7 Things You Can Do Now To Cash in On Social Marketing

Seven is a magic number. Why? Because there are seven simple strategies every small business can employ to jump on the social marketing bandwagon. The best part: most require only a moderate investment of time and/or money.

1. Start Blogging - Blogging is old news to many. Not quite the distant past, but still not the future... sort of a Web 1.5. Is blogging what's 'hot' at the moment? Well, no. It certainly doesn't compare with chasing a link from the front page of Digg. But blogging is alive and well! It continues to be a great way to get interactively connected with your customers. 'Dialoguing' is the reason social marketing exists. How much time you invest in your blog is up to you, but you'll get out what you put in. You don't have to drive yourself crazy putting in daily entries, but you should establish a regular schedule for your blog updates. Otherwise, when people check your blog they'll see the same-old/same-old so often that they'll stop visiting your site... which is the whole reason you started the blog! So don't shoot yourself in the foot by creating a blog that's a visitor-repellent rather than a visitor-magnet.

Blogging is not a monologue. Your blog is not the electronic equivalent of Hamlet's soliloquy. Just the opposite! Blogging is about creating conversations and joining others in progress. Take time to read what others in your industry are saying. Get in on the discussion (and get your name out there) by posting your comments on other blogs. It's free, and again, the amount of time you invest can bring some very big returns. The beauty of blog posts is that you'll almost always be encouraged to supply your name and URL when leaving a comment. This is a great way to build visibility and create a springboard to catapult traffic from other blogs to yours.

2. Take and Share Digital Photos - Flickr can be a tremendous marketing tool thanks to its incredibly active photo groups. The time and cost investment are minimal, and you can use Flickr to reach thousands of highly targeted prospects with compelling images of your product.

3. Be The Answer Man (or Woman) at Yahoo Answers - There's one thing you have to provide that no one else does - your expertise. If you're a service-based business, your knowledge is your #1 marketing tool. Yahoo Answers is a great place for you to hammer away at prospects. Imagine being the go-to person that people seek out. That's who you'll be at Yahoo Answers.

There's no better way to share your expertise and make an instant and direct connection with potential customers. I know dozens of marketing pros like me who spent as little as an hour or two each week answering SEO and promotion-oriented questions there. They tell me that they've been able to track big results from even that small investment of time.

4. Get Into the Movie Business - Pictures may be worth a thousand words, but moving pictures are worth their weight in solid gold marketing. Fortunately, good video cameras are cheap these days, and a short video needs little editing/production work in today's "everyone's a filmmaker" environment. And if you've got the creative "chops" to add some sizzle to a video, go for it! Be the next Scorsese, if you can. Fortunately, the software you need to add special effects won't break the bank. The most "viral" videos are usually spontaneous and unproduced... merely "captured" by a videographer. For marketing purposes, however, a produced video is the way to go... and a how-to video featuring your product is a good choice. If the look or location of your business is a selling point, "tour" videos - of a workplace, a restaurant, the homes you sell, the real estate you landscape, etc. - are your best bet.

Marketing videos are finding a home on local search portals like CitySearch. The find-it-in-your-town site announced that local video ads will be added to its listings. YellowPages.com is also exploring the idea of video opportunities.

Upload your videos to a unique page on your website or add them to your blog page. But don't stop there! YouTube is the most obvious - and the most active - sharing destination. And there are so many others. Just nose around the web and you'll find 'em.

5. Don't Wait To Visit StumbleUpon.com - There are many so-called 'discovery' type sites in social marketing. The best-known are Digg, Reddit, and Netscape, but they're also a bit complicated. StumbleUpon requires the lowest time investment. The site's functionality makes it much quicker and easier to join groups related to your industry and add friends from those groups.

Once you've joined and created your lists, you can start to upload "sticky" (appealing to visitors) content and before you know it, other users will "stumble upon" what you've added. That's when the "magic begins". When visitors give your pages good feedback, your content is shown to even more users.

You can't sell your product or service on StumbleUpon. The benefit it offers is increased traffic, which can lead to increased profíts. Those profíts are just a click away because your site is just a click away. Think of StumbleUpon as a way to raise awareness, Blog readership, grow subscribers, etc... all of which ultimately feed into your profit stream.

6. Join Up - A HUGE part of social marketing is detective work. You need to find your customers where they like to hang out. Well, if your customers are like most people on the planet, it's pretty likely that they hang out at Yahoo Groups or Google Groups to share interests and opinions.

Fetch, Marketer! Go get those prospects.

Like Flickr, the groups at Yahoo and Google are organised into interest-based lists. When you join the lists and discussions, you can provide your expertise (there's that word again) and become a trusted member of the community... the person that other people will want to do business with. There's no better outcome to marketing than that!

7. Make Friends, Not Noise - As you explore social marketing opportunities across the web, be sensitive to the rules and regulations posted on various websites. As a member of a social community, it's your obligation to play by the rules... so make sure you know them and follow them! But here's one general rule for using these sites as marketing tools: Don't spam the system. Flickr doesn't want your entire product inventory posted, and they have rules against doing so. But a few high-quality photo submissions that add to the community are fine.

Whatever social marketing you do, make a contribution to the community. Try to add content and comments of value, not an endless spew of "Buy my product" messages. In other words, don't be a leech that's merely there to suck up prospects. Give back a little. Or, better yet, give back a lot! When you do that, you're on the road to social marketing success. (Translation: more money than you'll know what to do with!)

And remember, with social marketing we're not talking about any old traffic. We're talk about platinum, USDA Prime, pre-qualified, eager to do business, trusting, ready and willing prospects who don't think of you as a business... they think of you as a friend.

So be a good friend. Deliver on the promise of quality and service. If you do that, social marketing will make you rích beyond your wildest dreams.

So stop dreaming and start marketing... socially.

9 Hot Tips to Increase Site Conversions

"Site conversion" is a very dry and unexciting way of saying "how to get more profíts from the same amount of website traffic." Isn't that a more upbeat way of expressing it? Who doesn't want to get more profíts from the same number of visitors?

Increasing your conversion rate is a straightforward, even dramatic way of positively impacting your bottom line. It really cannot be emphasized too much that any improvement at all in your conversion rate means additional revenue that is total profít.

Remember this fact when you are told that the way to "make more money" is to invest in more traffic-generating schemes (and dreams, at times). Before you start spending more money to generate additional traffic, you need to do as much as you can with the traffic you are already getting. If you keep the horse ahead of the cart in your planning, you will have an efficient, stable, measurable conversion rate from which you can extrapolate x amount of additional profit from y amount of new-traffic generation.

The following tips are not in any particular order (except for Number 1), and can be modified and reordered to suit your particular situation. Take ownership of the change and improvement, and make sure everyone involved understands the importance of maximizing every revenue source, beginning with the existing ones!

1. Before you can repair or improve something, you have to have a good way of measuring where you are, what you're doing, where you're going, etc. You can sign up for a free Google Analytics account and use other low- and no-cost tools to develop your "analytics" and "metrics" - essentially fancy words that tell you how you're doing with numbers.


2. Create landing pages that are both keyword- and campaign-specific. Try separating any related pay-per-click keywords into smaller and tighter groups, and then create the landing pages for each of those new subgroups. Conversions will almost certainly be better if keywords, advertising approaches and landing pages are thematically related and tightly integrated.


3. Test different headlines and copy writing. This might be the most effective way of quickly showing improvements. Therefore, you need to write compelling copy or find someone else who can do it for you. There is plenty of free advice about this (much of it worth every penny you pay for it), but the importance of copywriting as it affects site conversions cannot possibly be overstated. This is key.


4. It is very important to test your pricing, as it really does make a huge difference in conversions. If your goal is to maximize customer value, then the highest converting price may not actually be the optimal one. In other words, if you raise your price by 50% and only see a 10% reduction in conversions, you will more than compensate for the drop. Going the other direction, if you lower the price 15% and this doubles or triples your ratio, your gain compensates for your price reduction. Test your prices, and test them in both directions.


5. Website load time has become an oft-overlooked item in this age of "broadband everywhere." Load time is critically important in reducing your "bounce rate" on landing pages. There are various online services that will measure your load speed (websiteoptimization.com), and when you know what it is, you can reduce it by compressing images, removing redundant items, optimizing your style sheets (CSS) and HTML code, and so on. The referenced website will also give you advice on other ways to improve your site's load speed.


6. Clearly identify the sales path(s) and discard any points of resistance, or bottlenecks. Even if you have just a single product, there may be a number of different "paths" that lead to a sale. Perhaps you have a landing page to acquire visitor contact data, which then takes them to a sales page, thence to an order page, and so on. Check your metrics and analytics carefully and you should start seeing patterns in how your visitors navigate your site. If you can see when, where and how visitors are leaving the site, you can delete unnecessary steps, enhance the sales copy or the "call to action," insert a few testimonials, emphasize your warranty or something else to capture that business. Do everything you can to keep the sales process simple and straightforward. The less confusing it is, the less resistance visitors will display.


7. Let your praises come from others' lips. Sometimes talking about oneself can sound egotistical, and it has been clearly proven that third-party testimonials boost conversions. In marketing it is called "social proof" when you bring in statements and assessments from others to buttress your message. If you add testimonials - short blurbs, highlighted quotes, letters - to your various landing pages, sales pages and even shopping cart pages, you will almost invariably notice an improvement in your conversion rate.


8. You need to understand the mind of your market, and your customer's experience with your website. Place an order on the site yourself as you step into the mind of a first-time visitor. Identify the hang-ups, inefficiencies and confusing or missing components that hinder your conversions. In concert with step #6 above, you want to identify why you are not converting, so that you can make the necessary improvements, whatever they may be, to improve your ratio.


9. Some people believe passionately in the power of media on landing, sales and order pages to raise conversions considerably. Others are not convinced, and there is not much hard data from controlled studies to consult. You should consider testing this idea yourself. You should try pages both with and without automatic play engaged. The idea is to lower buyer resistance, and if media helps, all the better. Music, motion graphics and video do add life and personality to your website, but there is a "sweet spot" (balancing point) and the fact remains that different age and cultural groups respond differently to the media. You need to make changes here in the context of your site's demographics. You wouldn't put rock music on your page of ladies' perfumes, probably - unless you have a 20-something demographic and it's a signature fragrance from U2 or some other chart-topping band.

Aren't most of these lists called the "top 10" this or that? You can count this tip as a bonus, then: Keep track of everything you do! Nothing "goes without saying" anymore, so you are hereby reminded that all your hard work can go for naught if you do not keep good records of what changes you are making, when, where, why and how. Chart your progress, review it regularly and don't be afraid to make continuing refinements as you move along your strategic path.

Finally, as a "super bonus tip" - use some kind of sales accelerator, "offer intensifier" or other method to move people faster through the sales process. It could be a special "one time" or "limited time" offer, a limited quantity offer or even a "special event" promotion. Research what's going on at other sites in your industry and others, and stay abreast of what seems to be working. Add your creativity to the mix, tailor things to your company's situation and you should start seeing increased conversion rates in short order.

10 easy steps to fresher blog content

Blogging isn't easy, when you get started you can think of hundreds of ideas for great new articles, but as time goes by it can be difficult to find your posting rhythm, and to come up with unique ideas for posts that actually benefit the blogosphere and add value. I've decided to have a think about new and interesting ways of generating the fresh content that your blog so desperately needs. Hopefully these eight ways to generate fresh content for your blog will help you in

1. Frequent Forums

Some of the best ideas for new and fresh content I’ve had come from questions asked on some of the forums I frequent. If you keep an eye on a few forums within your niche, there will be questions popping up that you know the answer to, but haven’t realised that there is a knowledge gap within your readership.

Sometimes it's difficult to take a step back and think "Well I may know how to do X / Y but do my visitors?" Yahoo Answers and LinkedIn Answers are great question resources. They also are beneficial in generating increased traffic if you reference an article you’ve put together that solves someones problem.

2. Keep the old moleskin handy

Sad as it sounds I keep a notepad beside my bed. I always seem to get the best ideas late at night, or early in the morning. I get amazing ideas whilst giving the old pits a scrub in the shower. Must be the aroma of the shower gel or something. Or maybe its because of this.

3. Do post titles first

Write down post titles as they come to you, and then work on fleshing out the content later. I keep a working draft of about twenty posts in Wordpress, then decide which ones I can really write passionately about. Those things will come to you at the most random of times, so it’s important to get them stuck into your drafts as soon as they come to you.

4. Read outside your niche.

It's very easy to get locked into reading only tech blogs if you are a techie, or reading exclusively the things that relate to your chosen industry. Think outside the box, and read some of the thought leaders outside of your comfort zone. You'll find that by doing so, new content ideas will come to you as a result of your eyes being a bit more open.

5. Scour your comments.

If there is a significant feedback generated on your blog, and you have built up a good rapport with visitors, then you will be getting comments. Comments can be as simple as someone saying "Thanks for the article" (cynical Paul recons these are link hunters /spammers most of the time), or they can be much deeper than that. If you find yourself adding a large response to a commenter, that may be a sign of a content gap that you can fill. If you don’t know the answer to someone’s question - link to someone who does.

6. Fill content gaps

I frequently find myself whilst writing a blog post, that concepts crop up which I could explain further in another blog post. Always worthwhile re-reading the bits and bobs you’ve written before and finding how you can expand and improve. The benefit of this will be twofold, firstly your articles will feel more rounded, and secondly your internal linking will be much richer, which leads to deeper site interaction.

7. Newspapers / Magazines / Newsletter

Newspapers and magazines are always a good source of content ideas. If you are writing a blog on a certain topic - e.g. gardening - then flowers monthly is going to highlight some new ideas which would be of interest to your visitors. If you blog about architecture, get a subscription to Architects Journal. You get the picture. Copyblogger has a great article on cosmo headlines.

8. Buzz Monitoring

I've pimped the benefits of buzz monitoring enough in the past, but it still serves a purpose in generating content ideas. With news breaking faster than ever before, its important to get in on buzz monitoring to find out that snippet of information that could turn into a great new post. Tools like twitter can help with this, as mentioned below.

9. Twitter Search

Twitter is a live stream of conversation. Therefore it is a snapshot of what is hot and what is not in the blogosphere. I keep an eye on Twitter Trends to let me see if there are breaking #hashtags which I should be keeping up with, and writing about.

10. Brainstorming - Spider Diagraming

A bit of an old fashioned one here, but if you write down all the tags you currently have within your blog, and connect the lines with related terms, you should be able to see patterns that will connect the tags. Flesh out new connected tags, and then write one article concerning that new tag - Bingo! New content.

How & Why You Should Perform An SEO Audit On Your Website

What makes or break an SEO campaign is knowing where to start, what is important and what is simply not worth the time.

Resources are never infinite. If you're not careful you can spend them spinning wheels and tweaking things that will have no real effect on your search traffic. Plan effectively, and you'll achieve true growth and a positive return on your investment.

The difference lies in understanding how search engines work - how they crawl the web and how they use that data to rank web pages - and how your website does or doesn't meet these criteria.

The Technical Audit

The first order of action is the technical audit of your site. Tackle these issues first because this represents the foundation of your site. Some technical problems can render web pages invisible to search engines. Identifying and resolving these issues upfront is critical.

A technical audit should include:

• Code cleanliness / content visibility
  • Does the site use JavaScript heavily?
  • Is the code bloated?
  • Is content generated by JavaScript or otherwise not SEO-friendly?

• File size / page load time

• Navigation structure
  • Is the navigation Flash or JavaScript driven? If so, does it degrade gracefully for browsers that don't support these technologies (like a search crawler)?

• URL structure
  • Are there session ID's in the page URLs?
  • Are the URLs long and do they include multiple variables and parameters?
  • Do the URLs contain keywords?

• Title tag / headlines
  • Does the site have unique titles and headlines on each page (sometimes content management and ecommerce systems weren't built with this feature)?

• Current index
  • Have search engines fully indexed the site? If not, why?

• Canonicalization issues
  • Are there multiple URLs for the home page or other pages?

This technical audit can sometimes uncover serious problems.

If your site includes session IDs in all URLs, for example, you've got a major problem. Search engines do not index URLs that include session IDs. Some older content management and ecommerce systems were built this way, and, to put it frankly, there's no point in launching an SEO campaign if this can't be fixed.

Other problems are not quite as detrimental to SEO but still should get attention.

If your site navigation is generated by JavaScript and does not occur as standard HTML in your source code, it's likely that search engines aren't seeing it. This means they also aren't reading the words in your links - an important signal for page relevance. In the worst cases, they haven't indexed pages linked to this way at all. Rebuilding your navigation to be SEO-friendly can yield positive results without requiring significant costs.

The Content Audit

Having content that is relevant to your site topic and attracts links is a crucial piece of the puzzle.

This is a bit simpler than the technical aspects, but simple doesn't mean easy.

Your content can target keywords, but the user experience must always come first. When in doubt, sacrifice keyword use for better copy.

Some of the content aspects that are important:

• Keyword targeting
  • Do your title tags include relevant keywords?
  • What about your heading tags and body copy?
  • Does your site navigation use relevant keywords or more general language like "services"?

• Link attraction
  • Do you have link-worthy content? Has anybody linked to it yet?

• Readability
  • This gets more into usability issues than SEO, but it's vastly important. Does your content grab the reader? How well does it convert visitors into customers?

While targeting keywords is important, the general rule here is never to sacrifice your user's experience for SEO. They don't like it, and they'll get cranky and leave. And forget about attracting links if users don't enjoy your pages.

The Trust Audit

Why do search engines rank some pages over others? The simple answer: they trust that the content will satisfy the user.

Google's algorithm has always been focused centrally on signals of trust. There is money in ranking well, and for this reason webmasters, bless our hearts, can't be trusted to be honest or objective about how much trust we deserve.

This is why Larry and Sergey (Google founders) decided to focus on links as a signal of trust and authority. The basic idea is that the more links that point to a page, the more authoritative and trustworthy the page. The other major search engines followed suit.

Over time, since links were "out of the bag" and link building schemes erupted across the web, search engines have honed their algorithms to use other signals to determine trust.

Still, links are the single most important aspect of trust - and, in almost every case, SEO as a whole. Even tiny sites with just a few, poorly-optimized pages can rank well for competitive keywords if they simply have a powerful enough inbound link profile.

What to look at in evaluating website trust:

• Inbound link profile
  • How many links does the website have?
  • Are any of these links on websites with a high Page Rank or a large number of inbound links?
  • What anchor text is used in inbound links?
  • What pages do these links point to?

• Site age
  • How long has the site been live?
  • How long has the domain been registered? The older the better.
  • How long is the domain registered for? The longer the better.

• Outbound links
  • Does the website link to other websites?
  • Are any of the websites this website links to spam? Do they look to have been penalized by Google? Are they in a "bad neighborhood?"
  • Has the webmaster obviously engaged in link schemes, reciprocal or otherwise?

These questions aren't always easy to answer, but they're important. Many of them are crucial.

Before you start researching keywords, creating content, building links or otherwise optimizing your website (or hire a professional to do so), you need to know where you stand and what to expect moving forward.

The answers aren't always pleasant, but if building the volume and relevance of your search engine traffic matters to you these answers matter too.

Google fits Android for visual search Goggles

Google has introduced a new visual-search technology for Android phones, giving it the inevitably cutesy name of Google Goggles.

Part of a trio of Monday announcements concerning voice, location, and visual search technologies, Google Goggles matches a photo you take with your Android phone with images in - where else? - Google's data centers. If a match can be made, Goggles provides you with information about the object you just snapped.

The technology also includes text-recognition capabilities so that you can, as an example in an introductory video demonstrates, scan a business card, and move the card's info into your Android address book.

A third capability adds augmented reality to the camera's view, using a combination of the phone's GPS and compass to allow you to scan the scene around you with your phone's camera and have info pop up onscreen about businesses and other sites you view.

Google Goggles is just one example of how the company is tying in-the-wild sensing capabilities of relatively low-power devices such as Android phones into the immense compute power of Google datacenters.

Don't expect a visual-computing revolution overnight, however. Google's introductory blog posting freely admits that such computer vision is still experimental. In its current incarnation, Google says, the Goggles technology works best on books, DVDs, landmarks, logos, contact info, artwork, businesses, products, barcodes, or text. It's "not so good", however, at deciphering shots of animals, plants, cars, furniture, or clothing.

The ad-placement and impulse-buying potential of Google Goggles are obvious. If, for example, you find yourself enjoying a perky bottle of Shiraz, you can snap it and Goggles could quickly present you with not only information about that particular vintage and vintner, but also links to where you could buy comparable wines from Google's ad partners.

The augmented-reality capability could also be an ad bonanza for Google. Point your phone at a camera shop you're strolling by, for example, and Goggles could alert you that one of its photography ad partners was having a sale on point-and-shoots at that very location.

And, knowing Google, don't be surprised if those ads are finely tailored to your previous buying history. If, for example, you recently snagged a $1,500 telephoto zoom lens from an online ad partner, odds are you wouldn't be alerted to the fact that your local shop was touting low-end Canon PowerShots, but instead informed of a today-only sale on a tasty ultrawide zoom lens.

Google Goggles works with phones running Android 1.6 and higher (sorry, iPhone users). It's available now on the Android Market. ®