How to Market with Social Media

There's no doubt about it - small businesses are beginning to utilize social media tools and tactics with more frequency than ever before. A recent study by eMarketer reports that 260,000 small businesses across the US and Canada are employing social media tactics. 51% of small businesses are using social media for professional social networking using tools like LinkedIn.com and 28% are involved in microblogging using tools like Twitter.

There are several things to think about before just jumping right into using these tools. The most important is your time. Viral marketing through social media really requires a dedicated amount of time each day and you have to understand the value of your time. Many of the available tools are free to use. But that does not mean they don't come at a cost, because they certainly do. The cost is human capital. Think of it as a pet. While the pet may cost a little or even nothing, caring for it takes a lot of time. The same is true for social media marketing and networking.

Before you start, make sure your strategy is clear! There is a lot of social media hype and peer pressure to use these technologies. Just make sure you clearly understand your key goals and objectives. For example, are you trying to build direct sales with customers, improve positioning of your product or service, or build your authority in a specific area? Answering these critical questions will help you move forward with your strategy.

Your first step should be to verify whether the audience you are trying to reach is already using social media. If your target market isn't using Twitter or Facebook, then why are you? You also need to do your homework on where the audience you are trying to reach already exists. Are they on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter? Are they joining groups or creating new ones? These are all key questions to understanding your audience and how to best engage them.

What are some of the immediate benefits that small businesses are finding with social media? Well, most small businesses will tell you that social networking can help foster stronger relationships with customers, enable a faster vehicle to answer customer questions, incorporate customer feedback, and build awareness for their expertise. However, many small businesses are still trying to understand how social media can ring the cash register.

A New Orleans-based pizza company called Naked Pizza has used Twitter to successfully ring the register. The company has over 4,700 followers on Twitter. That means every time the company has something to say, 4,700 people will receive the message and could forward it to their friends and so on, potentially reaching way more than Naked Pizza's 4,700 followers. Jeff Leach, the CEO of Naked Pizza, reported that nearly 69% of sales were generated during a one-day Twitter advertising blitz.

Other companies are also seeing direct-to-customer sales via social media. For example, Barbershops, Spas & Salons is using Twitter to let customers know that walk-in times are available due to cancelled appointments. Before Twitter, this was lost profit.

Another great example of Twitter ringing the register is The Albion bakery. When there's a fresh batch of bread out of the oven, it notifies Albion customers via Twitter and Facebook. If you are ready to take a dip into social media, Ad Age offers 5 tips for marketing on social media platforms:

1. Track sales made on social media.
2. Don't use Twitter as Facebook (and vice versa).
3. Create a conversation with friends and followers.
4. Sell last-minute inventory.
5. Alert followers to changes.

As a small business, the way you spend your time is critical. So if you do decide to pursue social media, make sure that you have the proper tools to help you succeed. For example, a smartphone makes it incredibly easy for you to update your Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and blog accounts.

In today's fast-paced business landscape, you don't have time to get back to the office to engage your customers or react to their online comments. You have to be mobile and equipped at all times or lose that business to your competitors.

7 B2B Social Media Tools You Probably Haven’t Heard Of

With the vast array of social media tools out there, it’s easy for some useful ones to get lost in the mix. Here’s a few that might be flying below the radar, but can be valuable tools for B2B marketers.

1. Social Mention

http://www.socialmention.com

Cost: Free

For those of you that use Google Alerts you may want to take a look at Social Mention. Social Mention is a real time search platform that will allow you to search on a keyword/phrase and see its social mentions across 100+ social media properties. It offers a strength score, sentiment ratio, a passion score and reach. This stream of information can be fed into your RSS feeds or be delivered to your inbox. It also displays Top Users, Top Hashtags, and Sources. It’s a great addition to your listening toolbox.

2. Flowtown

http://www.flowtown.com

Cost: Free trial, monthly fees based on imported contacts and email volume

When all you have is an email address, Flowtown can give you a name, age, gender, occupation, location and all the social networks that person is on. It’s a great resource if you need to append your customer file with social network profile information, learn more about the social habits of your database or if you want to target them on social networks.

3. Compendium Blogware

http://www.compendium.com

Cost: Varies depending on number of keywords

You should consider Compendium if you rely on your blog for SEO results. Compendium’s Blogware product helps you target keywords because it automatically organizes your content in a way that’s ideal for search engines to crawl. It also has great administrative tools with a step-by-step approval process so you can manage your blog content within your organization.

4. Trackur

http://www.trackur.com

Cost: Free for 1 saved search, plans for multiple saved searches

Trackur is a social media monitoring tool that provides an impressive set of features at very reasonable costs. You can save searches which are updated every 30 minutes, receive alerts via RSS or email, bookmark and save discovered items and track sentiment and trends. You can try it for free which includes one saved search, so its easy to give it a test run to see if its right for you, and if so just upgrade into one of the paid plans.

5. Swix

http://www.swixhq.com

Cost: Free (for now)

Swix is your social web index. It allows you to create pods, which is a way to see your metrics for a particular social media property (Twitter, YouTube, your blog, Flickr, MySpace, etc.) Then for each property, you can enter your amount spent, your cost per unit and then see your return on investment. It’s simple to use.

6. Addictomatic

http://addictomatic.com

Cost: Free

Addictomatic instantly creates a custom page with the latest buzz on any topic. Pick the channels where you want to source your information then save your search as a bookmark. It’s a helpful way to determine the buzz about your product or service, find potential audience and to see what channels are sources of content for your keywords/phrases.

7. Spiral 16

http://www.spiral16.com

Cost: N/A

Spiral 16 offers 3D Visual Mapping. Their visualizer displays the relationships between unique URLs in dynamic 2D and 3D maps. This enables users to quickly identify key influencers who are spreading a positive, negative, or neutral message about a topic across the Internet. It can help you discover trends, identify targets, measure campaigns and sentiment and increase customer loyalty.

Are there any other tools you find useful in your B2B marketing research, monitoring or ROI calculations? Leave us a comment with your favorites.

How to Submit a SiteMap to Bing

Once you've created an XML sitemap, you want to make sure that the search engines see it and index your site. Learn how easy it is to submit a sitemap to Bing.

Difficulty: Average

Time Required: 10 minutes

• Create an XML Sitemap. You can create an XML sitemap by hand, or use an XML sitemaps generator to do it for you.

• Login to your Windows Live account and go to Bing Webmaster Center.

• Add your site to Bing by filling in your URL and the URL of your sitemap. Click add a site.

• Bing will check the sitemap and begin indexing your site as soon as it's determined that the sitemap has no errors.

How To Make Sure Your Link Building Helps Your Rankings As Well As Your Visitors

 

What Is Theme Relevancy And Why Should You Care?

What theme relevancy means is the site that places a link to yours (an vice versa) should be relevant or related to your sites "theme". Ideally, your link partner's Website should complement, but not compete with whatever you are offering.

For instance, if you are selling blue widgets, it makes sense to get a link from a site selling widget accessories. Or, if you are selling Search Engine Optimization services, it's a good idea to get links pointing to SEO-related articles, search engines news and forums. And, in both examples, it's definitely NOT a good idea to exchange links with casino, gambling, or real estate sites.

This is not to say that blue widget buyers never gamble or never purchase real estate. But if they came to your site looking for your products or services such as blue widgets or SEO services, there's probably one chance out of a million they are interested in casinos or real estate right now.

This is how your site's visitors would have thought, and this is how search engines think it should be. Google, Yahoo!, Bing and other major search engines have been designed with one purpose — to provide value to their users, which means relevant, accurate search results. Their algorithms may — and will — change, but this underlying principle will remain the same.

A Link Is Still A Link, No Matter Where It Comes From, Right?

Wrong! This is a misconception that can easily get you in trouble. This approach could bring you short-term benefits 2 or 3 years ago, but major search engines (especially Google) have gotten a lot smarter since then.

If you still think theme relevancy is nice-to-have rather than a must-have, well, think again. Get a hundred unrelated links pointing to your site, and several things will happen, none of which involves high rankings for you:

* Google will simply not count these links when computing your ranking. This is the best thing that could happen since it doesn't involve penalizing your site;

* Google will think (justifiably) that your site belongs to a different theme (say, gambling) and treat it accordingly. This could mean your site will go up in gambling-related search results, and down in the results you seek (such as blue widget results). Now, you don't want this, do you?

* With the last Google algo update (dubbed "Big Daddy"), Google will decide (again, justifiably) you are trying to trick search engines and will simply drop your site from its index. Ouch. That was definitely NOT intended.

So here's a rule of thumb: Always keep your site's visitors in mind when running your link building campaigns. Try to get into your visitors' shoes and think what resources they would be interested in. Would they be interested in casino sites? No? Then don't do it.

How Do You Find All These Beautiful Sites Related To You?

Easy. There are several ways you can do it:

1. Do a search in major search engines such as Google using your niche keywords. Scan the results, copy the URLs you are interested in into a spreadsheet, wash rinse and repeat.

2. Visit a good link directory. Link directories are human-compiled directories of sites broken down into categories. DMOZ is an excellent example. Simply find your niche category in a directory, and search for relevant link partners there.

3. A trick you could use is examine your competition. Your competitors, who are selling, say, red widgets, most likely have other sites that link to them. You can use the LINK:WWW.COMPETITOR.COM command in Google, for example, to find out who.

How to Submit Your Blog into Search Engine

We can use many ways to make our blogs famous and get many traffics, such as blog walking or visiting others blogs. Registering to various aggregator, and the most effective ways is through the search engine.

New Blogger are thinking that after making blog, their blog will be found in search engines. But here they are wrong because we have to submit our blog in their directory. So, it will be easy to increase traffic.

Now, have you submitted your blogs to the search engines? Or you still don’t know how to submit your blogs. Just follow the tutorials below.

1. If you want to register in MSN. Just fill in the verification code and your URL blog in the available square, then click submit and finished.
http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx

2. If you want to register your blog in Yahoo. Go to this link
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

Before registering here, make sure that you have yahoo account. Why you need yahoo account? Because to register here, you need to log in to your yahoo account. If you still don’t have any yahoo e-mail, click here to make one first. And if you have e yahoo account, you just need to log in with your username and password. As soon as you log in, you will see a column. Just fill in the column with your URL blog, then click Add URL and done.

3. Want to submit in google. Here is tutorial.

First go to here.
http://www.google.com/addurl/

If you want to register in google you have to
1. URL --> Fill in your URL blog
2. Comments --> Fill in the related keywords to your blogs.
3. Fill in the blank square with the verification code available.
4. Click Add URL.
5. Finished


Here is the Complete List of Search Engine:::
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines

Keyboard Shortcuts While Posting on Blogger

Blogger has several keyboard shortcuts you can use while editing posts. They definitely work in Internet Explorer 5.5+Windows and the Mozilla family (1.6+ and Firefox 0.9+), and might work in other browsers.



Here they are

control + b = Bold
control + i = Italic
control + l = Blockquote (when in HTML-mode only)
control + z = Undo
control + y = Redo
control + shift + a = Link
control + shift + p = Preview
control + d = Save as Draft
control + p = Publish Post
control + s = Autosave and keep editing
control + g = Indic transliteration

Use Adsense Between Every Blog Post

Adding adsense ads Middle of the blog posts is a very good thing to do to increase your CTR. CTR means"(the number of times your ad clicked) divided by (number of times it is shown).So, the more CTR you have, the more $$ you get. As we know, there are more chances for the ads to be clicked when they are in the middle (blog posts) rather than at the sidebars(especially the right sidebar), footer, etc. So, How to place adsense ads between Blog posts: By doing this, the adsense units will be displayed between the blog posts in the homepage, archive pages and permalink (individual post pages). Follow the procedure to do this


1. Sign in to your blogger dashboard>click on the layout link

2. Click on the Edit link in the "Blog Posts' column [look at the below screenshot]

#a pop up window opens

3. Check the box next to 'Show ads between Posts'

4. Next, configure the ads, choose the format, colors, etc and SAVE THE CHANGES.

That's it! Now your adsense ads will show between blog posts.

What is a Landing Page?

A landing page is any page on a website where traffic is sent specifically to prompt a certain action or result. Think of a golf course… a landing page is the putting green that you drive the ball (prospect) to.

Once on the green, the goal is to get the ball into the hole. Likewise, the goal of the copy and design of a landing page is to get the prospect to take your desired action.

Here are a few examples of ways that landing pages are used with various traffic sources:

• Traffic is sent from a pay per click (PPC) search marketing campaign (such as Google AdWords) to multiple landing pages optimized to correspond with the keywords the searcher used.


• Traffic is sent from a banner ad or sponsorship graphic to a landing page specifically designed to address that target audience.


• Traffic is sent from a link in an email to a landing page designed to prompt a purchase.


• Traffic is sent from a blog post or sidebar link to a landing page that pre-sells affiliate products or encourages an opt-in to a sub-list.


• The page you’re currently reading is a content landing page designed to organize many related pages around an overall theme.