Blog

In our recent six-part video presentation, Twitter and Blogging for Business, we explore the connection between blogs, Twitter, and how the two forms of social media can partner together to greatly benefit any business’ internet marketing campaign. Blogs and Twitter, a micro-blogging platform that allows users to share information with messages using 140 characters or less, have been used successfully by entrepreneurs and corporations alike to enhance various attributes of their business, including customer service, branding and sales. Twitter and its integral functions are spelled out so that the components of this micro-blogging platform are emphasized in order to highlight its importance as an internet marketing tool.

Twitter and Blogging for Business continues on and provides a rundown on the benefits of blogging: Businesses can publish content regarding their products or mission while inspiring interaction with consumers on blogs, and blogs are assets to businesses when used for direct communication, brand building, search engine marketing and reputation management. Given that tweeting and blogging both encourage customer participation while working to solidify a business’ branding strategies and promotional outreach online, it’s a given that when Twitter and blogs pair up the results are extremely beneficial for a business. Twitter and Blogging for Business concludes with this point, that tweeting and blogging together make for effective internet marketing tools that generate buzz for any kind of business while improving and building upon a business’ presence online.

Courtesy of recent trends in social media, truncated, shorter blog postings are proving to be useful for those looking to embed links and information in Facebook statuses, Tweets and away messages. Several free link-chopping sites are out there to transform a lengthy URL into a web address that clocks in at 25 characters or less. Sure, this is a great way to promote your link and get it out there on multiple social media networks, but what about SEO? What about stats, numbers, and tracking the success of your website now that you’ve significantly shrunken a link to it?

Enter: Bit.ly. Unlike other link-shortening sites, there’s now a new option that enables viewers to see the statistics and clicks to the link in question that’s as simple as typing in an extra character. After you shorten your link using Bit.ly, all you need to do is add a plus sign (“+”) to the end of your URL: For example, instead of leaving your Bit.ly link as “http://bit.ly/14d7yE”, you would type “http://bit.ly/14d7yE+” in order to see all the tabulated statistics regarding the traffic your link has seen.

This helpful hint was provided by Danny Dover in his talk, “Make SEO Tools Work For You” at the SEOmoz 2009 PRO Training Series in Seattle. For more helpful SEO and search marketing-related tips and tricks, SEOmoz is a proven dependable resource and forum for online marketing professionals.

Advanced Media Productions has put together a video introduction to Internet Marketing for entrepreneurs and small businesses. Entitled “Using Internet Marketing to Build Your Business”, this presentation, taken from a seminar sponsored by Middlesex Savings Bank for their Business Customers, outlines the components of internet marketing while also defining internet marketing practices such as various types of search, digital asset optimization, optimizing social media on a local scale, and tracking and reporting on traffic, landing pages and conversion rates. Other components of the presentation focus heavily on Google and Google’s impact on local search, especially when it comes to organic search optimization and PPC [Pay Per Click] campaigns. Advanced Media Productions introduces features in Google, such as the Local-10 Box, the Info Box, and what you can do through optimizing content and PPC campaigns to ensure that your business snags a top ranking in your local search marketing campaign.

The rest of the series continues on to define, distinguish and explain other aspects of Internet Marketing: Whether it’s putting the different areas of search marketing in plain English or defining Twitter’s lingo, these videos take you through each and every Internet Marketing tool and strategy to make the Internet’s available resources benefit your growing business. “Using Internet Marketing to Build Your Business” can be watched in its entirety on our YouTube Channel. The series, which consists of twelve videos, has accompanying slides with valuable information. Just press “Play” for an engaging, interesting and valuable glimpse at the basics behind the tools of the trade of Internet Marketing.

There is evidence that small businesses, organizations and corporations are starting to see the value of social networking for their operations, but many grossly underestimate the time and effort it takes to be successful. No doubt, social networking can be an effective way to build brand visibility, brand awareness, generate deep user engagement and viral buzz for a product or service online. By deeply engaging and interacting with potential clients and current customers they can become an important part of a business’ social circle that can help broadcast the business message to a wide circle of people.

Social Networking - More Than Setting Up a Profile

Social networking on the Web is a time-consuming activity and requires hard work that must be done on a daily basis. Unfortunately, many businesses, online marketers and even large corporations are getting involved with social networking with the mistaken notion that it’s free, quick and easy. They often do not understand that being successful in social networking is a lot more than establishing a social networking profile at LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Social networking requires nurturing and managing profiles on a daily basis and getting deeply involved in continuing conversations, listening, generating content, friending, adding, tweeting and commenting, to encourage interaction and engagement with the people in the community using the communication channels provided by the social network platform.

What Is Required To Be Successful With Social Networking

If you are a small business or organization already involved in social networking and are struggling with the grueling task of keeping your profiles fresh, you’re not alone. A recent study by Michael Stelzer ‘How Marketers are Using Social Media to Grow their Businesses’, 64% of the respondents said they are using social networking for five hours or more each week, with 39% using it 10 or more hours weekly and 9.6% spending more than 20 hours each week with social networking. Those working for a company are twice as likely as small business owners to be committing 20+ hours a week to social networking. Those who said social networking helped them generate leads and close business have been active in social networking for years and/or are investing more than 16 hours a week in it.

The longterm ROI of social networking, with the appropriate time commitment and necessary skills, can be huge. Although social networking activities can drive qualified traffic to web sites that can convert to leads and sales, the main strength is not direct response marketing. The primary benefit of this tactic is building brand visibility and brand awareness, so the effect on revenue is longterm.

Is Social Networking For You?

With social networking being so time intensive the barriers to entry are getting higher for small businesses with one business owner or a few employees. It is therefore, a critical decision for small businesses to decide whether they want to put their scarce resources in social networking to generate business down the road. Social networking is a constant moving target that will continue to offer new online marketing opportunities so the future of small business and social networking will be interesting to watch.

In this presentation on Search and Digital Asset Optimization I cover the various types of search and the specific characteristics of Google Web, image, video, product shopping, news search, real-time Twitter search and the Google Adwords PPC search network.

I am showing where search fits within the overall online marketing eco-system and how and when Google pulls content from those vertical search engine databases into the regular web results (Universal search or blended search).

I also highlight the fact that paid search is still the most effective direct response marketing tactic and dominates the online advertising marketing in terms of annual spending.

Since this Search and Digital Asset Optimization presentation is targeted to local businesses, I spend a large portion of the presentation on local organic (Google Maps) search and how and when the local search results appear in the Google Universal search results (10-box) and what you can do to improve the rankings of your site in Google Maps. I will also highlight that local search is not always trigged by a local keyword anymore and that search engines more and more try to discover the user intend when a search query is performed. At the end I also discuss Google Local Business Ads and provide tips for Web site optimization with local search terms.

In part 3 of Search and Digital Asset Optimization I will focus on an undervalued aspect of search engine optimization (SEO), which is keyword optimization of all digital content a company may posses (PDF’s, online press releases, white papers, video and audio files), the distribution of this content throughout the Web and how business owners and online marketers can benefit when their content it is leveraged in this way. I also explore the differences between hosted and posted content.