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Tweet and Ye Shall Find (on Google and Bing)

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

Both Google and Bing have announced agreements with Twitter this week to ensure Twitter updates are included in their search results.

Bing has already launched a Twitter Search tool (it’s still quite buggy at the moment) and judging by their blog post about the subject, it seems Google aren’t far behind.

This is a significant step for the major search engines, because it means users are closer than ever to experiencing real time search. From Bing’s announcement:

“The idea of accessing data in real time has been an elusive goal in the world of search. Web indexes in search engines update at pretty amazing rates, given what it takes to crawl the entire web and index it for searching, but getting that to “real time” has been challenging.

The explosive popularity of Twitter is the best example of this opportunity. Twitter is producing millions of tweets every minute on every subject you can imagine… Search needs to keep up.”

How fresh and relevant the Twitter search functionality will be remains to be seen, but as Danny Sullivan points out in his post today, Twitter’s own tweet search is a lot fresher than the tweets that the search engines are currently dishing up, so they have a long way to go.

What’s more interesting to me about the Twitter search deals is how it will impact SEO. Webmasters will start using Twitter to get their freshest site content indexed by the search engines. Companies that haven’t created Twitter profiles to date may find themselves outranked by their competitors who do.

I’d also expect to see a lot more Twitter spam as people start to realize that tweeting is a fast ticket to the top of the search results. Hopefully the search engines will be able to react to this with some hefty spam filters.

How to Turn Casual Customers into Raving Fans

By Judy Murdoch in Featured

One piece of advice I’m hearing again and again is the importance of taking good care of your “core customers.” The customers who have been working with you for years, who send you referrals, and who return again and again to buy from you.

Loyal customers are vitally important during difficult economic times like we’re currently experiencing because they’re less expensive to sell to: you don’t have to spend weeks sometimes months building credibility because they’re already sold.

But what if your business is relatively new and you just don’t have many customers who are coming back yet? Or what if you just lost several of your business customers and you need to cultivate new relationships?

Can you do something to accelerate the process of turning casual customers into raving fans who sing your praises?

Advertising “Click Fraud” Rampant Online?

By Jim Edwards in Featured

“Pay-per-click,” by far the most popular form of online advertising, recently came under fire as charges of rampant “click fraud” gather steam on the Web.

Google and Yahoo! earn the majority of their money through sales of advertising to tens-of-thousands of online merchants, companies, and professional.

In fact, some estimate that 99% of all Google’s revenue comes from advertising sales. Unfortunately, allegations of click fraud may well rain on Google’s otherwise sunny parade and cause a whole scale revamping of current online advertising practices.

Pay-per-click advertising does exactly what it sounds: advertisers pay for each click on their ad, usually mixed in among search engine results or displayed on relevant websites.

“Click fraud” occurs when, for whatever reason, an ad gets clicked by someone or something (usually an automated “bot” that simulates clicks) with no intention of ever buying anything from the advertiser.

The sole intention of click fraud is to simply drain an advertiser’s budget and leave them with nothing to show but an empty wallet.

Who commits click fraud?

Usually an unscrupulous competitor who wants to break a rival’s bank, online “vandals” who get their kicks causing other people grief, or search engine advertising affiliates who want to earn fat commissions by racking up piles of bogus clicks.

Regardless of who does it or why, click fraud appears to be a growing problem search engines hope stays under their advertising clients’ radar.

This problem isn’t exactly news to the search engine giants.

In fact, on page 60 of their 3rd quarter Report for 2004, Google admits that they have “regularly refunded revenue” to advertisers that was “attributed to click-through fraud.”

Google further states that if they don’t find a way to deal with this problem “these types of fraudulent activities could hurt our brand.”

Bottom line for Google and Yahoo! (which owns Overture, the Web’s largest pay-per-click search engine): as word of click fraud spreads across the Web, they must act quickly to calm the nerves of advertisers who could well abandon them over doubts about the veracity of their advertising charges.

The search engines all claim to carry measures that identify and detect click fraud, but details about how they do it and to what extent remain sketchy.

They claim revealing details about security would compromise their efforts and give the perpetrators a leg up on circumventing their defenses.

This sounds good, but affords little comfort to advertisers who feel caught between losing out on their best traffic sources and paying for advertising that won’t result in revenue.

One way to protect your business against click fraud is to closely monitor your website statistics.

Look for an unusually high number or regular pattern of clicks from the same IP address.

If you need help, enlist the aid of your hosting provider to aid you in spotting suspicious trends in your website traffic.

Also, a number of services have sprung up online to help advertisers spot and quickly analyze and compile the data necessary to effectively dispute fraudulent click charges with the search engines.

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Jim Edwards is a syndicated newspaper columnist and offers a FREE 90-Minute “Mini-Site Strategies” Webinar replay that explains step-by-step and click-by-click…”A Quick and Easy Way For YOU to Painlessly Set Up Your OWN Moneymaking ‘Mini’ Websites… Without Being a Computer Geek, Buying Expensive Software, or Paying Outrageous Fees To A Webmaster!”

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Write Quality Articles Faster with Batch Processing

By Steve Shaw in Featured

Article Marketing can be extremely rewarding to anyone who consistently submits quality articles over the long term. The most challenging part of Article Marketing is getting the articles written, but there are many things you can do to make the writing process easier.

Do you want to write your articles faster and more efficiently and capitalize on a momentum of creativity? If so, then I encourage you to try batch processing.

Batch processing is a productivity technique where you deal with several of the same type of task at one sitting, rather than doing one isolated task at a time. A great example of batch processing would be emails:

Scenario #1: You can either handle each email one at a time as it comes in, which would cause your workday to be interrupted every few minutes. Or…

Scenario #2: You can check your email only at designated times, say once in the morning and once in the afternoon, and at those scheduled email checking times deal with many emails at one sitting. This would free up your attention throughout the rest of your workday, and also allow you to process the emails faster because you’re doing several at one sitting, rather than one here and one there.

Scenario #2 is batch processing–you save time by doing several of the same task at one time. It works with email, and it also works with articles!

WRITING MORE EFFICIENTLY

For articles, batch processing in involves writing multiple articles at one sitting. So, rather than sitting down 8 separate times to write 8 different articles, you might have 2 scheduled writing times a month, and at each writing time you would write 4 articles.

Writing articles successively allows your mind to get into a writing groove, and helps build creative momentum. After you get used to batch processing articles, you should be writing each article faster, accomplishing more writing in less time.

Also, a major part of writing an article is the warm-up–when you sit down to write it takes a while for your mind to get into ‘writing mode’. When you write articles in batches, you eliminate much of this warm-up time. If you’re writing one article at a time, your mind needs to warm up each time you sit down to write, but if you’re writing in batches, your mind only needs to warm up before the first article–the other articles don’t need a warm up time because your mind is on a roll.

HOW TO BATCH PROCESS YOUR ARTICLES

1. Determine which days you’ll be writing. If you’re submitting 8 articles a month, then you’ll only need to schedule a couple writing days!
2. Schedule a block of time to focus on writing–4 hours or so.
3. Eliminate online distractions–turn off email, twitter, IMs and the like. You will need your full concentration for your writing session.
4. Brainstorm article topics before your writing session, then use the ideas you’ve generated to write your articles.
5. It may help to first create an informal outline for each article–jot down the major points you’d like to cover, and then flesh out the details.
6. Set a word count limit. Aim for 400-600 word articles, or at the longer end maybe 600-800 word articles. Setting word count limits puts boundaries on your article so that you’re not spending all 4 hours writing one really long article!

ADDITIONAL PERKS TO BATCH PROCESSING

• One research session can result in several articles.
• If you get on a roll in one article and find that you actually have enough content for 2 or 3 articles, you can write the other articles while your mind is still on that topic.
• Writing one article often spawns ideas for other articles–this is creative momentum at work.
• Eliminate procrastination: It’s easier to get yourself to your writing desk one time to write four articles than four times to write one article.
• And not to mention, it is very gratifying to get a major chunk of your writing out of the way in one day! This takes a lot of stress out of the need to write articles every month–you have your scheduled writing days, and you know you will be writing several on each day to meet your goals.

YOUR HOMEWORK

• Try batch processing your articles this month.
• Set a goal of getting 4 articles written in one writing session.

Will you try this? I think you will find that this productivity technique helps you write quality article faster and more consistently and eliminates a lot of writing stress from your life!

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Steve Shaw is an article marketing expert, and founder of the popular articles submitter, http://www.submityourarticle.com , used by thousands of business owners. Discover how to use the power of article marketing to reach tens of thousands of potential prospects for your website – download a powerful free report on successful article marketing from
http://www.submityourarticle.com/report

Don’t be Dopey – Copy Disney!

By admin in Featured

The best marketer I have come across is Walt Disney and he used 5 simple strategies that anyone can employ. It’s about consistency, a good plan, and then practice to make it perfect.

Marketing is essentially all about the four P’s: Product, Promotion, Price and Placement. With the right product, placed in front of the right visitor at the right time, promoted in the right way and offered at the right price you are guaranteed success.

Put these 5 strategies into action, and watch the results:

Much Ado About The Big FTC Blogging Disclosure

By Ann Williams in Featured

As it turns out, the blogger flap generated by the FTC two weeks ago with their rules regarding non-disclosure and fines of $11,000, is pretty much “nothing”. Mary Engle, an FTC attorney and assistant director of Advertising Practices, said they, the FTC, never intended to police all blogs and bloggers. (No kidding!) “We couldn’t do it if we wanted to and we don’t want to.”

So, what was this great FTC tsunami announcement all about then, if it wasn’t about bloggers disclosing certain freebees or payments as an incentive to blog favorably about the product or service? According to Engle, this announcement was meant only to fill out the guidelines first issued in 1980, having to do with endorsement and testimonials. These new guidelines are nothing more than beefed-up older guidelines with no force of law. They are separate and apart from the FTC’s Rules and Regulations that, if violated, can carry some rather severe civil penalties. The newly rounded out guidelines are aimed, Engle said, at those advertisers and marketers who provide free goods and services in a large way to certain segments of the population who in exchange promise endorsements on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

For example, a Proctor & Gamble campaign recently provided 400,000 moms with free products, like Tide and Febreeze, for their favorable testimonials about these products on their social network accounts or on blogs. The general assumption by the reader would be that these moms tried the products and loved them, sending something of a false advertising message. Engle noted that this kind of relationship needs to be disclosed to further fair advertising practices. Engle mentioned that they could have done a better job in defining the guidelines, to outline more specifically at whom the FTC was aiming. (No kidding again!)

To further complicate the great misunderstanding over the revised guidelines was the fact that shortly after the FTC announcement, Richard Cleland, chief of the Consumer Protection Agency, intimated that if a blogger received an item for review on a blog, that it would be considered to have compensatory value unless returned after the review was written. That remark fueled a firestorm!

But in the end, it turned out to be just a quick little grassfire. Bloggers who mention a product they may have received as a freebee or may have bought, have no need to go scouring back over their records. That free bottle of wine you received from a vintner back in January, drank and barely remember tasting, won’t cost you $11,000.

Relax. Just a minor bureaucratic flap.

Bacardi Rum, 80 Million Bucks & Facebook

By admin in Featured

Bacardi recently launched its latest campaign, called “Islands,” which is poised to make a splash (pun intended) in the world of social media — but in the end, what is the company trying to accomplish? Like any successful marketing campaign, a social media push should do two things: build the brand and sell more rum. The real question social marketers want to know is, how does Bacardi go about dropping a good amount of marketing money in social media and drive sales?

From what I can tell, company strategists have decided to spend the entire budget (which is probably less than $80 million) on a one-minute commercial and then post it on YouTube and Facebook. It would be unfortunate if that was the entire scope of the campaign, because the video is fantastic and the possibilities for engagement on Bacardi’s behalf are huge. For that to happen, however, strategists need to take a few more steps.

First of all, as of Oct. 14 the rum giant had 32,187 fans on its official Facebook page; compare that to the more than 432,000 fans Absolut vodka has, and it looks like the “Islands” campaign has its work cut out for it. A heavy digital campaign skewed toward social media ramping up the fans should be Bacardi’s No. 1 priority.

Of all the social channels, Facebook fans are your most important brand advocates; this is Bacardi’s loyal army of enthusiasts that serve as the gateway to the rest of the most valuable social network we have. One way to the think of these fans is to to consider how online marketers place a lifetime value on each email address they collect. While calculating the value of a Facebook fan is not as straightforward, I’ll bet you money their worth is at least 10 times that of an email address.

Also, thanks to the free analytics section available on corporate fan pages, a big digital push can be looked at in terms of how successful each post was in driving engagement. What are fans reposting, how many people click “like,” and what are the fans sharing?

Of course this begs the question of how you get more fans. Obviously dropping a ton of cash on a new campaign offline helps — but there are some easy ways to drive this number. The first one is the most obvious: Take the channel (Facebook) seriously. Putting your TV spots up there is probably not going to cut it. Bacardi needs to create a voice that the brand inhabits, one that speaks specifically to this audience.

Additionally, no one can become a fan if they don’t know you have a fan page. Drop facebook.com/bacardi on some of the tchotchkes that get handed out at clubs; also, some Facebook ads probably wouldn’t hurt.

Another great way to ramp up your fans is to offer them something they can’t get elsewhere. I’m sure Bacardi, like most liquor companies, sponsors a night out where drink specials and trinkets are featured — so how about one just for the fans? Absolut recently offered 10 of its Facebook fans the chance to win tickets to a Jay Z concert it was sponsoring, showing that the company both takes its fans seriously and offers something unique for their friendship.

Having a conversation with your Facebook audience goes to the heart of what makes social media the best marketing channel to come along since email. This is permission-based marketing with a built-in viral component, complete with a full set of analytics going out to a demographic that most advertisers would kill for.

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Jared Stivers is a founding partner and the CEO of San Francisco-based Walker+Stivers Analytics, a social media analytics firm. Contact him here.

List Building – 9 Steps to Creating a High Converting Squeeze Page

By admin in Featured

With a high converting squeeze page, an online business will make more use of the traffic they drive to their website. With more email leads an online business can promote to, there are more chances of buyers for your products and services. Generating traffic is hard work so you want to capture as many of the visitors’ emails as you can when they visit your website.

Here are 9 steps to creating a high converting squeeze page:

1. Determine Type Of Traffic

Decide what type of prospect you want to attract with your squeeze page. Then create your squeeze page to attract that particular type of prospect only. Don’t create a squeeze page which caters for everyone. Your conversions of visitors to leads will suffer.

2. Professional Graphics

Create the best graphics you can for your squeeze page. Eye-grabbing graphics have proven in my tests to increase conversion rates. So hire a good graphics designer if you can’t design good graphics yourself.

3. Keywords

Make sure your squeeze page shows the keywords which the visitor is looking for. If your ad promises that they will receive an insurance review report when they visit your squeeze page, make sure your squeeze page shows the words “insurance review”.

This will confirm to the visitor that they are on the right page and they should find the information they are looking for.

4. Attention

Get your visitor’s attention right away when they visit your website.

You can do this by showing a headline that raises curiosity and promises benefits.

Once you have their attention, they will read more of your squeeze page.

5. Benefits

With your squeeze page, explain the benefits for the visitor if they sign up to your list.

Explain the benefits using words or video. Make sure that when you read the message on the squeeze page, you actually emotionally feel how signing up will benefit your visitors.

6. Graphics – Video/Report

If you are offering a free report or video on your squeeze page, create a graphic (called an ecover) for it.

This will make your intangible product seem tangible. Visitors will want their hands on your free offer. It’s all about packaging your offer.

7. Call To Action

In your squeeze page, make it very clear what you want the subscriber to do. Don’t make them guess that they should enter their name and email address to sign up to your list. Tell them directly in simple terms. Command them on what they need to do.

People react to commands. Telling them to enter their name and email and then click on the submit button is needed. This may sound silly, but tests have shown this to increase response rates.

8. Split Testing

With every squeeze page you create, you need to create another one with a slight variation such as a different headline, different benefits or place your sign up box in another place.

All squeeze pages can be improved. Use the tool at http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer to test which 2 versions of your squeeze page has the better response rate.

Remove the low performing squeeze page and try to create another one to achieve better response rates. This is how you create squeeze pages that have 50% sign up rates.

9. Drive Traffic

At the end of the day, you need to drive traffic to the squeeze page and see what type of prospects react to your squeeze page. If you notice that a certain source of traffic has good sign up rates then market your squeeze page more in that area.

The more traffic you drive to your squeeze page, the quicker you will be able to create a high converting squeeze page.

All these steps are not rocket science, yet not many people follow them. Improve your squeeze page one step at a time following the advice above and you’ll be able to convert a high percentage of your visitors to subscribers. This list building component of your online business is essential if you want to increase sales. If you want your online business to succeed, a high converting squeeze page is mandatory.

About The Author:

For more tips on how to promote your online business and increase sales, visit information product creation. To hire professionals to create your own best selling information products, visit http://www.eliteghostwriters.com/infoproducts.html – Alan Cheng, Elite Ghostwriters.

Social Networking for Business Guide

By admin in Featured

It seems like there’s an over-abundance of social sites nowadays. For a newbie, it can be quite intimidating when first joining a network or two and building a community. A handful of questions may run through your head:

• Which networks to join?
• How to participate?
• What’s enough, or too much?
• How will it help my business?

So, to answer some of these, I’d like to present my “Social Media For Dummies” overview. First, a quick recap of my favorite networks and what they’re about.

Never Underestimate the Power of Social Media

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

We’ve all seen the wave effect social media can cause when it comes to spreading breaking news stories such as Michael Jackson’s death and the Samoan tsunami.

But social media is also empowering regular citizens with the ability to break news stories as they take place or spread the word about events they consider to be newsworthy. The phenomenon is birthing a new wave of Citizen Journalism and it’s one of the major reasons news agencies are performing backflips trying to stay relevant.

A perfect example of online citizen journalism occurred in the UK this week, when blogger Jonathan MacDonald witnessed a London rail guard verbally abuse and physically intimidate an elderly passenger whose arm had become stuck in a train door. Midway through the incident, Jonathan had the foresight to whip out his video camera and film the exchange, during which the Transport for London (TFL) employee hurled insults at the passenger, swore loudly at him and threatened to “sling him under a train”.

When Jonathan expressed his distaste to another train guard and suggested that the abusive staffer would lose his job over it, she laughed at him. As a result, he felt compelled to blog the experience and tell as many people as possible as he believed the passenger was being bullied and an injustice had been done.

As well as blogging and tweeting about it, Jonathan posted the video on YouTube, filed an official complaint with TFL about the incident and sent emails to several members of the London press. Social media did the rest.

Outraged viewers of the video joined forces to spread the word, with Twitter users pushing the hashtag #TFL into the trending topics list. Bloggers linked to Jonathan’s post, shared the link on Facebook, MySpace and other social media networks. Within 24 hours the story made headlines on Sky, BBC, LBC, ITN and on the front page of the Evening Standard and the Telegraph. The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson became involved and at the time of this posting, Jonathan’s video has had nearly 145,000 views on YouTube.

As a result of Jonathan’s actions, the TFL employee has been suspended and is now the subject of an internal investigation.

The moral of this story? Never underestimate the power of social media.

From Jonathan’s blog:

“All I did was see something that shouldn’t be tolerated and used the ammunition we have in our hands – video/blogs/network… the main reason this story has flown is due to what happened on camera. We must remember that. It’s not me. I didn’t ‘invent the story’. I just blogged, like I do, and the Twitterverse powered the rest. The conversation may continue for a while and I hope that more citizens become aware of the power they already have to stop hatred, abuse and fear” he says.

Hats off to you Jonathan.

© Copyright 2012 All rights reserved. Jayde Online, Inc.

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