Social Media
Six Strategies for Holding Competitions to Get Backlinks
Mar 2nd
Running a competition or a giveaway is often touted as one of the most successful and failsafe strategies for sending visitors to your site, increasing branding visibility, and getting backlinks for SEO. However, since everybody has started saying how great it is, the ‘noise’ in the competition market is that much greater. You will actually have to compete to give things away, strange as that is! So today we are looking at six strategies to help you get the most value out of your competition for SEO.
'Running' a Competition
8
1. Collect as much contact information as possible
… without scaring entrants away. It is a rich opportunity to get demographic information that you can use later in web marketing opportunities. Add a couple of demographics questions to a competition entry form, and you have instant extra value.
2. Use your own products or services as the prize where possible
Everybody wants a new iPad or a trip around the world, and these competitions will naturally create a huge following and number of entries. However, when you have to pay retail prices for the prize, the competition becomes decreasingly cost effective. Use your own products where possible.
3. Look for competition partners
You may be able to get some prizes donated if you email around your partners and offer to include their logo, tagline and contact details on the competition form. You’ll still have to donate the major prie if you want YOUR business to get the brand recognition, though!
4. List your competitions on comp sites
There is an entire community of people that play the statistical odds, entering every free competition they can, in the hope of winning prizes. There are also (naturally) websites that collect competitions for people that do this. Make sure your comp gets listed on these sites, such as::
- Loquax.co.uk (UK)
- ThePrizeFinder.com (UK)
- Compaholics (UK)
- CompetitionWinner.com.au (AU)
5. Video marketing to promote the comp
This can be ultra-effective … videos are easy to share on social sites, so lets people share with their friends.
6. Require a link back to your site
This ca be a great way to get backlinks … accept competition entries only from people who provide a link from their site to yours, in a fairly permanent place. The requirement could be reviewing one of your products and providing a link to it, for example.
5 More SEO Strategies You Can Do in Ten Minutes
Feb 22nd
In some ways, SEO and internet marketing are very big tasks. However, there are plenty of component tasks that you can undertake to help push up your rankings, that take less than ten minutes. Today we give you the fast lane version of the SEO handbook!
Life in the fast lane
1. Answer a question on Yahoo Answers
This is one of the biggest and most popular question and answer sites on the net now, and even new questions rank quite well in Google for search terms phrased in the form of a question. Answer a question that you have expertise in, provide a link to a relevant resource on your site, and you’ve just marketed yourself, sir!
2. Create a list
There’s no need for your articles all to be 1000 word rants. Keep your list short and simple, and try to make sure that the resources it offers aren’t available elsewhere on the web in the same context.
3. Link out to someone else, and let them know
I you like a company, a product or a service, link to them from your website (as long as the link is relevant and in context!). This is the equivalent of bringing a batch of muffins over to someone ’s house … a great pretext for further conversation and friendships. Good karma online can never hurt your SEO rankings!
4. Comment on a blog post that you find thought-provoking
However, only if you can add something to the discussion. Telling the author that he’s created a great post will never encourage people reading the comments to click on your link … adding something useful or insightful to the conversation will.
5. Work on your LinkedIn profile
Especially if you are in B2B operations, your LinkedIn profile is a valuable web marketing tool. Expand your connections, update your resume, join in with Group discussions, etc.
Should I Use a Facebook Group or Page to Promote My Business?
Feb 19th
Recently we’ve been looking at Facebook for web marketing and SEO – specifically at the two main methods for businesses to connect with people on Facebook, through Groups and Pages. We mentioned that from a consumer point of view, the two are much the same; but from a business perspective each offers their own benefits and drawbacks. So today we’re going to toss the coin with you and help you decide … Group or Page? Group or Page?!
The old style of non-virtual group!
To recap:
Just to recap the difference between Groups and Pages (and save you sifting back through the old posts!), a Group:
- Can be created for free
- Are simple and have plenty of viral potential
- Members can ‘invite’ other members
- Have a limit on the number of your members you can blast message at once
And Pages:
- Can also be created for free
- Are more highly customizable than Groups, including applications, Flash and other rich content
- Have no limit on the number of members you can blast message at once
- Are a little more difficult to share
- Are often the ‘official’ version of a product – Facebook has been taking action against Pages that aren’t administered by the official company or group, in response to a joke Barack Obama Page.
Most popular business choice … Pages
Pages are the most popular method of social media marketing on Facebook for businesses. This is because they have several eency weency features that Groups don’t have. These include:
- A shortcut URL, so you can promote the page more easily outside of Facebook
- Allowance for extra applications, Flash etc, as mentioned above
- Visitor statistics can be monitored
- Pages can cerate Events through the Facebook Events function, and invite their fans
- Can be promoted with ads, whereas someone must be logged into Facebook to access a Group
But don’t close the book on Groups yet!
One striking difference which can impact the culture of your social media marektin greatly is simply the language Facebook uses for members of the public to connect with your business on Facebook. Consider that:
- With Groups, people can ‘become members’ and ‘invite friends’
- With Pages, people can only ‘Become fans’
This small linguistic matter can create an entirely different feel for the Page/Group, and your business culture and brand should determine which is best.
That said, the differences are quite minor … and both are great for social media marketing, general internet marketing and SEO!
4 Things You Should Know About Facebook PAGES for Web Marketing
Feb 18th
From the user perspective, there is little difference between a Facebook Page and a Facebook Group. Both allow you to connect with like-minded people or ‘brand’ yourself … whether those like minded people are fans of breastfeeding in public, the 5th gen iPod classic, or saying “Bond … James Bond“. From a company perspective and for internet marketing purposes, though, there are a few differences which could make a big difference to the ease and effectiveness of your Facebook marketing.
What are the features of a Facebook Page?
Facebook pages can have inbuilt applications, HTML and Flash in them – they’re a lot purdier than Groups are. It’s not only form, though, Facebook pages have much better functions than Groups – the applications make the most difference.
Pages are displayed a lot more prominently on people’s profiles than Groups are. If you click on a Friend’s ‘Info’ tab for their profile, the Groups are listed in order of joining, as a mess of blue hyperlinked text. Pages are much more spaced out, and they have their own individual little icon … however, the viewer does have to click a link to see any more than the most recent five or six pages joined.
What is the cost of setting up a Page?
Zero, zip, zilch, nothing, nada – there is no cost to set up a Facebook page, at least in terms of putting it on Facebook. However, if you want your page to have the additional functionality of applications or rich content like Flash (and you aren’t a web developer yourself), there is a cost involved in having that set up and troubleshooting done when they inevitably break. Of course, there is also an internal cost in administering the Page – replying to questions in wall posts, posting blogs, notes and reviews, and generally creating enough content to make your Page worthwhile for fans. In this respect, the cost is much like setting up a website – you can get a template for free, but if you want to personalize or add value, you’ll need to factor in some dollars.
Page Title considerations
Can you think of a way to engage your readers at the level of friends, or people with a common interest, rather than as a business? For example, if you manufacture underwear that stays where it is put, your Page could be titled ‘I would rather walk around with a wedgie than fiddle with my underwear in public’, or something similar. If you have an effective unique selling point, you can have a page that engages your potential customers like this!
4 Things You Should Know About Facebook GROUPS for Web Marketing
Feb 15th
While figures do vary according to the particular survey and geographic region, there is no doubt that Facebook is one of the most popular websites of the noughties. It took a while for businesses to find their feet with Facebook web marketing – for quite a while, all you could do on the site was play Vampire Wars, after all. Nowadays, though, Facebook Groups are well-recognized as one of the primary methods of social media marketing. We explore what you need to know about Facebook groups for web marketing success.
What are the features of a Facebook Group?
Many of us are familiar with the features of an ordinary profile page on Facebook. A Group page is simply a page where people of similar interests and values can come to discuss things and post related content. When you set up a Facebook Group, you can use the platform for:
- General discussions via the wall (although conversations can get a little messy)
- Post photos related to your topic
- Post videos related to your topic
- Post links to related content across the web (although these are not followed by Google and therefore don’t count toward link popularity)
- Sending news and updates to your Group members
What is the cost of setting up a Group?
As far as Facebook is concerned, there is no cost to set up a Group. However, you will certainly want someone either within your organization, or outsourced, to administer the group. When somebody posts a question about your product or service, the polite thing to do in social media situations is to answer it 
.
Group Title considerations
People on Facebook often use Groups as a ‘bumper sticker’ for their profile. If you create a group name that is bumper sticker-ish, you instantly increase appeal for these people. Use a bit of humour, and make sure you go into detail about the group’s purpose in its title. Here are a couple of good examples:
- People Who Always Have To Spell Their Names For Other People
- I Flip My Pillow Over to Get To The Cold Side
- Unlike 99.99% of the Facebook population, I was born in the 70s.
- When I was your age, Pluto was a planet
Do you have a running joke in your company or industry that other people relate to? You can see that the groups that have no direct link to companies or monetization of any sort often do well.
If you get popular…
You’ll have to think about all sorts of different things, like assigning someone to administer the group on a more permanent basis, weeding out spam links in the comments and wall posts, and developing a strategy for marketing with the blast messages.
Web Marketing with Neuroscience – Tip of the Day #1
Feb 3rd
You can do a lot of things with your brain. In fact, without, you can’t do anything at all . You can also do things with other people’s brains, if you have a basic understanding of how to engage certain neural circuits in ways that favour your own ends. This is all sounding a bit mad scientist-ish for internet marketing, I know! It will all become clear very soon. Today we are thoroughly exploring one tip for using the quirks of our human brains (neuroscience) to help get people to take action on your website.
Brain cells - great web marketing tools
Tip of the day: User ratings and reviews
The neuroscience: People are social creatures. It is how we have evolved, and one of the most prominent reasons that we have come to dominate the planet – our ability and drive to cooperate. That drive to fit in, to cooperate rather than confront other humans, can be stimulated by showing your visitors that there is a community that has been built around your product. If you can show other users that there are people that trust your product and believe in its benefits, you are much more likely to convince them.
The web marketing tactic: There are several ways to implement this strategy on your website.
- Enable ratings on your products
- Enable reviews on your products
- Make sure that people visiting the site, as well as people actually leaving reviews, know that reviews aren’t changed by you, no matter what they say. Writing something like “You can instantly publish your review – we do not moderate comments on our products”.
- Add demographic information to ratings and reviews (as an optional extra). People might relate more strongly to a review if they see that the reviewer has similar demographics – age, sex, loaciotn, family status, etc – to themselves.
- Enable comments on your blog and respond to commenters
- Add an ‘Agree’ and ‘Disagree’ button for comments on your site
- Build a forum that can be an additional resource for site visitors
Ratings and reviews can help new buyers, as well as contributing to their sense of community and social validation. They can also help them rationalize purchasing something they haven’t seen in person – “It worked fine for them, it will probably work fine for me”.
Of note: Testimonials don’t really work for this purpose! Every savvy web user knows that they are selected, edited and wouldn’t be on the site if they weren’t positive. Don’t remove bad reviews, simply post a public response to them offering to clear up the problem.
4 Top SEO Keyword Research Tips
Jan 25th
Keyword research is one of the first concrete activities that you complete in an SEO campaign, and one of the most important. Trying to move too quickly here, or acting on assumptions rather than research, can taint your whole campaign and remove the value of all of those dollars you put in. Keyword research tips are many, says Yoda – today we look only at the top 4.
Keyword Research - not a precise science
1. Relative Search Volume
When you first startedt on the process of determining the keyphrases that will best serve your SEO and web marketing needs, you probably got out a big piece of paper, called everyone into the same room, put on the coffee and fluffed up the sofa cushions, and said ‘Troops – Brainstorm!’. You’ll have a heap of different phrases relating to your business – the nest step is to determine which of these consumers are searching for the most. The top phrases are not necessarily the ideal ones to go for if they don’t represent your business as well as others – but you need the information.
So, check the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, the MSN Keyword Research Tool, and Wordtracker.
2. Keywords in season
Check when your keywords are in season. This won’t be the only deciding factor on whether you should use a particular word for your web marketing, but it will help guide which ones are more important. For example, if the term with the highest average yearly volume shows an enormous peak in November and December, but is flat the rest of the year (and you don’t like competing at Christmas time!), it won’t be as high on the list.
3. Examine the competition
Look at the domains that rank in the top five spots for the terms you are targeting – perhaps for your top five keywords. Check out their Pagerank, and number of inbound links.
4. Think about emerging trends
Knowing the lexicon of current events and trends is one of the easiest ways to get traffic to your site. Find out exactly what people are talking about with site-specific tools like Google News Trends, Blogscape and Twist for Trends in Twitter. This may add to your brainstorming list, or it might indicate which keywords would make your SEO campaign more likely to succeed.
Applying The Immutable Laws of Marketing in SEO, part 3
Jan 23rd
Phew! 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing is actually quite a few . Ries and Trout have done quite a good job explaining what happens in a marketing context overall, but only a segment of the laws apply closely to internet marketing, and to SEO in particular. Today we continue our look at how Ries and Trout’s observations relate to the world of marketing on the web.
Marketing styles - different for every business, but all follow the same rules!
Time, time, time – see what’s become of me
One of the most relevant laws in an SEO context is number 11 – “Marketing effects take place over an extended period of time”. This is absolutely true in SEO – there is no business, anywhere in the world, that can launch a website one day, and be first on Google the next. Not only is the phenomenon not overnight, it often takes much longer than you expect. However, it is an ongoing practice with ongoing, very real rewards.
Negative thinking
This highly counter-intuitive rule is practiced almost nowhere on the web, and almost nowhere in traditional marketing – the rule states that ” When you admit a negative, the prospect will give you a positive”. The examples given are Avis, which ran a successful marketing campaign after admitting they were the number 2 car rental brand; Volkswagen, which admitted the Beetle was ugly; and Listerine, who admitted the mouthwash tastes like petrol. The fact is, it takes courage, honesty and confidence in your product to admit something negative about your brand … and those are aspects everybody wants to have in companies they partner with. Make use of it in your website copywriting, your PPC ads, your social media marketing, and any communication your have with your customers.
Success, arrogance, and failure
The 18th law of marketing is that ” Success often leads to arrogance, and arrogance to failure”. In an SEO context, we see this most often when companies believe that a number one Google position is absolute. They get to #1 … and then believe they can stop spending on SEO. If you want to remain successful, you have to keep trying to be successful!
Applying The Immutable Laws of Marketing in SEO, part 2
Jan 22nd
Marketing and SEO go hand in hand – SEO is simply a new tool to achieve the same position that you used to have to get by taking out ads in the Yellow Pages, and by creating crazy jingles for radio and TV . Today we are continuing our partial look at the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing (as defined by Al Ries and Jack Trout), as they apply to your internet marketing activities. Check out our web-based analysis of the first four laws as a starter, if you like.
Owning a Word
Laws 5 and 6, which state respectively that “The most powerful concept in marketing is owning a word in the prospect’s mind”, and “Two companies cannot own the same word in the prospect’s mind”. These realte to the entire discipline of SEO … only you have to own a word in Google’s mind, but not necessarily in your prospects. Nice parallel … but we did know that anyway!
Strategy Determination
Ries and Trout observe in the seventh law that the strategy you should use depends on what rung you occupy on the ladder. The ladder is generally understood to mean the hierarchy of products within a category that exist in a consumer’s mind … and the main difference is what you do when you are number one, versus number 2, 3, 4 or lower. This gets a little complicated when you start thinking about details though – a web marketing firm will be an essential partner for implementing this one!
Follow the leader?
The ninth law comes next in our partial review of Ries and Trout’s genius – and it states that if you are shooting for second place, your strategy is determined by the leader. That is, if you are competing with a very strong brand in your category, and can realistically expect to get to the number 2 spot on the strength of your company and product … you should do the opposite of what the #1 company does. People want an alternative, not an imitator … and there are plenty of ways to give yourself that label through your web marketing activities.
Long Standing SEO Tips (Part 2)- webmarketingexperts.com.au
Jul 30th
B. During the Initial Stages
5.) When you’re creating content, it might be best to first focus on your target audience rather than your business. Address their issues and concerns. Write articles and blogs that cater to their needs. Of course, you must not forget to use keywords, with the right density, in order to be crawled by web spiders. But then again, you must present relevant and readable content, in order to be noticed and appreciated by online surfers.
6.) When you have built a following, you must then upgrade the level of your write-ups so as to create unique and interesting content for your readers. You must endeavor to keep them updated and make them insightful. Readers love to be taught, moved and challenged. It is during this phase of the SEO process that you can pitch in your product or service, relating it to the content being expounded. Again, you must not forget to use the keywords in order to maintain categorization in search engines. You can even use these keywords as anchor texts for internal linkages, which in turn, help web spiders recognize what your other web pages are all about, and rank them accordingly.
7.) Along with building content, you must also build links to other websites. This will assist in increasing your credibility and page ranking. But this does not mean that the more linkages you have, the higher your credibility and ranking goes. No.
Link building is the same as the case of good apples being mixed with bad ones. When you align with poor ranking websites, your ranking is pulled down to. So you must build links with websites that have a page ranking of 6 and above. That will certainly boost your sites online visibility and integrity. Use trusted directories, like DMOZ or Aviva, to look for quality sites to link to, or to promote your site to other credible sites online.
8.) After you’ve settled your links, the next thing you can do is advertise. Use press releases wisely. Take advantage of social media and join forums and social networking sites. Submit blog entries to blog sites. Aside from making relevant one-way linkages to your site, these internet marketing strategies also enhance your online visibility.
SEO is an ongoing web marketing cycle. It may take as short as 6 months or as long as six years, no one can ever tell. The online market weather is something that is never really predictable. But regardless, with hard work and dedication, SEO will ultimately catapult your business to fame. Make sure to apply these tips in order to fully reap the rewards of search engine optimization.
For more tips on how to get good SEO, check out www.webmarketingexperts.com.au.