How a Fortune 1,000 Company Got 88,000 Facebook Fans in 4 Weeks, and Only Paid For Half of Them

My major focus the last three months has been Facebook advertising. I’ve been trying to figure out how to get awesome results with Facebook ads. It’s been a personal challenge, because I have more or less mastered Google AdWords and SEO, so I thought: I should be able to figure this out!

It’s been very challenging. Facebook ads are significantly different from AdWords. It’s not just search keywords vs. interests. And it’s not just about applying lessons from display advertising. The entire process is different. What works is completely different.
I’ve been fortunate to be able to get experience with about 10 different clients, from unknowns to affiliate offers to Fortune 500 brands. My results have improved by a factor of five. I’ve chatted and compared notes with a handful of the best in the Facebook advertising business.
But there is a guy who keeps getting dramatically better results than anyone I’ve heard of… Jeremy Koch of Pertnear down in Hilton Head, South Carolina. He regularly tortures me with screenshots of CPC’s below $0.10. So I thought I’d ask him a few questions about some of Pertnear’s Facebook marketing successes and see what we might be able to learn.

=> Case Study One: A Fortune 1,000 Company
This is a publicly traded specialty retailer.

BBC: You got 88,000 fans for them in four weeks?
Jeremy Koch: Yep, and we’ve done more than that for other clients.

BBC: Are you paying for all of these fans? What’s the friend-recommending component?
Jeremy Koch: About 50% of them have been viral. This is fairly typical, this number will grow with time.

BBC: So you’re only paying for half of these fans- whatever you get from ads, you get that much more for free.
Jeremy Koch: That’s right. It’s fun.

BBC: What is the key to getting such a high viral %?
Jeremy Koch: The key is identifying the people that truly are Fans of the brand or the good/service the brand provides.  If they truly love the brand they are very likely to interact on the page, which draws in their friends.

The Virtuous Cycle of Facebook Fan Growth

BBC: So what are you doing on the the fan page itself?
Jeremy Koch: People go to the fan page and they see all these awesome posts from people who love the niche as much as they do. We’ve turned it into a “Bragging Board”.

BBC: What does the client think about all this?
Jeremy Koch: If we can reach our goal of 500k within 3 months, I think they will be OK with that.
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Commentary:

• These ideas seem no-brainer, but successful Facebook Marketing always looks no-brainer in hindsight. If you get the right things to line up with simple compelling incentives, it works and it makes sense. It looks so simple that you realize the real art is fighting your way through complication to the most direct, easiest path for the prospect.
• On the flipside, it’s too easy to operate with no process, no plan and no principles and end up with mediocre results.
• Some of this is just good marketing practice, like “find people who are really qualified prospects”. Creative advertising has been choosing TV shows and magazines to target the right prospects for decades. But Facebook gives us direct quantifiable feedback about how qualified those prospects really were. If you get bacon-lovers to fan a fast food joint’s page, do they engage as much as the people who love hamburgers? The combination of creative and affinities in highly quantifiable direct marketing is new, and interesting. AdWords has been this way for search keywords and search intent, but attaching this process to interest-based marketing is new.
• I’ve seen Facebook ad campaigns without good page management strategy get 5% or less viral friending. To see 50% from Jeremy’s techniques just shows how your page management strategies can make a 100% difference in your results.

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How a Regional Vacation Rental Company Tripled Their Sales with Facebook Advertising
=> Case Study Two: Brindley Beach Vacations
Brindley Beach Vacations offers vacation rentals in the Outer Banks, a 200-mile long string of narrow barrier islands off the coast of North Carolina, beginning in the southeastern corner of Virginia Beach on the east coast of the United States.

BBC: How many fans did you get them?
Jeremy Koch: We started with 348 people on their page, we are now at over 12,000. They want to be at 20,000 by November 1st.  They already have more Fans than anyone we have been able to find in their industry.

BBC: How much business has this gotten them?
Jeremy Koch: Their reservations for June (the month we started) were triple their expectations. By July they told us to stop promoting summer reservations and work on the Fall.  They’ve had many days when their reservation staff reported almost everyone they talked to mentioned the Facebook page.

BBC: How are they doing compared to their competitors?
Jeremy Koch: That is an interesting question… Not only have they been doing well, but because they have been creating so much new business, it appears it has even spilled over into their competitors.  I think we have helped create a demand that may be surpassing the supply, at least for the peak seasons.

BBC: Is this helping them in their off season?
Jeremy Koch: They are seeing an increase in bookings for the shoulder seasons.  Facebook is a great avenue to subtly recommend coming in the shoulder seasons. We see people even planning additional trips.

BBC: How is Brindley feeling about the results?
Jeremy Koch: The owner of the company has given us permission to give his personal cell phone number out to prospective clients.

Discussion and Take Aways

BBC: Ok, well let’s talk about the HOW. What, that you’re willing to reveal, are you doing to get such remarkable results?
Jeremy Koch: We like the people we work with, we take the success of each client personally.  When we take on a new client we want to exceed their expectations… under promise and over deliver.  I know that is not what you were looking for… The real key to what we do is identifying the people and/or the target audience that already wants what our client is offering.  It becomes very expensive if you are trying to convert people who are unaware of your product or service.  Find the people that want what you have, then get them to make the introduction to their friends, even if they don’t realize they are making the introduction.

source from:searchenginejournal.com

Enhance Google Search Results with Interclue FireFox Addon

Interclue is a nice FireFox addon that lets you preview the linked page content. But it does not only that. In facti it could be a cool Google search companion.

1. More informative search results

The addon adds Delicious tags below each results for you to better understand the page topics as well as usefulness. when you hover over any tag, you will see how many times exactly that page was saved using the tag:

2. Page Preview and Further Info

You can preview each page contents without ever leaving Google’s SERPs. The preview pop-up includes:

• The search result text;
• The linked page thumbnail (upper-right corner);
• “Meta clues” that provide further info on the linked page.

The meta clues may can include (you can add / remove meta clues from the tool options):

• Page date (from the page header);
• Page stats (number of words, number of links, number of files);
• Syndication links:

What’s more, you can actually switch between search result previews using the green arrows you see above: click any of them to load the next / previous result right in the preview window – how cool is that!

3. “Similar Pages” and “Cache” Link Preview

You can easily grab further information on the page right from the search results. Just hover over “Similar” pages and get the list of related results right in the preview pane:

Similarly, you can load the page Google’s cache version in the preview pop-up:

All in all, I found the tool a huge time-saver! What are your thoughts?

All About Google Instant – Summary

Google launched ‘Google Instant’ last week with a much hyped press conference with live streaming video of the event on YouTube. Since then the social media buzz and the blogosphere have been invaded with tweets and posts about Google Instant.


Google claims that Google Instant makes the search experience more fast, fluid and fun.


The main components of Google Instant are :

• Predictions
• Instant Results
• Scroll To Search

Google suggests or predicts what the user might be searching depending on each character the user types in the search query box. The user can select what he is searching for by using the arrow keys and as the user makes the selection the search results keep on changing accordingly. The user does not need to hit the ‘Enter ‘ key.


What is important to note is the speed with which it all takes place. Its fast and really fast. Google Instant can save 2-5 seconds per search. Google claimed at the launch event that in just an hour that Google Instant has been up it has already saved 36,542 hours of our time. Well if time is money then it surely has added that much productivity potential also to every industry as search is a vital aspect for research and knowledge for each and every industry and this shall surely reduce a lot of disguised employment.


Marissa Mayer of Google who presented this concept stated that Google Instant isn’t search as you type, it’s search before you type. She even mentioned in an interview that Google Instant is to search what power steering is to a car and it surely helps people with slow typing speeds.


Google Instant has started rolling out to users on Google domains in the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Russia who use the following browsers: Chrome v5/6, Firefox v3, Safari v5 for Mac and Internet Explorer v8. Please note, users on domains other than Google.com can only access Google Instant if they are signed in to a Google Account. Google will continue to add new domains and languages over the next several months. Google Instant is not yet available on mobile, but Google plans to release it soon.


Google Instant is being referred as search at the speed of thought. But what has to be considered is the impact of this on the users, the search experience as a whole and the future trends in t he search and SEO industry as a result of this speed incorporated in the display of search suggestions and search results .
No doubt search is faster but due to the fact that the users are just using the arrow keys to select the predictions made the user starts focusing on the first few results and the inclination of scrolling down may decrease over a period of time as user starts searching for more queries rather than more searches per query. In a way it has a direct effect on the patience levels of the user.


Moreover, if the user is focusing on the first few results then Google needs to list more relevant results instead of results from Wikipedia or other verticals as when people search they want to know about companies offering the product or service they are searching for – locally or globally.


This should force Google to display quality results but, if this initial display slot gets occupied by PPC and especially the companies with high search marketing budgets then it shall affect the benefit derived by the SMEs due to organic search. As I mentioned that over a period of time the tendency to search for more by scrolling down the page and searching other pages may diminish.


But on the other hand considering the technological advancements in hardware also, it seems that this problem maybe soon be solved. As in the near future there is expected to be a huge shift to the mobile devices and if more and more people start using smart phones, IPads and other mobile devices for searching and surfing then the touch screen devices shall make the scrolling and searching for more easier and faster.
As regards the SEO industry Google instant has not affected the rankings. The basics of the search are the same. So for whatever terms your site has been ranking it continues to rank for them on those SERPs.
So the SEO scene is very much unaffected but Google Instant might just cause a temporary disturbance for the SEOs when all the clients start demanding to be in the first 3 positions. But, Understanding the changes in the search behavior, due to the introduction of Google Instant will need actual data that can be collected over a period of time. Hence we have to wait and watch to find out the actual impact.

source from:searchenginejournal.com

Sign-up for a Free 10 Week Internet Marketing Course from StayOnSearch

So Google rolls out Instant Search and there are screams and cries that SEO is Dead, but hello did anybody think about the impact on commercial side of search? The sponsored results or Google AdWords?
Being that paid results are taking up more and more of the space on Google’s results page, you need to start to think about how this might be changing people’s search behaviours, traffic patterns and potentially opening up new opportunities for your business via AdWords.


Plural Preferences?


There also seems to be an early preference for the use of plural version as the top suggested result but it doesn’t seem to be related to search volume as Google advises the Instant algorithm is built around. Compare the two keywords Hotels vs Hotel and you will see that even when the plural version has significantly less search volume.

Also looking at how the higher likely traffic impacts on Google Instant results show that the new algorithm gives preference to showing Hotels as the first suggested result. So if you are buying AdWords traffic on the exact phrase “Hotel” you might now be missing out on being showed as the users will likely pick the “Hotels” phrase as it is shown first.

SEO vs AdWords on Instant

It is likely that search optimisation projects will have to be having to spend a reasonable amount of time examining their existing projects and revising current link building plans as it can make or break the companies organic strategy depending on how they approach the idea of targeting the plural versus the singular version of their primary keyword.

You can see the impact of such a decision below to chose target Job rather than Jobs means that NY Job Source was showing #6 for the search term “Jobs” near the bottom of the page out of sight, looking for jobs just got easier for consumers but harder for business at least in organic results.

(Click to enlarge)

For AdWords campaign it might require just a few tweaks to split off a new campaign that seeks to target just the singular version or maybe start experimenting with broad match terms, no need to tweak or adjust backlink profile, so at a basic level AdWords will gain back its importance to a number of businesses now left out in the cold because of poor or little keyword research.

Google Instant Censorship?

There are early issues around self-censorship of Instant search terms that violate Google’s autocomplete policies where it shows a blank screen which requires the searchers to hit enter or click search to see the results. No big change from what they used to do, but it may change user’s behaviour to think they are getting no results so much be doing something wrong and should stop that train of thought.
I lost my focus during writing this post as a lot of people on Twitter & Facebook started calling the new platform a potential tool for censorship of particular industries not liked by Google. I wanted to see how this might affect well known darker verticals, so if you or your clients are into any industries like porn you don’t have to worry about optimising your organic or paid results for Google Instant results because you get the blank censored screen. But interesting if you operate in the following areas you need to rethink your strategies as Google Instant works for you with the suggestions in (brackets)

• Generic (Viagra, Yaz)
• Blackhat (seo, atm)
• Bit Torrent (for music, for movies, for books)
• People Smuggling (in mexico, into Australia)
• Anything illegal (illegal immigration, illegal drugs)
• Hacking Anything (hacking games, hacking Facebook, hacking Netflix)
• Selling Organs (for money, on the black market, on ebay)
• Payday loans (online, direct lender)
• Free (movies online, ringtones, credit report)
  
  

It seems that while Google has enabled Instant Search for a number of these verticals the difference between AdWords showing or not is based on how searches phrase the query by using or not using spacing. But if you are currently getting traffic around based around one or two key prases via AdWords you need to start to test what possible primary terms you should consider bidding on.


Google Instantly kills long tail traffic?


It seems that a number of sites that has typically benefited from either buying cheap long tail traffic or mistyped search queries via AdWords have the most to lose with the recent update. So example one of my sites based on information about medical problems that I had planned to focus around building quality content around long tail keywords now may likely struggle as Google refines how it suggests or filters out long tail keywords.

What happened to those Sponsored Links in suggestions?

Hopefully Google Instant will not see a return of Sponsored Links in the suggested results as this would be too much for anyone but the biggest advertisers to optimise and target effectively. It would likely also overwhelm the users who are already seeing too many ads in the search results. I’m glad to see that they have vanished from Google Instant but since the new platform is AJAX based they could be easily added back in the future.

Since Instant Search has less page views does that mean fewer ads shown?
I started this post by comparing AdWords campaign data from the 7th September vs. the 8th September for a US campaign. It seems that already there has been a noticeable impact on the AdWords campaign since the launch of Google Instant. We all know that one day is not enough data to start the filling the pantry with canned goods and bottled water but it does highlight that you need to be closely watching your AdWords campaigns and even organic traffic.

Instant Campaign Clicks


It seems that initially there is an impact on the clicks compared to the previous day (without Instant) with phrase match volume dropping to 62% and exact match volume dropping to 72%. It’s very interesting to see that broad match volume didn’t change with the Instant Search update which reinforces the benefits of using broad match terms. But overall there was a 16% drop in AdWords clicks since Instant Search was launched.

Instant Campaign Impressions

It seems that initially we see both positive and negative impacts on the impressions compared to the previous day (without Instant). There has been a drop in impressions for exact match terms down to 85% of the previous day’s volume which shows the new Instant Search feature is likely already changing people’s search behaviour.


An interesting side effect seems that impressions for phrase match & broad match keywords has actually risen by around 15% since Google Instant was launched which might be due to the progressive results or people doing more searches?

 source from:searchenginejournal.com

Competing in the Global Market for Online Travel

International SEO Case Study: Hotels.com

While the online travel market has become highly competitive in the United States, there are numerous excellent, untapped opportunities for companies looking to expand internationally. The internet is global and with over 1.5 billion people now connected. Many of these people are in countries with a rapidly developing middle class who are spending more on travel.

Hotels.com is one of the most prominent online travel companies. People use the site to find deals on hotels for both business and vacation travel. But with the US travel market exhibiting slower growth due to recessionary pressures and increased competition, international markets will be increasingly important for the Company’s future.

This mini-case study looks at how Hotels.com is using search marketing to expand internationally including its strengths and opportunities for improvement.

Buying Market Share

So what is Hotels.com doing to capture a piece of the more lucrative global travel market?  The Company’s primary tactic is to drive traffic to country-specific websites using paid search marketing. For each targeted country, Hotels.com has implemented a local language site with prices displayed in local currency. For example, someone searching for hôtel on Google France can click on Hotels.com’s sponsored ad and be directed to the French site located on the subdomain fr.hotels.com.

Driving international visitors to your site through paid search is fine if you don’t mind handing over suitcase loads of cash to Google. Most companies would probably prefer a joint strategy of driving traffic through organic (or non-paid) results as well as sponsored results.  A properly implemented international search engine optimization strategy can reduce dependency on paid search and drastically lower average cost per click.

Hotels.com has optimized its country-specific sites. But how well do they fare?

International SEO Strengths

Domain Name: A keyword-based domain name is a major factor in attaining high search engine rankings. Hotels.com ranks number 1 in the US search results for the term “hotels” thanks in part to the keyword term being equal to their domain name. Hotels.com also ranks number 1 on google.co.uk for the term “hotels” and their German language subdomain ranks number 6 for the same search term on Google’s German search engine, google.de.

Hotels.com has also made the strategic decision to buy the Spanish and Portuguese equivalents of their domain name – hoteles.com and hoteis.com. This strategy has helped them rank number 1 on Google in the United States and number 2 in Mexico for the term “hoteles” and number 2 in Brazil for “hoteis”.

Site Structure: Hotels.com has implemented country-specific sites and regional sites targeted at international visitors. The majority of these sites have been set up as subdomains on the main hotels.com site, for example de.hotels.com. For the Spanish-speaking Latin American market, the Company has established a separate website, hotels.com and for Brazil, hoteis.com in Portuguese.

On Page Optimization:  Page titles, meta tags and headers have been optimized in local language.

Link Building: Each of the country-specific sites is linked to the others. This most likely helps the separate domains (hotels.com and hoteis.com) most of all as the links between sites implemented as subdomains are more likely to be discounted by Google.

Opportunities for Improvement

Local Domains: Hoteles.com ranks a lowly tenth on Google Spain for “hoteles” and Hoteis.com is a mere 36 in Portugal for “hoteis” despite owning the .com domains for these highly popular keyword terms.  The number 1 ranking site in each of these cases was one with a local country domain – hoteles.es in Spain and hoteis.pt in Portugal.

While Hotels.com has done an excellent job in optimizing their sites for Latin America, they have failed with these sites in Europe. Google apparently doesn’t believe these sites are relevant to a European audience. What Hotels.com should do for these markets is implement subdomains – one targeted for Spain and another for Portugal. Better yet, if the price is right, they could negotiate a buy-out of hoteles.es and hoteis.pt.

A key lesson for companies with keyword-based domain names, and plans to expand internationally, is to buy the country-specific domains as well before a local competitor tries to steal your market.

Local Link Building: For sites that target audiences in specific countries, it’s important to acquire links from sites within that country. The majority of links to Hotels.com’s sites are from other sites they own. For their country-specific subdomains, this is particularly true and most likely the reason why Hotels.com does not perform as well in Europe. If their German site, de.hotels.com, had more links from German language websites, it would probably rank better than it does.

A “Mixed Bag” Strategy

Hotels.com’s international search marketing strategy comprises country-specific sites implemented on subdomains for countries in Europe and Asia, and separate sites for Spanish and Portuguese speakers. While this strategy appears to working reasonably well for the Company, it could be improved by implementing local sites on local domains while also including lingual translations on the main .com domain.  However, this approach may prove costly as it requires negotiating the purchase of country-level domains that have already been acquired by aspiring local entrepreneurs.

How to Engage Your Blog Readers with Cc:Everybody

A few weeks ago I wrote a review of a cool new service Cc:Everybody started by people behind Omgili (the service I have just mentioned recently in the post on choosing SEO hosting). Basically, the tool provides a way to take advantage of your useful email correspondence which would otherwise have got lost in your private inbox.


The best thing about the tool is that it’s a huge playground. You can think of new and new awesome ways to use it. What I decided to do is to use it for an email Q&A session.

First, what did I do?

Setting Up Your Public Email Inbox

Registration is quick and easy. I registered and got my public email inbox. Now, once I have some useful email correspondence I would like to share with the world, all I need to do is to CC my @cceverybody.com email address. The post will go live and shared publicly after I confirm the action (via email or online).
Note also that all further back-and-forth correspondence with the same person on the same topic, gets automatically published in your public inbox in the same thread.


The second thing I did was adding my Twitter account – this way…

• I can reply and publish any Tweeted questions as well (referencing my Twitter account)
• I can automatically share my public correspondence on Twitter.
  

Besides publishing your email correspondence online, you can:

• Comment on others’ threads;
• Receive comments from readers and moderate comments;
• Pin (or stick) any conversation for it to always appear on top (just like in a regular forum).

Playing Further

Then I started playing. I posted an update to my personal blog inviting everyone to send their SEO-related questions to my @cceverybody.com email address. I got quite a few questions but replied to only most interesting ones (and to those I knew what to answer).


I got great feedback from Twitter followers and blog readers:

Then, I also used this plugin to update my post of new answers I publish (Read: Blogify Your Static Website for Google):

To publish the RSS feed of your CC:Everybody mailbox updates, use this code to fetch and display your inbox atom:

http://cceverybody.com/username/atom,num_items:=100,random:=false,show_description:=true–>

For example, for me that was:

Note also, that not only my original post gets automatically updated of new answers in my public inbox. My Twitter followers get those updates also. And all I need to do is just forward my email to my @cceverybody.com email address.
In seconds my email Q&A session gets comments and retweets:

While I didn’t have too much time to play as much as I would like to, I liked how the experiment went through. Imagine if you put some time, effort and creativity, you can come up with the powerful Q&A content, for example!

My personal conclusion is that Cc:Everybody is a great tool and I’d love to hear your thoughts!

source from:searchenginejournal.com

The Shift From The Traditional Media Of Marketing To The Internet Media Of Marketing

It is quite possible that the shift from the traditional media of marketing to the fast catching up online or internet marketing may cause some confusions, clutter and teething problems till you settle down with the new mode of thinking and way of interacting with the potential customers and deal with after sales queries and issues online.


Before you start calculating the ROI from this online media of marketing and jump to conclusions analyze the current scenario of the marketing aura of your company. Why I am referring this as an aura is because the new way of marketing the products and services of the company not only affects your marketing and PR team decisions and mind set but this new thought process also gets passed on to the other teams like the sales, operations and even accounts and of course just cannot forget to mention the CEOs , VCs and the presidents of the companies especially if they are not so net savvy.


As everyone in the office will start talking about social media and SEO according to what they have heard and what impressions they have gathered from the water cooler conversations or meetings. Everyone has an opinion but to make everyone come to a right consensus in accepting this new communication, PR, marketing and branding tool will surely take time but it is the onus of the team who is managing this task to see that the minimum possible time is taken for the adjustment as social media is growing at an alarming rate and you cannot afford to miss the bus when the company buzz can have a global market outreach at such a high level and especially at such an alarming speed.


For that we have to go into a little analysis of the situations and requirements.


Firstly, it is important to know who is managing the online marketing campaign. The possibilities could be as follows:

• It is outsourced to a professional SEO and Internet marketing company.
• It is managed In-house by the appointed people
• Or, if it is a SMB may be, a DIY (Do It Yourself) model is being followed.

Situation 1:

The Online Marketing Campaign is outsourced to a professional SEO and Internet marketing company.


If it is outsourced then of course the responsibility is also on that internet marketing company and your team can concentrate on the main line of business. But, in this case the marketing budget allocated for online media has to be high and the success of the campaign will depend upon the professionalism and approach of that company.


The communication is the most critical factor as regards to this situation as the success and the goals will be achieved only if the marketing company has understood what you are targeting at with this media. Again the communication is only the main factor when this internet company conveys the results to you or trains your team regarding the internet brand image of your company.

As in certain situations especially the after sales discussions with a dissatisfied customer will probably be handled by the sales or PR team member with valid inputs from the technical team. So it is very crucial how the flow of information will take place as it should not result into Chinese whispers which may harm the image of the company rather than healing it.


The reporting factor is very important when this task is outsourced to check whether the dollars spent are going down the drain or developing the deserved niche on the online scene for your brand.

Situation 2:

The Internet Marketing Campaign is managed In-house by the appointed people.


Dealing with such a situation the selection and training of the team for this task is very important but since it is in-house and assuming that the people involved in this have the knowledge of the company products, history and situations and the communication in-house flows faster, the results achieved can be monitored closely and more frequently and the control of the media accounts and website in case of SEO also remain in-house with less possibility of manipulation in-case of any disputes.


The communication again is very crucial here also as any marketing campaign as mentioned earlier affects each and every team of the organization. In this case the size of the team and the internal communication flow will be the main deciding factor for the success of the campaign.

Situation 3:

When the company concerned is a SMB and a DIY (Do It Yourself) model for the Internet Marketing Campaign is being followed.


This is the most challenging of all and if the entrepreneur himself or some trusted person is handling this task as in these kind of organizations one person wears many hats and here allocation of time becomes the most crucial factor. As it is quite possible that this person manages other important tasks as well and we know that social media is kind of addictive and one can just at times get lost in the flow of conversations and the opening up of a whole new world of possibilities out there.


Hence, balancing all the tasks and allocating the time and budgets will be the challenge in such a case. But, the results achieved will surely be fast and will be monitored well as the person concerned has the decision making authority and is emotionally attached to the brand.


Eventually, whatever the situation it has to be borne in mind that marketing is nothing new what is new is the shift to the online media so the focus should be on understanding what is different in using this media as a marketing, PR and communication tool put together and what would be the best way keeping your teams strengths and weaknesses in mind.


If the leads generated from the traditional form of marketing are high, the best way would be to swap budgets to internet marketing, phase wise and stage wise, gradually weaning away from the outdated platforms which are losing their visibility, influence and reach. This will vary from company to company and also if the market is local or global . Sometimes the local markets responds to a certain form of marketing which may not be possibly achieved via the internet.

source from:searchenginejournal.com

5 Facebook Fan-Acquisition Strategies

These are the only five ways to get Facebook fans. If you have another way, it’s wrong. Just kidding.
These 5 fan-getting techniques are part of what I call my Complete Facebook Marketing System (yet another audacious title that will turn some commenters into haters).  The system is a two stage process for getting fans, then getting revenue. I’ll tell you below where to find more info about that if you’re interested.
Here’s what the system looks like:





Yeah, I make cool systematic diagrams. But it’s more than just a pretty picture, because it came from real world testing of what works and what doesn’t. It was derived from proven results on Facebook for multiple clients, both mine and the work of a handful of other Facebook marketing stars in a variety of verticals and including companies like Axe and Hershey’s, but also local companies. And it can work for lead generation, with some modifications.


Here are the five fan acquisition strategies:


1. Turn Buyers Into Fans At Time of Purchase


This is a no-brainer. If they like you enough to buy, there’s a good chance they’ll like your Facebook page, but it requires a little work.


The easiest way is to make a Facebook Like Box the most prominent thing on your thank you/confirmation page.

A more difficult but stronger strategy is to use another incentive to get them to like your page- for example, a contest that requires liking to enter. With a little programming, you can require they fan you and post a message on their wall about you, and then you can add them to your database of contest entrants immediately. This increases your fan-base and gets some word of mouth out about you as well.


NOTE: there’s a lot of controversy about contests and the Facebook Terms of Service; the upshot is that if you talk to a Facebook rep and get yours approved, you can do more. The downside is that you’re not going to have a rep to have that conversation with until you’re spending 5 figures on Facebook advertising.

2. Incentivized Like, or “Reveal Tabs”

Facebook pages have evolved toward better business results. Here are the stages of evolution so far:

• Get a Facebook page
• Create a special landing tab for new visitors who haven’t LIKED the page yet, make that the default tab for non-likers
• Add a special reward (like a discount) to the landing page for Facebook users specifically
• Require people to LIKE the page before they can get the special thing – now the reward is an incentive
  

The “Incentivized Like” increases the percentage of new visitors that like your page. And if you run Facebook ads, that decreases your cost per new fan.

Matt Monahan coined the term “Reveal Tab” – I call the pre-like tab a “reveal tab” and the post-like tab the “revealed tab”.And yes, the next stage of evolution uses Facebook Apps.


3. Facebook Ads (Social PPC)

Facebook pay per click advertising is a huge topic (you should check out my free training, “Pay Per FACE: 52 Facebook Ad Tips and Best Practices” for a start on Facebook ads). I’m going to have to issue a Part Two to that soon, because I’ve learned a lot more since then. But that’s a good basic intro.

Combine good Facebook Ads with the “Incentivized Like” strategy above, and you’re getting the most fans for your money. This combo-strategy can lead to up to 80% of visitors becoming fans.

4. Incentivized Word of Mouth Contests

We found that, if you have something (or a variety of things) you can give away every week, you can boost

• Engagement,
• Word of mouth, and
• Fan growth.
  

If you don’t have anything, look for partners that do have things to give away that want more exposure themselves. Then you both benefit from the conversation and fan growth it drives.
The basic idea is:

“Hey, post X on our fan page wall, and whoever gets the most likes and comments wins a Y.”

X is the conversation, and Y is the prize.

• The conversation could start with any question relevant to your offerings, benefits, or audience.
• You can combine it with a survey need you have.
• Or most ninja of all, make them think about the core desire or dream your offering fulfills for them.
• Or the easy one: “Tell us why you think you should win the prize.”
  

You’ve told them they’ll win if they get the most engagement, so you’re incentivizing them to post and then tell all their friends to come to the wall to like and comment, and what do those friends have to do first? LIKE your page. ;-)

5. Email Transformation

This is a trick I got from one of my Social Media Expert interviewees. It also might be a hole that Facebook will plug one day, so now’s the time. Depending on the size of your email list and how you value your social media list, it could be worth thousands of dollars to you.

Some say a Facebook fan is worth twice what an email subscriber is worth, because you have to ability to reach their friends too. It’s much easier to get a fan to bring their friend in than for an email subscriber to get you another email subscriber. And the value of a fan or email really depends on what you do with them. If you’ve made money from your email list, you may be able to make a rough guess what a Facebook fan is worth to you.

There are other more obvious wasy to turn emails into fans:

• Include Social links in all your emails
• Send an email quarterly about your Facebook page and tell them about your “Incentivized Like” discount
  

Then What? How Do We Make Money From These Fans?

That’s the next step. There are four or five primary strategies for that, but it’s beyond the scope of this article.
If you’d like more, I’m working on a free training video on the Complete Facebook Marketing System. It contains the fan getting strategies and the revenue generating strategies, and since it’s audiovisual, it’s a little bit easier to grasp than just reading all this text. If you hate reading, you might like that better :-) But, to get it done, I just need a little more spare time… this dang Facebook marketing is keeping me too busy!

source from:searchenginejournal.com

5 WordPress Plugins to Keep in Touch with Your Blog Co-Authors

Maintaining multi-author blogs is hard but it definitely pays off. A multi-author blog provides the variety of insights, perspectives and blogs. Most feeds in my reader are from multi-author blogs – namely because I enjoy the daily variety they offer.

Creating the strong community of guest authors and contributors around your blog is gold: the guest bloggers would

• Come daily to comment their own (and each other’s) posts,
• Link to and cite their guest posts from many other places they contribute to,
• Share their guest posts across their social media channels, etc.

However building this community is definitely hard and takes plenty of time, effort and commitment.
No matter what type of multi-author community you are building (paid authors, regular columns, one-time guest contributions, etc), the following WordPress plugin will let you effectively keep in touch with your authors, invite them back to your site and develop stronger contacts with each other:

1. Email Users

Email Users lets you send a newsletter to all your registered authors (or even subscribers). How you use this plugin depends on the type of the blog you run and the type of relationships you have with your co-authors. Surely, I wouldn’t overuse it but it should work great for important updates and announcements.
As far as you can see from the screenshot below, the plugin supports a few mail formats and some variables. It also lets you choose the author names to send the newsletter to or just send to everyone:

2. Peter’s Collaboration E-mails

This plugin updates both the blog owner and the contributor on the submitted guest post status:

• When a Contributor user submits an article for review: The plugin e-mails a list of approvers of your choice, letting them know that there is a post ready for review, and giving them a link to edit the post.
• When a post is approved: The Contributor user gets an e-mail saying that their post has been approved and who it was approved by. If the post was directly published, the author is given a link to read the post as the whole world sees it. If the post is scheduled to be published, the author is informed of the time that their post will go live. When the post does go live, the author will get another e-mail informing him / her of that.
• When a post’s status is changed back to “draft” from “pending”: The original Contributor user gets an e-mail saying that their post has been reverted back to a draft, along with a link to edit and re-submit the post.

3. Peter’s Post Notes for WordPress

Peter’s Post Notes for WordPress: this plugin allows to post quick private notes to go with posts. It is thus a very handy collaboration tool as an editor can suggest a quick fix, the contributor can report a status or ask for the advice etc – and the whole conversation is forever saved with the post for you to refer to it whenever you need to. Besides, when used in combination with the above plugin, the note recipient will be updated of a new note via email.
The notes are added right to the extra panel added to the sidebar (once you save the draft or publish the post, the note is saved as well).

4. Admin Msg Board

Admin Msg Board is a plugin for WordPress that will add a messaging system in your WordPress admin area. Messages can have up to 140 characters (ala your own internal blog Twitter), and you can choose whether to send a message to all writers or select recipients

5. Private Messages For WordPress

This plugin allows users of WordPress blog send private messages (PM) to each other. The number of PMs can be controlled via the plugin option page.
Otherwise, an email will be sent to user when a new PM is received.

Do you run (or plan to launch) a multi-author blog? Please share your insight!

source from:searchenginejournal.com

Capturing the Long Tail of SEO By Filling a Void [Case Study] Read more

I didn’t plan on writing this post for my column this month, but something happened that I had to write about.  If you’ve read previous posts of mine, then you know I’m a big believer in the power of the long tail of SEO, which is an incredibly important concept in Search Marketing.


You can check out my long tail study to learn more about the how important the tail can be for organic search.  Well, over the past few weeks, I’ve witnessed another great example of the long tail in action.  The example I’m going to explain shows how you can capture the long tail by filling a void.  Specifically, how building valuable content that helps other people can naturally target the long tail and drive a lot of traffic.  It also shows how good Karma can pay off.  I’m going to cover what happened and then what this means to you as a Search Marketer.

Adventures With Syncing A Samsung Captivate

I recently left the world of Blackberry and moved to a Samsung Captivate, a high-end Android phone running on AT&T’s network.  It’s an incredible phone, with some excellent features, but I just couldn’t accomplish one very important task – connecting my phone to my computer to sync contacts, calendar, transfer files, etc.

Needless to say, this is one of the most fundamental things you want to do with a brand new
smartphone. I ended up spending over three hours researching the problem, without success.  There simply wasn’t a documented solution for the specific problem I was experiencing.   I was extremely frustrated and was unfortunately ready to bring the phone back.


I spoke with AT&T support, and they conferenced in Samsung technical support, but there was still no solution.  Then, since I was experiencing a visual problem on my phone (flashing screen, usb problems, etc.)  I ended up searching for videos that could potentially solve the problem.  In a weird twist, I ended up finding a video on Daily Motion (in French) that showed the exact problem I was having.  To make a long story short, there was a single comment on that daily motion video page that ended up solving my problem.  Talk about the power of Google, right?  :)

Welcome to the Void

After initially solving the problem on my Captivate, I couldn’t believe how I ended up finding the answer.  I also couldn’t believe that there wasn’t a solid online resource that explained how to overcome the problem.  It was obvious that there was a void that needed to be filled. Remember, I spent over three hours digging around the web trying to find a solution.  In addition, AT&T and Samsung telephone support didn’t end up recommending the solution.  It was the French video on daily motion.  Note, I had a different experience with Samsung’s Twitter support and I’ll touch on that later in this post (it was definitely impressive).

Good Intentions and Filling The Void

So, I decided to write a blog post to help other frustrated users overcome sync problems with the Samsung Captivate.  I wanted to make sure it was valuable and thorough, and I also provided screenshots to help other users along.  I had a feeling that many other Captivate users were experiencing the same problem.  And since over a one million Galaxy phones have been sold in the United States already, something told me my intuition was right.

I have provided a link to my post below in case you want to check it out:

My Post About Fixing Sync Problems With The Samsung Captivate:

How to Connect A Samsung Captivate to Your PC Using Samsung Kies | The Missing Manual For Overcoming Sync Problems

Being Thorough Covers the Tail

That night, I wrote the tutorial and made sure it was thorough, easy to follow, and provided screenshots to help people along.  I wanted to make sure other Captivate users had a fighting chance of syncing their phones.  Note, whenever I explain the long tail to new SEO clients, I’m often asked how to effectively target the tail.  Well, I believe that a thorough and detailed post covering a specific topic will naturally target the long tail.  As you cover that topic in detail, you will inevitably include a range of targeted keywords, variations of keywords, etc.  If you don’t, then your post might not be as thorough as you think.  :)

The Resulting Wave of Captivate Users

So I posted the tutorial, hoping that other users would find it helpful.  Then I moved on.  I had an incredibly busy week so I wasn’t really paying much attention to the post.  Little did I know that a wave of frustrated Captivate users was hitting my blog.  Sure, I knew that other people could be having the same problem, but I had no idea how widespread the syncing problem was.  Suddenly, emails started coming in thanking me for the post.  Some people needed more information, while others were asking additional questions.  At the same time, some comments started being posted on my blog.  People were also reaching out to me on Twitter to either explain how the post helped them or to get clarification on how to fix the problem. I could tell the post was helping other Captivate users.  In the graph below, you can see how visits spiked only two hours after the post launched.

Long Tail, Meet the Void.  Void, Meet the Long Tail

After seeing the activity I mentioned above, I decided to take a look at the keywords leading to the post.  As I was logging into my reporting, I was expecting to see several targeted keywords that led to the post (maybe a few dozen).  Little did I know that the Captivate problem was much bigger than I had thought.  I drilled into my keywords reporting and saw that the long tail of SEO was in full effect.

As of yesterday, 896 different keywords have led to that single post.  More keywords are leading to the post every single day and the traffic on my blog has spiked.  It was truly amazing to see the variations of keywords that led to the tutorial.  There are some keywords that are 5, 6, 7+ words in length.  Try and find those in your favorite keyword research program.  :)  It’s a great example of how a thorough and valuable post that fills a void can target the long tail (naturally.)  Below, you’ll see a graph showing the increase in the number of keywords leading to the post since the day it launched.    There were 21 keywords leading to the post on the first day and 896 in total, as of yesterday.

What This Means For You

If your goal is to attract targeted users to your site via organic search, then keep the following points in mind.  And by the way, although this is a great example of the long tail, it’s not isolated.  There are many examples I’ve seen that are similar.  OK, maybe not with 896 keywords leading to each post, but you get the idea.

• Always be on the lookout for “the void”.  If you can solve a problem that few people have addressed thoroughly, then write a valuable post that explains how to solve that problem.  If you build high quality content that helps others, then you can also reap great rewards (and capture the long tail).
• Be thorough.  The more details you can provide that add value to your content, the better chance you have of effectively targeting the long tail.  Again, this will happen naturally if you write a thorough post.  Don’t skimp on content if you decide to fill a void.
• Be fast.  If you find a void, fill it fast.  Don’t wait.  I immediately wrote the post (that night) and published it the next morning.  This will give you a greater shot at being noticed as the original resource that solved the problem.
  

What This Means for Samsung

I love my Captivate, but it’s pretty clear that Samsung has a big problem on its hands.  As I explained earlier, there have been over one million Galaxy phones sold in the United States already and I can tell you firsthand, a lot of people are having sync problems.

I ended up working with Samsung Galaxy Support on Twitter (and they have been incredibly responsive and helpful).  I just hope they can add more accounts to deal with the wave of users I mentioned earlier.  I know they are working on a better solution with a new build of their desktop software (Samsung Kies), but they better move fast.

Well, that’s my latest long tail example.  So the next time you are thinking about creating a resource, think about how this story unfolded.  Don’t simply target one keyword or a handful of keywords, capture the long tail and go after 896.  Now it’s time to go sync my Captivate.

source from:searchenginejournal.com

Why Brand and Reputation Management SEO are the Way Forwards

If I were to sit in a meeting with a big client now and tell them to slash a little of their traditional SEO budget and instead spend more time optimising the top 30 SERP’s for variations of their brand names, they would literally laugh me out of the room.


People and big companies have only these last few years got their heads around SEO, they now know that in order to get more traffic, more sales and more revenue, you need to optimise your site and make its targeted keywords appear as high as possible in all the major search engines.


But moving forwards more and more independent SEO’s are going to be jumping onto the scene, as well as this more and more SEO companies opening up shop. So with even more SEO’s and more companies competing for the same term(s) every sector is going to be a battle field, but there are a few options:

1. Optimise for long tail terms and drive traffic through with ranking for quantity terms rather than the quality ones. (Again this will start receiving huge amounts of competition).
2. Optimise for local terms and then slowly optimise for all the locations that you cover, you will have a lot less competition, but will the search volume and customers be there?
3. Finally and this is what I see expanding rapidly in the next few years, especially for mid sized companies and large companies that are already advertising by other means and already get a lot of direct traffic.
   
   

If you look at some of your client’s analytics data you will see that, some of the terms that actually bring the most visitors are their brand terms. As an example, do you know how many people actually go to Google and type in Facebook rather than just typing it in the browser?…….  1,680,000,000 that’s how many!
Now that is not even including mis spellings, so now imagine your client getting a fraction of brand searches, or for the rich and famous reputation searches. Currently there are not many SEO’s concentrating on this factor, but let’s just think about what happens if you do not own the rest of the sites, in the Top 5 or the Top 10? You are basically going to be losing traffic that you could have easily grabbed and converted.  But what is even worse is imagine that Top 10 for your branded term had 3-4 bad experiences or false negatives about your clients company or image, you could potentially be missing out on lots of click throughs even though you are number one for your brand term, because people are seeing the negatives about you.





Brand and reputation searches are on the increase, just take a look at the above graph, this is persistent with most brand terms.


Over the next few years Brand management SEO and reputation management SEO will literally have to be offered as a separate service to clients, because although you may be number 1 for your brand. Is that really enough? What do you think?

source from:searchenginejournal.com

How to Piss off an Online Community – 4 Recent Examples

People are resistant to change.  We find solace in our daily routines.  And because social media sites have become a part of that routine (for better or worse) even small changes to those services can effect us.    So while not every change is bad, and most (if not all) will have their naysayers, some changes are just harder to swallow than others.  Here are 4 recent (and very public) examples of changes that caused the respective communities to lash out.

Betray your users’ trust

Example: Facebook’s Privacy Settings

It’s no secret that Facebook privacy policy is complicated.  In fact, it’s longer than the US constitution.    Late last year, however, Facebook rolled out a privacy settings update that made users (previously private) friends lists public, and gave no ability to make it private again.  Gawker called this ‘Facebook’s Great Betrayal’.


While this wasn’t the first time Facebook was under fire for its privacy policies, it is arguably the worst example by the social media giant.  Outraged bloggers became concerned news outlets which eventually evolved into a main stream media fire storm of concerns over Facebook & privacy.  A storm that is still going strong today.

Create a feature that people want, but ruin it

Example: Twitter’s Re-tweet Button

In retrospect, the addition of a one-touch retweet button made a lot of sense.  The format RT @username: became such common use, that to NOT add a button seemed more of a slight than to screw it up.  Well screw it up they did…


The problem with what Twitter released last year wasn’t about functionality, but rather the format. Instead of simply adding “RT @username” before the tweet as your own, the re-tweet would instead show up in your followers’ feeds as it originally looked, avatar and all.  Additionally, the button didn’t allow for users to amend the original tweet in any way.


While this wasn’t the worst thing that Twitter could do, it was widely criticized by the community.  Almost a year later, people continue to use the original format and manually RT instead of using the button.  In fact, in my own twitter feed, I had to go 3 pages deep and pass over 10 manual re-tweets before finding a Twitter generated re-tweet.

The lesson here: if you’re going to add a feature based on common user activity, keep it as similar to that activity as possible.  Twitter still hasn’t listened.

Take away core features

Example: Sphinn announces they’re removing voting

In case you hadn’t heard, just a few days ago, Sphinn announced it was doing away with user voting.  The social media news site for the SEO and Internet Marketing community will now be completely editor hand picked content.  The decision came just a couple weeks after the announcement of a more strict editorial policing of content to prevent sub-par submissions from reaching the front page through group voting.
It’s not hard to imagine why people would be upset by this news.  No longer will the community have the power to vote on what content is featured on the main page.  Criticism that Sphinn will become more of an “old boys club” and that editors will only promote content by their peers are wide spread and (perhaps) valid.  Danny Sullivan himself even admitted the site would no longer be a “social media” news site.


While it is yet to be seen if the decision will pay off in the long-run, many loyal users are upset by this prospect and don’t see why they would continue to participate in the site.  So even if this improves the quality of the content on Sphinn, the backlash will likely carry a price in the short term.

Completely change the entire way the site works (including breaking it)

Example: Digg v. 4

Just over a week ago Digg made major changes reflective of a new era for the social media news giant.  The problem is: nobody likes it.  There have been enough articles about what changes people hate the most and what features that are no longer available users are missing the most, so I won’t go into the gory details.  In order to truly appreciate the differences between the two versions you simply needed to experience it.  In short: the site practically stopped being Digg and became a whole new idea altogether.


If change is bad, then Digg just committed a mortal sin.  At least that’s the feeling when you talk to some power users about it.  Many are begging for features to come back and (even as I write this) conducting boycotts of the service to make their points heard.


What’s worse: the service seems to be completely unreliable as of late showing a “broken axle” (Digg’s “fail ox”) for sometimes hours at a time.  And even when it is working, angered users (in protest) have promoted popular stories that point to the competing (and growing) reddit instead of the original article making for a very poor user experience.


Digg’s creator and former CEO (who stepped down this week) Kevin Rose promised that they were working to bring back many of the removed features, but the damage has been done.  The site has lost over 1/3 of it’s traffic and devout users have already started migrating elsewhere.  What will become of Digg?  It’s anyone’s guess.

source from:searchenginejournal.com

Social Media Marketing – NOT for Everyone?

After 10 years of preaching the merits of search engine optimization to sceptical business owners, I’ve found there’s a new challenge in online marketing and it’s a funny one.


Nearly all business owners I meet think they should use social media marketing to promote their businesses, but a good number have a real aversion to using social networking channels.


I am finding many people are afraid that if they don’t start using social media they’ll end up behind their competition – or even that they are just going to be missing out on this ‘next big thing’. I’ll be called in for a consultation on using social media for a business, and after discussing the ins and outs of a successful social media campaign, I see there’s something not quite clicking — but as averse to using social media the client may be, he still feels that he must use it.


Do you convince such people that they need to push on, as social media marketing is a necessity these days, or is social media just not for everyone?


Whilst we’ve all heard the benefits of using social media to promote businesses, the dilemma is that using social media as an effective marketing tool also requires:

• some technical ability (albeit pretty basic);
• time, when you may already have issues with time management;
• putting yourself ‘out there’, the social aspect of social media is intimidating to many;
• creative writing skills;
• buy-in from management that may be concerned about dealing with unfriendly comments, time and money spent, etc.;
• a budget to hire a professional to get started or run your campaign, if you just cannot manage it internally.
  

Even after discussing the ways of managing all of these issues – sometimes over and over again – I still get resistance in many cases.


“I can’t see myself telling the world what I’m having for breakfast.”
“I just don’t get Facebook.”
“It’s just not ME!”

So I’ve become a Social Media Marketing Evangelist, and I’ve been able to convert nearly all of those ‘with little faith’ through:

• inspiring with case studies of related businesses that have shown real results through social media marketing;
• brain storming content ideas related to the areas of the business that the client is most passionate about;
• using channels that are most suited to the clients skills and interests – videos for YouTube may really excite a person less inclined to write blog posts;
• working out a time management plan that fits with the clients’ other responsibilities;
• identifying others that may assist the client (at no or low cost) – teenage children are a good resource for sole traders, while using a variety of staff members works in larger organisations;
• looking at the higher cost of alternative ‘traditional’ offline or PPC advertising;
• showing how to set a realistic budget for social media marketing in case professional assistance is needed on a regular basis;
• setting up tools for integrating accounts and automated posting;
• discussing the other benefits of using social media – communicating with and retaining existing customers, networking, keeping tabs on competitors, etc.;
• meeting the sceptical parties in an organisation to get their buy-in and discuss setting up a social media marketing plan and policy.
  
  

Usually at some point along this path I see the client become more comfortable with using social media.  Most become full converts after signing on new clients and making more sales through their social media efforts, for example:

• a small business owner, who barely used email a year ago, is now happily chatting with prospective clients on Twitter on a daily basis;
• a sole trader that couldn’t see himself ‘rattling on about my daily habits online’, has a popular YouTube channel showing off his services;
• a marketing assistant that had to struggle with the business owner for the okay set up a social media campaign, now amazes him with the number of sales they get through their Facebook page and Twitter.
  
  

There are still those who just don’t get it and may never get it.  They may have heartedly set up a Facebook Pages that is only posted to once a month, or Twitter accounts that have just the very first post from a training session. They are not going to see much result from such efforts and this will probably confirm their fears that Social Media Marketing is NOT for them or doesn’t work altogether.


Perhaps the super sceptics will have to take their chances using more traditional marketing methods, but as there has been such a shift in marketing practices toward using social media, they may very well fall behind their competitors and will have to come to terms with it sooner or later. In this case they are probably best off hiring a professional social media consultant to run their campaigns for them.


Social Media Marketing may not suit everyone initially, but it’s definitely something that business owners, marketing and sales staff do need to come to terms with to be competitive in the business world today.

source from:searchenginejournal.com

Why Small Advertisers Can’t Use Adwords Anymore!

Remember back in 2001, during the good old days (of the internet) when you could actually use Google Adwords as a means to drive quality traffic to your website, at an extremely low investment to the advertiser? Back when niche keywords cost .05 – .20 per click and if you really wanted to open up your pockets and bid on broader terms, you would pay .25 – .75 per click.


Now days you would be so lucky to find a niche where you can pay under $1.00/click. What I am saying is that the days when small advertisers could gain visibility (at least in the paid results) on Google are over. Small advertisers don’t have a budget to “test” keywords, landing pages, offers, etc… For a small, local businesses, $250/month is a lot of money!


The problem is that over the past 10 years, the competitive landscape has gotten much more saturated. There are bidding wars between advertisers to push their ads towards the top. I know, I know…Ad Quality Score plays a factor in how much you pay per click, but I’ll tell you something, if you have deep pockets and are willing to pay a lot per click…Google will put you at the top. So when push comes to shove, the big brands and large corporations with the bigger budgets, are the ads that are still going to be showing.

The Solution

So what can small, localized business do? The good part is that there are so many new and innovative ways you can drive traffic to your site. Just to stay focused on Paid Search, you can try newer ad platforms like Facebook Ads and MyAds (Myspace Ad Network). Facebook Ads in particular has been getting a lot of attention recently because the CPCs are reasonable, you have a ton of awesome targeting options, and…oh yeah…Facebook gets a ton of traffic!

To the Small-Business Owner: Don’t let Adwords put a bad taste in your mouth about paid search. Paid search can still be a valuable marketing tactic; you just need to find other outlets that can still drive quality traffic at lower costs. I would strongly recommend to keep your mind open to other paid search techniques. It may be that you can drive the same amount of traffic that Adwords would bring you, with Facebook and MySpace ads at half the cost.


Using best practices to increase ROI:

• Create relevant landing pages
• Use strong call to actions
• Use free content as a means of lead generation
• Use promotions and timely specials to entice user action

Google Brings “Search-to-Store” to the Mobile Web

Google Maps for Mobile has a new feature that could help you get exactly where you want to be. Earlier this summer they introduced Expendable Map Ads that appeared in both applications and mobile web. This app provided a banner from paid advertisers that once clicked on, a user would see a map with options to call the business or get directions to it. The only thing that could have been a problem with that is the fact that locations were identified based on IP targeting.

However with Google Maps for Mobile, targeting capabilities will come from GPS and triangulation, just like regular Maps does. Another change is that the ads that will appear will be based on user search queries, thus make the experience more personalized. Once a user begins a search, a banner will appear allowing the searcher to click on it and then giving them the ability to call or get directions; the directions function will integrate into Google Navigation.

source from:searchenginejournal.com

The Four P’s of (Search) Marketing

Search Marketing isn’t all that different than traditional marketing. And, just like the physical market, you have a plethora of vehicles from which to choose.  Optimizing your efforts can get a little confusing, so look to the traditional Marketing Mix to help a bit.

P Number 1:  Product

The end-result.  In the Internet world, we’ll call this the user’s interaction with the website being promoted.  I want to look at it this way for sake of including all types of websites, not just ecommerce sites.
This is where conversion fits into the marketing mix.  There’s no sense in wasting link building efforts or on page optimization work if the end result of this leads the user to a junky place.  So many clients want their pages to be at the top of the SERPs, yet aren’t willing to make changes to their website that make them worthy of high rankings.

P Number 2:  Price

How much do you spend on your website and it’s promotion?  The numbers that float by my screen sometimes astound me.  People and companies are spending a lot on search marketing.
Forrester has predicted 3.1 billion dollars to go to social marketing by 2014, but that’s only 1/10th of what they think is going to search marketing.  These are some big numbers, there’s no doubt about it.  Take a peek into your competitors search marketing and search marketing spending  habits.  Are you in the same ballpark?

P Number 3:  Place

This P, also known as distribution, applies to how the first P (targeted website) is delivered to a potential consumer.  Are you getting a lot of direct traffic?  Where are you in the SERPs?
Where are your back-links hanging out?  It’s essential to understand your market coverage.  How often are your keywords being searched?  A neat tool to check trends of keywords is  Google Insights. Don’t waste money in keywords that aren’t of interest to users (duh!).

P Number 4:  Promotion

Let’s refer to packaging, here.  I’m talking meta description and title tag.  While these aren’t on-page factors, per se’, they are so important to search marketing efforts.  Don’t blow these.  Inevitably, like a kid at Christmas, Googlers & Bingers will pick the box that most looks like the best present.  The Red Rider.

Note: This post was written by of Kim Greuel of SlingsotSEO Zach represents here at SEJ

source from:searchenginejournal.com

How to Easily Install Twitter Testimonials on Your Blog

A couple of weeks ago I took a look at some examples of how brands collect and leverage Tweeted feedback – which has a positive effect:

• This creates favorable social media context around the brand (and thus makes it “friendlier”);
• This engages users to promote the company social media profiles (by adding them to friends, sharing, etc)
• This makes the brand more trust-worthy (as Twitter testimonials are easier confirmed and verified).

One of the best scenarios you may want to apply (in case you decide to take advantage of social media reviews) is a semi-controlled ones:

1. You track Twitter mentions and add them to your Twitter favorites (by “starring them”)
2. You grab your Twitter favorites RSS feed and make it public at your site.
   

This way you have the full control over what is being shared with your visitors.
Fortunately, it’s all even easier to do than it may sound.

When collecting examples for my BlueGlass post I have linked to above, I stumbled across this nice WordPress plugin that does exactly what I have described above. The smart idea and simplicity of implementation appealed to me so much that I decided to share it at SEJ.

I am sure many of the readers will love it as much as I have.

How Tweet-stimonials Work?

It’s really that fast and easy as it sounds: just install and activate plugin and you are almost done.
Now, navigate to your “Widgets” control panel in your WordPress dashboard, find the “Tweet-stimonials” widget, drag it to the place in your sidebar where you want to display Twitter testimonials and configure the widget:

• Provide your Twitter handle (the plugin will be using this Twitter account’s favorites RSS)
• Select how many entries you want to display in the sidebar;
• Provide the widget name to be displayed in the sidebar;
• Select if you want users’ Twitter avatar displayed;
• Select if you want to link to “More testimonials” (will be linked to your Twitter favorites page)
• Select if you want to invite users to follow you on Twitter.

You are done! Now check your blog sidebar – as easy as it sounds!

So Why Can Running Tweet-stimonials Be a Good Idea?

The plugin provides for an easy way to:

• Personalize your testimonials (display photos of real people who were using your product or service and liked it)
• Grow your (official account) Twitter following
• Decide what exactly you want to display there (you are the one who selects testimonials by starring them).

What should you be aware of?

• The plugin requires PHP5 (so one of my really old blogs couldn’t run it)
• The plugin is compatible with the latest WordPress version.

I’d love to hear your thoughts! Isn’t it a bright idea?

source from:searchenginejournal.com