Blog - Archives February 2012

A few stories to illustrate the power of blogging

27 February 2012

We all know that blogging to promote your business is a good idea, but you’ve also probably had an experience with putting tons of energy into a blog and then seeing the traffic languishing at 40 visitors a day. This article isn’t about making a success of a blog that exists for its own sake - a monetized entertainment or informational blog that is designed to be its own source of income.

This is about a few examples of how using a blog can save your business, be it web-based or brick-and-mortar.

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How important is online video in relation to web search?

24 February 2012

Video SEO, or video marketing, is quickly becoming an important part of online search marketing that companies will ignore at their peril. As more and more people get access to broadband, watching videos online is becoming more common, and so that provides an ever-growing pool of prospective customers you can’t access by any more direct means than by posting videos.

This isn’t exactly a new thing. People have been using videos to promote their website or brand for a long time, and the format hasn’t exactly changed: give people something useful or entertaining for free, and tell them to come to your site for more. If you want to know how to grow a bonsai tree, there are videos that explain it, with links to a site where you can buy supplies.

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Do you know how people find you online?

22 February 2012

You probably have a Google Analytics account, but if you’re not a search marketing wizard you’ve probably only used it to see at a high level how much traffic you’re getting, and where in general your visitors are coming from. Google Analytics can do much, much more though. While this isn’t intended to be a guide to using advanced features of Analytics, I’m going to show you a few tricks that can really make the info you get out of it work for you.

Knowing where your visitors are coming from, and expanding these channels, can make a huge difference to not only your traffic, but your conversions as well.

To illustrate my points I’ll be using data from one of my own sites, a fledgling retail site in a developing country. The site is spending about $100 a month on Adwords, and has spent a few hundred on sponsored posts and things like that, but has done little off-site SEO due to resource constraints.

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How to make the most from a Facebook fan page

20 February 2012

Everyone knows you’re supposed to have a Facebook page if you’re an online business (or any other kind of business, for that matter). But far too many businesses have a Facebook page with 112 fans and four updates. In order to make the most of a Facebook fan page, you need to understand how they work, and how to use them to interact with your target audience.

Here are a few things to note before we start:

1. Pages don’t behave like they used to. If someone likes your post, that doesn’t mean it will show up in their feed for their friends to see anymore. If 10 people do, though, then it will definitely show up.
2. You can do a lot with pages - they’re almost like little websites. They’re not just a mouthpiece, but an extension of your business’s front desk.
3. Some businesses simply do not need a fan page. I do not want or need to be a fan of my brand of orange juice, or the place that cuts my hair. Just because your business is your whole world, doesn’t mean people want it spamming their Facebook all day.

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Which are the second tier social media networks to look at using for your business

17 February 2012

Everyone knows that to promote an online business you need to make use of social networks like Facebook. But second tier networks, as they are called, can play an important role in marketing to a niche. Unless your website has wide-ranging global appeal across all demographics, you’re going to want to look at more specialized networks to promote your brand and your ideas.

What makes a network “second tier”?

Second-tier can mean a number of things, but generally it means “less popular” than Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn. Even Google+ counts as second tier, as it’s generally more interest-specific. Second tier social media networks are places where you can access an audience that is more specialized, and more interested in what you have to say - if you do it right.

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Are you using Google Places, why you need to!

15 February 2012

Google Places is an innovative new search feature from Google that is specifically designed to help local businesses with a physical presence. If that’s not you, then Google Places won’t really help your online marketing efforts. Google Places is great for people who are trying to market their shop, restaurant, etc., online, and it can dramatically reduce your marketing spend.

 

What is Google Places, in a nutshell?

 

Google Places is simply a location-based tagging system that puts you on Google Maps. You register for it, they send you a code by snail mail, and then you verify that you exist at that address. You can only have one listing per physical address (but multiple places per business if you have more than one branch or location). It helps you only if your business involves getting customers into your store or premises.

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What are lists in Twitter and why are they useful?

13 February 2012

Twitter unveiled its long-awaited lists functionality in 2009, and this has given both private and business users much greater power over how to organise information on the popular microblogging service. As a business owner, you’re probably wondering how you can turn Twitter lists into money. While their application is more useful for personal feed organization, you can use (read: abuse) lists to improve your visibility on Twitter.

What are lists?

Lists, in a nutshell, are “groups” of feeds. You can follow a list without following all of the people on it, which makes it easy to get a snapshot of what people in a certain industry are all talking about at one time without suffering information overload. You can keep your friends and your competitors separate, and it makes it easier to sift out context-specific information. Lists can be formed according to the people you follow, or topics that people are talking about.

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What are eye-tracking studies and how do they help my website?

10 February 2012

Since the earliest days of e-commerce people have been trying to understand how they can optimize websites to take advantage of the way people view information on a page. We already know a lot about how people read a page or an advertisement, so it isn’t that difficult to transfer this knowledge to a web page.

What Are Eye-Tracking Studies?

Eye tracking studies are studies done using a specialized piece of eyewear that records how the eye responds to stimuli, both active and passive. These studies use sensitive cameras and electrodes to see where the eye naturally rests, given various things to look at. Some of the results are quite surprising:

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How do you create an email marketing campaign?

08 February 2012

Email marketing, despite being around since the dawn of the internet, is still a major tool in most e-commerce business’s marketing toolkits. A large list of interested customers, who all came to your website by choice and signed up because they thought you had something good to offer them, can be a fantastic source of continuous and reliable revenue.

Creating an email marketing campaign requires three things: a good offer, good writing, and a good plan to get people clicking. It also obviously requires a large list of people who have signed up to a newsletter. A “campaign” includes all of the emails you will send in a specific order to new customers, or to your existing list. Let’s go through these three things.

You can of course set up your own campaign and do all of the mail merges, etc., yourself, but it’s much easier to use a service like aWeber, which does it all for you for only a few dollars a month.

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A few things to consider when you are starting a Facebook advertising campaign

06 February 2012

Facebook ads are a great way to drive traffic to a page, or even to your website - though the clicks are quite expensive, so you had better be sure your landing page converts well. We’ll assume you’re trying to drive traffic to a Facebook fan page or get people to “like” something or share something on Facebook.

The Difference Between Facebook Ads and Adwords

Facebook ads, while seeming very similar to Google Adwords, are most definitely a different thing all together. For one, they’re much less intelligent, and much less keyword-based. They’re also far more expensive than Google ads if you’re trying to use them in the same way (around $1 a click).

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How to use Wordpress on the go through mobile devices

03 February 2012

I remember, a few years ago, reading a post by a prominent blogger and SEO expert about “mobile blogging”. He had a “blogging box” which allowed him to blog wherever he was (which I thought was a bit stupid and pretentious). It included a digital camera, a laptop with a 3G modem, a notepad and pen, and various other bits and pieces. The whole lot just about fit in a suitcase.

Thankfully, things have moved on a little bit, and we now have WordPress apps for iPhone/iPad and Android. Both apps are now in around version 2.0, and compatible with more or less recent versions of WordPress. That being said, make sure you check which version of WordPress you need to be running in order to access your dashboard via mobile.

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What is the best way to promote your website

01 February 2012

Asking this question is a little like saying “what is the best way to cook food?” The answers are as various as there are types of food. But there are a few simple truths that hold for almost all websites, regardless of niche or product. For the purposes of this article, we’ll stick with websites that are selling a product. Websites that “sell” only information, like blogs, are a slightly different creature - but many of these tactics will work for those as well.

SEO

SEO is the cornerstone of online marketing, and an understanding of it is critical to promoting any website. SEO best practices change over time, and there are no hard and fast rules to how you should approach it. Generally it is made up of two things: article marketing and link building.

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