Do you manage a social media team? If so, when was the last time you assessed your campaign process?

If the answer is “it’s been a while” or worse, “never,” listen up. A pre-determined process is essential to social media success. It allows you to do the following:

1. Identify exactly where in the campaign your team failed or needs improvements
2. Determine specific goals that will be addressed during each step
3. Create measurable metrics for each step that can help determine ROI

So how do you develop a plan as a business new to social media? Simply Business created the below interactive visualization that takes readers through each step of the social media process. The flow chart asks questions that will help you determine whether or not you are ready to move onto the next step. Answer the questions honestly and see how your current process stacks up against this ideal process. Click on the image below to launch the interactive version:

Need to focus your efforts? Here are three steps outlined in the above visualization that many businesses fail to execute on:

1. Don’t stretch your team to thin
If you have your pulse on industry news, you’ve been reading about Pinterest endlessly. The month before was all about Google Plus, and the month before that was all about Instagram. Honestly, there are too many social media platforms to keep track of, so why would you want to have your brand in every one? Focus your team’s efforts on the spaces that your customers utilize most. If you are in men’s fashion – are men really using Pinterest? Know your market and focus your energy on the platforms that matter.

2. Define goals and set targets
This is the easiest, but most often the most overlooked step. Why would you be just tweeting away for no reason? You did get into the social space for a reason, right? Making sure your team is setting goals is essential. First, it makes sure you can measure ROI later on. Second, it makes sure time and money isn’t wasted on undefined goals. Lastly, it makes sure everyone is on the same page and no expectations are left unmet. If everyone is on the same page from day one, there is less of a chance for disappointment down the road.

3. Monitor whether you are reaching those targets
Having goals is great, but you need to stay on top of whether or not you are actually reaching them. This is where metrics come in handy – it allows you to easily identify the ROI of your team’s efforts and see where you can make improvements. There are countless tools to evaluate metrics, so do some testing to determine which ones are right for your business. If you aren’t reaching your goals in one campaign, at least you have measurements in place to determine why you didn’t reach them and plan for better execution the next time around.

Adria Saracino is the Head of Outreach at Distilled, a creative Internet marketing agency. When not writing about marketing and connecting with interesting people on the web, you can find her writing about style on her personal fashion blog, The Emerald Closet. Visit www.adriasaracino.com to get in touch or follow her on twitter @adriasaracino.

Technorati Tags: infographic, social issues, social media marketing

Small Business SEO  is the dirty secret of the SEO industry.  It’s a dirty secret because with a little clever on page work, expensive ongoing SEO fees may be avoidable.  Paying for SEO is a huge burden for small business – SEO companies tend to apply blanket costs to all businesses, when really, there is a world of difference.

What’s the difference between big business and small business SEO?

Keywords.  Large businesses may be pursuing keywords with hundreds of thousands of searches per month.  That means that there’s a lot of competition so they need expensive, intense SEO services.

Most small businesses wouldn’t know how to handle that much work!

Small business keywords tend to be niche keywords or keywords with geographical modifiers.  For example where McDonalds may be pursuing HUGE keywords like “food, burger, take out, soda, dinner” a small business example could be:

“Restaurant NorthNewcastle, or Authentic Egyptian Food Online”

These have much lower search numbers so they don’t need aggressive SEO tactics.

How to do quality small business SEO on budget

It’s all about Content Marketing in your blog and quality on page SEO.  Content marketing is about targeting specific long tail keywords (three or more words that specifically target your business and have low search numbers but high conversion rates) with useful content that answers your customer’s question.  An example blog entry may be:

Authentic Egyptian Recipes

Many authentic Egyptian recipes include these five core ingredients:

Etc etc

This immediately gives your reader a useful insight and answer to your question while positioning you as an authoritative Egyptian chef.  A link to your online store at the bottom with a call to action about a free sample pack, and you’ve got a great chance at a conversion.

Meanwhile, you’ve located someone very interested in what you do via a highly relevant keyword.  That keyword may only bring 5 visitors per month but those five will have much higher conversion rates and be more likely to share your content through social channels.

Small business needn’t pay a fortune for SEO, just use it wisely and enjoy the results!

Dana Flannery is the Creative Director at Talk About Creative, an online marketing firm specialising in Small Business Online Marketing and SEO.

Technorati Tags: majestic seo, on page seo, seo google, seo guide, seo software, seo techniques, SEO Tips, SEO tools, seo tutorial

For many experienced marketing professionals, press releases have played a key role in promoting a business or product for years. On the flip side, reporters have relied on properly distributed press releases in order to keep their readers up to date on company information, news as well as product announcements.

For many business owners, especially small businesses, the thought of writing and pushing press releases (or paying someone to do so) seems very daunting and out of reach. The truth is that with modern technologies and the reach that the Internet provides, even the smallest businesses can benefit from adding press releases to their overall marketing push.

Types of Internet Press Releases

Free – For the business owner that is operating on a shoestring marketing budget, the Internet provides numerous outlets for promoting free press releases. These may include sites like PR.com, Free-Press-Release.com and PRZoom.com. These free sites offer distribution to industry reporters as well as search engines, and are a good start for the price. They will not propel a business from the depths to stardom overnight, but they will provide a place to get the hang of writing, editing and publishing proper press releases. A few of them even offer links back to a company website.

Paid – For those business owners that can afford to put some actual dollars into marketing and want better reach than the free market has to offer, there are many pay-to-play press release distribution sites that will work to get your information in front of some of the largest publications in the business. Companies like BusinessWire.com and PRNewsWire.com are good places to start, but in order to have any impact business owners need to be willing to shell out a few hundred dollars per release. There is no guarantee, but there is always a chance these press releases can be picked up and either syndicated on sites like Yahoo News or have a reporter write their own piece and reference the business.

Traditional Press Release Push

While the Internet is a great place to start with press releases, it has also created a complacent attitude for many businesses. Since the distribution is large and so many firms have popped up to do all the work, it is easy for companies to sit back and pay a few hundred dollars to throw a press release in the pile. As with almost anything, the easier it is to do, the more that will participate. Therefore, it is common for a press release to get lost in all the noise.

For those with a little more time, there can be a benefit from manually pushing a press release. The first thing that must be done is a contact list needs to be compiled or bought for news outlets within a specific sector or target market. Once a proper press release has been crafted, it should be manually distributed to the correct contact at each outlet. This can be by email, fax or even snail mail, depending on how they prefer to receive news.

This method can be time consuming but very effective since it targets the right companies within an industry. The businesses that see the most benefit are the ones that are persistent and stay on the news outlets. Simply sending over an email once will rarely do it. But and email, followed by a letter and three phone calls is much more likely to be received.

The Biggest Press Release Requirement

The most important thing regarding press release marketing is that whatever is submitted must be newsworthy. Good examples are a store opening, a new product offering or an award received. There are countless topics that are press release worthy and each industry will differ. Too often companies waste valuable time and money by pushing things that no one is interested in. It does not matter how much effort or money you put into it, nothing beats a truly interesting story that has the potential to take on a life of its own.

Eric Stauffer is a marketing consultant and a small business advocate who helps merchants find the best credit card processing firms to work with. His company reviews organizations like AppNinjas and Charge Anywhere and ranks them based on their overall practices towards merchants. 

Technorati Tags: Article Marketing, marketing, PR, press release, SEO

In December 2011, Facebook rolled out the new Facebook Timeline and is fazing users into Timeline as a mandatory change to Facebook functionality.  Most Facebook users are often adverse to the constant changes to Facebook and frankly are a little bit scared about the roll out.  Currently, Facebook Timeline is only for personal use, but if it is implemented for brands, what could it mean for your business?

First of all, if your business does not have a Facebook page under the current design, you should implement one.  Facebook has over 800 million active users and some of these are bound to be your current and potential customers.  If you start a business Facebook page though, make sure that you are putting out useful and original content on a regular basis for maximum affect.  Facebook advertising can also be very targeted and efficient.

Using Pictures to Showcase Your Brand

Facebook Timeline has almost a magazine feel to it, with a large main picture and room for important/featured pictures and content in the display area below.  More pictures translate into more opportunity for brands to show off products and services.  According to Social Media Today, the top three pieces of content that Facebook users most often click on are:

1. Pictures with text
2. Images
3. Videos

The way that Facebook Timeline is laid out allows your business to showcase these most popular pieces of content to translate into more interaction with your brand.

Be More Creative

The old Facebook layout was restrictive and only allowed for a profile picture and five thumbnails.  The new Facebook Timeline allows businesses more flexibility in what should be showcased and actually makes the business Facebook page more like a real website page.  The timeline feature also allows for greater longevity for content, since older content is more easily accessible due to the “by year” feature that displays on the right hand side of the page.

More like a Website

As mentioned above, the Facebook Timeline feature reads more like a website than the old profile used to.  Brands can now have more options on where to drive their online visitors to.  Drive some visitors to the company website and others to an ever growing Facebook community.  Businesses could also use their Facebook Timeline like a company blog to communicate directly with their customers and followers.

If you need assistance in utilizing Facebook in your online marketing efforts, please contact Eric Wagner.

Technorati Tags: The Facebook Timeline

Conducting market research is an age-old business practice. Marketing teams worldwide carefullyresearch market statistics to try and determine the likely success of various business initiatives, like new product development or emerging markets.

But how can market research be used to improve online marketing efforts?

The term “market research” has been thrown around for years, but only relatively recently has it proved to provide opportunities for Internet marketing. Why even pursue market research for the online space? First, online marketing is a long-term investment that can often take weeks and months to see results. Thus, the same principle applies to the web as for traditional marketing: it is essential to conduct and analyze market research up front to avoid wasting valuable time and money.

Second, and probably most importantly, market research can open the door to other opportunities in the online space. How you ask? Here are three types of traditional market research methods and the ways they can be used to targetsecondary online marketing initiatives.

1. Online surveys
Between printing, mailing costs, and analysis, conducting surveys used to be very expensive. That all changed with the Internet. Today, surveys can be conducted fairly easily – there are even market research companies dedicated to organizing surveys and helping othercompanies gather information from consumers.

Surveys allow you to gather information and analyze it relatively fast. And you can ask anything. While there is a fine art to writing a successful survey, there is hardly a better way to get information than asking your audience. Sure, there can be bias, but no more bias than you’d get from asking them directly – and you will be further ahead than not asking anything at all! Plus, if you offer incentives for filling out the survey like prizes and discounts, you can ensure you are collecting a statistically significant amount of data. You could even apply other social success strategies to your survey, such as encouraging your customers to pass along the survey to their network for more chances to win. This offers incentive for participants while increasing the number of survey responses you receive.

Secondary Benefit of Surveys:All the data you receive from a survey can open up doors for new opportunities. For example, you could end up collecting interesting data that would lend itself to an infographic, which you could then use to attract attention and SEO benefits for your business.

Another secondary benefit of surveys can be pursued before the survey even goes out. You have the ability to ask survey takers anything you’d like. You could also use a survey to provide more information on another sales funnel.

For example, let’s say your business offers an expert badge to your business customers for being a valued customer. They take this badge, embed it on their site, and link back to your site. Typically you do separate outreach for this badge, but with a survey, you can get the word out to your customers about it without needing to do any additional work.Simply add a question in the survey asking if they are aware of the badge, while briefly describing what the badge is and how it can benefit them (improve their own brand, increase conversions, etc.). As a follow up question, you could then ask them if they would be interested in hearing more about the badge. Boom: now you have their email and permission to contact them about the badge. This not only gives you feedback on the placement and effectiveness of the badge, but might gain you a few more embeds.

2. Focus groups
Focus groups can be a great source of qualitative research. With a group of a dozen or so customers organized into a consumer panel, you can learn more about the customer’s perspective on different topics relevant to your online marketing strategy. Focus groups are different than surveys in that it allows you to pick your customers’ brains thoroughlyand see their thought process, something quantitative research like surveys cannot capture.

Secondary Benefits of Focus Groups:You will gather a lot of information for a specific topic during a focus group. However, you can also use focus groups to learn other information that can directly apply to a content marketing strategy.

One of the biggest complaints about focus groups is that participants sometimes lie because they do not know the moderators, and thus try to give answers they think the moderators want to hear. You can use the beginning of a focus group to ask light questions in order to make the participants feel comfortable and hopefully influence the likelihood of more honest answers during the meat of the discussion. Using this “light” period to ask questions that could potentially help define a content marketing strategy is a great way to get the most out of your focus group.

3. Statistical Analysis
Statistical analysis is often done when looking up information on a large set of data, such as census and demographic statistics released by governments. You might be conducting statistical analysis for a number of different online marketing efforts, such as infographic creation and emerging markets.

Secondary Benefits of Statistical Analysis:You could also use statistical analysis to target local online marketing initiatives. In a world of an unlimited marketing budget, you would promote to all locations, but since this is not the case your business might have to allocate its marketing funds to ensure it receives the highest ROI.

Knowing the income levels, education, and age statistics of different locations can be used to help you narrow down the area to target for your online marketing efforts.For example, say you find out after elaborate statistical research that there are four towns in your area that are particularly wealthy and its residents match most of the demographic profile of your target market. You could use this information as a lead to further research for search terms to target. If those terms such as “hometown + your business offering” end up having enough relevant search volume, you will have just refined your SEO keyword initiatives and possibly discovered a new sales funnel your competition hasn’t jumped on yet.

Adria Saracino is the Head of Outreach at Distilled, a creative Internet marketing agency. When not writing about marketing and connecting with interesting people on the web, you can find her writing about style on her personal fashion blog, The Emerald Closet. Visit www.adriasaracino.com to get in touch or follow her on twitter @adriasaracino.

Technorati Tags: market research definition, market research jobs, market research methods, paid market research, primary market research, primary research, secondary research, types of market research

Bio: Dan uses google plus to market his site, cashfortrucks.com a car buying company, that can help you sell a car.

Technorati Tags: google plus account, google plus circles, how do i join google plus, what's google plus

Most people aren’t aware of it, but you can start selling your product even before it exists by making smart use of Google AdWords. Think about it. You will be able to assess your business’s potential for success even before you’ve created a product. Here’s how it works.

First, create a landing page that is targeted for keywords. Do some research, using tools like Keyword Discovery or BeBiz to determine that people are indeed conducting searches for information relating to the product that you have in mind.

One of your keyword phrases might be “how to make money on the Internet,” for example. Based on this phrase and related ones, you identify the potential to develop an e-book that shows people how they can make money on the Internet.

The landing page you develop will directly address the issues that people run into when they try to start an Internet business. You will also let people know that you have found a terrific solution to their problems and that you are in the process of creating a comprehensive guide to starting an Internet business.

Your next step is to ask your readers if they are interested in learning additional information about your guide once it is completed. Offer an opportunity to opt-in for more information. Your landing page, then, becomes a link to your website. Therefore, it needs to have high quality content. The quality requirement also holds true for any bulk content vehicles that you may employ, as well.

Your landing site will have many similarities to a standard sales site. In the first place, you want to capture people’s interest and attract them to the page, relate to the problem they are facing, establish credibility for yourself as someone who can provide a solution to the problem, and call your readers to action.
On the landing page, however, your call to action will be different from the one you will put on your sales page. Instead of asking them to buy, you will ask them to sign up if they want to learn more about the solution that you are developing. Thus, your landing page will include a simple process that allows people to opt-in to a first alert list. Once your product hits the market, they’ll get the word before anyone else.

Why is this strategy useful? It allows you to determine the amount of interest that’s already out there and it will establish a listing of potential customers who’ve already expressed interest in your upcoming product.
Now it’s time to unleash Google AdWords. This will allow you to use PPC (Pay Per Click) ads both to send traffic to your website and to assess the effectiveness of your sales approach. With AdWords, create at least fifteen ad groups that represent your most important keywords. Then you can assess their effectiveness and make whatever changes may be needed to your sales copy.

Send as much traffic to your site as you can afford. Remember, the more traffic, the longer will be your potential customer list will be when you get your product off the ground.

So where do you stand now? You’ve determined that a market exists for your product and have developed a list of potential buyers. Now simply send them an announcement via e-mail and watch the orders come rolling in.
This strategy will help you determine the viability of your product idea, but more than that, it will gather critical information that you can use in building your product and your website. You can even expand on the strategy by sending e-mail queries to people on your opt-in list and ask detailed questions about what features they are looking for. You can use this information to fine-tune the development of your product.
In short, you can’t go wrong.

Paul thinks that sales training and sales coaching are two of the most important points in order to become a true “salesman”.

Technorati Tags: google adwords help, google adwords keyword tool, google adwords learning center, google adwords traffic estimator, google adwords tutorial, google adwords voucher, google analytics

When it comes to SEO, many people make a serious mistake when it comes to optimizing page content. They forget that the ultimate purpose of SEO – and their website, for that matter – is to connect with human readers, not search engines. So whenever you craft page content, it is of the utmost importance to keep your human readers in mind.

There are some simple tricks that you can use to improve the readability of your page content and make a visit to your website a better experience. These techniques hold true whether you have bulk content or high quality content on your site.

Don’t rush

The first tip is not to rush things. Once your copy is written, do not publish it immediately. Let it simmer for a day or two – or preferably longer. Writing is a little bit like wine. It improves with age. When you return to the copy that seemed so brilliant a day or so ago, you are likely to find all kinds of improvements that you can make.

Another tip is to read your copy aloud. It’s funny, but hearing your words instead of just seeing them adds a whole new dimension to your writing. Does it sound stilted? Does it really make sense? Is the meaning what you actually intended? Have you repeated keywords and keyword phrases too many times, or stuck them into places where they really do not make sense?

Also, get someone else to review your copy. You may hate them for it at first, but they will likely find additional ways to improve the content.

Helping search engine bots is important, too, although not as important as catering to your human readers. Just think simplicity. Use strong keywords early in your content. Build your sentences so that they make it easy for the search engine spiders to find the relationships between your keywords. And do not forget to use keywords and keyword phrases throughout the texture of your content.

Keyword Stuffing

But do not become guilty of keyword stuffing – the practice of unnecessarily repeating keywords. It looks silly and amateurish to human readers, and search engines consider these unnecessary repetitions to be spam.

In your internal links, pay attention to the anchor text. When spiders examine the site, they key on the anchor text and relate it to search queries. Always use keyword phrases in your anchor text. This is a fundamental practice and it pays off. It helps the search engine understand the relationship between the terms you use in the links and the various pages on the site.

Content Simplicity

And do not forget about content simplicity. Your goal is to make it easy for someone to find your site and easy to follow it. You also want to ensure that both people and bots find the site easy to read. You should take care in writing your content, cover the subject well (but do not overwrite) and always include links (with keyword anchor text) when they are relevant. Remember the old rule of thumb: Writing is a lot like a woman’s skirt – is should be long enough to cover the subject, but short enough to be interesting. Taking SEO into consideration takes a little extra time when you build your site, but it is worthwhile. You will profit from enhanced visibility from search engines, more site visits and an increase in conversions.

Nick is an SEO Expert, visit his website for SEO Leicester services, for more SEO tips and general SEO happiness.

Technorati Tags: seo blog, seo guide, seo prices, seo software, seo techniques, SEO Tips, SEO tools, seo tutorial

My first giveaway event has ended. It was a success, I got about 650 new subscribers in my mailing list and banked few hundreds dollars in sales.
I’m happy and very pleased about that experience.My confidence has been boosted.I’m planning more great stuff.

I had more failures than successes online but each time I succeed , the feeling is absolutely fantastic.It makes me forget about all the painful failures.My first giveaway event reminds me my first success online which was selling physical products using e-commerce sites.The program I followed then was Niche Blueprint which gave everything needed to have real businesses online selling physical products.Included in the course was the most advanced SEO tactics from keywords and niche research to how to find dropshippers and then how to get traffic to the site.That was the first course that led me to REAL success online. That was the first time I experienced the feeling of waking up in the morning and having hundreds dollars in my paypal account as a results of my sites sales.

The guys behind Niche blueprint then released another course called Blueprint Black that was even better. I bought it and upgraded all my sites with great sales increased.Steve Clayton and Tim Godfrey are they great minds behind these e-commerce courses.You might already know them.The point here is they have done something That I’ve never heard before.

Steve Clayton and Tim Godfrey are launching a new courses called eFormula.eFormula is about how to make money with eCommerce marketing in the same way that Niche Blueprint and Blueprint Black were – In other words selling physical items online… but without having to stock or ship them.The differences between this version of the course and previous ones is that they have included a lot more software tools – specifically ones that will help with areas of eCommerce which some previous members found difficult.They have FOUR new research tools… new SEO tools… new Store software… and a many other new elements which they’ll be announcing on launch day.In addition they are concentrating far more on paid traffic this time round so when people get their websites set up and running they’ll show them how to generate targeted traffic and make sales FAST via Adwords and Microsoft AdCenter.

To give you a taste of what is coming they are giving all the chance to win over $5000 in cash as well as a selection super-cool prizes from the Apple® store. Ipad’s, iPhones & more… Access to a brand new ‘money-getting’ software tools worth over $400. You’ll get them free.

I would like your feedback after you download the software.Keyword research has never been so easy. Download and leave your feedback here I’d appreciate it. You can download the software HERE.

Talk to you soon,
Alexis

Technorati Tags: commission blueprint review, dropship niche blueprint, eformula, eformula bonus, eformula review, niche blueprint 2, niche blueprint 2.0 download, niche blueprint 2.0 scam, niche blueprint download, niche blueprint scam

I’ve been very quiet recently with regards to blogging as I was working on something very exciting.

Have you ever asked yourself what was the best way to build your very own Profit Pulling Opt-in Mailing List Lightning Fast? One of the best way to do that is using Giveaway Events.

After some amazing success as contributor in many JV Giveaway events over the last 12 months,I’ve just launched my first JV giveaway event to allow you to build your own very own Mailing List Fast! I’ve named it The Marketing Advantage Giveaways The set up is finished now and I’m in the prelaunch period.The event is now open to contributors.

More than 160 well known internet marketers have already joined.The opportunity I’m offering is insane; Only $10 for an upgrade that will allow you 5 Gifts, 5 Text Ads, 5 Special offers and best of all You earn 100% commissions from any contributor upgrade you refer.

So if you know the value of a mailing list and that giveaways events are one of the most powerful way to build a mailing list fast, don’t even carry on reading this blog post go register and list your offers now.

It’s important for me to thank Kerry Russell who has been very supportive showing me how to set up the whole thing. After working with her I strongly recommend her Giveaway Masterclass .
Over the last 12  months or so I actively participated in lots of JV Giveaway Events as contributors but right now I think the best way to build a list would be hosting events myself and giving opportunities to others to grow their lists.You can do that too and the good news is there is now a Giveaway Masterclass that will show you steps by steps how to host your own Giveaway Event.

The event itself will be launched for members on the  1st December and ends on the 15 December. So for who ever want to grow his mailing list there is still 2 weeks to go.  Some marketers are already rocking with their special offer sales and I’m very proud of them and glad to give them that opportunity.

If you are newbie to giveaway events, do not hesitate to contact me. I’ll hold your hand and show how to use those amazing opportunities to start making some real income online.I may even go further to show you in case you have ZERO subscribers in your mailing how to get your first 100 subscribers FAST.

I’ll talk to you soon,

Alexis

Technorati Tags: blog giveaways, branded giveaways, exhibition giveaways, giveawayoftheday, jv giveaway directory, JV Giveaway Event, jv giveaway script, marketing giveaways, promotional giveaways