Social Media: Monitoring Vs. Measurement

Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim asks, Would you search for social media monitoring or social media measurement? It’s a good question and it must be pointed out that the two are distinctly different. However, I wouldn’t say either is more important than the other.

His Twitter audience overwhelmingly favored monitoring. Some of the responses were quite interesting:

@schachin monitoring… social sounds like it needs monitoring not measurement like ROI or CTR

Point well taken, but I think social media needs both.

@tonicarr I think I would be more apt to search “social media analytics”, then I would vote for your “social media measurement”

Here’s another point well taken, but not everyone knows to search for a term like “analytics”. But that’s essentially what the term “measurement” implies.

@SurjGish Depends, monitoring & measurement are 2 different things

Let’s see, where have I heard that before? ;-)

@1000cigarettes would depend on my intentions. measurement if i were looking for my own results, monitoring if looking to see cumulative mentions

This is perhaps the most revealing of all the responses. If I was looking for ways to measure and analyze data acquired from social media then I’d search for “social media measurement”. But if I was looking for ways to monitor mentions of my company brand then “social media monitoring” would be the more appropriate phrase.

@jimmyrey Social Media Monitoring is what I search for when looking for people who want to buy it

I’m not sure why you’d search for that term when looking for people to buy, but it’s an interesting response.

@chriskovac I’d search for “”social media monitoring” — “measurement” seems to vague, especially to people that are just now experimenting

Social media measurement is a rather vague term. If you don’t know what it means or you aren’t sure what it might mean then you likely would not search for it.

@EvanKRob social media monitoring. Seems to project a proactive philosophy where measurement suggests reactive.

Here’s another very telling response. I’m not sure that “social media measurement” is reactive. It depends on whether you intend to act on the data you collect.

@KidQuick my vote goes to social media monitoring. But, my 1st search query on that topic would be something else “social media analytics”

Another interesting response that favors “analytics” over either of the other two terms.

Personally, I think which search term you’d use depends on your knowledge and experience of social media marketing in particular and Internet marketing in general. If you’re familiar with the terms then you’d likely search for the term that is most appropriate to your needs. If you’re only familiar with one of the terms then you’d like search for that one. I doubt that anyone would search for any of the terms unless they’d heard them before somewhere.

But Andy Beal’s point shouldn’t be missed. What’s important when marketing to search engines is what people will search for. You may provide social media analytics, but if more people will search for social media monitoring then you should probably include that in your keyword list and target the phrase.

How Important Is Content Creation?

Without content no website can succeed. It’s like a car without an engine. It just won’t go. So you can bet it’s the most important part of your website development. But should you outsource it or hire an in-house writing team?

There are pros and cons to both. An in-house writing team will be easier and more convenient to communicate with and train. However, it could also be more expensive.

With outsourcing, it’s easier to let someone go if they aren’t producing the quality that you expect. It’s also a good way to test writers that you may be considering for an in-house team. Many times you can get very good quality writers at just a fraction of the cost of hiring someone to work inside your company.

So where do you find writers to produce your content? Here are a few resources you might consider:

• Craigslist
• Freelance websites like Guru and Elance
• Reading blogs within your niche or industry
• Job boards
• Local colleges and universities
• Professional writing associations

It’s important that any writer you hire, whether they be an in-house writer or a freelance writer, have some necessary knowledge. At a minimum they should:

• Be familiar with search engine optimization strategies
• Understand social media marketing
• Know your goals and objectives
• Be familiar with your company style and voice

On that last point, it’s not just important to know your style and voice. A good writer must be able to imitate it. After all, they are producing content for your website and your readers will know if they get it wrong.

Whether you hire an in-house writing team or a group of freelancers, keep in mind that your content is your business. Don’t let them compromise it.

Are You Ready For Location-Based Networking?

Location-based networking, using your cell phone to notify others of your current location so that they meet up with you (for God knows what), is beginning to take off. This is a spin off of the Twitter and Facebook geographic networking phenomenon. So what’s the difference?

With geographic networking you are networking with others in the same city or area. For instance, Facebook has local groups you can join that are based on the city in which you live. It’s one way to use Facebook and has worked well for many small businesses. Twitter, too, has been used for geographic networking.

Location-based networking takes this concept one step further. You can narrow your location down to a specific point within your city and let others know where you are right now. You can then hook up, make a connection, hang out, or whatever it is you choose to do based on your networking. So what’s the benefit?

Actually, there are a number of benefits. If you’ve been following someone on Twitter and you know they are in the same city as you then you find them on Foursquare, one of the many location-based social networking sites to emerge, and you see that they are just around the corner from you having lunch, you could send them a quick message, “Mind if I join you?” Your networking then has just taken on a new dimension. You’ve met in person.

Of course, this can happen in other ways as well. Meetup groups allow local Twitterers to connect in a similar fashion, but usually as a group. With Foursquare you can hook up with a contact one on one. It might mean the difference between closing that sale and letting one slip through.

ChannelWeb lists eight other location-based social networking sites (besides Foursquare). While the idea hasn’t exactly caught on yet, it’s just a matter of time before it does. Are you poised to be there?

Try these eight location-based networks and see what happens.

• Brightkite
• Citysense
• GyPSii
• MobiLuck
• Loopt
• Plazes
• Whrrl
• iPling

And, of course, don’t forget about Foursquare. Take your local social networking one level deep.

It Might Be Easier To Market To Women Online Than Men

Is it easier marketing to women online? It might very well be if you put stock in some statistics provided by comScore in a recent WebProNews article.

Consider these:

• 75.8% of all women visited social media sites in May 2010; 69.7% of men did during the same period.
• Women represent 47.9% of unique visitors to social networking sites yet view 57% of all pages on those sites.
• Women spend 56.6% of the time on social networking sites.
• Women average 5.5 hours on social sites per month while men average just 3.9 hours.
• Women worldwide spend more time on social sites than men and regionally in North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia.
• Women spend 8% more time online than men.
• Globally, women spend 20% more time on retail sites than men.

Considering these figures, it seems that targeting women with your online marketing efforts makes since. While marketing to men can also be a big payoff, if you sell products and services that appeal to women, your chances for success are greater.

Do You Follow Your Competition?

Social networking is not going away. In fact, the most trafficked websites online these days are social networks, including the #1 site – Facebook. These networks are great places to scope out the competition.

In fact, if you aren’t following your competition on the most popular social networks then you probably are not engaged enough online. I’d recommend, at a minimum, following your competition on these three four social networks:

• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• YouTube

But what if you can’t find your competition on these sites?

If your competition isn’t engaged in online social networking then take advantage of this shortsightedness. You’re there so enjoy the competitive advantage. Chance are, however, that you can find at least one of your competitors on these social networks. When you do, follow them. Keep an eye on what they’re up to.

Are these the only social networks to monitor? By all means, no. In fact, if you have industry social networks, forums, blogs or other areas online where members of your profession meet then you should go there and monitor/follow your competition.

Is CSS Important In Web Design?

One of the best developments in web design over the years is the technology called CSS. CSS stands for cascading style sheet. With a CSS file you can make updates to your websites in minutes, updates that used to take hours prior to the development of style sheets.

CSS allows you to make changes to your website across an entire section or your entire site. Rather than go page by page to make changes that affect each page of your website, with CSS you can change the element one time and it changes across your entire website. Isn’t that cool?

There are still some web developers who design pages entirely by HTML using tables. This is a very primitive way to design websites, but it can be done. However, I’d recommend using CSS when practical and possible.

With CSS you can influence the following types of changes sitewide with a single update:

• Navigation menus
• Page background colors
• Font styles and types
• Link attributes
• Page layout
• Column width
• Header and footer details
• Mouseover and hover effects
• Special effects like drop shadows and rounded corners

There’s plenty more you can do with CSS. In fact, you can get quite creative with it. If you are designing web pages today then you must consider CSS in your design strategy. Pages built strictly with HTML are quickly going by the wayside.

Can Viral Marketing Take Place Offline?

Viral marketing – is it just for online marketers or can it take place off line as well?

Viral marketing is just another name for word of mouth. It can manifest itself in any number of ways, online or off line. For instance, online viral marketing can occur when a video grows popular because many people have bookmarked it or shared it with their friends. Maybe they sent the link by e-mail or they bookmarked it on their favorite social bookmarking site. Perhaps they favorited it on YouTube or shared the link on Twitter or Facebook. The fact that a lot of people shared the video in a short period of time means the video has gone “viral”.

This phenomenon takes place off line in the same way. Suppose you open up an ice cream shop in your neighborhood. On your first day of business you get only 10 customers. But all 10 of those customers tell five friends, each of whom visit your store the next day.

That’s 50 customers on day 2. But what if those 5 customers told 10 of their friends about your ice cream shop? They e-mailed their friends, called them on the phone, talked to them at church or school. Wherever they bumped into their friends, you were mentioned.

Now you have 510 people who know about your ice cream shop. On day three suppose that half of your first day customers came back to visit you again. And suppose 20% of your second day customers returned. Furthermore, suppose that half of the people they told about your shop came in as well. On day 3 of your shop you’d have 265 customers. Now you’re really growing!

Now, suppose those customers each told 5 of their friends about you. And they all came into your ice cream shop some time over the seven days. Getting the picture yet?

Viral marketing can, and often does, take place off line as well as online. The key is to provide a remarkable service, something that people will talk about. If you can do that then you’ll go viral, whether you are online or off line.

What Good Is Benchmarking?

Benchmarking is the practice of comparing your business to a cross-section of businesses within the same niche. You don’t get any real data about any of the other businesses. Rather, you only get a compiled data set of all the other businesses with an average, or mean, for comparison purposes. So what good is it?

Benchmarking does have its place, but it has limitations. First, the benefits:

• You get to compare your business to the average business in your niche and see where you fall
• Any data that can be measured can be benchmarked
• Benchmarking can take place over a short term or a long period of time
• Information you gather from benchmarking can be used to better market your business and position it within the marketplace

Now what are the drawbacks?

• As competitive intelligence, you can’t get any real data on any specific business
• If you don’t know what you are looking for then you can easily misinterpret the data
• You cannot benchmark data that you can not measure in some way

Benchmarking is useful for a specific purpose – it tells you where you stack up against your competition based on industry averages. In other words, if you have 5 key competitors and their average sales is 10% higher than yours then you know that you are 10% behind the average business in your niche. What you don’t know is which competitors are higher or lower than you (there’s other data for that).

When you want to see where you stack up against the average business in your niche, benchmarking is an excellent marketing tool.

17 Rules Of Social Media Optimization

Social Media Optimization (SMO) is a phrase that was coined by search pioneer Rohit Bhargava in 2006. Since then the term has grown and expanded and millions of people are now practicing this science (art?) every day. Many practitioners, I presume, may not even know where the term came from.

Rohit originally introduced 5 rules of social media optimization. Then someone added a 6th and 7th. Someone else came along and added rules 8 through 11. Another pioneer amended the list to include rules 12 and 13. Then there were rules 14, 15 and 16. Rohit rounded it out to include the 17th rule. And, of course, there have been many translations into languages other than English.

The purpose of this blog post is two-fold:

1. To recognize the SMO pioneers who introduced and expanded this ever-evolving area of Internet marketing;
2. To list all 17 rules in one place for easy reference.

With that in mind, here is the list of 17 rules of social media optimization and recognition of the person who introduced each rule to the growing conversation.

17 Rules Of Social Media Optimization

1. Increase Your Linkability – In a sense, SMO is SEO. If you do it right then your content will be more linkable. Any inbound links you gain will increase your SEO advantage. (Rohit Bhargava)
2. Make Tagging And Bookmarking Easy – This rule is so commonplace that many people do it without knowing they’re practicing SMO. (Rohit Bhargava)
3. Reward Inbound Links - People who link to you are helping you out. It’s only right that you should reward them for their kindness. (Rohit Bhargava)
4. Help Your Content Travel – Put it out there and watch it fly. (Rohit Bhargava)
5. Encourage The Mashup – This one has been a bit controversial as there are still companies online who are stuck in the traditional mode of thinking about content ownership and copyright infringement. While those are legitimate concerns, a reasonable letting go of your content to allow it to evolve into something more powerful and with SEO and SMO benefits attached is a good thing. Don’t fight it. (Rohit Bhargava)
6. Be A User Resource Even If It Doesn’t Help You – Providing unselfish value has a way of coming back to reward you. It’s the old “what goes around, comes around rule”. Or call it karma, if you wish. Either way, become a resource for others without regard to how it benefits you and you’ll see the benefits come back manifold. (Jeremiah Owyang)
7. Reward Helpful And Valuable Users – If your site visitors take the time to interact with you and leave valuable comments and boost the community then show your appreciation by giving rewards. A simple “thank you” is often enough. (Jeremiah Owyang)
8. Participate – Social media is not just about producing your own content. Interact with other people’s content as well. Be a contributor across multiple websites. (Cameron Olthuis)
9. Know How To Target Your Audience – Instead of just throwing paint on the wall and seeing what sticks, interact with your audience in their hangouts. Otherwise, you’re wasting your own time. (Cameron Olthuis)
10. Create Content - It may seem like a no-brainer, but if you don’t create then you can’t optimize. Social media is as much about creating content as it is about distributing it and it is just as much about creating content as SEO is. (Cameron Olthuis)
11. Be Real – You can put on an act for only so long and when you are discovered your reputation is shot. Be genuine, be real. (Cameron Olthuis)
12. Be Humble – Be respectful of others and don’t get a bighead. No one likes a self-congratulatory know it all. (Loren Baker)
13. Try New Things – Just because there are rules doesn’t mean they should always be followed with no innovation. The rules are always changing anyway so embrace the change and try something new. (Loren Baker)
14. Develop A Strategy – Don’t just wing it. Have a plan and stick to it. (Lee Odden)
15. Choose Your SMO Tactics Wisely – Just because someone else is doing it doesn’t mean you should too. Not every tactic will work for every business. Analyze your strategy and choose the tactics that show the most promise for reaching your target audience. (Lee Odden)
16. Make SMO A Part Of Your Every Day Process – Add it to your list of things to do each day. Make it a part of your best practices. (Lee Odden)
17. Don’t Be Afraid To Let Go Of The Message – Back to Rohit Bhargava. If you have a great idea, let others own it. Let it go and develop on its own, just like Rohit Bhargava did with Social Media Optimization.

I hope these 17 rules of social media optimization are helpful to you. Social media is about three things really: 1) Creating Content, 2) Sharing Content, and 3) Distributing Content. It’s all about the content and what you can do with it.

What Is The Value Of A Link?

Infographics can be helpful or just a sad attempt at link bait. But one thing is for sure, if they are helpful to others then they can helpful to you. This infographic by Vertical Measures illustrates that very well.

What makes this infographic so useful is it’s awesome simplicity. Right away you’ll notice that there are two categories of links based on this graphic. There are PR values and there are link types. The graphic breaks link types down into these categories:

• Content
• Blog/Forum comments
• Purchased
• Reciprocal
• Embedded
• Reclaimed
• Natural
• Requested

But which ones are the most important, or most valued?

This is really subjective, but Vertical Measures ranks them according to two metrics – difficulty and quality. In general, the more difficult it is to obtain a link of a particular type then the higher quality that link will be, which translates into more value for the link builder.

From easiest to most difficult, VM ranks them this way: Content Distribution, Blog and Forum Comments and Purchased Links are easiest to obtain. Next are reciprocal links. The third level of difficulty is populated by social media links, embedded content and reclaimed links. Natural links are the next most difficult to obtain and the most difficult links of all are link requests. This is almost a no-brainer.

From lowest to highest again, quality scores are broken down this way:

• Reciprocal links are in the lowest position (note that they are second level in order of most difficult or easiest to obtain)
• Purchased links and comments are slightly higher quality than reciprocal links
• Distributed content and social media links are next on the quality scale
• Embedded content is a bit higher quality than social media and content distribution links
• Finally, the highest quality links are reclaimed, natural and requested

Notice some slight jumbling in the order but generally following the same parallel between quality and ease of obtaining?

The most interesting part of the value score that I find, however, is the break down of PR values. A PR1 link, for instance, is the equivalent of 11 average links, according to the infographic. That begs the assumption that the PR1 link you get is above average. The question is, What’s average? Would that be a 3 on the quality scale? If so then that would include social media and distributed content links. But some of those types of links can themselves be extraordinary, can’t they?

Vertical Measures places a PR10 link to have the equivalent value of 28,080,881 average links. In other words, get one PR10 link and that could be enough to push you up to a respectable search engine ranking.

Getting the picture yet?

I think the point is to get you thinking about what types of links you should be going after. Personally, I think you should pursue any links you can get. Many Internet marketers in recent years have tried discouraging their clients from chasing reciprocal links because they aren’t valued as highly as one-way links. But the fact is they do carry value. Get a reciprocal link from a PR7 site when your site is a lowly PR4 then that will be a valuable link.

I think you can over think the question. To build a solid link portfolio you need to build diversity into it. That means not focusing on any one particular type of link or link from sites with a high PR. After all, PR1 links carry value too. And some day that PR1 site might become a PR8 site. Your link will still be there.

When it comes to link building, just do it. Do it smartly, but don’t over think it.

Skype Offers Pay-Per Call Competitive Advantage

If you’re familiar with VOIP technology (Voice Over Internet Protocol) then you’ve likely heard of Skype. While there are more costly VOIP services than Skype, Skype does offer an affordable small business alternative that is hard to argue with. It’s free.

Though Skype has been free  for the longest time, the company is now providing a pay-per-call service for website owners, which begs the question: If Skype has been free then why would small business owners pay to use it?

It is a good question and the answer is just as good: Because, until now, there has been little motivation for mass use of Skype for individual purposes. The reason is because users have to download the Skype software to their computers in order to make a call. Most people haven’t seen the necessity of doing that just yet.

So why offer Skype on your website then? Because it could give you the competitive advantage and you have nothing to lose.

Since Skype is free to download and free to use, there is nothing to lose in offering it to your customers. Put the Skype button on your website and anyone who has the software on their computer can call you – for free. Customer who don’t have Skype, and don’t want to download the software, can still contact you through current means of contact (contact form, e-mail, 1-800 #, traditional phone, etc.).

The benefit to you is that you can add Skype to your website and it costs you nothing unless someone uses it. They click the button, call you on Skype and you pay only when the call connects. Your customer gets free and immediate attention. It could mean the difference between gaining a sale and losing one.

Learn more about Skype’s pay-per-call service and take your Internet marketing to a new level.

Rankings Vs. Conversions: Is Your Search Engine Marketing Working?

Many search engine marketers spend most of their time chasing the elusive search engine ranking, hoping that if they just SEO their website enough then it will magically appear in the No. 1 spot on Google for their target search term. Unfortunately, it rarely happens that way.

You can rank No. 1 for any search term if you work hard enough. But will you make any money from that ranking? Bottom line: If your web page does rank No. 1 for an important keyword or search term but doesn’t convert any visitors to traffic then you aren’t any better off than if your web page doesn’t rank anywhere at all. You’re still making no money.

Quite frankly, you’re better off with a Page 5 search result that converts at 50% than you are a No. 1 search result that converts at 0%.

You might want to read that sentence again.

Let’s put it into raw numbers. Let’s say your No. 1 search result delivers you 5,000 unique visitors per month but none of those visitors convert to customers. Either you’ve targeted the wrong keyword or your landing page isn’t written for conversions. That’s a problem.

On the other hand, let’s say your Page 5 search result sends you only 10 unique visitors per month but converts 50% of those visitors. Now you’re getting 5 new customers per month. Isn’t 5 better than 0?

Even if your No. 1 search result converts 1 percent of its traffic, 5 new customers from 5,000 visitors is nothing to get excited about. You’re still only converting 1% of your traffic, compared to 50% from the lower ranking page. It’s all in the numbers, man.

Instead of focusing on search results, you should be focusing on building landing pages that convert well. Optimize them for search traffic, sure. But if you are focused heavily on building links and optimizing for keywords and you forget to optimize for conversions then you’ve wasted a lot of time. And money.

Reputation Monitoring: Where Reputation Management Begins

No reputation management plan is going to succeed if you don’t start at the beginning. And where is that? With reputation monitoring.

So what is reputation monitoring? Reputation monitoring is using Internet tools to monitor what your customers, clients, competition, media and others in the marketplace are saying about you and your company. While monitoring your reputation you should not just be concerned with your company name. You should be concerned with key people within your organization and each of your brand names.

The most basic and free form of reputation monitoring is Google Alerts. You can monitor what others are saying about you relatively easily. Simply create an alert with the word or phrase that you want to monitor. Here are some ideas to help you create alerts that will seamlessly allow you to monitor your reputation:

• Company name
• Tagline
• Motto or slogan
• Subsidiary names
• Name of every brand of product you manufacture or market
• The names of all C-level executives for parent company and subsidiaries
• The name of your media representative or PR manager
• Key phrases associated with each of your products and company
• Names of known key competitors and outspoken opponents
• Perceived weaknesses in your brand and company name along with subsidiaries

These are your basic reputation monitoring needs. You want to find out what people are saying about you, your company and your products. After you have a handle on what is being said you can then begin to plan a reputation management campaign to address marketplace concerns.

Do You Subscribe To Your Competitors Marketing Offers?

Your competitors are full of valuable information and believe it or not, they just can’t wait to shove it down your throat. You can subscribe to their blogs through RSS feeds or email, or you can become a subscriber to their newsletters, and you can become followers or friends on any of their social media presences. The danger is that you’ll gain too much information.

Knowing what your competition is doing is a necessity and always has been. The best offline businesses are the ones that have always strategically placed themselves to best advantage – and you can’t accomplish that without knowing where you competition is, and what they are doing. The online business world is no different. What is different are the methods used to obtain some of that information.

You can research and spend some time spying on your competitors – or you can let them send you information. The reality is that you will need to do both. Your own research will uncover a lot of the un-publicized data ( such as keywords) – but that flood of information coming out in the form of blog posts and newsletters for example, can also help to build a picture  of where they are at and what sort of threat they present to your business.

Internet marketing can be a two way street – while you are out there promoting your business, you need to be aware of how your competitors are promoting theirs. Are you subscribing to any of the information that your they provide? You should – it’s free and they can’t wait to send it to you!

Competitive Intelligence Needs The Right Tools

Competitive intelligence relies on information, more precisely, data in the form of raw numbers or words. Just looking at a competitors pages can provide you with a lot of information, however, knowing what keywords they may be targeting, who is linking in to them, and what sort of traffic they may be receiving can all be important to your forward planning.  To obtain this information, you need a good set of tools – a set of tools that you are comfortable in using.

When it comes to SEO for example, Firefox is generally the browser used by most professionals. There is huge assortment of add-ons available for Firefox, all free and many of them fairly easy to use. The hardest part is actually building your tool box of tools – sorting the good from the bad, then learning how to gain the most from each tool.

Forums can be a good starting point. Talking to others, finding out which tools they prefer and why. You can also find some good tips on how to get the best our of a particular tool.  Visiting mozilla.org is another good place to start. You can search the database of add-ons, many of which have user reviews along with information on what each add-on can do.

Learn about each tool before putting it to use otherwise you will either not be getting the best out of the tool, or you will be receiving misinformation rather than valuable information. Used effectively, you can learn a lot about your competitors web sites, who links to them, and how well placed they are in the search results.

How Twitter Can Be Good SEO

Have you seen one of your tweets hit page 1 for a key search term? If so then you understand how it can be good SEO. If not then pay attention because this isn’t rocket science.

Of course, not everyone is doing it either.

Twitter results are now a part of all the major search engine results in real time. But even outside of real time you can rank for keywords on Twitter as well as on secondary social networks.

A secondary social network is a social media site you are a member of that automatically updates any time you update your Twitter feed. Many social media sites allow you to sync your profile with your Twitter feed so that your tweets automatically appear on those sites. Every tweet that is fed to a secondary social network has the potential to rank in the search engines.

When you write your tweets, keep your keywords in mind. Target them just as you would in a blog post or any other online content. You might just find your tweets appearing on the first page of search results at all of the search engines.

5 Internet Marketing Terms You Should Know

If you want to become an Internet marketer, whether your interest is in affiliate marketing, e-mail marketing or you intend to promote your small business through Internet marketing strategies, then you need to become familiar with Internet marketing terms. Here are 5 terms every Internet marketer should know before starting their IM career.

• Keyword – What’s a keyword? If you don’t know what that means then you’ll have a difficult time figuring out how to market yourself online. It’s a very basic concept and an important one. A keyword is any word that you would like your website to rank for in the search engines.
• Search Engine Optimization – Also called SEO, for short. Search engine optimization is the utilization of keywords and links to help your web pages rank better in the search engines.
• Social Media Optimization – You’ve no doubt heard of social media. Maybe you’ve heard of social media marketing. But have you heard of social media optimization? This is the practice of producing your content in such a way that it has an increased chance of spreading itself around in social media circles.
• Link Building – You cannot maximize your SEO efforts without inbound links. These are links that point to your website without a reciprocal link back to the linking site. Also called one-way links. Link building is the process webmasters utilize to build their one-way link portfolio.
• Pay Per Click Advertising – Pay per click advertising, or PPC, is a form of online paid advertising where you bid on keywords and you pay for the advertising after your target audience clicks on the ad and visits your website. Other forms of PPC-like advertising include pay per action (PPA) and pay per view (PPV), or CPM (cost per thousand views).

These are not, by any means, the only terms you should be familiar with. There are others – viral marketing, video marketing, HTML, PHP, CSS (cascading style sheets), and many more – but these 5 Internet marketing terms are so basic that no one should start their Internet marketing plans without being familiar with them.

Take the time to learn if you want to earn.

Competitive Intelligence Techniques

There are two types of competitive intelligence:

1. Battlefield Intelligence
2. Noncompetitive Intelligence

Let’s start with Battlefield Intelligence. I call it this because its purpose is to help you gather information that will lead to stealing market share from your competition. This is the most common type of competitive intelligence though it may not always be the most productive. In order to succeed, your intelligence must be actionable and contain enough information to help you develop better products, better deliverables, better marketing and better customer service. It might even require you to develop new products to match your competition one on one.

Noncompetitive intelligence consists of strategies and techniques that do not necessarily impact your competitive stance. However, they are important strategies and lead to the gathering of important information to help you improve your internal processes.

The second type of intelligence, noncompetitive intelligence can consist of:

• Forecasting and predicting
• Describing your current business environment
• Challenge existing assumptions
• Identify your company’s weaknesses and propose solutions
• Point to strategies that are outdated or that may need adjusting
• Provide information to help you formulate intelligent questions for review and analysis

There are many different sources of information and techniques for gathering it. There are electronic sources of information and manual sources. You have in-house assets as well out external assets that you may be able to query for actionable intelligence. Furthermore, your intelligence gathering initiatives may be ongoing or short term.

One method of gathering intelligence about the marketplace is market research. A market research team can ask consumers what they think about certain aspects of your business environment, including strengths and weaknesses of your product and strengths and weaknesses of your competition’s products.

You can also collect the sales and marketing literature of your competition, which will give you some insight into how they are reaching their market and how they are communicating their own perceived strengths.

Academic libraries usually contain articles and abstracts written by industry professionals. Read what your competition has to say about important issues related to your market.

These are just a few of the techniques available in helping you collect actionable competitive intelligence. The first step is to decide just what you need the information for and what you will do with it once you gather it.

The Importance Of Opt-In Placement

Simply placing your opt-in box on your website and hoping you get sign ups isn’t a very effective plan. Lots of website owners have found out the hard way. Instead, why not take the time to learn the optimal place for your opt-in box so that you can increase your subscribers and increase your revenue?

Is there an optimal place?

To be sure, it is relative, but that doesn’t mean inconsequential. There have been eye studies that show where most website visitors view a web page and where the human eye is more likely to go. In essence, the two hottest spots on any web page are on the top left and on the bottom right.

So does that mean that is where you should place your opt-in box? Not necessarily.

The general rule of thumb is to put your most important content in the hot spots and fill everything else around them. You want your web pages to “breathe”. That is, you don’t want them cluttered. So make sure there is some white space.

However, you want to make maximum use of the space that you do have. And that means putting your most important content items in the hot spots and placing other items around them ensuring that your overall design is attractive, uncluttered and puts your visitors’ eyes right where you want them most.

Web design is about more than just making your site pretty. It’s also about making it functional – and profitable.

3 Must-Do Things For Going Viral On StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is a social media service that allows web users an opportunity to show their like for a web page by “thumbing” it up or to show their dislike by “thumbing” it down. The service has a reputation for two things:

• Sending lots of traffic to many websites
• Being responsible for high bounce rates and low conversion rates

Many webmasters use that second point to justify not using StumbleUpon at all, but that is a msitake. It is true that conversion rates are low and bounce rates are high as many people will stumble a site sent to them by a friend then immediately leave without really reading what they stumbled. Of course, users on other social media sites do the same thing.

But it is possible to go viral on StumbleUpon. And when you do you’ll be really excited that you got some Stumble notoriety.

If you do the following three things on StumbleUpon you’ll greatly increase your chances of going viral and getting a reaction from your Stumble traffic.

1. Write a killer headline. Content is good, but no matter how well written and compelling your content is, if your headline doesn’t grab people’s attention then they will never read your content. Make your headline outstanding.
2. Get rid of the popups. Most people don’t like them and if your site is full of popup advertising and other annoying web pests then Stumblers will not give it a thumbs up.
3. Be active. Don’t just stumble your own content. Be active in stumbling the content of your friends and other users. Use the StumbleUpon toolbar to send a note to your most trusted friends about a page you want stumbled. Let someone else be the discoverer. If you thumbs up your own content and that’s all you do then you could get banned.

Going viral on StumbleUpon is not as hard as it seems. It is possible, but you’ve got to have great content that starts with a great headline and a clean site free of annoying ads.

Will Twitter Kill Your URL Shortener?

One thing that all of us who use Twitter will need to keep an eye on in the near future is whether or not the URL shortening service we are using on Twitter is going to survive Twitter’s growth. According to Website Magazine – August 2010 issue – Twitter will be rolling out its own URL shortener soon. If that happens, look out. We could see an epidemic of URL shortening services going under.

If that happens then there will be thousands of links from tweets to web pages that will be broken. You’ll either have to go back and change the URL shortening service for those tweets or just eat it. Of course, if that happens then Twitter could automatically default to its own URL shortener.

If you use the same URL shortening service for other social media sites that you use for Twitter and Twitter drives that service out of business then you’ll also lose the links from those other services. There likely will not be any default to fall back on at those services – depending on the service, of course.

One of the benefits to Twitter’s URL shortening service will be metrics. You’ll be able to see how many people are clicking the link, retweeting the link and interacting with it in other ways. It’s possible that this could be a paid service so not everyone will have access to the metrics. Possibly. Keep in mind that I don’t have inside information.

Still, if Twitter does go public with its own URL shortening service, you can expect the way we all tweet to change accordingly.

Why URL Shorteners Are Bad For SEO

It seems that Twitter has made URL shorteners popular again. But are they good?

Naturally, many URL shortening services do offer value-added benefits that you won’t get with your traditional long URLs. The primary benefit to any URL shortening service, of course, is that you don’t have to pass along those godawful long URLs that could take up three lines or more in print. And if that’s the reason you are using the service then more power to you. It’s a useful benefit.

But what you should know about URL shorteners is that they are not good for SEO. Use them sparingly.

Think about this. When a visitor to your website clicks a link you created with an URL shortening service, they are being redirected to the URL shortening service’s website then on to the end page where you want them to land. The visitor actually leaves your website (or the website of origin) for a few seconds while the URL shortening service redirects them to the destination page. Because of this redirect, the link juice that flows from the web page of origin flows to the URL shortening service’s website, not to yours.

You know that some of the important and necessary SEO elements are inbound links with relevant anchor text. You won’t get those benefits with URL shortening so you should weigh the importance of the service against any search engine optimization benefits you desire before committing to URL shortening.

Search Engine Marketing – Let Me Count The Ways

When you survey the field of search engine marketing (SEM) it’s easy to get lost. There are so many different ways to get to the end goal. Sometimes you can achieve the same results using different strategies. Which one is right for you depends a lot on preference and style. There may not be a right way and a wrong way.

Search engine marketing has expanded a lot in recent years. There are many ways to go about conducting a search engine marketing campaign. Here are some of the ways you can use search engine marketing to boost your business’s performance in the search engines.

• Search engine optimization – Yes, good old-fashioned SEO still works as a search engine marketing tool.
• Pay per click marketing – PPC falls into the category of paid search and it’s one of the fastest ways to achieve great results through SEM.
• Blog marketing – Blogging has become so popular in recent years that everyone knows what it is and you’d think the blog marketing arena is so saturated there’s not any room for more. But there is. And there’s always room for a better one in your niche.
• Content marketing – Commonly called article marketing, content marketing is a little bit broader of a term that also includes marketing with articles. Effective content marketing includes using your network of like-minded website owners to market your content through their sites as well as your own.
• Social bookmarking – Save your best pages on sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit and watch your traffic, and your links, soar.
• Link building – Building links is one of those things that everyone should be doing on an ongoing basis.
• Social networking – Just because it’s social doesn’t mean there aren’t search engine marketing benefits. Add a well-optimized Facebook page to your online portfolio and you’ll know what I mean.
• Video marketing – Marketing through videos is just now reaching the beginning of its run, but it will soon be one of the most important search engine marketing channels available.
• Viral marketing – Not so much a channel as a strategy, viral marketing is much misunderstood. But it’s still a great search engine marketing strategy.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. There are literally hundreds of search engine marketing strategies you can try: Squidoo lenses, HubPages, Knol pages, Blogger blogs (and not just as blogs), customized search engines, Google Apps, etc.

The key take away here is to pick your poison and use it to boost your search engine rankings. Stay away from risky maneuvers and focus on the tried and true.

How To Manage And Enhance Your Reputation With Links

One aspect of link building that rarely gets talked about is online reputation management. Of course, in many ways, the reputation management benefits of link building are ancillary – they aren’t the main goal. But if you are cognizant of the impact that links can have on your reputation then you can influence your reputation online just by adding a few inbound links to your important reputation enhancement web pages.

For instance, let’s take your About page. Your About page likely has information about your professional reputation that you want your site visitors to know. But do you promote it?

Many webmasters spend a lot of time building inbound links to their important landing pages, as they should, but neglect to build links to their Contact page and About page. Instead, they let their internal website links serve as the means of driving traffic to those pages. But you can actually build reputation enhancing links to those pages as well. How?

Here are a few ways you can build inbound links to your reputation enhancement pages and use link building as a reputation management tool:

• Press Releases - When you send out a press release to online press release distribution websites, make sure that you include a link to your About page with important anchor text regarding your name or reputation. You might include a sentence like this in your press release:  “(Your Name) is a recognized expert on guinea pigs.” Let “expert on guinea pigs” be your anchor text.
• Social Networking Profiles - When you link to your website from your social networking profiles, link to your About page. You might say something like, “For more information about raising guinea pigs see (Your Name)’s online bio.” Link “(Your Name)’s online bio” and let it serve as your anchor text.
• Social Bookmarking – Why not just social bookmark your About page at some of the popular social bookmarking sites? Ask your friends and most valued customers to do so as well.
• Like Button – Add a Facebook Like button to your About page.
• Request Links – Request links to your About page. You’d be surprised how many people actually will link to your About page if you ask them to. You might even provide them with some choices of anchor text for their links.
• Blog And Forum Signatures – When you comment on blogs and forums, occasionally link to your About page instead of your home page and other landing pages. You should vary your links anyway. Just be sure to throw your About page into the mix with appropriate reputation enhancing anchor text.

Reputation management is becoming more and more important online. Why not use the activities you are already engaged in to improve your reputation and the perception that others will have of you and your business?

Is PPC Like Renting Traffic?

I read somewhere on another blog (don’t remember where now) that running a PPC campaign is like renting traffic. The analogy makes sense, but if you think that renting is a bad thing then think again. Renting traffic can actually pay off.

There is a difference between renting and owning, however. While PPC is like renting traffic, SEO is more like owning it. Here’s how they differ.

When you spend $100 on a PPC campaign and receive 100 visitors to your website then you’ve paid $1 per visitor to read your offer. But let’s say that you close 1 in 10 of your visitors or, to say it another way, you have a 10% conversion ratio. Each sale costs you $10. But you only pay for that sale whenever you have your PPC ads turned on. Stop the advertising and you stop the sales and the traffic.

Measuring ROI is a different thing altogether. Let’s say you sell pink widgets for $20 each. For each sale you pay $10 to obtain you also earn $20 to close. But that’s not your profit. You also have material costs. Let’s say it costs you $3 to make your widgets. Your profit is $7 for each widget you sell. There’s your ROI.

SEO works a little differently. Let’s say you pay an SEO professional $500 to optimize your website. Your conversion ratio is still 10% and let’s say that you get 1,000 visitors from the search engines each month. That means you make 100 sales every month and at $20 each you earn $2,000 on your search engine traffic the first month. That’s an ROI of $1,200 the first month and $1,700 every month after that.

Obviously, the money you can earn from SEO has a lot greater potential than the money you can earn from PPC. But, realistically, you have to wait 2-6 months for that SEO traffic to become profitable. If that $500 investment doesn’t start paying off for 6 months then you do not realize an ROI for 6 months on your investment whereas you can realize an ROI on your PPC the very same month. It’s a lot more immediate.

Question: Would you rather earn $70 additional income today or $1,700 additional income 6 months from now?

Consider that your $70 ROI will add up to $420 over a 6-month period. If you re-invest that money into other vehicles then $420 could turn into more. So don’t knock the lower numbers today that you can earn from PPC. I’d recommend that you utilize both channels – PPC and SEO – for your online marketing efforts.

BTW, the numbers in these examples are not reflective of actual sales and ROI numbers. They could be higher or lower for both PPC and SEO. Some companies actually earn higher ROIs from PPC.

Are Facebook Pages Good Internet Marketing Tools?

You’ve likely heard a lot about Facebook pages. In fact, if you are a small business owner then you’ve probably heard a lot of good things about them and likely have heard that you just have to have one. Well, it’s not quite that simple.

Yes, Facebook pages are good Internet marketing tools if you implement them effectively, but they are not necessarily good marketing tools for every type of business. Some businesses wouldn’t do well with them at all.

For instance, if you manufacture commercial aircraft engines then a Facebook page probably won’t work for you.

One way to tell whether or not a Facebook page is the Internet marketing tool for you is to evaluate your target market and assess whether or not that market is likely to be found on Facebook. If you don’t see the opportunities for engaging your audience through Facebook then it is highly unlikely that a Facebook page will be a big payoff for you.

On the other hand, if your audience is on Facebook and has a proven history of interacting with brands through Facebook pages then it just might be a useful tool for you. But you still need to evaluate the value of the Facebook page to your unique business environment. Do you have someone on your staff with the skills to build your page? Will they have time to maintain the upkeep of the page? If the answer to both of these questions is no then you might have to hire someone to do these things for you. Can you afford to do that?

While Facebook pages are effective Internet marketing tools, like all tools, you have to know how to use them, have the means and wherewithal to do so and understand where you are going with them. If you’ve done the proper research and have decided that a Facebook page is an Internet marketing strategy you wish to pursue then plan it well and execute it even better.

2 Sources of Free Competitive Information

If you want quick, clear and concise competitive intelligence information then there are two online sources that are easy to use and very affordable. They’re free.

One of them you are likely familiar with. The other one you may not have heard of, but it’s still just as useful. In fact, the reliability of the information may actually be better than that of the first source. So what are these two sources of free competitive information?

• Wikipedia – Everyone knows about Wikipedia. That is, everyone who’s conducted a Google search. You’ve likely seen Wikipedia land at the top of the search results a time or two. While not all of the information to be found in Wikipedia is 100% reliable, you can usually pick up some good competitive information about the companies in your niche. But not always. If you are the creator of a new niche of business then you won’t have competitors, but you get my drift. You can find Wikipedia here.
• The Free Library – The Free Library is an article directory unlike any other article directory. Most of the articles are original content. And they’re also valuable pieces of information. You can search for articles on any topic by topic, author, title and keyword. It’s like a virtual library right at your fingertips. Find information on anyone or anything. You can visit The Free Library right here.

When it comes to competitive intelligence, don’t leave these two free online sources out of your research.

Content Or Web Design? Which Is More Important?

When it comes to online marketing and web design there are certain things that every marketer considers to be absolutely true, then there are certain things that are debatable. One of the things that often comes up for debate is the relationship between design and content. Which do you favor?

Before you answer, consider some of these points:

• An ugly website can still make money
• If you do not capture your visitor’s attention in 3 seconds then they will go elswhere
• No one buys anything online until they read something that makes them click the Buy button
• Pictures tell a thousand words
• You don’t need a thousand words to sell
• All other things being equal, people will spend more time on a pretty website than on an ugly one

Some of these statements may seem contradictory, but each step on its own is worth a goldmine of wisdom. But what do you make of “an ugly website can still make money” and “people will spend more time on a pretty website than an ugly one?”

Can both be true?

Yes, actually, they can. You need to keep in mind that content is what sells, not design. However, a beautiful web design can enhance a user’s experience. If your site visitors are turned off by the design of your website then they may not stick around to read the content. But if they do read the content and it doesn’t sell them on your products or services then your design won’t either.

Bottom line, web design and content go hand in hand. Make them work together.

Why Hotmail Is A Viral Marketing Pioneer

It is generally recognized that Hotmail was the first successful viral marketer. Started in 1996 by two visionaries of Internet marketing, the plan was simply to provide free e-mail addresses to anyone who wanted them. Whenever someone signed up for an account and began sending e-mails there was a message at the bottom of the e-mail inviting the recipient to get a free e-mail address. The more people who used the service the more Hotmail received free advertising and the more people signed up to use the service. It was an overnight phenomenon.

Hotmail was also followed by other copycat services – free web-based e-mail services. And that was really the beginning of viral marketing. After Hotmail, other marketers began to see opportunities to promote themselves for free or to get other people to promote their offerings for free.

Viral marketing works on that principle. Get others to do your marketing for you and if it is successful then an idea can take off and spread virally in a very short period of time.

Hotmail may have been first, but there are other ideas that have gone viral since Hotmail. YouTube has been instrumental in seeing certain videos spread rapidly. Other social networks like Digg, MySpace, Facebook and Twitter have also done well in helping ideas to spread. And, of course, e-mail is a viral marketing mainstay.

No matter the medium, if you have a hot idea and you can get that idea to catch on then you can have a viral marketing sensation.

Google Places Optimization

A few weeks ago Google rolled out a new beta within its Local Business product, which it changed to the name of Google Places. They began allowing select cities to offer Tags on their Google Places listing. Now, Tags has been rolled out to all 50 U.S. states.

Tags can be used when your local business has a video, offers coupons, wants to showcase a restaurant menu, feature photos, or just highlight its website. In essence, it’s another way to remain competitive. There’s just one catch.

These Tags aren’t being used to affect search engine rankings.

So why do them then? Well, you should use Tags on your Google Places listings to make them stand out more. Your Tags will allow you to present your Google Places listing in a unique way and showcase features of your business website or online presence that will make your business stand out from the competition. There’s really no better optimization than that.

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