Green Marketing 2.0| SEO SEM Social Media Consulting - Lorna Li» Online Marketing

10 Ways to Get a Website Indexed Fast

lorna li — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 06:00:08 +0000

Been researching ways to get a website indexed faster than 48-72 hours. If a 2-3 day indexation time frame is OK for you, then here are fast, easy ways you can get your site indexed by Google.

Ping your website and individual pages using free tools like Ping-o-matic or Pingoat
Stumble it on Stumble Upon or other social discovery sites
Tweet it on Twitter
Syndicate the RSS feed to Friendfeed, and other RSS & blog directories. A great list of blog and RSS directories can be found here.
Bookmark it on Delicious or other social bookmarking sites
Link to it from well established website or blog
Hook the URL up to Feedburner
Include the URL in your a forum signature
Send out a press release
Submit the XML site map to Google

If your new website is a business, submit it to local directories, like the free Brownbook, or via a paid service like Get Listed, which will submit your listing to Google Maps, Yahoo Local and more. However, local directory submissions are a bit more time consuming.

There is no need to apply every technique, usually one or more will do the trick.

Submitting your XML Sitemap can Speed Up Indexation

If you want it indexed sooner, say, within a few hours, submitting the website’s sitemap to Google can speed things up.

If your website is self hosted, you can easily create an XML site map in 4 easy steps using this XML Sitemap Generator.
If your site is a self-hosted WordPress.org site, you’ll want to use the Google XML Sitemap Generator plugin.

In order to submit your XML site map to Google Webmaster Tools. You’ll need to sign up for a GWT account, verify your site, and then submit the XML sitemap through their sitemap submission tool.

XML Sitemap Submission for WordPress.com Blogs

If the new site is hosted on WordPress.com, then you can take advantage of their Tools and built in XML sitemap. Your WordPress.com sitemap can be viewed when you go to YourSite.WordPress.com/sitemap.xml. WordPress.com provides instructions on how you can get your Wordpress.com blog verified by search engines. Essentially you’ll need to:

Sign up for an Google Webmaster Tools account
Choose the Meta Tag option for site verification
Copy the verification code
Go to the Tools area in your account control panel, paste the verification code into the appropriate field and save.
Go back to GWT and click on the Verify button
Then submit your XML sitemap

In the old days, webmasters used to talk about the “Google Sandbox”, an effect whereby Google puts new sites “on probation” for x months, until finally including it in the index. I’ve never encountered a Google Sandbox effect with any of the sites I’ve built – applying the above tactics usually gets them indexed in a couple of days, maybe a week if I do nothing.

It’s possible to use mass submission software programs, like the Website Indexer to get sites indexed within, some say, 5 minutes. However, if you are not in a huge rush, any of the above methods should work without you having to download a software program onto your computer.

The Complete Road Map to Launching a Green Brand Online

lorna li — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 05:30:03 +0000

Never has there been a better time to launch a green business. With more and more people becoming aware of climate change, consumers are increasingly seeking out more environmentally sustainable products. If your products or services have been designed to be low impact or environmentally sustainable, it’s important to communicate these benefits to your target audience. Establishing a memorable green brand will help you stand out in the crowd. Here is a road map to help you with your green branding process from concept to finished website.

Keyword research. A really good starting for the branding process is doing some keyword research using a free tool like Keyword Discovery or the Google Adwords Keyword Research tool. This will help you understand what your customers are looking for when they are researching your product in search engines. It will also help you understand how many searches a month are performed for your products or services, which will help inform your branding and messaging.
Brand name and tag line. Brainstorming a name for your company or product is fun and creative, but one fatal mistake that many business entrepreneurs make is the failure to include a search keyword in their brand name. For example, if you are an organic chocolate company, consider including “organic chocolates” in your brand name or tag line. This way your customer will make the association between your unique brand name and the product you sell. Bear in mind that once you’ve established your brand, its a pain to turn back re-brand, so be sure to do your keyword research in the beginning.
Domain name. At times it’s not possible to include your search keyword in your brand name or tag line. Maybe it’s too awkward or long. If so, that’s OK, but definitely do your best to make sure that your keyword is in your domain name. Having your keyword in your domain name will help with search engine optimization (SEO), as it indicates to search engine spiders that your website is about that keyword.
Messaging. You will need a mission statement and a clear laundry list of what makes your product, service, and or company more green. What makes you unique? What products do you offer? What makes them better? Why buy from you rather than from the generic product manufacturer. Once you’ve fine tuned your messaging, be able to distill the essence of your company’s unique value proposition into a 30 second elevator pitch
Website architecture. Now that you’ve got your company & product messaging nailed down, you will now need to think about how this will map out onto a website. Of course you will need your utility pages, like the About page, Contact us page. Most importantly, you will need to think about how to organize your product pages and what keywords you need to optimize those pages for. For example:

www.greenyogacompany.com
www.greenyogacompany.com/yoga-mats/
www.greenyogacompany.com/yoga-mats/brand1
www.greenyogacompany.com/yoga-mats/brand2

The more organized your product pages are in terms of semantic themes and hierarchy, the better this will be for SEO. Try mapping out your web pages in Excel.

Web platform. As a small business entrepreneur, you are busy growing your business. The last thing you want is to get bogged down by the minutiae of website maintenance, or have to pay someone each time you want to update your site. Therefore it’s critical you choose a platform that is the least amount of work to manage and maintain, such as a content management system that allows you to edit your content in an easy to use interface, rather than in html. You can easily set up a free website on a number of platforms like Blogger, Weebly, and Wordpress.com. However, for more control and flexibility in appearance and functionality, getting a self-hosted Wordpress.org site is great option.

Many inexpensive web hosts do one click installs of WordPress software onto your server. From there, you can install a myriad of beautiful, free, WordPress themes. You can select a website theme, or a blog theme, or a theme that incorporates both. For example, the free Green Stimulus theme for green business enables you to select whether you want a website option, a website plus blog, and it will even allow you to publish your blog posts to the home page. Watch this video demo of a San Francisco multimedia agency installing Green Stimulus.

While most people know WordPress as a blogging platform, it can be used just as easily to power your small business website. All this involves is choosing the right WordPress theme for your business.

Website copy. Now that you’ve selected a web platform and your website architecture has been established, you are going to need SEO-friendly copy written for the pages. Use excel to map out your page urls and target keywords. Then, write the copy yourself or if you are too busy, as most entrepreneurs are, outsource the web copywriting through oDesk, Elance, or Textbroker. Another good reason to choose WordPress is that many writers and bloggers already know how to use it, so you can hire someone to write the web copy AND post it publish it directly to WordPress, so you are not stuck with the cut & paste & formatting job.
Logo, identity, and website design. While you’re web copy is getting written, now’s a great time to get your logo and website designed. The great news is, you can get great, professional design done very inexpensively these days through design contest websites like Crowdspring and 99Designs. You launch a design contest, and a specified cash prize amount on these sites, and dozens of talented designers from all over the join your contest. This gives you the abilility to evaluate different styles and concepts. The more clear you are in your project specifications and in your feedback, the better the design will be.
Web development. Let’s say you decided to go with a custom website design rather than use a free theme. At this point you will need to turn your design PSD from your design contest into code. This may be the most complicated part of your website launch process, especially if you are not tech savvy. The great news is, you can find web developers to help you with this process on outsourcing sites like ODesk, Elance, and vWorker.com (formerly Rent a Coder). You can also find a number of services to convert your design to html or even into a Wordpress theme. Try XHTMLChop or ShopHTML. You will still need a web developer to take these files and integrate them, but this will shave off some hours off his / her consulting time.

The “right” way to lauch build a website is to build it first on a test server, QA everything to make it works, before migrating it over to its proper address – your business domain name. That way, you don’t have visitors coming to your site and witnesssing it in an awkward stage. In the very least, slap up a site maintenance page while work is being done.

Launch & promote. Once you’ve ensured everything is working you are ready to launch and promote your site. Announce the launch of your business website to your community, and get it listed in various directories, especially local directories if you are a brick and mortar business. Be sure to claim your local listing on Google Places, Yahoo Local, Bing Local, and get listed on Yelp, BOTW Local, Citysearch, etc. To submit to several directories at once, use GetListed.org.

There you have it, the complete road map for establishing your green brand online, from scratch. Happy launching.

How to Optimize Your Green Business Website for Local Search

lorna li — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 08:15:18 +0000

Search engine optimization for your small business website is quite a difficult process, especially when facing competition from older, more established giants. Larger websites often have strong domain authority and many pages of content, which makes it easier for to rank higher in search engines for competitive keywords, as well as rank for a plethora of long tail keywords, enabling them to capture more search engine traffic. But there are ways in which a small green business can easily compete with the bigger and more popular websites on various search engines, especially at the local level.

Nearly 40 percent of all searches include some reference to local information. Even when the search query doesn’t ask for local information, search engines still provide local results. This is because, more often than not, when a consumer is searching for a product or service, such as “organic catering company“, chances are, they are looking for one that is local. Therefore, smaller and medium-sized businesses now have a terrific opportunity for local search engine optimization.

Now you may be asking yourself, what is local SEO? Local SEO is the art of driving geo-targeted search engine traffic to your business website. Local SEO involves whole combination of strategies and tactics that will ensure your website is found quickly and easy by potential customers in your geographic locale.

By optimizing your website to appear in local searches on the Internet, you’re adding yourself to a crucial virtual directory that millions of people access every single day.

How to Optimize Your Green Business Website for Local Search

As with regular SEO, local SEO is comprised of on page factors and off page factors. In other words, you need to add content to your website that tells search engines where your business is located. In addition, you need to get your business listed in search engines, directories, and linked to by other websites in a way that clearly indicates your business location. On page optimization is within your control, however, for it’s still possible to rank well in local search with low optimization. In highly competitive markets, however, on page factors are more important. Off page SEO are where you will need to spend most of your time and energy if you want to rank for local search.

Below are 7 steps important steps to optimize your green business website for local search:

Claim your local business listing NOW. Claim your local business listing on Google Local, Yahoo Local, and Bing Local, and. For branding purposes, you want to make sure that you control what’s yours – your own business profile - and protect your geo-listing from getting hijacked by competitors.
Optimize your local business listing. Now that you’ve claimed your business profile, make sure you indicate your address, local telephone number (NOT 800 number) and associate your business listing with keyword rich catogories. Making sure your target keywords are in your business title and description also help.
Add your business to web directories. Adding your business to web directories like Yelp, SuperPages, infoUSA, CitySearch, BOTW Local etc, increases the number of address citations around the web that contain your business name, your address, your telephone number, and your website. Every citation you get from a reputable source on the web is another vote of confidence that your business is indeed in that specific geo-location.
Include your address on every page. It’s a good practice to include your business address and contact information in the footer of your website. This simple step is not only great for user experience, as it eliminates visitors having to plumb the nether regions of your website to find out where your business is located and how to contact you. It also tells search engines where you are as well. If you cannot, for some bizarre reason, include your contact information in your website footer, in the very least, make sure your address appears on your home page, in your your about section, on your press page if you have one, and your Contact Us page.
Localize your title tags. Make sure your title tags include your target keywords, as well as your locale. For example, you have a green landscaping company in Lagunitas, California, your title tag should read something like this, “Green Landscaping & Design | Company Name | Lagunitas, CA.”
Get local links. Get listed on local business directories, in your local chamber of commerce website, and solicit local business owners to link to your website from theirs.
Get good customer reviews, often. Frequency of customer reviews appear to be increasingly important for local search. A steady stream of good reviews will also be great for your business.

If this all seems like a lot of work, you may want to first hit up GetListed.org, a service that allows you to submit to several search engines and directories at once. GetListed also provides great information about optimizing your business website for local search.

Local SEO for your green business ought to be high on your online marketing priority list, because it is one of of the easiest SEO and least expensive tactics to implement. As your website begins to appear in local search engine results, your business will be more visible, and you should begin to see more search engine traffic.

Why Your Green Business Needs a Green Business Blog

lorna li — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 09:39:48 +0000

Gaining exposure is necessary when it come to successfully starting a green business and generating new clients is also important. Keeping customers informed and having accessibility to you and your company should be a top priority. A great way to do this is by creating a green business blog. With the increase in technology information and the outlets provided to you for free, beginning a green business blog for your green business is a great way to market and gain new customers. Let’s start with this…

Exactly What is a Blog?

A blog is basically an online journal where you can write, read, edit, publish and share personal or business information. Stemmed from the words “web log,” a blog is a website that incorporates regular entries written by an individual, including event updates, and other material that you want to share, i.e. pictures, videos, announcements, links, etc. Blogs can be easily maintained without prior knowledge of the technical aspects of web design. The many free blogging platforms make it possible for anyone to make one. Sometimes blogs can be made for personal use to write about your days, similar to a journal. Other people utilize blogs to write about certain themes or areas of interest. They also allow for users and viewers to comment on any updates you publish. If you’re running a business, utilizing these blogging tools and technology to promote your message of going green is an efficient and promising way.

I Already Have my Green Business Website, Why Do I Need a Green Blog too?

While having a website with your own personal URL for your green business is great to have, establishing a green business blog will help you succeed just as much, if not more.

Websites are great because they show an amount of stability and a concrete place for establishing your internet presence. Blogs, however, will generate traffic and can bring new customers into your website. Usually blogs are generated or hosted by a main website such as WordPress.com or Blogger.com. Like Facebook or Twitter, there are already users plugged in and skimming other people to be “friends” or “follow.” Blogs are just a free way to give you more accessibility to your customers or new customers, and at the same time, they can have easy access to you. Spreading the green message about your business is already something that needs promotion in its own; the tools necessary to do this are out there and ready to be utilized. Having your green business blog will allow you to do the following:

Keep your customers updated and current with all the exciting news and things to look forward to from your business
A direct message feed on your green business blog will allow your customers to know your current special offers
Direct contact with customers and hear feedback concerning your business will be easily accessible
Allow communication of new ideas and create an outlet for sharing your experiences from having a green business
Generate traffic from your green business blog to your website

A Green Business Blog Can Benefit You in Many Ways

As stated before, blogs can be free and with a little extra time, you can have it up and running in a matter of minutes. Marketing strategies for businesses usually generate the same way. With any business, you can really utilize the internet to your advantage. Without having to print and throw away paper for flyers and other promo things, establishing a green blog is just another way to promote and market your business in a eco-friendly way. These are the key points in what a green blog can do for your business:

Creating your blog and keeping it current with new content will increase your SEO (search engine optimization) – that means, search engines will pick up your blog more and more with your updates.
When you write and publish your blogs with updates, you can fill it up with keywords like “going green,” “buy green,” “green furniture,” “green household items” – whatever your green business is about, you can utilize keywords into your updates which will increase traffic to your site
Creating a blog will also allow you to have more pages so you can interlink your blog posts and product pages, thus driving more traffic to your website
Also a cool thing, you can get more involved with your customers and be able to receive and share information about being green and possibly creating a green living blog

So if you haven’t started a blog, you should today. Whether you’re running a green business or not, it’s a free and easy way to promote and market your business. It’s easy, fun, and can make your business grow.

Bootstrap Marketing 101 for DIY Entrepreneurs

lorna li — Tue, 18 May 2010 07:00:53 +0000

Are you a scrappy entrepreneur or unintentional entrepreneur trying to launch and market your business with as little money as possible? This presentation gives you an overview on how to create, brand and promote your website with as little money as possible. Covered in this bootstrap marketing presentation:
- DIY SEO
- DIY PPC
- Low Cost Web Design & Copywriting
- Low Cost Email Marketing
- and more!Bootstrap Marketing for Entrepreneurs

View more presentations from Lorna Li.

Justmeans Social Media for Sustainability Conference Oct 19, 2009

lorna li — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 07:41:37 +0000

If you’re in San Francisco on Monday and want to learn about how companies use social media for good, check out the Justmeans Social Media for Sustainability conference at Mission Bay Conference Center at UCSF.

Justmeans is a social network for the “business for good” community, a place where professional do gooders of all orientations, from activists to social entrepreneurs to CSR (corporate social responsibility) buffs and green marketing fanatics, can network, share information, and collaborate on making business better for people and the planet.

The conference explores the different social media tools and platforms available to company employees and strategies around engaging stakeholders and creating a vibrant community. Important questions that will be addressed at Social Media for Sustainability include:

How can social media propel sustainability communications?
Which companies are most effectively using social media to reach stakeholders?
How do you make sure your message is heard in the new media atmosphere?
Should companies be using social media to influence the way that people act beyond the purchase of a product?

Some of the speakers on Social Media for Sustainability include:

Jeff Hollender, CEO, Seventh Generation
Bob Pearson, President, the Blog Council
Chad Boettcher, SVP Social Innovation, Weber Shandwick
Danny Kennedy, Co-Founder and President, Sungevity
Graham Hill, Founder, Treehugger
Kevin Long, Co-Founder, Justmeans, Ashoka Fellow
Ryan Mickle, Co-Publisher, Triple Pundit, LLC
Ron Gonen, Co-Founder and CEO, RecycleBank

The Concise List of Must Have SEO Plugins for WordPress

lorna li — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 07:21:30 +0000

I think I’ve researched every WordPress SEO plugin in existence. The list I amassed was daunting. I had plugin anxiety. All In One SEO Pack or Platinum SEO? Many of them had features that overlapped. The thought of having to install all those plugins and to get them to work with each other was a developer nightmare.

Due to some fortuitous Tweeting, Joost DeValk, the WordPress SEO Guru, picked up on my Tweet and offered to go over my massive list of 30 SEO plugins via Skype, and eliminate the chaff. Granted he wrote many of these – but that’s why he’s the WordPress SEO guru. If you care about WordPress SEO, you oughta mosey on down to Joost’s site and read his WordPress SEO Bible.

Must Have WordPress SEO plugins

The list of plugins below should have your site covered for all things SEO.

HeadSpace2 – HeadSpace is a powerful all-in-one plugin to manage meta-data and handle a wide range of SEO tasks. With it you can tag your posts, create custom titles and descriptions that improve your page ranking, change the theme or run disabled plugins on specific pages, and a whole lot more.

Google XML Sitemaps – An essential tool in any blogger’s armory of SEO tools. While the name only mentions “Google” this plugin creates an XML-sitemap that can be read by Ask, MSN and Yahoo also.

Redirection – For any number of reasons you sometimes need to move a page from one spot on your blog to another, but then you risk losing that page’s status in search results. Redirection helps you with your 301 redirects, captures a log of 404s so you can work on correcting them, sets up an RSS feed for errors and more.

SEO Friendly Images – Yoast is on the fence this. I kind of like it. Images can be a great source of traffic as people search for images of various subjects, and this plugin helps you with making sure that you have “alt” and “title” tags on all of your images so that the search engines can properly index them.

Meta Robots WordPress plugin – An easy solution for adding robot metadata to any page you choose on your blog. You can use it to make your front page links into “nofollows,” prevent indexing of search pages, disable author and date-based archives, prevent indexing of your login page and numerous other features. Some of the great things it does includes:

Prevent indexing of your search result pages, while still allowing the search engines to follow the links on them, by adding noindex,follow robots meta tags.
Prevent indexing of the subpages to your homepage, by adding a noindex,follow.
Prevent indexing of your login, register and admin pages by adding noindex robots meta tags.
Add noodp an noydir meta robots tags, allowing you to opt out of DMOZ and Yahoo! Directory descriptions
And more!

RSS Plugins

MediaRSS – MRSS is an RSS extension used for syndicating multimedia files (audio, video, image) in RSS feeds. MediaRSS is a way of embedding media into your feeds. This plugin is equipped to locate img tags in your posts and generate XML code that can be used by feed readers.
RSS Footer – This very simple plugin let’s you add an extra line of content to articles in your feed, defaulting to “Post from: ” and then a link back to your blog, with your blog’s name as it’s anchor text, which you can edit like this:

Social Media Plugins

Sociable is a social sharing plugin with big, plush social media buttons that you just want to press. It’s much more attractive and noticable than Share This.

Post Ratings – Adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog’s post/page.

Twitter Plugins

Choices abound on Twitter plugins. I would do Retweet first and then the Twitter Box once your account is up and running.

Retweet Button – The TweetMeme retweet button is for website and blog publishers who want to encourage their audience to tweet their content on twitter. The button shows a live count of the number of times your webpage or blog post has been tweeted.
Tweetbacks – People are talking about your posts, and not only in the comments to your post. A lot of that conversation is happening on Twitter, and now, you can take that conversation right back to your blog! This plugin imports those tweets about your posts as comments. You can display them in between the other comments on your blog, or display them separately.
Twitter Box – Provides on how to create a fancy box that displays your latest Twitter rants in your sidebar without having to turn to clunky plug-ins that bog your blog down.

Content / Media

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site. Key features include:

An advanced and versatile algorithm: Using a customizable algorithm considering post titles, content, tags, and categories, YARPP calculates a “match score” for each pair of posts on your blog. You choose the threshold limit for relevance and you get more related posts if there are more related posts and less if there are less.
Related posts in RSS feeds: Display related posts in your RSS and Atom feeds with custom display options.

Video Player Quicktags – This plugin adds a button to your editor that allows you to paste the URL that the video is located at into the prompt box. You can fully configure how the videos are displayed (width, height, colors, alignment on the page) and much more. Your site will even stay (X)HTML valid unlike with the code provided by most video sites.
SlideShare – This plugin allows you to easily add SlideShare presentations to your blog by just copy pasting the default WordPress embed code. It has one (!) setting, “default width”. If you set that setting, it will make all presentations appear at the width you set there, allowing you to easily adapt the width to your theme’s content width.
Smush.it – Reduce image file sizes and improve performance using the Smush.it API in WordPress. Every image you add to a page or post will be automatically run through Smush.it behind the scenes. You don’t have to do anything different. Smush.it optimizes images by:

stripping meta data from JPEGs
optimizing JPEG compression
converting certain GIFs to indexed PNGs
stripping the un-used colours from indexed images

Commenting

Subscribe to Comments – Subscribe to Comments 2.1 is a plugin that allows commenters on your blog to check a box before commenting and get e-mail notification of further comments. It is one of the most popular WordPress plugins out there for the simple reason that it helps foster a community around your blog by encouraging commenters to come back and stay engaged in the dialog

WordPress Maintenance plugins:

W3 Total Cache – W3 Total Cache is a performance optimization plugin for WordPress, in other words, it speeds up the performance of your WordPress site so that you don’t lose traffic and you rank better in Google. Written by Frederick Townes, a social media designer and the CTO of Mashable, W3 Total Cache is designed to include every speed enhancing feature possible, and optimized to handle all hosting environments.
WP Database Backup – Manages your Wordpress database. Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database.
No Self Pings – Some people really like that WordPress sends pings from your own site to your own site when you write posts; it lets them easily leave a trail of related posts. Some people do not like this behavior; it clutters up their comments. So here’s a plugin to disable self pinging.
Other
Zemanta – Zemanta provides contextual content recommendations to you while you write. It enhances your blog post with relevant images, videos, links, and SEO optimized tags. All recommended content is blogger friendly with clearly marked licenses (Creative Commons or similar).

Other Tips:

Sitemaps are now a part of core WordPress functionality. According to Yoast a traditional sitemap can actually be done within the theme, so there is no need for a plugin.

Breadcrumbs used to once require a plugin but are now incorporated into native WordPress functionality as well.

Social Media Revenge by Viral Video – United Airlines Breaks Guitars

lorna li — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 04:16:14 +0000

Face it, we’ve all been there. You’re a paying customer, you have a legitimate problem that the big, faceless corporation refuses to address. The hours being put on hold, the paperwork, red tape, and maddening bureaucracy, the endless navigation of phone systems, and repeating your story over and over again, only to be told in the end – “Fuck you.” By your airline company, your insurance company, your credit company. What the hell happened to the good old days when the “customer was king”?

Then, the best online reputation attack ever, by singer / songwriter Dave Carroll. After 8 months of stonewalling and passing the buck, United Airlines refusal to pay for the $1200 worth of damages to Dave’s guitar created a worse PR nightmare.

While I can’t say I’m a huge fan of his country style music, Dave Carroll’s YouTube response to United Airlines breaking his guitar is a brilliant example of ordinary people using the power of social media to take back their power in the face of big corporations.

One smashed guitar, one YouTube video; 12 months and 4,467,537 views later, United Airlines is finally listening.

6 Steps for Creating a Social Media Marketing Roadmap & Plan

lorna li — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 06:42:51 +0000

Recently, Britta Meyer of Eurekster, which makes an embeddable custom social search portal called a “Swicki”, posed a question on LinkedIn about how one would go about defining a social media marketing roadmap, and how you would prioritize each social media channel.

There is no cookie cutter approach to social media marketing. Your strategy will depend on:

1) Your goals – SEO, PR, traffic ( to drive awareness? advertising click-thus? conversions?)
2) Your audience – where does your target demo hang out?
3) Your resources – you, you plus an intern, internal team, agency?

Here are 6 steps to help you design your social media marketing roadmap.

Step 1: Understand What Social Media Is

The best way to look at social media is to view it as one of many Internet marketing channels, one that has the amazing power to go viral. In the very least, it has the awesome ability to engage your audience in meaningful conversations about your product, issue areas, company, and brand.

The social media marketing umbrella includes sites that are both Web 2.0 and Web 1.0 – basically you want to be anywhere that enables discussions, sharing, and user-generated content (UGC), such as:

Blogs and Forums / Discussion Boards
Consumer Review Sites
Social Networks / Online Communities
Social Bookmarking Sites
Social News Sites
Social Music Sites
Video and Photo Sharing Sites
Wikis

Step 2: Understand What Social Media Can & Can’t Do

Social media can engage your audience, encourage online conversations that are user-generated, increase your web presence, expand brand awareness, generate publicity (both good & bad) and provide SEO benefits. It doesn’t convert.

For most marketers, social media has no ROI but is great for:

Brand building
Relationship management
Product development
Reputation management
Customer interaction
Customer feedback
Customer support
Community building
Defensive SEO – Yes! Bury your bad press with positive UGC

In some cases, social media can convert – usually if you own the community, and have the power to strategically capture leads. But that’s like being the D&D Dungeon Master.

Step 3: Determine Where Conversations are Happening

You will need to respond to conversations that are already happening. To determine where conversations are happening about your brand, you will need to have some kind of buzz monitoring or online reputation management system in place.

Prioritize these discussions, then hop in.

Step 4: Divide…

Next, you want to expand into unchartered territory.

Before venturing out into the vast unknown, create your social media road map – a map of the social web as it pertains to your business. Gather all the sites that would be most interested in what you have to say and segment them by type (blogs, social networks, social news sites, forums, etc) and by target audience / topical interest.

Once you’ve done that, it will be more clear to you what your campaign specific marketing strategies and tactics ought to be.

Step 5: …and Conquer

Now comes the tactical deployment. Here are some examples of different kinds of social media engagements.

Blogger outreach & engagement – this is a top down, bottom up approach. To demonstrate a significant impact, this is best handled by a team. You will need to identify the A-List blogs, cultivate a positive relationship with as many as possible, persuade them to blog about your issue, or guest blog for them. You will need a team of conversation agents to fan out into the blogosphere and engage in MEANINGFUL conversations wherever conversations about your topic is happening.

If you have a call to action, relevant product, or web resource you are trying to drive traffic to, drop html links with target anchor text for an additional SEO lift (a % of the sites you will be hitting will be do-follow)

Disclose your identity, be courteous, informed about the subject, or you will be flamed, and that will live forever on the web.

Social networking – only hit the communities relevant to your issue, product, company, topic or you will get poor quality traffic, if any.

Are you infiltrating tight-knit interest-specific online communities? If so, you will need to ingratiate yourself into the pack.

Are you starting your own community on a hosted platform, like a Ning? You can drive conversation and awareness, your revenue options are limited (ad revenue sharing).

Do you own the community? Great – you can drive targeted conversations and include strategically placed calls-to-action, promos, ads, anywhere. If you’ve designed your site with SEO in mind, your users will create the content, and you will had an advantage in the SERPS, especially for long-tail keywords.

Social news marketing – thru social sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Newsvine. These sites also have a unique culture and will work for you if your news item relates topics favored by the community. Digg, for example, veers towards the geeky. Write for maximum click thrus – think “linkbait”. Popular stories here can get picked up by bloggers, which will also give you an SEO boost. Traffic can be huge and fickle like a tsunami. Don’t expect it to convert. Avoid marketing here – you will be buried.

Step 6: Trust in the Force

Finally, trust is a huge factor in social engagement. Understand that social media marketing is most effective when users in the community know you. The only way for the community to know you is if you spend a lot of time online and invest managing your social web presence across communities.

Social media builds awareness and drives conversation. It’s a powerful way enable communication between the company & customer. Always remember, selling is a secondary or tertiary benefit of social media.

[tags]social media, social media marketing, seo, social networks, blogging, roi, lorna li[/tags]

SEO Analytics With Google Analytics

lorna li — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 00:21:56 +0000

This is a great video y Ian Lurie of Conversation Marketing on how to use Google Analytics to interpret data from your search engine marketing campaigns. The three most important pieces of information you will want to understand from your traffic statistics are:

Keyword data: Which keywords are driving the most traffic to your site?
Keyword value: Which keywords account for the most engagement in your site? Which keywords drive the most conversions?
Page context: Which pages receive the most search traffic? What keywords are associated with those pages?

Online Videos by Veoh.com
[tags]seo, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, keywords, sem, analytics, google analytics, seo analytics, search marketing analytics, lorna li[/tags]