Online Marketing Tricks of the Trade
A question you may be asking yourself if you run an online business is: who exactly are my customers? Sometimes it’s shocking to think that hordes of people want your service. You get that “they love me, they really love me” moment so typified in Hollywood movies. But think about it like this, you’ve done your research, planted the seeds of your business, and are now reaping your due harvest.
You may not need to use Anywho’s reverse phone number finder to learn every possible customer detail on record, but you do want to stay knowledgeable as to who your customer base is. The reason for this is that the market is changing constantly. Social media and search engine customization is always in flux, forever waiting for the next big game-changer or the next big algorithm. Here are a few tips that will help you as you move forward with your online marketing endeavors:
Separate your personal profiles and your business profiles on social media sites.
First of all, you don’t want to harass your friends and family with every detail of your business. Yes, of course, a few times a month it’s acceptable to toot your horn and use your personal profile to discuss an element of your business. But any more than that and you risk seriously annoying your most loyal brand ambassadors.
Increase your exposure.
Configure your site for social bookmarking so that your customers can pass on news of your service to sites like Delicious, Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. Also, create a Wikipedia page for your business. Contribute as much to conversation marketing as you can by taking part in relevant forum discussions and participating in Google groups.
Optimize your site.
Nothing leverages you for Internet success more than SEO. Become friendly with search engines by creating a sitemap, XML if possible, and good internal linking structures. Not only does this make search bots more likely to find you, it makes your site more structured.
If you have the budget for it, create accounts on pay per clicks networks like Google and MSN.
If you’re running a cheaper campaign, look for quality impressions on lower tier networks.
We’re just scratching the surface here. There are hundreds of tools and strategies for beefing up your online marketing endeavors. A successful campaign will require a lot of research and scouring the marketplace for the best models in your industry. No matter what field you’re in, social media etiquette, social bookmarking and SEO are going to be major components to a healthy campaign. Figure out your budget and create a game plan.
Read More67 page views per day
Not bad considering that I haven’t been posting a lot of good content lately. I admit, I’ve been in a slump. A general lack of motivation and drive has resulted in my taking days upon days off and not blogging that much here. I’ve been spending ample time on Twitter, a good amount of time on my new fancy BlackBerry Curve, and of course doing what it is that I get paid for at PsPrint.
Actually, my hats have been expanding here. I’ve been doing more web development on small projects to assist with our overloaded graphic services department, and I’ve been doing more development of images for our e-mail campaigns. It’s nice to have something new and different to do every once in awhile; it definitely is something I’m very capable and willing to do and breaks up the monotony of staring at CJ weeding through affiliate applications.
I’ve also given myself a sabbatical on the social networking. I haven’t sent anything through StumbleUpon or Digg, and haven’t been stumbling or digging anything lately either. It was getting to be too big of a distraction during the day, and trying to get everything done was a hassle.
Now it feels like things are calming down a bit now that we’re two weeks or so out from the holiday weekend and I’ll probably be picking up where I left off on the social media stuff, ramping up and collecting tips for my roundtable discussion next month.
Do you have any social media and networking tips to share?
Read MoreSocial Media Pays Off
Whoever said that hanging around social media platforms never helped anyone is flat out lying. I’d like to think of myself as ahead of the curve in most situations. I try to be an early adopter whenever I can now. So I’ve been eager to jump onto the bandwagon with new social platforms like Social Thing and Britekite, most recently. I’m making a point to be a presence in the social media space for two reasons:
- Fun.
- Traffic.
I am geekier than I care to admit most times, and I’ve always been into instant digital communication like email and instant messenger. Which is why I acclimated to Twitter so easily. Making the jump from LiveJournal to MySpace, then later to Facebook was a piece of cake. So I have a lot of fun hanging around talking to people, exchanging ideas, or just exchanging rather meaningless comments. I’m just an online oriented person. Not that I can’t carry on a phone call or face-to-face conversation, I just enjoy the technical aspects of writing. Blame it on the geek in me.
But as I mentioned, the other more beneficial reason for hanging about on these networks has been traffic to my blog here. I’ve always known that my efforts and time spent on Digg and Stumble Upon would eventually pay off. At the same time, I was never worried about whether they would or not since it was the fun that kept me there. Today I decided to check my Analytics account, something I don’t do nearly as often as I should. I found a wonderful sight.
That’s right… my top 5 traffic sources include three social networks. This makes me totally happy that my addiction to these things is paying off. So listen to all of us social media nerds and register your brand names and participate. It’s just one of the many ways that you can make fun your job 🙂
Read MoreCribbed Content for January 25th
As promised last week, here’s my look around the web for interesting business, marketing, web 2.0, etc. stuff.
- Digg changed their algorithm. No one cared except Digg diehards.
- After two+ weeks, PrintSalesPro finally publishes a reprint of my All For One, One For All Printers post.
- LaTease Rikard, one of my StumbleUpon friends, took some advice after my post about our launch of the affiliate program (officially) and joined up and wrote about it.
- ProBlogger just today published Dropping The F-Bomb: Blogging with Naughty Words. I don’t see a whole lot of repeated topics on my jaunts through the blogosphere, but this is the second article on using the F-bomb since September. The first was Scott Jangro back in September. I wonder if this is really a wide spread phenomenon?
It’s been a slow week, so there you have it. Not much going on, really.
Read MoreCommunication @ Oak Leaf Church
It’s great to see one of our affiliates using the link, and also great that the content is so great! Just sharing a little love!
read more | digg story
Read MoreFussing Update
I fussed around more with del.icio.us, Digg, and Technorati. So far my thoughts…
del.icio.us: really easy to use. I exported my bookmarks from Firefox and imported them into my bookmarks in a matter of minutes. I’ve spent probably the last half an hour cleaning up my tags since they’re so scattered and I’m a neat freak like that. But it’s a really simple interface that’s a breeze to use. I’ve head a lot about this site, so I get the feeling I’ll be using it a lot whenever I come across something particularly cool.
Digg: pretty easy to use, but there’s a lot there. The home page of News & Videos is cracking me up reading some of the titles. Not sure how this can be leveraged though without digging my own stories. I did try a plea on Twitter for digs, but got none. And it’s taken me hours, but I’ve figured out how to add the Digg This button you see to the right. I found out though that I have a friend already on Digg, so I can foresee messing around more with this and building more friends on this network.
Technorati: Okay what the hell? The main function of the site, as far as I can tell, is to keep a list of your favorites. Do me a favor and look HERE. Do you see any favorites? If you don’t I’m really annoyed because I followed their instructions to export my blogs from Google Reader, saved the file correctly, imported them to Technorati, they showed up for a couple minutes and now they don’t show. So my frustration is building with this site to the point where I’m already ready to give up… which for an experienced web user like me, isn’t good at all. So I’ve decided to walk away from it for awhile, focus my efforts on the other two, and mess around with this once they’ve got this bug fixed. I already ventured into their help forums on the first day… not really a good sign, folks.
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