Category Archives: SEO

Outside The Box Creative Marketing Tips

Blogging, content marketing, Copywriting, SEO, SEO video, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Video marketing, Viral marketing

Business people should all know the importance of online marketing. Furthermore, from SEO to social media, we should all know the tactics, ways and methods of advertising and promoting a business, service or product online. However, there is also a plethora of online marketing tactics that aren’t as known or thought of as much. Here are a few online marketing tips and strategies that will require a bit of thinking outside of the box.

Video is King among content marketing

Video is a Content King

When it comes to optimizing and creating online presence through content, a lot of SEOs and online marketers choose to go for written content as the surest means. Now written content is king, and blogs and articles are vital for online marketing, however video is also a content king that cannot be ignored.

Google love videos, as do most internet users. YouTube, along with a host of other video sharing websites should therefore be utilized to the maximum in order to draw more interest in for a brand.

Start Up a Blog

Starting up a blog in order to draw attention around your business is such a basic internet marketing idea that it should not even be defined as creative, or ‘outside of the box’. However, there are surprisingly still plenty of businesses without an online blog, which suffer because of this limitation.

The internet has revived humanity’s love for reading, and while most aren’t quite on Shakespeare’s level of literature, blogs fulfill our need to read. Build a blog around the field you’re marketing within and ensure that your opinions are intelligent, original and insightful. Make sure that your blog is identifiably linked with your business. If this is done correctly, readers will begin to align their positive thoughts on your blog to your business and products.

For example, if people think your fashion blog is a trustworthy authority on fashion, then they will trust your authority on the clothes you sell.

Online press

Online Press

Marketing online through literature isn’t all about self-blogging however. You should find online magazines, blogs and online newspapers and try to get other sources to write articles on your business or products.

Conduct an outreach campaign using Outreachr, and find as many potential blogs or magazines that will want to write about your business, or write an article that is hyperlinked to your business.

Make sure that these websites have customers reading their articles and a high domain authority.

A website with a low domain authority, won’t be worth very much as Google only really values websites with a strong online presence when ranking.

It is also important to ensure that these blogs have a fair amount of readers (which usually correlates with their domain authority).

The written content should not be duplicated either and last but not least, the articles written on your business should be of high quality. After all, you will of course want people to read these articles and no one will waste their time with material that isn’t engaging or content that is poorly written.

Our guest post is by Stephen Brian

a content writer and webmaster who lives in the Kent, England.

6 Ways To Build More Engagement On Facebook

Facebook Marketing, Mobile Marketing, SEO, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Viral marketing

Facebook EngagementSuccessfully marketing your businesses on Facebook isn’t just about the number of fans that you have. Now certainly, the more fans you have the better (overall) but what you also need is an engaged audience.

In other words, successful Facebook marketing is all about interaction, rather than just you publishing content and nobody responding to it.

Not only is a highly engaged audience far more likely to see you as a trusted authority and end up buying from you, but in addition Facebook’s EdgeRank formula – which determines what posts you see in your newsfeed – is also set up to reward posts that get a lot of interaction.

In this way by building engagement with your Facebook audience you’ll find more and more people actually see your status updates, leading to more marketing leverage overall.

So what can we do to actively drive engagement with our fans, and in doing so significantly increase the results we’re seeing from our marketing efforts?

Share Images

Images tend to get far more engagement than many other types of content principally because they are so eye-catching in your feed. So when you’re sharing content from your site, don’t just paste a bare old link into the box.

Instead, use Creative Commons licensing to find the best royalty free images you can and then upload these to Facebook. Add a little text and a link to your article and you’ll find far more people like and share your post, and the traffic you receive as a result will also be far higher than usual.

Ask Questions

Questions are a great way to build interaction and engagement because people love to give their opinions. A smart idea is to frequent popular forums in your niche, as well as sites like Quora, Reddit and Yahoo Answers, to find questions that keep cropping up again and again. Then find ways to turn these ideas into questions you can ask your fans on Facebook.

Create A Simple Poll

While Facebook has a simple “poll” option for status updates, we’ve seen far better results on our Facebook page by simply asking an “A or B” question by typing it into the status box.

For example if you were in the pet niche, you could ask people if they prefer cats or dogs. if you were in the sport niche you could try pitting soccer against basketball and so on. As these are “opinion-based” questions there are no right or wrong answers and it can be a fun way to encourage your fans to take part in your page.

Facebook Comments

Did you know that you can now let your blog visitors leave their comments using Facebook? If you’re driving traffic from Facebook to your site, using a WordPress comments plugin that displays your visitors comments directly on your Facebook page can be very powerful indeed.

Not only does it make commenting easier for your visitors but in addition all those extra comments showing up on Facebook can kick-start the virality of any content that you share with your fans.

Be Personable

People like businesses that have a public figure as the “leader”. Think of Steve Jobs from Apple or Richard Branson from Virgin. In other words, when you’re interacting on your Facebook page, try not to do it just as a “brand” but as an individual.

Share stories about yourself. Use your name. Show people you’re a real person and they’ll mentally build up an image of you and will feel more rapport between you.

Respond To Comments

Finally, nobody likes to leave a comment only for it to languish unloved after all their effort. So instead, try to be the most regular visitor to your Facebook fan page. Log on regularly and interact with others. Respond to their comments. Speak to them as valued individuals and they’ll be far more likely to continue interacting with you and engaging with your brand.

Our Guest Author: Richard Adams is a UK-based technology writer whose popular ebook entitled “How To Promote Your Blog” teaches dozens of ways to increase traffic to your website.

5 Web Trends Every Business Should Know

SEO, SEO video, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Video marketing, , ,

5 web trendsWhether you conduct business in cyberspace or run a local small business, the Internet inevitably will influence the success of your business. Recent years have seen web technologies evolving at an astonishing pace. These five trends represent some of the most vital web trends that businesses should know and consider.

1. Cloud Services are becoming Standard

Cloud services have leveled the playing field between businesses of all sizes. Unfortunately, this also means increased competition. With the cost savings and productivity benefits of cloud services, many businesses will need to consider not whether they can afford to utilize cloud services, but whether they can afford not to use them. From allowing more work outside the office to managing clients, cloud services offer affordable ways to accomplish more at prices any business can afford. For an in-depth guide on cloud services, consider this guide at InfoWorld.

2. Webinars are changing the Way that Businesses Conduct Video marketing

From product demonstrations to question and answer sessions, webinars are quickly becoming a popular way for businesses to engage their clients and customers. Though in-house events and promotions will always have their place in business routines, webinars are becoming an ever-popular way to invite others into some aspect of your business and to build up buzz about a product launch or event. These online events are also a great way to capture information for marketing purposes. Chris G offers a brief overview of how webinars work and what they have to offer your business.

3. Virtual Environments are the Next Hot Trend

Virtual environments, such as those offered by InterCall, are one of the newest ways to host events and extend your business’ online presence. From virtual trade shows and meetings to employee training or online learning, virtual environments combine popular elements video marketing, Internet conferencing, webinars, trade shows and other business events with an easy to use Internet interface. This allows customers, clients or employees to attend from anywhere in the world with a few clicks of their mouse. Many virtual environment hosts make it easy to customize the environment with branding and other visual elements for increased engagement and marketing potential as well. As an emphasis on globalization, cloud services and other technologies continues to grow, this innovative solution will become more popular.

4. Internet Video Conferencing is becoming increasingly Affordable and Vital

Video conferencing is helping to eliminate physical distance as a hindrance to business communication and productivity. From small team collaborations and personal conversations to full-scale conferences with hundreds of attendees, there are a variety of platforms available to meet business needs. Most modern conference call services support numerous ways for attendees to get involved. Features, such as collaboration, conference archiving and file sharing, provide numerous benefits over traditional or phone-based conferencing. Whether they are streaming the conference to their smart phone while on a business trip or sitting in a virtual conference center with other attendees, the result is a fully interactive and engaging experience for everyone. Computer World recently outlined 7 of the most popular solutions.

5. Social Media is Here to Stay

In the last year, social media has solidified its place in the business process. While the coming year will likely see many businesses analyzing the benefits of social media with increasing depth, it is certainly not going anywhere. Customers are beginning to view social media as a common communication platform as well. A recent post at eWeek outlines some of the findings from a recent Gartner study on social media expectations. Gartner predicts that by the end of the year, businesses that fail to establish a social media presence and monitor it regularly could see a significant backlash from both existing and potential customers. If your business has not yet established a social media presence, BlogTyrant offers a great guide on choosing the right platforms and getting started.

The Internet continues to change the way that the world does business. From making it simple to communicate around the world to providing new and powerful ways to market your brand or products, the Internet is an essential tool for any business. These five trends are likely to shape businesses in the coming year.

About the Author: Stephan Jukic is a freelance writer who generally covers a variety of subjects relating to the latest changes in white hat SEO, mobile technology, marketing tech and digital security. He also loves to read and write about location-free business, portable business management and finance. When not busy writing or consulting on technology and digital security, he spends his days enjoying life’s adventures either in Canada or Mexico, where he spends part of the year. Connect with Stephan on LinkedIn.

What is SEO and how does it work?

Link Building, SEO, Small Business Marketing, , ,

what is seo?SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. Search engine optimization is the process of improving the website visibility in the search results of search engines. This process involves various SEO techniques to improve ranking.

The need for SEO arises because research shows that most people don’t look beyond the first page of search results, so if you want to create awareness about your brand, then you need to appear at the top of search results.

Effective SEO can help you:

  • Broaden awareness in new geographical areas
  • Build reputation among customers, employees
  • Improve customer service by delivering strong online support
  • Increase awareness of product benefits among public
  • You can improve the products, by conversing online with the customers via blogs, forums and feedback forms.

How does SEO work?

Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing index pages on the web with the help of spiders or crawlers. These spiders or crawlers use web pages links and travel from one site to another after the links. When search engines find any new page, then it will crawl its code and transfer it back to its data center. To keep their index fresh, spiders may visit indexed websites daily. Search engines use a formula commonly known as Algorithm to “rate” relevancy of the websites for each search query. The most relevant websites for a particular search query appears at the top of search results.

Some of the major factors contributing in Google algorithms for better ranking in search results are:

  • Keyword rich on-page content in the form of paragraphs
  • Keywords in description tag
  • Number of links on a page
  • Keywords in title tag
  • The number and quality of the web pages available on the internet that are linking to your site
  • Keyword density

Visibility of the website can affected by two basic factors:

  1. On-page SEO factors
  2. Off-page SEO factors

On-page SEO factors: On-page factors are those factors which affect visibility of the website on search engines, but it can only found on your website. These factors include:

Content, title of URL, title and Meta descriptions and keyword density. Different search engines place different values on various elements. For instance, what Google carries value for particular element may not equally important for Yahoo?

Off-page SEO factors: off-page factors are those factors which affect t visibility of the website but cannot be found on your website. To find relevancy of your website on the basis of off-page factors, search engine will assess that, what other websites think about your websites. It will depend on the measure and quality of the links which you will receive from other websites.

Search Engine Optimization is extremely a wide topic. Besides this there are no set of particular rules for optimizing the websites for search engines. Due to this online marketers work hard to search or find the loopholes within the search engine algorithms and once they find, they end up with providing UN suitable or irrelevant content to users. To sort out this, search engines update their algorithm constantly, so that they cover up these loopholes and give relevant content to the users.

Kristine  Lise an author who is interested in written on SEO/ Internet marketing related topics. She is currently working with SEO Rank Smart, who offers best SEO Packages to its clients you can see her work on her company site.