Register and Edit Your Profile

The first thing that you should do is to sign up for a Facebook account. When you’re done, the next thing that you should do is edit your profile.

It’s highly recommended to use a first-person conversational tone when writing your “bio” section. This would make your account sound more human. Being business-like makes your profile look like a dummy account that solely promotes your products or services. As for your birthday, it’s best that you hide the year of your birth for security purposes.

It is also your prerogative whether you’ll show your real relationship status or not. You can state your relationship status or you can just leave it blank. You can also set your privacy settings so that only a limited number of people can see your relationship status.

Upload a Profile Photo

In this age of social networking, a relaxed but professional-looking headshot photo is a more acceptable for business purposes. You can also edit your thumbnail to make it recognizable. Meanwhile, using group pictures of you and other people is not advisable. You wouldn’t want your key contacts guessing who’s who based on your profile photo, would you?

Another thing, make sure that you’re using your most recent picture as a profile photo. That way, it’ll be easy for you to establish trust with your potential customers.

Understand the Power of Likes and Interests

You can connect to a relevant page by filling out your Facebook profile’s Likes and Interests section. Therefore, make sure to select the Likes and Interests that are related to your business. This could help you locate your potential customers and know other businesses across your niche.

Don’t Mix Business with Personal Stuff

Mixing business matters with personal stuff is a big no-no in Facebook marketing. That way, you’re guaranteed that whatever embarrassing posts your personal account have will not ruin your business’ online marketing strategies.

Facebook is definitely an influential online marketing tool that should be included in your tool box. But using it to its full potential requires a professional, trustworthy and relevant user profile.

Relevant Search Results are Brought by Social Signals

According to a study on social media growth, social media sites are used to distinguish and engage new customers. However, most businesses don’t have any idea on how these social websites directly affect search results.

In fact, a survey conducted by SEOmoz showed that 80% of the respondents believe that social signals will be one of the factors for page ranking in the future. Since search results are based on what people are talking about, the survey result is something that could happen while making content more timely and relevant.

Why Twitter Authority is Important

Other than social signals, Twitter authority also matters when it comes to search ranking. The more followers actively re-tweeting and responding to your content, the more you are deemed as an influential Twitter user.

It’s a no-brainer that the micro-blogging site has the power to consistently replicate a link—something that can be beneficial to businesses and website owners. Thus, the importance of a Twitter link relies on the number of tweets and re-tweets that a website can generate. In fact, the number of re-tweeted links produce inbound links to a website.

Therefore, it’s safe to conclude that tweets, and other social signals, can improve search rankings. It’s also a note worth taking that re-tweeted content can tantamount to authority. In relation to this, sharing content and gaining Twitter authority can result to relevant search result to your site. However, you have to optimize your keywords, as this is one factor to consider when it comes to search ranking.

Although gaining authority on Twitter is easier said than done, the micro-blogging site is a marketing tool that could come in handy. Simply because a link shared on Twitter gets authority through numerous re-tweets. Hence, dropping your contents from the higher part of the Twitter pyramid can stream down to more users. In turn, you’ll become an influential Twitter user.

Defining Internet Marketing

Also called online marketing, it is the process of promoting a brand, products or services over the Internet. Its broad scope includes email marketing, electronic customer relationship management and any promotional activities that are done via wireless media.

It also combines the technical and creative aspects of the World Wide Web such as advertising, designing, development and sales. Moreover, Internet Marketing also deals with creating and placing ads throughout the various stages of customer engagement cycle.

Online marketing is divided into different types:

Affiliate Marketing:

It is a marketing practice wherein a business pays an online retailer, e-commerce site or blog for each visitor or sales that these websites make for their brand.

Display Advertising:

This refers to advertisement banners that are displayed on other websites or blogs to boost traffic for their own content. This, in turn, can increase product awareness.

Email Marketing:

From the name itself, this is a marketing process that involves reaching out to your customers via email.

Inbound Marketing:

This type of Internet marketing involves sharing of free valuable content to your target market to convince them to become your loyal customer. This could be done by setting up a business blog.

Search Engine Marketing:

This is a form of marketing that promotes a business through paid advertisement that appears on search engine result pages. This includes paid placement, contextual advertising, paid inclusion or through search engine optimization.

Search Engine Optimization:

Contrary to SEM, SEO uses the unpaid and natural process of promoting content on SERPs. This includes keyword research and placement, link building and social media marketing.

Social Media Marketing:

Based on its name, social media marketing is the process of promoting a website through various social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest and more.

Why Internet Marketing is Important?

The Internet has the power to connect millions of people from around the world. Thus, it also has the capabilities to bring your business to millions of your target market worldwide. What makes this process a best inclusion to your promotional effort is the fact that you don’t need to shell out plenty of money.

In addition, the effectiveness of your campaign can be easily measured using web analytics and cost-volume-profit analysis tools. However, it requires you to learn the many facets of Internet marketing so that you’ll know whether your efforts are giving the return on investment that you want for your business.

To be clear, the report is not talking about the traditional search that is currently available on Bing. It is all about the Visual Search tool that Microsoft’s search engine has released in 2009. The feature uses a unique Silverlight technology that enables users to view large set of images and data.

What Does Visual Search Do?

First announced in September 2009, Visual Search made an initial appearance at TechCrunch 50 Conference. It lets searchers browse easily using a slick interface of “structured data sets from trusted partners.” As described by Erik Shoenfield, a TechCrunch writer:

“For instance, if you type in ‘dog breeds,’ it organizes them for you in a grid of images that you can scroll through using a slider on the right. When you hover over a particular image, it enters the name of that dog breed in the search box. And you can re-order the image results by size, breed, exercise needs and Bing popularity.”

It initially earned a spot on the homepage search categories, under the Travel. Then it will be gone missing from the top of the navigation once the user is into Bing search results. The idea behind Visual Search is simple: Use clean imagery to enable users to sort through large sets of data easily.

It was followed by improvements in December 2010, which includes moving from Silverlight to HTML5 and promoting 111 different Visual Searches. However, the Visual Search feature no longer resolves. Other than revealing that the search tool is no longer working, a Microsoft spokesperson pointed out that the feature’s gallery has been shut down since last fall.

“Last fall, we began the process of removing Visual Search galleries on Bing. Like all of our betas, Visual Search was part of an on-going effort to better understand how we can offer the best search experience possible. We learned a lot from Visual Search beta and we’ll apply that knowledge to Bing as part of our continuing effort to help users ‘do’ more, while keeping our offerings visually appealing. This does not affect nor should be confused with Image Search that will remain a key feature to us.”

What is Business’ Weakness?

Unfavorable reputation is often caused by exposed company weaknesses. What makes it worse is the fact that various media could amplify it. Therefore, it is important to know your business’ defects. This lets you anticipate what needs fixing, which prevents customer resentment go haywire.

Avoid Defamatory Remarks

You should know how to avoid defamatory remarks inside and outside of your business. Do not include any damning content in your company’s blog or website and even internal emails. In addition, you should prevent your employees from addressing a customer in a disrespectful tone.

Check Your Online Reputation

The Internet is a great way to know what other people are saying about your business. Identify the key influencers in your industry. They could be other experts from your field, online magazines or bloggers. If you can afford it, you can also keep an eye on people outside of your industry and see what they say about you. Additionally, you can hire companies who specialize in online reputation management.

React Accordingly on Valid Remarks

Before reacting to any negative remarks about the company, determine who made the comment and check if it’s valid. See also if other people are talking about the issue and how fast it’s spreading. If the situation becomes erratic, bring the conversation to your website or open a forum on the topic. The speed and nature of your response should reflect to the degree of the problem.

Outline Your Response

While it is always better to respond on what other people has to say, handling your company’s reputation crises has two ways. Offer a genuine apology when it comes to valid statements. Tell your customers your exact plan of eradicating their animosity, re-establish consumer trust and convince them to continuously do business with you.

False account, on the other hand, must be dealt by asking for a retraction and providing the accurate information. When publishers are being uncooperative, get your message out through your own blog or send in the lawyers.

Act Like a Professional

It’s okay to be defensive when responding to criticism. However, don’t get too emotional. Deal with the situation efficiently and professionally. Gather all the facts and apologize, don’t be arrogant, avoid unnecessary litigation threats and negative PR campaigns against the commenter.

What people say about your company online can either make or break your brand. Hence, it is your responsibility to learn what people are saying about your brand and respond accordingly. This is needed in order to maintain your business’ clean image.

Why Planning is Important

One way to be successful with business blogging is to know your competition. Study your niche and see what blogs dominate it. Know what they write about, how they interact with their readers, and think of ways that you can adapt from them and on how you can get ahead of your competitors.

Having a content plan is also helpful for your business blog. Determine five to ten keyword-rich subcategories for your blog, and then list at least five topics for each. Once you’re done, fill in your content and decide how much content you want to generate within a week.

Now that you’re done with research and you have your content-calendar planned, it’s time to get your business blog rolling.

Gearing Up Your Business Blog

Starting a blog is not easy as it seems. Your blog must have a purpose that complements your business goal, regardless whether it’ll be used to generate leads, establish online presence, or develop content for other reason. That’s why your blog needs a core message that will give readers an overview of what they can expect from your blog.

Having a Content Provider

Content writing is the heart of blogging, which means that a blog needs a dedicated content provider. A fresh and valuable content is what will give your readers a reason to ask for more and come back later. Be honest and evaluate whether you can provide ample time to constantly update your blog. Otherwise, you’re doing yourself and your audience a disservice, which can hurt your brand’s online reputation.

Think of Your Audience

Before starting a blog, you should also think of your potential readers. In one way or another, they could also be your ideal client. It’s essential to know who they are, what their needs are, and how you can deliver those needs to them. That way, you can tap into their emotion and encourage them to act depending on your blog’s business goal.

Having a successful business blog definitely requires thorough planning. Once the preparations are done, your business now has a marketing tool that can establish your brand’s online visibility to attract your target market.

View All-time Reports

An “all time” option is now available when a user selects a date range of his or her reports. It shows all earning, impressions and clicks accrued since the first impression. This feature has been previously available, and has been returned by Google in the current AdSense interface.

Quick Links on My Ads Tab

Google has also added quick links to a user’s reports that are found under the My Ads tab. This makes the need to search for an ad unit or channels on a report unnecessary. When viewing ad units, custom channels, or URL channels on My Ads tab, there will be a “View Report” link below a specific line item.

It enables a user to view an item’s performance data for a particular ad unit or channel. As a result, this feature is useful when an account owner is looking for a channel data that is not linked to ad units found on the interface.

Export CSVs Based on Language Preference

Previously, users from other countries were having difficulties to export CSVs to analyze data. That’s because each country has its own way of putting punctuation marks such as period and comma on numbers and figures.

For instance, $1,000.00 in the United States and United Kingdom can be written as $1.000,00 in most European and South American country. In addition, only the $1,000.00 format was available for downloadable reports. This time, users can now export CSVs with figures in relevant format based on their language preference.

The Smart Pricing Survey

Other than the improvement on AdSense’s reporting features, Google also released a research last week, pointing out that smart pricing can increase a publisher’s revenue. As stated on their study:

“Online publisher networks, such as Google AdSense and Yahoo! Publisher Network, enable advertisers to simultaneously contest click auctions for thousands—even millions—of web publisher ad slots, all with a single max CPC bid. Recognizing that different publishers deliver disparate performance for advertisers, some networks feature automated systems to help advertisers bid more efficiently with that single bid—effectively discounting click prices on publishers according to the relative value of clicks on each publisher’s ad slots. Google, for example, applies Smart Pricing (SP) for this purpose to appropriately discount advertiser bids on the Google Display Network.”

Based on the research, a well-executed SP improves advertiser value. However, it is still a debate whether it improves network revenue and average publisher revenue via publisher revenue sharing agreements.

Register an Appropriate Domain

If you’re yet to set up a website for your business, you’ll need to have your own domain name. When choosing a web address, it should be direct and easy to remember. Moreover, it should be the same or closely related to your business’ name. For example, if you have a shoe store named Sole Mate, then buying the domain name www.solemate.com makes perfect sense.

In relation to this, you should also consider misspelled and hyphenated versions of your chosen domain. This would avoid your potential customer to confuse your web address with another URL.

Fix Your Navigation Bar

After having your own domain, you have to make sure that your visitors can easily move around your website. The best thing to do that is by fixing your navigation bar. Use something that is user-friendly and noticeable but not annoying. You can also take advantage of a horizontal navbar since many computers have wider screen.

Establish Your Credibility

A website is not only used for marketing purposes. You can also use it to establish your credibility online. Thus, you can create a profile of your known and respectable clients. Just remember to ask their permission first before listing their name on your website. Furthermore, you can also put your happy customers’ testimonials on your website.

Consider Graphics and Color Scheme

When creating a website for your business, it should have a color scheme that is distinctly yours. However, you have to consider your chosen hues based on your target customers and the emotions that you want your content to convey.

Moreover, good graphics can draw your visitors’ attention although it cannot necessarily help your website’s ranking on search engine result pages. It is advisable that you use them sparingly and only choose the best quality.

Learn Search Engine Optimization

SEO is a great way to make sure that your website can be found on the Internet. It has many facets that you have to learn in order for your content to appear using a relevant keyword. For your business to get the top of the page rank, conduct proper keyword research, learn how to use them, and don’t neglect local SEO.

The success of your business can be attributed to your website’s design. As stated by Rand Fishkin, founder of SEO consulting firm SEOmoz:

“For many businesses, a website is the first way that your clientele will look at you—even if it’s just to find your address and phone number. The quality of your site is often a measure of the quality of your business.”

Introducing Bing’s Social-friendly Search Engine

It should be recalled that Bing announced its new search engine last week. It is said to put the spotlight on social search by off loading the social elements on a new sidebar area. With Microsoft’s new search engine, users will see three columns which feature search elements that can help get things done.

Core Web Results

The foundation of modern search remains to be its core algorithmic relevance. That’s why Bing aims to deliver expected results by the user. Instead of cluttering the search results with social update, they are providing core web results that will help users to focus on important links that they need.

Snapshot

The snapshot feature is found at the center of Bing’s search result page. It brings search-related information like maps, restaurant reservations and reviews. The results will be based on the search engine’s pre-determined intent of users in conducting the search. This will most likely allow users to take immediate action to get things done fast.

Social Sidebar

Since majority of Internet users ask their friends’ opinion when it comes to decision making, Bing decided to bring friends, experts and enthusiasts into someone’s search experience via the social sidebar. Whether they want to purchase an item, go to a popular restaurant or see a nice movie, users can now share, discover and interact with other people like the way they do in real life.

New Bing Search Goes Mobile

Although Bing’s new search interface is only available in the US as of the moment, it also requires that users must have a Facebook and Live account. That way, they can take advantage of what the social-friendly search engine has to offer.

On the other hand, users on the go can access the new search engine using their mobile devices. It was previously reported that Bing has been optimizing the layout and placement of the social results for smaller screen sizes. In addition, they have implemented technologies that can deliver relevant results while protecting their users’ data and privacy.

Whether the new Bing search engine can be helpful for its users remains to be seen. Nevertheless, they were able to bring social search on their interface without cluttering the search results.

Conduct Online Marketing Research

When planning to incorporate online marketing on your business’ promotional stints, it’s best that you know what you’re doing. Leveraging you business on the Internet is not as easy as it seems. It requires you to learn the nook and crannies of online marketing.

Build a Website

Promoting your business online requires that you have a website. This will serve as your home on the World Wide Web where everyone can visit to learn more about your brand. In addition, a website is also the starting point of your online marketing efforts.

Provide Compelling Content

Online marketing means that you should build and establish your brand’s online presence. You can do this if you have compelling content that you can share with your potential market. Moreover, content development is your way of proving to other people that you are credible and you know a lot about your chosen niche.

Learn SEO

Search engine optimization is an important part of online marketing. This helps you generate the traffic and leads that you want. SEO has many facets, each of which can be beneficial for your promotional efforts. If done properly, it can expand your business’ online presence and can increase your revenue.

Use Email Marketing

Email marketing can be old school, but it’s a good tool in keeping and engaging your existing customers. This is a great way to connect with your consumers and keep them aware of what’s happening in your business online and offline. Email marketing basically makes your interaction with your audience as personal as possible, giving them the impression that they matter most to you.

Monetize from Your Online Business

The Internet has provided ways on how you can earn online. There is AdSense, affiliate marketing, or making your website an e-commerce site. However, you cannot achieve that if you don’t know what to do. Until you have the website and proper content to draw your audience, you cannot encourage anyone to take your product or service into consideration.

The key to a successful online marketing strategy is learning. You have to take all of the free and paid lessons that you can get when it comes to promoting your business on the Internet. By learning and applying them to your business, you can surely get favorable results.