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The Facebook and Twitter traffic boom has led all the industry run after SMM so that they can get their fair share of the SMM Pie. Now these big corporations forget that the Social Media sites are “For People” and it not a “Place” for blatant marketing.  To use the social media platform you need to understand that the Social Media forums are audience focused. The Participants come here to “Socialize” and not to buy soap or some stuff.

Recent market studies shows that people tend to distrust corporation and they don’t trust company blogs or paid blogs either. So when you spew out your Social Media “Marketing” messages from the veil of your logo, you should get this curtained that there are pretty few people  who actually believe those and follows you..let alone be motivated by them.

In social Media, one to one interaction is the most important factor. People, the real player of this whole marketing industry and the most misjudged also, likes to get importance, they like to feel special. So when you are posting some messages and you receive some comments back, you should try to answer them back in the timeliest manner possible.

You should be prepared to accept negative feedbacks and you should try to handle them diplomatically. To me when you are on a Social Media platform, you should try to maintain the thin line between too personal and abject professional marketer. It really doesn’t matter that on how many platforms you have presence.  If you are a hit on Platform A then you should stick to Platform A rather than diversifying your resources to other platforms.

The conversion or the ROI matters the most to a marketer, so I would suggest that you should stick to a certain platform which you feel comfortable with and which you think will value the most and the platform should be capable to “follow” your business policy. I mean you can attract customer for a coffee shop in Manhattan from Saudi Arabia.  So here you need to target, improvise and polish up a little bit.

While summing up, I would suggest that you keep you cordial, non professional tone up while maintaining the “thin line” I discussed before try to focus on metrics. SMM is all about trying and testing and again re-testing..so it usually takes some time to chip in. Hang in there..and be tight..you will have your ROI pretty soon

Location sharing is the latest trend that caught on with the social networking sites with Twitter and Facebook leading the race. But the question is, how much effective is it going to be?

Location Sharing and Social Media Marketing

Recently Twitter has launched location sharing feature, Twitter Places , which enables users share their physical location in their tweets as soon as they activate this feature. As you turn on this feature your geographic coordinates are shown via Google Map.  While Twitter is all set with this new attribute Facebook has kept location sharing (Facebook Places) limited for iPhone users as of now.  As you check-in to different places on Facebook it gets listed on the News Feed and on your friends’ home pages.

But are users ready to accept this exposure? It is learnt that many Twitter users are against going overtly public with personal informaton sharing. Well, it is still an optional feature. Even though people are apprehensive regarding misuse of location information many are glad to share their whareabouts with frinds and acquintances.

Shifting focus from personal view point if we concentrate on the commercial aspect we’ll see that location sharing can add new dimension to social media marketing. Just as search engine marketiners are turning to geo-targeted or Local SEO with the help of Google Places, social media marketers can make use of this new features on Twitter and Facebook  for their campaigns. It can be a great tool to catch up with the potential local customers in their network. The target customers can easily find them out as they search for tweets from their locality. It will be easier for companies to advertise about their local offices, events and meetings and create their brand awareness locally through social media. Thus location sharing online may drive off-line sale as well.

May be Facebook and Twitter’s location sharing feature is primarily designed for personal user accounts but with these two social networking behemoths competing each other we wouldn’t have to wait too long to see what’s more in store for business entreprenuers.

In the consumer world managing you data is tough, think about it this way— Marketing, It, Operation and you will have to appoint Sub –Managers under it too. So your profitable business becomes one heck of a lot complicated stuff.

Here comes your SEO provider to your rescue. The face of SEO is changing….now SEO is not only just giving your clients links, but this service now includes..Managing your client’s product data and often work at an intersection of IT and Marketing infrastructure.

If you can constantly manage the whole process, then you can term yourself out that your Seo Business policy is correct and it is moving towards to the right direction. Now how will you manage or what are the process involved in this managing stuff an all that.

• Create some Unique and “Readable” content about your products

I think I don’t really need to go in all details with this point. Today even a market –toddler know the essentiality of the content of you page..that includes your product catalogue too. More over keeping aside the SEO things about content, you need good, content to educate your leads and to woo them to become your customers. In Internet world, content is the only way of “talking” to your customer..Or to your lead so create them with some time and make them informative.

• Create an online Distribution system for your Content

Now that you have your fresh, unique product data..You need your network to syndicate them. Your website is just a single page or a group of pages in this vast ocean of information network. So to really get some conversion you need to syndicate your unique information to credible sources which ion term will create the buzz that you need. There are various methods to syndicate content…you can create RSS feeds, or XML feeds or video sitemaps..it really depends on which network you are actually targeting  to.

• Categorize your customers

This is perhaps the most overlooked process in all SEO world. You can sell a Minivan to a teen. This process sounds simple…But it is the hardest part of all the business process. To find your niche customer base is like hitting the holy grail of consumer world. If you can find a targeted customer base and you can successfully target them you can pat your back and say to yourself that..Yes you now have a market.

• Finally track your sales and conversion

This last bit is also known to all, I mean everybody knows that you have a monthly budget for your SEO and online marketing.  When you are beginning a campaign you should track it so that you can measure the ROI on your expenditure. You should track whether your campaign is targeting your desired customer base or not. Since sporadic marketing will have little or no effect, it is always necessary to funnel your effort to a small zone to reap the most benefits out of it.

Overall the above are the most evident four points to evaluate your total Internet marketing procedure. There are countless Knicks and knacks in to this whole system and the process continuously evolves as you get the trends and data on your ongoing campaigns.

7 Reasons Why You Should Take Blogging Seriously

Blogging is the latest trend in online marketing industry. From small business owners to celebrities, from professionals to amateurs everyone is having a blog knowingly or unknowingly of how much powerful blogging can be. However, we can cite 7 solid reasons why blogging should be taken more seriously and be included in your routine.

1. Productive time: Blogging is a good way to make use of your spare time. Instead of chatting online or flipping though TV channels you can use this time productively by writing something out of your professional or personal experience that can be of help to others.

2. Improved skill: For people who have a flair for writing or those who have already taken up web copy writing as profession can use blogging as a good platform to improve their writing skill, grammar and vocabulary.

3. Increased creativity: Blogging helps to increase your creativity as you religiously keep on thinking about what to post next. You will have to dig out new ideas to write on and improvise new ways to presenting it in an interesting manner in order to attract readership.

4. Insight on a subject: Blogging is learning. As you write on something you need to do thorough research on the topic to write with authority. During the process you learn a lot.

5. Improved Public Relation: As you keep blogging chances are that you start receiving feedbacks gradually. It not only impels you analyze your writing but also helps you improve your public relation skill. Wondering how? Well, you may not get positive feedbacks all the time; there will be negative comments and criticisms too. In the due course of time you’ll learn how to deal with the negativities of life.

6. Knowledge in technicalities: While small business owners who mostly look for blog optimization and maintenance services as part of their extensive online marketing campaign individuals can handle it on their own. Creating, designing, and optimizing a blog can give you an insight into the technicalities and technological aspects of blog hosting and maintenance.

7. Reinforced online presence: You might have profiles in a number of social and professional networking sites. You might be popular and gained several recommendations from your fellow contacts. But nothing can add more substance to your online profiles as blogging. If you can write well and deliver some useful quality content it adds value to your credentials whenever you apply for a better job. In short, it helps you reinforce your identity as a writer and your employer will know beforehand about your writing style and prowess.

So, blogging is a two-way process. The more you give the more you get in return.

There are many “Video Hosting Solutions” available in the market, but among them Vimeo and Youtube are the top two.. They both offer HD videos with Embed options. Rather this “Embed” option is the most important function that makes this Video hosting solution to be the best available option there.

You can upload your videos and you can “Embed” them in your blog-posts, Hub- pages, lens … practically anywhere.

Now the question comes, which will you choose…?

To get to the bottom of this debate…we need to understand so as to why we really post Video in our sites, blogs..or whatever…because adding a “Relevant” video which is in tandem with your Post, site content you are actually guarantying that the visitor will stay for a certain time frame. So you will choose a Video host such that it will not “steal” away your precious visitors away from you.

YOUTUBE

It is the Top and the first Video hosting service. Practically it is the De-Facto service that will each use when they need a video service. The YouTube service has some Pros and cons to ponder.

Pros

1. Huge Upload size…1GB HD uploading
2. Huge Community
3. More expected exposure

Cons

1. Doesn’t look Cool
2. Cannot White label..at any stage
3. Viewers, and visitors get Distracted easily
4. 10 Minute Video Limit

Vimeo Service

Pros

1. Good Quality Videos
2. Clean, professional Looks
3. No distraction, Only your Video is shown

Cons

1. You are allowed to Upload Only One HD video per week in a Free Account
2. It has an Imposed 500MB limit to Free Account
3. Expected Less Exposure, the community is growing, but slowly
4. There is an Upgrade option, and if you run out of quota, you can buy extra.

The only thing that hurts while YouTube is that they show the users Related Videos with some videos with spot light too. And the video quality is not so clear as Vimeo. Though the Vimeo Community is relatively young with respect to YouTube, but it is a better option if you are ok with a paid Service.

Article Marketing or Video Marketing?

Article marketing and video marketing are two aspects of online business promotion which are very common and very popular as well. The reason is that both are free and both are capable of pulling in visitors if properly targeted with related keywords. However, video marketing is relatively newer to article marketing, which is there from the very beginning of online business and web promotion.

Article marketing – an overused strategy?

Initially article marketing was doing well. Many search engine marketers have made money by creating one article, stuffed with keywords and links back to main site’s landing pages and submitting it to several article directories. But increasing competition, innovation of automated article writing software and spreading of viral articles degraded the quality of content inevitably. Moreover, Google got busy in improving its search algorithms almost everyday. So, the things got tougher and an alternative was required to stay ahead in the competition.

Video Marketing as an effective alternative

With the growing popularity of social media as internet marketing platform video marketing came as an alternative. Multimedia attracts people more than a plain article. A video with sound and moving images can instantly impact viewers mind. There is no denying that video has a larger target market. So, interesting videos were created and distributed across various social networking sites and video sharing platforms for branding and marketing. With time creating, viewing and downloading high resolution videos have become a lot easier. And it has been proved that like human users search engines also love videos provided you upload them with relevant keyword or key phrases.

Which one to choose?

And there arises the question, which one to focus – video marketing or article marketing? Well, from experts’ point of view, both are important. Both are capable of boosting your website’s rank on SERPs if targeted properly. Video may have a wider spectrum but articles are still valued as good resource. Google values contextual links as more authentic and natural way to earn backlinks these days. And in addition to article directories, blogging and guest posting on related blogs have opened up a new horizon for article marketing. However, good quality of the text content is a high priority. So, the best possible way is to combine these two strategies – article marketing and video marketing in your web marketing campaign to get the best result.

The Old Google Local is now back in a new avatar — Google Places. Here you can have a Profile page with listing in the local maps. All of us know that Google Local did give us a Profile page and a Listing in maps but what is special now…

You can answer back to the reviews that you receive. This gives you a chance to explain yourself as a business and you can “deal” with any negative feedback which you think has been wrongly put. You can Navigate to your profile page and there you can answer you reviews as the owner publicly thus having a chance to manage your negative publicity.

The more you answer your reviews, the more active your profile page is and the more social media power track you receive.

So to put it in simple terms

What Is there for me?

1. I can answer my clients
2. I can deal with the ORM Black mails
3. The Power Balance is achieved to a certain level, yup we know it was moving too much towards the consumers..
4. Get the On hand Consumer views of your business..And improve.

The only point to chew on is that will you go for each review or just choose to respond some or none. There are companies who have “learnt their lesson” from Social media as in some select cases it is the best option to ignore a “fire” and it is likely to go out by itself.

There is no denying that social media sites today, have huge impact on common man’s life. More and more people are signing up to an increasing number of social media sites to create a worldwide network of friends. With increasing popularity of social media search engine marketers are investing more time in leveraging the networking power of social media for online business promotion.

Social Media Marketing

If you have not yet switched to social media for marketing your brand here are the reasons why you should opt for it immediately.

Cost-effective

Social media marketing is highly cost-saving compared to traditional marketing strategies. And to be more precise it is much more effective than other online marketing methods such as email marketing which is more of a one-way communication to clients and customers.

Direct and Interactive

Social media lets you interact with your clients and customers in more humanly way. Online conversation and quick exchange of messages work more effectively with users.

Impact of Recommendations

If they like your messages they can instantly spread them in their networks and most of us often rely on the recommendations by our friends. Thus you can get a large number of followers shortly by letting your social media contacts advertising for you.

Quick Turnaround

It may take a long time to build a niche with your website. Making way into the first pages of popular social media, bookmark sites and online video platforms can notably increase organic traffic to your way and in turn move up the sales conversion rate to a great extent.

Improved Ranking

Social media marketing has the potential to boost the search engine ranking of your website. You get more natural back-links to your site and it becomes easier to improve rank on SERPs.

More over, Google have already started indexing real time tweets and posts from some of the prominent social networking sites including Twitter and Facebook. And this real time search result works similar to Google PageRank – that’s what the SEO experts say.

Reduced Risk

You may argue that you can buy links from other website owners in little time instead of ‘wasting’ so much time behind social media marketing. Buying links might be an easier option but it in turn increases the risk of getting your site booked in Google’s black-list and banned forever. But with social media you get natural inbound links which is much more valuable in terms of search engine.

As per “2010 Social Media Marketing Survey Industry Report” about 91 percent of today’s marketers use social media to promote their business online. The number increased from that of last year’s 88 percent. It is also noticed that young marketers of age group 30-39 are more enthusiastic in using social media for branding and marketing purposes. Therefore, it is obvious that social media marketing is going to be one of the most powerful tools for online business promotion in the near future. The sooner the small business owners recognize it the better it is for them.

Though not very new, page segmentation analysis for search engines has come into focus in the recent past. Page segmentation implies how search engine divides a web page into separate blocks to analyze each segment independently. It helps search engines to sort out the main sections of the page and focus on it while weed out the accessories like navigational elements, header, footer, etc. However, introduction of HTML 5 has brought this issue on the surface once again.

Addition of some new tags for in HTML 5 promises improved page segmentation that was not possible with this presentation language so far. Let’s take a look as how HTML 5 is going to benefit SEO page segmentation. As page segmentation leads to more accurate understanding of a particular page’s relevancy the new tag elements in HTML 5 are expected to prove beneficial for optimized web design.

Let’s take a look what’s HTML 5 has to offer.

• <Article> tag: The new <article> tag can be used to mark any sort of online entries including forum post, blogs and articles. In a way it will help the search engine to concentrate on the main content of the page. It gives a relief from using several <div> tags for better display and management of on-page content.
• <Section> tag: The new <section> tag for marking different sections of a page can have its own HTML heading. The tag can be used to exploit the relevancy factor. The search engine will treat the section containing the keyword in greater number as more relevant than any other sections and focus on it.
• <Header> tag: The <header> tag similar to existing <h1> tag in terms of functionality ensures greater flexibility by allowing marking long texts, even an entire paragraph as well as hard-coded links in addition to common header elements such as H1, H2, H3, etc.
• <Footer> tag: Similarly the <footer> tag can contain all the important information at the bottom of a page as well as a section.
• <Nav> tag: Navigational elements are important factors from SEO perspective. The new <nav> tag can be used to point out the set of links to other pages to the search engine.

With these tags it will now be easier for the webmasters to direct the search engine about how to segment the page. The coding will be much cleaner resulting in faster crawl of a page by the search engine robots. It not only adds to flexibility of the presentation language but also makes it easier for the search engine to decide importance and assign relevancy of a particular section with respect to a particular search term.

Web Content Writers often struggle for versatile and quick references to consult with. Repeated writing on similar topic is exhaustive unless their effort is fueled with striking momentum.

Hence it is imperative to navigate them with resourceful ideas so as to make their contributions ever green.

a) Nurture the habit of delivering problem solving observations and recommendations through your writing. It’s interesting and satiating too.

b) While writing for client website, consult competitors too. Understand what and how they are offering? How different is your client’s service, practice area from rest others? In a way find primary data from multiple relevant domains.

For example, if the assignment is about a service company, assimilate information from these following sections based on availability- Client testimonial, FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions), service type and specialties, reviews, location, case studies, updated news etc.

c) Ideas can flow from any direction- On a particular topic of your choice ask opinions from your friends, colleagues or seniors either offline or online. You can incorporate the essence of natural discussions too.

d) Keep a close watch on Newspaper’s editorial columns, speaker’s note, reviews; necessarily weekly magazines and special inserts too. These are authentic and well researched sources.

e) Develop the knack of analyzing Global advertisements and marketing pitch publicized in different media. Follow their trend of product/service display. Write on your own established view point, user’s experience.

f) Join some social networking sites, forums, discussion panels. Always look for quality places while participating and exchanging views.

g) As your topic necessitates, subscribe to sites with automated update features like Newsletter, RSS Feed, Blog post, Article feed etc. Through Google email alerts you can cover most of news story, industry trend, celebrity or event updates based on your choice of query or topic.

h) Learn how to connect and synchronize thoughts by expanding topic association. Play with words, experiment with their uses, identify good writing style on web and then imbibe it.

Finally, be honest to your contribution. Feel pride while serving information cum solutions to billions of audiences. Cherish the writing moments!