This is a guest post by Anita Brady.

A meme, according to Merriam Webster Dictionary, is “an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture.” Originally coined by evolutionary biologist and ethologist Richard Dawkins in the 1970s, a meme is something with which just about every member of a culture is familiar.

For example, the simple act of swinging a hammer to drive in a nail would be considered a meme, or the way Bostonians pronounce the word “car.” Even the “quick fix” method of getting your Nintendo cartridge to work by blowing dust out of it was a meme. It’s something that’s passed around and repeated throughout a culture and it doesn’t need the internet to spread, though the web is making memes more and more popular by the millisecond. And what comes to mind when one says “meme” is quickly changing in relation to social media.

Today, when one mentions a meme, they’re usually talking about a mimicked action spreading virally through social media. One of the pioneers of meme fame is the site ICanHasCheezburger, which includes all kinds of memes from comic strips to single images to videos. It received its first real notoriety, however, with the segment LOLCats. Featuring pictures of cats in all sorts of awkward or captured-on-camera positions, each image is framed with a phonetically spelled tag that typically elaborates on what the cat might be thinking in order to generate a laugh. For example, a little white kitten might be poking its head out of a pile of marshmallows and the caption could read “Did u think me was a ‘mallow’?” Or a cat hiding in a suitcase could read “I iz not cat, I iz sweater. Keep packing.”

Regardless of the caption or the picture, the act of taking silly cat photos and tagging them with a funny line quickly caught on and imitations began popping up all over social media.

A more recent example would be the Ridiculously Photogenic Guy. Using the LOLCats model, someone surfing through Flickr spotted a recently uploaded image of a runner in the 2012 Cooper River Bridge Run in Charleston, South Carolina. After copying the photo, they tagged it with a caption calling out how ridiculously handsome he appeared while running. The meme caught on like wildfire and within 11 days of the original image being posted Flickr, Good Morning America had him on as a guest along with the person who posted the original image.

From one in roughly 40,000 runners at a race to national notoriety in less than two weeks is practically mind-blowing. The popularity of memes is obviously a social force to be reckoned with, so how do you harness the meme monster and use it for your own purposes, such as business marketing?

Dissecting the meme

What makes a meme popular? There’s no real way to tell how, when, or why a meme will catch on. Something as silly as sticking a piece of bread on your cat’s head and taking a picture could be picked up by the national media within 24 hours, but images of leaving old tennis shoes in random places might never spread. It’s the will of the mob, the random inclination of a crowd. It also has to do with people of note picking up on the meme and spreading the word through their hundreds of thousands of contacts at once. For example, the bread-on-cats-heads, or “cat breading” pictures mentioned above was picked up by the popular cartoon South Park in a March 2012 episode, and ever since its popularity, has been running wild.

The safe bet, then, is to avoid starting a meme from scratch and jumping on board one of the popular meme veins for your marketing purposes. Don’t let this discourage you, however, from starting your own meme. If you think you have a great idea, run with it! You never know what might catch on.

Making Memes

Though memes seem remarkably simple in concept, you should do your research before making your first meme. You don’t want to make a meme that’s already outdated the second you post it. While LOLCats appears to be timeless, other memes such as doing the Tim Tebow pose, or Tebowing in random locations, is already outdated, and different ways of saying “all your base are belong to us” from the game Zero Wing has been out for years. So how do you know what’s popular and what’s not? Check out the top pages of social media and viral video sites such as eBaumsworld.com, Reddit.com, StumbleUpon.com, LiveLeak.com, 9gag.com, 4chan.org, ICanHasCheezeburger.com, and Facebook.

Marketing with Memes

Now for the fun part, creating a meme that can be used to market your company while still appealing to the masses. It might sound like a difficult task, but the great thing about memes — and internet marketing in general — is that subtlety typically wins the day.

This soft sell approach is even starting to bleed over into standard television advertising. What do Vikings have to do with credit cards? Or rowing guinea pigs have to do with insurance? The key is in getting people to pay attention first, and then adding your company almost as an afterthought at the end. Advertising online takes it even further by just allowing ads to blink across the bottom of a popular video either as pop ups or in the blank area below a letterbox-formatted film.

With this in mind, think of how you can approach advertising your business with memes. For example, if you have a music company, why not have a picture of a cat eating a chicken leg and write “I lovez the drumstikz at Bob’s Audio.” Or if you have a fabric company, why not use a picture of a cat tearing up someone’s knitting with the caption “Knitter, please” and tag the bottom with your company name.

These examples are with the standard LOLcat, but there are so many more alternatives out there. If you know someone who can draw reasonably well (one of the appeals of meme comics is that they are usually very poorly done), have them create a four-panel comic meme for your company. If you have a baking company, maybe you could create a story in which a little girl would give anything in the world for a piece of cake. Or if you have a coffee shop, you could create a panel in which your coffee gives people super powers.

The object is to be as creative as possible and appeal to that 35 and younger crowd that spends the majority of their time online. Post your meme on all of your social media sites, get friends to share it, and let the web do the rest. In the end, you’ll be sure to generate some laughs and hopefully a brand new and growing crowd of customers.

Anita Brady is the President of 123Print.com, where you can make your own business cards and customize other promotional materials. She is an industry veteran who has managed strategic marketing and other efforts for companies small and large.

[ How To Use Memes to Promote Your Business is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

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This is a guest post by Joel Harrison.

The way content is shared today changes online marketing, putting content to the forefront of what users, companies, brands and products are about.

Google+ has just won the People’s Choice award for social media at The Webby Awards presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. This may come as a surprise, since Google+ isn’t as popular as was first expected. It’s trying to reverse that situation though and bind everything together into a huge social network, always faithful to its mission ‘to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’. A day may soon come where there is no getting away from its global presence.

This post will talk about the old model (links), the new model (Authored PageRank), authorship markup, rich snippets and their benefits, a possible Google+ commenting system, vanity URLs, and how Google+ all effects content marketing.

The Old Model

Prior to the latest Google updates, links were closely related to high rankings and more pronounced visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). Every link had the same capacity to influence search results (bad content didn’t matter as much back then) but the black and white hats combined made Google begin picking its cherries more carefully. Trustworthiness became more important than sheer numbers. Links are still important, as of now; they are still here to stay, but according to Tom Anthony of Distilled, “in the last 2 years 15% of the algorithm that was links has been replaced by other signals in relative importance”.

So What Are the New Signals?

Social signals – they don’t operate as links. They contain messages about other pages and websites, and a lot of other valuable information, but don’t really help with links. This is all about to change with the introduction of authorship markup that essentially verifies the author of a link. Since some links are visibly authored links, they may prove to be more trustworthy to users, plus AuthorRank adds more weight to the link according to the author’s online presence. Tom Anthony called this the AuthoredPageRank model (AuthorRank and PageRank combined). What it means for marketers looking to increase click-throughs is that they should be hiring authors with a high rank who post content at pages with a high rank.

How Authorship Markup Works

Who the link is from is more important today than where it is from.

Many of us have heard from doctors, “Don’t read online articles on health, they are just opinions.” Well, all this is about to change with authorship markup that verifies an author as a Google+ user with their Google account linking back to the verified page but also to other profiles, such as LinkedIn where the author’s qualifications can be checked, along with recommendations. Only ‘serious’ organizations (ministries, government bodies, global organizations) had the privilege of claiming absolute trustworthiness and high quality of content before. Now ‘regular’ users have a chance at establishing a more weighty reputation online.

SERP Facelift: Rich Snippets

Rich snippets are playing a huge part in making users decide: to click or not to click? Additional information next to the Google search result gives users a taste of what the page will contain and introduces the author, adding more weight to the link. Take a look at a Google+ profile snippet as it appears in the search results.

You can usually see the author’s name, Google+ profile page URL, number of users in Circles, job position, geographical location, introduction, etc. The profile image will definitely pop too, making authored links stand out from others. Even in Google News, profile-based links appear.

The Benefits of Rich Snippets

Rich snippets are great because they:

1. Draw attention to the relevant result
2. Provide instant information (decisions are made faster now – think 2 seconds vs. 5)
3. Increase CTR (20-30%) and minimize bounces which occurred because users couldn’t find relevant content
4. Increase visibility in SERPs
5. Help break the monotony of search results lines.

Access to information is faster now – you don’t have to click on the link to find out the basics about an author. SEO efforts should aim to provide relevant engaging content within the SERP in this new pattern. Since users know what to expect when they click, they are more likely to stay a while and come back – it can mean that once you gain a user, it may be easier to make them a dedicated follower and possibly even ‘circle’ the author in Google+.

The Future of Rich Snippets

Rich snippets appear not only for authors but also for restaurants, music albums, people, business and organisations, recipes, video, products, and events. How do you know which movie review to read if you don’t want to drown in the bile (and industry jargon) of a professional critic but need something more middle-of-the-road and closer to heart (not 8th-grade level either, thank you)? With the rel=”Publisher” code you will be able to find just what you are looking for without wasting so much time.

The future of rich snippets seems to be bright since they bring so much good already. The most realistic prediction is that they will expand beyond Google and the internet will be restructured as a collaborative effort, with everyone involved changing their techniques to fit the new mould.

Google+ Commenting System

Since Google+ hasn’t been as successful as was initially hoped for, there are rumors that Google is about to introduce its own third-party commenting system, which will link the comment back to the author’s Google+ profile (with the comments probably posted into Google+ the way Facebook does at the moment). Google+ will also introduce vanity URLs soon. As the world’s information is never going to be located on the same website, Google+ is trying to connect it all together instead of trying to “own” it within its own walls.

Google+ Search Results and SEO

Learning to optimize Google+ profiles should be on the agenda of all marketing professionals today because the actual search results are a live stream of Google+ content. Important query terms should appear in the Introduction, Employment, Education, and Place Lived section of the Google+ Profile. Who you have in Circles and whether they match the query is also of great importance. Spammers will be abusing the new scheme, which is easy to over-optimize. Search+ results (Search plus Your World) will also play a vital role, as well as the wide availability of the +1 button. All this should be taken into consideration for successful SEO efforts.

Conclusion

The face of marketing is changing. The person behind the content is becoming more important today. A recent study in the UK has shown that most PRs are working closer with bloggers, and AuthorPageRank is bound to give these former underdogs of the Internet even more weight. The trust and authority that rich snippets create can make the author a new valuable resource. B2B content marketers should take note of that, and authors with high personal ranks who produce high-quality content on highly ranked pages should be hired as company representatives, bloggers or spokespeople.
No doubt these changes will be discussed at local industry events near you, and you should know what is happening to achieve all-round success.

This is a guest post by Joel Harrison, Editor at www.b2bmarketing.net, where like-minded marketers can join together for ideas, tips and best practice information.

[ The New Model: How Google+ “Gets” Content is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

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This is a guest post from Christopher Wallace.

It’s 2 p.m. on a Wednesday and that fully loaded triple-decker sandwich from the nearby deli has you wondering how long you can get away with catching some z’s under your desk, or if that drawing-eyes-on-your-eyelids thing really works.

Whether or not you plowed down a big meal or have the mid-week blues, those last few hours of the work day or week can be some of the most unproductive. So how do you pick yourself up and get back into the swing of things?

The answer is in creating good habits. While taking a swig of an energy drink might help for a few hours, it’s really only a temporary patch. Good habits at business not only help motivate you throughout the day, they start to kick in naturally once you make them a part of your daily routine. And once you have good habits in place, you’ll find that you’re more productive, less tired, and more satisfied with your overall performance.

Take Breaks!

That’s right, one of the best ways to stay on top of your game is to take brief breaks throughout the day. According to a recent study published by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a brief break every 20 minutes or so throughout your work day will help you focus more on the task at hand. And “break” doesn’t necessarily mean go surf the internet. Just switch your focus to a different task for about three to five minutes. The distraction allows your brain to draw itself out of stasis and stimulate itself with a new line of thinking. After your break, delve back into the task at hand and you’ll be surprised by the fresher perspective your line of thought takes.

No other projects to stimulate you? Then don’t take your break by reading something involving, such as an article from the Washington Post. You might become too absorbed and spend much longer than necessary on your break. Instead, pick something light, like browsing through Pintrest or playing an old-fashioned round of Bat the Penguin. Better yet, why not get up and stretch your legs for a couple minutes? Even a brief walk around the office will help stimulate your system and help prevent illnesses such as heart disease. In fact, recent studies show that even a one minute movement break several times a day can be beneficial to your health.

Schedule Your Project Work Times In Advance

While we usually remember to schedule important meetings and deadlines for major projects, we rarely block off time on our calendars to prepare for these tasks. Instead of shoving a few minutes in here and there, look at your calendar in advance and block off times to work on that important presentation or put together that proposal you have due in two weeks. By blocking off the time in advance – and sticking to those times to work on those projects – you know you’ll have time to complete your task and with only a fraction of the stress created by stealing bits of time from other projects and/or waiting until the last minute. You’ll not only feel more productive at the end of the day, you’ll probably feel much better about the end results.

Good Week? Don’t Drop the Ball the Next

After a very productive week, employees are often inclined to “take it easy” the following week. This can happen in just about any profession – from sales to professional services to public works. A super-busy week can take it out of you, but that doesn’t mean the next week has to suffer. Instead of coming in with low expectations, pick something entirely different to focus on and give your brain a break from the chaos of the previous week. A fresh project or a new goal could be the stimulation you need to keep your productivity up and your exhaustion low.

Don’t Be Afraid to Delegate

Good employees and good business owners often feel as though they are the only ones that can complete a project the way it needs to be done. And while that might be true, that doesn’t mean you have to personally handle every last detail. More often than not, you’re working as part of a team – whether it’s a project team or your company as a whole – and teams should always work together. For example, if an upcoming project requires detailed statistics, which, let’s say, you’re good at, but it needs to be presented in an easy-to-understand format, which you’re not, there’s no harm in asking another member of your company who might be savvy at chart graphics to put your numbers into a comprehensible format. And if someone else is really good at creating presentation covers, ask them for help. There’s no point in working alone when you’re a part of a team. In the end, if you’re anxious about the final product, schedule enough time to go over it with a fine-toothed comb before presenting it. But by delegating different jobs, you’ll not only give yourself enough time to finish the project, you’ll probably receive valuable input that you might not have gotten if you hadn’t reached out. Remember, even if you’re a small business owner with only one employee – yourself – there are always people you can reach out to for help. And when they ask you to return the favor, that not only helps to build good business, but good friendships, as well.

Live It, Love It – If You Don’t, Why Are You Here?

Let’s face it – another reason for poor productivity is simply not liking your job. There’s a lot to be said about loving what you do, and even liking what you do is better than hating every second of the day. The Chinese social philosopher Confucius once wrote, “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”

If you feel your passion waning for your profession, find out what you liked about it in the first place. What drew you to your current job? What position were you hoping to attain when you started with the company?

Consider what it is that you truly like about your job and do everything you can to make that your focus. By enjoying what you do, that passion will be passed on through your work and your productivity will only benefit.

There are many other ways in which you can increase your productivity and create better business habits, but these should get you started. Remember, if you schedule your day with enough time to complete your present and future tasks, take breaks, keep your mind fresh and enjoy what you do, you’ll not only be more productive, you’ll be more satisfied with your work week all around.

Christopher Wallace, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Amsterdam Printing, has more than 20 years experience in sales and marketing. At Amsterdam Printing, a leading provider of logo pens and other promotional items such as imprinted apparel and customized calendars, Christopher is focused on providing quality marketing materials to small, mid-size and large businesses. He regularly contributes to Promo & Marketing Wall blog.

[ How to Build Better [Business] Habits is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

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This is a guest post from Craig Robinson.

Getting proper return on investment for Facebook advertising can be tricky. First, you need to create an ad that attracts clicks, which usually is the easy part, and then you need a decent percentage of the people clicking through to be potential customers. The last thing is a bit harder to control but has a huge impact on the end result. When the wrong people click, your conversion goes down and you have to pay Facebook for nothing. There are, however, a few tips you can follow that might increase your performance. If your Facebook-advertising results are around break even, they may very well make your advertising efforts profitable.

Top Five Tips for Improved Ad Conversion

Test your ads for conversion

Usually, when we create Facebook ads, we do a number of versions of them (via A/B testing) and then choose the ones that get the highest click-through rate (and this is possibly why we see so many ads with smiling stock-photo ladies). However, this might not be the most effective ad-creation process. When doing it this way, we take don’t take the conversion into consideration, which essentially decides how much we will earn in the end. In most cases, a lower click trough rate with higher conversion is the best option for an advertiser. It gives value for the money put in.

Next time you do a campaign, also measure the end results and not only the clicks. Although clicks are important, they are just a step in the middle of the process.

Pay for the right people

What you need to pay Facebook to get potential customers to see your ads is not exactly crystal clear. In their guidelines, they more or less say that it’s best to choose the max bid when advertising, which isn’t really a surprise since that makes the Facebook owners even richer. Facebook obviously benefits from providing better ad value to people who pay a lot for clicks, and they want them to keep on bidding high so the competition gets even tougher. To achieve this, many advertisers claim that ads with high bids are shown to people who are on Facebook less often but spend more time on every session. The ads will be visible for a longer period of time and the chance of users clicking through and converting is higher.

Compare this to a user who logs in and out several times per day, possibly a younger person or someone who works in an office and checks his/her wall every day. Chances are, this person doesn’t have any intention of following up on the click.

If your conversion is low, test a campaign where you choose the max bid. It might do wonders to the end result.

Timing is everything

Depending on what product or service you promote, you should consider when you want to advertise. Perhaps your conversion is better in the end of the month, during certain days of the week, or perhaps in the night time.

If you’re a wine merchant, your conversion might be better over the weekends. If you deliver pizza, evenings are probably the best time – possibly towards the end of the week. And if you run a gym, try the period after Christmas. That will most certainly work.

If you want to run ads during certain hours, it’s a bit of a hassle in Facebook’s own interface. You have to go in every day to start and stop your campaign.

However, with a Facebook ad tool with access to Facebook’s API, you can use the scheduling feature to have this done automatically.

Once you know when it’s best to advertise, just choose those days or hours.

Example of a system to keep track of your ads. From here you can start, stop, and pause each ad.

Landing pages matter

You can spend hours and days of tweaking your ads so they get a great amount of clicks but still it doesn’t matter because your landing page doesn’t meet the visitors’ needs.

If a Facebook users lands on your web page and it’s filled with a lot of information and graphic elements, chances are that you’ll lose him right away. He clicked through to (maybe) make a purchase, sign up for something, or whatever your goal is, but forgot about that when he couldn’t find where to do it on your page.

Often the best idea is to create a separate landing page on your website where you present the offer from the ad. Of course there’s room for more information, but everything should revolve around what the visitor came for in the first place.

Choose the right ad type

When we read about Facebook ads and how to optimize their performance, it’s often the traditional external-website ads that are discussed – ads that are linked directly to a web shop or a sign-up form. And even if countless of businesses have seen positive ROI from this type of advertising, you may see better results from testing other advertising options on Facebook.

Studies have shown that if an ad includes social interaction of some kind, they automatically raise the visitors’ purchase intent, which correlates with the conversion and end results.

We must never forget that Facebook is a network where people go to communicate with friends, post funny clips, and see where the next party is held. It’s a social network and if you’re able to incorporate social elements to your ads, they fit what people come to Facebook for.

If you see an ad for a business that three of your friends like, the chance of you clicking through and following the instruction is generally much higher. So if you have the chance to run sponsored stories or page post ads, the results may very well improve.

Also, if your goal is not immediate sales but instead attracting likes and brand recognition, the social type of advertising like sponsored stories are much more effective and generally show higher conversion rates.

…but in the end it’s all about testing and tweaking

I can’t put enough emphasis on this: It’s better to test and tweak your ads an extra time instead of going with a campaign just because it gains profit.  There’s usually something you can improve on and this is best measured looking at the conversion.

You may benefit from running a social type of ad, but you may very well not; you may benefit from running your ads only during the day and not the night, but maybe not; you may raise conversion when putting higher bids, then again you may not.

The best thing with Facebook as an advertising platform is that your results will show you what works and what doesn’t.

Go with what works – but remember to look at the right numbers.

Craig Robinson is a writer, social media fanatic and Facebook advertising specialist at Qwaya.com, a marketing tool connected with Facebook’s API.

[ How to Make Your Facebook Ads Convert is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

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This is a guest post from Brad Shorr. 

A lot of entrepreneurs and midsize firms say they “get a lot of web leads.” However, when asked if they know the source of the leads, they have only a vague idea – and sometimes, no idea at all.

How can you tell where to direct your marketing efforts if you don’t know where your leads are coming from? You can’t.

This post will talk about how to set up lead tracking on your site, take the guesswork out of your marketing, and help you get more, high quality leads.

Phone Conversions

A lot phone inquires are never even identified as web leads! This can lead firms to seriously undervalue their Internet marketing efforts.

There are basically two ways to track phone leads: “simple” and “session.”

Simple Phone Tracking

With this method, a service provider such as Marchex sets up a unique phone number that is tied to a particular lead source. Depending on how broadly or precisely you want to track, a handful or a much larger number of phone numbers can be used.

For example, some firms tie one phone number to all of their Google AdWords ads. Other firms tie a phone number to each keyword within the AdWords campaign. The first way allows you to measure the effectiveness of your PPC program as a whole; the second, more granular approach allows you to evaluate the effectiveness of each keyword phrase you are bidding on.

In the same way, a unique phone number can be tied to Microsoft adCenter ads, an email campaign, a specific email blast, a social media landing page, or even a print ad. The service provider collects the data and supplies analytics.

Beyond providing aggregated referral data, tracking services can supply you with a recording of every phone call.  By listening to the call, a business can identify the source of each individual lead – and evaluate and improve its inbound sales team’s performance.

Session Phone Tracking

Firms that are highly dependent on web leads often want more detailed lead tracking data. Service providers such as Mongoose Metrics are able to assign a unique phone number to each site visitor, which dynamically displays when they enter your site.

Phone numbers stay attached to the visitor for a fixed period of time — say, 12 hours. During that time, the tracking service records all phone leads, along with data from every visitor session, including where visitors came from. Data on referring sites can be as granular as specific keywords from a PPC ad.

These services are expensive, but offer insights that can help refine not only lead generation, but conversion rate optimization (CRO) as well. We normally start recommending this approach when a firm’s media spend exceeds $5000/month.

Insider Phone Tracking Tips

• Always select an 866 number over an 800 number. Since 800 numbers have been around much longer, they tend to be recycled, and as a result, generate more junk calls from people who associate the number with its previous owner(s).
• Be sure to ask your tracking service to turn on phone recording because surprisingly, some don’t record automatically.
• When reviewing recorded calls, accept the fact you will have to listen to misdials, hang-ups, and auto-dialers (phone spammers). These often represent a fair amount of call volume, but need to be sifted through in order to identify and evaluate the true leads.

Form Tracking

Many firms lump all of their form fills into a “web lead” pile that doesn’t tell them anything about where the leads came from. This can be fixed by setting up form tracking, which can be done internally or through a service.

DIY Form Tracking

You or your developer may have the ability to set a cookie that identifies the referring site of every visitor, including the PPC keyword. When a visitor fills out a form, the referring site information is attached to the form. Now you know where your form leads are coming from.

Form Tracking Services

Two problems with DIY tracking: first, some firms don’t have the expertise to set it up; second, even though the referral information is connected, everything else in the conversion process is still manual.

To overcome these problems, services such as Marketo can be hired to basically take over your form management. These platforms not only manage data collection and analytics, they take care of your lead response process – sending acknowledgment emails, offer fulfillment, etc.

As these services offer a high level of automation, they tend to be pricey and make sense for firms with a high volume of leads, or sell high-ticket items, and/or are highly dependent on web leads for their success.

Insider Form Tracking Tips

• Avoid using CAPTCHA on forms. Although it cuts down on spam, it causes conversion rates to plunge.
• CMS platforms may often alternatives to CAPTCHA that have little or no impact on conversion. We use Drupal’s Mollom module, which uses a 50-point inspection to identify spammers, is activated when the user submits the form. If the user is deemed a spammer, Mollum will block it or display CAPTCHA.

Get On Track

As I hope you can see from this post, lead tracking can be fairly easy to set up either internally or with the right partner. One reason businesses fail to do this is a lack of awareness – they just don’t know tracking options exist. A second issue is strategic: businesses don’t always organize a marketing program around their websites, even when their site generates a substantial number of leads. But that’s another post!

Over to You

Are you tracking leads now? What tips do you have for businesses that are ready to start?

Brad Shorr is Director of Content & Social Media for Straight North, a leading Chicago SEO firm. They work with small and midsize firms in a wide array of B2B niches, including truck tracking and machine knitted fingerless gloves.

[ Web Lead Tracking Explained: How to Get High Quality Leads with the Internet is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

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This is a guest post from Neil Davidson.

In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in the amount of video people watch on the Internet. Any forward thinking business will do well to take note and use video to their advantage.

But where do you start? Surely, video marketing must be really expensive, time consuming, and technical? Actually, none of those concerns are necessarily worth the worry. The growth of affordable, digital technology means that anyone can make a video and put it online, instantly widening their audience base beyond anything we could have imagined 10 years ago.

The key is strategy. Even on a limited budget, if you plan well, maximize your resources and invest some creative energy it is possible to build a video marketing campaign that will take your business to the next level.

Here are some tips to get you started.

Have clear goals

There is no use investing the time and money in creating a video marketing strategy if you don’t know what you want at the end of it. Are you trying to build awareness of your brand? Maybe you want visitors to stay on your website for longer and reduce your bounce rate? Or perhaps you just want to turn those page views into sales.

Knowing your goals will help you measure the success of your strategy throughout its development. In the process, you will also become aware of any weaknesses that need attention in future.

Create your video

If you have the skills in your team, you can produce and edit a video yourself. If not, there are video production companies who can do it for you and not necessarily at a killer expense. This can be a really exciting part of the process.

Do your research. Find a handful of production companies and compare their prices, what they are offering, and ultimately, their attitude; you want to work with the team that shows almost as much enthusiasm as you for your project. Be involved in the process and guide it to be sure you are getting what you want.

Your video doesn’t have to look like a Steven Spielberg production. Think about what you want your audience to see and hear about your business and the video solution will quite possibly be under your nose. You may want to shoot your employees in action, your products in action, or a combination of the two. This video by Inspired Bicycles is a great example of using the resources around you to create a video that works for your niche audience.

Market your video

You will have invested a lot in making your video and it is important that you do it justice by investing equally in its marketing and distribution. Your own website is a great starting point for placing your video. But how do customers find your website?

There are more tools than ever at your disposal. An understanding of sharing sites, social networking, and search engines is essential if you want to maximize your presence on the Internet. Covering all bases will make it easier for people to find and engage with your business.

Set up a YouTube Channel

You can store your video’s on your channel and then embed them on your website using the embed codes generated by YouTube when you upload a video. This is not only easy to do, it also has the added bonus of making your video available throughout the Internet – not just your own site. Be sure to set your video as ‘public’ and that the ‘embed function’ is enabled. This means that other people can share your video too.

Below is a YouTube Video about embedding:

Search engines

Do everything you can to get ‘Google juice’. Google juice is another term for PageRank. One way that Google measures the relevance of the content on your site is by looking at the amount of and the quality of the links to your site. The more links to you and the better quality they are (judged by domain relevance and quality), the higher you appear in search results.

With the right titles and tags, you can optimize the exposure of your videos. Google likes video and other media content. When uploading your videos to YouTube, fill in all of the fields and think carefully about your keywords. Imagine what your customers might type in to the search bar when looking for the services you have to offer. This will make your video easier to find. See our recent article on search engine optimization for more information.

Social networking

Social networking is one of the best ways to grow your audience and keep customers engaged with your business. Be creative. You can use social networking to your advantage for next to nothing. Look at how other businesses utilize social networking. It may mean setting up a Facebook page that viewers can ‘like’. You may want to run competitions to engage your audience. Think outside the box.

Evaluate your strategy

How can you measure your success? This is where you come back to where you started and remind yourself what you set out to achieve.

There are ways to gather quantitative data about your videos. YouTube analytics counts the amount of times a video has been watched, how many likes, dislikes, and shares it has had, which is a fantastic way to understand what does and does not work:

Google Analytics is a great way to gather information about how users interact with your site. For example, you can see how long people are staying on your website in comparison to before you had any video content:

Analytics also generates handy graphs so that you can see the number of visitors and any relative increase or decline in the number of page views your site is achieving.

A more reliable way to test the effect of your videos is to use technology such as Google Optimizer to A/B test your page with and without video.

Social networking sites have a range of ways to measure the impact of your presence, whether that be the number of ‘friends’, ‘likes’, ‘followers’ or ‘retweets’ you manage to collect.

Evaluating your strategy is the best way to decide how to move forward. Learn you’re your successes and failures and review your strategy regularly to ensure you stay with the times and don’t waste any time.

What results can I expect to see from video?

This is a tricky answer as it depends on your execution of all of the above. But what we can tell you is that there are incredible results to be had if you take the time and effort to commit to using video well.

Here are just a few specific examples of the improvements that our clients have seen in website performance over the last year using video:

• Virgin Holidays saw a year on year 30% uplift in seat upgrades, which translated to £3 million revenue
• A credit card company got a 10% increase on take up for a corporate card
• National IT Learning Centre doubled their online sales conversions
• A hotel group had a 170% increase in room upgrades

The results are there for the taking but only if you can determine the right strategy to suit your website visitors.

Neil Davidson is the Founder of My Web Presenters, who are a leading Online Video Production specialist. They work with businesses of all sizes to create and market compelling and emotive corporate video that helps them to communicate with their specific audience.

[ How to Create a Video Marketing Strategy for Your Business is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

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This is a guest post from Andrew Knibbe, Marketing Manager at Flippa. Scroll down for a special offer from Flippa!

Patrick Meninga’s post a few weeks back mentioned his experiences in building and ultimately selling his website. Apart from a great how-to on starting up a site, it highlights the growing trend to buying websites rather than starting from scratch.

Why Buy?

Like Patrick, anyone who’s tried starting a site from scratch will know first-hand how much work it can be to attract and retain an audience. It’s typically a relentless slog of design, content generation, social media engagement, backlinking, and analysis – with the overriding risk that it will all amount to naught.

By buying instead, you can get a proven website where you can focus on growing the site rather than getting than initial traction.

A number of SEO pros are also starting to buy websites based on the keywords they rank for, or the Twitter and Facebook accounts that are attached to the sites.

The steps below provide a high-level view of the sorts of things website buyers consider when buying a website.

Where to Buy

There are two main avenues for buying websites: keep an eye on website marketplaces, or approach owners of websites directly.

I work for Flippa, the largest website marketplace around, so I can readily talk to the first option – it blows people’s minds to discover that people are actually buying and selling websites like this. It’s a sign of the times!

Most marketplaces will work to make it as easy as possible to find sites for sale, provide buyers with as much information as possible about the site being sold (revenue, traffic age, backlinks, ranking keywords, verified Google Analytics, Copyscape checks), then facilitate the sale – typically via auction or private sale.

The alternative is to buy directly from the existing website owner. This can be time consuming in that the majority of website owners have no intention of selling – especially if it’s an actively maintained website. The way to address this is to find sites where the owner may have lost interest. One trick is to find sites where the copyright details have not been updated recently. For example, trawling through the results of a search for “Copyright © 2009 pets” can give you sites that rank for “pets” but have potentially not been updated for a while.

Due Diligence – Check the Facts

Once you have located a website for sale, it is incredibly important that you verify an owner’s claims around revenue, traffic, and age, and do some digging to ensure there are no problems waiting behind the scenes that will impact the value of the website.

Most website owners who are looking to sell their site will be open to you verifying their claims. Many website buyers will ask for a screenshare session with the seller to validate their revenue, profit, and traffic records. Sellers may also be open to providing you with third party documentation such as bank statements.

Remember to account for the time the website owner spends on the website. For example, if you’re buying a blog where the current owner is the sole contributor and spending 40 hours a week writing content, then a revenue figure of $1,000 a month may not be especially compelling.

It’s especially important to understand the key drivers of both revenue and traffic. If the site relies heavily on organic search engine traffic, be sure to validate dependencies such as backlink sources to ensure its has long-term viability.

Work out a Valuation

Now that you’ve located a site to buy and have worked out whether it’s worth buying, it’s time to work out what the website is worth. It can be a tricky task.

The general rule of thumb for revenue earning sites tends to be valuations at 12 to 36 months revenue. It is highly variable depending on the niche in which the website is in (e.g. sites about internet marketing usually go for lower multiples than sites about sports) as well as any risk factors identified as part of the due diligence activity.

This becomes more complex for websites where more of the value is in existing traffic rather than existing revenue (a problem I’m sure the guys at Pinterest are totally fine with).  Again, the niche will define the value of the audience here.

Still unsure about a valuation? Try entering some of the website’s metrics into our advanced search page at https://flippa.com/search and you can get an idea of what the market is paying for similar sites. You can include all listings to get a feel to where bidding reached (or didn’t reach) – even for unsold sites.

Going Through with the Transaction

There are a few final items to bear in mind as part of your communication with the seller.

The first of these is drafting a sales agreement. Website marketplaces provide free template sales agreements as part of the service; however, it’s important to understand the terms you are agreeing to.

One particular area of focus should be agreeing on the extent to which the previous website owner will be involved with the website post transaction. Most buyers and sellers agree on some sort of hand-over period for this.

Another item to consider is getting a non-compete agreement in place to ensure the previous owner does not end up becoming one of your competitors.

Finally, for any serious transaction, it’s worth agreeing to use an escrow service such as Escrow.com for payment. This involves the buyer paying the agreed-upon funds to escrow, the seller transferring the website to the new owner, then the buyer releasing the funds once the agreed assets are in their possession. This will give both parties some level of confidence in the transaction being successful.

We’ve covered a great deal here in terms of the process and considerations when buying a website. If you really are interested, I’d suggest you take the time to watch a few live sales happen, so you get a feel for the sorts of valuations in the market. Also, consider the wealth of available resources such as blogs and forums which will be able to give you a deep dive on any of the topics mentioned here.

An exclusive offer for Techipedia readers – we’re giving away $20 in credits for the first 20 readers who redeem them using the credit code techipedia. This is especially valuable for any website owners who are now inspired to sell!

[ How to Buy a Website is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

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This is a guest post by Adam Leiter.

We all know that social media is about more than just putting out messages and shouting with a bullhorn. While the copyright may still legally belong to the business, today it’s the audience that truly owns the brand. Social media gives them the power to take content in new directions, thus causing us to react and respond accordingly. The good news is that, as practitioners, we can guide our clients towards positive experiences by embracing a triple bottom line mentality. This practice allows us to avert the shouting match and instead ensure a true dialogue by starting conversations around our clients, engaging with the right audiences, and enhancing what is being discussed.

Although some communications professionals may think that triple bottom line social means using Facebook, Twitter, AND LinkedIn, we’re going to take a little bit more of a philosophical approach than that. The term triple bottom line (TBL), also known as people, planet, profit, comes from the world of sustainability-focused business. It captures an expanded spectrum of values and criteria for measuring organizational (and societal) success: economic, ecological, and social, and makes a case for companies to account for the full cost and impact of doing business.

People – This refers to the fair and beneficial treatment of employees, as well as the social community in which a corporation conducts business. A TBL company seeks to benefit many constituencies because of interdependency, not exploit them. Fair labor practices, safe work environments, and involvement with community healthcare and education are some examples of this leg of the stool.

Planet – Revolving around sustainable environmental practices, a TBL company works to benefit the environment as much as possible or at the least cause minimal impact. A few basic ways that businesses measure this area are management of energy consumption, waste reduction and sustainability reporting.

Profit – Although this is tied to the internal profit made by a company, in TBL terms, true profit is the economic value created by the organization after deducting the cost of all inputs, including the cost of the capital tied up. It is the real economic impact the organization has on its economic environment.

In the end, by focusing on more than just a single bottom line of revenue, businesses adhering to a TBL model see a return in brand loyalty, employee productivity, energy expenses and hiring attrition expenses.

This mentality can easily be applied to the world of social media – and practically every client you represent (not just eco-friendly ones) – by replacing the three P’s (people, planet, profit), with the more marketing-appropriate, three C’s: client, community, and conversations.

Client – It all begins here with a concept as old as commerce itself: balancing your client’s needs with what the market will bear. Only today, we’re talking about whether a message, rather than a product and a price, will be considered and accepted. And so we ask questions like: What are the goals for my client’s product/brand/etc.? And what level and type of interaction will be deemed a success?

Community – In the court of public opinion, the social audience will decide for themselves what is important and worthwhile. Rather than blindly putting a program out into the social ether, customizing messages for true communities/groups increases your odds of connecting with an audience that will be receptive and potentially act as brand advocates. As we said at the top, today brands are not ultimately owned by corporations, they’re shared experiences for the audience.

Conversations – What is the inherent value of the material/content you are communicating? Of course, it’s still important to craft the primary messages that your brand wants to broadcast, but in the social world, you also need to make sure they are created to be inclusive and engaging,to be interesting enough to start and maintain conversations. And once the message is out there, the audience expects responsiveness as well.

Forget about focusing only on what you want to say. Today you need to consider more than just your client’s outreach/targeting message and create a holistic strategy that considers the audience and the value of their reactive conversations. If you focus on creating good content, it will prosper and spread organically.

Another point where traditional TBL and social media intersect is at the junction of local emphasis. Inherent within the people/planet/profit mantra is an importance placed on supporting local economies and constituents, with broader influence radiating outward regionally and globally. It’s easy to see how involvement at the community level and showing returns back into the local social infrastructure can benefit a business. Likewise, a local, personalized approach through social media can forge a stronger bond with influencers online. The word “local” in the social world can take on many connotations depending on whether you are talking about a business, discussion group, activism page, etc., but the main premise should be that messages and content are specific to the distinct audience they are aimed at.

If you are ready to acknowledge that your customers have a larger role to play in the development of your brand than ever before, you will understand why this style of connected cohesiveness makes sense. Just as traditional TBL measurement takes into account the environment and society, social TBL acknowledges that the online world is essentially an ecosystem in its own right. The best results will benefit all parties, and come from a mix of engaging client content, focused on the right audience conversing in a way in which they feel comfortable.

To summarize: Brands that act with a TBL mentality take into account the full impact of social engagement. In the end, it’s more practical as a long-term strategy for gaining a supportive audience. And all along the way, it lays a solid foundation for true conversations, rather than scattershot shouts.

Adam Leiter is a Vice President of Social Media and Emerging Media with Star Group, and is responsible for the strategic development and implementation of social media relations, as well as guiding the broader public relations team on evolving social media trends.

[ Triple Bottom Line Thinking for Social Media is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

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This is a guest post by Lisa Kalner Williams.

Ever read those articles on how a business has successfully used social media to increase brand awareness and drive sales? A typical story explains the goal of the said campaign, shows screenshots of the tweets and posts used in the campaign, and lists the results of these efforts. The articles either end there or conclude with a self-congratulatory remark by a company rep.

These stories – and the campaigns and companies they showcase – are missing an important element: the human element. These are the people who take the time to read the company’s posts, and in spite of information overload and hyper-extended schedules, respond by clicking, “Liking,” or buying a company product.

When Mariah Carey or Katy Perry win a big award, they are quick to thank their fans. But it’s rare to see such fan love on Facebook and Twitter. Why is that?  Saying thank you is not only a vital “social” action in social media, but it’s also just plain good marketing.

Now, it’s more than just at award time when companies when should express gratitude – although I’ll speak about that later. Businesses should give thanks in nearly all encounters they have with their online fans.

Offer Online Thanks for Offline Events

Does your business regularly attend industry conferences or trade shows? If you use social media prior to an event in the hopes of increasing traffic to your booth, that’s great. But be sure to show gratitude to those who decided to stop by your booth.  Take photos of folks you meet during the show and post them to Facebook – the new timeline now gives you lots of nice real estate for images. Add a personalized caption to acknowledge the conversation you had – like “Thanks to Maria and Tomoko from USC for stopping by on Tuesday. We loved talking to you about our products and that off-campus pizza shop!”

Businesspeople who rely more on in-person events such workshops, book signings, and seminars can easily apply these ideas. Your fans are still carving time to see you and to approach you with a question or a book to sign. Thus, giving due praise is vital.

Continued use of this online-offline connection with fans often results in exponential growth in engagement and loyalty. Another nice perk of being kind!

Give Props for Giving Props

Social media can indeed provide a time- and cost-effective way to conduct market research. Just keep in mind that yes, you’ve put in effort to create your questionnaire. After all, it is your job to do so. On the other hand, fans are under no obligation to take your survey. Even if a prize has enticed fans to take your survey, these individuals still took the time to stop what they were doing, click on your poll, and give you their feedback. So make fans feel like they’ve done you a favor – because they have. Tweet your gratitude and give them a sliver of insight from the survey results. Here’s an example: “Thanks to all those who told us what new social media sites they’re on. Seems like a lot of you are on Pinterest!”

Some businesses work hard to have their fans to get them to win a local newspaper award or an Internet honor like a Shorty Award.  Fans allow your gentle reminders and “Vote For Us!” pleas into their news streams, and some even take the step to go on to an external Website and throw their support behind you. Don’t take your fans’ patience and actions for granted. If you didn’t get top honors, be sure to show gratitude to the winner in addition to the people who put in the time to try to land you in the winner’s seat. If you did win, get your Mariah Carey on and thank those fans who supported your business.

A Must for Milestones

Is having a large social fan base a sign of good business or social savvy? Suffice to say, it certainly doesn’t stack up to a high percentage of fan engagement, new leads, or conversions. But it is a metric that is achieved predominately by the actions of your fans. They are the ones who clicked the “Like” or “Follow” button. So thank them.

Danish footwear company ECCO Shoes recently gave this bilingual, heartfelt thanks to its Facebook fans upon reaching the 50,000 mark.

On Twitter, NBA reporter and blogger Alex Kennedy gave the following hashtag love to his 20,000 followers:

And a milestone doesn’t necessarily have to end in a zero. Consider the spontaneity of celebrating at an  atypical number (1,556, anyone?). If scheduling messages in advance is more your bag, consider giving thanks for a particular time milestone as ECCO hinted at in its thank you post.

To show deep gratitude, shy away from calls of action in your message. As a fan, there’s nothing worse than getting a hug with a prompt kick in the rear saying, “Now get more friends to ‘Like’ us!” or “Make sure you also follow us on Twitter!” Just show thanks and let your fans embrace it.

Cheer For The Holidays

Holidays are a great time to show thanks. You can always show fan appreciation with a discount or a freebie. But words make for a simple gesture of gratitude – that’s what Elsevier’s Mathematics and Statistics Page did as 2011 came to a close:

Valentine’s Day is a natural choice for most businesses to show love to its Facebook fans or Twitter followers.

Industry-specific days of celebration are also great ways to acknowledge your online community. Does caffeine fuel your business or community? Then be sure to give fans love on U.S. National Coffee Day (September 29).

After a while, uttering the two words “Thank You” at every milestone and holiday and after every event and contest will feel unnecessarily robotic. It’s at this point, if not sooner, to get creative to make sure your signs of gratitude are unique and from the virtual heart.

With these tips in mind, how might you plan to show more gratitude to your fans and followers?

Lisa Kalner Williams is the founder of Sierra Tierra Marketing, a social media marketing company that provides social analysis, strategy, and instruction to businesses and non-profit organizations. She provides social media news and tips to her fans on the Sierra Tierra Facebook Page.

[ When to Thank Your Social Media Fans is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

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The following is a guest post from Susan Waldes, Senior SEM Manager at PPC Associates.

So you think your business is ready to get into paid advertising channels? Or are you into them already? In order to make sure you get the most out of every penny, here are the things you should think about (or should have thought about) first.

1. Is your brand and site optimized? Meet Sally. She’s not ready to buy a tablet right now, but she’s been researching tablets because once she gets her year-end bonus, she’s going to buy one. Her boss has been talking about buying a tablet next week. She wants to impress him with her familiarity with tablets, so she tells him, “In my experience, Joe’s hyphen poorly hyphen designed hyphen tablet hyphen shop dot com has all the newest tablets, if you drill into that tiny link at the bottom of the page.” See where I am going here? Sally won’t even bother trying to communicate that garbled mouthful, and she won’t remember it either when her year-end bonus comes.  Make sure you are memorable, easy to talk about, easy to find, and leave a good impression.It’s totally possible to make positive ROI if you are joes-poorly-designed-tablet-shop.com, BUT if you want to squeeze every penny out of the value of your paid advertising, you are going to get more return if you are tablets.com with a lovely, well-designed website all about tablets. There is some teeny-tiny value in every impression that your advertising gets and pretty substantial value in every click, even the non-converting ones. That value only exists if people both remember you and have a positive reaction to what they see.
2. Do you know what defines success? Positive ROI is simple on the surface. If we spent $1 and made $2 in revenue, we’ve achieved positive ROI, right? Wait, our margin is only 30%; we actually lost money on that sale. Hang on, though – our average acquired customer orders from us five times over the lifetime of the relationship. We are profitable after all! Well, actually, that average is totally skewed because users in California order from us 10 times but this order came from Alabama, where customers generally only order once, so we lost money. But…we need to prove we can develop a user base of 10,000 people to get our next round of funding, so every acquired customer is really important right now…To some degree, the conditions listed above are things that you can work out and refine in the progress of optimizing your paid marketing, and I did push that scenario to the point of being ridiculous. However, knowing what success means for your paid advertising efforts is critical to getting the most out of the money you spend, and success can be a very complex issue. Before you start paying for clicks, think it out fully and deeply for your business and make sure you can communicate all the pieces to the people running your advertising campaigns.
3. Do you have multiple ways to engage and reengage your customers? It’s great that your average customer orders five times, but why not shoot for 10? If you are paying for clicks, make sure that you also have a way to maximize the long-term revenue from these users. For many businesses, the long-term value is the tipping point between profitable and non-profitable advertising. How to do that varies by industry, but this probably means you should have a developed email marketing program, an active Facebook page, and a phone number with great customer support people answering it.
4. Have you fully developed your funnel (and everything else)? Your design team finished a great landing page that is going to funnel folks right into leads, so it doesn’t matter that the rest of the site won’t be done until next month, right? Wrong. As much as those of us in the interactive advertising world would love it if every person were predictable and faithfully followed the funnel, the reality is that at least 20% of folks are probably going to break out of the path you have laid out for them. The most common thing to do is click on an ad and come back via a direct visit. If parts of your site are “broken” or do not help people get back into the funnel when they are ready to convert, you are not getting the most out of your ad spend. Make sure your whole internet presence is camera-ready before paying for clicks.
5. Have you implemented all the tracking you need? Paid advertising should drive profit first, but there is a secondary value in the data you are collecting. The data is only as good as what you are capturing, though. Make sure before you launch you have systems in place not only to capture the metrics you want to see now, but the ones you think you may want to see later. Granted, you cannot always predict what those will be. However, it stinks to realize after you’ve spent $100,000 and met your CPA goals for that spend that it really would have been helpful to know that long-term revenue those users produced.
6. Do you have enough cash? Some advertising campaigns are meant to be flighted. However, for your core campaigns, you want to make sure you can keep things rolling to benefit from the data. For some channels, like the Google Display Network with CPA target bidding, you can get increasingly improved performance just by algorithmic accrual of data. For others, like paid search, manual optimizations require the consistent collection of data. If you are constantly turning your ads on and off because you just don’t have sufficient cash flow to support them consistently, you are not getting all the performance that you can. Particularly if your sales cycle is long, making sure you have the cash to support your advertising while you wait for the revenue is imperative to scaling your business in a consistent manner.
7. Can you iterate creative? “Wow! That Facebook ad hit the sweet spot and performed amazingly for three days, but we are seeing some ad fatigue. Can we get some new creative?”
   “Sorry, we’re tied up for the next two months.”
   “Oh.”
   Don’t get to this position. Whether you need to change creative for positive performance or negative performance, being able to quickly iterate when necessary is essential to display and Facebook advertising. Make sure you have the resources to support quick creative turnaround to maximize your success.
8. Do you have a dedicated team member to serve as an industry expert to the marketing team? As a business person, you are probably pulled in a million directions, but when you are paying for visits, ignoring that particular direction is costing you money with each passing moment. You don’t want to finally answer the email a month (and $5,000) later with, “No, actually, our winery doesn’t want to pay for clicks from Utah because laws prohibit shipping wine there.” Whether you have an in-house team or you go with an agency, the people handling your paid advertising have a core competency of paid advertising (hopefully). That means that no matter how knowledgeable they become in your particular industry, they will always be one step behind what you know about your business. Making sure that you or a team member can serve as a constantly available person to answer questions quickly and represent your goals to the paid marketing team is crucial at getting the most out of your money.

You can have the best, most sophisticated SEM techniques and analytics platforms, but failing to answer any of the above questions before launching a full-borne campaign will seriously handicap your chances to get the most out of your efforts. It’ll take coordination across departments, but it’ll be worth it when everyone sees those consistently sparkling graphs in subsequent team meetings.

Susan Waldes is a Senior SEM Manager at PPC Associates, a digital marketing firm with offices in the Bay Area and downtown Chicago. PPC Associates does search, display, social, and mobile advertising for medium to large clients ranging from ecommerce to lead gen to EDU.

[ 8 Questions to Answer Before You Pay to Advertise Your Business is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

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