Posts Tagged ‘Google’
Social Media Marketing – Easy and Inexpensive Publicity For Small Non-Profits
If you run a small non-profit agency, you owe it to yourself to learn more about social media marketing. Social media marketing is an effective and easy way to promote and publicize your organization for little or no cost.
Social media marketing takes advantage of the social aspects of the Internet. How? Before we begin that discussion, let’s first start with an overview of the objectives of online marketing in general.
Online marketing has one main goal – attract visitors to your Website. To draw traffic, most organizations focus on improving their ranking on search engines like Google. There are many ways to boost your ranking, with paid listings, search engine optimization, and link building being the main ones:
Paid listings offer fast results but are prohibitively expensive for small non-profits. Search engine optimization (SEO) involves making your site really relevant to the keywords that pertain to your organization’s mission. It has no direct costs, but you may need to pay for the services of a search engine marketing firm to get decent results. TIP: The critical aspects of SEO are keyword research and large quantities of Website content, which makes it an important part of your marketing strategy whether you choose to use social media or not. A Google search on SEO techniques can help you learn how to optimize your site. Link building is a strategy to increase the number of links pointing to your site. The greater the number of links, the more popular and relevant your site is considered to be, and the greater the chance of a high search engine ranking.
Social media marketing goes hand in hand with SEO and link building. It can help you increase the content on your Website and generate tons of links to your site. The synopsis below explains how.
Social media marketing is based on participation in various online communities/meeting places, like blogs, article databases, and social bookmarking and news sites. Each time you participate, you can create a link to your site. You can use blog entries and articles to fill out the content on your site, making it even more relevant in the eyes of the search engines. And you can do all of this for next to nothing, especially if you know some Net-savvy volunteers with a flair for writing.
Here is a quick overview of the main tools used for social media marketing:
Blogs. Each blog posting has a unique URL, or Web page address. This means that if the blog is hosted directly on your site, every blog post will create a new page on your site, giving search engines more to work with when assessing your site’s relevance. To host your own blog you need a domain name, which has a monthly cost. If you host your blog elsewhere, like blogger.com, there is no charge, and you can still take advantage of link building opportunities by pointing to your own site in your posts or adding your posts to social bookmarking and news sites.
Social Bookmarking. Social bookmarking sites allow users to share their favourite Websites with others over the Internet. More bookmarks to a site mean more potential links. In the context of marketing, social bookmarking sites allow your organization to post every blog entry, new Web page and article you write, and create a link to your site for each one. Companies like addthis.com offer buttons for your site that allow visitors to bookmark your site with the click of a single button.
Social News. Social news sites are similar in concept to social bookmarking sites. With a free membership you can start submitting your articles and blog posts to news sites. These sites have a lot of traffic and can lead many users to your Website. Check out services like Digg and Reddit for more information.
Social Networking. Most non-profits and many businesses have a page on MySpace or Facebook. These heavily visited sites give you lots of opportunity to network online with supporters and volunteers, building your “brand” and inspiring people who like what you do to visit your site.
Article Writing. Articles are not a social medium per se, but I like to include them in discussions of social media marketing anyway. Article databases, like EzineArticles.com, give you a forum for posting detailed articles (as opposed to short blog posts) that relate to your organization. Articles allow links, so you can easily connect readers to your site. You can also post your articles on your own Website to increase the content there.
Although social media marketing takes time, it is well worth the effort. If you haven’t considered it before, I advise you to do so now. There is ample research available on the Web about social media marketing. Do some reading, then gather a committee of staff, board members and volunteers to plan a strategy that will allow you to reap the benefits of this no-cost marketing opportunity.
Country Wine
Social Media Marketing Tips – Video Submissions
It’s hard to believe that YouTube is only three-years-old. In such a short amount of time videos have changed the way we market products and communicate with friends and family. If you look at Google Trends you’ll see that as many people search for videos as they do shopping and news. So if you are an internet marketer, then, for social media marketing tips purposes, you absolutely have to include videos in your mix.
YouTube is the #1 video site, of course. It receives more traffic than Google and, because Google owns YouTube, the videos rank well in Google too. You shouldn’t limit yourself to YouTube, however. New video sites pop up every day and some of them might reach a target audience that matches well with your niche. Let’s take a look at some of them:
YouTube caters to a younger audience (18-24). Half have an income of $60K or more and half have attended college or grad school.
Metacafe is the second largest video site in the US. It focuses on creative videos from emerging talent and also established Hollywood performers. It gets 27 million unique visitors each month and attracts a heavily male audience with an average age range of 25-34.
Vids.Myspace.com has 10 million monthly unique visitors and is slanted more to females (57%).
Video.MSN.com reaches an older audience – more than half are over the age of 45. It gets 2.7 million unique visitors per month.
Google Video attracts a slightly younger audience than YouTube and the audience is mostly white (71%) and male (53%).
Dailymotion is set up for larger videos: 150 MB, compared to YouTube’s 100 MB and has a video limit of 20 minutes compared to YouTube’s 10 minutes. It appeals to a male audience (60%).
If you’re not sure which video sites to use, there are video uploaders that will upload your videos to all the main video sites. Look for software or
membership plans that have testimonials and customer support. All you do is create the video and the uploading service will take care of the rest for you. Each video site has different requirements for tagging and descriptions and file size so it will save you a ton of time if you use a service like this.
If the thought of making a video intimidates you, remember that you don’t have to appear in the video. You can place an ad in Craigslist or look on elance to hire someone else to appear in it. Or you can do a Camtasia or PowerPoint type video that is a slide show of screen shots.
No matter what type of product you sell or what type of market you are in, video will work for you. Please feel free to let us know how videos have worked for you.
Homemade Spirits – Learning To Make Alcohol
Google Gadgets & OpenSocial – A Social Media Marketing Toolset
If you have several different social media sites, such as MySpace, Imeem, Friendster, etc., the trick is to get them to interact with one another. It is difficult sometimes to keep up with friends who may be on different sites. Or rather, it was difficult until Google Gadgets and Open Social started their own social media marketing toolset.
Open Social is one of the most exciting things to happen to Google in a long time. This will allow you to build applications that will link many different websites to one API and will also allow the system to host other social applications as well. You need to have a bit of JavaScript knowledge and HTML, but Google provides you the tutorials to do this in their Open Social guide online.
In addition to Open Social, you can also use Google Gadgets to keep your marketing linked to your social networking sites. Google Gadgets can enable you to build a social application very inexpensively. If you are looking for a way to use social media as a marketing tool, Open Social and Google Gadgets are just the thing to help you achieve success.
Google Gadgets are bits of code that you can structure to your own website and use in links and signatures all over the internet. You can post links in many different places as your signature code. If your gadgets are created for your website, they will update as your website updates. One gadget can be put on all of your social networks to continually reflect changes in your website so that you do not have to do this by hand.
And by combining Google Gadgets with Open Social, you can use Social Marketing to its ultimate success. You can actually use one gadget that can virally spread across all of your different social networks through the Open Social application. This saves you time that can be spent taking care of business.
Combining Google Gadgets with Open Social, which has just become available to the public, is the best way to connect all of your social media sites together and keep them updated and connected to your website through a gadget.
Social media attracts billions of customers yearly. Years ago, the only social networking site was MySpace and a few others. Today, there are hundreds of different sites and more developing each day. Imagine being able to spread your marketing ideas across these different websites with one click of the mouse! Thanks to this new Google Technology, you can save a lot of time and reach a lot more potential customers on social sites by using Open Social. Adding Google Gadgets can keep it running without any more effort on your part.
If you want to promote your business or website on the internet through the effective means of social media, check out Open Social at Google and learn how to operate this user friendly program. This can be a vital source of marketing for your website.
Homemade Spirits – Learning To Make Alcohol
Social Marketing Means Higher Sales Conversions!
In this new frontier of SOCIAL MARKETING, you can spike your traffic FAST, and if you do it right, you get LONG TERM search engine traffic too. It’s really the best of both worlds. Free traffic and higher search engine rankings!
Plus! Higher Conversions
Here’s the final key ingredient… and that’s the fact that social marketing means that the huge flood of EXTRA traffic you are going to get on your site is already PRE-SOLD. You already have a relationship with them… and they are going to convert into customers at a rate you haven’t seen since your grandmother visited your lemonade stand when you were a kid.
It’s this simple… people like to buy from people that they already know, like, and trust. And your social marketing campaign will give you the kind of presence so that people already KNOW you, LIKE you, and TRUST you before they even hit your web site. It’s not rocket science.
In a recent test performed by a well respected marketing analysis firm MarketingExperiments.com, a site that runs online tests and records the results in their newsletters. They recently concluded a 12-month test where they measured the results of social marketing versus buying paid traffic to a series of 4 sites.
Here is what they found
Using social marketing, they were able to generate over 93,000 visitors to their sites, paying an employee to do the social marketing work for a total of $3600 during that time, resulting in a total cost per visitor of 4 cents.
Then they ran a one month test driving traffic from Google AdWords. Using that strategy, they obtained 2,057 visitors after investing $1,250 in click costs, resulting in a cost per visitor of 61 cents. Four 4 cents versus 61 cents – social marketing yielded a 1,427% better return on their investment. Not bad!
By now I’m sure that you’re foaming at the mouth, wanting to dive in and take advantage of the huge opportunity that Social Marketing presents.
My newest product devoted to applying the techniques of getting traffic from social networking, involves three sites that will get your social marketing off to a great start. They are MySpace, Facebook and Twitter. In my videos I show you why they work and how to set them up to get the fastest results.
There are no secrets! It’s all about creating a presence on each one, developing friends and a relationship with your friends! The rest (traffic) comes naturally when you use social networking the right way!
7 Social Media Marketing Tips
You know how important social media optimization is but, admittedly, it can be a daunting task trying to keep up with it all. So I thought I’d give you seven simple social media marketing tips you can do regularly to help build your social media network.
1. Contacts. Add 5 new contacts on Facebook or LinkedIn each week. This should take you less than an hour. Fortunately, Facebook and LinkedIn make this easy for you by recommending friends with similar interests. Or you can simply visit the pages of your other Facebook friends and find new friends there to invite. When you send an invitation, include a personal message, such as, “Hi, we are both friends with Jim Miller and have some similar interests and hope you will accept my invitation.”
2. Forum posting. Concentrate on one active forum in your niche and build up your profile and make 3-5 posts per week. Use the PM (Private Message) feature to communicate with other members behind the scenes. But don’t sell to them!
3. Prune your RSS Feeds. Go through your feed reader (Google Reader, Bloglines, etc.) and ruthlessly prune. You’ll find that you don’t read all the blogs you have subscribed to and you should eliminate this clutter so that you aren’t as distracted from your work. Make a list of the top 5 blogs in your niche and read those posts every day and leave at least one comment per week on those five blogs.
4. Yahoo Answers. This isn’t effective for all niches because Yahoo Answers readers tend to be young, but answer 5 Yahoo Answers questions per day in your niche, if appropriate. You’ll quickly notice that most of the people who answer questions aren’t very articulate or don’t provide quality information, so it will be easy for your answers to stand out and get selected as the best answer.
5. Digg away. Spend 15 minutes on Digg each day and try to befriend some of the top Diggers there. Instant message is the best way to keep in touch with them and they usually post that info on their profiles.
6. Focus, focus, focus. Just because there’s a lot of hype about a particular social media site doesn’t mean you should devote time to it. Focus only one the sites that will help you grow your business and don’t get caught up in drama and hype.
7. Be on alert. Check your Google Alerts for your name once a day. If someone has mentioned you in a blog or other website, go and leave a comment or respond in some way.
By following this tips, you should be able to use social media more efficiently and see your business grow as a result.
Beer Crafting
Social Media Marketing and Its Implications For InterNETwork Marketing
“Social media marketing…what’s that? Never heard of it in Asia.”
I can almost hear you say that.
That was MY response when I first researched it on Google. I have been using parts of this form of marketing but have never knew the collective term for it.
So What is Social Media Marketing?
I found this rather formal definition on the internet…
“Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a form of internet marketing which seeks to achieve branding and marketing communication goals through the participation in various social media networks.”
After reading it, I’m still confused as to what it is! So I have decided to put it in layman terms for you.
Basically, social media marketing covers all the activities that center around:-
Creating content (articles, videos and audios) on websites or blogs Social interaction within social networking sites like Facebook Sharing videos on You Tube Bookmarking and sharing interesting articles on Digg…. …just to name a few.
Why Do InterNetwork Marketers Need Social Media Marketing?
A lot of people get online onto the internet and become all excited and hyped up about new technologies and forgot all about the “Why?”.
Remember the Dot-Com days? Without a clear focus on bottomlineMany have become Dot-Gone!
In business, network marketing or otherwise, we should never get into anything just because it is the in-thing that everyone else is doing. It would be wise to first evaluate the business implications before investing a huge amount of time and effort into anything.
So how exactly does this social media marketing help us build our network marketing business?
Well, in the offline world, a nicely renovated shop on a busy street will attract lots of customers.
In the online world, however, having a nice flashy website does not attract customers to you…You will need to write lots of relevant content on your website, and leave lots of content footprints everywhere, only then will you attract lots of targeted prospects to your website and opting into your mailing list.
Content creates Traffic. After you have Traffic, you can deepen the relationship and PREsell through emails. You can utilize social interactions within social networking sites to allow people to know you better as a real person. Done correctly, this will position yourself as a solutions provider. It moves your prospects through the process of Knowing You, Liking You and Trusting You. And when your prospects reach the stage of trusting you, Monetization is simply asking for the order 
The Anatomy of Social Media Marketing & Where Should You Start?
With so many choices and options and upcoming variants, it’s hard to stay focused and get something productive done!I have recommended below a few areas of social media marketing that I have personally used to build my internetwork marketing business.
1) Website
My website is the centerpiece of my social media marketing strategy and is powered by Site Build It!. This is where I write majority of my content and where majority of my content gets found by Google. If you are wondering why did I choose a Site Build It! website over a Blog, you can find out more by subscribing to my InterNETwork Marketing Newsletter below.
2) Content Sharing Sites
These are sites where you can write articles on a variety of topics. The reason you want to post articles here is because search engines love them and they get found quickly.
I recommend Squidoo and Hubpages, and that you start by learning how to post articles there.
3) Video Sharing
If you have done some searches on Google, you will find that some of the results are videos! Videos are also content (most people miss this one)! People can find your video if they searching for the keyword that you have put into your video’s description.
I recommend You Tube (for short videos) and Google Video (for long videos).
4) Social Networking Sites
These are like those clubs and societies that you have in the real world. People socialize, play games, flirt…whatever in these social networking sites, pretty much like what happens in the real world too! But the best part of these social networking sites is the ability to connect to your friends’ friends’ friends’ friends’ friends (you get the idea?), and keep track of those relationships. This is impossible in the real world.
There is also this function of updating your profile status to let people know what are you doing at the moment. This allows people to “follow” you and know you as a real person. Also, after you have written a new article, you can update your status in your profile with the url and people may actually click to read what you have just written.
I recommend that you start with Facebook, play around with it and make some new friends online! You may also what to check out Twitter, which basically lets you know what other people are doing and tell other what you are doing (it’s fun, just don’t get addicted to it).
5) Social Bookmarking
After you have created so much content, you can share it at social bookmarking sites, so that even more people will find your content and come to your website. I personally used Digg and StumbleUpon.
I hope my recommendations gives you some direction as to where to start in this vast, complex, but yet exciting area of Social Media Marketing.
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