Looking to get ahead of the social media marketing game? Sure, Facebook and Twitter are still the king and queen of this kingdom – just as reported in a recent StrongMail survey of online marketing budgets in 2011 – but the New Year also heralds a number of new social media darlings that are certainly worth keeping an eye on. Last year, it was Foursquare and Posterous leading the pack. This year is just as promising – if not more promising, thanks in large part to the continued expansion of social media and to the crazy range of new sites, apps, and startups out there. Here are our picks for social media websites to watch in 2011. Quora Last March 2010, Quora reportedly received $86 million in funding from Benchmark Capital (also a Twitter investor). It didn’t make any million-dollar noise the rest of the year, but this 2011 just might be the year Quora really makes waves. As a – Read the full article
There’s a lot of hype in the social media realm over the dozens of new tools and dashboards that help you keep an eye on what people are saying about your company. Indeed, online reputation monitoring and management is quickly becoming a must-have for your marketing strategy. It is every business owner’s dream to be able to keep tabs on their brand name. Now, they can swoop in and clean up after a dirty situation. Likewise, they can reward or thank people for good mentions. Social media is growing at an enormous rate, but it still makes up only a relatively small portion of the Internet. There are billions of websites and blogs that also like to talk about things. Many of those sites have a reach comparable to or larger than the social mentions that are happening around your brand. Reputation monitoring goes beyond social media: you should be monitoring the whole Internet. Before you spend money on expensive – Read the full article
Did you know that 20 percent of all searches on the Internet are for specific locations or businesses? Search giant Google did, and that’s why they changed Google Local to Google Places and began to display – for every search query that may be locally or geographically influenced – the local information for businesses, maps, and directions in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Right now, Google displays seven Places results for every search, as well as a map on the right side of the SERP that shows exactly where these seven places are. Obviously, Google Places pages help customers search these maps for local information while finding businesses within their area that are relevant to their search. Meanwhile, for small businesses, mom-and-pops, stores, offices, and other organizations with a physical address, Google Places is a unique local search tool that can drive and direct those who are searching to those who have something to offer or sell. Leverage this – Read the full article
Google-Groupon Deal? Search giant Google is reported to be offering as much as $6 billion for leading e-Commerce coupon site, Groupon. According to a number of media sources, the deal’s initial payment will be worth about $5.3 billion, with the remaining $700 million to be used as an incentive for keeping Groupon’s employees. The deal, if it happens, is going to be Google’s largest acquisition yet, much bigger than its successful $3.1 billion bid for DoubleClick and the $1.65 billion price tag of the company’s YouTube deal. Launched in November 2008 and headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, Groupon is a social shopping network that delivers daily deals to users in cities across the U.S., Canada, and Europe. While the price of the rumoured acquisition seems high – Groupon only has an estimated $600 million in revenue – industry observers say that the coupon site is the clear leader in a rapidly growing new category on the Internet. Its overwhelming success in – Read the full article
First impressions last. That’s why, when it comes to marketing yourself through a website, your homepage will have to be love at first sight. And while the other pages of your website deserve equal attention, they aren’t necessarily of equal importance. A homepage, by its very nature, will typically have a unique set of design goals, content objectives, and mood in order to catch and sustain the attention of visitors. Here’s a list of seven best practices for a more effective homepage: Communicate concisely who you are, what you do, and what your site is for. Don’t leave people in the dark – show them the light, and show them the light in the first five seconds upon arrival. Your company’s name is Charlie’s Tees, and you sell funny shirts and vintage shirts, and your online store is the source of sartorial awesomeness. See? Concise and clear. Do that and you’re off to a good start. (Bonus tip: Make sure that these – Read the full article
It used to be that businesses concentrated their marketing efforts exclusively on traditional (offline) media – like print ads, TV commercials, radio, PR campaigns, events, billboards, direct mail, glossy brochures. And then the Internet happened. And then social media changed the Internet. A recent report by GrowBiz Media, a small business market research firm, and online survey company Zoomerang led to key insights on how much money small businesses are allocating for their Internet marketing efforts. Entitled “SMB Marketing Practices: Small to Midsized Business Survey Results, 2010”, the report gathers information from 751 completed surveys across the U.S., by businesses with less than 1,000 employees. Among the key takeaways: More than half of the businesses with less than $1000 marketing budget are adopting social media practices, most notably in social networks Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter (in that order). Around 39 percent of respondents are spending more than 20 percent of their marketing budgets on websites (design, development, content creation, marketing, – Read the full article
If only we can search for restaurants, takeout menus, and food deliveries in the same easy, convenient, hassle-free way we can search for pretty much anything else on Google… Wait. Hold that thought. Because there is actually a way to do just that. Or ways, rather. Plural form. Search engines for restaurants? It is no longer just a possibility. It’s now a reality. It’s a pretty convenient reality, too. If you’re a customer, you’ll no longer have to keep calling the same old pizza place every Friday night. No more queuing up for half an hour at your favorite café, and no more getting frustrated by botched phone orders. Just click and eat. If you’re a restaurant, café, bakery, fast food company, florist, or caterer, then you’ll have a chance – unlike any other you’ve had – to leverage the Internet and tap into a new audience: people who stay in and look at your menu – not from the – Read the full article
SEO is simple, right? That’s what we SEO professionals would like you to think – so you do it wrong. And we win. Lots of people move to that “advanced beginner” stage – where they think they know what they’re doing, but in reality, have no clue what they’re doing at all. It’s impossible to avoid until someone would point out gaffes in your SEO strategy. I’m not trying to be egotistical or anything here: definitely, I made these same mistakes at the beginning, and I’m only pointing them out so you don’t. Looking at your own site at a high level – but not others’ sites: Many people are capable of deeply analyzing their own website for things like crawl errors, indexation, and the like, but when they see a link target, they completely throw it to the side. In my early days, I would find link directories and blindly submit because the homepage was a PR4 (PageRank) – – Read the full article
