Last year’s weak holiday results provide e-tailers with a relatively low hurdle to meet, or exceed, past performance. Doing more than just beating last year’ s performance will be hard, especially in a year of restrained shopping, when consumers are looking franticly for “free shipping and handling” offers, sales, and coupons to keep their holiday spending costs down. One strategy marketers are using to support their merchandising efforts is social shopping, because it can have a powerful impact for a relatively low cost. It should be noted that social networks influenced 37 percent of shoppers in 2009, up from 24 percent in 2008, according to e-tailing group research.
As a form of marketing interaction, social shopping continues to evolve. Social shopping has expanded from dedicated social shopping sites like Kaboodle, StyleHive, and ThisNext (where less than 10 percent of U.S. online retailers have a presence) to broader social media sites, like Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, and Twitter (where consumers’ various networks connect). Savvy marketers are just following their prospects and customers based on eMarketer’s April 2009 assessment of the social networking sites used by U.S. online retailers; roughly three in five U.S. online retailers have a presence on Facebook.
Seven Ways to Exploit Social Shopping
Marketers must understand that customers use social media sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter to communicate with and gather information from their friends and colleagues. As a result, your presence on these sites must be integrated into the multi-directional communication when consumers want to interact with your firm. Here are seven ways to maximize social shopping results:
Build relationships with prospects and customers. Enable consumers to reconnect with you later in the purchase process by providing a variety of options including Facebook, Twitter, RSS feeds, social bookmarking, e-mail, and chat.
Add social tools that encourage your content to travel, so as to cost effectively extend relationships and attract new prospects. Provide consumers with tools such as social booking for the major sites your target audience uses, as well as e-mail and IM where appropriate.
Make your message consistent across platforms. This is particularly important for building your brand. In the process, ensure that it’s integrated with the rest of your marketing, both online and off, at every touch point.
Listen to and participate in the conversation. Unlike other media environments, you can’t deliver your message on your timing. While marketers worry about negative feedback, negative comments occur roughly half as often as positive ones, according to Anderson Analytics’ “Social Network Service A&U Profiler” research. Respond to negative comments to show that you’re listening to and care about your customers.
Ensure your Web site efficiently closes sales. Regardless of how well-received your offering is on social networks, your Web site must be able to process the sale quickly. While this sounds obvious, last year, a surprising percentage of sales were lost due to e-tailer inefficiencies. Also, consider allowing sales to be closed offline via phone or retail.
Maintain your competitive positioning. It’s critical to be present in media environments where your direct and indirect competitors are, to ensure that you’re part of the purchase discussion and decision.
Make attractive offers to social shoppers. Since social shopping often translates to efficient transmission of buying information for customers, offer these prospects attractive promotions where you can leverage the strength of your customers’ networks to cost-efficiently distribute them.
Measuring Social Shopping’s Impact
The inability to effectively measure the impact of social media on branding and sales can hinder its use as a marketing strategy in some organizations. Some online retailers find it difficult to move beyond the direct response mentality of tracking advertising effectiveness only through improved response and sales. Still, it’s important not to wait to implement a social shopping strategy because you don’t have the appropriate metrics. Here are some metrics to monitor to help assess the effectiveness of your social shopping tactics.
Track your traffic — particularly your upstream traffic — from the sites that visitors use before coming to your Web site. Are social media sites accounting for more of this traffic than they have in prior periods? Does the traffic from social media sites have any special characteristics that set it apart and can play a role in your marketing? Is this traffic directly translating into sales? Also, monitor your downstream traffic that shows where visitors go after they leave your Web site. Do many of them visit social media sites? If so, which sites? Are there any special trends?
Monitor the conversation to assess brand mentions. Analyze whether the mentions are positive or negative. Are these comments building a positive image of your firm? Make sure that someone is present on each of the major social media sites to respond to direct queries and negative comments.
Assess your competition to determine how they’re using social shopping and the size of their presence on major social media sites. Where possible, estimate the size and impact of their efforts. Consider how their brand is being perceived versus yours, and why.
Given the recent growth of social media sites, marketers must engage with prospects and customers in the place where they’re spending their time, if they want to become part of the purchase decision process. As social media sites evolve, more tools will be developed to facilitate sales, and along with them, better tools to more directly track those sales.
Meet Heidi at Search Engine Strategies, Chicago, Dec. 7-9, 2009. She’s participating on the panel, “Social Media Marketing Checklist.”
How does real time web benefit your small business? As most know about bulbwired.com, we are committed to helping small business and we do that mostly through Social Media Integration. Bing is MSN’s search and decide engine and in in experiment with Twitter to bring value to real time search. And of course you didn’t think Google was going to miss the party did you.
Where we see it benefiting you business is; if your name/brand is in a conversation of Twitter, Facebook and/or all of the other Social Media outlets that are all tied together, you can then me search-able. All this creates “link juice” better known as back-links. If you don’t know what all this means trust that we do and can bring it all together for your business.
The following 2 excepts are posts on the issue, reported from the Bing blog and Goggle blog; enjoy and ask questions.
One of the most interesting things going on today on the Internet is the notion of the real time web. The idea of accessing data in real time has been an elusive goal in the world of search. Web indexes in search engines update at pretty amazing rates, given what it takes to crawl the entire web and index it for searching, but getting that to “real time” has been challenging.
The explosive popularity of Twitter is the best example of this opportunity. Twitter is producing millions of tweets every minute on every subject you can imagine. The power of those tweets as a form of data that can be surfaced in search is enormous. Innovative services like Twitter give us access to public opinion and thoughts in a way that has not before been possible. From important social and political issues to keeping friends up to date on the minute-by-minute of our daily lives, the web is getting more and more real time.
“We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort; you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.”
Google isnt the only search engine to get its hands on this valuable data, Bing was also included in the agreement and have been quick to act with Bing Twitter Search already available for US searchers. So if you’re based in the US, feel free to take Bing Twitter Search for a test drive here.
If all this is a blur and you are trying to figure out what it all means to my Small Business and you find yourself asking “Can this type of media marketing bring me an ROI? Consider 2 things;
1) To begin with, simply being on the net is not enough, you need to drive traffic to your
Marketing & Social Networks Webinar (What You Need to Know)
What social media networks can do for your business
How social networks benefit your web presence.
Why blogging and micro blogging is important.
Learn how Bulbwired can help grow your business using social media networks
Register for our weekly Webinar and learn more about this new area of marketing.
test
information, But more importantly, that type of exposure seldom offers you the credibility, validation or build brand trust as being featured as a top level search result will. The most effective approach is a strategic online marketing mix. You can reach your target market and gain validation and credibility through effective online PR, and then utilize the this to leverage your message. That is the marketing strategy that you now need in order to build your business, land more customers and make more money.
2) Come and see our weekly webinar and we’ll lay it all out for you in layman’s terms and show you our commitment to helping drive more business to you!
Marketing & Social Networks Webinar (What You Need to Know)
What social media networks can do for your business
How social networks benefit your web presence.
Why blogging and micro blogging is important.
Learn how Bulbwired can help grow your business using social media networks
Register for our weekly Webinar and learn more about this new area of marketing.
How to Add Social Media to Your Press Release Strategy
Before the web came along, small businesses often had very little control over the publicity they could generate in the press, even when sending out press releases. They had to submit their news to a traditional press distribution or media wire service, which was often expensive and provided no guarantee that their news would ever be mentioned anywhere in a newspaper, magazine, or other publication. Reporters and editors were completely in charge of which press releases were deemed newsworthy enough to be published, and the rest were basically ignored.
Things improved greatly for small businesses with the development of online press outlets that allowed submissions from all types of companies, large and small. One main benefit of these sites was that even if your news wasn’t “picked up” by a major news outlet or site, at least it generated some new, high-quality inbound links back to your business web site, providing you with some additional exposure online and helping improve your search engine rankings.
Now with the explosive growth of social networking sites, small businesses have another great opportunity to gain extra publicity and online exposure by incorporating social media into their corporate press release strategy.
When thinking about a press release strategy for your small business, consider creating a comprehensive plan that includes your web site, online media outlets, and social media sites. For example:
Web Site:
* Be sure to have a “Press Room” or “In the News” section on your business web site. Include the latest press releases for your company, and also provide a link to a press release archive for older news releases.
* If you are a Chamber member, always submit your release to your local Chamber of Commerce. These organizations love to promote news from their members, and Chamber publications are typically well-read by the membership and others in the community.
* Submit your press releases to any other organizations or professional groups to which you belong, or to other sites in your industry that accept news releases about your type of business.
Online Media Outlets:
* There are hundreds (or probably thousands) of web sites that are news-related or niche sites that publish news from press releases submitted to them. Many are free or very low cost, and will accept press releases from all types of businesses. Just do a Google search to find the online press release sites that fit your budget and your industry.
* Optimize your press release for the keywords that you also target on your web site. Use keywords in the title and subtitles of your release, as well as through out the body of the press release.
* Always provide links from your press release back to your web site. Better yet, provide links to specifically optimized landing pages that target the keywords or the subject of your press release (e.g., a new product announcement).
Social Media Sites:
* Include links from your press release to your social media accounts such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. This helps drive traffic to your social media sites, and may provide the spark needed for your release to go “viral”.
* Use Twitter to announce your press release, and link back to your web site’s Press Room or the landing page for the release.
* Put your optimized press release on your Facebook page, preferably in a custom tab where your optimized release can help boost your site in the search engine rankings (regular “wall” posts don’t help your rankings)
* If your social marketing profiles have been set up correctly, the press release can be published automatically to all your social media and bookmarking sites with one single action on your part (such as a blog post).
Press releases are an excellent way to publicize your company, build inbound links to your web site, improve search engine rankings, and promote news or events going on in your company. Because of the web, small businesses now have more access than ever before to get their news (and links) in front a huge audience without the approval of traditional news reporters and editors.
By adding social media to your press release strategy, you can create a comprehensive plan that not only takes advantage of your web site and online media outlets, but also uses social media sites to distribute your news further on the web, help keep it visible longer, and ultimately extend the reach and effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
Link Popularity is one of key area to increase your site page ranking and search ranking. Incoming links are just like votes in election for your website however there is point as we have to emphases on quality links rather quantity. Valuable links are like 100 of poor links equals to 1 quality link. In this article, I would like to explain how differentiate quality links and how to get them which will effect and improve and strengthen your website ranking.
Mistakes in Link Building
It is never too late to focus on the right direction to get qualified incoming links. Here is few mistakes those may follow by SEOs, Link Builder or website owner and webmasters.
1- Focus on Quantity than Quality: It is the quality of incoming links that will bring your website at 1st page so always you should look for qualified incoming links rather quantity. 2- Link Exchange or Reciprocal Links: Link exchange or reciprocal links should be avoided. 3- Ignorance of Check and Balance for Links: If you don’t check and balance your listings periodically, you may lose your hard gain incoming links 4- Purchase Bulk Links: Search engines become very intelligent these days, you can’t make them fool by purchasing bulk links, because search engine check your incoming links frequency as well with time 5- Paid Links: Paid links can be very healthy but if they are used as a part of the strategy, if you have no idea of how many paid links you are going to have, that can upset your link building campaign.
Do You Have Categorized and Simplified Database?
In link building campaign, your database is your key to success; it is the backbone of your overall link building strategy. If you have a poor database, which is not categorized and simplified, you can’t be comfortable from your link building strategy.
Try to have categorized and simplified database, make a master database with following mentioned fields.
Important Fields for Master Database for any Link Building Campaign
1. URL
2. Direct Link (Direct Link of Submission or Registration)
3. Industry Type (Show Biz, Construction, Telecommunication…)
4. Link Type (One Way, Reciprocal, Paid)
5. Link Style (Anchor link, Title Hyper Link, URL Link, Vote Link)
6. Link Period (1 Year or Life time)
7. PageRank (1, 2, 3…10)
8. Title Limit (Characters Limit)
9. Description Limit (Characters Limit)
10. Keywords Limit (Characters Limit)
Insertion & Update Your Master Database!
Your master database (structure) is ready, now You need to make it valuable by inserting data to it, it requires an on-going updates. Don’t let anything go away as it can be used for your current asa for new projects
Does anyone else find it surprising that so many site owners are reluctant to provide outgoing links on their website. Somehow they have come to believe that providing relevant outgoing links from their site can be harmful to their results in the search engines.
When you send your visitors to a relevant resource, this is not a bad thing. This is a good thing.
Relevant sites does NOT mean competitive sites.
Definitions of Relevant on the Web:
Having a bearing on or connection with the subject at issue; “the scientist corresponds with colleagues in order to learn about matters relevant to her own research” wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
Evidence or information that has enough value to prove something significant to a case.http://www.attorneykennugent.com/library/r.html
If you write an article and would like to provide evidence of what you are saying, you should provide your resources within the article. Those MUST be credible resources. For example, if I write an article about website credibility, the site I point to in order to back up what I am saying must be an EXPERT on the topic, such as the Stanford Guidelines for Website Credibility. This method (used properly) gives your pages MORE value, not less. It also adds to the relevance of your page to the topic.
Incoming and outgoing links are not just about making pages filled with links. It is something that can be blended into your website in multiple ways, as it pertains to the specific page.
Think about the common interests of your target visitors and you will have no trouble deciding if a link is relevant to your site.
Link building is still one of the biggest obstacles in improving your website ranking and traffic. If that is the case then the natural next question is; how do you build them?
A good place to start is to submit your site to web directories and directories in your niche. Sound simple, doesn’t it? Well it isn’t, most of us look the most obvious places, this certainly is a good place to start, however you need to look for the hidden gems inside your business category. Many of the best directories exist on sites like manufacturers you sell or buy from, or your own local Chamber of Commerce. The point here is the amount of weight Google puts on “Link Relevancy is huge. So try to avoid just blindly buying or link exchanging, etc. Be smart here and it will pay off. SEO is not for the “Immediate Gratification” folks, I wish it were. I would be gratified by now I think.
One part of your link building strategy can be “Dofollow Blogs”. If you have anything credible to say inside of your business you need to start saying it. The way to get some buzz around your product, service, brand etc is to find likeminded blogs that dofollow,
(DoFollow – This is given in the HTML page or the Robot.txt of the website, in order to direct the search engines to follow that particular web page.)
If you happen to be already blogging and commenting of others blogs by all means you should be getting some bank for your buck. Look for sites that have a relatively high page rank and comment on the ones inside your business. If you sell blue-left-handed widgets do not comment about “Things in the Solar System”. And please for goodness sake say something more than “nice post” or “kewl”, I know many guys with blogs will just delete you as “spam”. You may find some decent “dofollow sites” here. The last I’ll say about this right now is;
Don’t Be A Spammer – Be A Value Provider!
Spamming Dofollow resources will not give you results…not only that, it hurts the entire community, and forces Dofollow providers to convert their sites to Nofollow. Be sure that all of your link-building exploits are done so tastefully and honestly. If you don’t cram keywords and give an honest account of what your site is about, search engines will reward you for it!
The following is a quick rundown on what a DoFollow actually is:
Nofollow’ is a HTML attribute attached to hyperlinks in order to ensure that the specific link in question does not pass any value that will help improve the target site’s search engine rank.
It was first created by Google in 2005 as a means to combat keyword spam, particularly on webpages where users can add links by themselves. Other search engines like Yahoo and MSN Live both respect the nofollow attribute as well.
More details from Google’s official blog:
If you’re a blogger (or a blog reader), you’re painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites’ search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like “Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site.” This is called comment spam, we don’t like it either, and we’ve been testing a new tag that blocks it.
From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results.
This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.
In its most basic definition, dofollow is just a way of referring to links that do not use the ‘nofollow’ attribute. In other words, these are normal links which pass value and credit towards improving search engine ranks.
The origin of the term ‘dofollow’ appears to stem from a movement by bloggers who believe that comments are legitimate contributions by readers, therefore the wholesale marking of every comment as spam by default through the ‘nofollow’ tag is not fair and justified
As such, these bloggers or other non-blog websites override the existing platform defaults by removing the nofollow attribute, making all the links ‘dofollow’.
These dofollow blogs and websites have consistently been a target of webmasters and spammers who leave keyword links with their choice of anchor text in order to enhance their search rank. You can find dofollow blogs through a simple google search. Let me wrap this up by cautioning you to not be obsessed with Dofollow’s it is just a small part of the overall picture in building a long term “Luv Presence” on the net. Long live ya! Thanks for letting me yak all over you.
SEO, PPC, and SMO, how do you pull them all together?
If you’re a plumber or a lawyer or even an Indian chief for that matter the answer is you don’t. You may have breathed a sigh of relief or more likely you said. “Then what”? I’ll get to that later, first let’s talk about the problem and then we’ll dive head on into the solution. Have you heard, “I am not sure what my SEO company is doing”, or worse yet, you said it. Or, I hope you haven’t said this one, “My SEO Company is ripping me off”. I have heard both of these and more in my time in this industry more than I can count. I might lose you here, you are the problem, let me explain before you call the nuthouse about me.
Marketing & Social Networks Webinar (What You Need to Know)
What social media networks can do for your business
How social networks benefit your web presence.
Why blogging and micro blogging is important.
Learn how Bulbwired can help grow your business using social media networks
Register for our weekly Webinar and learn more about this new area of marketing.
I fully agree that the Illusion, “don’t try this at home” has become real in the Search Engine Marketing space and has become littered with all sorts of subpar services to put it nicely. However, if you can admit that you are the problem, you can get to a viable solution that returns ROI’s that rival this best and better. The most successful campaigns are born out of a well thought out process, AKA: a plan. Here comes another one of those “nutcase” statements, no plan ever works out, yes that is right ZERO times has your plan at the outset worked out. That’s the good news Ladies and Gentleman, a plan is not a destination, it is a journey. Here is where you might save me from the white coats; you need to plan anyway, without one, no action. Action always produces something. Wouldn’t you agree?
Ok then sir, how does one put together a plan to attack such a complex subject? Glad you asked. Very succinctly, a well crafted plan authored by a Professional in SEO/PPC/SEM, (Project Manager) Recently I was consulting a client that has a monthly budget in this area of about 20k. You would think that if you threw 20k a month at something it would turn to green, well think again. The first question I asked him was, who manages this? Are you sitting, the answer blew me away! “My secretary”, he shared. Don’t get me wrong here, I asked “what this is his/her qualifications are in this area”, and he didn’t have an answer. I am sure I don’t have to tell you this “20k a month” bounty was.
I can’t help myself in quoting this post from Outspoken Media, Read this article, real good down to earth advice. Thanks Lisa Barone,
“You couldn’t pay your mortgage and your house was foreclosed on? Don’t worry, it wasn’t you, it was the recession. You lost your job and now you’re stuck at home cruising Twitter ‘looking for a new one’ all day? Don’t fret. It wasn’t you, it’s the recession. Can’t find new clients so you’re left bitterly blogging that clients suck and the frauds in the industry are stealing your dollars? Calm down, pretty, have a cookie and take a nap. It’s the recession.
Actually, it’s probably not the recession. It’s probably you.”
All kidding aside I really don’t mean to insult anyone, however, the point is; the only thing in the way of your Site blasting out SEO returns like a printing press of money is, yes YOU. If you can get your arms around this one fact you can be free. Free to actually contact someone like myself or the thousands of other qualified Internet Marketing concerns and get rocking. Getting to putting together a solid plan that gets you into action and closer to your boss telling you what a great job you are doing. Or better yet this is your own endeavor and you are laughing all the way to the bank.
I am going to be a sport here and give you 5 things to keep your site from “sucking”.
Write for your Audience – if you can’t do this hire some that can, PERIOD.
Make your site useful – I hate to repeat myself, however, if you can’t do this hire someone that can, PERIOD.
Make the content unique – Again, well you know ….
Make it Interactive – believe me this isn’t at expensive and far reaching – Again, (broken record), if you can’t do this hire someone that can, PERIOD.
Convert readers into subscribers – ask for their email address! And don’t be afraid to use it.
Bulbwired has many other valuable techniques and tips do put your site to use in the real world. I will leave you with some very good, simple yet very sound advice my Dad used to tell me, “Do not go to a dentist to get your haircut”.
You want to get the attention you deserve; bulbwired can give you SEO, PPC and SEM that rocks. If you’re looking for landing pages that “get the Click” yes we do that to. And if you need Upstanding fine Internet Marketing professionals for advice and/or Manage a project to fruition then for goodness sake,
Sometimes schedules are so busy and there just isn’t the time to write another post even though you have great info to share. Lo and behold this was in my email box, I wish I could take credit for writing it, however, it was written by Aaron Wall from SEObook.com on the3 subject of Social Integration, this following information held true well before the Internet and well after it, if there if is a well after it… with out further ado…
“As many business models continue to get commoditized by fierce worldwide competition, the only things that separate winners from losers are: relationships, social status, trust, attention, market timing, and packaging. In an idea economy, the winner is not just up to who comes up with ideas, but who expresses them most clearly and who can spread them further faster.
Having an editorial component to your site that people pay attention to builds content and gives people more reasons and ways to find you and talk about you. Publishing a blog with an RSS feed that notifies hundreds or thousands of people when you have new information to share is a big advantage against newer competitors or companies that fail to see the value of building social relationships and giving away information.
It can take weeks, months, or years to gain attention and trust. The more reasons you give people to trust you the more it builds on itself. Eventually, if your operation is exceptionally efficient you can start owning ideas and building self reinforcing market positions. At some point winning new ideas gets easier and easier.
There are also lots of other hidden benefits to having lots of friends and contacts
- you can help them promote their best work in exchange for them offering you feedback and helping you promote your best work
- you can do coordinated launches of your best content where many friends mention it at the same time such that you flood the marketplace with your best ideas
- you can ask friends for links and get a near 100% success rate getting quality links from them (though you may have to return the favor at some point)
Participating in the conversation, linking out to other like-minded webmasters, and creating community oriented projects with the input of other members in your community help get you noticed quickly.
If you have a new blog or new website reinvest in your website and market your own content instead of placing many ads on your site.
The deeper we get into bulbwired and our mission of helping businesses succeed on the Internet the deeper we get into sharing, just today we got a RT (Retweet, on twitter.com, this is simply Reposting a comment from me and a link to me) from another SEO guy, flattering yes and humbling. We trust that it all come around full circle and on that subject I can’t say enough thanks to Aaron Wall for his course SEObook.com. This has really re-directed what we do.
For a limited time bulbwired.com is offering our “10 Point SEO Spring Cleaning” for an amazing $500 and we can show you how you can get that for free, no kidding absolutely free. Contact us below and we will tell you how.
Seven Ways To Tap Social Shopping
Link Popularity is one of key area to increase your site page ranking and search ranking. Incoming links are just like votes in election for your website however there is point as we have to emphases on quality links rather quantity. Valuable links are like 100 of poor links equals to 1 quality link. In this article, I would like to explain how differentiate quality links and how to get them which will effect and improve and strengthen your website ranking.
