Why Pay Per Click Is Now
I had a customer ask me if there was a more immediate way to make money online than blogging. I said the best way the make money right now is to wage a pay per click campaign. And I fully believe it. It’s the best way to make your efforts pay right now.
Why is pay per click advertising the best “right now” marketing tool online? Because you can set a budget, write your ad and have your ads online within 30 minutes. Your ads could be live within five minutes of starting your new campaign. You could get your first click within a few seconds of that ad going live. You could make your first sale just a minute or so after that. So, literally, pay per click marketing is the best “right now” marketing tool online.
But that doesn’t mean you should drop everything and just jump on the pay per click bandwagon. Pay per click has its benefits, but there is one thing that it cannot do that almost every other online marketing method can – SEO.
That’s right, pay per click marketing is not search engine optimization. That means you still need to perform some other form of search engine marketing with a long term strategy for ranking your web pages in the search engines. Pay per click is good for right now, but it isn’t so good for next year. To be successful online, you need both a short term and a long term strategy.
What Will Be The Most Important IM Tactic In The Future?
At certain times in the past there have been certain Internet marketing tactics and strategies that have stood out as more important, or more effective, than all the others. There were keyword stuffing and meta tags, directory submissions, article marketing, pay per click advertising and blogging. These days it looks like Facebook and Twitter, or social networking, is winning the game. But what’s next?
When I look at emerging technologies like video marketing, mobile marketing, cloud computing and e-books, it’s hard to see just which one will win out. I think local Internet marketing will certainly be at the top of the list. But in what form?
Predicting the future is difficult, especially online. Who could have ever predicted the popularity of blogging ten years ago, or that social networking would have caught on? It’s not like people go looking for these tools. They just spring up and then people learn how to use them effectively. Once the word spreads, you can’t stop it.
I don’t know what will be the most effective Internet marketing strategy of the future, but I do know that successful Internet marketers will be those who have their ear to the ground and learn to use the tools that are available effectively. Will one of them be you?
Facebook Could Become Your Best Competitive Spy Tool
Spying on the competition in today’s fast-paced Internet business environment is a necessity. If that is something you place high priority on then you might be interested to know that Facebook could very well be your best spy tool.
Competitive intelligence just keeps getting better and better. And Facebook has recently introduced some interesting developer tools and social plug-ins that could make that a lot easier. However, they are quite controversial.
Privacy concerns are what’s on everyone’s lips, but businesses could find one benefit in Facebook’s Like button. The fact that you’ll be able to see users’ likes publicly, including events they plan to attend, may mean that you can spy on your competition and do it right out in the open. How’s that for a benefit?
Of course, privacy advocates are working hard to nip that in the bud and if they succeed then it will be a moot point. However, until they do, follow your competition on Facebook and see what you can learn about them.
Why Facebook Could Become Important For Web Design
The Web is atwitter today with talk of Facebook’s potential network and its Like feature. The focus is on Facebook’s privacy settings. By allowing publishers Web-wide to mine data about Facebook users through a Like button on their site, Facebook could use that information to target advertising on its own website. But that Like button could be more important than anyone realizes. It can be important for web design.
Issues that web designers will have to consider when building their website will include:
- Whether or not Facebook’s Like button is necessary.
- Where on each page of the site the Like button should be displayed.
It’s a no-brainer, of course. If Facebook is the most trafficked website on the Web then most webmasters are going to consider putting the Like button on their site, but is that going to be a good idea? You might find that consumers will not Like your content if they think that it will reveal something about themselves that they don’t want potential employers, college admissions counselors or someone else knowing. That Like button could then be a pariah.
It will be interesting to see how the Facebook privacy controversy plays out. It will be more interesting to see how it affects web design.
Three Qualities Of A Successful Viral Marketing Campaign
There are two types of viral marketing campaigns – successful and unsuccessful. Running either of those is no reflection on your skill as a marketer. Good marketers can have an unsuccessful campaign and bad marketers can get lucky and hit a home run. But there are certain principles of viral marketing that should be followed if you want your campaign to have a chance at success.
No. 1, whatever it is you are trying to promote should have some kind of popular appeal. You may have the very best motorized widget on the planet, but if your target market is smaller than a little league baseball team then quality is a small consideration. An idea has to have some popular appeal if it is to ever go viral.
Secondly, it helps get your idea into the hands of a few well connected individuals. Your product or service can be high quality and popular, but if you can’t get at least one well connected person with influence to plug it then chances are you’ll have a hard time getting it to go viral. I hate to plug it as a popularity contest, but that’s what it is. Even 100,000 average Joes won’t have as much influence as 1 kingpin with 100,000 average Joe devotees.
That last sentence needs some elaboration. 100,000 average Joes have friends and their friends listen to them, but they have no one to appeal to as an authority but themselves. The 100,000 average Joes who follow King Cheese, however, can always point to King Cheese as the authority. “Hey,” they could say to their friends, “If you don’t believe me then listen to King Cheese; he’s the man.” Those kinds of appeals work so it’s important to have at least one highly popular and influential person to like your idea enough to promote it.
Finally, your product or service has to have quality. It can be popular, but if it isn’t full of quality then popularity will wane.
Here’s to your next viral marketing campaign. May it be successful.
Do You Have A Video Sitemap?
One of the most important developments the search engines ever came out with was the sitemap. It allowed all of the search engines to better crawl websites and find content for indexing. Now, Google is offering video sitemaps and I’m betting it’s going to be every bit as revolutionary as the original HTML and XML sitemaps.
A sitemap is very important for crawlability and getting indexed and ultimately for achieving high SERP rankings. It tells the search engines how many pages you have on your site and which pages are important for crawling and, more importantly, what changes you’ve made to your website since it was last crawled. A video sitemap will do the same for your video content.
You might as well face the music. Video marketing is here. And it’s only going to grow bigger. The only question you need to answer is, Are you getting on the bandwagon now or later?
Should You Ride The StumbleUpon Wave?
WebProNews reports that StumbleUpon – not Twitter, not YouTube and not Digg, but StumbleUpon – is the No. 2 driver of social media traffic globally. Did you figure on that?
StumbleUpon is a curious mix of social bookmarking and social networking. It is based on quite a unique concept. I consider it a bit of a hybrid among social media brands. But it has its negative points as well as its positives.
On the positive side, StumbleUpon is great for driving new traffic to your website. On the negative, most of that traffic bounces.
Unless you have something that SU visitors really want to see, don’t expect them to visit more than one page on your website. They’ll visit, and they might even give you a thumbs up (many SU users actually give you charity thumbs up in hopes that you’ll do the same for them), but don’t expect them to stick around.
Is that good? It depends on what you mean by good. It’s bad only if you value a high bounce rate. But the real test is, does that StumbleUpon traffic make you money? If it does then you’re gold.
Will Facebook Ads Rival Google Ads?
A WebProNews article asks if Google AdSense will be in trouble if Facebook starts offering advertising opportunities. It’s a good question.
Two days ago we asked if Twitter was offering a new SEM model. We might just as well ask the same question of Facebook.
The difference between Facebook and Twitter, of course, is traffic. Facebook is only about 50 times the size of Twitter in terms of traffic. It is now the most trafficked website on the Internet. And it’s gathering information about its members that Google would kill for.
Every time you Like something on Facebook you are indicating your interests. Every time you comment on something or share something on Facebook you are indicating an interest. That’s much more valuable information to advertisers than a string of keywords you entered into a search query. And it’s something that I think Google knows as well.
If Facebook did roll out an ad network based on user interests, would you advertise through it?
Google Local Changes Name To Google Places
Yesterday Google announced that it was changing the name of Google Local to Google Places. If you’re interested in why Google doesn’t have a unique domain name – yet – for Google Places, you can read about that at Search Marketing Standard. It’s a good read.
But whether you think Google screwed up or hit a home run, this is an important step for all of us, especially local business. Google says that one in five searches are local so if you have a local business then you need to claim your business at Google Places. Don’t wait.
Here are some of the new features Google has added to Google Places:
- Claim your own service area and hide your address
- For select cities, you can add tags to your listing for $25
- Add photos
- Get custom QR codes
- Join the Favorite Places program
- Add real-time updates
- Track your progress with your own personalized dashboard
Seriously, this looks like a good deal to me. Could Google have rolled it out in a more strategic manner? Yes. But that they’ve done this and done it now says a lot about how serious Google is about local search marketing. I chalk it up as a plus.
Is Twitter Introducing Another SEM Model With Promoted Tweets?
Twitter has announced that it will start introducing ads called Promoted Tweets, except that these ads will be organic tweets with one exception. They’ll be labeled Promoted Tweets.
And there is one other difference as well:
There is one big difference between a Promoted Tweet and a regular Tweet. Promoted Tweets must meet a higher bar—they must resonate with users.
The plan is this …
Promoted Tweets will be added to users’ Twitter streams according to relevance. If Twitter users don’t reply to or retweet the Promoted Tweets then they’ll disappear. They won’t be shown any more. My question is, Will the advertiser be reimbursed for any unpublished tweets or is the risk a part of the deal? Do advertisers pay a flat rate and take a risk on the tweet not resonating?
This certainly looks interesting and if the first phase of advertisers manage to pull off ads that resonate then I’m guessing that other advertisers will be given an opportunity as well. Will Promoted Tweets become another potential advertising stream for search engine marketers who want to reach their target audiences? Will it fly?
How Videos Can Improve Your Reputation Management
Reputation management has become very important to online marketers. And video marketing seems to be picking up speed as well. In fact, video marketing is here and if you haven’t started your video marketing plan or even thought about how to use videos for your online marketing then you are behind the eight ball already. Videos are not only good for search engine marketing and social media marketing, but for online reputation management as well.
The idea behind reputation management with videos is two-fold:
- You want to use videos to increase your search engine marketing presence
- You want to use videos to improve your brand perception
Both of these initiatives is possible with videos and you can do both simultaneously. The search engine marketing aspect of video marketing can be taken care of with distribution of your video to the various video sharing sites as well as the embedding of video on your own website. The brand perception, however, is taken care of by the content of your videos.
Now is the time to stat planning your video marketing and your reputation management initiatives. Wait any longer and you’ll have no chance of catching that eight ball.
Where Do You Get Keywords For PPC Campaigns?
If you are running any PPC campaigns and are looking for places to find keywords outside of the traditional keyword research tools, is there help for you? Actually, yes, I think there is. You don’t have to use the same old keyword research tools to find your keywords.
Here are a three places you can find additional keywords for your PPC campaigns:
- Twitter – There are two ways to use Twitter for keyword research. You can look at Twitter trends, which is real telling for what is hot right now. And then there is Twitter Search. Either way will tell you what is popular on Twitter or what is happening on Twitter.
- Analytics – Take a look at your website’s metrics. What keywords are people using to find your site? Those keywords could be ripe for a PPC campaign.
- Competitive Blogs – What are your competitors writing about? Better yet, pick the top three blogs in your niche and read the comments. What are the readers saying? They are the same audience you are trying to reach. Pull out some niche-related keywords for your PPC campaigns.
When it comes to PPC campaigns, you don’t have to be like everybody else. You have to do what is right for your business. It starts with keyword research.
Why Yellowbook Deserves A Hat Tip
Yellowbook is a staple of local business advertising. First started as a print directory in 1930 to serve Long Island, New York, Yellowbook has become a major publishing company that now serves 48 states. It is one of America’s most important publishing companies.
In recent years, however, Yellowbook has become more than a print directory. It is an online publishing powerhouse that now serves every community in the U.S. with directory services. If you want to find a particular type of business anywhere in the U.S., Yellowbook is the place to go.
But things have just got better. Yellowbook now has an iPad app. That means that the millions of early adopters who have purchased an iPad can now find any business they want through Yellowbook. Well, they can find any business listed. Are you listed? If not, the iPad is the perfect reason to list your business at Yellowbook. This is local Internet marketing at its best.
Can You Compete With Free?
One of the best ways to keep up with the competition is to buy what they’re selling. And if it’s free then it’s really easy to do. Just take that free download and look it over. Can you compete?
It might seem difficult to compete with free, but if you first understand what “free” is then it might not be so free after all.
Most marketers will offer a free download in exchange for an e-mail address or contact information. It’s considered an even trade off. I’ll give you something for free right now if you give me your e-mail address so that I can keep contacting you over and over again to try to sell you something. Of course, we know this works.
But is that the model that you should use? That’s a question that only you can answer, but before you answer it you should see how many of your competitors are giving stuff away for free and what it is they are giving away. If it’s working for them then it might work for you. Consider that.
How HTML 5 Will Make Video Design Elements More Accessible
It’s been awhile since HTML has had a major update. It’s about due for one and in fact there is one currently in production – HTML 5.
HTML 5 will certainly be a revolution in website design elements. One area where HTML 5 will make necessary and revolutionary changes for webmasters and web users alike is in how browsers see videos. Currently, anyone who watches videos online must first download a browser plugin. At least one of them, and in many cases web users have more than one.
Popular browser video plugins include:
- Adobe Flash
- Apple Quicktime
- Shockwave
- RealPlayer
- VLC for Mac OS
- Windows Media Player
Chances are, if you watch videos online right now then you have one or more of these browser plugins installed in your Web browser. If you don’t have at least one of these then are not able to watch videos. HTML 5, however, will make these plugins obsolete.
HTML 5 Means Increased Web Security
Many Internet users are concerned about security. They don’t want to download anything they are not sure about. Therefore, they are a bit skeptical of the whole video browser plugin thing. With HTML 5 they won’t need to be. They’ll be able to watch videos without a plugin. And there browsing experience will be more secure as a result.
These security concerns are not without warrant. Many a website user has landed on a website and been asked to download a Codec for a video then been hit with malware issues that completely destroys their trust in websites that use video. While there is no such thing as complete Web security, HTML 5′s video tag will mean no Codec downloads are necessary and therefore any requests for such downloads can be immediately ignored. Videos will automatically play in any browser without a Codec or browser plugin.
HTML 5 Will Provide More Design Control For Webmasters
If you use video on your websites now then you are stuck with current sizing and embedding conventions. Customization is out of reach for most website designers. HTML 5 will change that.
With HTML 5 you’ll be able to control height and width of your video frames, autoplay on or off, design of your video frame and even search engine optimization with file naming conventions and src attributes. You can host your videos on your own server rather than upload them to YouTube and embed them on your site.
Another great HTML 5 attribute is the poster attribute. You’ll be able to designate an image placeholder to display while your video loads. That placeholder can be a branding logo, an ad or a cartoon. It’s entirely up to you. Again, more design control.
When Will HTML 5 Be Available?
A release date for HTML 5 has not be published. But production has been going on for a couple of years now so I’m guessing it’s getting close. I would not be surprised if HTML 5 was unleashed by the end of 2010. It would be a welcome change to the current state of video optimization and website design.
Viral Marketing Starts With Updated Content
The first thing you should do before you embark on that new viral marketing campaign is to give your website content a complete look over and overhaul it, if necessary. Let’s face it. If your site is more than five years old then chances are it needs an overhaul. So do it.
What does an overhaul mean, exactly?
First, it doesn’t mean redesigning your site from scratch – though that might not be a bad idea either. It may not even mean changing every word on the site. What it probably means, at least in most cases, is to rewrite the content so that it has more a now feel to it and not an outdated feel.
If the information on your site is outdated then you definitely need to rewrite it so that it is more up to date and contains accurate information. For some sites that might mean a complete overhaul. For other sites it could mean simply tweaking a few words or lines here or there to keep the information up to date. Every site is different so every site has different needs.
The bottom line: Viral marketing won’t work if your site is out of date. Keep the content current.
Paid Search Gets A Boost
Paid search increased by 11% in the first quarter of 2010 over the same quarter in 2009. Could this be the beginning of an economic recovery for online business?
There’s no doubt that 2009 was a depressive year for the online economy. But it appears that advertisers are starting to gain confidence again. If that is the case then we can expect that 2010 might be a good year for paid search. I guess we’ll have to wait another quarter to see for sure, but I do think that the second quarter of 2010 shows some promise, particularly when typical years show a decline in the first quarter due to the after Christmas decline in retail business.
With paid search and Bing both increasing their year over year percentages the retail sector is showing more and more promise. If you’re ready to start advertising again and you’re ready to launch your next paid search campaign, talk to someone who is familiar with your business sector.
Is Twitter Considered Social Media?
I’ve head of Twitter being called social media, but I’ve also heard people say it’s not social media. So which is it?
I think it certainly has some qualities of social media. I mean, you can follow people and they can follow you. You can directly contact individual users, send private messages and make lists of your favorite Twitterers. There certainly are some social media qualities.
But in other ways Twitter does not resemble social media. For instance, you can follow people who never follow you back and you’ll both get along fine. Or vice versa. You can have people follow you that you don’t follow back and everyone’s still cool. Your public messages can be broadcast to hundreds or thousands of people with no reciprocation and no response. You can still be effective on Twitter as a mass publisher.
But which strategy is most effective for Twitter? Is the social media strategy where you connect and interact? Or is it the non-interactive strategy where you simply publish and expect no responses?
Personally, I think that’s a question that every Twitterer has to answer for him or herself. There seem to be people on Twitter making both strategies work quite well. The bottom line is, What works for your business?
How Many Links Does It Take To Rank A Web Page?
At one time SEOs talked about something called keyword density. The idea was that if you put just the right number of keywords in your content then you could rank it pretty well in the search engines. Then Google came along.
For awhile after Google became the dominant search engine, keyword density was still talked about widely. But links became so much more important and after about three years it became apparent to many SEOs that inbound links were just as important or more important than the number of keywords on your page. Some SEOs even start saying that the number and type of inbound links to your web pages were more important for ranking purposes.
In fact, links did become important. In many cases, you could rank a web page for its key terms by finding the right kind and right number of links with just the right anchor text. Today, however, that’s a bit more difficult to do.
Links are still important, but all the search engines are a bit less forthcoming about how links fit into the overall picture. The search engines used to report your links. Now they don’t. Not much any way. And it’s a lot more difficult to find out information about how your links are affecting your search rankings.
The way it looks now, links are still important. They’re as important as they ever were, but there are so many ranking factors now that it’s difficult to say that there is any one ranking factor that is any more important than any other. We could probably identify a dozen or so ranking factors that are at the top of the ranking factor food chain and inbound link anchor text is one of them. Still, when it comes to the number of links you need to rank for a keyword, your guess is as good as mine.
Search Engine Marketers Now Need To Consider Site Speed
Does your website load slowly? If so then you need to figure out how to get it to load faster because Google has now made page load speed a ranking factor.
This is very significant. If you do any pay per click advertising then page load speed has already been a factor for your quality score. But yesterday Google announced that site speed will now be considered as a ranking factor.
This actually makes a lot of sense. Users don’t like to land on a page and have to wait for it to load. It could mean the difference between them staying on your site or visiting your competition. So why should Google be concerned about that?
Truth is, they’re not. They don’t care if you make any money or not. But they do care if they make money and they do care if searchers have a good experience on any site that Google sends them to. If your site is an AdSense site and it loads slowly then Google will make less revenue. If you advertise your site using pay per click advertising and it loads slowly then you’ll likely have fewer clicks and Google will make less money. See how it works now?
Fix your site load speed or you might start seeing your pages fall in the rankings.
Reputation Management Begins With Brand Monitoring
Reputation management is not rocket science. It’s more like story telling. There’s a beginning, a middle and an end. The beginning is monitoring – monitoring your name brand to see what people are saying about you. The middle is what you do in response to that. And the end is the follow up.
You can go online and start posting all kinds of stuff about yourself and do it in a vacuum. Build a website. You should have one anyway. Start social media marketing. Do a little Twittering. YouTube your videos. And so on. But what are you doing it for? Do you have a plan? A strategy? Are you winging it?
Don’t wing it.
It’s better to start off with a plan. You can modify the plan later if you have to. But start with a plan. And the first item on your plan should be to see what people are saying about you before you start talking about yourself. How you approach your own brand reputation management could have something to do with what’s already being said. You can’t change what you don’t know.
There are some tools available for you to help you do better reputation monitoring. Here are three tools that you should start using right away:
- Google Alerts – It’s free. Enter your name brand and receive e-mails any time someone online mentions it.
- Twitter – Start paying attention to Twitter. If someone is saying something about your brand right now then you want to know about it. Conduct a Twitter search for your brand name. See what’s being said.
- Facebook – Facebook is now the most trafficked website online. If someone is talking about you they are probably talking about you on Facebook.
These won’t be the only tools you’ll use to monitor and manage your reputation online. But they are a good place to start. If you have no online presence yet then start with these three tools. Effective reputation management branches out from there.
Why Pay Per Click Marketing Is Good For Startups
Pay per click marketing has its ups and downs. There is no doubt about it. Clicks can be expensive, you have to deal with click fraud and if your landing page isn’t ready for taking orders and closing sales then you could be paying for clicks that don’t convert. Even worse, you could have a poorly written ad and be paying for unqualified leads. But enough about the dangers. How about the pros?
It’s easier to explain why you need pay per click advertising for a new website by explaining the negatives in search engine optimization and social media marketing. Let’s start with SEO.
You can work your tail off day in and day out and not see any real results from SEO for a year or two. Depending on the competitive nature of your industry it will likely be an uphill climb. That doesn’t mean it won’t be worth it and that you shouldn’t employ search engine optimization in your marketing strategy. You should. But don’t expect immediate results.
Social media marketing has its own challenges. Like SEO, the results will likely not be immediate. You’ll have to work for them. Then there’s the whole tracking of your results issue. But that’s a completely different item.
When you consider that even the best SEOs and social media marketers have to spend hours managing their campaigns over a long term basis just to see the beginning of their results, it becomes much more clear why pay per click marketing is ideal for new start ups. You don’t want to wait forever for results to start coming in. You see want to some ROI soon. The sooner the better. Pay per click is the best option for most start ups.
Should You Use A Content Mill?
Content mills are not new. They are, however, new at dominating the SERPs. I’ll restate that another way.
There was a time long ago (like in the late 1990s) when there were two types of content. There was the high quality content that you’d find on any A-list website and there was less-than-stellar content. Some of that less-than-stellar content was produced by freelance writers or people who wrote SEO content for others to profit from.
In those days the ratio of quality content to the other kind was pretty even. But today, the less-than-stellar content seems to have taken over some corners of the web while quality content struggles to stay afloat.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
There really are just two (legal) ways to acquire quality content for your website.
- You can write it yourself
- You can hire someone to write it for you.
If you hire someone to write your content for you then you’ll still be responsible for its quality. What guidelines do you have for that? If you have none then you’ll have to accept the guidelines of you content provider. Will it be quality content?
This is where webmasters who cannot write themselves can end up in a quandary. If you hire a budget writer then you’ll likely get budget content. For the high quality content you need to spend some money. And there’s the rub. Can you afford the quality content?
This is ultimately your decision to make, but don’t make it blindly. If you want your content to shine then you need to hire a quality content provider.
Checking Your Competition’s Inbound Link Atrophy
We’ve found a cool tool for testing and comparison your link atrophy with that of your competition’s. In case you’re wondering, link atrophy is the process of your inbound links disappearing. Why does that happen?
First, it happens because domain owners that are linking to you have let their domain ownership lapse. If there is no domain then there is no link. That’s probably the number 1 reason why links disappear. But it’s not the only reason.
Another reason you could be seeing your inbound links disappear is because you have a disproportionate number of links from one domain compared to other domains. For awhile – and still today, actually – it was a popular strategy among website owners to build a blog on a separate domain from one’s own website and use it to build inbound links. As a result, these websites built up a large number of inbound links from one domain. That has caused link atrophy and can actually be detrimental to your marketing efforts.
Short term links also disappear after a period of time. Press releases, social bookmarking and other short term links only pass link juice for awhile. Then they disappear.
That’s three reasons for a high link atrophy percentage. If you test your link atrophy then you should also test the link atrophy of your competition and see who is faring better at keeping their links. If your competition is beating you – that is, their link atrophy percentage is lower – then you need to figure out why, and fix it.
Use this tool to check your link atrophy. Then check your competition’s.
Will HTML5 Improve Web Design?
Members of the W3C are muddling their way through an update to HTML, the principle language of the Web. The new version, HTML5, is said to be an improvement over HTML4, the current version of HTML. But is it?
Some of the code elements that are being tested as we speak include:
- <header>
- <footer>
- <audio>
- <video>
- <article>
- <embed>
- <nav>
- <section>
The above HTML tags are currently not included in HTML4. I will say this much. These tags will certainly streamline the code in HTML and make some parts of web design much easier. The big issue will be in the implementation of the new version of hypertext markup language and whether or not HTML4 will still be acceptable to modern browsers.
My guess is that HTML4 will still be acceptable and readable, but I do see a point afar off in the future where HTML4 will be phased out completely and replaced entirely by HTML5. Of course, HTML6 could be in development by then.
What do you think. Will HTML5 make web design easier?
Two Forms Of Viral Marketing Right Under Your Nose
OK, this might come as a shock to you, but two of the best methods of viral marketing are right under your nose and the chances are you’re already using them.
Ready? Brace yourself. The two forms of viral marketing right under your nose (and that you are probably already doing) are:
- Blogging
OK, now tell me you didn’t see that coming.
First, blogging. There are a lot of reasons why blogging can be viewed as one of the best methods of viral marketing. But, truth be told, it’s even better when matched up with other social media marketing methods like Facebook and Twitter. And … real time search has made it even more important because your blog posts can be indexed and set aside as a part of the real time search results giving them even greater exposure than ever before. The only thing you need to do is create great content that others will be happy to share.
Then, there’s Facebook. Facebook is like a party. That means there is more than just one way to get in. Not only can you make friends and share your blog posts and other interests with those friends, but you can also build a fan page with all sorts of great features that will attract followers and you can also build apps that get passed around and used. Both of those Facebook marketing tools can easily make your website an instant viral sensation.
Viral marketing is nothing new. It’s been around awhile in various forms. And blogging and Facebook are not the only methods of viral marketing online. But they are right under your nose and there’s a real good chance you’re already doing them. Need help making them viral?
A Sign Social Media Optimization Is The Future Of Marketing
When a major international political power lays off aging workers because they don’t understand social media, that’s a sign. Of course, we already knew that social media optimization was the future of Web marketing, but this kind of reinforces that message for us.
Why? Why, you might ask, is espionage social media habits a sign that this is the way of the future?
Well, here’s the way I see it. If the spy agencies rely on social media and they are doing it undercover, how much so should those of us with nothing to hide (literally and figuratively) be open to the power of this new technology?
The devil, as they say, is in the details. But social media marketing is still a new form of marketing and is virtually untapped. I see other important agencies the world over going the way of MI5 and migrating its work force to social media marketing and social media operations, including social media optimization. Social media is not just for marketers any more. It’s for all of us.
Is Search Engine Optimization Enough?
So you’ve done a good job getting your web pages to rank in the search engines. You’re at the No. 1 spot with several of your most important keywords and you’re in the No. 2 and No. 3 spots for several others. You’re even getting a good load of traffic from your keywords. But what about sales? Zero. Zilch. Nada. None, right?
Welcome to the Internet marketer’s eternal dilemma. You’ve learned the most important lesson the hard way. Search engine optimization is important, but it’s not the holy grail.
If you expect to make it in the world of Internet marketing, you’ve got to do more than just manage your keywords well. You’ve got to build web pages that sell products and services. You’ve got to convert traffic to sales. And if you don’t, well, then you aren’t really doing what a marketer should be doing. Simply ranking well won’t pay the bills.
Instead of focusing all of your efforts on keywords and search engine rankings, try to figure out what converts traffic to sales. If you can nail that down and still rank your pages well in the search engines then you’ll start making the money. Just don’t expect too much until then.
Is Facebook Good Search Engine Marketing?
Now that Facebook is the most trafficked website online, is it good search engine marketing?
It depends on what you mean by search engine marketing. If you expect that every message you post on Facebook is going to end up in the search engine results, don’t count on it. But if you mean that some aspects of Facebook have a good chance of ending up in the search results then yes, it is good search engine marketing.
Facebook profiles have been indexed for some time now. If you have a Facebook profile and you are active on Facebook then your profile has a good chance of ranking well for your name. At the very least it makes for good reputation management. But profile pages are not the only pages that have the potential to be indexed in the search engines.
Fan pages, too, can get indexed and rank for key terms. Since businesses can start a fan page without having a Facebook profile, it makes for a great opportunity to target a keyword and get a search engine ranking.
Another way that Facebook could be good search engine marketing is through real-time search. Some of the search engines, like Bing and Google, are beginning to index Twitter, Facebook and other other social networks in their real-time indexing and that could mean great search engine marketing.
So what do you think? Will you be using Facebook more?