One of the more interesting trends in Internet marketing today is the idea of outsourcing content creation and copywriting. Here’s how it works: you run a small business, you become too busy with work, and on top of that – as though your calendar wasn’t crazy enough, as though you actually had time – you find yourself having to refresh your website or company blog with new, engaging content. You have to meet the demand for new, diverse information about your product, your brand, your industry. And you’re not even a writer by profession. One can only do so much, right? If only you can leave the writing to those who do it for a living. Enter your team of freelance writers, eager to develop content and copy for your site. They may be regular readers of your blog, looking to contribute their own content; they may be freelancing neighbors from just around the corner; or they may come from – Read the full article
The first book that I have been wanting to read for months is 4 hour work week. I downloaded it from audible (see previous post) and have already listened to 2/3 of the book since downloading it yesterday. It is extremely intriguing as he describes the process of outsourcing his life. I am going to try and outsource some small tasks to India. You can use sites such as elance to find reviews of companies or these virtual assistants. They can do everything from submit you to directories for SEO, research plans for a birthday party to responding to all your email for you. These “VA’s” are not only polite, efficient and better with a computer than most americans, they are college educated. You can find a VA for $2-15 per hour. The latter would be for graphics, technical knowledge or web programing. But what if you could hire someone to find and order your christmas gifts, pay your bills – Read the full article
When you try and use Internet marketing and blogging to bring in more business, it is essential to think about each word that you publish. Each page of your website needs to have a goal and each blog post must be aimed at achieving the following: Providing readers with information regarding your business and industry Creating a call for action Encouraging sales Working on optimizing the website Providing customer service Building brand recognition Installing trust Fitting all that into a blog post of around 300 to 500 words may seem like a lot but with the help of SEO copywriters, each of your blog posts can achieve all of those goals for you. Working on Web Copy Your website will no doubt be split up into different sections; what they are will depend upon the services and products that you provide. Most websites will have the obligatory Welcome page, About Us page, and the Contact page. These need to be – Read the full article
It used to be that marketing teams and technology people didn’t really interact apart from uncomfortable meetings about getting a new offer onto the latest website build. But with the rise of mobile-optimized websites, custom branded apps, locality services, and integrated messaging campaigns, the lines between marketing and technology are blurring. Marketers today must be comfortable talking about HTML5 and integrated databases. Technologists today must be comfortable talking about audience segments, targeting, and messaging strategy. But mobile technology is changing more than how we work together. It’s literally changing how we market and where we put our marketing investment. Poor Old E-mail E-mail was called the ‘killer app’ for at least a decade. Its power to connect with audiences led to an entire generation of technologies to gather addresses, segment lists, target messages, test performance, and provide service. Only, young people today don’t (or rarely) use it. They use instant message technology and social networks, with mobile (and SMS) figuring – Read the full article
Social media advocates are often quoted as claiming that social media is the greatest form of advertising because it is free. At Silicon Beach Training we use social media in a big way; we use it to increase exposure for our training courses. We use it to build relationships with key influencers and our customers. We also use it extensively to promote and share our flow of content generated to inform and inspire our existing customers and potential clients. One of the most important paybacks for all of this activity is it seriously improves our ranking. I believe that Google is going to up the stakes on this one, too; social shares are going to become even stronger signals that affect page position. In order to sustain these benefits, however, we need to employ people. We employ full-time people and we need to tap many external sources for content generation, paid for in currency and in back-links. Time and people – Read the full article
Yesterday Yahoo! Site Explorer decided to retire from business. It has left many amateur SEOs, and some professional SEOs too, at a bit of a loss. Many SEOs and agencies have been using the back link service in Yahoo! Site Explorer to monitor, analyse, and generally try to copy the link building actions of their competitors. As someone who has been involved in SEO for over 5 years (not so much by choice but by necessity) I have used Yahoo! extensively, and seen my competitors use it against me, too! I manage several sites across various niches, and some of my sites do interlink with each other, wherever a connection really does benefit a reader. I have seen people leave comments on all my blogs, and doing so in the order of Yahoo! backlinks for my main website. SEO Stalkers are gonna have a harder time I have also seen the same people leave comments on other blogs where I – Read the full article
Starting an online marketing campaign can be a difficult and confusing proposition for many small companies. Which sites should you have a presence on? Is a “group” better than a “page”? Should you take support requests via social networking sites, or keep them all funneled through your website? These questions could be answered easily if you were to enlist the help of an online marketing company or social media agency. It’s easy to make the mistake of assuming that all an online marketing company does is throw up a few pages and produce flow charts with pretty buzz-words on them. In truth, an Internet marketing company or social media agency does a lot more than that, and can help you to make sure that your promotion efforts are not wasted. What will an online marketing company do that I can’t do myself? While it’s true that setting up accounts and making a few friends on social networking sites is easy – Read the full article
LinkedIn is universally respected in the business world for its ability to bring professionals together. Originally, the network was very strict about managing connections. Only people who had done business or gone to school together were allowed to be connected. If a person was a stranger to you, LinkedIn shunned adding them as a connection. However, this may have all changed. A LinkedIn connection was once almost as personal (while still being professional) as a Facebook connection; however, recent news is reporting that Klout scores are available fore LinkedIn users. Will this mean users will embrace LinkedIn with a game-like sense? I’m not going as far to say users on LinkedIn will begin exploiting connections to gain Klout, but users on Twitter are already tweeting about raising their Klout score quite often. We may see a paradigm shift in the sole purpose of LinkedIn. What is Klout? A Klout score is best compared as a social popularity ranking. Users are – Read the full article
