Posts Tagged ‘Marketing’
February 15th, 2010 | 
Author: Although there are many factors to consider when trying to get your website listed higher in the search engines, backlinks are important. A backlink to your site is a link one someone else’s website that goes directly to yours. Consider Site A links to Site B. If you are Site B, you have a backlink from Site A. Got it?
So how do you know who is linking to you? Well, there are many sites out there that can show you this information, but a simple quick and easy way is to go directly to the Google Search Engine. Simply type into the search box – link: www.domainname.com where domain name is your domain. See below in the example for my website.
First glance and it looks like there are over 1,400 links back to my site. Technically this may be true, but many of those links are actually within my own site. One page linking to others. Once you get through all of those, you can see other sites that have added a link to their pages back to one of yours. This could be from another blog, a forum you visited and added your information to, or a site just showing you some love! It’s a good idea to know who is out there and linking to you. A lot of the sites listed when I do my search, I already know about. However, I often find someone linking that I had no idea about either! Sharing links is good, if it makes sense for your website. Consider a list of other local and trusted businesses, or offer a shared link for those that meet certain requirements.
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Once in a while, a video, blog post or news story will spread online like wildfire with unstoppable speed. At times it’s information that’s pretty pointless (a YouTube video of someone dancing or singing), or it could be a “news” story reported by some bystander through a Tweet (the landing of the plane in the Hudson River). Often we have no way of knowing how or why something is so big, but to get your information to spread viral is huge. Although hitting it big can be chance, there are still great marketing tactics you can use to induce a viral attack!
1. E-mail Signatures
You have huge power at your finger tips in your own e-mail client! Use your e-mail signature effectively to spread your message. Have a conference coming up you want people to sign up for? Add a link to a website with more information. Want people to know about a new product? Perhaps add an image or photo to the bottom. A well constructed signature can spread the word. Each e-mail you send will keep the marketing word flowing. Get on an e-mail thread that includes many recipients, even better!
2. Newsletters
It’s your newsletter, it’s your news! Add information that helps you market in the right way. Get people to sign up through your website, offering something in return. Perhaps a useful article that is free to those who register? Use case studies, white papers and fun contests to get people to read it, including info about your products throughout.
3. Twitter
Although this one might be fairly obvious, many companies have avoided ‘tweeting’ for fear of the unknown. Use this medium to generate new relationships and nurture and grow current ones. Although having a decent number of followers means a lot of immediate readers, it’s those well written tweets that are likely to be retweeted by your followers, which is were taking it viral happens! Consider someone on topic, funny or thought provoking for maximum impact.
4. Facebook
Similar to Twitter, the more friends you have the better. BUT, a carefully thought out status, or post can help generate interest. You can also use Facebook to upload photos and videos along with your posts. Consider a photo album full of product screenshots, or a launch party you just had. Everyone loves an image of people having a great time, what better marketing angle than that?
5. LinkedIn
Sometimes the forgotten younger sister of Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn can be just as powerful. It’s viewed as perhaps the more professional networking site of the three but can still be used to add posts, comments and feedback to others. Use all three together and feed your tweets and Facebook updates directly into your LinkedIn profile. Makes your marketing plan easier to execute when you can minimize your work efforts.
6. You Tube
If you have a product or service you are trying to market, many buyers feel happier making a commitment to buy if they can see the end result, rather than read a press release just ‘telling’ them all about it. Film other clients giving testimonials, go out and do a survey on the streets, or film a demonstration. Anything that will show you and your company in the best and quickest way. Again, combine this with numbers 2-4 and link back to the video from those avenues.
7. Social Bookmarking
There are many sites out there that allow you to repost or ’bookmark’ your articles and information you have posted online. Using tools like Share This on your blog will enable your readers to simply click and send the content to sites like Digg, Stumble Upon and Reddit. This is a very quick way for a blog post to go viral. As always, unique, genuine and well written content will be the first to find its way to those sites!
8. Affiliate Programs
An Affiliate Program allows people to sign up and earn rewards if they can refer visitors from their own website, back to your site, and the end result be that a purchase was made by the visitor. This is a legitimate way to have others help spread your word and generate interest in your product. Companies like GoDaddy and Amazon have affiliate programs which a pretty popular, you just need to come up with what reward you will bestow on those that help you in your quest for helping with your marketing!
9. Groups and Forums
Being the member of an online group (think Yahoo, LinkedIn, Industry related groups) can bring a lot of value to your company. Having the opportunity to build and grow relationships is the primary reason. Building relationships builds trust. Trust can equal a sale. Although going in there spamming the message boards will get you kicked out fast, you can use the signature of your profile to link back to marketing information. Also, if your product is relevant to the discussions going on, share the info with the rest of the group.
10. Microsoft Tags
This last way is pretty new, and you can read more information about it in a previous blog post, but adding a tag to your product brochures, cards and website can be a fun new way to spread the news!
Can you think of any more? Feel free to share so we can all learn more!
If you have had your Facebook Profile or Fan Page for a while, you might not know that you can select your own unique url. This makes it easier to give a client the link of http://www.facebook.com/GeorgiaTrolleyServices rather than giving them the link of http://www.facebook.com/pages/Lawrenceville-GA/Georgia-Trolley-Services/78159213364?ref=ts. The first is a lot catchier and easy to remember!
So how do you do it? You need to be logged in to your account first of all. Then simply type in the following url:
You will then be prompted to select your preferred username:
Keep in mind that if your name is John Smith, chances of you getting this name as your unique url are pretty slim! You might have to get creative. Usernames are a relatively new option that were introduced around the middle of 2009. It was announced that the feature was coming and some users grabbed their username as soon as they were able to! With the first launch of this, you could only select the username for your profile and not for your Fan Page. So, many people (including myself) used their business name as their username. I am kicking myself now because I have a Megan Walker Facebook Profile with the username of http://www.facebook.com/PurpleStarConsulting but then have a Fan Page with a url of http://www.facebook.com/PSConsulting. If I could choose again I would, but once you pick the url, you are stuck with it!
If the username is available, you can select it by clicking Confirm. If you are not sure, click Cancel and search for something else. As I said, this is final so you want to be sure! Once you click Confirm, you can start sending people your new Facebook url! A lot easier and simpler to remember. *** (while this facebook url is real, it is used for a test account and is not monitored)
Want some free and shameless promotion? Post your own unique Facebook url! Let’s see what you got!
Ok, so I think this is pretty cool. Microsoft introduced a Beta (in testing) project back in January 2009. They created new technology using barcodes, similar to those you might find on products in the grocery store. These bar-codes can be placed on fliers, on the back of business cards, on the back of packaging or in your store somewhere. You can create them to hold data that when snapped with your camera on your smart phone, you can be taken to a website, see an advert, view a video, or download your online business card directly to the phone!
The first step, in order to actually click on these bar-codes is to download the tag reader from the Microsoft website. Or, download it from your phone browser using this link: http://gettag.mobi This will download the application to your smart phone (which must have a camera). Next, you need a tag to snap! Using the Tag Reader application you downloaded, you will simply click a picture of the bar-code tag in the image below. My BlackBerry phone needed a bit of patience and practice when snapping the image. My husbands Sprint HTC Touch Pro 2 phone didn’t even need me to click the camera, it zoomed in and found the image on it’s own, pretty cool!
Creating the tags is pretty easy. You must create an account, or you can use your MSN Live account and log in with that if you already have one. Once you are logged in, you can start creating tags. It allows you determine what will happen when someone snaps your tag. Do you want it to go out to a website (as the one above will), dial a number that you can set up with some kind of advertisement or 1-800 number with information, or even download your business card to their address book!
As you can see on the tag above, you can customize the tags with your own images and include them in the bar-code. Clicking on the tag above will download my vCard (business card) directly to your address book! The possibilities are endless! Although this is relatively new, companies are catching on to the technology. Microsofts website shows Pilsbury and General Mills using tags on some of their fliers, and Xbox and Best Buy have used them also. They can be used to send information about new products, generate hype about up coming events, or send information to customers in a fun and unique way.
How could you envision incorporating this into your business? Can you see it catching on, or a need for this method of distributing data? Let us know what you think in the comments below.
Recently I have worked on a number of different projects on a variety of websites. Some wanted a whole new site, ready for the opening of their new store, one company already had the website they wanted but needed a blog added, and another was looking for some search engine optimization. I wanted to take a moment to highlight some of them here.
The first is for a wonderful lady named Suzanne who just recently opened a coffee and cake shop in Lawrenceville, GA. Known as the Cheesecake lady, she found a great location in the downtown area. Walking into the building gave me all the inspiration I needed to create a website that was a reflection of her and her family, and the cozy and inviting ambiance she had created. The color of the walls were red and green, and inspirational quotes were stenciled onto the walls. Along one of the walls, she has a gallery of photos with wonderful black frames, a great contrast against the red background. I used these colors for her website, and recreated the quotes into image files, one for each page of her site. Sweets on the Square has a wonderful gallery page to showcase her work:
Click on one of the small thumbnail images, and get a full glorious photograph of one of her edible creations. Using lightbox code, the images can then be scrolled through easily and to get more information about the desert.
She also has an online contact form with an interactive Google map so visitors can easily find her and get directions. If you are local to the area, you have to stop by, she makes the best cheesecakes! Visit her site here: www.sweetsonthesquareonline.com
Next is a site that had been created by one of the owners of the company. Baby Steps Online offers classes in childbirth and all things baby and pregnancy related. Their goal is to offer mothers and fathers the information and tools they need to make the decisions that are best for their families.
They already had a WordPress blog and understood the importance of blogging and how it could improve your rank in the search engine results. One of the things that the search engines look for with regard to your site is how often they are updated. Blogs, when updated regularly are great for this, and you can inform and educate your reader at the same time! The only problem was, their blog was hosted at WordPress.com, and was not a self hosted blog on their own server. This means that it’s not going to be your main site that gets the hits but your blog, not hosted within your main domain. Another thing with WordPress’s hosted blogs are that the themes you can use are limited, meaning that you don’t have as much flexibility. WordPress also offers free code for designers to set up a database for you, and design a theme that is exactly the same as your current website. This allows you to incorporate it directly into your website. So, rather than having http://babystepsonline.wordpress.com/ for their blog they now have it within their own domain url at http://www.babystepsonline.net/blog/. This also allows them to keep the visitor within their site, rather then out to an external site and also to use their own favorite icon, rather than the WordPress one. If you have a WordPress Blog that is external and hosted by WordPress, yet you have your own domain, consider having it set up and customized to have the same look and feel, and consistent branding with the rest of your website.
Finally, I recently did some Search Engine Optimization for a wonderful new client called Two Dads Pet Services. Mike Howell, one of the owners, contacted me after hearing reviews from a fellow pet sitter, Valerie Pegg of Best Fit Pet Sit. Val is at the top of the search engines, something Mike was looking for. Not looking for a total site overhaul at the moment, he was looking for some simple things I could provide to help out with their site.
The first thing I added was a favorite icon to the site. This shows up right next to the url of the website and is great for site and brand recognition. This shows up also when someone bookmarks your website. These can be made from your company logo, or anything that you wish to keep your icon unique and eye catching. 
I also made some changes to the titles of their pages. The title is what shows up at the very top of your browser. Most people tend to stick with the name of their company, and then maybe one or two words to describe the page. Do this, and you miss out considerable one what the Google search engines in particular are looking for. The titles are very important to the search engines, and use them to find key words when people do searches. It can take a few weeks for these to be scanned through and have an impact, but already if you type in Pet Sitter in Brookhaven, they are on the first page of results (remember, blogging is the biggest thing you can do to keep high on the list!). Keywords and Descriptions are also important, but not as big a deal as they used to be. With different search engines having different algorithms and calculations, best to use all that you can. I also added Google Analytics code to each page, and also submitted the site to three of the major search engines. This allows Mike to see who is visiting his site, and how they are finding him.
For more information on any of these services, please contact us at info@purplestarconsulting.com
