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
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
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
In mid-March, Google launched a social sharing tool called “+1.” Similar to the Facebook “Like”, +1 was added to search results to improve social relevance for users. It was noted last week that +1 will make its way across the Web in addition to (simply) search, with a widget that allows Web pages to allow +1 sharing. This will link Google profiles to content and websites, and the +1 now aims to put Google in a space where they have strived to be in for the past 5 years: social. Now, what exactly is +1? And why does it even matter? Essentially the +1 button is Google’s version of the “Like.” With hopes to capture a bit of Facebook market share, Google looks to take the world’s information and make it publicly available (according to their mission statement). So what does this mean for you? Well, besides the fact that it’s another way to draw traffic to your blog, the – Read the full article
Blogging doesn’t involve just writing: it involves promoting your content and making it rank for relevant search terms, too. Don’t worry if you’re not a technical expert or SEO rock star: like in most areas of Internet marketing, there are tons of ways to improve your performance in SEO-focused blogging, and it sounds a lot easier than it actually is. If you’re not quite convinced that you should have anything to do with SEO when blogging, just remember that getting people to your site who are already interested is much easier than the kind of cold, hard sell tactic used by most traditional outbound marketers. So drive those visitors to your site. Here are 4 tips to improve your inbound Internet marketing tactics with a blog: Write Creative Headlines Write blog headlines that will drive clicks on Twitter. Think from a user perspective; there are 60 million tweets sent out each day. Getting people to click on your URL from – Read the full article
In lieu of the recent news about the Facebook smear campaign against Google, it seems that Google may be poised to remain the top dog in online ad spend this year. Last week, the story regarding Facebook hiring PR firm Burson Marsteller to spread lies about Google’s new “Social Circle” went viral. The war over the social graph, a data set of information about the social networks users are connected to, is in full force. However, Google isn’t even flinching. According to Fortune, Google’s Eric Schmidt insisted that Microsoft, not Facebook, was the true competitor to Google. He said, “Facebook users tend to use Google Search. Facebook’s ads business does not displace our advertising. I’m somewhat perplexed by the obsession because I don’t think the facts support it. Things are going great for Google.” The facts may support that businesses prefer to use Facebook and Google simultaneously; however, the percentage in which they invest their marketing budgets may be a – Read the full article
