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On Page Search Engine Optimization: Type in “Hot News” in Google?

Apparently the most smolderingly hot news is still Apple’s iPhone 4 and the new Apple OS 4.0.1.  I guess that makes sense, although I really expected to find something either a little more urgent or risqué when typing in “hot news” in Google.  Anyway, there is a major reason that should be of interest to you as to why Apple is able to lay claim to the coveted spot of being #1 in “hot news” - Apple’s page is powered up with “hot news” keywords optimization.

For all of you that think Apple has that top spot just because it’s a traffic behemoth, then take a look at spot #2 for “hot news” in Google.  You don’t find Microsoft or Coca-Cola, you find the most boring website I have ever seen, http://www.railpace.com/hotnews/.  It’s the website for Rail Pace Magazine, a train magazine with a website so boring and uninspired you wonder how you’re still awake after looking at it. 

But don’t fall asleep, think about what this means for your business; it means you have a legitimate shot of making it to the top.  Rail Pace is ranked #6,009,033 in terms of website traffic compared to Apple’s rank at #47.  So how did they get there?!  For one thing, their page title is called “hot news.”  There probably isn’t too much else to account for it, other than the fact that they did update their information freshly today. 

This article should illustrate to you how much untapped opportunity lies out there for your small business to get found.  With the right keyword online advertising, you’re website can have the hottest news on the internet, just ask Rail Pace Magazine. 

AIM Integrated Marketing is here to help find the keywords and strategies to help you get found.  Click Get Found With AIM for a free conversation on how we can help you.

The Truth about Social Media Demographics

There are a million excuses why some small businesses still refuse to use Facebook, Twitter, and other social media tools.  One of the big ones is that social media is mostly for young people, and that the age group doesn’t match your target market - this is baloney (or bologna if you prefer).

This new study by Pingdom shows us that the average social media user is 35-44; so don’t confuse social media with the high school crowd.  Potential B2B and B2C customers are online doing market research about you and are consulting social media as their trusted word of mouth resource.  I was not surprised by this.  I have attended quite a few social media meetups in the Phoenix, AZ area including Mashable and SMAZ, and the 35-44 demographic fits very closely to the crowd of people that I networked with.  In fact, I would say that the groups were actually composed of an older crowd.

If you want a younger audience, the social network Bebo has 44% of its members under 17 years old.  For an older crowd, classmates.com is the best choice with about 8% being over 65 and 78% being 35 or older.

This article is a reminder that you should never discount social media for your marketing strategy; it could be your best source of new leads and customers if you are on the right social network promoting the right message.   You may not only find new customers here, but because social media is a trusted “word of mouth” environment, you may end up finding your most supportive and lucrative customers ever.

As Online Advertising Gets Smarter, Content Strategy Will Be Rewarded

On the contrary to what you may have been thinking, online advertising is actually becoming more welcomed by consumers.  A poll from March of this year by Opinion Research Corp. has shown that customer responses and sentiment to different sources of online advertising had positively increased from the same study done a year ago. 

In the poll, 51 % of respondents were either likely or very likely to respond to e-mail offers; a 4% increase versus 2009.  The survey also showed some increased interest in customers clicking search engine links with an increase in 1% interest versus 2009. 

Findings like this are why marketing is pervading the online marketplace more and more.  This sounds troublesome at first, but with marketing technology becoming smarter and more targeted, this could actually be a good thing.  If I’m searching online in Google and it is doing a better job at getting me in front of the websites and information I am looking for, then it seems difficult to complain. It could also seem a little bit eery that no matter where I surf on the web, certain kinds of ads keep following me.  It could feel like cyber-stalking.

Therein lies the dilemna that faces Google, which has more users than any other internet company, and enormous troves of data, as they move towards the world of highly targeted advertising:  every advance in the innate intelligence of the marketing solutions they offer has a direct impact on our privacy.  How much are we willing to relinquish? 

Google has become notably more voracious in its appetite for user data.  Until fairly recently, Google wanted to keep its hands off our private messages, etc.  Now that Facebook has begun living off of private user data and leveraged it as a major part of its business model, Google has felt compelled to follow suit.  Google has gone from being the good guy, the most protective of user privacy, and the most self-policing, to the one being dragged into the ring by smaller more aggressive players and social media rivals like Facebook.  An August 10th article in the Wall Street Journal entitled "Google Agonizes on Privacy as Ad World Vaults Ahead" provided an insightful look at what the future might look like through Google's eyes if it were to pool all of its data, and permit cross-sharing across its many currently firewalled service offerings.

Regardless, there are benefits in local search advertising that most people can agree are positive.  If Google knows where you are because you are using a mobile device, it will be able to give you local search results for restaurants, pool cleaners, carpet cleaners – whatever you are looking for around town.  The smarter Google gets, the more online advertising small businesses will do, and the more businesses and customers will be connected in a mutually beneficial way.  According to an August Gartner Report, Mobile device sales surged 13.8%.  You can definitely expect to see some massive growth in mobile online advertising, so make sure you have your website optimized for mobile use.

Here at AIM, we love to see the shift from outbound marketing to inbound marketing.  The way consumers are more accepting of marketing messages these days points towards the fact that marketing is becoming more inbound. The content you generate on your website is what helps services like Google find you, as well as offering value to your customers.  So keep the content coming, and don't be surprised to find people, and some intelligent ads, starting to follow you. 

Can Apple Help Your Small Business Marketing Strategy?

Apple is a cool company with cool products, but does it have a place within your small business?  I’m not talking about using Apple because you subjectively like the operating system more than windows; I want us to take a look at how it can really be used uniquely in day-to-day inbound marketing operations in your small business.

Let’s take the famed iPad.  It’s a pretty nifty gadget to have on your coffee table and a good friend for rides on the subway, but it can also be an asset for your sales or service/repair teams.  The iPad comes with optional 3G built in.  If you’re in the real estate business and you’re taking a client to see 5 different houses, you now have an interactive way of staying on top of the housing information that your clients want and expect to make an informed decision.  As a bonus, it makes you seem very professional to be using a modern and technologically advanced piece of equipment to better help your customers.  If you are a non-profit or door-to-door sales company, you can use the iPad as a way to sign up new customers without your typical clipboard.  A sales consultant at a retail store, or hostess at a restaurant might also employ an iPad to great effect. Try getting people to sign up using something they will really want to get their hands on.

Check out this Small Business Ipad Article for some more business uses and a look at the benefits of iWork software.

If you're engaged in content marketing, then clearly any Apple device with iLife and iWork are going to be a boon.  With their built-in iSight cameras, any Apple iMac desktop or Macbook or MacBook Pro laptop, and the ease with which iMovie can be used to film and upload viral videos to You Tube or Vimeo, working on Apple can help you and your team become content generation machines. 

The convenient Mac OSX utilities such as Grab for screen shots, and Digital Color meter for sampling and matching screen colors, or Podcast Capture, are just several of the many built in features ready-made and easy to use for content creation. iWork is also another real asset for content creation, due to the ease with which formatted documents can be done quickly and professionally in Pages and exported to PDF or Word seamlessly, or keynote presentations exported to Quicktime for online viewing. Spend time on the message and the content, and let these tools increase your productivity and lower your cost when it comes to formatting

The trick is to open up your creative side and think about new ways to use new equipment.  Apple is recognized as an industry leader in quality and innovation - this is something that you want your customers to associate with you.  So Apple can do a lot for the branding of your company.  It’s not necessarily because everyone loves Apple, but because customers appreciate the fact that you are using new technology to better assist them with their needs.  Throw in the fact that Apple Computers are just a blast and a pleasure to use, and there you have it.  'Nuff said. I'm biased.

In short, if you want to succeed at inbound marketing, then whether you realize it or not you are also in the publishing business.   In addition to your main line of business, you're now in the business of creating content that attracts customer's interest and demonstrates your knowledge, trustworthiness and helpfulness in your field of expertise.  To equip yourself for maximum productivity, no pun intended, "dude, you should get a Mac."

Since we are talking about tools to help with your small business, I wanted to include this link to internet marketing tools - it has some helpful software specifically for small businesses.

Measure Social Media Reach the Right Way

Social Media is just about out of its grace period of not having to conform to ROI standards.  Part of the reason that social media was always considered to be a fad that would fade was because despite its popularity, there was no ROI to show a CEO.  The companies that decided to take the leap of faith into social media were impressed with the new ways of releasing promotions, learning from customer feedback, and the renewed strength of public relations online.  But what about being able to monetize the use of social media?  Let’s take a look at the “soft” and “hard” measures of ROI for social media and attempt to get closer to understanding the best way to gauge success.

Soft Measures of Social Media ROI

Return on Engagement: The duration of time spent either in conversation or interacting with social objects, and in turn, what transpired that’s worthy of measurement.

Return on Participation: The metric tied to measuring and valuing the time spent participating in social media through conversations or the creation of social objects.

Return on Involvement: Similar to participation, marketers explored touchpoints for documenting states of interaction and tied metrics and potential return of each.

Return on Attention: In the attention economy, we assess the means to seize attention, hold it, and measure the response.

Return on Trust: A variant on measuring customer loyalty and the likelihood for referrals, a trust barometer establishes the state of trust earned in social media engagement and the prospect of generating advocacy and how it impacts future business.

Hard Measures of Social Media ROI

Purchases:  If someone clicked your twitter link that directed them to a page where they bought your product/service, then this is a concrete measurement.

Coupon Codes:  You can use Twitter specific coupon codes that only your Twitter/Facebook followers receive and measure the amount of those social media specific codes you receive.

Traffic and Community:  These are the weakest of the hard measures.  However, metrics like traffic increase still have a monetary value – the idea of how many visitors it takes to make a purchase online.  For your community of followers, fans, etc, you can at least say that these metrics hold a higher value than a radio or television commercial impression.

Should we be okay with letting social media slip past the stringent demands of marketing metrics?  The answer is yes and no.  Part of why social media is so great, is because it is for people (customers) first and business second.   The golden rule of social media is to attract fans or followers by strengthening your community and online relationship with them.  The reason why it is difficult to get direct metrics is because as businesses we need to be careful about what types of calls to action and selling propositions we employ in social media.   Maybe we should stop seeing this as a dilemma, because for better or worse, it is what it is.

Here at AIM, we have clients that use their social media metrics in a number of ways.   We find that social media specific code tracking is a great way to measure conversion and success; especially for specific campaigns.   One way to create an environment that is more suitable for tracking ROI is by making sure that you have objectives and a strategy in mind.  Create a criteria checklist, and track whether or not you are accomplishing your goals.

Try this nifty Social Media ROI calculator tool; it's not a magic bullet but it definitely has value.

Do you have some examples of how you've been able to track your social media ROI?

Twitter Marketing and Presentation Synergy

There was an awesome Twitter marketing presentation from HubSpot with Dan Zarrella recently  and I wanted to discuss some of the main points with you.  Let’s look at how Twitter and presentations can be combined to create an awesome synergy, and look at the qualities that successful tweets possess.  This will help those of you out there trying to get followers and retweets.

Twitter Marketing in Presentations: 

Dan brought up a lot about psychology in his presentation, and the need to incorporate ingratiation into your presentations.  For example, start off your presentations by saying, “I know a lot of you out there in the audience are a lot smarter than me, so please feel free to tweet about things you disagree with or any opinions you have.”  Flattery will get you some tweets during your presentation - give it a try. 

Dan also mentioned some of the tendencies that men and women differ on.   In one of his webinar  presentations, Dan asked his audience to raise their hands, without any apparent reason to do so.  He then asked the people who raised their hands to tweet to him that they did so.  Interestingly, a lot more men responded with Tweets than women.  It was great to see that the audience got involved and did tweet, but it was very curious how men participated so much more.

This blog will often give you tips on ways to connect and engage your audience – like creating a healthy controversy.  Dan collected numbers showing that 40% of men will tweet about things they disagree with, whereas only 28% of women said they would.  Controversy seems to get better results on Twitter with the male audience, so keep that in mind.

Twitter Promoting Presentations:

The three main things that Dan stressed were important for presentations and getting them to spread on Twitter were

1.  Shareability
2.  Novelty
3.  Relevance

These qualities come as no surprise, but now that we have them in front of us, we should create a mental checklist when we want to know how great something will be to tweet. Shareability is what it sounds like, and is especially popular for Twitter users that have a lot of followers – because they altruistically want to share in their community.  Novelty can be saying something old in a new way or saying something new in an old way – get something out there that your customers have never heard before.  Relevance is, yes, the stuff that makes sense for your audience and interests them.  If you put these three ingredients together, you should start hearing the birds tweet about you.

The idea with the pie chart up top is that either you (as the presentor) or your audience should be promoting your presentation on Twitter as it is happening.  If you can get the message out that there is an exciting presentation going on live, you create a great sense of urgency for people to check it out.  I suggest getting the word out for people to join within 15 minutes of the presenation starting.

I'm sure some of you readers out there has an example of cool,unique ways to engage peope on Twitter - let us know your Twitter Marketing stories below...

4 Best Practices for Sharing Content (Easy Marketing)

 

 

Ah yes, you know that you need to be authoring content that has compelling body copy and tantalizing titles that people are dying to click on.  You also know that you should write content with SEO in mind – choosing specific keywords and placing them where it matters most – e.g .title tags, headlines, alt text, and meta descriptions.   Now ask yourself if you are doing your best to make sure your content is getting the exposure it deserves.   Here are 4 ways to make sure your content is being shared effectively…

1. Think of your content as a digital message:  When you write a blog post, think of it as being a digital message that you can translate into many forms.   Take your blog post and do a video blog post from it or a podcast.  Take a portion of your website that is informative and package it into a more convenient and shareable whitepaper and promote it that way.  You can even change your blog posts into slideshows and start using Slide share more.  There is so much opportunity here; make sure you are  capitalizing on the potential of the great content you already have.
2. Ask them to:  At the end of your blog or article, implore your reader to contribute comments by giving them a question that is worth it for them to answer.  Try coming up with questions that you genuinely want an answer to.  Don’t be too simple with questions like “what do you think.”  Specifically ask questions like “How do you see your marketing changing because of inbound trends?” and you will start to pique people’s brains for interesting answers.  Get people thinking and they will be more apt to share your message.
3. Use Buttons:  Yes, you should be using the same buttons that we have just above our blog here.  These buttons make it possible for people to dig our posts, add them to Stumbleupon, Reddit, and more.  Check out blogplay.com for their cool plug-in.  Go here for the Facebook like button.   Also, I was visiting the blog at Pull not Push and was especially impressed with the way they place CTA (call to action) buttons at the bottom of their blog posts.  Check it out – their CTA’s are always different.  Sometimes they simply request you to tweet about their blog, sometimes they offer a big button to click that will take you to a whitepaper.  They are consistent with the buttons up top, but do a good job engaging readers at the end with something new to click on for every post. 
4. Give People Reasons to use Buttons:  For example, be creative and think of ways to give people a reason to tweet your bog post.  Maybe say that you will pick the person who tweets AND has the best comment about your post will be selected for a guest post.  I’m sure you can come up with something…

I’m sure a lot of you readers have some best practices that you could add to this list.  Tell us your favorite best practice, and HOW you have used it to share you content...Let us know below!

Personal Branding on the Web

Personal branding has become a hot issue lately.  I think it warrants some attention because most people think they “get it” but haven’t really thought about what it means or they should actively engage in it.  The biggest question that stands out in my mind is “do you create your personal brand beyond what comes naturally, or is it just a byproduct of who you already are?” 

I think personal branding was previously a byproduct of what you did and the reputation you cultivated.  Like how Oprah is seen as the queen of daytime TV or Jack Welch as a business guru.  These associations are still what personal branding is all about, but it seems nowadays that people are considering more of a branding process for creating the image they desire, rather than simply letting it happen by itself.

If you go to this blog on personal brands, you’ll see that they are actually giving out awards for who has cultivated the most valuable personal brand.  This means there must be some type of branding process out there, and a seriously premeditated way to design what people associate with your image.

I’ve noticed that people are starting to have personal logos and more catchy nicknames.  I recently went to an SEO meet up group that was hosted by a gentleman going by the name “Radar Roy” – get it?  He calls himself Radar Roy because he knows where the people go online and how to get them to your website.  It seems simple, but if you compare the catchy name of Radar Roy to some other SEO guy, Radar Roy has a better chance of standing out - if he is any good – an Radar Roy was great.

You also have the mega bloggers out there like Chris Brogan with a personal online branding strategy.  If you check out Chris’ name on the main page, you see he actually has his own logo for his name – a B with a circle around it. 

A personal brand requires consistency, just like any other brand.  That means that you need to have the same persona on your Linkedin page as you do on your Twitter and Facebook accounts.  For me, I still feel as though my personal brand should be left to fate. 

Do you think that a personal branding strategy results in something more effective than just being natural?  How do you find yourself “polishing” your personal brand? 

Leave your comments below…

Marketing Your Blog: 5 Major Blogging Tips

 

Blogs comes in different shapes and sizes.  Many companies pass the torch and outsource their blogging duties to someone they trust as a blog expert. If you choose to take care of your own blog, these tips will offer you some help on how to make sure you’re making the best of your time and resources.

Tools: Pick a blogging tool that is dynamic and easy to use like Blogger, Wordpress, or Typepad. These tools will give you some ways to customize the look and feel of your blog.

Keywords: If you have a website with embedded keywords you rank for, be mindful of incorporating the keywords into your blog articles. Google keyword search tool is helpful, and you will want to spend time going after the “long tail keywords.” Remember, content still comes before keywords.

Optimization: Get an arsenal of great ways to share your blog with links to social bookmarking sites like Delicious, RSS feeds, Facebook, and Linkedin. If you are using a tool like HubSpot, you will have an easy time adding rich meta tags, title tags, and alt text for pictures.

Observe: Go out and search in places like Google blogs for other blog sites like yours and observe what makes them successful. Make comment that add value to the author or other commenting visitors, and eventually earn the right to have people stop by your blog with a link.

Share: Put your blog on business cards, your e-mail signature – spread it the same way as you do your phone number – only a lot more readily!

Having your blog hosted on the HubSpot software gives you access to analytics that help with your long term vision and strategy for casting your voice. 

Any specific examples of what’s worked for you? Share your ideas with us below…

Need help? Click Marketing your Blog and fill out the quick request form.

Small Business Marketing Ideas: Cloud Content Management

I just learned about this new way to share content without the usual compatibility boundaries.  Cloud content management for small business may sound complicated, but it’s really just a way to share content, like pdf’s, without worrying if people have the right program to read it, like Adobe Reader.  The software I’m talking about comes from a company named BOX.  BOX is trying to make it easy to share content internally and externally of your company, and even use any mobile device to access the content.  It turns out there is a practical way to employ content management system development. 

BOX’s cloud content system is an open platform, so if your business relies on a CRM, like Salesforce.com, you can integrate your content easily.  Other business applications for HR, finance, and operations will integrate also.  The idea here is that the sharing is not just easy, it’s also organized.

One of the reasons this struck me as so interesting was the way it will open up options for mobile users.  Some of the best phones on the market are iPhones and Droids.  I’ve personally been in the Verizon store and heard stories from customers about how they are limited to using Windows based phones because they need to read Excel and other Microsoft Office documents.  BOX Content software may not fix everything, but maybe it can give some people freedom from having to choose only one type of phone operating system to view files.

If you have ever been in the situation where you had to spend extra time downloading software, drivers, plug-ins etc. just to view a document or video, then you have felt the pain that BOX can help you relieve with this tool.  Maybe this tool for sharing content is not something you need for your business right now, and that’s okay.  This blog is here for small business marketing ideas that you can use for the future too.    

Could cloud content management help your business?  Leave your thought below...