Social media is quickly becoming the norm in online marketing and business plans.  Facebook is a great channel for sharing your content with a large, active audience.  There are many things you can do to take advantage of this free and valuable social media platform and below are a few of ideas get you started:

1)   Search engines index content from Business pages on Facebook.  Take that opportunity to incorporate keywords into your status updates.

2)   Include images to create a more eye catching post.  Did you know that updates with an image get 54% higher clicks?

3)  The news feed is one of, if not the most valuable asset you have on Facebook.  Because it only displays about the top 1% of content, you need to do everything you can to get your updates posted in users’ news feeds.

Later on this week, we’ll detail more Facebook optimization ideas including how to increase your chances of ranking in user’s news feeds, so be sure to stay tuned!

Most people are familiar with the term social bookmarking, but many are still not sure what it is or why it’s important.  Just as you would bookmark a favorite site on your computer, you can use social bookmarking to share the pages you like on a public website.

Social bookmarking can be a great way to generate traffic to your site.  People browsing the social sites can come across your site/link and click if it looks interesting.  When an article on your site is bookmarked and links back to your website (inbound links) that helps increase your Page Rank.  Extending that idea further, the higher your PR is, the easier it is for people to come across your website in search engine results.

I’m sure you’ve seen the following buttons on various websites:

To make it easy for others to “social bookmark” your site, it is a good idea to add bookmarking buttons to you site, so your visitors can easily “digg”, “like”, “tweet”  your articles.  Try to be selective with which buttons you choose to add.  You can use Google Analytics to determine your traffic sources.  If there is a decent amount of traffic from Digg, it may be a good idea to link back there!  Also, consider which countries most of your traffic come from.  Facebook is popular in Australia and India, while Orkut and Twitter are big in Brazil.

Integrated with other marketing platforms, e-mail marketing can be an extremely effective and inexpensive way to reach your target customers. The simple truth is that customers are more likely to read an e-mail that’s pertinent to them.

Therefore, to be effective in your e-mail marketing campaigns, it’s important to tailor your e-mails for different target audiences.

With the potential customers (i.e. new leads that have made a purchase yet), you want to guide them through the sales funnel- building trust, educating them, and creating excitement via special offers and deals.  Remind customers of what your product can do to help solve their problems.

With current customers, your focus is on building brand loyalty/customer retention.  In this case, e-mail marketing can be used to inform existing customers of new uses for your current products, introduce new products, share interesting related content,  or promote a quality affiliate offer (and make some extra $$$!)

Segmenting e-mails by potential and existing customers is a great place to start.  As you track your e-mail campaigns, you can even start targeting further by sending follow up e-mails to people who opened the original e-mail, or clicked on the e-mails links.  Try using popular online email services, such as AWeber and Constant Contact, which allow you to setup multiple e-mail lists and easily create auto-responders that automate email delivery as soon as new leads are added.

Web Video Marketing is growing faster than any other ad format online, especially amongst small businesses.  People like watching videos.  The truth is most people would rather watch a video than have to read.  Below are 3 ways to reap the benefits of video marketing:

1)      Add a video on your landing page- videos have the proven ability to hold visitor attention, decrease your site’s bounce rate, and drive conversions.  Test to see what converts bests- short vs. long, autoplay vs. manual, etc.  Write a script for your video to ensure a professional, well-delivered message.  Lastly, as with any landing page, make sure your video contains a clear call-to-action (CTA).

2)      YouTube- YouTube is the 3rd most trafficked site in the world and a huge SEO opportunity.  Since Google owns YouTube, it favors their video content in search results.  Just like on-page SEO for web pages, you must optimize videos for SEO by entering quality titles, descriptions, tags and links.  Tags are important because they associate your video with related videos; therefore, when someone watches a video relating to yours, your video thumbnail can show up in the suggestions section.  Of course with YouTube, page views, comments, ratings and inbound links/embeds are important in getting your view ranked higher in search results.

3)      Google- Google likes video content.  However, since the search engine doesn’t automatically index all video content, it’s possible that some of your site’s most valuable content isn’t visible to their web crawlers.   To ensure that your videos are being seen, create and submit a video site map to Google.  Video sitemaps provide Google with essential indexing information, such as URLs, titles, descriptions, keywords, thumbnail images and more.

To learn more about how to create effective, professional internet videos, IMRC members have positive things to say about Dave Kaminski’s Web Video University (A- rating, 15 grades).  If you would rather leave video making to the professionals, 30 Second Video (B+ rating, 8 grades) is an easy and affordable way to get website commercials to promote any industry and any niche.

Posted February 07th 2011 to Uncategorized • Comments (2)