January 16th, 2012 by WendySuto
Regardless of whether you’re a start-up or an established business, it can be tough to promote your business on a limited budget. Often, the most effective marketing campaigns are those that are creative within their means. Though it can help, you don’t have to spend money to promote your business.
Even some of the largest companies are now turning to inexpensive social media venues to get the word out about their products. Here are some cheap ways to use social media to punch your way into the market.
Blog.
A blog is an excellent and increasingly popular way to not only get the word out about your business, but also to create a dialogue with customers. A WordPress blog is completely free. If you can commit yourself to writing one high-quality, engaging blog post a day (or hire someone else to write it), in a few months’ time you will have tens of thousands of visitors hungry for the content that only you can provide.
The key benefit of a blog is the dialogue that it allows you to have with customers. Always try to cultivate a solid batch of comments for every post. Comments are free content. Usually the people commenting are passionate subject matter experts in the field, and potentially valuable contacts for your business. This also allows you to hear what your market wants, and how you can better get it to them. Always attach “Retweet” and “Like” buttons after every article so people can share your post with their friends.
Facebook.
Everybody and their Mom now has a Facebook page. Facebook has quickly become one of the top marketing tools alongside Google’s plethora of marketing gadgets. Use Facebook to share pictures, links, and blog posts to your own blog and other related items of interest.
The key with Facebook is to try and be very organic. When marketing on Facebook, think of it as a way to develop relationships and create exposure rather than trying to sell products. If you have a smart phone you can do this extremely quickly, several times a day to create an engaging story of your businesses’ day-to-day.
Twitter.
For such a simple platform, Twitter can be one of the most difficult to master, although one of the most effective if done correctly. Twitter, like Facebook, is not meant to be a sales tool, but rather a way to indirectly connect with fans and customers. Much like Facebook, you can capture interesting moments of your operation or daily life in your business, or just tweet links of related subject matter. In fact, you can set your Facebook to share anything you tweet, so it can all be done seamlessly.
The key to promoting yourself on Twitter is to follow and engage relevant people within your business or industry, and add value to your peers by offering insight and expert opinion.
Use Video!
Your average web surfer has a rapidly diminishing attention span. With all the ads and links, it can be hard for someone to focus on text alone for longer than a few minutes at a time. You can capture people’s attention better through video, and really show your personality and enthusiasm to your visitors, followers, and friends.
Tags: social media for businesses, social media marketing
Posted in Business Social Networking, Online Social Networking, Social Media | No Comments »
January 10th, 2012 by WendySuto
Organic search traffic is free, which I can’t argue with, and is a great boon to new businesses. But to say organic traffic converts better than paid searches indicates that the search marketer is not optimizing their paid campaigns. Paid campaigns also have several other advantages for yielding higher conversion rates that can’t be achieved through organic marketing without great effort.
- Product Specificity: Paid search engine marketing exposes visitors to only the products and services you want to promote. You can match keywords to product offerings to capture visitor’s looking for something specific.
- Pays for Itself: Often times paid campaigns generate enough revenue that they pay for themselves. Compare a paid campaign with all the man-hours required to rank keywords in organic results, and you’ll see that you’ll spend just as much time in labor as you will in dollars for paid results.
- Content Changes: With an organic search campaign you have limited leeway to change much of the content surrounding your product without changing your SEO targeting and search results. Also, you don’t necessarily have control over which pages Google chooses to display in query results.
- Targeting Behavioral Cues: With paid search campaigns, you’re granted ability to target specific behavioral cues by using multiple keyword matches, negative match keywords, and advance query performance reporting.
Finally, visitors coming from organic search results usually have a specific intention. First time organic visits usually don’t convert. It’s only until after several repeat visits, and even then only with excellent content, that visitors are converted. By targeting a searcher’s specific needs with paid search results, you can experience a tremendous growth in conversion rates.
Tags: paid online advertising, paid search campaigns
Posted in Paid Advertising Online | No Comments »
January 7th, 2012 by WendySuto
In the last post on this subject we went over how Google Panda has changed the game of Search Engine Marketing. In this post, I’d like to provide a few strategies for overcoming the impact of Panda and achieving SEO success.
1. Reduce Your Dependence on Google altogether
If Google is your primary source for search traffic, even a minor rank change could have a huge impact on traffic and conversion. By routing your traffic through other engines and other marketing mediums, you reduce the impact any change in Google’s query results may have. “Avoid it” may seem like an obvious strategy for marketing your way around Panda, but ideally you should already be focused on other mediums anyway.
2. Use Actionable KPIs to Measure Success
A lot of SEO metrics are useless since most webmaster tools are focused on things you have no leverage over, or are only useful when used with other metrics (such as visits, page views, and average time spent on page). Bounce rate, micro and macro conversion rates, revenue, and visitor loyalty are all actionable metrics that you can manipulate with a little effort.
3. Build Community
Google currently uses Twitter’s feed and some info from public social media pages like Facebook to influence rankings. Rather than trying to build SEO links through your social media pages, start establishing earned press from your social media fans and supporters. Start a dialogue with your visitors and customers through Twitter, Facebook, or your own online community. Getting good media and comments from your social networks can yield great referred traffic.
It’s a great idea to place a “like” and a “re-tweet” button at the beginning and end of every blog post or article. This makes it easy for the visitor to express themselves by sharing your content with their friends.
4. Quality Evergreen Content
Even with Google Panda in force, there’s nothing that will drive traffic to your site like quality evergreen content. Even if you don’t achieve the search rankings you want, you absolutely must continue to provide the best content. Anything less will cause visitors to seek what they want and need elsewhere. Even if you’re not getting much search traffic, you can more than make up for it through social media referrals and word of mouth. Generate quality content, and searchers will find you.
Tags: google panda update, seo updates
Posted in Google News, Search Engine News | No Comments »
