Category Archives: Viral marketing

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.

What Mobile Marketing Means For You

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

Mobile marketingThe technological world has opened up many doors for advertising via mobile.  Virtually everyone has some sort of mobile device that connects to the internet, be it a phone or one of the numerous tablets available today.  This has opened opportunities for the “old time” internet marketing to go mobile, and many businesses are taking full advantage.

E-mail

A good mobile marketing service will tell you that e-mail is still a killer way to reach your audience and get more business.  The key is to get them to sign up for the e-mails.  How is that done?  Offer them something in return.  Many restaurants offer a free dessert or appetizer in exchange for signing up for their emails.  How do they adapt this to the mobile era?  Make the coupon one that does not have to be printed.  Rather allow the user to simply show their mobile device and have it scanned, and they receive the free item or discount.  This works for other businesses as well and generally it works best if perks come periodically.  This keeps customers opening those emails.

Text Messaging

A great many businesses are offering text promotions similar to email lists.  Customers can test a simple message to a simple number and receive periodic updates from the company.

The technological world has opened up many doors for advertising via mobile marketing. Virtually everyone has some sort of mobile device that connects to the internet, be it a phone or one of the numerous tablets available today. Obviously the Kindle Fire and the iPad are the most popular, but there are also other brands of tablet computers out there these days.

The same hook works here.  Typically a discount or free items is offered at sign up, and then occasionally a text will come that offers an exclusive discount by simply showing the text when making the purchase.  This is another area where a mobile marketing service can help out, as they can handle all of the incoming and outgoing texts for any campaign and relieve the business owner of those duties.

Social Media

Facebook and Twitter campaigns have been popular for a while, but mobile devices now allow customers to participate anytime, anywhere.   And increasing number of businesses are making Facebook promotions available by showing the mobile device as well as printing, meaning it is no longer necessary to find a printer before taking advantage.  These campaigns can grow very rapidly, with Facebook responses and Tweets reaching into the thousands quickly.  A mobile marketing service can focus on all of this, as well as monitor the sites involved; ensuring nothing slips through the cracks.

With the world of mobile marketing growing by leaps and bounds, it is wise for business owners to find help when it comes to starting and maintaining a successful mobile marketing campaign.  While in the beginning it may not be a big deal, a mobile marketing service can definitely be beneficial in long term. To learn more about mobile marketing services, click here.

Lisa Swan writes for a variety of computing websites. She lives in New York City.

6 Simple Steps To Creating Web Traffic With Chat Sites

Blogging, content marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Viral marketing

Starting your own blog is an easy thing, but how would you drive traffic to your website? Thanks to the social networks that have made easy and a success. Social chat sites can now be used for your advantage and with no or less constraints. There are few steps that you need to undertake in order to surpass traffic of other individual or company blogs. Below are the 6 Simple Steps to Creating Web Traffic with Chat sites.

Writing great profile

After creating an account with any chat sites like Facebook, Zinzzchat and twitter, spend some time to create a good profile of your site. In this case, personal issues and life should be kept away and concentrate on the dating business. The profile should be simple, interesting and genuine. This acts as the basis of creating relationships with people. It is also important to include a link to your dating sites on your profile page and that you link all your blogs and social media accounts too.

Keep interacting

In order to create traffic you need to be interactive. Write posts and join conversation and share relevant stuff. Spend some time of your day sharing of relevant information on a particular niche. Sharing of information builds trust that would lead to good results. It is not a must to share what you are an expert on, you can even post inspiring and encouraging things that people appreciate and are related to your blog.

The content written must be compelling and make use of catchy headlines. People would avoid contents posted in crappy titles.

Share your content

Share you content on a regular basis. There are great tools that would do this easier. The only thing you need to do is to encourage readers to do the same by either clicking on the ‘share’ or the ‘like’ buttons.

Use social bookmarking sites and sharing sites

You can even ask others to promote your website through social bookmarking sites such as Reddit and others. Make use of the social sharing tools on your blog. This will allow you to combine sharing options via Facebook, twitter and email all into one tool.

Optimize the content

You can optimize content for the search engines by using on page optimization strategies and relevant keywords. The content will make your site not only interesting to the followers but would also help your rankings in the search engines. Search engines do use social media to find out how well liked and popular websites are.

Start and join groups

There are many groups in the social networks like on Facebook that you can join, many as possible. You can start your own group that is related to your business site and invite other people to join the group. The advantage of starting own group is that, you are able to get the target users. For instance people who are interested in your ideas, product and services. For more traffic, you will have to read comments and participate intelligently. Commenting and responding to questions helps in adding your credibility.

Social networks are great tools to market and promote your site. In conclusion, using of social networks requires one to use his or her time wisely so as to successful.

By Jacqueline – who runs a blog site where ingredients such as authentic blogging, blogging with fluid intention and good SEO optimization is discussed. Follow @jaquelinedela.

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.