How Does Social Media and SEO Work Together?

• Category: Case Studies, Marketing, SEO, Social media
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In order to make your on line website be as successful as it can be you need to understand and use both social media and SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is a means to attract clients to your website. When you set up an SEO optimized website by using strong keywords and good content, you allow search engine websites to find, evaluate and appropriately index your site. The end result is your business showing up at the top of search engine results in your niche.

Social media is a means of on-line networking that has become the forefront of advertising on the web. Everyone from politicians to charities and businesses need social media to be successful. It is how successful businesses and other entities are able to gain contacts and followers.

Today, both SEO and social media combined drive businesses to success. When the two are intertwined and used together to promote your business, results can be amazing.

Here are some things you will need to do in order to optimize your success from SEO and social media:

Link your social media networks to your website

Depending on the social media network or networks that you are using, there are different ways to do this. Post it on your page and/or make sure that you always provide a link in your signature. Links to your site from social media networks can be very powerful in driving traffic to your site.

Optimize the content on your website

Optimizing your content will be essential. If you are going to be directing traffic from social media sites to your website you need to have excellent content. If your content is less than stellar, this could hurt. Many social media sites have areas to comment or grade your site. If your site is not up to par this could hurt your reviews and diminish your chances of getting new customers.

Work to build your following and fan base from social media sources

When you build a twitter following, accumulate face book fans and develop good relationships with high profile bloggers your website content will get seen more. The more your site is seen, the higher your ranking on search engines.

Provide links on your site to all of your social media platforms

You want your current customers to find you on Facebook, follow your on twitter and read your blogs. When they become your fan on Facebook their contacts will see that and may check you out. When one of their contacts becomes your fan then all of their friends will see you and so on. The possibilities are endless. Having followers on twitter, blogs and other social media sites can provide the same results.

It is easy to see how SEO and social media can work together to help build your client base. Making sure you are connected to a variety of social media networks and follow great SEO practices is vital to your success. If one area is lacking, it will not work as effectively with the other. The most successful companies, organizations, etc effectively work to connect the two.

Why Email Marketing Might Be the Golden Ticket for Your Business

• Category: Case Studies, Content, Email Marketing, Marketing
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You may be operating your business for just a few months or even a few years relying solely on mass snail-mail marketing campaigns. Postcards, mailers, and printed newsletter may have proved successful for you to some degree but in light of the economy and the need to streamline any business these days, it may be time to venture into the world of email marketing.

Here’s why:

Bigger Circulation Area

It is a lot of work to create, print, stamp and address thousands of marketing materials being mailed out. With email, all you need is one email address. No stamps, not printing, no wasted hours spent. Set up a form to grab addresses on your website and get the contact information for people you may not reach through print marketing campaigns. By establishing an email mailing list, you already have access to your target audience. There is less of hit-and-miss game of chance taking place.

Easier Access to Your Company

On print marketing materials, you include your name, address, telephone number and email address. All of which are necessary but not necessarily convenient for the potential customer. In an email marketing campaign, you can provide a direct link to your website or product page and all the reader needs to do is click twice to have access to your information. Recipients can also email you back immediately should they have questions.

Trackable Actions

If you use an email application for your email marketing campaign, you will be able to see who is doing what with your information. Different applications allow you to run different reports to see who clicked-through on the links, who opened the email, and more. This information is invaluable for helping you to decide what is working and what doesn’t. You can perfect your advertising campaigns as you go along.

More Acceptable

If you have been relying on cold calls to get the majority of your customers, you may already know many people don’t take too kindly to repetitive calls when they are busy. Sending email information is a less intrusive way to reach your target. Customers often will save the information in an email to come back to at a more convenient time. It will take several email contacts to gain attention but an email will likely be stored while a phone call is quickly forgotten.

Much More Affordable

Email marketing is beneficial especially to start-ups that have little marketing funds in the beginning. The costs of print ads and marketing materials can be tremendous. With email, however, the cost of a monthly service for email contact is reasonable and there is no need for a huge investment initially that may or may not pay off. Email is perhaps the most inexpensive form of marketing your business can use after word of mouth.

Time To Check In With Your Email Marketing Campaigns

• Category: Email Marketing, Marketing
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One reason emailing marketing stops working is because those on your mailing list are getting tired of the same old thing, month after month. If you found your customer/potential customer’s interest going down rather than up, it may be time to revitalizing what you are selling and how you are selling it.

There are several ideas you should consider to pump some life back into your email marketing campaigns and communications. Here are few for you to try right now:

Give Newsletters a Makeover

Customers may be used to you regular format for electronic newsletters but they may also have grown tired of looking at it. Check out the last few month’s worth of newsletters and see how eye-catching they truly are not. Can you say your work demands attention? Even if the newsletters are indeed informative, you might need to jazz them up a bit. Change colors and fonts. Add a color photo or graphic to catch people’s attention. Check out the layout of your materials. Are people finding it easy to find what they are looking for? Is your information quality and update? There are many simple upgrades you can make that will bring a world of difference to your marketing efforts.

Find New Angles

While the topic for your newsletters and email campaigns are already something of interest for your readers, why not trying adding a spin on things. Are there ways to find a different approach to material that may be tired? Are you sure you are answering the questions your readers are really asking? If you aren’t sure what is left to write, put out a survey one month in place of a newsletter. Ask readers what they are interested in learning. You may receive feedback that can change the whole angle of your sales pitch. Offer to sponsor a giveaway as part of the survey to keep people interested in responding to the survey. Keep up to date on the happenings in your industry so you are always finding new and relevant things to share with your readers.

Analyze Your Reports

If you ignore the information in your campaign reports, you may be wasting time and effort on stuff that is just not working. Don’t overlook the valuable information you can glean from these reports. You need to understand how many people are actually clicking on the email, who is going further, and why they are doing so. Even more importantly, you can help deduce the more important answer – why are people not clicking?

Upgrade Your Mailing List

If you have not had new members joining in, you are missing out on a breath of fresh air. Start a small marketing campaign on your website to encourage people to sign up to the mailing list. You can offer a giveaway contest or some other marketing gimmick to help recruit more readers. While you are getting in the mailing list to add new, make sure you also clean out the old and organize a stale mailing list.

Compensate The Loyal

If you have maintained a good, strong customer mailing list and response from email marketing campaigns, do something nice for your readers. If possible, try and set up an open-house of sorts to thank the loyal customers you have. If you business is strictly online, think of other creative ways you can give back to your readers. Free stuff always works!

Mind Your Internet Manners or Lose Business Profits

• Category: Marketing, Social media
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It has become customary for many B2B transactions to start, develop, and end without any personal interaction outside of technology. Email marketing and email correspondence are a part of everyday life for many thriving businesses. However, those who overlook the importance of conducting electronic business as they would in person-to-person business can easily lose out on profits.

What Is Internet Etiquette?

Just because you are not able to look at a person in the eye when doing business, doesn’t mean you can forego basic manners and civility. How you present yourself online and through emails makes as much of a difference as it would if you were standing in a room of people. Email etiquette is important for any business and there are many ways a business can fail by acting improperly.

Avoiding Electronic Pitfalls

People who interact online are often more open because there a certain sense of anonymity with the Internet. Business owners, especially new ones, are eager to meet people and let them know about their products and services. However, many times their efforts are disregarded because they fail to remain professional and in some instances actually are offensive to potential clients or customers. Since many online business have little chance of creating a personal impression, it is crucial that online business marketing and communication be conducted in the utmost professional manner.

Here are some tips to get you started to better Internet etiquette:

Use Common Sense and Discretion

This is a popular topic for many. Funny jokes and silly forwarded emails may be hilarious to you and your friends. But think twice before sending it out to your customer database. What you may find funny, others may find offensive. Use common sense to control what you are putting out to the public as it all comes back to represent you and your business. If you have a particularly good relationship with some customers, use your personal email to send jokey messages and keep work email for work-related information.

Keep It Simple, Clean, Professional

Unless you are promoting your art or very specific creative services, you’ll want to keep your websites, emails, and blogs simple and to the point. Creativity is fine but don’t use several types of fonts, colors, pictures, and other designs on yourself if they will take away from the meat of the matter. You want people to focus on your professional business experience and not on your gallery of cutesy photos or crazy fonts.

Get to the Point

When you are sending out email marketing materials or announcements, write what you want to say in a concise manner and get right to the point. Don’t send your email list page long missives and large attachments. Make your content clear and easy to read. Don’t talk over people’s heads. Be personable and informative but know when to stop talking.

Tone Matters

While it may seem like emails are just a bunch of words, people do clearly hear the tone in other’s writings. You’re objective is to let people know how your business can provide solutions. It is not meant for you to brag on and on about how great your company is. Speak respectfully in your writing and proof it before sending to make sure the right message is getting through.

Different industries will have different etiquette standards but overall politeness and professionalism are the two most crucial parts of communication when representing a business voice. Practice your etiquette with every email and social media action because you just never know who might be listening.

Scribe SEO Could be the Answer to Your SEO Copy Needs

• Category: Marketing, SEO
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You know that SEO makes all the difference in how your page ranks in the search engine results. You know that keyword research, competition research and strategically placing keywords in the right places in your copy can make the difference between being tenth in the SERPS and being first or second. You know these things – and you want the results- but you just don’t have the time, the inclination or the money to make sure that every post you write, every page on your site and every tweet you twitter is optimized to make the most of SEO benefits when Google does their daily crawl. So are you destined to spend your online days at the bottom of the second page or is there an affordable, workable solution that can help even you move to the the top of page one?

Well, there just might be- enter Scribe SEO, an amazing new software service that just might help you move to the top of your niche and stay there. Scribe SEO is created for WordPress blogs and works with the All-In-One SEO plug-in. The creative inspiration for Scribe is none other than Brian Clark, Mr. CopyBlogger himself. CopyBlogger is one of the 50 most influential blogs on the Internet, with over 100,000 subscribers and a quarter of a million unique blog visitors a month. Suffice it so say that CopyBlogger knows his SEO. He partnered with some talented creative techy types and they created Scribe SEO to help you get the most from your content.

Scribe analyzes your content and tells you exactly what you need to do to optimize it for ranking. At the click of a mouse, the program tells you where you can tweak your copy to keep it reader friendly and turn it into spider bait for the search engines. A lot of SEO focuses on the structure of your blog or site- how the pages are set up- but as every online business owner and blogger knows, content is king online. Scribe evaluates your content in a unique way.

Rather than just searching out keywords and telling you where to stuff them into your text, Scribe reads what you write and then tells you what the search engines will think you are writing about. This allows you to write your content in a natural, organic manner and still manage to optimize it properly so you can get a higher page rank.

Scribe SEO is a monthly subscription based service and it offers three different price points so it can fit into every budget. You can even check it out with a free trial so you know what you’re getting without spending a dime. If you are serious about your online business, you owe it to yourself to check out Scribe SEO service.