Once youâ??ve decided what you want from social-media optimization, you can measure the results that youâ??re gaining from your efforts. The most obvious indicator is web-site traffic. If your traffic begins to climb, itâ??s a pretty good bet that your social-media efforts are working.

But if you donâ??t want to rely solely on site traffic as in indication of your success, there are several other elements you can look to in the effort to determine how successful your social-media efforts are.

There are many good web analytics packages that will track what the most popular content on your site is. I think that Google Analytics is one of the best analytics solutions out there, and as its free, its well worth a look at. With this software you can see where your site visitors are coming from and how long theyâ??re spending on your page. This information will help you determine which of your content is most successful and who is sending the most traffic to your blog, so that you can capitalize on that.

Next, you can monitor the number of visitors who are actually interacting with your content by checking your guest book, forums, or comment capabilities. Guest books arenâ??t nearly as popular as they once were, but if youâ??re participating in a social network and you donâ??t have forums or comment capabilities on your blog, youâ??re missing a large part of the value of social media.

Also pay attention to how often youâ??re added to social booking sites. Sites like del.icio.us and StumbledUpon are a couple of the social bookmarking sites that can help boost your site traffic. The easiest way to monitor your site in social bookmarking networks is to create an account with them and then use the account to search for your URLs. In other words, who is actually adding your site/article/blog posts to sites.

Measure how many readers are actually subscribing to your RSS feeds. The number of subscribers you have on your RSS feeds will be a good indicator of how well youâ??re doing in your SMO efforts. The more subscribers you have, the more popular your site is.

Another way to measure your success with social bookmarking is to watch who is linking to you. If you have a good analytics program, it will probably provide you with a report that shows where incoming links originated. If your analytics program doesnâ??t provide this information, you can figure out whoâ??s linking to you using that old standby, a web search. To find out who is linking to your site use the following search string, replacing your website with the actual URL of the pages you want to
track: link:http://www.yourwebsite.com.

One last way to monitor your success in the social-media space is to monitor how many people are connected to you. In MySpace and FaceBook, that might mean how many friends you have. In LinkedIn, it would be how many colleagues you are connected to, and on Digg the measurement youâ??re looking for is the number of times your content is tagged.

All of these are indications that youâ??re being followed by someone. And the more people with whom you can build a relationship, obviously the better your success will be. And thatâ??s probably the most important rule of all to remember about social-media networking and social-media optimization: build the relationship first and the rest falls into place.

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Thought leadership was found to be an important goal by many bloggers in the Backbone Media Corporate Blogging Survey 2005. Respondents to the survey stated that the top three priorities for bloggers starting a blog were 4 â??another way to publish content and ideas,â?? â??thought leadership,â?? and â??build a community.â?? The same respondents were asked what issues continued to be important in their current blogging strategy. Thought leadership and idea sharing were the most important factors. When asked about the impact of their blog on their company, the following factors were identified as bearing the most impact from their blog: â??another way to publish content and ideas,â?? â??thought leadership,â?? and â??RSS syndication.â??

There are reputation benefits from establishing yourself as a leader in your community, but there are also some practical benefits for search engine rankings. If a blogger establishes himself or herself as a leader in the blogging community with a good following of readers, there is a good chance other bloggers will cite and link to the bloggerâ??s posts and comment on those posts. Those links may help with boosting the ranking of a blog in a search engine for any keywords listed on the blog post. Those higher rankings may translate into more traffic to the blog. A blogger, and by implication, the company that employs him or her, will gain credibility and influence in their community by writing blog posts that establish the blogger as a leader in ideas in their blogging community.

What do you think is important for establishing credibility as a blogger? How did you gain your credibility and what tips would you give for budding bloggers to replicate your success?

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So, what is ‘organic keywords’? Organic keywords are those that appear naturally on your web site and contribute to the search engine ranking of the page. By taking advantage of those keywords, you can improve your site rankings without putting out additional budget dollars. The problem, however, is that gaining organic ranking alone can take four to six months or longer. To help speed the time it takes to achieve good rankings, many organizations (or individuals) will use organic keywords in addition to some type of PPC  or pay for inclusion service.

To take advantage of organic keywords, you first need to know what those keywords are. One way to find out is to us a web-site metric application, like the one that Google provides. Some of these services track the keywords that push users to your site. When viewing the reports associated with keywords, you can quickly see how your PPC keywords draw traffic, and also what keywords in which youâ??re not investing still draw traffic.

Another way to discover what could possibly be organic keywords is to consider the words that would be associated with your web site, product, or business name. For example, a writer might include various keywords about the area in which she specializes, but one keyword she wonâ??t necessarily want to purchase is the word â??writer,â?? which should be naturally occurring on the site.

The word wonâ??t necessarily garner high traffic for you, but when that word is combined with more specific keywords, perhaps keywords that you acquire through a PPC service, the organic words can help to push traffic to your site. Going back to our writer example, if the writer specializes in writing about AJAX, the word writer might be an organic keyword, and AJAX might be a keyword that the writer bids for in a PPC service.

Now, when potential visitors use a search engine to search for AJAX writer, the writerâ??s site has a better chance of being listed higher in the results rankings. Of course, by using more specific terms related to AJAX in addition to â??writer,â?? the chance is pretty good that the organic keyword combined with the PPC keywords will improve search rankings.

So when you come to consider organic keywords, think of words that you might not be willing to spend your budget on, but which could help improve your search rankings, either alone or when combined with keywords that you are willing to invest in.

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Envelope size

The standard business envelope is 9 x 4 Inches. It’s called a #10 envelope. The European size is 110mm x 220mm, and it’s called a C4 envelope. Whilst, however these are the standard sizes, nothing is stopping you from using a different size envelope which more suits the type of mail your company often needs to send. As long as your envelopes are designed with the same brand as the rest of your stationary, size doesnt really make any difference.

Create a focal point

One element should be dominant, and it should be dominant in the same way on both the letterhead and the envelope (and the business card). On most corporate identity materials, the logo if often the focal point, but if you have any other brand related element which suits more as a focal point, be sure to use that.

Just as an example, take a look at the stationary for one of my businesses, DigitalTRAX. Whilst the logo is one of the main elements on all stationary, you will notice that the real focal point is the blue tint, and is consistent across all of the business branding materials, including adverts, stationary, cars, and even clothing.

Alignment

Choose one alignment for your stationery! Don’t center something across the top and then put the rest of the text flush left. Be brave-try flush right down the side with lots of line spacing. Try setting your company name in huge letters across the top. Try placing your logo (or a piece of it) huge and light, maybe as a shadow beneath the area where you will type (as Ive done with my stationary for DigitalTrax above). On the letterhead, make sure to arrange the elements so when you type the actual letter, the text fits neatly into the design of the stationery.

Second page

If you can afford to make a second page to your stationary, take a small element that appears on your first page and use it all by itself on a second page. If you are planning to print, let’s say, 1,000 letterheads, you can usually ask the printer to print something like 800 of the first page and 200 of the second page. Even if you don’t plan to print a second page, ask the printer  for several hundred blank sheets of the same paper so you have something to write longer letters on.

Faxing and copying

If you ever plan to send your letterhead through fax or copy machines, don’t choose a dark paper or one that has lots of speckles in it. Also avoid large areas of dark ink, reverse type, or tiny type that will get lost in the process. If you do a lot of faxing, you might want to create two versions of your letterhead-one for print and one for fax.

So as you can see, with a little thought and careful consideration in planning, creating corporate identity you can be proud of isnt that difficult. For more information on designing with your companies brand in mind checkout Tips For Effective Business Card Design, and Create Consistent Branding.

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A web page without links is like a desert island. Itâ??s sitting there, right in the middle of the ocean, but no one really knows itâ??s there. The island could be littered with diamonds. The plants that grow on the island might heal every disease known to man. But if man doesnâ??t know the island is there, none of that matters.

Itâ??s the same with your web site. It doesnâ??t matter how great the information or the products on the site might be. If people canâ??t find it, itâ??s as good as a desert island.

The purpose of links, then, is to first link your web site to others that are relevant to the information included on your site. In addition, links provide a method by which traffic to your site is increased. And isnâ??t that the reason youâ??re playing the SEO game? Your desire is to increase the traffic to your site, which in turn increases the number of products that you sell, the number of sales leads you collect, or the number of appointments that you set with highly qualified clients. In short, links lead to increased profit and growth. So of course youâ??d want to use them on your site.

Another reason links are so important is that links into your site from other web sites serve as â??votesâ?? for the value of your site. The more links that lead to your site, the more weight a search engine crawler will give the site, which in turn equates to a better search engine ranking, especially for search engines like Google that use a quality ranking factor, like PageRank.

To say that links are an important part of SEO for your web site is probably an understatement. If you want your site to be found, you must have links in from other sites. Without those links, you may as well be an island sitting in the middle of an ocean full of other web sites.

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In addition to the standard address and phone number, now you probably need  to include information such as your mobile number, fax number, email address, and if you have a web site (which you should), your web address.

Format

Your first choice is whether to work with a horizontal format or a vertical one. Just because most cards are horizontal doesn’t mean they have to be. Very often the information fits better in a vertical layout, especially when we have so many pieces of information to include on such a little card. Experiment with both vertical and horizontal layouts, and choose the one that works best for the information you have on your card.

Type size

One of the biggest problems with business cards designed by new designers is the type size. It’s usually too big. Even the  10-or-11-point type we read in books looks horsey on a small card And 12-point type looks downright dorky. I know it’s difficult at first to use 9 or even 8 or 7-point type, but look at the business cards you’ve collected. Pick out three that look the most professional and sophisticated. They don’t use 12-point type. Keep in mind that a business card is not a book, a brochure, or even an ad - a business card contains information that a client only needs to look at for a couple of seconds. Sometimes the overall, sophisticated effect of the card’s design is actually more important than making the type big enough for your great-grandmother to read easily.

Be Consistent with Brand Materials

If you plan to create a letterhead and matching envelopes, you really need to design all three pieces at once. The entire package of business cards, letterhead, and envelopes should present a consistent brand Image to clients and customers.

There really are some amazing business card designs out there today, and with so many businesses vying for your customers attention, you really need to find a way to stand out from the crowd. Take a look at a few ways these businesses have done just that in Ivan’s post over at CreativeBits.Org - Best Ever Business Card Designs.

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The Hollywood Pitch

Itâ??s important to have a clear idea of what your business does and what it offers to its customersâ??both for your own thinking but also because friends, family, customers, and even potential investors are all going to ask you, â??So what does your business do?â??

The best way I have found to encapsulate your new business concept is to use what I call the â??Hollywood pitch technique.â?? You identify the basic elements of your business and compare them to familiar, existing concepts or previous successes in a pseudo-mathematical equation.

In Hollywood, new movie and TV program ideas are often pitched this way because it uses already existing success stories to give listeners a quick, positive impression of what you are proposing. Boiling down your business idea to this quick summary will also help you focus on what is important and unique about your business.

For example, the hit TV show American Idol might have originally been pitched in Hollywood as â??an updated Star Search with Hollywood Squares-style celebrity judges and cell phone voting.â?? Similarly, the Austin Powers movies might have been pitched as â??1970s James Bond meets Inspector Clouseau to save the world!â??

Figuring out the key concepts and buzzwords for your e-business will also help you write effective copy for your website and construct effective â??meta tagsâ?? to help your search engine rankings.

Now, ask yourself: How can you summarize your new business using this Hollywood pitch approach?

Copywriting for Your E-Business

Even if youâ??re selling commodity products like batteries or socks, youâ??ll need accurate and persuasive product descriptions to convince your audience to purchase from you.

If you are offering more unique items or services, your website needs to communicate the value of your goods in a concise and compelling manner.

If youâ??re embarking on a more information-intensive or publishing related venture, your copy will essentially be your product, so it is even more critical to your success.

In all cases, the Internet can once again help you deliver compelling written materials cost-effectively, even if you are not a good writer (or speller) yourself. Donâ??t underestimate the importance of well-written copy because it is more important than you may think. Youâ??ll need good and regularly updated copy for:

• Website pages
• Product descriptions
• E-mail newsletters
• Customer service documentation
• Advertisements
• Business correspondence

If you are a good writer, you can probably fulfill your e-businessâ??s content creation needs yourself. There are two basic situations, however, that may warrant your getting some writing help:

• You are not a particularly good or fast writer (or at least you donâ??t enjoy it).
• You are too busy to do a good job at writing the copy your business needs.

As usual, the Internet can help you solve your problem. (By now you knew I was going to say that, didnâ??t you?) There are thousands of experienced writers available who would be happy to contribute to your siteâ??s content needs on a project basis. You can find good writers looking for work by going online and posting a small ad (usually for free) to ask for help with your specific writing needs. Good places to start would be ELance & Craigslist.

Regardless of how you recruit your part-timers, ensure you are specific in your ads about the length of the written pieces you need and the style (e.g., product descriptions, advertisements, informational articles, website promotional copy, etc.), as well as your deadlines and offered compensation.

Youâ??ll soon find that finding and hiring freelancers is a great, cost effective way to increase your productivity. This strategy also will work well for graphic artists, Web designers, photographers, customer service staff, and even salespeople.

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If you have a site designed mainly for market awareness, you might emphasize contests, quizzes, games, or other ways of generating interaction with your visitors. But some market awareness sites are changing in subtle ways. Movie sites, for example, frequently do some Web sales (for the soundtrack, for instance) or they link to organizations whom are selling tickets for your film at the cinema near you. Cereal sites are starting to sell DVDs, action figures, and other toys on top of the free interactive games.

If your site exists mainly for awareness, do not overlook opportunities for Web sales of other products, but make sure that your site fulfills the awareness needs first. Cereal sites that spend too much time amusing children with games might upset a mom who wants to learn more about the cereal’s nutritional content.

Regardless of what your awareness site is trying to do, your search strategy focuses mostly on navigational searches. Cap’n Crunch cereal mostly gets searches (from kids or moms) for “capncrunch” or even “captain crunch,” but not for the specific games or action figures on the site (unless they have an ad campaign for them). Searchers will be typing in the name of the cereal, the name of the movie, or other brand names.

Market awareness sites are also more likely to be “trendy” than sites with other purposes, because they are great places to generate buzz about a product (movies are again a good example).

If you have a brand awareness site that you want to promote for your company, i wouldn’t rely on organic search engine rankings just yet. Organic SEO can take a while to get moving (you must design and optimize your pages and wait for search spiders to find them), therefore whilst your site matures and is waiting to get indexed by the search engines, id recommend paid placement techniques to start the marketing ball rolling.

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Anytime youâ??re being voted for, you want to have as many votes as possible. however you want to be using tactics which are going to pay dividends in your linking strategy, not do more harm then good. Below i list some of the best and safest methods around for generating inbound links for your website. Some can be more effective than others:

• Requesting Links: The oldest method of gaining inbound links is to request them. This requires that you study your market to find out who the players involved in the market are. Then, you contact each one of the sites and ask them to link to your site. In most cases, the person you contact receives your request, but providing links to other sites is the least of their worries, so you may never hear from them. If you do, it can sometimes be months later. So, you put a lot of time into requesting links from other sites for a relatively small return on your efforts. For more on requesting links, i recommend you checkout The Do’s & Dont’s of Requesting Links.

• Writing Articles: One of the most effective methods of gaining inbound links is to offer an article for other companies to use as long as they include a paragraph at the bottom that includes credits for you as well as a link back to your site. This method of gaining inbound links works well, because web sites are always looking for good content to include on their pages. The catch here is that the article you write should be well written, accurate, and useful to other sites in your industry. Once youâ??ve produced an article that meets these requirements, you can begin to let others know you have content available for them to use for free; you can do this by having a ‘free articles’ page on your site or submit the content to article directories. For more on article marketing, view Bill Platt’s in-depth article, Article Marketing for Links.

• Blogs: Another way to get links back to your site is from bloggers. What started as a strange phenomenon that was mostly personal has now become a powerful business tool; many businesses rely on links back to their sites from the various industry bloggers out there. In most cases, though, bloggers arenâ??t just going to stumble onto your web site. Itâ??s far better for you to contact the blogger with information about your organization, some product that you offer, or with news that would interest them. This information then gives the blogger something to use in his or her regular posts. Keep in mind, however, that you canâ??t control what a blogger might say, so itâ??s possible that the review you get wonâ??t be favorable. Its possible to get reviews from small to mid-sized blogs without too much of a problem, but when it comes to getting reviews from the most popular blogger in your niche, it may cost you a few hundred $$$. For example, John Chow charges a whopping $500 for a review, which he doesn’t even write himself.

• Press Releases: Press releases are one of the mainstays of any marketing program. It can be so effective that many organizations hire companies to do nothing but distribute their press releases. Whatâ??s so powerful about a press release? Itâ??s just the facts, including benefits, sent out to publications and organizations that might publish all or part of the press release. Use press release marketing to send out new items of all types, and send them as widely as you can. New organizations, publications, newsletters, even some forums will post press releases. When you write it, make sure a link back to your site is included.

• Affiliate Programs: Affiliate programs are a type of paid advertising. You provide a link to people who want to link back to your web site. They place the link on their site and when someone clicks through that link and makes a purchase (or converts any other goal you have arranged), the affiliate â?? the person who placed your link on their site â?? gets paid a small percentage. Usually the payment for affiliate programs is very low ($.01 to $.05 per click or a small percentage of the sale). But some people make a good living being affiliates, and many organizations receive additional traffic because of their affiliate programs. The trick with affiliate programs is to not allow them to be your sole source of incoming links.

• PPC and Paid Links: Pay-per-click advertisements are an acceptable business practice. There is no problem with using PPC advertisements to achieve inbound links to your site. Remember that, like affiliate links, PPC links are not direct links to your site. Paid links, on the other hand, are different from affiliate links â?? you pay to have a direct, or flat link, placed on a page. Some search engines frown on the practice of using these types of links. Using paid links (especially those that land on link farms) is a practice that carries some business risk.

• Link to Yourself: Linking to yourself is a technique that sits right on the line between ethical and unethical. Linking to yourself from other sites that you might own is an acceptable practice. But if you set up other sites simply to be able to link back to your own site and create the illusion of popularity, youâ??re going to do more damage than itâ??s probably worth to you. If you are linking to yourself and you suspect that you might be doing something that would adversely affect your search engine ranking, then you shouldnâ??t do it. There are plenty of links to be had without linking back to your own web sites; you just have to work a little harder for the higher quality links.

Inbound links are such an important part of any online marketing strategies that some organizations find themselves caught up in the process of learning who is linking back to them. Itâ??s not a bad thing to want to know where your links are coming from. And one of the places you can gather that information is from your web-analytics application. A great and free analytics program available is Google Analytics. Check it out.

So there are my top link snagging tips which i actively employ for most of my online businesses. Which tactics do you use for your website, and have i missed out any good link-snagging techniques? Have your say by leaving me a comment.

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Depending upon the way your siteâ??or the site youâ??re working on for someone else is set up in terms of trademark and other legal aspects, it may fall to you to ensure that the sites designer implements and makes sure the companyâ??s brand is well-defined and maintained throughout the site. Being consistent with branding is key in defining and maintaining a brand identity.

For trademarked names, logos, and slogans, in the United States, it is up to the holder of the mark to ensure its strength and safety. This is one reason some companies, such as Disney, are notoriously litigious when it comes to anyone trying to mess with their brand materials.

If itâ??s up to you to help the client define the brand for his or her Web site, here are some time-honored tips to help:

• Consider a brand name that has existing and related meaning to your goods or services. A well-known example of this is Nike, a brand known worldwide. Nike is the Greek Goddess of Victory, a perfect choice for athletic goods.

• Build your visuals based on the symbology of your brand. Images should reinforce the message behind the brand, not dilute it in any way.

• Write slogans that are catchy and relevant.

• Integrate your strategies into the long-term Web site plan.

• Test early. If the brand name, images, or slogans do not test well early in the design process, it may be time to go back to the drawing board and gain more insight as to why.

• Be sure to place your branding consistently throughout your site. The company logo should appear on every page, as should any slogans. Imagery related to the brand should be used consistently, too.

One last tip. Many designers create a larger logo for the home page, and use a smaller logo on subsequent pages. Linking logos on subsequent pages to the home pages is also very common; many people expect the websites logo to link back to the home page, so its pretty much a recommended practice.

Do you have any tips or experiences when it comes to ensuring a brand is used consistently and ensuring a brand is implemented effectively onto the web?  Tell us your views by leaving a comment below.

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