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Social Media Marketing – How to start?

Posted on May 29, 2009 by SEO Consultant (admin) in Blog, Facebook, Google, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO, SEO Consultant, Twitter Leave a comment

How to plan, start and organise your Social Media Marketing?

To market yourself you can use a number of online tools. Here are just the main ones:

1. Your web site
2. Your blog
3. Twitter
4. LinkedIN
5. Facebook

The list is endless. What will work for you might not be the best for everyone else. You need to understand where your target market ‘hangs out’, and use those sites.

Your Web site

Using one of those tools by itself is good. The true success in social media marketing is when you start combining them. Years ago, having a web site was enough. Then the search engines came and it was important that your web site is search engine optimised. Otherwise no one has seen it! Today, the number of optimised sites is so huge, and the size of the data published online that SEO itself is not enough anymore.

What become the powerful tool is the subscriptions to ezines and newsletters. You captured the web site visitor and he agreed to get an email whenever you decided to send one. It’s all great but we all started getting far too much mail we really wanted. As a publisher of a web site you always wanted to ‘talk’ to your visitors. Here comes ‘The Blog’…

Your Blog

Blogs are a bit magical from a number of aspects:
1. Interaction with the visitors via the blog comments is unique. The web site visitors can have their say on your web site! Unique.
2. RSS feed subscription enables everyone to subscribe to your updates and read them where and when they like, in a very manageable format.
3. From the search engine optimization perspective blogs are almost always performing better than your own web site. In majority of the cases a blog will attract a multiplication of the total number your own web site can attract.

Twitter

So what do you do with all your blog visitors now? You get them subscribed to your feed or at least on Twitter. The best exit path from your blog after the ‘Buy Now’ or ‘Subscribe’ (or whatever is a conversion on your site) is ‘Follow me on Twitter’.

LinkedIN

Let your visitors connect to you via LinkedIN. There you capture their name, phone, email and actually their whole professional life is logged there. It is quite easy to export your LinkedIN Contacts, and here is your perfect marketing list.

Facebook

Similar to Twitter as it is another permission based (marketing) message broadcasting channel. Facebook is more ‘feature rich’ compared to Twitter. Get your web and blog visitors to Connect to your on Facebook.

So why getting your web site visitors to the social networking sites to connect to you? Simply to capture their details, and enable them to start and engage in the conversation with you. You then use the social networks to advertise your new products, special offers, services… and back they come to your web site and your blog. The big red ‘Buy now’ button is jet again in front of them. And again, and again…

Any of the online marketing tools alone cannot achieve anything similar by itself. Your offering will determine what will you use, but you have to use either a web site or a blog, and you have to use at least one social network. The choice what to use will not be based on what you like, but based on what your target market is using .


Facebook has 200 million active users

Posted on May 28, 2009 by SEO Consultant (admin) in Blog, Facebook, Google, Search Engine Optimisation 1 Comment

Last week I was invited and have attended IIA Congress 2009 and the IIA & Enterprise Ireland Net Visionary Awards 2009 on 21-22 May. It really was nice, and I would like to compliment the organisers and thank again for the invitation.

facebook-200mil

Colm Long from facebook had an interesting presentation, and I guess the most impressive fact and slide was the ‘stickability’ of facebook. Curently they are at 200 million users who are active on the site (have logged on in last 30 days).

Just a clarification that is this many users: 200000000
(for the record…)

The Welcome Pack of the IIA Congress 2009 was also nice. Inside was also a sponsored USB Memory Stick by Elucidate. When I plugged it in I was a bit disappointed that the capacity was only 512 Mb. Lately when I think of the storage I think in gigabytes and terabytes. Then again it was a really pleasant surprise that the memory chip is obviously quite fast since my Microsoft Windows Vista accepted it as a storage for the ReadyBoost – extension of your RAM on the external disc. The Elucidate Flash Drive will obviously be a very good friend of my Notebook that has ‘only’ 2 GB of RAM, so additional 512MB is more than welcome!


Social Networks will waste your time – if not used properly!

Posted on May 6, 2009 by SEO Consultant (admin) in Blog, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO 1 Comment

The fact that my last blog post is about 2 months old is a sign that something happened to the blog, or actually happened to the author of the blog. So what happened exactly that made me effectively stop blogging?

Twitter, Blogger, Facebook and LinkedIN happened!!!

When you interlink Twitter, LinkedIN, Facebook and your own Blog, strange things happen.

LinkedIN – ‘The Professionals Social Network’

The Social Networks drive traffic to your blog, that sends them back to your Social Networks. The referral web traffic is just huge! A single LinkedIN Group article posting (super targeted audience!) can bring hundreds of people within a day to your site, and literally thousands within a 30 day period. Remember it is only the people within that LinkedIN group who see that link to your site so you actually see the LinkedIN Profiles of your incoming web site traffic.

Twitter – ‘The Time Waster’

Whoever tells you that he knows how to use Twitter for anything business related is probably smarter than people who invented Twitter themselves. There is no Cook Book on how to use Twitter successfully. There are lot of eBooks on how to use Twitter, but none is promising ANY success. No one can tell you how will Twitter positively affect your revenue. Anyone who used Twitter can tell you how Twitter will kill your productivity!

The success in using Twitter or the successes we (heavy users – with lots of time invested in it) all had are all sporadic and completely unpredictable. We cannot really define why any of them happened. This is why Twitter usage is unpredictable, and the success path is less obvious than with any other social network.

Just be aware that Twitter as well as LinkedIN drives extremely targeted traffic to your site. So use it wisely. 140 characters (minus the length of your URL) is a very short message space!

Facebook – ‘My Private Life and just FUN!’

The European usage of Facebook greatly differs from the way they use it in the US. On our side of the ‘pond’ we use Facebook for fun. Your Friends and Family are in your Facebook contacts far more often that someone you do or plan to do business with.

Niche Social Networking Sites

There are a lot of industry specific networks, based most often on NING or similar platforms. Those as well give you a chance to drive their web traffic to your site, but publishing articles on those networks inviting the users to come and see more info on your own site. This is again targeted referral traffic – so the highest quality visitors that you can imagine.

Inbound Linking

One aspect of the usage of the Social Networking sites for building web traffic is to get the referral traffic from them. The other aspect is the inbound linking. If the links on those sites are ‘Clean Links’, meaning no redirects or the nofollow tag used – those are nice inbound links to your site. Since the search engines just love the social networking sites, especially the ones where the whole content is ‘open to them’ – meaning no user login is required to read all the pages, the links from those sites are very good form the search engine perspective. A good social networker will therefore use the social networks to get the referral traffic, and in the same time place lots of one way inbound links to his site.


You Oughta Know Inbound Marketing

Posted on March 12, 2009 by SEO Consultant (admin) in Blog, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO, SEO Consultant Leave a comment


+++ No Comment +++

Got to get my Stratocaster out one of these days…



Ireland Search Engine Marketing Report 2008

Posted on September 23, 2008 by SEO Consultant (admin) in Blog, Search Engine Marketing, SEM Leave a comment

If you had enough of reading about SEO, that is supposed to be so simple and easy, and jet somehow does not happen with YOUR site, here is an easy way out! The PPC World of Google AdWords. Here is the Table of Contents of the Whitepaper published earlier this year (see About section for the authors).

I only got the short sample but an interesting chart in it already about the Irish PPC market. It is the breakdown of the industries that people are using PPC most (Does it give you an idea what your next AdSense rich Blog should be about?). If you have the full copy of the whitepaper, I would not mind reading more about the PPC, so send it on!

Pay Per Click (PPC) Ireland Business Sectors

Ireland Search Engine Marketing Report 2008
April, 2008

The research has been supported by the Irish Direct Marketing Association (IDMA) and the Irish Internet Association (IIA).

Table of Contents

1. About E-consultancy 4
2. About research sponsors 4
2.1 About ICAN 4
2.2 About Cybercom 5
2.3 About Interactive Return 5
2.4 About RingJohn 5
3. Executive Summary and Highlights 6
4. Introduction 8
4.1 Introduction by ICAN 8
4.2 Methodology and Sample 9
4.2.1 Methodology 9
4.2.2 Turnover 10
4.2.3 Business Sector 10
4.2.4 Is search done in-house or by an agency? 11
5. Survey Results 12
5.1 Budgets 12
5.1.1 Percentage of total marketing budget spent online 12
5.1.2 Breakdown of online marketing budget by digital channel 13
5.1.3 Search engine marketing budget split 14
5.1.4 Do you expect budgets to increase or decrease? 15
5.1.5 Search engine marketing spend 16
5.1.6 How much are search budgets going up? 17
5.1.7 Allocation of paid search spending 18
5.2 Objectives and effectiveness 19
5.2.1 Primary objectives from search engine marketing 19
5.2.2 Relative importance of paid search and SEO on brand 20
5.2.3 How digital channels rate for return on investment 21
5.2.4 Return on investment (ROI) from Search 22
5.2.5 Tracking return on investment from Search 23
5.2.6 Effectiveness of ROI tracking 24
5.2.7 Use of web analytics tools 24
5.2.8 Rising click costs (CPC) 25
5.3 Search Engines 26
5.3.1 Search engines used for PPC 26
5.3.2 Best search engines for ROI 27
5.3.3 Is dominance of Google a threat? 28
5.4 Search problems and issues 29
5.4.1 Paid Search problems 29
5.4.2 SEO problems 30
5.4.3 Availability of training 31
6. Market overview 32
6.1 Market valuation and growth 32
6.1.1 Key sectors 33
6.2 Market trends 34
6.2.1 Advertisers seize opportunities as market matures 34
6.2.2 Search advertisers get more savvy as competition increases 35
6.2.3 Polarisation between sophisticated and unsophisticated 37
6.2.4 Google dominates as other search engines fail to step up 38
6.3 Barriers to digital marketing growth 41
6.3.1 Slow uptake of broadband 41
6.3.2 Traditional mindset of marketers 41
6.3.3 Skills gap and lack of understanding 41
6.3.4 Lack of transparency in market 42
6.3.5 Other barriers 42


BLOG = Better Listings On Google

Posted on September 22, 2008 by SEO Consultant (admin) in Blog, Google, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO Leave a comment

I don’t really know who said it first:

BLOG = Better Listings On Google

If you search Google index the quotes start appearing in early 2005. Back then, I did not really believe it.

Oh boy, how wrong was I…


Driving traffic with inbound links

Posted on September 18, 2008 by SEO Consultant (admin) in Blog, Google, Search Engine Marketing, SEM Leave a comment

An interesting question posted in the LinkedIN Answers by Tim Van Der Stek:

Is there money to be made by posting links of other websites on your own website? Do you need a middle man to accomplish something like this? How can you find out the going rates?

And my LinkedIn Answer:

Google will not like you really much if they find out that you are selling or renting links from your web site. So do not display the advertisement for such a service on your front page, since Google will not send you much traffic, and we all know that the vast majority of the web sites have the majority of their traffic directly from Google.

How to find the rates?

Rates depend on the traffic volume, traffic quality, geographical market, industry, or niche and if your traffic is from Google – what keywords is your web site found for.

The easiest way to find out what is the going rate is to ask a large number of similar sites to yours – in the same market, industry, and with the similar number of the Google PR and Alexa ranking – what would they charge to link to your site (or a fictitious site). Or even better, send them an email and say, I offer €XXX for the link to our site on your front page. From their responses you will quickly establish what would they agree to sell it for – and that is what the going price is.

The majority of this link trading is done by the third party companies, that try to do it all ‘under the radar’ for Google not to notice. Google on the other hand encourages the webmasters to report paid links. Unfortunately they do not offer any of their cash as a reward.

Other third parties like Google AdSense and Text Ads,… offer a far smaller revenue then the direct link sales.

For more of my LinkedIN Answers in the Internet Marketing visit: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ivanstojanovic. View Ivan Stojanovic's profile on LinkedIn


SEO Consultant first in Google Chrome

Posted on September 3, 2008 by SEO Consultant (admin) in Blog, Google, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO, SEO Consultant, SEO Speed Test 11 Comments

SEO Consultant first in Google Chrome
SEO Consultant first in Google Chrome!

It took about 6 months from the web site launch to get it to the first position in Google for ‘pages in Ireland’.


Blogging is a way of building the inbound links

Posted on August 12, 2008 by SEO Consultant (admin) in Blog, Search Engine Optimisation Leave a comment

Blogging is a way of building the inbound links. How?

You blog, about interesting topics (link bait). Then you put comments on related and relevant blogs with a link to your blog / articles. You submit your RSS feed to wherever you see fit, and you submit your blog to the blog search engines.

Outsourcing Blogging or not - you need a blogger who understands your (target) market and your niche. A local blogger will write in a local language, about local topics. That is far easier to read (especially in a blog) than a PR structured articles released by the professional PR agencies.

Blogging Costs - an hour or two a day to start with. That will give you a meaningful (measurable) results in a month or two. You need to decide what your targeted SEO result is. In a number of relevant visitors per day. Relevant meaning, that come from the search engines for the phrases you want them to come (relevant to your business). Scope depends of the size of the market. Google.ie is much smaller than Google.co.uk, that is much smaller than Google.com. Therefore it is most likely (depending on the industry or niche), that you will achieve much more in a smaller market with the same budget.


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