August 4, 2011

 

Social Media Plan – Part One –

Where is your Brand’s Voice?

Part of how I map out the start of a Social Media plan is to look at the past of what a company has been up to on the social web.

 

Looking into the following areas:

What social sites are you a part of?

What is the personality of your brand’s voice- do you have a voice?

How often do you communicate information?

What kind of communication are you putting out?

Where does the communication go and from where does it come?

How quickly do you respond to fan posts/questions/feedback?

How have you responded to negative posts?

 

By looking at these areas we can tell where your brand is situated online. Does it need to be re-branded on social media? Businesses that have started in social media, but slacked off after the beginning stage because of time issues, leave fans bored by the lack of conversation. If you are going to start a social media presence, they best thing to do is start it properly and update it regularly.

How to check your social presence: [Read more...]

SEM vs SEO

Nowadays most companies realize the importance of online marketing, particularly through the search engines. I think that most people would agree that customer’s most likely end up on your website via a search engine rather than typing your url directly into the address bar. That being said, I am sure that we can all agree about the importance of having a strong brand presence within the search engines to ensure that you reach your target audience. How you achieve that presence is debatable. Today I will outline some key benefits for both search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO).

SEM can easily be defined as paid advertising such as pay-per-click advertising, sponsored links and purchased ads via platforms including Google, Yahoo, Bing and many more. SEO is the process of improving the visibility of your website through natural or un-paid (organic) search results.

SEM Pros

5 Caveats When Choosing an SEO

Jared Mumford, Lead SEO

Like Jaxon and his first post, I too had a hard time finding the perfect topic for my inaugural write-up on what will soon be the hottest marketing blog this side of the Port Mann. I too drank many cups of coffee and sifted through my mental archives.  I thought of all the interesting facets and trends in SEO that I could write about. Link bait. Anchor variation concepts. Interlinking strategies. Taxonomies. I thought about all the questions people ask me about SEO like “should I use an ampersand instead of the word ‘and’ for my titles?” or “does the meta keyword tag actually do anything?”

But in the end I decided to leave these topics for later, and start with what’s really important – what to look out for when shopping for an SEO. Here’s the first 5 that come to mind: [Read more...]

What it takes to be a good Affiliate Manager

I have been mulling over what I should write in my initial post and which direction I wanted to go in for the last hour. After careful thought and a couple cups of coffee, I thought that it would be a good idea to share a couple of my personal views on what I think it takes to be a good affiliate manager. [Read more...]

How to Have a Relationship with Your Consumer

When it comes to online marketing there are specific ways to show the client the ROI, Return on Investment. How many clicks throughs, visits to the site, purchases and SEO are all a part of this analysis. But how do you really know your consumer is spreading the word? Are you going to call up every single person that has purchased your product and ask them for a review? Yes, an interrogation process would definitely be affective.

To help a business grow, there has to be a purpose to the product, coming from the CEO to the salespeople and finally to you, the consumer. Being an entrepreneur is not enough if you don’t believe in the purpose of your product. We have all seen it a million times when shopping in a store where the salespeople aren’t helpful or engaging. When we work for a company whose owner exudes the money hungry obsession that clouds his purpose. [Read more...]

Google Instant & What It Means for You

With the launch of Google Instant, people will now be able to get faster, more accurate and more personalized results with their Google searches – giving Google a distinct advantage in light of the Bing/Yahoo partnership. This new technology produces a dropdown list of educated guesses at what you may be searching based on the letters or words you’ve entered in the search box, as well as past search and browsing history. Google even boasts that the new Instant technology, if used worldwide, can save up to 11 hours/second on search time, although this will only mean 2-5 seconds per user search.

Google Instant Screenshot
[Read more...]