking is an important part of building a successful business, whether you are interacting with other business owners or potential customers. Networking events are an excellent place to meet other like-minded individuals who might be interested in building a JV partnership with you.
However, these occasions may cause shy individuals to shiver with anxiety and may even result in you missing out on valuable business opportunities because your fears prohibit you from attending. If social networking makes you nervous, take a class on interpersonal communication that can provide you with the skills you need to handle these events with confidence.
* Team Playing
An effective business is a team of individuals, all working together toward a common goal. If you want your business to be successful, you will need to learn to play nicely with others. This includes other business owners in your field that might be lucrative JV partners, as well as those who work directly in your business with you. Cooperation, contribution and positive encouragement are all traits that make individuals effective team builders.
If you are lacking in any of these traits, team-building classes will show you how to work well with others. Learning specific techniques like active listening and group brainstorming can also show you how to make the most of the creativity and enthusiasm within your staff to make your business run more smoothly.
Psychology plays an important role in a successful business, whether you are forming JV partnerships with other business owners, working with your staff, or interacting with your customers.
If you feel your interpersonal skills are lacking, now is the time to get educated on the finer points of networking and team building. Professional classes are available in psychology, communication and interpersonal skills through community colleges and professional training forums. The money you invest in building your professional skills will go a long way in helping you run your business more effectively.
The Importance Of Being Earnest, Err… Honest
posted by Web_University @ 8:00 AM
Sunday, April 10, 2011
The Importance Of Being Earnest, Err… Honest
Whilst “The Importance of Being Ernest” was a trivial comedy, the importance of being honest is a little lesson that anyone looking to benefit from SEO could learn from. Google’s commitment to each and every searcher is to provide the most relevant and trustworthy result for their specific request. It is therefore safe to assume that if we, as SEO’s and marketers want to rank well in Google, we need to commit to a similar philosophy, isn’t it?
The answer is of course yes – quality content wins the day, and theoretically, the more quality content you provide your website visitors with, the more you should be rewarded by Google with traffic. Yet, time after time, we see newcomers to the SEO scene filling their websites with garbage (content that is either poor quality, makes no sense, or both!), buying dodgy, powerless links and expecting their site to draw a flood of traffic from Google and co. The reality is that whatever success might be achieved using this methodology will certainly be short-lasted. Here’s a (perhaps overly) simple equation to SEO success:
Quality Content (in whatever format) + Decent Promotion Thereof = Backlinks & Therefore Ranking
The problem that most “legitimate” internet marketers face is simple: they create the super-duper content, but nothing happens thereafter, leaving them feeling disheartened and tempted to follow a more sinister route…
The missing link in the equation is promotion. Quality content, be it a free ebook, report, tool, information, whatever – will NOT promote itself. It is your job to make sure that it gets promoted so that people start talking about it, following which, the traffic and links begin to flow… A few simple ways to promote your content include:
1. Signature links in relevant forums (”Get This Free XYZ By Visiting ABC Now!)
2. Soft promotion in blogs and comments
3. Email Marketing (if you have a database of relevant prospects)
4. A careful selection of banner ads (if your budget allows for this)
5. An even more careful selection of Adwords keywords (get a stack of cheap keywords and promote)
6. Facebook Ads (once again, only if your budget allows it)
The options are endless, and all it requires is a little thinking on your part. Where do the people that would like what you’re offering (the target market) hang out? How can you most cost-effectively reach them?
Once you get that initial flood of visitors, be sure to implement simple sharing tools, like a “refer a friend” script and the like. You might also want to provide an incentive to get people linking to your site, such as a free eBook or similar.
However you go about it, remember that quality content alone is not enough – you need to promote it. Imagine if YouTube never told anyone about their site when they started, and just expected people to type in their web address by mistake.
So this brings us back to the beginning – the importance of being honest… What did that have to do with anything? Well, it’s quite simple – provide a quality, honest product or service that provides value, promote it, and you will naturally have more and more people linking to you over time. No need to employ dodgy link builders in India, or try implement strange “black hat” tactics. Just provide value, promote it, and the world is your oyster…
Could Tomorrows Storefront Be Your Web Site?
posted by Web_University @ 8:00 AM
Saturday, April 9, 2011
Could Tomorrows Storefront Be Your Web Site?
There is good news. Web based sales have continued to spiral upward year after year. Sales are projected to hit $200 billion by the end of the year. The better news: by the year 2012 this figure will increase to $335 billion.
The internet is making mega dollars for those who implement wise usage of it’s vast potential. It has continually grown in online sales, as more and more people take advantage of buying and selling online.
With the spike in gas prices, it becomes reasonable to shop from home – save the commute to town, save time and effort during the Christmas rush!
Not to mention the bargains that can be found through online auctions, close-outs, and retailers who do not even have to worry about overstocking, or inventory- due to on demand shipping.
It is a safe bet, that those who go global now, are positioning themselves to reap the rewards of this huge marketing bonanza! More and more businesses are stepping up their online presence to where more than half of their overall sales are coming from the Web.
And why not? Why pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a brick and mortar store, where only hundreds of visitors may occupy, when they can have an online store which thousands can occupy daily?
Most big stores close for the night, where the dot-com stores never have to close! Why put hundreds of thousands into payroll for employees, when one server can meet the same needs in the digital world?
Why pay megabucks in health care and retirement – if the same results can be gained by retailers who simply sell and do not manufacture?
Don’t get me wrong, there will always be mom and pop stores simply because there are plenty of services that require employees.
But many are finding they can sell online – at a fraction of the cost, of building a retail outlet! This is a trend which will only get bigger.
Which is better, banking three or four million a year in profit, or taking in nine or ten million a year, only to bank two million after overhead?
Those who already have a huge online business, can only look forward to growth. They have proven themselves as a worthy online retailer to their customers.
The customer is pleased to know that whoever they send to your site will get the same treatment as they did.
It becomes a win-win exchange. This is how Fortune 500 companies, and other online retailers can know their expected growth is most likely certain.
It pays well to have your customers best interests at heart, for clients will reward those who take the time and effort to make sure their customers are well pleased.
Who would you buy from? Those who prove to you how important your business is, or those who seems indifferent and treat you as a number?
Your web presence and online appeal is directly related to how your prospects view your site. If it is polished, and a help to their needs and interests first, you can be sure of repeat business.
However, if it comes off as “thrown-up” and offers no help or assistance, but simply offers a shopping cart and an order now button, it is doomed. Bad news travels a little faster than good news in the business world.
If you are serious about growing your online sales, and want to prosper in the coming boom, do yourself and others the favor of hiring a professional writer for your Web content.
It will pay you many times over what you pay them, and once that expense is absorbed, you can face with confidence profits upon profits!
5 Focus Factors To Use For Your Online Business
posted by Web_University @ 8:00 AM
Friday, April 8, 2011
5 Focus Factors To Use For Your Online Business
One of the biggest game killers for an online business is lack of focus. The internet is jam packed with distractions and time wasting activities. It is easy to waste hours doing useless things online without even realizing it.
There are millions of websites and people trying to get your attention and that can be very distracting, if you let it. The key is to stay 100% focused on your business and perform only those tasks that will move you forward.
After wasting hours and hours of my own time online, I decided to get serious and stay focused on my business. As you can imagine, it has helped me a ton and it will help you as well.
1. Stick To A Designated Action Plan
It is super important that you have an action plan for your online business. It is not a good idea to get online without a gameplan. If you get online without a clear idea of what you are going to be doing, you will just get lost in a never ending sea of distractions.
Having an action plan will help you to navigate through all of the online distractions, so that you can focus on what is important for your business. Having an action plan
will also help you to stay more consistent with your efforts.
2. Don’t Check Your E-mail More Than Once Per Day
As you probably already know, checking your e-mail can be a very big distraction. If you have to check it more than once per day that is fine, as long as you limit yourself.
It is a better idea to check e-mail only after you have completed all your tasks for the day. This way it won’t distract you.
Almost all e-mails can wait. In fact, you could probably check your e-mail 2-3 times a week and be perfectly fine. The trick is to eliminate your distractions and e-mail is a big distraction for most people.
3. Set Goals
It seems like everyone is always talking about the importance of having goals. Well goals are very important for your online business because they are going to help you to stay focused. You should have daily goals that are part of your action plan.
When you are setting goals you should remember to set short term, medium, and long term goals for yourself. This is going to keep you on track to achieving what you want.
4. Keep Track Of Your Progress
It is also good to look at the progress that you have been having in your business. Being online makes it very easy to get all of the statistics you need to see. Google Analytics will give you all sorts of helpful statistics that you can go back to often.
This will give you a good idea of what is working and it will also motivate you to get more good results.
5. Have A Clear Vision
This is almost like having goals for your business, except it is a little bit different. Goals are great for pushing yourself to reach new pinnacles of success. Having a clear vision means knowing where you are going.
There are so many ways to make money online that it can be confusing some times. You should know exactly how you are going to monetize your efforts and then stick to it. It will not be effective for you to try to make money a million different ways.
* In Conclusion
Doing these 5 things above have dramatically changed my productivity online, and they will do the same for you if you apply them. There is no substitute for focused, consistent action in any business online, or off.
16 Questions Critical To Starting An Internet Business
posted by Web_University @ 8:00 AM
Thursday, April 7, 2011
16 Questions Critical To Starting An Internet Business
It is usually overwhelming for a prospective internet marketer at the point of starting an internet business.
What with the many aspects he has to consider.
1. Does it matter whatever domain name I pick?
2. How much should I invest in this online business initially before it starts generating revenue?
3. What advertising sources do I invest in and which do I get free?
4. What website type do I use – static or dynamic?
5. What online marketing training program do I join to put me through? Which are the best of these online marketing training programs?
6. Which forums do I hang out at where I can find my colleagues in a similar niche? Which are the best of these forums?
7. How do I get my website set up? Do I design it from scratch, use templates or even go for an already completely set up website?
8. What plethora of internet marketing tools and resources am I required to keep and utilize?
9. On completion of my website set up, how do I subsequently keep updating it? Update myself or outsource?
10. If I learn to update my website, what software or web platform is most ideal for me to get this done?
11. What blogging platform do I use – blogger or wordpress?
12. Do I start with just one internet affiliate program and after making some progress begin to add others?
13. Of the available internet affiliate programs, which do I join?
14. How will the internet affiliate programs I intend selecting pay me my commissions?
15. How fast will I start to make money online with affiliate program?
16. Can my country’s nationals fit perfectly into the internet affiliate programs I intend getting involved with?
Negotiating Your Corporate SaaS Agreement: Do You Flunk the Test?
You’re offering a SaaS (Software as a Service) solution to the corporate market. You’ve developed your standard form SaaS agreement (sometimes referred to as a “hosted software services agreement”). And you’ve presented your agreement to your corporate prospect’s representative.
Are you prepared for the issues you’re most likely to be confronted with by a SaaS-savvy corporate user – or do you flunk the test?
Two Approaches to SaaS Contracting
There are two basic approaches to SaaS agreements with end-user customers:
* The click-wrapped agreement approach – a “take it or leave it” online agreement that’s presented electronically during your site’s registration process with an “I Agree” button, and;
* The traditional paper-based, signed agreement approach – an agreement that’s presented with the expectation that it will be negotiated and eventually (you hope) accepted and signed by the user.
Since the click-wrapped approach is not subject to negotiation, that’s not the subject of this article. What we’re concerned with here, is whether you’re prepared to negotiate the cutting edge issues of a traditional paper-based, signed agreement with a corporate user – and a SaaS-savvy one at that.
The single, most significant driver of your prospect’s questions and concerns with your traditional paper-based, signed SaaS agreement is the fact that your prospect is considering surrendering its valuable and sensitive data to you – transferring it into the “cloud.” Your prospect will test you with questions and concerns regarding the privacy and security if its data. How you respond will determine, in most transactions, whether you’ll get the business. Are you ready for the test?
Your Data Center
If you’re typical, you’ve outsourced your data center to an outside hosting service provider, and your prospect knows that. So the prospect is considering a transaction where its data is being outsourced not once, but twice. This raises questions and concerns regarding privacy and security.
Some of the key questions and concerns are:
* Who is your hosting service provider? What’s their reputation in the field and financial viability? Is it permissible to visit the data center for purposes of evaluation?
* Where are the servers located? Will servers be required to be located only in the United States?
* Security audits – does the hosting service provider provide SAS 70 reports periodically (Type 1 or Type 2)?
* Changes to a successor data center – will the prospect insist on approval of any change to another hosting service provider?
* Privacy and security agreements – are satisfactory privacy and security agreements in place between you and the hosting service provider?
* Responsibility – will you be responsible for the acts and omissions of the hosting service provider as if the acts and omissions were yours?
* Disaster recovery – what’s the level of support?
* Redundancy – if there is a problem with the active server, does a mirrored server kick in?
* Backups – what’s the frequency of data backups?
* Access to data – who at the hosting service provider has access to data in the server?
Your Customer’s Access to its Data
Although the data resides in servers located at your hosting service provider’s facility, your customer may have a need to access this data from time to time.
Some of the key questions and concerns are:
* Data requests – how will the customer’s requests for data be handled, including responses to legal discovery (eDiscovery) requests, search warrants, and subpoenas?
* Return of data – when the SaaS relationship ends, how will the data be returned and will the hosting service provider retain data, such as in its backup system?
Are You an Insurer for Data Security Breach?
Do you give an indemnity for any and all security breaches that affect your customer’s data? This is a key question. If you do, you need to be sure that you’ve added an additional fee to your pricing to cover this significant risk.
Think about it. It’s a fact that there’s no system currently known to man that is guaranteed to be absolutely safe and secure from outside hacks. So, if you guarantee data security with a general indemnity, you’re providing a guarantee over which you have no control and which you’ll be expected to honor financially in the future with some of your customers. Count on it. In essence, you’ll be providing an insurance policy, and you had better be charging an insurance “premium” to cover the risk.
One way to deal with the issue is to agree to a standard for data security that you’ll be responsible to satisfy. The standard may be general in nature, such as compliance with reasonable data security measures that are generally followed in the industry. Or, the standard may be more specific, such as standards set by the EU Safe Harbor or the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, or a very specific negotiated standard. In any case, once the standard is agreed upon, you might agree to be responsible for a security breach only if it’s enabled by your failure to comply with the standard. If the breach is not enabled by your breach of the standard, you’re not responsible.
One of the issues regarding your scope of responsibility for a data breach is who is responsible (or the extent that the responsibility may be shared) for notifying the persons affected by the data breach as required by the patchwork quilt of state laws dealing with breach notification.
Conclusion
Did you pass the test?
If you’re not prepared to discuss these questions and concerns competently, then you’ve flunked the test.
If you’re not sure about how to handle these issues, you’re advised to seek competent legal counsel who’s familiar with them.
The ultimate questions are whether you:
* Understand and adequately provide for the risk allocation inherent in your SaaS agreement, and;
* Provide a satisfactory response to your prospects’ questions and concerns regarding privacy and security.
Attract More Clients By Dumping the Junk – Your Pita Clients!
If you want to attract more clients, then you need to fire the pain-in-the-ass (PITA) clients who do nothing but suck up your time and energy. You know exactly who I’m talking about — the time-wasting, buy-nothing customers. By dumping them, you free up time to develop and care for the ones who really matter.
Why You Should Fire the PITA Customer
You can see the warning signs a mile away as they…
* Push you on price
* Threaten to take their business to your competitors
* Make unreasonable demands
* Masquerade as the decision-maker
* Don’t return phone calls; yet expect fast, complete and reliable delivery of your service.
These clients do nothing more than create added stress that you don’t need in your life, PITA customers are never happy. They drain your energy, test your patience, and waste your time. They demoralize your entire sales team. Yet companies accept this bad business continually, thinking bad business must be better than no business. But is it?
Dump the Hidden Costs and Start Attracting More Clients
When organizations take on bad customers, they pay a hidden cost as they leave thousands to millions of dollars on the table. By focusing on PITA clients, many business owners are losing the opportunity to use those resources going after and servicing the phenomenal clients they want and need to make money! Collect too many PITA customers and watch your profits dwindle… not a compelling scenario.
Why accept business from a few customers who drive us crazy and drain our resources? Many salespeople say they sell to “anyone who fogs a mirror”–because of a looming quota, or because their company insists on certain deals. Many sales organizations create unrealistic expectations that they can turn a bad situation into a good one. Are you dreaming? Bad business is bad business. Period.
Dump the Junk and Attract More Clients Who Want Your Help – And Is Willing to Pay For It Dearly
Targeting just “anyone” often means attracting more PITA customers. Never ask a PITA to refer you. Why?
Because PITAs hang out with other PITAs. They belong to the same organizations, play golf together, and love telling stories about how they negotiated an unprecedented deal, or whipped a salesperson into shape.
Your best sales decision: Fire the PITA. Don’t take them in the first place, and if you have one, recognize you have a PITA situation and fight back.
Yes, fight back! Don’t take their abuse. You deliver a service that boosts their business. If they push you on price, be willing to walk away. That really turns the tables.
To demonstrate this point, picture two people standing with their arms out straight, pushing on and resisting each other’s hands. No one gets anyplace. It’s a stalemate.
Now re-create the same picture: One person stops resisting. What happens?
The other person moves toward the one who ceased resisting. The same thing happens when you’re willing to walk away. Sometimes you’ll walk, but many times the PITA comes to you.
Are You Now Ready to Fire PITA Clients and Attract Even More Clients
Great! But words don’t mean anything. Take action now and fire the PITA! We know them 90 percent of the time before we even begin to work with them. Say NO. It’s OK to walk away.
When you walk away, you have time to attract exactly the kind of clients you want. Follow my advice and you will watch your sales soar!
Search Engine Strategies – How To Increase Your Search Engine Ranking
posted by Web_University @ 8:00 AM
Saturday, October 9, 2010
Search Engine Strategies – How To Increase Your Search Engine Ranking
The methods employed to increase your search engine rankings may seem like rocket science to you, so you have probably avoided dealing with this issue. I am here to tell you—the time has come to face your website! A high search engine ranking for your website is so essential that if you have the slightest desire to actually succeed in your business, there is no way you can continue to avoid this issue.
At least 85% of people looking for goods and services on the Internet find websites through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The idea of optimizing your pages for high search engine rankings is to attract targeted customers to your site who will be more than likely to make a purchase. The higher your page comes up in search engine results, the greater the traffic that is directed to your website. That’s what search engine optimization is about.
You can immerse yourself in all the technical information available online to figure out how to optimize your web pages to achieve higher rankings. Or you can look at a few simple items on your pages, make some small adjustments, and most likely see improved rankings quite rapidly. The first item you should examine is the title bar on your home page.
The title bar is the colored bar at the top of the page. Look at the words that appear there when you access your home page. To increase search engine rankings, the words on your homepage’s title bar should include the most important keywords or phrases, one of which would include your company name.
Then click on all your links and examine the title bars on the pages you access. Each title bar on every single page of your site should contain the most important keywords and phrases taken from the page itself. However, avoid very long strings of keywords, keeping them to six words or less. Avoid repeating keywords more than once in the title bars, and make sure that identical words are not next to each other.
The next item to put under your microscope is your website content. Search engines generally list sites that contain quality content rather than scintillating graphics. The text on your site must contain the most important keywords—the words that potential customers will be typing into search engines to find your site.
Aim to have around 250 words on each page, but if this is not desirable due to your design, aim for at least 100 carefully chosen words. If you want to achieve a high ranking on search engines, this text is essential. However, the search engines must be able to read the text, meaning that the text must be in HTML and not graphic format.
To find out if your text is in HTML format, take your cursor and try to highlight a word or two. If you are able to do this, the text is HTML. If the text will not highlight, it is probably in graphic form. In this case, ask your webmaster to change the text into HTML format in order to increase your search engine rankings.
Next we come to what is called metatags. I know this sounds like something out of science fiction, but it is really just simple code. Many people believe that metatags are the key to high search engine rankings, but in reality, they only have a limited effect. Still, it’s worth adding them in the event that a search engine will use metatags in their ranking formula.
To find out if your page is set up with metatags, you must access the code. To do this, click the “view” button on the browser menu bar, and select “source”. This will pull up a window revealing the underlying code that created the page. If there are metatags, they usually appear near the top of the window. For example, a metatag would read: meta name=”keywords” content=. If you do not find code that reads like this, ask your webmaster to put them in. This may not do much for your search engine rankings, but any little boost helps.
Lastly, we come to the issue of link popularity. This is a factor that is extremely important in terms of search engine rankings. Almost all search engines use link popularity to rank your website. Link popularity is based on the quality of the sites you have linked to from your links page.
If you type in “free link popularity check” in a popular search engine, the search engine will then show you what sites are linked to your site. In the case that there aren’t many sites linked up to yours, or that the sites that are linked up have low search engine rankings, consider launching a link popularity campaign. Essentially, this entails contacting quality sites and requesting that they exchange links with your site. Of course, this requires checking out the rankings of the websites you want to link up with. Linking to popular, quality sites not only boosts your search engine ranking, but it also directs more quality traffic to your website.
Search engine rankings are extremely important for a successful Internet Marketing campaign. Before you go out and hire a search engine optimization company, try taking some of the simple steps listed above, and see if you can’t boost your rankings yourself. Don’t ever ignore this all-important factor in Internet marketing. Remember, the higher your search engine ranking, the more quality customers will be directed your way.
Use SEO Strategies to Increase Web Traffic
posted by Web_University @ 8:00 AM
Monday, October 4, 2010
Use SEO Strategies to Increase Web Traffic
Every new technology adopted widely by society brings about a number of new opportunities. The movable type printing press created affordable print information, the telephone and radio created the concept of instantaneous communication over great distances. Today, the Internet has unified both of these concepts into the information explosion that is the digital age.
Consider this article alone – a mere forty years ago printing even fifty copies of each page would cost either a chunk of change or at least a suspicious look from the boss as you hovered over the office copier. Now the information can be sent to thousands of people within the time it takes to brew a good cup of tea.
Of course with every technology comes a system to make the best marketing use of that advancement. The radio gave rise to the modern commercial advertisement, which was refined by the television and still persists on the Web. The telephone gave us telemarketers and the first concept of communication networking. For making the most of the Internet, the strategy of the day is Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
What is SEO, again?
In short, SEO is the presentation of a webpage in such a way that it consistently ranks highly in particular search engine results. While fads and sensations can quickly boom online from “word of mouth,” they don’t produce the same reliable success as a balanced, systematic approach.
Very few businesses, after all, want one rush of attention that leads to a website crash, followed by an equally quick slide into the various forgotten graveyards of the web. Therefore, SEO uses a combination of elements to make the site increasingly relevant to the various searches that Internet users perform, to bring it up again and again among the best results.
Key SEO Strategies
1. Set goals.
Identify what you want your SEO campaign to accomplish. While any SEO-conscious writing and page design can contribute to a site’s search engine rankings, an unfocused effort will simply waste time and money. After all, a business promoting athletic clothing and footwear may not benefit too much from showing up in searches for evening wear. Is your goal simply to increase your site’s visitor traffic? Do you want to generate more sales of a product? Is it part of an effort to promote your digital brand? Each of these goals benefits from different aspects of SEO technique.
2. Link up.
Link building is one of the cornerstones of any SEO effort. Many search engines are spider-based, meaning they use automated processes to collect and categorize information on various websites. When a large number of websites provide links back to your business, or when a particularly high-traffic site does so, the spiders take notice of it and increase the relevance of that link in searches related to those sites.
3. Get the keys.
Keyword writing is consistently stressed as a requirement when websites look for content writers. Keywords are just that, words and phrases chosen for their popularity and relevance to key searches.
There are dozens of theories about keyword writing. In the earlier days of SEO writing, it wasn’t uncommon to see pages that were nothing but long strings of repeated variations on a few keywords. This has evolved into more organic writing that fits in keywords with the article as a whole.
Whichever strategy is chosen, care must be taken to avoid the temptation to abuse keyword searches. Yes, a proper keyword density will bring up your search rankings over time. However, Google can and does ban pages from its index when they determine it to be a keyword-abusing effort. So consider your keyword choices carefully, and seamlessly integrate them into your entire strategy.
4. Be on the right page.
One aspect occasionally neglected in SEO is the architecture and design of the webpage itself. Search engines and their ranking systems (be they spider or human based) are growing more sophisticated all the time, and look at many different factors in their decisions. A site that buries its keyword-rich articles on interior pages behind dozens of subsidiary links will not perform as well as one with strategic keyword-oriented material right on the front page. Have an SEO-conscious designer look over your page, as well as your articles.
Remember that every business is a multi-faceted whole. Many failures occur when people attempt to compartmentalize too much. You can’t consider SEO as some sort of ‘event’ that you do every so often, just as a business can’t put off routine maintenance of their equipment and expect it to function properly. Integrate your efforts into the entire process, and give them the same focus as any other effort in the business, and they will return their investment much more reliably, quickly, and ideally.
15 Important Web Design Tips
Here are 15 important website design tips that you might not be
aware of or have overlooked. Consider taking advantage of them
if you haven’t already done so…
1. Custom 404 Pages
Create a custom 404 web page, so that any time your website
visitor mistypes or misspells a URL on your site, they will
still be provided with navigation options for your site
(instead of getting nothing but a “Page Not Found” error
message, which is neither friendly or helpful).
2. Redirect Non-www. To www.
Website visitors will often leave out the “www.” portion when
they type a URL or link to your website. Set the website up so
that it automatically redirects any non-www version of your
domain urls (http://domain. com) to the www version
(http://www.domain. com) of your website.
3. Properly Sized Graphics
Size and define all graphics and images on your web pages
properly and correctly. Web pages will load quicker if the
graphics contained on each page are properly defined so they
don’t require the web browser to re-size them. Properly sized
and defined images can reduce the web browser workload and speed
up the page loading time.
4. Favicon
Add a Favicon (favorite icon) to your website, so that your
company or product logo appears in the URL box. This icon will
also show up in a bookmark list, and gives the web site an added
level of professionalism.
5. Include RSS Auto-Discovery
If you offer an RSS feed for any content on your website, be
sure to include auto-discovery code in the header of your
website. This will allow many browsers and RSS readers to
automatically detect the presence of an RSS feed and alert the
visitor that it is available.
6. Alternate Domains
Domain names are relatively inexpensive, so you should register
multiple domain versions and extensions in order to protect your
brand. The varied domains can be parked on the main website,
simply to prevent others from obtaining them. Registering
alternate domain versions will help protect your brand.
7. Consistent Navigation
Navigation should remain consistent on a website. As a website
visitor moves through the website, the navigation bar should
remain in the same place on each page. This will make it easier
for visitors to navigate your website, and become more
comfortable as they move through your site.
8. Home Goes Home
The main graphic, company logo, or “header” at the top of the
site should be included on every page in the site, and should
always return the visitor to the home page of the website. This
has become a web standard, and most visitors now expect to
return to the main page of the site simply by clicking on the
main top graphic from any page within the site.
9. Copyright Notice
Include a copyright notice on the bottom of each page contained
on the website, and keep it current! It may seem trivial, but an
out-of-date copyright notice can send a message to your visitors
that the website and its content may be out-of-date as well.
10. Meaningful File Names
Use meaningful file names for any files, graphics, or web pages.
Many search engines look at file names as part of their search
algorithm, and using keywords in file names may help to improve
search engine rankings.
11. Hyphens vs Underscores
When naming files and webpages, use hyphens
(i.e. web-page.html) rather than underscores (i.e. web_page.html)
for the file names. It is much easier for search engines to
separate and index the keywords when hyphens are used.
12. Alt Tags
Use ALT tags to describe what images represent on web pages. ALT
tags not only assist visually-impaired visitors in knowing what
the images are, but they also help with search engine ranking.
13. Spell Check
Use a spell-check feature on the text of all web pages in a
website. A website that contains mistyped or misspelled words
just shouts “unprofessional”. Take the extra few minutes
necessary to check the spelling of text on each page of your
website.
14. Test
After making changes to a website, test it! Many times, a
webmaster will upload changes, confident in their abilities,
only to later discover that in their attempt to fix one thing,
they have “broken” something somewhere else. Make testing a
habit after making even the most minor changes!
15. Keep It Simple
Simple is good. Remove unnecessary clutter and distractions
from a website and navigation menu.
How to Hard-Wire Your Site to Google
Until Bing turns into David and slays Goliath, the only search
engine game in town is Google. While the other search engines
can’t be ignored or forgotten, when it comes to online search,
Google will deliver the majority of your quality organic
traffic. For webmasters and especially for online marketers,
having your website virtually hard-wired to Google is a
marketing Must-Do.
We are strictly talking about white hat stuff here. If you’re
seeking the opposite color, look elsewhere. As a full-time
search engine marketer, I have learned a few things over the 10
years or so I have been working on the web. One of the most
significant factors running constantly in the background has
been Google. And, the underlying fact is that the more I
intertwined my sites and content with Google, the more success
I achieved. There seemed to be a direct correlation between the
two, making it a little more than ironic that the original name
for Google was BackRub.
But this is not exactly rocket science territory here. Google is
the biggest entity on the web, especially if you go the free
organic traffic route. There are tons of ways to market online
which don’t involve Google at all, but for the purposes of this
piece, I will be discussing ways any webmaster or marketer can
better connect their site and content with Google. Plus, I’ll
(if it’s not already obvious) also give you some reasons why
this is a smart marketing strategy on your part.
The first technique you must perfect is how to get your new
content into Google’s Index within minutes, if not seconds.
These days with social media sites this can be easily achieved.
It may be as fast as your latest Tweet or Google Buzz
(http://www.google.com/buzz). Google News (http://news.google.com/)
is another easy way to instantly get your content into Google.
Press releases are another immediate way to connect your content
with Google. So too is something as simple as making a video and
posting it on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/) which is Google
Owned.
(Note – Google has recently revamped the YouTube system and
provided many ways webmasters can view the linking data and
stats; great source of information for webmasters and marketers.)
Actually Google will index any new site or content fairly
quickly these days so you don’t have to worry about it. One
method I like best is using a free blog from Blogger/Blogspot
(http://www.blogger.com/) [which is also Google owned] and
placing links there to be indexed within minutes. To keep track
of what content Google is indexing, I usually set up Google
Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts) for all my main sites and
my main keywords. Whenever a page is indexed in Google related
to my sites or keywords, Google sends me an email. Many savvy
webmasters use these alerts to find and build link partners
since these indexed pages will be thematically related to yours.
Using Google Alerts will make it seem like you’re totally welded
to Google and Google’s indexing system, every second of the day.
Needless to say, keywords rule the web and Google. You must
attach your content to keywords people are using to find stuff
on the web and build top 10 rankings for those keywords in the
search engines, especially Google. Now if you’re new at this,
Google gives you some valuable keyword tools you can use to see
how many searches are made each month for a keyword phrase and
also gives you some idea of the keyword competition you will be
facing. I like using http://google.com/sktool and also
http://labs.google.com/sets. Besides, you must start your Google
courtship off on the right foundation.
Next, you must realize Google is not really a search engine but
a business. The main goal of this business is to supply quality
content to web users so that these users will use Google over
and over again, allowing Google to attach ads and make a profit.
The key to getting and keeping Google’s attention is fulfilling
your part of this “quality equation” with superior content which
surfers want and find helpful. Make this your religion and the
SEO gods, including Google, will smile kindly upon your site.
Now like any religion there are some strict rules you have to
follow. In a recent WebProNews video interview, Matt Cutts said
Google has (200) signals it uses to rank content on the web.
Most webmasters refer to these as ranking factors, but in truth,
they are really signals that your site gives off… provide the
wrong signals and it could spell lower rankings. So if you want
to keep your site in Google’s good graces, you have to follow
some simple SEO on-page rules, such as placing your main keyword
in the Title, in the Heading, in the Body and in the URL. Make
sure your site is easily navigated by your visitors and
especially by the search engine spiders. Keep your linking
structure simple, with no links more than three clicks away from
your index or homepage. In my opinion, getting quality related
one-way backlinks is the most important way to get top rankings
in Google.
In recent years, Google has gone out of its way to help
webmasters understand all these simple SEO basics. And as far as
I am concerned, one resource every webmaster should be using is
Google Webmaster Tools (http://www.google.com/webmasters/). This
is a whole suite of tools and information webmasters can use in
correlation with Google. Recently, in Webmaster Tools Google has
made available Click-Thru data on its search engine results so
that you can find out how many impressions you’re getting for a
certain keyword and your click-thru or conversion rate. Some
webmasters are questioning the accuracy of these numbers, but it
will give you some indication of how well your site and content
is doing in Google.
Perhaps, another just as valuable program is Google Analytics
(http://www.google.com/analytics/), where you’re really giving
Google access to all your site’s information. You can use
Analytics to measure different links/content on your site to
see how well it performs. More importantly you can use it to
fine-tune your conversion rates in order to make more sales. I
also use it to test-out different graphics, different salescopy,
different site layouts… and so on. But a word of caution,
don’t just use Analytics. As an online marketer you want many
sources of information, so regularly study your own traffic logs
and raw site data. Even with Google and probably especially with
Google, you should always cross-reference any data with other
sources on your site and on the web. Lets not get too carried
away with this Google worship thing.
I use both Google Adsense (https://www.google.com/adsense/) and
Google Adwords (http://adwords.google.com/) with most of my
sites. As an online marketer, I know I can get 10 times more
from an affiliate link than from Adsense… but over the years
I have found having both types of links on sites doesn’t
significantly reduce sales. To explain further, I have tested
my pages with and without Adsense, and it doesn’t affect my
affiliate sales even though I know I am losing some sales to
Adsense. Overall, using Adsense adds to the competitiveness of
my pages. If someone is looking for the lowest price and finds
it in a Google ad, they come away happy and will probably visit
my site again or sign-up to my newsletter. Besides, Adsense is a
very quick way to monetize pages which I don’t have ready
affiliate programs for on my sites. In addition, Adsense and
Adwords give you valuable feedback on your content’s performance.
There are several other Google programs which I use to further
connect with Google such as Google Docs (http://docs.google.com/),
Google Knol (http://knol.google.com/) and iGoogle
(http://www.google.com/ig). One must-have program is Google
Accounts (https://www.google.com/accounts/), which basically
connects me with all my different programs within Google. I have
found managing all your Google programs is much easier from this
one location. I also like using Google Profiles
(http://www.google.com/profiles) and Google Buzz
(http://www.google.com/buzz) to get my content quickly into
Google and onto the web. As you have probably guessed already,
Google does have a lot of programs which webmasters can use to
improve their content’s performance. In the process, by using
and intertwining your content with all of the Google programs
highlighted here, you’re really connecting with Google en masse.
While many marketing experts will say it is foolhardy to marry
all your content to just one search engine, I have found over
the years that hard-wiring your site to Google really makes
your content readily accessible in the most dominant presence on
the web. Doing so not only gives your content the attention it
deserves, but it can also help further your own goals. Actively
positioning your site and content firmly within Google’s many
different facets can prove beneficial for any webmaster or
online marketer. Just get that pre-nup agreement in writing
first!
Top 10 Tips for Using Twitter
When it comes to social media, no one “gets it” as well
as Twitter. According to Econsultancy, as of Jan 2010,
Twitter has 75 million user accounts, with about 15
million of that total being active users. See
http://tinyurl.com/yetgcru . That’s a lot of people
sending a lot of Tweets. This micro-blogging service
makes it easy for small businesses and entrepreneurs
to stay in touch with those who choose to follow them,
and stay updated on new products, services, special
offers, industry news and more. It’s a win-win for
both the Tweeter, and their followers.
When it comes to using Twitter, there’s a right way and
a wrong way to use it. Your messages must be kept short,
under 140 characters, and they need to be helpful or
informative. Don’t carry on about what you ate for
breakfast, or the fact that you just brushed your teeth.
People will unfollow you faster than they can hit
the button, even if you do have good oral habits.
I’ve been using Twitter for a long time now and here’s
what I’ve found works best when participating in this
close knit community of few words.
1) Regular Postings: Now I’m not saying you need to post
every day, although that would be nice. You do need to
make an appearance on a regular basis. It’s like school -
you need to show up to pass. Be a contributor that your
followers get to really know and look forward to your
Tweets. If you’re the type of person who needs to plan
ahead, you can always use a service that allows you to
schedule tweets in advance, such as
http://www.socialoomph.com/
2) Retweet: If you see Tweets posted by other users that
you think your followers would like, then retweet them. It
only takes one click, and you’ll also be creating goodwill
with other Twitter users at the same time. If you’d like,
you can add a personal thought or comment before sending
it. Also, make it easy for others to retweet your posts
by adding RT buttons to your website or blog. It’s easy
with http://tweetmeme.com/about/retweet_button
3) Be Helpful: Keep in mind Twitter is a form of social
Media, so social interaction is key. It’s not all about
you. Whenever an opportunity arises to answer a question,
participate in a survey, or help solve a problem, do so.
In this way you’re participating in the community. This
also will help your brand and image when others know
they can count on you for support or feedback.
4) Don’t Be A Follow CopyCat: Don’t follow everyone who
follows you. This is probably my biggest pet peeve when
it comes to Twitter. So many people turn this feature on
to auto follow those who follow them. Why would you
want to do this? I’d prefer that those I follow are
people and topics I’ve hand-selected that interest me,
and not a mish-mash of followers who may be ranting
about things I have no interest in. Be selective in
who you follow or your Twitter stream could quickly
fill up with junk or spam. For quality people to
follow, see – http://followontwitterlists.com/
5) What to Tweet: Make sure that the tweets you post
are helpful and/or informative. Late breaking news
pertaining to your industry, as well as any specials or sales
you may have going on are always good topics. If you
find something you think your followers would like,
especially if it’s free or a bargain, share the love.
Plus, if your tweets are good, it will encourage others
to retweet them. For ideas see -
http://www.artbizblog.com/2009/07/what-to-tweet.html
6) Comment: Particpate in the community by commenting
on other people’s tweets. If you can answer a question,
do so. It never hurts and people really will appreciate
it when you take the time to comment on what they have
to say. It lets them know that others are actually
listening to what they have to say in the “Twitterverse”.
7) Say Thank You: When someone takes the time to retweet
one of your tweets, make sure to reply to them with a
“thank you”. Manners rule online as well as off, and
they’ll like the fact that you noticed the retweet
and took the time to show some gratitude. It may even
inspire them to retweet more of your tweets in the
future.
Be Personal: Again, I don’t need to know what you
ate for dinner, but every now and then you should show
your human side with a creative thought, quote, or
other statement. Let people know you’re “real” and
not just a lean mean business machine. You want to
tread lightly in this area. Too personal is overkill,
but a little can help in establishing a connection with
your followers.
9) Post Pictures/Video: Remember, Twitter is not just
for text. It’s easy to post short videos, and pictures
too. It’s nice to mix it up a little and share content
in other formats as well. Here are some resources
http://freenuts.com/video-sharing-websites-for-twitter/
10) Talk About More Than Yourself: It’s not all about
you, so please don’t make all your tweets one big marketing
message, such as only tweeting about your latest press
release, blog posting, or article that was published. No one
will want to follow you if you’re one big commercial. Yes,
some of this is fine in moderation, but you need to walk
a fine line and mix it up with other helpful, interesting
topics.
Now it’s time to start putting these tips into action.
Social media is all about participating and listening
to what others have to say. It’s all about creating and
sharing information and becoming part of the community.
If you approach Twitter in this fashion, you’ll not
only have a lot more fun, but your followers will like
and respect you – and if that doesn’t strengthen your
brand, nothing will.
Web Marketing Ideas You Can Use
The Web is full of information, articles, videos, white papers,
e-books and all matter of research and information. Some of it
is very, very good, and some of it is misleading and irrelevant.
Somewhere in the middle, falling squarely in the category of
spectacularly mediocre, is the vast majority of the rest of it.
If you’re like me, always trying to improve, learn, and grow
your business, then you’ve probably been frustrated in your
search for truly useful information that you can actually use
to improve your marketing, branding, and sales efforts.
There seems to be a wide choice of articles dedicated to
surefire courses on do-it-yourself marketing that will make
you a Web-Media-Mogul overnight (usually available for a mere
three payments of twenty-nine, ninety-five) and of course,
there’s always lots of stuff on how you just got to get
onboard with the next big social networking fad. Excuse me
while I delete another email about an absolutely fabulous
linking strategy I just can’t live without.
It’s all too familiar and for the most part, a waste of time.
If this nonsense were really the answer to growing your
business, then you’d already be rich, sitting on some
Bora Bora beach sipping pina coladas, and not hunched over
your computer trying to find something useful that will
actually help.
In One Word Or Less
When it comes to marketing, it really doesn’t matter what
venue, method, or media you employ; marketing is simply a
matter of effective ‘communication,’ easy to say, not so
easy to do.
Your ability to communicate is the key to marketing success,
or conversely, your inability to communicate effectively
is what is holding you back. So the time has come to grapple
with the real problem, and that is, how do you communicate
your marketing message in the most effective manner to your
audience; how do you tell your brand story so people pay
attention, and care.
The first thing to understand about marketing communication
is that text messaging, Twitter and all other limited, one
dimensional solutions, stifle the very thing that’s necessary
to implement effective marketing communication: the nuance,
depth of understanding, and emotional value inherent in what
you offer – the very thing your audience needs to know about
what you sell. The key being ‘why they need what you
offer’ not ‘what.’
Communication Is A Complex Process
The second thing to understand about marketing communication
is that it involves five critical elements in order to be
effective: the Message, the Method, the Messenger, the
Audience, and the Venue.
Ask yourself, why are you on the Web at all? If it’s because
everyone else is on the Web, then you’re never going to have
the marketing breakthrough you crave; but if it’s because you
have something to say, a story to tell, a reason for people to
say, “I need some of that!” then it’s time to get serious about
developing the right message, delivered by the right messenger,
sent to the right audience, and employing the Web venue’s best
method of multidimensional communication – Video.
This is nothing new. Web Video is now accepted as the most
effective communication tool available to Web businesses, so
what is the difference between Web Videos that are an utter
waste of time, and worse, counter productive, and Web Videos
that turn companies into marketing phenoms?
Unlike one-dimensional forms of communication, Web Video
delivers your message by accessing multiple senses using visual
and auditory techniques. Just by adding a human being as
presenter goes a long way to making an impact.
Because video communicates by accessing multiple senses on both
a subliminal and direct level, it demands knowledge and
expertise in concept creation, writing, casting, graphic and
motion design, video production and editing, audio, music and
sound design, as well as the ability to get it all to work
together in an effective presentation delivered on time and for
an affordable investment.
But all of this expertise and skill can be wasted if your video
campaign lacks an identifiable emotionally relevant conceptual
design. One of the hardest marketing concepts for bottom-line
oriented business executives to accept is that the value of
their offering is found in the emotional satisfaction their
product or service provides. Telling people what a company
does alone is not marketing, telling them why they need what you
do is. Companies that focus on ‘the what’ turn their products
and services into commodities and products that are
indistinguishable from the competition, but companies that
focus on the emotional value they provide, deliver the answer
to the question, why people buy from one company and
not from another.
Effective Marketing Communication is Concept Based
All good marketing is based on an emotionally based concept.
This is especially true on the Web, where content and attention
span go hand-in-hand. If your Web marketing is not interesting,
informative, and entertaining, it will never be memorable; it
will never have the lasting impact you need to meet your sales
and marketing objectives. Effective marketing communication
starts with an emotionally charged concept, one that can be
spun-out into a long-term presentation strategy, a concept
with legs.
Coming up with an appropriate concept that will work for your
product or service takes a bit of creative thinking, but it
really isn’t as hard as you think. One caveat that often escapes
clients, when they come to us with their ideas is that the
concept must be executable for the available budget. Anybody
can come up with fantastic ideas that are impossible to
implement or cost prohibitive. The trick is to develop a
concept that can be implemented on time and on budget.
Executable Brand Video Campaign Concepts
One method we use to develop affordable brand video campaign
concepts for clients is to combine the emotional value
proposition the client offers with a recognizable presentation
trope.
Tropes are metaphorical expressions, or in this case,
storytelling-scenarios that audiences recognize and accept in
terms of their implied expectations and implications. Used
properly within the context of a Web Video presentation,
tropes can simplify and shorten a complex message, and provide
cover for what would otherwise be a boring, blatant sales pitch,
or desperate plea for business.
Human beings are all programmed for pattern recognition, it is
a basic skill needed for survival, and it’s been hardwired
into our DNA. Our very survival as a species is dependent on
our ability to recognize danger and opportunity. Business and
marketing is no different. And that is what makes communication
tropes effective. This intrinsic aspect of our nature allows
professional video marketing experts to tap into the
motivational triggers that govern our subliminal decision-making
responses, the kind of responses that get people to buy
what you sell.
What to Expect from Web 3.0
Video: Google to provide Fastest Internet in US
The buzz is growing about Web 3.0, but as usual you have to filter out all the hype, self-serving PR, old-fashioned nonsense, newfangled marketing verbiage and other noise. You will then find a few facts that you can grab onto and try to figure out what’s going on. The first thing to remember is that, like “Web 2.0,” the term Web 3.0 is not an official term of any sort, does not represent any particular protocol or standard, belongs to no one – and is used, misused and made nearly meaningless by everybody. It is, quite simply, just an arbitrary “version number” that, at most, describes how the Internet is built and how it delivers services, at least as of the freeze-framed moment in time that represents the end of 2.0 and the start of 3.0.
Sometimes it is called the “semantic Web,” but perhaps the less-used term “everyware” is more descriptive. The new scenario is one of ubiquitous computing, the advent of cloud computing where a “thin client” (no- or low-powered PC, or even just a monitor and mouse) runs cloud-based applications using cloud-based data and services. The Apple iPhone, iPod and iPad are all examples of formerly standalone devices that were integrated into the Web, and connect people in a seamless, real-time and very simple way with – well, with everything, from libraries and department stores to other people, anywhere in the world.
From Read-Only to Interactivity
One of the Web’s true “parents” was Tim Berners-Lee, who had his own notion of how the technology and the Internet developed. The first phase of the Web had read-only capabilities. It was essentially a spectator experience until read-write functionality came along (sure, call it Web 2.0) that included services to enable contribution, collaboration, content creation and interactivity. The next step in Berners-Lee’s version vision, Web 3.0, is heralded as “new territory,” where users can assemble and run their own applications, create all sorts of cooperative and collaborative enterprises, and truly put their ideas in motion rather than simply uploading stuff to this, that or the other site.
People with money invested in other, still-useful devices – phones, PDAs, fax machines, etc. – don’t have to worry about Web 3.0 making them obsolete. In addition to letting users create their own tools, Web 3.0 is another step in the evolution of usage and interaction in which the Internet holds multiple databases and content that will be accessible to many non-browser-based devices and applications. The obvious uses will be video that streams from a PC to a TV, picture frames that receive wireless updates from an online or local photo app, and phones that display items recommended by your trusted sources – friends, review sites, experts – when you’re shopping.
From Data to Knowledge
In addition to the foregoing characteristics, Web 3.0 is also said to encompass other important advances. For one thing, all sorts of inputs are possible, which means all sorts of new combinations become possible. Content can be made even more broadly relevant when it’s related to GPS, so that social networking, for example, can be enhanced by knowing who is where and doing what.
More importantly, you will get more and better control of your data and be able to establish a number of personalization systems to “wrap” your personal information with different levels and types of protection – so that you can share it widely, narrowly or not at all. Over time, the accuracy of recommendations and trustworthiness of ranking systems will help us determine which data sources to take seriously and which to avoid.
From Business Faxes to Online Games
With the rise of “linkable web apps” you will be able to use all of your different desktop, server and mobile devices and applications – telephones, fax machines and online fax services, instant messaging, pagers – and control them from a single browser window on your desktop, smartphone or handheld device. All of it will take place in an always-on, always-everywhere environment, with functionality embedded sometimes in hardware, sometimes in software, sometimes in both – so that when you need to take care of business without downloading the capability, you’ll be able to do so.
Along with more of the visual and voice-based services that are already starting to proliferate, there will be more lifelike avatar interactions in the growing virtual social networking world. This will lead to social shopping trips and virtual reality gaming far beyond anything currently being done.
In mid-2009, the “Wall Street Journal” ran a story on the development of Web 3.0 capabilities and the promise of ever-greater interconnectedness among technologies, products, services and people. The story even gave us a yardstick by which to measure the success of Web 3.0, if in fact it does succeed. If, as the WSJ puts it, “computing could become as integrated and invisible as electricity and just as important” – and we can attribute it to the new and improved Web – we’ll know that the promise has lived up to the hype. Here’s hoping!
Why You Should Create Controversial Content
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 8:00 AM
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Last week, like every other week, I wrote an article. This time I decided to syndicate it, something I should be doing twice a week, but only get to about 4 times a month, and that’s if I’m feeling up to it.
This was one of the biggest traffic draws from a single article that I have had in years. It is still producing a steady stream of traffic, sales and subscribers as I’m writing this.
It’s been 2 years since I’ve gotten that much of an appreciative response, or that amount of attention, period, for an article I wrote that wasn’t widely syndicated. In fact, it only appeared in one major publication.
So what’s all the hub-bub, bub?
As you may have guessed, there was a controversy surrounding the article. First, there were several typos. Normally I’d edit the article so relentlessly that by the time the article was perfect, it would be a month since I wrote it and it wouldn’t fit into my article marketing campaign for that week.
Since I’d been kicking my own butt to get content out on schedule, even when it isn’t perfect, I took my own medicine and just sent it out the way it was. And boy were the grammar, typing and spelling police mad!
Two people wrote me that they passed my article around at their meetings as an example of what not to do. Does it count as a backfire when one of the people who sees it Googles you and becomes a client?
(Just had to get in that little dig. Forgive me.)
What else was so bad about the article?
I called my readers “punks” – in the title.
This was a calculated risk – I’d run another version of the article, a blog post, and from sharing on StumbleUpon alone it got over 3000 visitors. In this new version, the article then went on to tell my readers to basically get off their over-thinking butts and do something, then gave them two examples of things to do.
There was, of course, a vocal minority of outraged responses about this too. But, curiously, other, louder, people who read the article – people I haven’t ever met or spoken to – came along and defended it.
In the end, my slang-ridden, typo-laden, in-your-face article brought me more profitable traffic and attention than any other article I’ve written this year. It was written in a moment of passion I had at seeing a friend almost lose her house, and a peer almost lose his business, mostly as a result of inaction.
And seeing this reaction led me to go back and look at my other articles. I write all my own stuff – it’s far more profitable for those of us who are at least halfway decent at writing to write an okay article injected with personality than it is to pay someone else to write generic content.
(I still hire writers for certain things though. But I concentrate on the ones with voice and depth, and pay them more for unique, engaging writing – I don’t simply outsource to the lowest bidder. I say if you’re going to hire a writer, get someone better than you.)
If you have the ability to generate controversy with your content, do it. Not convinced? Here are seven reasons why you should consider it.
1- It’s Effectíve
Nothing gets more attention than controversy. That’s why reality shows are popular. It’s why we read the journalist who we think is making an absolutely backwards prediction about something we care about. That’s why people gossip and debate.
Why merely participate when you can be the topic of discussion?
2- Negative Attention is Sometimes even Better than Positive Attention
Nothing spreads faster than outrage. Wide exposure for a controversial view is much better than no exposure for towing the conventional wisdom line.
3- Display Your Skill at Dealing with Diverging Viewpoints
Let people see the smooth way you react to the rude comments from people who take your words personally that WILL follow. I’ve gained lifelong friends, fans and customers from them witnessing what they call poise under pressure – and I call common courtesy.
You don’t have to respond from the same type of energy that’s being directed at you. Why let someone else having a bad day ruin your day?
4- It Vets Your Buyers
For example, if you want more clients that will take your advice to heart, get off their butts, and stop making excuses, try making a video that takes a hard line and tells people to get off their butts and stop making excuses!
Yeah, you’ll get reamed for it – by people who make excuses. They will be offended and won’t ever sign up to your newsletter.
Awesome. Because the people who needed a coach who believes in swift kicks in the butt will take your advice and hungrily seek more of it.
5- It’s Fun to Do
What’s more fun than seeing something controversial? Being controversial or doing something controversial. It’s not for the faint of heart, but if you can take it, boy is that a fun ride!
6- It’s Entertaining To Experience
When people are entertained, they buy more. You probably haven’t ever noticed the music playing in the background at the grocery store. It’s there because studies show that people browse longer and thus, buy more, when they’re being entertained.
Now you see more TVs at gas stations and in convenience stores. When I used to live in Vegas many of the Strip cabs had TVs on the backs of seats before I ever saw them in regular cars.
Then there’s the classic example of commercials during our favorite TV shows.
7- It Sets You Apart
You know why bigger companies are afraid of controversy?
Me either. If you find out, come tell me. All I know is, I’m not afraid of controversy because I see it as an opportunity. It’s another way to connect, to have something to discuss, and in the case of my last controversial article, to help people.
Even if you aren’t going to make a controversial audio, video, blog post or article, for goodness sakes, do something different.
No one watches boring shows on TV, invites boring people to parties, reads boring books or listens to boring music unless they have to, for study or evaluation.
Try a little controversy and see where it takes you. If that’s too scary, at least risk being extraordinarily passionate. The spotlight can be fun.
Google SideWiki Encourages Public Graffiti
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 8:00 AM
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Google has launched a controversial new tool that allows the public to comment on any web site in a side bar displayed in their browser.
Called Google Sidewiki, the tool is integrated in the latest version of Google Toolbar and works with both Firefox and Internet Explorer but ironically, not yet Google Chrome. To use Sidewiki, download the latest version of the Google Toolbar and set it to enhanced.
When activated, Sidewiki slides across from the left and becomes a browser sidebar, where you can write entries in a vertical column and read the entries of others. To activate Sidewiki, you simply click on the Sidewiki button in your Toolbar menu or the little talk bubble on the left hand side of your screen.
See: http://www.sitepronews.com/images2/sidewiki.jpg
If you’ve got a Google profile, your image will appear next to your Sidewiki entry. You can either highlight a certain part of a web page, click the Sidewiki button and comment about it, or you can make a general comment about the entire web page. If you’ve got Sidewiki installed, you can see comments made on the same web site by other members of the public and you can forward your Sidewiki comments to colleagues, friends and family via direct link, email, Twitter or Facebook.
It appears that persons can read the Sidewiki comments sent via link whether they have Sidewiki installed or not. When you’re logged into Sidewiki, you’ll always see your comments at the top and any others below.
Not only does your Sidewiki entry appear on the original page, but if you have highlighted text, your entry also appears on any webpages that contain the same snippet of text that your comment is about. From the official blog post:
“Under the hood, we have even more technology that will take your entry about the current page and show it next to webpages that contain the same snippet of text. For example, an entry on a speech by President Obama will appear on all webpages that include the same quote. We also bring in relevant posts from blogs and other sources that talk about the current page so that you can discover their insights more easily, right next to the page they refer to.”
Rather than viewing them in the order in which they were written, Sidewiki entries are ranked via an algorithm determined by Google:
“So instead of displaying the most recent entries first, we rank Sidewiki entries using an algorithm that promotes the most useful, high-quality entries. It takes into account feedback from you and other users, previous entries made by the same author and many other signals we developed.”
The technology used to determine ranking involves large-scale graph computing but other factors are at play, as revealed by Danny Sullivan in his post about Sidewiki. These include use of sophisticated language, complex sentences and ideas, user reputation and user history as revealed by your Google profile and comment contributions. Your comments and others can be thumbed up or down using the “useful – yes or no?” tool, or reported as abuse, further contributing to your user reputation and “Profile Rank” as Danny calls it.
Google have also launched an API that allows developers to work freely with the content created in Sidewiki. Where no comments have been made on a web page, Google may show blog results relating to that page.
The potential applications of Sidewiki are interesting and frightening at the same time. For example, I can see how it could be a useful bookmarking tool, allowing you to make notes about a web site you’ve found which you could refer to later. You can even embed YouTube videos in Sidewiki (take a look at the Google home page to see this in action).
It also has fantastic potential as an online collaboration tool, letting you annotate the pages on a site in conjunction with team members in a similar way to tracking changes in a MS Word document and sharing document versions via Google Docs.
BUT, (and it’s a big but), I can see Sidewiki being open to abuse in a similar way to Searchwiki, Google’s comment tool for search engine result pages. Searchwiki has been widely panned in the search industry because it’s Notes feature has been exploited by spammers, overactive PR companies and people with a chip on their shoulder about certain web brands. Unfortunately, I see Sidewiki heading in the same direction. And fast.
Any user controlled element of a search engine is open to some level of abuse. But I don’t see a huge amount of comment filtering going on yet and have already seen evidence of spamming (view the Microsoft home page with Sidewiki installed and you’ll see anti-MS entries like this one).
Yes Google have a usefulness rating system in place, a Report Abuse link and are flagging some comments with the disclaímer “These entries may be less useful” but I doubt their filters will be able to keep up as Sidewiki takes off. There’s also going to be the troll factor which will undoubtedly lead to the system becoming worthless if it’s not carefully controlled. I’ve viewed Sidewiki entries on some major sites this past week and it’s already starting to feel like Toilet Wall Graffiti 2.0.
Sidewiki has program policies but spammers don’t care about those and trolls don’t read them. Besides, one man’s graffiti is another man’s gospel.
Google’s catch phrase for Sidewiki is: “Contribute helpful information to any web page”. To that, I say: Define helpful.
The Tricky Issue of Duplicate Content and Google
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 8:00 AM
Friday, April 2, 2010
Being a full-time online marketer means you have to keep a close watch on how Google is ranking pages on the web… one very serious concern is the whole issue of duplicate content. More importantly, how does having duplicate content on your site and on other people’s sites, affect your keyword rankings in Google and the other search engines?
Now, recently it seems that Google is much more open about just how it ranks content. I say “seems” because with Google there are years and years of mistrust when it comes to how they treat content and webmasters. Google’s whole “do as I say” attitude leaves a bitter taste in most webmasters’ mouths. So much so, that many have had more than enough of Google’s attitude and ignore what Google and their pundits say altogether.
This is probably very emotionally fulfilling, but is it the right route or attitude to take? Probably not!
Mainly because, regardless of whether you love or hate Google, there’s no denying they are King of online search and you must play by their rules or leave a lot of serious online revenue on the table. Now, for my major keyword content/pages even a loss of just a few places in the rankings can mean I lose hundreds of dollars in daily commissions, so anything affecting my rankings obviously gets my immediate attention.
So the whole tricky issue of duplicate content has caused me some concern and I have made an ongoing mental note to myself to find out everything I can about it. I am mainly worried about my content being ranked lower because the search engines think it is duplicate content and penalizes it.
My situation is compounded by the fact that I am heavily into article marketing – the same articles are featured on hundreds, some times thousands of sites across the web. Naturally, I am worried these articles will dilute or lower my rankings rather than accomplish their intended purpose of getting higher rankings.
I try to vary the anchor text/keyword link in the resource boxes of these articles. I don’t use the same keyword phrase over and over again, as I am nearly 99% positive Google has a “keyword use” quota – repeat the same keyword phrase too often and your highly linked content will be lowered around 50 or 60 places, basically taking it out of the search results. Been there, done that!
I even like submitting unique articles to certain popular sites so only that site has the article, thus eliminating the whole duplicate content issue. This also makes for a great SEO strategy, especially for beginning online marketers, your site will take some time to get to a PR6 or PR7, but you can place your content and links on high PR7 or PR8 authority sites immediately. This will bring in quality traffic and help your own site get established.
Another way I combat this issue is by using a 301 re-direct so that traffic and pagerank flows to the URL I want ranked. You can also use your Google Webmaster Tool account to show which version of your site you want ranked or featured: with or without the www.
The whole reason for doing any of this has to do with PageRank juice – you want to pass along this ranking juice to the appropriate page or content. This can raise your rankings, especially in Google.
Thankfully, there is the relatively new “canonical tag” you can use to tell the search engines this is the page/content you want featured or ranked. Just add this meta link tag to your content which you want ranked or featured, as in the example given below:
Anyway, this whole duplicate issue has many faces and sides, so I like going directly to Google for my information. Experience has shown me that Google doesn’t always give you the full monty, but for the most part, you can follow what they say. Lately, over the last year or so, Google seems to have made a major policy change and are telling webmasters a lot more information on how they (Google) rank their index.
So if you’re concerned or interested in finding out more about duplicate content and what Google says about it try these helpful links. First one is a very informative video on the subject entitled “Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues” which is presented by Greg Grothaus who works for Google.
Another great link is this page from Google Webmasters Support Answers by Matt Cutts. It has a lot of helpful information, including a video on the Canonical Link Element.
In yet another post, Matt Cutts discusses the related issue of content scraping and advises webmasters not to worry about it. This is a slightly different matter, other webmasters and unmentionables may use software to scrape your site and place your content on their site. This has happened to me, countless times, including when my content has been reduced to scrambled nonsense. Cutts says not to worry about this matter as Google can usually tell the original source of the material. In fact, having links in this duplicate content may just help your rankings in Google.
“There are some people who really hate scrapers and try to crack down on them and try to get every single one deleted or kicked off their web host,” says Cutts. “I tend to be the sort of person who doesn’t really worry about it, because the vast, vast, vast majority of the time, it’s going to be you that comes up, not the scraper. If the guy is scraping and scrapes the content that has a link to you, he’s linking to you, so worst case, it won’t hurt, but in some weird cases, it might actually help a little bit.”
As a full time online marketer I am not so easily convinced, I mainly have pressing concerns about my unscrupulous competition using these scrapings and duplicate content to undermine one’s rankings in Google by triggering some keyword spam filter. Whether in fact this actually happens, only Google knows for sure, but it is just another indication, despite the very detailed and helpful information given above, duplicate content and the issues surrounding it, will still present serious concerns for online marketers and webmasters in the future.
“My mechanic told me, ‘He couldn’t repair my brakes, so he made my horn louder.’” – Comedian, Steven Wright
We all want our websites to be more effective, and if you’re like most business people you are constantly searching the Web for anything that will help. What you find is a cabal of experts armed with statistics, analysis, charts and graphs all pointing to how they can get you high-up on the search engines and drive more traffíc to your site. The problem is that like Steven Wright’s mechanic these guys are adjusting your horn when it’s your brakes that need fixing.
There is little point in attracting more visitors to your site if your site has little of interest to say. Even if your site is jammed packed with useful products, services and solutions if it doesn’t connect with your audience, they won’t ever invest the time necessary for you to make your case.
When websites fail it’s most often because they do not function effectively as your primary communication tool. The Web is overcrowded with options and unless you’re prepared to deliver a compelling differentiating presentation you will be quickly dismissed as irrelevant. Let’s face it; business is tough, probably tougher than it’s ever been before.
Something is Missing
You’ve done all the technical tweaks and responded to all the research and analytics. You’re blogging, micro-blogging, social networking, and search optimizing, but still something is not quite right, something is missing. What’s the missing ingredient? You know it’s out there, but you can’t for the life of you figure out what it is.
You know the Web offers the potential to access new markets, find new customers, and reach new heights, but with all that potential, the results always seem just out of reach. If research and analytics were the answer you’d already be rich. Of course it was an over-reliance on research that brought us the Edsel, New Coke, and that wonderful Wall Street goody called Derivatives, one of the greatest investment boondoggles of our time.
There is something artificially comforting about putting your faith in seemingly logical yet unfathomable solutions based on indecipherable scientific modeling and over-hyped research analysis, all brought to you by computer scientists and mathematicians who haven’t ever run a marketing department or launched a new product or business.
Business leaders have adopted the attitude that, “It must be right, because I sure as heck don’t understand it.” And when it all goes wrong, or results are anemic, well, “What are you going to do? It’s not my fault, it all looked good on paper.” Ad agencies and Wall Street have been getting away with this kind of bunkum for decades, and look at the mess they’ve made of things.
What’s It All About, Alfie?
Business success is all about your ability to engage your audience with a message that compels them to action. Simply put, your business relies on your ability to communicate. Eureka!
And your website is the best communication vehicle you have. The question is how do you use your website to communicate your marketing message in the most engaging, compelling, and memorable manner? What is the missing ingredient that will turn your scientifically sterile online cookie-cutter presentation into something that cuts through the massive sameness of Internet clutter, and makes a statement that your audience will respond to?
Finding Your Emotional and Psychological Value Proposition
One of the hardest things for tough-minded business people to accept is that sales and marketing success is based on the subconscious emotional and psychological appeal of a brand. That’s the reason, reliance on feature selling rarely works, and only tends to commoditize a product or service – the guy with the most bells and whistles for the least amount of money wins, and why would you want to play that game?
Even the most casual market observer must recognize that all leading brands have one thing in common, no matter what they sell: the promise of their brand is based on a concept that is established through an emotional or psychological appeal. Apple is about thinking and acting creatively without the worry of technical issues; Starbucks is about reconnecting to the original coffee break ideal of a relaxing oasis away from the hustle bustle of everyday life; and Ikea is about stylish living on a budget. Each concept appeals to the deep-seated desires of the targeted audience. It is this singular concept that makes each of these companies special and different from their competition; it is the message that all their marketing, advertising, and promotion is based upon, and it is the true value they provide their audience that attracts interest, holds attention, and delivers promise.
Implementing Your Emotional and Psychological Value Proposition
In order to implement a company’s emotional and psychological value proposition, we use a process called the ConceptCreator. It starts with various sales’ points that need to be covered. Based on the supplied information, we develop a focused marketing concept using the Law of Dissatisfaction that enables us to discover the experiential human subtext of why people will want what you sell. The presentation concept is boiled-down to a movie-style logline that states the brand story to be presented in the Web Video campaign.
How Much Is A Concept Worth?
“Wait a minute – did he say a movie-style logline? That sure doesn’t sound business-like, and I haven’t heard any corporate CEO or MBA talk about movie loglines.” Maybe so, but think about it. Hollywood studios spend enormous sums of money to produce a movie with the potential of making hundreds of millions of dollars, and each financial investment starts with someone coming up with a clever logline that captures the imagination. Television commercials can cost ten thousand dollars a second to produce and without a guiding conceptual premise they become DOA when implemented. So why wouldn’t you start your Web Video campaign using the same proven formula.
The logline, mission statement, or elevator pitch if you prefer needs to state the characters, goals, obstacles, differentiating factors, and resolution within the context of a story scenario.
For Instance…
If it works for the movie industry will it work for the advertising and marketing industry? Let’s take a look at one of the most successful, popular, iconic marketing campaigns of the last number of years, The MAC versus PC campaign.
Example Logline Concept: A stylish, pleasant, mild-mannered young man verbally spars with his geeky competitive opposite (characters) in a series of humorous, relatable incidents (story scenario) that illustrate the people-friendly advantages (resolution) of the brand compared to its rigid, unbending competitor (differentiating factor) whose sheer size dominates the market (obstacle) in an effort to win the hearts and minds of the computer buying audience (goal). – The MAC Versus PC Ad Campaign.
“The Time Has Come The Walrus Said…”
- Lewis Carroll from ‘Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There,’ 1892
The time has come to realize that Web Video is the best communication tactic available to deliver your marketing message to a worldwide audience; an audience that craves answers and resolution to their every need, concern and desire. It is not good enough to list a bunch of features and hackneyed bulleted points or even to dump pages and pages of search engine optimized hard-to-read text, especially when it’s aimed at an audience raised on television, movies, music and video games. We must learn to speak the language of the audience, and use the appropriate communication tools they can understand in a way that connects on a human level.
It all starts with finding the emotional and psychological value proposition your product or service promises. In a world of frustrated, cranky, attention deficit consumers, the onus is on you to present what you provide in a way that relates to the human elements that make your brand relevant.
7 Tricks to Get a Goooooooooooogle of Links
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 8:00 AM
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
SEO is a race. And in any race learning from your competitors makes you a better runner. Even when you’re running first it’s sometimes good to look back and check the runner-ups. And if you’re not the yellow jersey guy, you absolutely should examine the leaders: their gear, their training, their strategy. In SEO the most interesting thing about your competition are their links.
Whether you like it or not SEO is still pretty much about links. Good link profile can make up for almost any lack of optimized content and other onpage flaws. Love or hate, the best thing you can do about it is embrace the fact and run with it.
So let’s go through some tricks that will enable you to look deeper into your competition’s link profile granting you access to the restricted areas: their locker room, dirty laundry and even the briefing hall where they plan their link building strategies.
Let’s Talk Competitive Link Research
Finding out where your competitors’ links come from is not all that hard. You just go to Yahoo! or Google and type in link:www.your-competitor.com to get a list of inbound links to the site.
Yahoo’s much better in that respect as it tends to give more extensive and accurate data. The problem here is that there’s a limit of 1,000 links per website which is often not enough as the fattest link sources get left behind the limit fence. Here’re some tips to break through to the other side.
Note: If you’re lazy like me skip to the end of the article where I’ll share a tool that does it all much quicker.
Trick 1: Search for Links to Particular Web Pages of a Competing Site
Alongside with link:www.your-competitor.com search for
link:www.your-competitor.com/products.html or
link:www.your-competitor.com/services.html
and so on.
Trick 2: Exclude Internal Links
You may examine the internal linking structure of your competition if you want to gain some insight on their navigation and marketing steps. But as we want to find more external links, let’s exclude the internal ones.
You can do this by adding -site:site.com operator to your search query. Type in:
link:http://www.your-competitor.com -site:your-competitor.com or
linkdomain:www.your-competitor.com -site:your-competitor.com
and you’ll get a list of external backlinks only.
There’s a dropdown option in Yahoo! site explorer that does the same.
Trick 3: Exclude Links Coming from Certain Domains
The -site: modifier lets you exclude links coming from specific sites. So, whenever you see a large chunk of links coming from the same domain add -site:thisdomain.com modifier to your query and the links from this site will get replaced with new ones.
You can add -site: multiple times in one query so that you have something like this:
link:http://www.cnn.com -site:cnn.com -site:en.wikipedia.org
Trick 4: Check Links Coming from Certain TLDs
This is a little known trick. The site: modifier actually lets you get a list of links coming from domains with certain TLDs: .com, .org, .edu, .co.uk and so on. Just type in
link:http://www.your-competitor.com site:.gov or
linkdomain:www.your-competitor.com site:.gov
and you’ll get a list of .gov sites linking to your rival.
Note: Do this in Yahoo! regular search, not site explorer
Trick 5: Exclude Links Coming from Certain TLDs
This is an even lesser known trick. You can exclude certain TLDs from the results with the -site:.tld modifier. Usually the biggest chunk of links comes from .com’s so add a -site.com modifier and you’ll get lots of new link data.
Trick 6: Use Different Combinations of the First 5 Tricks
Try link:http://www.your-competitor.com/page.html -site:your-competitor.com -site:.com
Or link:http://www.your-competitor.com site:.org -site:wikipedia.org
Give it a thought and I’m sure you’ll come up with lots of ideas. Feel free to share your findings in the comments.
Trick 7: Use the Above 6 Tricks in Different Search Engines
Don’t limit your searches to Yahoo! and Google, go to AltaVista, Alexa, (Bing doesn’t give you link data, so forget about it) but then there’re Exalead, Excite and tons of regional search engines. Search them, get rid of the the duplicates and you’ll have a goooooooooooooooogol of competitor’s links to study.
Note: Some search engines have a different set of operators so you’ll need to type domain: instead of link:.
Getting It All Done Fast
This sure seems like a lot of work and it is. Moreover, getting the links list is only the beginning and the easy part of competitive link research. Once you get the list you need to analyze each link, weed out poor quality sites and only leave the ones you can get a link from. Now THAT’s a lot of work.
I’m too lazy to do this all by hand, besides I value my time too much to waste it on such kind of work. That’s why I use SEO SpyGlass an advanced link analysis tool that employs all the tricks described in this article (plus some more advanced ones I don’t even know) to get up to 25,000 links per domain, which is much, much more than any other tool can get.
SEO SpyGlass also finds all the data I need to analyze the links:
• Google PR of the domain and linking page
• The URL and title of the linking page
• The anchor text and description
• Whether the link is still on the page (sometimes the link gets removed but search engines will
think it’s there till they reindex the page).
• Whether the link is no-follow or dofollow
• How many other links are on the page
• How much link value the link passes
• And some other data like TLDs, domain age, country, etc.
If you want to do competitive link research seriously, I’d strongly recommend trying SEO SpyGlass out. And of course you can always use my tricks whenever you want to run a quick background check on that new guy on your block.
Five Simple but Powerful Ways to Use Google Analytics
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 8:00 AM
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Five Simple but Powerful Ways to Use Google Analytics
If you haven’t started using Google Analytics on your website(s) or blogs, I highly highly recommend it. If you’ve set up an account but rarely look at it – I recommend you start looking.
First of all – what is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a free analysis tool which gives you information on where your website visitors are coming from, which pages they visit, how long they stay, and a lot more. There are plenty of paid stat counters available which present data in different ways, but Google Analytics is one of the best, and it’s free.
One can over-analyze or under-analyze any website. Some people spend too much time checking stats, analyzing, and planning, and don’t spend enough time writing good content and getting new readers to their blogs.
On the other side of the pendulum, you could go on week after week, blindly publishing content and flailing along with offsite promotíon, without seeing what results your campaigns are getting, which type of content is the most popular for your visitors, and which traffic-generation techniques are getting the best results.
The first is like tuning your car’s engine every day without ever turning on the ignition, the second is like driving in the dark.
In between, we have a happy balance.
I find that the best times to check stats are when I don’t have a lot of time to do a more intense project, or when I am a bit too tired to do anything more “heavy.” Sometimes just before I go to bed at night is a good time to check into what has been happening between my visitors and my websites’ pages. I can browse and poke around in my Analytics account and learn quite a lot – even with minimal energy.
Here are five simple and powerful ways to use Google Analytics:
1. Find out which of your website’s pages are getting the most traffic, and optimize those pages.
If you are running ads on the pages, make sure they are properly placed and updated. If you are linking to affiliate products, make sure your links are up-to-date and that you aren’t missing any links, or new products which should be there. If you are using that page for some other purpose, such as to generate subscriptions or whatever the case may be, make sure that the page is laid out as well as possible. This can be helpful if you have a large website which has a long “to do” list and many things to optimize or tweak. By just starting with the most heavily-trafficked pages, you will get the maximum results from your efforts and also know where to start.
2. Find out which referrers are generating the most traffic, and continue any actions you have been taking to generate traffic from those referrers.
For example, if you see that Twitter is generating a large amount of targeted traffíc, you can expand your activity on Twitter. If you see that your article submissions are getting new visitors from article directories, you can make a note not to drop those out – or possibly step them up. Conversely, if you see that you have been spending time/money on a traffic-generation method which is not getting very far, you can stop wasting your time on it (presuming you have given it time to take effect).
3. Find out which keywords you are ranking the best for, and see which ones you can “push to the top.”
If you had a website on dogs, for example, and found that you were ranking at #30-#40 on Google for many keywords, but ranking #11 for, lets say, “dog chew toys,” you might want to work on increasing your rankings on dog chew toys and focus more of your SEO efforts on this term (of course there are other factors you would consider as well, such as the searches and competition for this term). Climbing from position #31 to #20 will generally not get you a huge improvement in traffic. But climbing from position #11 to position #3 almost certainly will. Focus first on keywords or key phrases that have the best chance of ranking high in the near future, and then move on to the others.
4. Find out which pages keep your visitors’ attention for the longest.
If the average visitor on Page A stays for 5 seconds, while the average visitor to Page B stays for 150 seconds, the likelihood is that your visitors find Page B’s content more interesting than Page A’s.
5. Look at the graph of your bounce rate.
This tells you how many people left your site without visiting a second page. Depending on the website and the page, this may be a good or bad thing. But if you have a blog or a content site, it is usually a good sign when people stick around to view more of your posts and content before they leave. If your bounce rate increased or decreased after you made a certain change, you can opt to revert that change (if bounce rate increased) or keep it (if bounce rate decreased). For example, if I changed the theme of my WordPress blog and then noticed a date-co-incident jump in my bounce rate, I might consider changing it back 
This statistic can be used in many ways – it will depend on the nature of your blog.
There are many, many other ways to use Google Analytics. The above are great ways to start, if you aren’t familiar with or used to using this tracking system. Google Analytics can give you a far greater understanding of what’s happening on your site and can guide you to continue on successful actions and drop the unsuccessful.
Adding Search to Your Marketing Mix
The powerful capabilities of organic search engine optimization (SEO) are now a highly sought after marketing tool by many companies that want to alert customers to their products or services by focusing on certain keyphrases that highlight these offerings. And though SEO has embarked on a meteoric rise in the past few years, other non-traditional forms of marketing are now gaining a great deal of well-deserved credibility as well. More and more marketers are using paid ads to hone in on a potentially profitable client base, while other more traditional channels, such as PR and print ads, appear to be becoming somewhat less effective.
In a recent study (1), Forrester Research found that interactive marketing spending will reach nearly $55 billion by 2014, representing 21% of all marketing spend. And the fact of the matter is that marketers are continuing to place more stock in newer forms of marketing and social media, leaving many higher-ups to wonder if it is time for them to include these channels in their own marketing mixes. And with the help of your search engine optimization company, it’s possible to achieve outstanding rankings and results!
What follows are some common considerations that should be analyzed prior to the launch of an SEO campaign so that you will know what you are getting into, what you will need from your team and your prospective search engine optimization company, and how to most effectively pursue this particular form of marketing.
Achieving Buy-in
Search engine optimization is unlike many traditional forms of marketing in that several departments must be involved in order for the SEO campaign to be successful. Apart from the obvious need to get buy-in from upper management (unless, of course, you are upper management), you will also need to get buy-in from your sales department and, very importantly, your IT department before pursuing the powerful capabilities your search engine optimization company can bring to the table.
Upper Management
While a well thought out, highly targeted SEO campaign is becoming an increasingly popular marketing tool, many “old school” bigwigs are uncomfortable pursuing something that is completely foreign to them. This is not an indictment of the individual – keep in mind that the traditional marketing methods that the company has likely relied upon (trade shows, direct mail, print advertising, etc.) have been relatively unchanged for decades.
While these traditional marketing channels may have remained relatively stagnant, the allocation of spend for them has not. According to a 2008 SEMPO report, more marketers are shifting their budgets to search rather than spending it on the more traditional channels of the past. Nearly 26% of advertisers shifted budget for print magazines to search; 23% from direct mail; 18% from print newspaper; 15% from website development; and 7% from email marketíng.
One of the reasons for this is obviously the effectiveness of the channel. In the same study, SEMPO found that respondents viewed marketing online efforts as their strongest tactic or best ROI. 63% of respondents saw paid search as the best return on investment in terms of marketing or advertising efforts; 49% for organic SEO; 43% for email marketíng; 12% for conferences and exhibitions; 11% for public relations; and 6% for print magazines.
Another reason for the shift in marketing dollars, which can be used as ammunition when you are trying to convince your higher-ups to go with a search engine optimization company, is the ultimate accountability that goes along with online marketing: the data that indicates success or failure of your SEO campaign is of the black-or-white variety.
When describing the effectiveness of a company’s marketing strategy, there is often an old sentiment tossed around – “I know that half of my marketing is not working, just not which half.” Because of the analytics involved in search engine optimization, your company higher-ups can take comfort in the fact that this is not another marketing initiative that will self-perpetuate indefinitely – the metrics involved in your SEO campaign will demonstrate that it is working, justifying the continued expenditure.
When trying to get buy-in from upper management, you also have a formidable weapon in the actions, or inaction, of your competitors. If your hated rivals are actively embracing the tools offered by a search engine optimization company, there will be a tendency among upper management not to want to let them get too far ahead. If none of your top competitors appear to be actively pursuing this channel, your company can gain traction before your rivals do and thus gain the competitive edge. Whichever the case, it is now much easier to present a compelling argument to pursue an SEO campaign.
Sales Department
There is often a mutual suspicion and distrust between sales and marketing, but in order for your SEO campaign initiative to be as successful as possible, you should involve sales in the process of selecting a search engine optimization company as early as possible. Achieving buy-in from the salespeople is critical in making certain that the leads that are generated from the website are followed up on as diligently as they should be. By asking sales to assist in important areas of the SEO campaign, like creating an ideal prospect profile and helping to identify targeted keyphrases (after all, they talk to your prospects more often than anyone), you should be able to ensure that when the leads start coming in, your sales team will believe that leads from the website are high-quality and worthy of their immediate attention. After all, without increased revenues, the SEO campaign is not a success – and your salespeople will play a crucial role in determining this.
IT Department
This can be your most difficult challenge. Unlike most other forms of marketing, search engine optimization is a mixture of marketing and technology. Without achieving buy-in, or at least acceptance, from the IT team prior to the launch of an SEO campaign, you are likely to run into problems. IT teams can be particularly protective of their “turf” and may be reluctant to hand over information to your prospective search engine optimization company. This is not inherently bad (it obviously shows dedication to the job), but it can make things difficult when your search engine optimization company is requesting that changes be made to the company website or that analytics platforms be introduced (to name only two likely scenarios).
If you are not used to dealing with your IT department, it would probably serve you well to involve your prospective search engine optimization company in the process of achieving buy-in with them. After all, the vendor should have years of experience in approaching these situations without ruffling feathers. If you choose to approach IT yourself, make it a point to let them know that they will receive a fair share of recognition for the success of the initiative and involve them in how you are defining success. This may be enough to win them over to your side.
Works Cited:
1. U.S. Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2009 – 2014
Simple And Successful SEO Strategies – On Page Optimization
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 8:00 AM
Monday, February 22, 2010
Simple And Successful SEO Strategies – On Page Optimization
SEO doesn’t have to be complex and by following these simple on-page optimization techniques you can give your SEO campaign the perfect start.
SEO is often seen as being a difficult and in-depth process, but the reality is that by following some reasonably common sense guidelines it is possible to get good rankings. That’s not to say that optimization is a simple or quick process; there are, unfortunately, no short cuts. Your SEO efforts should be a concerted and long term endeavour, in order for you to enjoy the best possible results, and should incorporate both on-page and off-page optimization techniques. By following the on-page SEO strategies below you can set a strong foundation for all your SEO work.
Keyword Research
Before you begin penning content and writing title and meta tags you first need to research the keywords you will use on each of your pages. Using the wrong keywords can negatively impact your entire campaign, causing you to lose untold hours and days of work and eventually forcing you to concede that you made the wrong decision and start all over again.
The most appropriate and most beneficial keywords are popular enough that they will enjoy regular searches but without being prohibitively competitive or overly generic. A number of keyword research tools exist and your competitors’ websites are a good place to start your early research. Ensure keywords are targeted specifically to the type of content you will provide as well as the service or product you will be selling. More targeted keywords will result in more targeted visitors and targeted visitors mean greater conversion rates and an improved return on your efforts.
Niche And Semantically Related Keywords
A good strategy is to incorporate a reasonable list of competitive keywords with less competitive ones. The more niche keywords will serve you well during the early days of your website and over time you should be able to start competing for the more challenging of the keywords you use. Also incorporate semantically or topically related keywords into your keyword list because the search engines are placing more and more emphasis on those pages that use related keywords as well as primary keywords.
Accessibility And Standards
Site accessibility is an integral part of good website design, but it should also be considered an important factor in any SEO strategy. Using standards based code for your website will help to ensure that anybody that wishes to access and view your website will be able to do so. It will also mean that the spiders used by search engines will be able to access and index your pages effectively ensuring that you get the full credít for your site.
Navigation And Intra-Linking
Your navigation menu and internal links should be prominently placed, easy to see, and easy to follow for the spiders. It is good practice to include a text link from the home page to a compliant sitemap on your site, alleviating any potential problems that might arise from broken links or the use of graphical or flash based navigation menus. You can also consider adding links into the main body of your content, although too many will make the page difficult to read and therefore diminish the overall effectiveness so don’t get too carried away.
Title And Meta Tags
While search engines do not specifically use the meta tags to help assess the value of a page like they once did, meta tags are still critical to good SEO performance. The title and description tags that you add at the top of a page are used in various ways including in the compiling and display of Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). This is the first thing a potential site visitor will see from your site so this mini listing needs to be as effective as any paid advert or PPC ad. Poorly written titles and descriptions can put many readers off viewing your pages so a little time and effort here can have a very positive effect.
Using your keywords in the title and the description is good practice because these will be highlighted in the search results if they were used in the search query itself. This will make your result more prominent and instantly identify your page as being relevant to the user. Don’t needlessly use keywords, however, and don’t throw extra keywords into the description at the cost of a well written, short ad.
Other Formatting Tags
On-page content should always be written with the visitor in mind, although obviously it can still be optimized for search engines. As such, proper page structure is important to your reader as well as to the engines. H1 and H2 tags are an effective way of breaking up page content, and give readers the chance to skim through a page and determine its relevance.
A page should only contain a single H1 tag at the top of the content but can include multiple H2 and H3 tags. Alt tags on images should also be included and these as well as the actual file path to the image itself can include important keywords (but do make sure that they actually make sense and are more than just a keyword thrown in for the sake of SEO).
Page Content Optimization
Finally, we get to the heart of the page – the content itself. Use the keywords you researched for a page, including semantically related keywords. Write as naturally and appealingly as possible while keeping those keywords in mind and don’t get carried away stuffing or cramming them into the body of the text. Not only is this unappealing to readers but is seriously frowned upon by the search engines.
The reader really is the most important aspect of your content. If the majority of your visitors are coming from the search engines, remember that they arrived using specific keywords. This means that they are searching for equally specific information relating to those keywords – make sure you deliver on the promise that you made in your title and description tags.
Video SEO – A Neglected Path To Higher Search Rankings
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 8:00 AM
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Video SEO – A Neglected Path To Higher Search Rankings
Video SEO is an underutilized search engine marketing
strategy. Even as videos continue to gain significant
traction in the search engines’ natural listings, most
companies either ignore them, or remain completely unaware
of their potency. That oversight represents a valuable edge
your company can use to leapfrog your competitors in the
organic rankings.
The strategy blends traditional search optimization tactics
with a relatively new platform. With the rise of YouTube,
Revver, Blip, and similar video sites, consumption patterns
have driven the search engines to provide these sites with
greater ranking authority. As long as your primary
objective is clearly established, a video SEO campaign can
have a dramatic effect on your exposure in Google, Yahoo,
and Bing.
In this article, we’ll explain why you should integrate
video SEO into your current search marketing strategy. We
will also provide a few ingredients that will help you
avoid potential pitfalls along the way. Last, you will
learn what to look out for when choosing a video SEO
company that can drive traffic and conversions.
How Video SEO Improves Your Search Exposure
Before Google released their Universal Search platform in
May 2007, their natural listings were dominated by
text-based pages. Videos were rare in the top spots.
Universal Search changed the way Google displayed their
primary index. Google, Yahoo, and Bing now include entries
from their respective video search platforms. What’s more,
popular video-sharing sites have been given higher ranking
authority and increased link weight (we’ll describe this
latter point in a moment).
Video SEO gives you greater exposure in the search engines
through two levers. First, it caters to the algorithm used
for Universal Search. By allowing syndication of your
videos to authoritative video-sharing sites, you will enjoy
more exposure through their increased ranking authority. In
effect, those sites will rank higher, drawing more people
to your videos.
Second, videos that are placed on your site (as opposed to
syndicating them) attract links – both directly and
indirectly. As your videos gain popularity, direct links
will naturally build, pointing to the pages on your site
that host the videos. Indirect links will point from other
sites whose owners have embedded your videos. As a result,
your inbound link profile will continue to grow and
strengthen, lifting your site higher within the search
engines’ organic listings.
3 SEO Video Tips To Capture Higher Search Positions
Your video SEO campaign can only be effective if you
recognize the limitations of the search engines. First,
their algorithms cannot read lips. In order to rank for
your target keywords, they must be available to the search
engines’ spiders in text form. If you’re placing videos on
your site, optimize your titles and surrounding text, and
include an edited transcript of the video. If you’re
syndicating them, optimize your external titles and tags.
Second, focus on inbound links. An effective video SEO
campaign relies on contextually related links pointing from
a wide breadth of sites. Videos that spark a groundswell of
attention – whether through entertainment, information, or
controversy – can achieve this easily.
Third, integrate a social media sharing component. You want
viewers to share your videos with their friends on
Facebook. You want them to “Tweet” about your videos on
Twitter. You want them to bookmark your videos on
StumbleUpon, Digg and Delicious. These social media sites
can form the backbone of your video SEO campaign, driving
waves of inbound links to your site.
Key Factors In Choosing A Video SEO Company
Traditional search optimization is a mature strategy. SEO
specialists have honed their craft for more than a decade.
By contrast, video SEO is still an evolving science. Even
though it leverages the core tenets of a traditional SEO
campaign, the rise of social media and video-sharing sites
have infused video SEO with enormous complexity. Hiring a
video SEO company removes the need to keep up with the
roiling landscape. The key is using the right criteria to
identify a proficient firm.
A professional video SEO company should have an established
track record that shows a keen grasp of the search engines’
organic algorithms. That track record should also
demonstrate an ability to evolve as the algorithms change.
Many search optimization experts were completely unprepared
for the debut of Universal Search. By extension, so too,
were their clients.
Leveraging Video SEO For More Traffic And Higher Conversions
A carefully executed video SEO campaign can sharply
increase your exposure within the search engine’s natural
listings. When implemented as a component of a
multi-pronged search engine marketing campaign, it can
drive more targeted traffic to your site. Targeted traffic
translates into higher conversions. If you are not yet
utilizing video SEO for your site, your current organic
rankings may be more vulnerable than you realize.
Build Backlinks & Rank Higher: The Five Most Effective Strategies
posted by Luigi_M_Scollo @ 8:28 AM
Friday, September 18, 2009
As the online market place continues to warm up to the idea of SEO, link building has become center stage as it tends to be the most time consuming and crucial part of any internet marketing strategy. Link building services are the most commonly outsourced aspect of SEO. This process involves finding qualified and thematically relevant one-way linking partners who will link back to your website.
At first glance this sounds easy and there are hundreds of automated products out there that claim to add thousands of back links overnight. The truth is there are no short cuts in cultivating authoritative back links for a site. Link building companies spend many hours link building by hand in order to get the best results. Spammy automated products often never cultivate valuable links and tend to do more harm than good. Here are a couple quick suggestions to help you get started.
1. Know What Keywords You’re Targeting
Link building strategies are an extension of your current SEO practice. You’ll want to reference the list of keywords you have selected to optimize your site. Make sure that the anchor text of the link has the keyword you are targeting. For example, if you’re targeting the keyword “baby names” you’ll want to place that keyword in the anchor text of the link. I’ve seen many companies go after links by using their company name. Although this does increase link popularity it fails to pass popularity for a specific keyword and can be seen as a failed attempt.
2. Develop a Link Building Strategy
There are many strategies link building companies use to source qualified back links to their clients. The most tedious but often most rewarding method is manual linking requests also known as “cherry picking”. This method allows you to obtain exceptionally qualified links which can really help boost your position in the search engine results page (SERPS). A good place to start with manual link building is to look at your suppliers, vendors, clients, related organizations associations and more.
Besides manual link requests other well known tactics include:
1. directory submission (Dmoz, Yahoo Directory, Joe Ant)
2. article submission (ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com)
3. optimized press releases (PRWeb.com)
4. social media outlets (FaceBook, Linked In)
5. bookmarking sites (Digg, Reddit, Furl)
6. Blogs (niche blogs)
7. Forums (niche forums)
8. Classifieds (niche classifieds)
3. Identify Thematically Relevant and Authoritative Linking Sources
Search engines see links as votes of confidence for your site. The more relevant and authoritative the site, the more consideration is given to the link and the subsequent keyword in the anchor text. It really pays off to focus on the quality of your links rather than the quantity. It is also important for your link building to look natural and not an attempt to deceive search engine spiders in search of links. Try looking for sites within your industry rather than general, unrelated sites to get links from.
A good example of this would be content creation and distribution. Try creating content on a relevant subject of which you can speak authoritatively. An example of this would be a SEO company writing a short article on 5 simple ways companies can start link building and placing it on an authoritative, industry relevant site like this one. Remember, before placing a link on a site (or making a request), ask yourself three questions:
1. Does a link to my website belong here (does it look natural)?
2. Is this site relevant and authoritative?
3. Is there any benefit to my potential customers?
4. Look for the onsite attributes of the linking site
4. Determine Where Your Link Will Reside
Once you’ve nailed down a potential linking partner that represents the overall quality and thematic authority that your site deserves you’ll need to see where your link will reside. Here are a couple guidelines that I look for when placing links on a site. I try to get my links no more than a few clicks away from the homepage. The page must be thematically relevant and recently cached by Google’s search engine (this lets me know that the page has been indexed by Google). I also take a look at the number of external (outbound) links leaving that page. I try to keep the number of external links below 50 as it will dilute the effect of the page. Lastly, I look at the page the link will be placed on. For some sites this is harder to control, but if you have the option you should know where the most valuable locations are. I always try to get my links in line with thematically relevant content, like an article or blog post. I’ve found this produces some of the best results. Try to avoid placing your links on a “sponsored” or advertisers section that runs throughout the entire site. Also avoid footer links as rumor has it Google has devalued links buried in the footer of the site. Links placed at the top of the page or inserted into the site’s navigation also tend to do quite well. Bottom line is that your links need to look like they belong and provide value to the user and the site it is published on.
5. Be Aware of “No-Follow” Links
Within the last 5 years Google developed the concept of the “no-follow” link. The “no-follow” code is inserted into your link and instructs the Google spider to ignore it. The “no-follow” link can be seen used most commonly in blog comments and forum posts. This initiative was set forth to combat spam and automated linking mechanisms that would throw links automatically on blog comments and forum posts.
There are a lot of SEO professionals that will only place a link if it is a “do-follow” link, meaning it doesn’t have the “no-follow” attribute. I tend to disagree with this notion especially when the link in question is on a highly trafficked authority site. If it makes sense for the link to be there, then add your link. Even though Google won’t give you any credit for it, it will be seen by thousands of people who may visit your site and link to you themselves because your site is highly relevant. I call this concept indirect link building. You are influencing and promoting your site to potential linking partners.
Link Building is a very time consuming process and link building companies spend a lot of time researching, testing and improving their techniques. Link building services are available for companies that don’t have the time to invest in manual link building. The bottom line is that with a little help anyone can link build and move their site up the SERPS.
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