Category Archives: Social Media Marketing

Removing Digital Tattoos: 5 Steps to Online Reputation Management

Blogging, Reputation, SEO, Social Media Marketing, ,

7 steps to excellenceWhether you’re the owner of a small business, an artist or a freelancer, your online presence can make or break you. You want to appear on the first page of a Google search, but not because of a photograph that showcases your poor judgment one night a decade ago. You’ll want potential clients to see that you recently won an award for outstanding achievement, but you won’t want them to see pictures from the after party.

Managing your online reputation can be difficult, since nothing on the Internet ever really goes away. You may need to use an online reputation management service if you’ve made some catastrophic mistakes, but most small business owners and freelancers simply want to get their names out to potential clients. When your reputation is critical to your livelihood, it’s in your best interest to protect your name:

1. Set Up a Google Alert

After choosing a word or phrase, you’ll be notified every time a relevant match appears on the Web. For example, if you put a Google Alert on YYZ Company, you’ll receive an email on either a minute-by-minute, daily or weekly basis about any new Web content pertaining to this company. It is a great way to keep track of your online reputation, though it does nothing to alter it.

2. Buy Your Domain Name

For about $11 a year, you can buy your domain name from GoDaddy.com. Buy your name in several varieties, including JohnSmith.com, JohnSmith.net, JohnSmithblog.com. Even if you’re not planning on setting up a site or blog, this helps build your online presence. When someone searches your name on Google, one of these sites — that you control — is likely to pop up, which helps push down negative content. Plus it prevents others from purchasing and using your domain name in a negative way.

3. Join Social Networks

You may have a Facebook profile for your personal life, but you may not have a page for your professional one. Today the first impression potential clients have of you or your business is made online, according to Reputation.com. Joining Web sites like YouTube, Pinterest, Tumblr and LinkedIn will give you additional help as you strive to establish and control your online persona.

4. Don’t Share Everything

As Anthony Weiner and others have demonstrated, you can very quickly end your career if you’re not careful about what you post online. Weinergate, 2011’s favorite double entendre, shows you just how much damage you can do to your career and reputation if you share more than your should. Here’s a simple question you should ask yourself before you decide to upload something: Will someone seek out another company or freelancer because I decided to post this? If the answer is yes (or even a slightly tipsy maybe), don’t post it.

5. Cleaning Up When You Fail to Follow Tip 4

Anthony Weiner has the millions to hire a PR firm to transform his image, but you probably don’t. Even so, he’s probably never going to win another major election ever again. The fact is that there simply is no way to erase your mistakes; you can only hope to change your image, to distance yourself from these errors in judgment and to make it difficult for people to stumble upon them. If an unflattering photograph on Facebook is causing the damage, you can untag yourself. If it is a poorly worded blog post, you can delete it. Only by making it harder for others to access the troubling content will you be able to move past it.

By Peter Marino – the owner of reelWebDesign.com, a website design and digital marketing company in Westchester NY.

Keyword Vs Brand Inbound Links

Blogging, content marketing, guest blogging, SEO, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Viral marketing, , , , ,

internet marketing strategyWith Penguin 2.0 upon us you should be adjusting your inbound link campaign accordingly. Matt Cutts (Head of Google Spam) has given us plenty of warning about Penguin 2.0 and how you should tacking your link building.

You Will Not Get Ranked With Links Alone

Internet Marketing is not just about link building anymore; you need to focus on various other factors as well if you want to perform well on search results. If you take a look at the below graph, inbound marketing does play a large part in search engine rankings, but you cannot just focus on link building.

If your website has poor onsite SEO, no regular blog posts, no social signals and no brand signals, you will never rank. Every section in the above graph is as important as the other. Do not think of Internet marketing as ranking high on Google, instead think of it as earning high traffic volume as your goal.

In this article I will be only discussing about inbound links, Brand vs Keyword. I thought I would add this note and graph so website owners wouldn’t think creating backlinks alone would earn them more traffic!

How Your Links Should Be Created

For those of you that are not 100% keyed up with inbound marketing, I will quickly go over it. Do not do any of the below:

  • Pay for backlinks.
  • Waste your time adding links in headers, footers or sidebars.
  • Join any link scheme or automated service.
  • Include your link in spammy content.
  • Have your link on irrelevant, untrustworthy sites.

Basically keep your links looking natural by guest blogging quality content with your link included naturally.

Keyword Backlinks

For many years now having keyword backlinks used to play a huge role in the positioning of your website on Google, not so much today. A keyword backlink is your targeted keyword used as an anchor text and usually pointing back to your homepage.

I believe keyword backlinks are important, but something you shouldn’t focus all your attention on. You should never only focus on your homepage, you should always build links to all web pages within your website. Every page is important, not just your homepage so build links to all.

If you wasn’t already aware, you should only try and optimize 2 main keywords for each web page, anymore than 2 will start looking unnatural. From these 2 keywords you need to build a list of variants using Google Keyword Tool and Trends. If you are using the same keyword backlinks to your pages, it will start looking unnatural. This is why having a list of variants will keep your links looking natural with the added advantage of being ranked higher for more key phrases.

Brand Links

Brand backlinks are anchor links that contain your company name, website address or a company employee. Branding is huge with Internet marketing at the minute and will be for many years.

Creating brand backlinks will increase your websites traffic on search results in the long run. The key is creating the quality content surrounding your backlink. If your end goal is to get ranked for keywords along the lines of ‘Builder London’, your content should be focused around that theme. For example, you could write an article on how buildings have evolved in London over the past 100 years. This content will be high value and of interest to users, at the same time, 100% focused on your keyword. Instead of using a keyword backlink, use a brand backlink. This way Google will connect your brand and website with the theme of your article (Builder London), thus increasing your sites authority and trust, which will then lead to higher rankings for this keyword, amongst other variants.

Brand backlinks will give your site more authority over keyword backlinks as your content will be connected to all text within the article. Not around the targeted keyword link.

Maintain A Ratio

Before reevaluating your inbound link campaign, have a company generate an internet marketing strategy for your business, not only for your links, but for blogging and social signal. If you are promoting all of these sections, your site will see a return on visitors. I would suggest creating 5 brand links for every one keyword backlink. This way your inbound links stay looking natural.

By Kev Massey – Kev is the Sales Manager at SixtyMarketing and writes the majority of blog posts for SixtyMarketing giving free, useful Internet marketing & web design tips. Please follow Kev and his team on Facebook for their latest posts.

10 Tips To Help Establish Online Authority In Your Niche

Blogging, content marketing, Facebook Marketing, Reputation, SEO, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Twitter Marketing,

online authorityAn online business with authority will stay ahead of the competition. Of course, when looking to get to the top, one must work hard. Here are 10 tips to help establish online authority in your niche.

Organic search results: When using a major search engine, a potential customer will place a lot of value on the top results. Remember, a business that ranks highly for the main keywords will have a serious advantage against the competition. Luckily, a website owner with great content and solid links can rank highly in the leading search engines

Guest posting: A well-written guest post will build the authority of an author. To get started, the business owner should contact bloggers to swap posts. With a well-written post, a business owner will see a serious spike in traffic to his or her website.

Advertisements: When searching on Google, one will see ads. When the ads of a company appear at the top of the search results, one will gain more customers. Remember, when a business has more exposure, customers will take notice.

Articles: A business owner should write articles relevant to his or her field. Then, the expert can posts articles all over the Internet. This will help a person establish their authority and gain in the SEO results. Remember, an informative article will help the individual gain authority for the short and long-term.

Social media: Now, customers expect to see a company on Facebook and Twitter. Luckily, one can set up social media accounts in an afternoon.

Website: When making a website, one must keep customers in mind. Ideally, the webmaster should include solid and interesting content on the Web pages. When including useful information, one will have a leg up on establishing a rapport with visitors.

Book: When an author can write an e-book, he or she will gain a loyal following. Fortunately, one can write an electronic book in their spare time. When giving the material away, an entrepreneur will go a long way in marketing his or her idea to thousands of followers.

Questions and answers: There are plenty of question and answer sites on the Internet. An informed individual should sign up for these sites and start answering questions. When doing so, the site owner will gain interested and loyal followers. Using these sites can also help a business owner with their SEO results.

Videos: People love to watch videos on the Internet. When posting an informative and helpful video, an entrepreneur can garner interest in his or her product or service. Remember, with a video, one can highlight their big ideas.

Press release: When writing a press release, a company can create a buzz for a product release. To get started, an individual should research the basics of a press release. Then, the entrepreneur should write the content and release it on news sites. With well-written release, a company should build authority on the Internet quickly.

When following these 10 tips, a company should have no problem establishing online authority in their niche.

Mark Smith is a business developer and technology enthusiest who swears by the Servecorp virtual office.

Why You Should Be A Social CEO

Blogging, content marketing, Copywriting, Facebook Marketing, Pinterest, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Twitter Marketing, ,

Three-quarters of executives wants their chief executive officer to become the social face of their brand, a new study from KRC Research and Weber Shandwick has revealed.

That’s because eight in 10 executives believe CEO sociability improves company reputation. 630 executives were interviewed and the vast majority wants their CEOs to use social media channels and engage with customers more frequently.

The benefits of a social CEO

The report actually predicts that the number of CEOs participating in social media will increase by 50 per cent in the next five years as people’s need to put a face to a brand and see who’s behind a company grows.

Some companies may be tempted to offload this responsibility on someone other than the CEO, but it should remembered that with a unique position comes a unique ability to influence how people feel about a company.

A social CEO can:

• Humanise the company

• Boost the company’s reputation

• Improve business results

• Show the company is innovative

• Set a social example for employees

Clearly all these duties can be carried out by someone other than a CEO, but it’s very rare for a company to have an employee who is better placed to lead from the front on these matters.

So, it’s time for CEOs to start taking social media seriously and learn how to use it to their businesses’ benefit.

They need to understand that social media takes time and it’s not just about updating the company’s blog or a social account like Facebook or LinkedIn with annoying promotional messages that customers will probably ignore.

CEOs should use social platforms to engage with conversation with existing and potential customers. They also need to understand that their social media activity should revolve around their audience. It’s all about the needs, wants and desires of the people a firm is trying to reach. It shouldn’t be all about the company.

The CEO Blogger

A blog is a great way to introduce a CEO to customers as it provides a solid platform to which other social activities can be anchor.

However, content needs to be well-written and helpful. Try and stay away from dull posts about what you had for breakfast and instead focus on tips and advice that will help people out.

Engaging in conversation and replying to comments will help gain customers’ trust, especially if they come right from the top.

In fact, the report showed that 32 percent of the executives with a socially active CEO believed comments posted by CEOs on social media channels are more credible, compared to 24 percent of executives who deemed CEO comments quoted by news media to be more credible.

The habits of highly social CEOs

Aside from blogging, Weber Shandwick’s report outlines several habits of highly social CEOs. These are:

1. Using a bigger set of social tools

2. Maintaining a presence on the company website

3. Writing their own content

4. Acting spontaneously but not becoming too informal

5. Engaging a wider variety of external stakeholders

Having a social CEO can bring so many benefits to a business so long as the CEO understands what social media is and doesn’t see it as a tool to push the company’s products and services on their customer’s feeds.

Guest post Alex Gavril – part of the 123-reg blog team. The company is the UK’s largest provider of domain names and offers a range of services including web hosting.