People Trust People: The Truth about Online Marketing
Apr 3rd
In the grand scheme of online marketing, the catchphrase “People Trust People” is a foundational principle. We trust individual people more than we trust groups of people. For example, government is difficult to trust because of all the groups interested in laws being regulated in ways that best suit their organization. Businesses are difficult to trust because their principal objective is to earn income.
You might respond that politicians make up government and that sales representatives create a businesses’ revenue. However, I would argue that it is when politicians join with other politicians and sales reps join with other sales reps that the waters tend to get a little murky and More >
To Increase Your Social Media Marketing, Think of the Search Engines as Your Customers
Mar 10th
If you want to improve your on-line presence, and all of us involved with social media marketing do, try thinking of the search engines like Bing, Google, and Yahoo as your customers. Imagine that each one of your web pages is a treasure chest, and your customers, the search engines, want to know what is inside of it!
Help search engines open the treasure chests within your website by acting upon the following advice:
- All of your web pages need to link to each other. But don’t make visitors or the search engines make more than two clicks to access every page. One click access is even better. Some web designers mistakenly believe that the more complex each web page is, the more visible it will be to the search engines. This is not true. Your online visitors and Google want their experience on your website to be as simple “flat” as possible. Social media marketing is all about helping others in any way possible. Search engines know how frustrating it is for customers if they have to go through four or five layers to get to where they want to go – and they judge your site accordingly. To find out more about this topic, you can review Google’s downloadable Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. However, before you leave, here are a few more recommendations you should heed.
- When possible, keep each web page’s address or URL clean and short – without any weird punctuation marks, equal signs, or underscores. Also, make sure you use detailed, relevant keywords in the address that are pertinent to the information on the page. You will lose ground with your attempts to improve social media marketing and the search engines will dock you if your web page’s address has little to do with the actual content on the page itself.
- Name your website. You might overlook the title bar at the top of each browser window, but search engines don’t! Give each page a keyword-driven, concise, title. If you sell knit beanies, for example, don’t title your page “Keep your head warm.” Instead, title it “Hand Knit Beanies.”
- Be as descriptive as possible for the search engines in the descriptive fields as you are finishing the page and getting ready to publish it. Think about this area as the text in a catalog. In order to improve your social media marketing through smart search engine optimization techniques, you must grab the attention of the reader, and the description must be relevant to its web page.
- Include a h1 heading tag to every article. Without an h1 heading tag on each page of your website, search engine crawlers will have trouble understanding your content just as if you would have trouble reading an article that didn’t have a headline.
Your Social Media Marketing Should Include Creating and Distributing Relevant Videos!
Feb 20th
The fact is that search engines are now giving preferential treatment to videos. It is their attempt to provide online shoppers with a better variety of specialized content when searching for our keywords. One company, Forrester Research, reports that compared with standard SEO and social media marketing optimization techniques, a properly submitted (and relevant) video is 50 times more likely to achieve a first-page Google ranking.
In the past, when we searched for a topic, take trust seals, for example, we were provided with relevant articles and news on how they increase a website’s conversion rates. Then came fresh, newly conceived, yet highly related blog posts telling how effective trust seals are at helping websites build high levels of trust with their visitors – turning more of them into valued customers.
After that, the search engines began including pertinent photos about what a trust seal looks like. With the photo, a link would take us right to the business selling the trust seal, making the process clean and convenient.
But photos were given more privileges, in many ways, than most content-driven articles and posts simply because it was different. Search engines were quick to rank relevant photos higher than equally useful content. Few complained as searching become more colorful.
Then YouTube showed up and offered the ability to find out about trust seals by watching a relevant video – much more attention-grabbing and in many cases just as informative as reading an article!
From Good To Great Social Media Marketing
Feb 9th
If Jim Collins (author of the bestselling book Good to Great) is right, and “greatness is largely a matter of conscious choice,” then all website owners can, theoretically, become great at social media marketing.
Good companies do a few things right. Great companies do all of the important things right. Let’s review a few of the important areas of the book, as they pertain to social media marketing greatness.
The book talks about making sure we have the right person in the right spot. If we have good people working with us, find out what they’re good at and have them focus their energies in that area. Don’t fire an intelligent, hard worker with a great attitude just because she isn’t performing in the area you chose for her to work. Find an area where she is More >
Social Media Marketing – An Hour A Day
Jan 13th
There are many activities that fill up our days besides social media marketing. An hour a day might seem like a lot to give up to focus on increasing our online presence and building our social equity. But there are some bonuses that come with organizing a small portion of our time with activities that really matter.
We’re not just talking about decreasing the amount of TV or movies we watch, although the sacrifice for doing so is minimal. We are talking about organizing our work day so that we can spend a solid hour working on increasing our relationships with customers, clients, partners, co-workers, vendors, and even competitors.
Here are a few specific social media marketing activities that will pay off huge dividends if we are committed to spend an hour a day doing them.
1. Find one social marketing program. We shouldn’t waste our time constantly looking for systems and programs. We could spend months looking at different systems without ever starting to increase our business’ visibility and that is not productive. Preferably, the system we choose should combine search engine optimization (SEO) with social media marketing.
2. Start spending and hour a day working through it’s modules. Set time a part during the work day. We shouldn’t start a new module until we have extrapulated everything that we can from the module we’re on. When we do so, we will build a global identity, while creating professional, honest, one-on-one relationships.
3. Fill up down time with proven habits such as listening to motivational or social media optimization (SMO) training, calling a client just to see how they are doing, and taking advantage of the opportunity to visit our competitors just to see what they have up their sleeves this week.
4. Get to know co-workers and vendors better. I once sold an item that had been on inventory for nearly a year simply by asking our delivery personnel if they knew anyone who might be interested in it! They appreciate our concern and our sincere desire that they succeed. Spend some time with them and watch their productivity soar!
In an effort to heed my own advice, and not feed you more than you can chew – at least while keeping your mouth closed – I will end there. Follow these simple concepts of focusing on social media marketing an hour a day and you will be successful.
Social Media Optimization – We’re all OK!
Jan 6th
In our quest to improve upon how we communicate socially – especially on the internet, it’s beneficial to get to the root of the human transaction.
In his best-selling book, I’m OK, You’re OK, Thomas A. Harris discusses Eric Berne’s thoughts on optimizing our social interactions, stating that the unit of social intercourse is called a transaction.
If two or more people encounter each other … sooner or later one of them will speak, or give some other indication of acknowledging the presence of the other. This is called the transactional stimulus. The other person will then say or do something which is in some way related to the stimulus, and that is called the transactional response.
There are key factors that can assist us in our attempts to ensure that there aren’t any discrepancies between the person responding and the person stimulating. Here are a few:
Listen. Whether we are communicating with our brother, client, vendor, or competitor, we should focus first on what they have to say without concentrating on a response while they are still talking. Otherwise we miss the stimulus.
Combining SEO with Social Media Marketing
Dec 30th
Often, what seems so new and cutting-edge, stems from principles learned long, long ago. Such is the case with the latest trend toward combining social media marketing with search engine optimization.
Thousands of years ago we were all hunters and gatherers. The hunters were sly and fearless. They divided and conquered. The gatherers’ stayed together as a close-knit group and, well, gathered.
The hunters all lived together, and the gatherers all lived together. But the hunters did not live with the gatherers. Each thought the other was odd and inferior.
That is until, as many legends attest,
How Trust Seals Will Increase Our Online Conversion Rates
Dec 22nd
In our never-ending quest to increase our online conversion rates, let’s consider the benefits of displaying trust seals on our websites. There are many trust seals on the market today. That’s because online consumers have never been so cautious about shopping online as they are now.
One company, Trust Guard, provides Security Verification Seals, Privacy Verification Seals, and Business Verification Seals – because shoppers are concerned about all three areas of website identity.
It makes sense for us as website owners to remove all the fear, doubt, and suspicion that accompanies making a buying decision online. When there is no hesitation to do what we want our online visitors to do, our conversion rates will increase.
Online consumers worry about
