Four Things a Small Business Must Do in Social media

Posted by Lynnea on Apr 17, 2011 in Da Blog! | 0 comments

Business owners often ask us what y should y be doing for social media ir company. In our “expert” (LOL) opinion, this question cannot be glossed over, let alone without doing bonafide research. That being said, asking is first step so we will answer it with help of social media expert Nicole Fletcher (follow her).  

Here is Nicole’s quick list of what your company MUST first be doing to get into swing of things – (source: Jacob Tyler)

1. Create a Facebook fan page Twitter account use m. Keep m updated with fresh, relevant content bring in your personal network for growth. Ask your community what y want to hear about n provide m with that information. Talk to m, respond to m do it in a timely manner…not just today, but tomorrow next day day after that. Make time for se tools – you’ll be glad you did.

2. Install social network links on your website. Your business website should ABSOLUTELY have social links (preferably in top right corner). Include Facebook Twitter to be sure, n comes YouTube, Yelp. LinkedIn Flickr to name a few. Make sure links work – broken links don’t do anyone any good.

3. Write blog posts. Blog posts don’t have to be perfect or long or serious. y can be fun short funny informative. Post often (but make sure you’re creating good, original, fresh content) link key phrases (that pertain to your business) back to relevant pages on your website. This does wonders for your search engine optimization counts as a link back to your website (even though it’s from your own blog). Also post se articles to your social networks. Feel free to tweet your blog post a number of times but be careful with excessive posting on Facebook – people tend to get annoyed with anyone takes over ir newsfeed.

4. If you’re a restaurant or or service business, claim your business pages on review sites like Metromix, Citigrid Google places. Also claim your venues on geo-location sites like Yelp, Foursqare, Facebook Places, SCVNGR, Gowalla, list goes on. Run specials (start with foursquare – it’s easiest in my opinion) track your conversion. It’s easy it’s free. People are talking about you wher you’re watching or not- why turn a blind eye to such a valuable tool?

se in short, are BARE ESSENTIALS to social media. To clarify, once you have se set up, you are far from striking social media gold – so don’t celebrate just yet. If you have a solid grasp on aforementioned points you thought you were sitting pretty, shoot us an email as well. We’ll take next step toger as sky is limit when it comes to being social.

Saving Your Small Business Social Media Sanity!

Posted by Lynnea on Oct 20, 2010 in Da Blog! | 0 comments

Source: Catalyst Enterprise Solutions

What do you have to say to your clients and prospects and what do they have to say about your business or company? You certainly do not need social media to reach out to your customers and clients but it doesn’t hurt to spread your name and brand in a way others looking for someone in your field can clearly see. Social media is about more than just marketing though. It’s about learning from those you engage with.

Karen Leland

The flip side, however, is that social media management for your small business can become maddening, due to the attention drain it requires. Social media attention-deficit is on the increase, but Karen Leland at Sterling Consulting Group provided a great 5-point primer, and a cute dog story to go with.

Source: Karen Leland | Huffington Post

Earlier this week, I came across a springy King Charles spaniel happily chewing on a tennis ball, when he suddenly became aware of his owner filling up his water bowl at the drinking fountain.

The dog — who had previously been in a state of single focus bliss — began to nervously shift his attention from the ball, to the bowl and back again. Then a bicycle blew by and the confused canine whipped around to take a look. Not sure which of these things was the most deserving of his attention, clearly stressed, and unable to make a choice, his head went from bike, to bowl, to ball and back again, over and over.

I know just how that dog feels.

And so does any small business owner or entrepreneur, who is confronted with crafting a modern marketing strategy out of the vast array of choices presented by today’s social media landscape.

“I think small businesses are confused about what they should do and how they should do it,” says Brian Halligan, CEO of HubSpot. “They stick their toe in the water by tweeting once a week or creating a page on Facebook, but that really doesn’t work. What they need to do is jump in, ask questions, learn and fully engage.”

In fact, the recent 2011 Social Media Marketing Industry Report , which surveyed 3,342 marketers, found that 48 percent of small business owners, who did engage, saw improved sales as a direct result of their social media efforts.

Mike Schultz, author of Rainmaking Conversations: Influence, Persuade, and Sell in Any Situation, says that there are benefits to marketing online but cautions that there are two social media paths a small business can pursue.

“Some people focus on the path of acquiring as many followers as they can,” says Schultz. “But the other path, which is much less sexy, but leads to more money, is to focus on finding people that you could not easily find in the past and reaching out to them in the right way.”

Just what is that right way? While social media mastery has many layers, the experts all agree that following five core steps is a good start to bringing social media sanity to your small business.

1. Generate an abundance of high-quality content. Be it blog posts, podcasts, ebooks, web pages, videos or webinars. The more substantial, unique and useful your content is, the more your potential customers will find you. Stuck on what kind of content to create? Ask yourself: What questions are my clients always asking me? Then write your answers to those.

2. Optimize that content for social media. Research the keywords your potential clients would use to find you and integrate those into your blog posts, page titles, blog headings, website text and any other content on your site. Google Keyword Tool provides easy research.

3. Integrate your website/blog with your social media. Publish your posts on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. In addition, post links on your social media back to your website offering free downloadable content. Blog buttons such as LinkedIn Share and TweetMeme help integrate social media.

4. Use alerts to monitor the conversation. Google Alerts notifies you when your business appears online but also helps you find journalists and bloggers in your field. Schultz suggests using Twitter Alerts as well. “One company I know of got a $250,000 sale by following up with a potential client who tweeted a general industry question,” he says.

5. Measure social media marketing. Google Analytics can give you instant access to where your Web traffic is coming from, how long people are staying on your site, which pages are the most popular and whether your overall website visits are going up or down.

In an era where participating in social media has gone from being nice to necessary, it’s critical to outline an overall plan for integrating social media into your marketing mix. Just remember to keep your eye on the tennis ball.

Take our quick poll: What is your biggest social media pain?

What are your greatest social media challenges? We would love to hear your commentsand questions. Call us to discuss your small business social media and search marketing needs. ADMAX can help!

Google Algorithm Punishing ‘Alternative News?’

Posted by Lynnea on Jul 16, 2010 in Da Blog! | 0 comments

Source: Catalyst House Blog

The new Google Algorithm is live. Just over a month ago, Google announced that they were changing their algorithm in order to weaken the search engine rankings of sites they deem to be “content farmers. Read Google’s announcement here.

 “Whereas most of Google’s algorithm changes are barely noticeable,” Eric Blair & Michael Edwards write at Activist Post. “The current change that they have been working on since last January will affect 12% of U.S. searches.”

There has been much debate about what “content farming” is, and Google has done little to offer a clear explanation, simply stating, “low quality” or “shallow” sites would be affected. This is similar to the vague definition of pornography — you’ll know it when you see it.

The problem with such a vague approach to what is a strictly defined algorithm is that it leaves too much room for a human interpretation. And as we have seen, Google has been exposed as having connections to U.S. intelligence agencies, which doesn’t bode well for alternative news sites that aggregate anti-establishment stories from around the web.

Given the other censorship threats facing the Internet, it seems those who might be critical of Internet control and real-time surveillance of average Americans are being targeted.

One definition of content farming sites comes from Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land:

– Looks to see what are popular searches in a particular category (news, help topics)

– Generates content specifically tailored to those searches

– Usually spends very little time and or money, even perhaps as little as possible, to generate that content

The first point is troubling for alternative news – these are sites who often scour mainstream news to find topics of popular interest so that competing commentary can be offered on a given issue. Even in the area of “help topics” there are many alternative news sites, such as our own, who focus on tips for survival, protection from economic crisis, advice for privacy protection and personal security, etc.

More from Activist Post –

Again, with the overshadowing definition of “shallow” content, who is deciding this? Furthermore, point two addresses tailoring content for specific searches, which sounds a lot like the “Google Bombs” introduced by Alex Jones and implemented by others as an effective way to compete with the mainstream media pablum, which focuses heavily on celebrities, sports, and other truly shallow and low quality content.

And, finally, point three seems to penalize blogs and other low-cost means of sharing opinions, as if not having a mainstream media budget automatically implies low quality, when provably the reverse is often true. Those who research information and present their own opinions as to the significance of what they have studied generally are doing so out of a passion to expose lies and direct their fellow man to the truth.

Google’s punishment of those who re-post material as an essential tool for sharing information appears to now reduce news aggregators to the status of plagiarists within the algorithm. There are many alternative news sites and blogs which have original material that they freely share, in part or in full, purely to support one another in disseminating the truth. We all know what plagiarism looks like and a link back to the original source should not, for instance, be grounds for labeling a site as shallow.

Google needs to address the vital tool of sharing information, as well as to more clearly define their algorithm in upcoming press releases, or we can only conclude that they have begun to wage war on news sites who aggregate information to present an alternative to establishment media.

Video Marketing Secrets for Small Businesses

Posted by Lynnea on Apr 20, 2010 in Da Blog! | 0 comments

Guest post by Brian Dean

Early on Video-Dean.com recognized that while online Video Marketing is one of the world’s most effective online advertising formats, the Internet is the fastest growing segment in Online Marketing; when you put Video Marketing and the Internet together you have the most powerful combination today for small business advertising.

The Internet Video Marketing trend is growing exponentially. The longer your company waits to start using online video ads to build credibility, trust, loyalty and excitement for your products and services the harder it will be for your company to make sales period! Online Video Ads are definitely the way to go.

When it comes to search engine visibility, search optimized Internet Videos have much greater odds then website based search results. Internet placed Videos are 53 times more likely to appear on the first page of the online search results than ordinary Web pages!

Video-Dean.com recognizes four primary factors affecting your video’s likelihood of appearing on main search page results:

1. Which Video Site Is Selected for Submission

YouTube reigns supreme in the search results at Google – but there are other video sites with good visibility results, including MetaCafe, Daily Motion, and Kewego. Same even for Bing and Yahoo, though YouTube is only slightly less prominent. Video-Dean.com recommends “cross-submitting” your business video to multiple platforms in order to maximize your potential audience and overall search engine reach.

2. Ranking From Within the “Native Platform”

The platform page one ranking of your video (as an example, YouTube’s native search results affects whether it will be included in main search engine pages. Research conducted by Video-Dean.com and others indicate that virtually all of the videos showing on the main search page results also appeared on the main page of their submission site search. And remember, YouTube, for example, is the third biggest search engine in its own right, even for so-called “local search” business queries.

3. Keyword Intention

The “Keyword intention” plays a major factor in determining whether your video is included in the main search page results. On the other hand videos that are search-optimized for transaction keywords (those including words like “ purchase,” “affordable,” or “on sale”) perform relatively poorly for main search results. Informational keywords, are what you really need to put your attention on. These are keyword phrases that are comparative in nature (“us versus them” or “ABC compared to XYZ”), educational (“do it yourself” or “learn how to”), and informational phrases (“who is” or “what is”). Navigation keywords and phrases produced inconsistent results. These are keywords that often include website URLs, brands, and product descriptions. But locational keywords, like city locations and targets, counties, etc., are vital for local search video marketing.

4. Make great videos: Use your best images, if its a montage-style video. Get your message across in under two minutes. Less is more for most marketing-type videos, especially for local business search videos.

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Brian Dean is a nationally regarded expert on producing search engine optimized videos that work. He is the president of Las Vegas based Video-Dean.com. Call Video Dean today at 1-888-479-5215 and find out how you can bring your business increased search engine visibility with customized Internet Marketing video ads.