Digital Marketing Consultant

Profit from a Valuable New Habit

In the early 1900s, Claude C.  Hopkins found himself with a problem.  A leading figure in the new but booming advertising industry, a friend had asked him for help selling a new brand of toothpaste.  

Hopkins had beaten some major challenges before.  He had increased sales of Schlitz beer by telling people that the bottles were cleaned with "live steam" — which was, in fact, how all beer bottles were washed.  And he had successfully pushed Palmolive by persuading women that Cleopatra used the soap in her bath.  But advertising the new Pepsodent represented a whole new problem: at the time, barely 7 percent of Americans bought toothpaste.  Ten years later, that figure had risen to 65 percent.

Hopkins had done something that happens very rarely but which can have massive consequences: he had changed a habit.

America is Changing the Way It Watches TV

Something similar is happening now.  According to a new report from Forrester (http://goo.gl/Y7GLA) the habit of Americans to spend their evenings passively in front of a television screen is changing.  The report states that 85 percent of US tablet owners use their device while watching television, while data from Nielsen suggests that as much as 30 percent of time spent on a tablet coincides with time in front of the box.

Some companies have already noticed.  USA Networks and DC Comics worked together to create a graphic novel to complement the TV show “Burn Notice.”  But all marketers should understand that the estimated 50 million people who have bought an iPad (and the few others who opted for an Android device) are likely to be engaging with your brand with half-an-eye on the television and NO eye on commercials.

That means that at peak time, you know where they are likely to be and what they are likely to be doing.  

If you know that the demographic for your product is likely to be interested in a particular television show, it will pay not just to tweet about the show but to tweet during the show, using a related hashtag to capture your market's attention and pull them towards your website.

You can also make sure that you are present on Facebook during the show so that when someone makes a comment related to the program, you are right there with them, demonstrating that you share their interest, and deepening your connection.

Of course, not all your potential customers are going to own a tablet computer — but many will, and knowing where they will be at a set time gives you a major advantage.

And you will even be able to check your progress.  As you tweet and comment on social media during a television show, you should find that your connections increase and sales figures show an increase in the number of sales made between eight and ten in the evening.  

If the sales do increase, you will have given yourself a valuable new habit.  If it does not happen, you will have a good excuse for watching TV when normally you too busy.  Right?

by LAUREN INDVIK  •  MARCH 23, 2012

Google’s recent announcement that it is going to be retiring a bunch of its products has got people wondering.  If the company is prepared to kill off Wave after less than two years — a tool that Techcrunch described as one of the most ambitious products it had ever seen — will the company one day pull the plug on Google+?

Those banging the drum for the social network’s demise point out that membership has flattened out.  After racing to 40 million members in the months since its launch, activity on the site has remained relatively stable.  People who use social media rushed to join and see what all the fuss was about, but it does not appear that mainstream users have been tempted by the promise of Circles to abandon Facebook for the Google competitor.

So give it another year or two and we should be waving goodbye to Google+.

But perhaps not!  And whether we should celebrate its demise is questionable.

Sure, the thought of having to use yet another social network to market products is unlikely to make many sellers happy.  And the idea that markets might be fragmented across different platforms is always going to mean more work for the same results.  But Google+ did bring some valuable new tools to the social marketing field.

The ability to build Circles, Google+’s main advantage, is a powerful marketing device.  It might have been created with the idea of allowing members to separate the posts they want their friends to see from the posts they want their relatives to read, but it also allows marketers to segment their lists.  

That is hugely valuable.

Being able to ensure that particular posts are only read by the people most likely to respond to them will help to ensure maximum conversion rates.

How frequently firms are doing this is hard to say.  Companies have not started releasing figures and it may be too early anyway to build enough data to draw conclusions about the strategy’s effectiveness.  But while it should yield better conversions, it will mean significantly more effort: organizing the Circles; monitoring activities in each of those Circles; and creating different posts for each of those groups of buyers.

Should Google+ fail and the market stay concentrated solely on Facebook, it could save us all a lot of effort.

But it is unlikely to happen.  Not just because Google has so much invested in Google+.  And not just because the search company cannot easily do without its own social media platform at a time when Facebook pages are as important as website URLs.

It is unlikely to happen because Facebook has already started copying many of the biggest new features that Google+ brought to social media.

Subscriptions and lists might not be as user-friendly as Circles but they do the same thing: they allow users to read posts from people — and brands — they don’t know; and they allow marketers to send different messages to different groups of people.

And, one more thing: Google is not finished building Google+ and its social media marketing strategies.   I think we should look for some positive surprises ahead.   What do you think?

So Google+ has now opened up to business pages. Companies can create pages, just as they can on Facebook, sit in a Circle with other favored corporations and interact with customers through discussions, posts and images. 

For owners of small businesses, it is a huge headache.

And it is not just that writing posts for Google+ and monitoring activity on the site is another draw on our time. It is that we have to learn how to do it. Google+ is new, so there are few case studies to look at and no figures to see which kinds of posts draw the biggest responses. While it is likely that the biggest influencers on Twitter and Facebook are also likely to be the most dominant on Google+, that is not certain. Until your Google+ page is up and running, you cannot be sure which of your followers are (notice I optimistically use the plural) most likely to spread the word, pass on your updates and take part in your discussions.

Google has now given us all a whole new learning curve to ride.

That is the bad news. The good news is that those marketers whose background included time in a traditional sales environment have an advantage.

It may not look that way. Facebook is now seven years old so many of those leaving college and starting careers in marketing will have been using the site since their mid-teens. To them, social media is as familiar an environment as the local park, and as challenging a tool as an old-fashioned feature phone. 

But take a look at Toyota’s Google+ page. Sure, the company has used the layout of photos at the top of the page to create a single image (just as some smart Facebookers have done). But look at the posts. There is lots of talk of “we” and “our.” When someone asks when he can expect to see the new Rav4s, the response is personal:

“Hi Jeremy. You'll see the '12 RAV 4s towards the end of December. Thanks for the post. ^RF”

This is not hi-tech wizardry, and it is got nothing to do with all of the smart things that Google+ can do that neither Facebook nor Twitter can do. This is a salesman fielding an enquiry from a customer. It is a personal touch with a greeting, a first name and initials at the end that tell the reader that this is coming from a real person and not from a company.

This is a simple post that lets leads know that when they are ready to buy, someone will be there ready to help them.

That is what traditional sales people have always done. They have always answered questions, built connections and used their personalities to make them the go-to guy when the lead needed products like theirs.

Google might have given marketers a new sales vehicle to learn how to drive, but for anyone who knows what really drives sales, getting behind the wheel should not be too uncomfortable.

Protecting Your Brand on Google

Have you ever searched for a company name, brand name or product in a search engine before you made a purchase or decided to do business with that organization? Your online brand is extremely important to monitor and manage.  Having one negative listing in the top 10 results of a search engine could be enough to have prospects steer away, leave your existing customers in a state of panic, and damage your brand to the point where business starts to go south.

Did You Know Facebook Has...

• More than 500 million active users
• 50% of active users log on to Facebook in any given day
• More than 35 million users update their status each day
• More than 60 million status updates posted each day
• More than 3 billion photos uploaded to the site each month
• More than 5 billion pieces of content (weblinks, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each week
• More than 3.5 million events
• More than 3 million active pages on Facebook
• More than 1.5 million local businesses have active pages on Facebook

This is where almost any business online regardless of their product, service or target audience can leverage Facebook.  Businesses can use Facebook simply as another landing page to tell visitors about their company.  The fact that Facebook is a creditable source, has a high page rank, is updated frequently and has millions of pages and links are all reasons for Google to rank a Facebook Business Page on page one of Google.  This is very similar to having your business listing on a site like Wikipedia, which also comes up high in the search results.

Every time you obtain a page one ranking in Google, you push down any of your competitors and negative listings that may be impacting your brand.  Combining this strategy with other social sites will allow an organization to dominate page one of Google for your branded term.  For example, if a user was to search for the phrase MSNBC, which is a cable news channel in the United States, you can see the areas in yellow to the left that outline social media channels such as Wikipedia, Twitter and Blogs that MSNBC is leveraging as well as their Facebook Page in green.

I lifted this article from TechCrunch where it was published on May 7th.  Forgive me, TechCrunch.  As a business Internet consultant, I try to explain the my clients that it is a full-time job to keep up with the moving target of Digital Marketing.  This article explains the coming rule changes in search.

Editor’s note: The following guest post is written by Shashi Seth, the senior vice president of Search products at Yahoo! Previously, Shashi worked at Google where he developed the monetization strategy for YouTube and was also the product lead for search.

Search is about to change quite radically.  For more than a decade, search has been stagnant: the core product has not changed much.  Users have changed radically in that time frame.  Even though the kind of content users consume is different, search engines are still focused mostly on web pages.  Users have become less patient and have less time on hand, while search engines still require users to dig through and extract information from the web pages to find what they’re looking for.  In addition, users are spending more and more time on their mobile phones and other connected devices, which require a completely different kind of user experience for search.

When we talk about Search, keep in mind that Search, Discovery, Recommendations, and Serendipity are all essentially the same thing.  Why?  Well, to start with, one would need a comprehensive index of content for each of these things to work.  This gives you a world view, so to speak.  How that index is created has changed over time, and what goes into that index has changed.  About ten years ago, the index only consisted of HTML pages, but that information has been changing.  How the index was created was heavily focused on signals provided by HTML pages, links, consumption, etc.

Today, many social signals are consumed, including how often and how quickly an entity or URL is being embedded elsewhere, whether it is with positive or negative intent and sentiment, and is it trending up or down since last week/month.  Search engines have mostly focused on the backend and infrastructure, and rightly so, because search requires a delicate balance between some of the most complex technologies, and a vast amount of infrastructure.  Solving today’s user needs requires a different focus: a special blend of science, a finely tuned user experience, cutting-edge design skills, and a slightly different mix of engineering and infrastructure.

The question now is—how do search engines respond to this new world?

The answer, to put it simply, is to re-imagine search.  The new landscape for search will likely focus on getting the answers the user needs without requiring the user to interact with a page of traditional blue links.  In fact, there may be cases where there are no blue links on a search results page at all.

Search engines will keep assimilating content from many different sources and aim to provide immediate and rich answers.  You ask a question and you get answers, nothing else.  The user may not even type the full question.  Search engines will have to become more and more personal, understand the individual user’s preferences, location, type of content preferred, context from previous search and browse behavior, signals from social graphs, and much more.

Search has been a pull mechanism for information and content, while social sites such as Facebook and Twitter are push.  For search to succeed in today’s world, it has to become more push, which is why we at Yahoo! have been so focused on what we call contextual searches.  A contextual search is when a user happens to be away from a search box, maybe reading an article on Yahoo! News, and comes across a name, or place that he/she wants more information on, yet they don’t want to spoil the reading experience and leave the page, open a new tab, and do a search.

With Infinite Browse, Yahoo! currently enables users to highlight the term and get a small pop-up search result out of that action, without leaving the page. Yahoo! also identifies and underlines interesting terms/entities on the page, so when the user hovers over the word or words, additional information is provided.

Imagine a future where this information is entirely pushed to you without prompting the search, so engagement with the content you want is immediately at your fingertips.  This will prompt more and more searches to happen away from traditional search results pages, and will happen more in context of wherever the user may be—reading a news article and wanting to know more about a topic or entity, accessing information on a commuter train, getting recommendations pushed while writing an email or social conversation on that topic, and much more.

In the near term, innovation in search will provide more in-depth answers.  For example, if someone types the name of a Major League Baseball team, they get a search results page with the team’s homepage and likely a couple pieces of recent news.  In the next phase of search, you will type the name of that baseball team and without hitting the search button or leaving the search box, you will be presented with an interactive display that includes a link to their homepage, recent news, the results and box score of their last game, their overall record and standing in their division, a schedule of upcoming games, photos, videos, and social media streams.

How about searching for a restaurant? In search today, you find links to the restaurant’s homepage, address, phone number, and rating.  In new iterations of search, you will type the name of that restaurant and be provided with its address and map, a view of its menu, the option to reserve then and there via OpenTable, see its ranking on Yelp, CitySearch, Zagat—along with photos, tweets, what your friends have said about it in your private social networks, and a quick and simple way to compare it with other similar restaurants.

The next chapter of search is going to be about providing answers and not just answers from Q&A sites (although Yahoo! Answers hit a billion Q&A last year).  We obviously believe in these types of “answers” and leverage it heavily, yet there are plenty of other types of real-time answers.

Most search indexes are in the 10s of billions of URLs, trending towards 100s of billions of URLs.  Information is dynamic and changes frequently.  For example, the movies running in a theater next to you are changing every week, and the timings may change even more frequently.  The San Francisco Giants score changes frequently too, as do the players stats.  So, while Q&A sites are really interesting in solving a certain set of needs for users, they are only a piece of the puzzle.

But the rise of Q&A sites across the Web speaks to the underlying need for better answers.  A new era in search is just around the corner that will make it easier to access the information, services and answers people are looking for.  A list of links just doesn’t cut it anymore.

Seeing how Google is flourishing, soon we’ll see parents and teachers teaching their kids “G is for Google.”  Google is not just a search engine but has hundreds of applications and services that every one and anyone can use to his/her advantage.  Now, if you are running a business and still not aware everything that Google is providing, here is a quick view. 

Google’s web search is receiving and dealing with millions of queries each day.  The main purpose of this Google web search engine is to hunt for text and images in the various pages available on the Internet.  Google has recently made advancement in its searching technology by introducing Google Caffeine.  The main idea behind this is crawling and hunting for text and information more accurately and faster.  You can learn how to take advantage of this engine to benefit your company and your sales. 

Google Products

“Froogle” became “Google Base” then “Google Product Search” and now is “Google Merchant Center.”  This implies that Google has many products with different properties.  With its diverse properties Google shopping has been made easier and much more prominent for you to list your products or services.  You can set up a feed if your business involves many products. 

Google Analytics

This is the tool that can track and analyze your site traffic.  It will keep a check on who visits and at what time.  You can subscribe for a weekly report via email and get a detailed analysis regarding your information.  What is important here is that you learn to understand what all the statistics are trying to tell you about your business.  But before the Internet, none of this was possible.

Google AdWords

Google helps you promote and run your ads on the search engine.  It will not be wrong to say here that Google AdWords Pay-Per-Click program can be a key revenue generator.  If you are unaware of how to use such this program for your business, it will be best to get help from a Google AdWords Advisor.  We are very aware of the huge sums that have been wasted on Pay-Per-Click unnecessarily.  

Google Places

By using Google Places, you can not only develop a strong local strategy but also promote your products and services in your city and region.  By paying a minimal amount, you can establish your Google local identity to include your business information, coupons, videos, and photos to attract your users. 

Google Webmaster Central

This will help you see how effective your website pages are.  For example, with this tool you can monitor your web conversions.  Add a word or two like ‘free shipping’ to your pages and the optimizer on the dashboard will let you know the effect.  This technique can really help improve the ratio of traffic conversion and have a powerful impact on the development of your website. 

Google Affiliate Network

To be part of the Google Affiliate Network, you will have access the Google’s large pool of publishers who will divert traffic to your site in exchange for some commission.

All the Google tools to help a business have success are too many to describe here.  They include Adsense, Checkout, DoubleClick, Apps, Postini Services, Geospatial Solutions, and Google Enterprise Search.  It may be a bit overwhelming to try to utilize all of Google’s possibilities, but with expert help, your business can grow.

So From Where Do We Get Valuable Links?

Other websites will link to your website if you have good content that they wish to refer to. In this case your website will acquire links without much intervention from you.

Many webmasters soon realized that external links would get their website ranked well and that is when they started to use techniques that are seen or termed as Black Hat SEO. A term used when one engages in activities that try to manipulate the search engine rankings.

The objective with link building is to get links back to your website using your “product keyword” or variable thereof in the link text. This is seen as a valuable link and not easily manipulated.

Links can be created by the following link building strategies:

• Blog posts that promote, discuss or compare products
• Article marketing – where one writes product related articles and submits to Article Websites where webmasters can use your article on their websites. The rule is that they cannot change your content and must leave the authors signature where links are pointed back to your website.
• Reciprocal links from other industry related websites. Where webmasters agree to swap links with one other using requested valuable link text.

Where Does Social Media Marketing Fit In?

Social Media could mean many things to us especially if one is not familiar with the term.  Social media could be looked at in the following categories:

• Social media advertising – using paid text or banner ads on sites like Facebook. These ads allow you to target your market based on their demographics
• Social media book marking – Sites like Digg and Stumbleupon provide users with the ability to tag websites that they like or recommend. Social Book marking supports your search engine linking strategy
• Social media optimization – upload your videos to Youtube and optimize them using product related keywords and you stand the chance of getting on Google’s first page for your related keywords. By posting optimized content on websites like Craigslist & Yahoo Answers (or it's successor), one can get ranked for related keywords in a short space of time.
• Social media networking – many business owners attend regular networking meetings where the objective is to meet other business owners with the objective of doing business with each other. Social media websites like LinkedIn provide professionals with a way to establish relationships online where one can build credibility and introduce their products and services in an educational manner.

The Study

Yesterday we talked about what search engine visibility was and the studies around it. 

What Information do We Look For?

The study revealed that people who use search engines are looking for the following information in order of importance:

• Easily found prices
• Download info
• Product info
• Product comparisons
• Your company’s approach to business
• Technical papers
• Knowledge base
• General information about your product
• White papers
• Case studies
• Multimedia like video on your product
• Information about your company
• Webinars
• Podcasts

From this list it is easy to see what the secret is; It is CONTENT. I am sure you’ve all heard of the phrase content is king.  Well, since the inception of the Internet, content is what we have all been looking for. It has stood the test of time, while many of us try to keep up with Google’s ever changing algorithms.

Once we find out that content is all we need to achieve search engine visibility, we see many business owners get excited about participating in their website marketing with great results.

The best way to get a return on your website investment is to create an asset out of your website. This is achieved by adding content to your website on a regular basis. This strategy is called Content Marketing. By adding content pages you increase your chances of ranking for long tail keyword phrases. These are phrases of 3 or more words that often result in highly focused and targeted search results.

Comment from John Danenbarger: I cannot remember which publication had this article, but forgive me for not crediting you.

How To Use Video SEO To Jump To The Top Of Google Search Results

Editor’s note: In the following guest post, Fliqz  CEO Benjamin Wayne  reveals some of the secrets of using video to help boost the search results rankings of your website. Fliqz is an online video platform.

As most search engine optimization (SEO) experts are aware, getting a first-page Google result is harder than ever. Not only do Google’s search and indexing algorithms continue to evolve in complexity, but Google has given over more and more of its search results real estate to “blended” search results, displaying videos and images towards the top of the first page, and pushing down—and sometimes off the page—traditional web results that would have otherwise competed for top rankings.

But where problems arise, so do opportunities. Although Google’s newfound enthusiasm for video has created more competition for fewer traditional search results, it has enabled sites with video assets—even sites that would otherwise score poorly in the Google index—to successfully achieve first-page rankings. In fact, Forrester Research found  that videos were 53 times more likely than traditional web pages to receive an organic first-page ranking.

Here’s what a blended search result looks like for the search query “777 built in 4 minutes “:
 
Those images at the top of the search results are video thumbnails, and today, there’s only two ways to get there:

1. Upload your video to YouTube.

The advantage of this is that you are 100% certain to be indexed into Google’s search engine. This does not guarantee you’ll get a first-page result, but at least it ensures that Google knows your content exists.

The drawback, of course, is that anyone who clicks on a YouTube result will be taken to YouTube, which may be fine if your goal is branding (i.e., you only care that people watch your video). If your goal is driving traffic, as is typically the case with SEO, this won’t be a successful strategy.

Your other alternative is:

2. Video SEO

Video SEO is a set of techniques designed to make sure that:
•    Google finds your video content
•    Google successfully indexes your video content
•    Google will display your video content when specific keywords are entered as search terms

Here’s how to make it work:

You Need Video Content

Google is fairly flexible in what it considers to be video content. You can use actual video footage, but screen captures, slide shows, animated PowerPoint slides, and other content will work just as well. Google can’t actually “see” what’s inside the video content, so it relies on title and other meta-data to determine what content your video actually contains.

Submission, Not Discovery

With traditional web pages, Google utilizes crawlers to discover and index web content. Unfortunately, Google can’t read Flash very well (although it is trying), and as a result, most video content is invisible to Google’s search crawlers. Therefore, the best way to appear in Google’s blended search results is to submit your video to Google using a Video Sitemap . This is similar to an XML sitemap, but is formatted specifically for video, and only contains information about your video content. It is submitted using Google’s Webmaster Tools.

The most common error in Video SEO is to assume that because you have submitted the web page on which a video resides, that the video content itself is being indexed.

You’ll also need to make sure that you have a robots.txt  file on all video pages, to ensure that Google can easily verify that the locations on the Web you’ve submitted do in fact exist, and that they contain embed codes which indicate the presence of a video.

Title and Title Tags

When ranking videos, Google primarily considers the match between search keywords and the video title. Although Google allows you to submit other meta-data such as description and keywords, these currently don’t have much influence on your search ranking. Google likes it when the title tag of the page matches the title of the video, and will give a higher weighting for results where this is the case.

Video SEO is Long Tail

Like traditional SEO, you’re much more likely to see results with Video SEO if you target more specific, or longer tail, search terms. A video titled “Dog” is unlikely to produce a first-page ranking, while a video titled “German Shepherd Police Dog” will be more likely to score well in Google’s algorithm. Since Google can’t determine the actual content of the video, you might consider submitting the same video multiple times with different titles that match potential search terms.

New and Small Don’t Matter

With traditional SEO, the age of a website is an important consideration for Google in deciding its ranking. Google also considers things like the number of pages on the site, and the number of links to the site, along with the importance of the places those links originate.

In Video SEO, none of this matters. This means that even new sites and small sites can compete on equal footing with larger and more established players. Publishers who are too small or too new to even consider traditional SEO can still be taking advantage of Video SEO opportunities.

For the Foreseeable Future, Video SEO is a Winning Strategy

As time goes by, Google’s discovery and indexing of video content will no doubt become more sophisticated, and as competition for video results increases, it will become harder for sites to achieve these first-page rankings. However, the number of web pages still massively outnumbers indexed video assets, and for as long as that continues, publishers will have an opportunity to jump to the top of Google’s search results through Video SEO.