The Benefits

You don’t have to be able to cook to use social media to your advantage. Paul Mershon in the Social Media Examiner notes the benefits to the 66-67% of small and/or self-employed businesses that use social media: increases in exposure and general traffic; opportunities to establish new partnerships and increases in qualified customer leads. Businesses also ranked reductions in overall marketing costs and increases in sales as big things social media can do for small business.

Be prepared to spend some time with this new networking technology. Mershon noted that active involvement of 6 hours or more a week seemed to be the tipping point for success, and in general those with the longest experience in social media reported the best results. Then again, what a great way to spend time talking about yourself and your business, for free! No experience? Have a look at what other businesses do, and you’ll find an amazing variety of messages, ads and services to claim your attention.

Customer Service And Feeback

It’s not all talk, though talk can do wonders. Consider asking satisfied customers for testimonials. Do your own write up the effort and ingenuity you put into solving customers’ problems and start your own blog. Take some photos of before and after as well as some photos of in-between. Pictures showing how high you really were when you re-roofed the church steeple, how many coats it took for that custom paint job or what the buffet table looked like before the guests dug in lets visitors to your posts get well acquainted with the quality of your work.

Join a problem-solving chat room to boost business even more. Trades like plumbing, carpentry and masonry, horticultural and arborist activities, and crafts like woodworking offer q-and-a sites that let you shine. Create a signature that contains your professional name and location so that every time you answer a question, readers learn your business information.

Go Viral

Get over the shys and go video. A great way to show what you actually do, a great accessory to explaining services, and the opportunity to go viral. In spite of all our technology, face-to-face is still the best business strategy on the planet, and doing videos gets your face in front of potential customers faster than pavement-pounding. (Bring your dog to work and whatever goofy thing he does on camera will bring you another whole set of viewers. Maybe they’re just there for the dog, but going viral is like having a full-sized ad on every bus in town.) You never know where your next customer is coming from. Give it a try.

Written by Tom Tolladay, Event Organiser for Chillisauce who specialise in Team Building Activities and Corporate Events

1. Create Interest

Your sales funnel must be able to create interest for your audience. This is a necessary step to win sales from them. Make your sales funnel interesting. Don’t make it too serious. Give them some jokes if you think appropriate. Give them some interesting facts, interesting figures, and interesting results. People will keep sticking with you if you’re able to make them interested in you.

2. Your Audience Wants To Feel Special

Most people want to be treated as if they are special gems. Your audience will arrive at your sales funnel, and if you can’t treat them as if they are special guests, you’re not building your image effectively. In order to create a good first impression, you have to show them that you care, and you have the solution for their problem. For instance, if you care about their well-being when you promote health products, they will tend to listen to you. Show that you care and your audience will have good impression on you.

3. Create A Sense Of “Need”

If you want to persuade your customers to buy the product immediately, you have to be able to create a sense of need. Make your visitors think that they need the product immediately. Creating a sense of need is equivalent with creating a sense of urgency. This will prompt your visitors take action immediately.

4. Meet Your Customer’s Expectations

What do your audiences expect from you? In short, your audiences expect the best from you. They expect different perspective on already known topic. Let’s take a look further. If you offer them another affiliate marketing guide, your audience will expect it to be different from the rest of affiliate marketing guides out there. In your sales funnel, you have to meet your customer’s expectation by giving them new ideas, new perspective, and new tidbits of information about the topic that you’re going to cover on your product.

5. Give Excellent Customer Service Even Before They Purchase

Give pre-sales support for your audience. Give them support before they purchase your product. Give them necessary information about the things that they want to know about your product. Let your audience to ask you any question and provide live chat support if you want to give them better support. Your pre-sales customer service will determine whether your potential customers like your product or not.

6. Follow-up Your Customers Via Email

If you build a sales funnel, don’t miss to give away at least one free product for list building. You need to follow-up your customers via email in order to give them further information to help them decide about taking your product or not. Follow-up email will also inform and educate your audience about your product. It will keep reminding them about the product that you offer to them and how important it is for your audience.

7. Free Trial Or Freebies

Free trial works best on sales funnel because people usually want the taste of your product first before they actually purchase it. By giving free trial or freebies for your product, you are giving a chance for your potential customers to test-drive your product, and they will decide for themselves after they know the quality of the product. If your product is really valuable, you shouldn’t have any problem giving free trial to your potential customers. In fact, it will be a powerful way to convince your audience to buy your product.

If you want more people to buy your product through your sales funnel, those ways will help you to strengthen your sales funnel and make it more powerful to generate sales for your product.

Are you interested to learn more on the author? Kenny is a freelance writer that contributes to www.cashforusedcarssandiego.com where you can get some tips on Sell your car San Diego and also san diego cash for automobiles.

Rich snippets are a system which allow the user to include extra information into their content which is readable by web bots, being one of the first steps being made towards creating a semantic web. Google have been accepting rich snippet information in three different formats; microdata, microformats and RDFa, however recently they have announced that they will be focusing on supporting the schema.org format, a standard set by Bing and Yahoo as well as Google, to avoid fragmentation of standards across different search engines.

Schema

Schema.org offers a library of syntax for you to add to your content, providing context for Google bots when indexing content. There is a wide range of syntax to choose from so you can be more specific about what topics your content is relevant to. It also absorbs the markups used in the old microdata, microformats and RDFa formats, so existing rich snippet data shouldn’t be affected at this point.

Product Reviews

The star system that you would have seen in the SERPs is typically down to Microdata being inserted into the content. Product rich snippets allow for a “review” tag to be used to generate the star rating. There are several pluggins for content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress and Joomla which make implementing rich snippet reviews far quicker and smoother, also allowing users to submit their own reviews. The number of reviews recorded will also be displayed, so similar search results which have similar or slightly lower star rating to other results and ratings around it are more likely to gain clicks due to the authority of having so many extra reviews, gaining the users trust more than the other results.

Snippet Spam

Google have recently updated their algorithm to penalise websites which have included their own fake rich snippet reviews. Through embedding rich snippets (usually using Microdata) into the website’s code it was easy to game the Google bots into thinking they were genuine reviews, however without a system that allows users to include their own ratings and reviews it is nothing more than spam, being treated as such with a long slide down the SERPs. You can now report pages you suspect are using fake reviews at Google’s own report spam in rich snippets page.

Check your Listings

To encourage people to start adding this extra data to their content Google have launched a rich snippet testing tool, so you can see exactly what is found by the Google bots and how it will be displayed in search listings.

So it looks like including rich snippets into your content would be a good move and adopting Schema early has the potential to pay dividends; just don’t try to game the system otherwise you may wind up paying the hefty Google penalty of search obscurity.

Based in Brighton, Silicon Beach Training offers a wide range of training courses across a variety of fields. Our popular courses include SEO Training and IOSH Managing Safely Training, helping you to take your career to the next level.

This data shows that businesses are clearly taking social media seriously in 2012, both as a marketing tool and as a way of boosting SEO. So what has changed between 2012 and 2011 to have such an impact on search marketing?

Social Media as a Marketing Tool

It has been hard to miss a ‘social media during the Super Bowl’ story this month as social media evangelists did their best to show how integrated social media has become in society. TV is a good example of the social media boom – every show now has social media channels and prompts viewers to interact while watching.

A lot of viewers do this anyway – this is called 2-screen viewing. Watching TV whilst using a mobile device to browse the internet and use social media. TV marketers – just like internet marketers – have realised that they can mould this interaction to their own purposes and make money out of it.

Now every business should have multiple social media accounts – Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest – whatever customers are using a business should be too. It is such an easy and effective way to interact with clients that it is no wonder how quickly businesses took to Google+ when they finally allowed business pages.

Social media is important to business not just so that they can promote their products to clients but also to communicate with clients and establish a solid brand identity.

However, social media is not just useful for building brand identity and selling products. More and more research is showing that social signals are having an increasing impact on search engine rankings.

Social Media as an SEO Tool

It is undoubted that social signals affect ranking. Search engines recognise that people have shared, liked, tweeted and +1’d content and so ranks it higher in the pursuit of relevancy. The thinking behind this is that if everyone is sharing something then lots of people want to read it compared to content that hasn’t been shared. The problem is that nobody can prove exactly when and how Google determines what content should be ranked by social shared.

However, there is a direct correlation between social shares and Google’s new search engine – Search Plus Your World. Results have now become personal. The results that appear in Search Plus Your World are posts and web pages that have been approved and shared by friends on Google+. If S+YW picks up as Google hopes it and begins to incorporate social signals from other social networks then it will be vital for marketers to show strong social signals so that their content appears in results. If 100 people share a post then any time their friends search for the subject of the post in personal search that post will appear on top.

2012 is the year for marketers to really push their social media efforts. With an effective social media strategy in place, businesses should see increase in sales, a boost to brand reputation and even higher rankings in search results. Impressive.

Silicon Beach Training is a Brighton based provider of Social Media Training and SEO Training. The courses run together so that delegates can enjoy the benefits of combining the two disciplines into a super marketing strategy.

In creating a marketing campaign, you should keep in mind the four Ps of business which are:

• Product
• Price
• Promotion
• Place

Here is a detailed view on each of the four Ps in marketing. Create your marketing campaign based on these and you might be boosting sales in no time.

Product

First of all, determine your product. Is your product new to the market or is it just another brand of the same idea? For instance, if you are thinking of offering spa services to the public, assess whether you have a service that will stand out. Are you offering the regular Thai massage or do you have an aroma infused, galvanic stone, Thai therapy? The market would not be as thrilled to see the regular service on your menu as compared to seeing a different approach to something ordinary. Basically, the first step in creating a marketing plan is to have a product that differentiates itself from others.

Price

Now that you have determined your product, it is time to look at the price. Since you are offering something different, you have the option to stick with the market price or go beyond it. If you plan on going beyond the average market price, however, be sure to stick within reasonable values. A markup of approximately 30% is normal while being 80% more expensive than your competitor might make you lose customers.

Promotions

Promotions are just as important as determining your price and your product because this will yield the actual customers. One of the best promotions you could have for a product or service is the availability of credit card payment options. Credit cards are widely used in America and when people do not have cash they could spend on hand, they turn to credit cards. If you have the Mastercard, Visa, or American Express logo displayed, people will be magnetized towards you. Here, you are targeting the idea that even if the customer does not have cash, they are still welcome and try out your service.

Another side of promotion that you need to assess is how you would reach out to your target market – radio, print, TV, or internet. In today’s modern age, your cheapest bet might be the internet. Social networking sites such as Facebook will allow you to put up ads on its right sidebars targeting a specific population filtered by place, age group, and interests. This makes your marketing campaign reach the people who would be most interested in your product instead of just spending largely on a population wherein a small percentage will actually be interested.

Tip: Read CreditDonkey’s recent American Express Plum Card review to see how you can manage your marketing promotions cash flow.

Place

Lastly, where you launch your product could also determine your fate. If you think that opening up a small café on a street dotted with larger, more established ones will make you earn customers in a snap, think again. Make sure that your area is still within the healthy competition. One of the best mediums for penetrating the market is through the internet, because here you are not just confined to a local area.

Jamie Scott from CreditDonkey says, remember that in any business, it is not the number of sales that matter but the profit you gain from each sale. Use the four Ps wisely to determine what you will offer, how much you will offer it for, how you will promote it and where you will offer it.

This article throws some light into certain aspects of HTML5 which were not known to the web-developing community till date. After reading this article it’s certain that the reader’s will recognize the potential of HTML5.

Advantages Of HTML5 And The Present Scenario

The prime feature of HTML5 is its media adaptability. This means that the web-masters and bloggers need not worry about their reader’s running away from the monotonous presentation. They can now conveniently enjoy music and videos along with blogging. To quote an example, Pandora recently launched a new version of music player in HTML5. A recent example of this is the Google Doodle, which is a collection of highly graphic-rich logos of Google that were created using HTML5.The most popular Pac man Google Doodle was an animated Google logo plus game which the Google users can play with.

It can provide numerous enhancements in the utilization of codes as well as make the contents easier for the users to understand. HTML5 has in stock various fresh tags that would be helpful for the developers for classifying those contents that they may find to be more significant.

Many mobile applications, launched in the market, were developed using HTML5. Like, Facebook launched the HTML5 iPad app. The online gaming platform Zynga recently launched 3 new HTML5 games to run on mobile browsers, etc.

HTML5 also helps in optimized indexing of the contents on the web. A web-master’s site as well as the contents would be indexed by search-bots. As mentioned earlier, the web-masters can now be fearless as his contents rich in media will also be indexed by the search-bots.

All these bring the insects to a single net, ‘Websites that are rich in media stand to gain the most.’

The Hindrances

In spite of all these happening, many famous recent browsers do not completely support the entire features of HTML5 in addition to codes.

It was mentioned by Google that they are may consider about using HTML5 in web-developing. However, their responses don’t seem to be on positive side. It seems that HTML5 will not be implemented until it becomes famous in the market and becomes the primary tool of web-developers.

HTML5 is a robust platform for developing media rich and attractive websites that can revolutionize the web browsing experience of the users. It also provides the developers with myriad of new codes for optimum indexing and hence effective SEO. However a lot of developments are yet to happen. In a nutshell, HTML5 is going to become tomorrow’s supporting pillar for SEO and taking out the pearl of data from the sea of Internet.

About the author: Margaret is a blogger by profession. She loves writing on design and technology. Beside this she is fond of books. She recently bought a  ATI Graphics Card. These days she is busy in writing an article on landscape architecture.

A Budding Blogger

A budding or an upcoming blogger desperately needs blogging for different popular websites. If you are a newcomer and just started his or her new blog then you might not get enough readers. This is the basic problem that every new blogger has to face. So what a budding blogger can do to increase number of readers or subscribers. Well! You can start guest blogging. You have to write blogs for famous websites, in return they will publish your name and bio below the blog. Hence when thousands of readers come to that famous website to read your blog, they might come to know about your new blog.

Off the Cuff

Guest blogging is normally different than what you write for your own blog. In guest blogging you basically write off the cuff. So you do not have to invest much time in creating a blog post. Usually you can go to article directories like Ezine articles and read different articles there. You can get inspired after reading some articles and build a blog post around it. This is so easy to do that you can write daily at least 3 to 4 guest blogs for various famous websites.  Hence I suggest you to write as many as guest posts daily.

Backlinks

The next big advantage of guest blogging is that you get backlinks for your original blog. Backlinks are very important to generate heavy traffic. Google search engine will rank only those websites or blogs who acquires maximum good quality backlinks. So guest posting can really help to build high quality backlinks. You just have to write guest posts for websites that are very popular on the Internet. Today all the famous websites allows guest posting hence you can register there and start blogging now.

Easy Income

Traditionally guest posting is an easy way to make money online compared to other forms. Here you can create content in advance and write up to 4 to 5 blogs daily. You can work as a freelance writer and earn money for every single guest post you write. Moreover in guest posting you earn not just directly but also indirectly. As I said earlier getting backlinks will help your blog to generate heavy traffic and from there also you earn money. So benefits are from both ends.

Future

Future of the guest blogging is really great. If you are a new blogger then I must suggest you to start with guest blogging. The most convincing reason is that there are thousands of famous blogs and websites whose owners daily update them. However they are so busy that they themselves cannot update it, so in order to update daily they need good quality blogs from guest bloggers. Hence there is always demand for guest bloggers by these famous website owners. They will offer guest bloggers to join free and write for them.

Conclusion

Finally I will conclude saying that guest blogging is really great for upcoming bloggers. You can write blogs as many as you like. You get free backlinks from famous blogs which in return is the guarantee for high income. Lastly guest blogging has a bright future because website owners are always looking for them. So never underestimate the power of guest blogging.

This article is written by Pritam Nagrale from Mumbai. He writes about SEO & blogging tips. He also blogs on money making subjects at his blog Jobs8Home. Just visit the blog to get more idea.

I learned long ago that it’s not only what your website looks like, how user friendly it is or how quickly each page loads that draws people to your website.  There is a little known secret that keeps your potential customers glued to your page, wanting to read more and ultimately wanting to buy and that’s all done through copywriting.

You’ve probably heard of copywriting over the years, thinking it was just a service provided by writers to make your website, sales pages, pamphlets and emails sound good and professional, but in fact copywriting services offer so much more.

Have You Experienced Copywriting?

If you have ever landed on a webpage that has sounded interesting, has had the perfect sales pitch and has had you glued to the screen until the last word, then you’ve experienced the clever art of copywriting.  After reading the page did you want to buy the product or service? Did you have faith in the company though you’d never set foot in their doors? Did they seem reputable and reliable? If you answered yes to these questions, you’ve experienced copywriting.

Copywriting services are a profession that offers the ultimate sales for businesses through words.  It doesn’t matter whether you need to hand in a presentation for a potential business deal, want to get more traffic to your website or want people to buy when landing on your webpage, you can enjoy great benefits through these remarkable writers.

With technology taking over in recent years, we all rely on the internet to promote our business.  It doesn’t matter what business you have, without the internet you don’t stand a chance against your competitors.  There are ways to promote the site and obviously a professional design, user friendly layout and quick loading play a part, but it’s all about the words.

Let the Written Words do the Talking

Words have such a big impact and you don’t realize how important they are until your competitors are piping you at the post.  The majority of us will rely on a professional looking site without spending the extra money to make it reader friendly.

When you think of copy-writing services, you need to take everything into consideration.  The person you hire to do this work for you needs to love words, they need to know how to use those words to draw in customers to your site and they need the words to get the people to want to buy your products or services.  Once this is achieved through words the copywriter’s job is complete, or so you would think.

A website is a great first step, but you need a blog, you need a social media page and you need ways to market your business online, through things like SEO marketing (Search Engine Optimization).  Now all this may be sounding too confusing right now, which is why finding a great copy-writing service may be the best option for you, someone who can understand what you need, write your blogs for you, market your business on the social networks and promote your business to encourage new sales.

Finding a company who specializes in copy-writing services and can give you the edge you are looking for over your competitors is businesses like Apple Copywriting.  These writers specialize in copy-writing, SEO and marketing, so you can sit back and let the words do the talking.

That’s all fine and good, and Google has made the new policy comparatively easy to understand for those who choose to read it, but the truth is that the entire issue is mislabeled because when people think “privacy” they probably aren’t considering one of the primary functions of the policy – to allow Google to combine personal information across its many products and services, package it and use it at their discretion.

There is no question this type of data collection would create an incredibly large and valuable cache of information. Google reps insist it will largely impact only users with Google Accounts and is designed to make their Web experiences more streamlined and intuitive. And, for those with no concerns about data sharing the new changes will undoubtedly create a more dynamic, personalized Internet interface.

Many critics and Congress, however, disagree on the issue of the policy’s transparency and motive. The U.S. government has increased its scrutiny of the company, alleging that the new policy does not make it clear enough to users how to opt out of data collection, or how their search actions are being tracked.

The European Union (E.U.) went one step further, asking Google to delay the rollout of its changes so that it may ensure the policy comports with E.U. data collection and privacy laws. Google dismissed the request, noting that any delay would require costly reorganization of its schedule and confuse the majority of users who are already prepared for the switch.

A less publicized but far more important issue regarding Google’s new policy is contained in the “Information Sharing” portion that outlines the company’s position regarding providing information to government entities that request it. Essentially, the policy states that Google will not require a warrant if it deems the release of information “reasonably necessary” to satisfy an “enforceable government request.”

Privacy advocates argue that the wording does not convey what should be a very strict prohibition against sharing personal information in this manner. This and other concerns have prompted many to call for a boycott of the search engine, and instead use an alternate search tool like Bing, DuckDuckGo or Blekko.

James Madeiros writes for Sparkplug Digital, a Seattle SEO company delivering online marketing strategy and execution for tech companies, startups, and non-profits.

Social Media is a sure shot game changer and we know that- what with Google jumping in with Google plus while Facebook changed the entire idea of social networking in the world! Now to answer the pressing question on Social Media and its impact on SERP, let’s look at a few points.

1. Sharing With Networks – Facebook, Google Plus, & Twitter

The sharing fever is already prevalent on social sites. Good content easily gains popularity and easily grows a steady base of real followers. This is certainly a good metric to measure the real popularity of a site, isn’t it?

2. Authenticity And Trust Verifiable

It’s certainly an easier way to decide whether a site is really popular or whether a brand is actually as big as it projects itself to be. The support from real people validates trust and authenticity. Strange as it may see, a little presence on virtual space and everyone knows everything!

3. Niche Content And Profiles – Business And Industry Segmentation

Another very interesting and relevant point is that users are constantly segregating their information and putting it up on various sites. Like twitter is for micro-blogging while LinkedIn has professional connections. Now, when a business features in various segments, it can easily be validated or indexed for relevant content. Why wouldn’t search engines look at this as an important factor?

4. Buttons For Sharing

Sharing has moreover, become very easy. Besides filling in personal info and letting people know about yourself, people are also sharing a great deal of web content with each other and not by copying, emailing or sharing prints – but simply by clicking buttons and creating direct updates.

The series of options here are frequently used to share and more people read indicate more traffic for the article, content or website. The buttons are making work quite interesting – bridging the gap between the human tendency to be lazy and keep quiet and click a button and endorse something. An important social media factor influencing SERP, I must say.

5. Business And Customer Service

And that brings us to customer service. Sitting here in America, I sent a a gift purchased online, to my niece in India and tracked on the internet. When I had a doubt about whether it is, I simple went on the facebook page and asked for help. I have never made a buy with the company before and nor do I know of the company – but the customer service on social media did it for me. Yes; important factor once again.

6. Growing Trends – People Attracted To Virtual Space

And here’s something you have to here: More people are going crazy over the virtual space and more people are falling in love with their virtual homes everyday! And in the future, they are only going to be more attracted to building their virtual identity. In short, no one’s going anywhere.

So when the maximum time a person spends on the web is going to be on social media, micro- blogging and other networking sites, then it’s pretty certain that what they endorse is going to be of value – and certainly, organic traffic. Search engines love the word ‘Organic’, so you are going to see them keeping their eyes open for this space.

7. Google update (Freshness, Real Time Results For People And Pages Profiles)

Looking at the search engine giant, we have two points to consider. One is its latest Panda 3.2 update which talks about ‘Freshness’ quotient. Google already shows real time updates and personal user profiles from social sites in its search; now it is simultaneously indexing content as soon as they are getting updated. Aren’t social sites places for live action? So putting two and two together, and ‘Plus-ing’ them, doesn’t it add up to some more social media and SERP connection?

8. Presence of Google Plus

That brings us to the second point – Google Plus. Google – the search engine giant, I repeat – feels the need to launch its own social site. And not only that, it is also aggressively marketing it. Take a look at this small example:

Google’s help pages show only the ‘+1′ button which means you tend to share the content only on Google Plus. Of course you could always use the link and share it anywhere else, but as lazy as we humans are, we’ll simply click the button and bookmark it for ourselves. This is a strong social media and search engine connection. Google – being what it is – is sure to make all its actions count.

9. Indirect impact

So finally, when so much is already happening and there are so many ways in which social media influences results indirectly – then, looking beyond, in the future – why wouldn’t there be a clear cut instruction and direct impact? We already know of official statements talking about how twitter or Facebook link-sharing can influence page ranks on Google and Bing – but we still don’t have clear demarcations on ‘How’. Life would be far harder then; so for now – let’s enjoy the social media.

Divya is a creative and vivacious lady dedicated to working on web content and web development. While she enjoys socializing – dancing, singing – just like everyone else, she also has a passion for Social Media optimization and blogging on e-commerce. She’s an expert in SMM, SEO, Link Building and consults with various SEO companies.