Category Archives: Small Business Marketing

What Is The Secret To Viral Marketing?

July 1, 2013SEO, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Viral marketingPeter Marino

With the boom in dotcom businesses, there has been a subsequent explosion in the success of viral marketing. By using social media to spreading the word about your business, product or interests you can capture traffic, which depending on your ambitions can either be translated into a cash return or help you to build your online brand.

Finding Your Edge!

With 48 hours worth of video material being uploaded to YouTube every minute, to execute a successful viral marketing strategy takes consideration. Although there are a few basic principles to guide you in producing strong viral content (which this article will address in a moment), the real secret to producing profitable viral marketing is this: the main reason social media users share anything is in order to build their own image. If you keep this simple truth at the forefront of your mind at all times you will find it easy to produce super shareable viral content. If your clip is able to provoke a reaction, it is more likely to be shared. Simple!

Share Your Creative Juices

Perhaps the first principal when it comes to successful viral marketing is size. Keep your clips short, sweet and preferably ripe for a remi x. Also remember that whatever you want to go viral – a video, an animation or a jingle – your piece of content should aim to be unusual. Whilst it’s almost impossible to be original nowadays try to think outside the box when it comes to developing your idea. Another clip of a dog barking the words ‘I love you!’ is not likely to spread like wildfire.

Ship’em Out!

Remember that attention span is a short and precious thing. Attempting to slow release content or encourage people to return for a scheduled announcement just isn’t going to work. If you have related items, release them at the same time and cash in on those click throughs.

Finding a home Sweet Home

Think carefully about which forum you might release your material through – forums belonging to your target demographic are a great place to start. Likewise, using social media platforms can be a great place to begin circulating your content through your faithful followers. If you think your material is strong enough, use a charm offensive to target a celebrity with similar interests. Just one repost from them and you could be well on your way to a huge share count.

Theirs A Time And A Place

Plan your release by picking a sensible time to share. Don’t compete with television schedules or make a post whilst the football is on. Think about the trends that are relevant to your chosen topic and try to time your release and if possible, try to connect your viral to an existing promotion. Most reposts happen on Twitter between 9am and 6pm, on Facebook around lunchtime and in the evening and Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday are the best weekdays for sharing as people are bored at work.

Always Fresh

Keep it current and concise. Choose trending topics, news items, anything that will grab your audience’s attention instantly. When you title it, keep by-lines pithy and purposeful and remember that friendly titles that will translate clearly when shared are ideal.

Hook, Line And Sinker

With these tips in mind, you will be well on your way to a successful viral marketing campaign in just the click of a mouse.

About our guest author: Steve Seymour is MD at Project Print Solutions, a printing and design company based in Manchester, UK.

How to Make Videos with SEO in Mind

June 27, 2013SEO, SEO video, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Viral marketingweb videoPeter Marino

Online marketing is more than just running a search engine optimization campaign for your website and social media marketing. A good online marketing campaign should include every type of media possible, especially videos. By including online videos into your Internet marketing strategy, you will ensure that you create and distribute content in a format that your target audience enjoys consuming. But how do you make videos with SEO in mind so they are seen by the search engines?
Let’ take a look here:

Keyword Optimization

Just like you would with a website, you need to optimize your videos for your target keywords. By placing your target keywords in strategic locations of your video files, you will increase the likelihood that these videos are found via online searches. Some places where you need to place your keywords are:

• Title
• Video File Name
• Alt Tags
• URL
• Link Text
• Video Description

When you place your target keywords in those locations with each video you upload, you will give the search engine bots a better idea as to what your content is about. This will help the bots rank your videos appropriately in the search results, allowing people to easily find your videos online.

Build Links to your Videos

In addition to optimizing your videos for specific keywords, you will need to build links to your videos just like you would with a website. When you create a number of backlinks that point to your videos, search engines will view your videos as containing valuable content because other people are linking to them. When your videos are viewed as having valuable content, search engines will be more likely to include your videos in their search results so that they can give their users the best content possible related to their search queries.

High Quality Content

In order for your online video marketing campaign to be a success, your videos need to contain high quality content. By making sure each of your videos contains content that people will actually enjoy viewing, you will increase your chances of having your videos be shared online. Once your marketing videos are able to go viral, you will see a ton of backlinks come in to your videos, improving your search engine rankings in the process.

If you produce low-quality videos that do not contain useful information, people will not want to view all of the videos you produce. After one viewing people will think your videos are a waste of time and will move on to the next company that offers better quality content. This is why it is so important to create videos with high quality content as you will have an easier time keeping your target audience engaged with your online videos.

Use Exciting Titles

Another tip you can use to help improve the SEO associated with your online video marketing campaign is to use exciting titles that entice people to click on your video. It can be rather easy for a video’s URL to get lost in the mix if you use a boring title. If no one is enticed to click your link, fewer people will actually view your video. By making sure you create eye catching, interesting tittles, you will increase your chances of getting clicks on your links and therefore will have better results with your video marketing campaign.

Video marketing should be an important piece of your overall online marketing strategy. Through the use of high quality videos, you will be able to reach more of your target demographic, especially the subset that enjoys consuming their content in video form. When using this marketing technique, you will want to ensure you use your target keywords in strategic locations of your video, build links to your videos and create eye catching titles to attract more clicks. Using these tips should help you see the best results possible when it comes to running an online video marketing campaign.

About our guest author: Professional writer and SEO consultant, Sebastin Webb, born and raised in New York. Today he writes about the importance of incorporating SEO into your videos. Although it is a very powerful tool, not many people use the power of YouTube.

How to Measure Social Media Success

June 24, 2013Facebook Marketing, Instagram marketing, Pinterest, SEO, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Twitter MarketingPeter Marino

Social media is a rapidly growing platform for marketers. Those who don’t embrace it are facing an increasing need to do so or fear being left behind. It has the opportunities for new, start-up brands or services to get the exposure their business needs, and it can equally serve older established brands by allowing more personal interaction with customers and clients.

However, with so much *noise* on many social media platforms, how do you know if your voice is going unheard? How do you know if you efforts are actually paying off? In essence, how do you measure social media success? It is essential to be able to directly trace any business garnered from social media, otherwise all your efforts might be in vain and essentially become one big time sink.

Below are five effective ways at measuring social media success (or failure).

1. Use Analytics

Analytics is essential for all websites and businesses regardless of social media. By being able to see a breakdown of your website’s traffic and interactions, and determining what percentage of that comes from social media, you will start to get a decent insight into the value of your social media efforts.

2. Tracking IDs

Like Analytics, using tracking IDs for any links you include on your social media marketing will give a very clear sign of success. Sites like bit.ly or goo.gl are the easiest way to shorten links and receive stats on how many clicks each link received.

3. Special Offers

If you use a special offer for your business, such as a coupon, a prize give-away or similar, and only promote that via social media, you will be able to directly trace any sign-ups or visits to those offers.

4. Finding Out Your Bottom Line

At the end of the day, social media efforts are usually for one purpose, increasing sales. If your bottom line sales do not alter much despite starting a new social media campaign (or pausing one temporarily), then chances are, your efforts are not necessary.

5. Significance

How significant a part in your business plan is social media? Some businesses rely almost solely on social media to get traffic, sales, and business, while for others, social media represents only a small aspect of business versus a large amount of time needed. If you can work out how well your business functions with or without social media, you will be able to analyse whether or not it is successful.

I find that newer businesses tend to rely more heavily on social media to get themselves heard, whereas the larger, established businesses have social accounts just as token gestures, almost like they are there to keep up appearances.

Conclusion

Depending on the needs of your business, there are different effective ways at measuring social media success.

If you are purely interested in traffic and generating interest, then tracking IDs and Analytics are going to be a simple, clear way of determining success, while large, already established businesses might have to do more testing and tweaking in order to find out the concluding results. In the end, it comes down to testing and tracking.

Our guest blogger: Naomi Vega is a freelance writer with interest in mobile marketing. She has more than five years experience in mobile and text marketing industry. She is currently working as a freelance writer for Trumpia.

The Use Of Rel=’Author’ In SEO Posts And Articles

June 20, 2013Blogging, Copywriting, SEO, Small Business Marketing, Social Media MarketingPeter Marino

Search engines like Google are always on the lookout for ways to identify websites with authentic high quality content, from spam sites using poor keyword-stuffed content in an attempt to increase their rankings. Google’s most recent algorithms were created to help improve the quality of search rankings, ensuring that users are always privy to the best and most relevant results for their searches. One of the latest tools Google has used to improve search quality is the Rel=Author attribute. In this article we are going to discuss how it works and the impact it has had on SEO posts and articles.

What is Rel=Author?

The Rel=Author attribute is used by writers to let Google and other search engines know that their work is legitimate. Basically they tag the content they have written with a link back to their profile. It is fairly straight forward to set up and is particularly useful for writers than produce guest posts on other websites and blogs. All you need to do is insert the attribute with a link back to your Google Plus profile at the bottom of your post. For example the author will write ‘By Joe Bloggs’ using the Rel=Author attribute to link their name back to their profile. You then need to add a link to the website or blog you contribute to, to your ‘contribute to’ section on your Google Plus profile. It could not be simpler!

How does it help search engines?

Using Rel=Author helps search engines to understand the authority of a website and trust the person that has written the content. It also makes it much easier to identify spammers that have stolen content from other websites. If a spammer takes the content from a website using the Rel=Author attribute, this will be picked up by Google, as the link will be visible within the content. This attribute can also help to improve search experiences as even if a website has a low page rank, if the author (marked as Rel=Author) has authority, the content will be valued higher by search engines.

Benefits for the SEO content writer

Along with improving a website’s credibility, using the Rel=Author attribute can also benefit the website in terms of visibility. Displaying the image of the writer of the content next to the search result is likely to generate higher click through rates. Using the image gives the search result authenticity and gives it a greater chance of it being clicked on by users.

For writers of SEO articles and blog posts, the attribute is also beneficial in terms of personal brand building. Readers will begin to associate your face (displayed in your author image) with your blog and the content you produce for other blogs that you guest post on. Connecting the content you write to your profile will help you gain recognition for your opinions on niche subjects of interest.

Conclusion

Search engines like Google appear to be attempting to transform the World Wide Web from a place of anonymity to a place made up of identities. Google’s latest use of algorithms like Penguin have shown that they are keen to filter out spam and move away from keywords and meaningless backlinks in their consideration of websites’ search engine optimisation. Rel=Author has already proved to be very popular with SEO content creators looking to gain recognition for their high quality work and build up a credible reputation online. The recent emphasis on author ranking suggests that it will play a significant role in future organic search rankings and is something that all businesses looking to improve their SEO should consider implementing into their content.

Written by Nathan Griffiths who recommends this SEO Company Hertfordshire based in the UK.