Feed the Social Media “Beast” and you’ll see it pay dividends

Small businesses:
Feed the Social Media “Beast” and you’ll see it pay dividends
Not long ago, social media seemed so new and different that it was treated as an appendage of sorts—a kind of marketing that should be tried only by “experts.”
While that view still exists to some degree today, it’s become clear to many that social media is no longer marketing’s new thing. It’s now simply part of the way we do marketing today.
I believe that the proper way to view social media from a small-business owner’s point of view is as more of an evolution than a revolution.
Traditional marketing tactics such as advertising, referrals, and public relations are still very important, but social media tactics have now become a part of everyday marketing’s fabric and need to be considered at the strategic level of your marketing decision-making process.
So, rather than asking yourself if you should or should not use Facebook or Twitter, the question is: “How can Facebook and Twitter help you achieve your marketing objectives?” It’s the same as asking how direct mail or having two more salespeople might fit into the plans.
From this integrated viewpoint, social media participation can start to make more sense for each individual marketer’s needs and goals.

Is social media simply today’s hot thing?
Think you can sit the social networking craze out? Consider the following statistics. According to the online competitive intelligence service Compete.com, social media growth
continues to skyrocket.
•  The top three social networks—Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn—collectively received more than 2.5 billion visits in the month of September 2009 alone. Twitter grew by more than 600% in 2009, while Facebook grew by 210% and LinkedIn by 85%.
•  As of this writing, Google and Yahoo are the only websites that receive more daily traffic than Facebook. Current trends suggest that may not last much longer.
•  In fact, if Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s fourth largest.
•  The most recent count of blogs being indexed by Technorati currently stands at 133 million.
The same report also revealed that, on average, 900,000 blog posts are created within a single 24-hour period.
•  It’s been reported that YouTube is likely to serve more than 75 billion video streams to around 375 million unique visitors during 2009.
•  The online photo sharing site Flickr now hosts more than 3.6 billion user images.
•  The online bookmarking service Delicious has more than 5 million users and more than
150 million unique bookmarked URLs.
So, you see, perhaps this social media thing is going to catch on after all.


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How exactly do you define social media?
Well, that’s a good question. And the complete answer could fill pages without really delivering the clarity that a small-business marketer might desire.
So here’s the simple definition for the purpose of this document. Social media is the use of technology to co-create, know, like, and trust.
Social media, and by that I’m lumping together blogs, social search, social networking, and bookmarking, presents the marketer with a rich set of new tools to help in the effort to generate new business.

What’s changed?
Well, c’mon, just about everything, right?
If you studied marketing in the textbook world, you likely covered the 4 Ps of marketing—you simply created a product, figured out how to price it, got it placed in the market, and promoted the heck out it.
Today’s approach to marketing, the approach infused with social media, leans much more heavily on the 4 Cs of marketing. Tons of relevant, education-based, and perhaps user generated content that is filtered, aggregated, and delivered in a context that makes it useful for people who are starving
to make connections with people, products, and brands they can build a community around.
Content + Context + Connection + Community = Social Media Marketing

An integrated social media strategy
It’s important to have a new media strategy attached to your new media tactics—or you’ll find yourself running around in circles and left with a sense that all this online networking stuff is a big fat waste of time.
Here are some worthy marketing objectives where new media tactics can excel:
•  Do you want to spread your content and expertise to new audiences?
•  Do you want to network with like-minded individuals and companies?
•  Do you want to build a community of evangelists?
•  Do you want to involve your customers and prospects in co-creation?
•  Do you want to automate the process of repurposing content?
•  Do you want to reach new audiences in the exact way they choose to communicate?
•  Do you want to be seen as a thought leader in your industry?
•  Do you want ways to aggregate and filter content so you and your people can digest it?
•  Do you want to easily hear literally everything that’s being said online about your brand, products, or industry in real time?
•  Do you want to be seen as a trusted source of information?

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I think the best way to look at social media is to view it as a way to open up new access points. These points can then be leveraged to create content, context, connection, and community. Do that well, and they can also add to lead generation, nurturing, and conversion. And that’s the payoff of social media. But get the order wrong, get the interaction wrong, get the participation wrong—and you may never see much return on the time you invest.
Social media conversations are just that—open, honest, transparent conversations, not sales pitches or shouting festivals.

The online hub and spoke model
Much of what this document deals with is creating outposts of content and connection on social media sites. But, there is one element that pulls this strategy together and that’s your primary Web hub. You can’t depend on the contacts you make in most social media activity to serve as the primary trust-building connection that ultimately leads to a sale.
Your primary website or blog is the tool that ties all of your social media activity together. Your activity on social media sites or spokes functions primarily as a way to lead prospects back to the much more fully developed content that resides on your website.
Your hub is the place where you can engage your prospect in a total education-based campaign that helps them understand that you have the solutions they are seeking. In fact, you can think of a great deal of your social media activity as a way to create awareness and an initial level of trust substantial enough for someone to want to know more. Social media and social networking may be the ultimate permission-based marketing tool when viewed in this light.

The hierarchy of social marketing
One of the things that small-business marketers struggle with around the entire topic of social marketing is trying to jump into the next new thing without enough analysis of what they should focus on. I happen to think this is an important, evolving, and essential area of marketing for small businesses, but there’s a hierarchy to it. In other words, there is a logical progression of utilization that comes about much like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Nature.
As Maslow theorized, the ultimate potential of your marketing or human self-actualization couldn’t be achieved until the most basic human psychological needs such as breathing, eating, sleeping, and sex were first met. In fact, safety, love, and esteem all come before transcendence. Now, before I edge too close to the deep end here, I’m simply comparing what I think is a bit like progressing up the social-marketing hierarchy.
Most small-business owners should look at the following progression or hierarchy as they move deeper into social-marketing tactics. So, jump in, but do it in this order and don’t move on until you have the basics of each stage down and working for you.

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1) Blogging: The foundation of the pyramid. Read blogs, comment on blogs, and then blog. This is the doorway to all other social marketing.
2  RSS: Aggregate and filter content
around subjects and use RSS technology as a tool to help you repurpose, republish, and create content.
3) Social Search: This is often ignored in this discussion, but I think it’s become very important for small-business owners. You can participate and
should stimulate and manage your reputation here.
4) Social Bookmarking: Tagging content to and participating in social bookmarking communities can be a great way to open up more channels to your business as well as generate extra search traffic. But it takes work.

Delicious is a popular social bookmarking site
5) Social Networks: Branching out to take advantage of the numbers of potential prospects that you might find in sites such as Facebook or MySpace will frustrate, at least as a business tool, if you don’t have many of the above needs met. These networks take time to understand and thrive on ideas and content. You’ve got to have much to share if you wish to build a business case.
6) Micro: Platforms such as  Twitter,  Thwirl,  Plurk, and  FriendFeed have become a very important part of the social media mix as they allow for quick tracking, joining, and engagement. However, they still reside at the top of the pyramid because without content, such as that created on a blog, the engagement on Twitter may not go very deep.

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Another way to view the pyramid
As the actual social media tools, blogs, RSS, and social networks evolve over time. (Twitter is more useful when more people use it.) As this occurs it can also be helpful to view the same pyramid idea less from a tool standpoint and more from an objectives standpoint.
Until you create a social media strategic plan based on marketing objectives, and find ways to use social media tools to listen and join the conversation going on in your markets, you may find it harder to engage and network and
ultimately build relationships and sales through the use of social media tools.
I believe the process for meeting long-term marketing objectives through social media is universal, but the tools needed to meet them are not. Twitter may indeed be a primary social media
tool for some, while the Facebook platform or a blog is what allows another to progress through these stages. A third organization may find it can strategically move through the hierarchy by integrating every tool in the toolbox with its offline initiatives.

5 tips for getting more from social media marketing
I think it’s helpful to finish the overview section of this guide with a few tips on using social media strategically. But don’t worry, we’ll get to the tactics as well.
1) Integrate: Don’t treat your social media activity as something separate from your other marketing initiatives. Feature links to your social media profiles in your email signature,
on your business cards, in your ads, and as a standard block of copy in your weekly HTML email newsletter. In addition, make sure that links to your educational content are featured prominently in your social media profiles and that Facebook fan page visitors and blog subscribers are offered the opportunity to subscribe to your newsletter and attend your online and offline events. Make your social media profiles a part of your address copy
block and you will soon see adding them to all that you do as an automatic action.
2) Amplify: Use your social media activity to create awareness for and amplify your content housed in other places. This can go for teasing some aspect of your latest blog post on Twitter or in your Facebook status, creating full-blown events on Eventful or Meetup, or pointing to mentions of your firm in the media. If you publish a biweekly newsletter, in addition to sending it to your subscribers, archive it online and Tweet about it too. You can also add social features to your newsletter to make it very easy for others to retweet (tweetmeme button) and share on social bookmark sites such as Delicious and digg. I would also add that filtering other people’s great content and pointing this out to your followers, fans, and subscribers fits into this category, as it builds your overall reputation
for good content sharing and helps to buffer the notion that you are simply broadcasting your announcements. Quality over quantity always wins in social media marketing.

Read More at www.WordofMouthMarketting.com

 

To Know Or Not To Know SEO

   Search engine optimization is one of the most powerful marketing options that are available to website owners, and if you are interested in marketing your website and increasing the number of people who visit your website, then optimizing it according to the guidelines of search engines is very important.
Did you know that when you create a website, it is just like adding one more drop of water to a very large ocean. There are about a billion websites on the internet, and if you just purchase one more domain, it will make no difference. However, if you wish to make your website successful and gain a large number of visitors, you will have to optimize your page properly.
small business seo optimize search 112x96 Search Engine Optimization TipsSearch engine optimization is a term that spans a range of techniques that you can use in order to gain recognition on the web. In this article, you will find a variety of different tips and techniques that will help you in gaining more visitors from your page and attracting more visitors.
If you are running an online business, then it is even more beneficial for you to gain visitors as that will help you greatly in expanding your business. In the following paragraphs, you will find some of the best search engine optimization tips in order to expand your business.
If you have just started your page, the most important thing that you need to do is to get your website indexed by all of the popular search engines. If you get your website indexed by a good search engine such as Google, then automatically all of the other search engines will index your page.
Once your page has been indexed, the only thing now is to try and get the rankings of your website higher in order to attract more people. One of the best things that you can do in order to optimize your website is to write articles and submit them in various article directories. There are lots of different websites that allow you to write articles and submit them to their directories, and if your articles are properly optimized, then you can easily attract a lot of visitors.
keyword magnify 100x100 Search Engine Optimization TipsFor example, make sure that you have properly carried out keyword research and you use them properly in your articles. The keyword density should be properly catered to, and you should give references to your website whenever possible.
Also, in the resource box, make sure that you include a link to your page as well, as that will help you in building up the number of incoming links to your page.
There are lots of people who read such articles, and it will be extremely beneficial for you to get visitors to your page. Secondly, another great thing that you can do in order to optimize your page is to create a site map for your website.
The lesser number of clicks that it takes for users to get to all of the pages on your website, the better it will be for users and visitors. Many marketing experts suggest this technique, and the best part is that it is extremely easy to do so. If your website does not require it, try to avoid using Flash Player as much as possible.
main seo 300x115 Search Engine Optimization TipsWhen it comes to search engine optimization, Flash does not contribute at all, and if you are not in it for the looks, then it would certainly be a wise idea to prevent using Flash as much as possible.
Click Here! I use all products I post,yes I make a couple of dollars, but I love this on.

The Website Builder Pro-Leading the Search for Success

The Website Builder Pro-Leading the Search for Success

craigseaton

March 18th, 8:42

Current Location:

My Home SD

Mar 18 2012
The Website Builder Pro's team of experts knows designing a website is not an uncomplicated task. Designing a website that creates a dominant Internet presence for your company is even harder, says Craig Seaton owner of The Website Builder Team. Once you have placed your photos, designed your text and added your video, getting your website ranked high on the search engine listing is a top priority. Proper search engine optimization can give you access to the key words and other techniques that are required to send your company to the top of the search engine list. This is most beneficial at the planning stage of a website or during any updates.

Our team will rank your website on the front page of Google
We will build a website for you	We will teach you how to build a site or SEO your site
We can save you time & money	You can buy our Training on SEO

  Search engine optimization begins with common sense and ends with simplicity. The entire purpose of choosing a San Diego SEO company is to make your website as search engine friendly as possible. Understanding how a search engine operates is a powerful tool in website design. All search engines use search spiders to crawl over websites and record everything on that site. If a link to the website exists anywhere on the Internet, a spider will eventually find that page. These search spiders travel over website content in the same way that humans read a book. They begin at the top of the page and follow the text and photos down to the bottom right of the page. As they move across the website, the spiders record data. If the spider comes across a link to another site, it signals a second spider to check out that website, as well. This process is continuous as the search engines update their listings.
 

   Content is crucial for human visitors as well as spiders, of course. The website’s content should be focused on a single theme. One topic per page is a good rule of thumb for search engine optimization. When the content is being written, an SEO company will be able to focus that content toward keywords and phrases. Once again, this is easily accomplished during the beginning stages of the website design. Choose a theme and stick to that theme for a single page. If you have a second them for your website, put that theme on a second page. This creates a smooth read for both humans and search spiders. Here is where many companies run into a snag in their website building. Repetition of keywords can be considered spam for many search engines. That repetition is also extremely annoying to human readers. Simple, easily read content is essential for optimizing the website and for drawing customers. Much more on SEO at http://thewebsitebuilderpro.com