10 Things to Keep in Mind with Social Media Marketing

1) Time! You must give Social Media Marketing time.

2) You cannot guarantee results. You can't predict 100% whether others will like or dislike your material or how they will react.

3) Provide informative, desired content on a regular basis to keep your presence active on Social Marketing sites.

4) Create an active, followed blog.

5) Publicize your blog and feeds making it easily found and subscribed to.

6) Ability to have influential presence on a variety of Social Marketing sites.

7) Provide your content to other bloggers so they can write about it as well and add to your overall reach.

8) Take advantage of all your networks. Co-workers, friends, etc.

9) Know the Social Media sites communities. Each one has their own language, guidelines and unwritten rules that must be learned from interaction. Don't break them!!!

10) You can never do enough research. Research, Research, Research!!!

Google Analytics Tip #2 - Researching Popular Pages

The last post on Google Analytics Link Tagging showed you how to measure any outgoing links, downloads, emails, etc. Today I would like to show you how to judge the current content on your site.

Have you ever wondered what the most popular pages on your site are? With Google Analytics you can easily navigate to the most popular pages on your site. Here's how:

1) On the Left Navigation in the interface click > Content

2) Then Select > Top Content

This will give you a list of the most popular URLs / pages on your site.

Why do I need to know this?

Knowing your most popular pages lets you know what visitors are looking for on your site. When you know what visitors are looking for on your site, you can give them more of what they want. You can expand on your most popular pages, write more relevant content about these topics or strengthen your selling proposition.

SMX Social - NYC Oct. 16 & 17 Recap

Search Marketers, Social Marketers, Marketing Managers and Bloggers across the globe gathered earlier this week at the SMX Social Conference in New York City, as well as myself.

SMX Social was the first conference dedicated to Social Media Marketing. Overall the conference presented Social Media Marketing to those who had not yet gotten a total grip on the area as well as provided those already involved with tips and useful tactics. The conference covered Social Media Marketing all the way from the top dogs (Digg, MySpace, Facebook) down to the niches (WebMd, Etsy, etc.)

Linkbaiting

One of the topics covered most throughout many of the sessions was Linkbait. Developing the right content to maximize the number of other sites that decide to link to you because of this content. Check what's worked and what hasn't, watch trends, research your industry niches and a variety of other arenas to look at. Successful Linkbait categories include: Lists, How To's and Current Events.

Once you have your Linkbait wrote and begin submitting to the various Social Media sites many feel their job is done. However that is completely untrue. Social Media Marketing takes a large amount of resources to be done properly. You need commitment to the highest degree. Before submitting you need to have your friends / networks in place and be able to take advantage of them. You also need to be able to monitor the reach of the Linkbait. How many new links were achieved? From where? Is the site getting more traffic? Have your search positions increased? After submission, most of the real work then begins.

Social Media Websites

The list of Social Media websites is virtually endless. There are new bookmarking and news sites popping up on the web every day. If they'll become the next Digg or Facebook, I doubt it. But while trying to get on the homepage of Digg may be the ultimate goal, it is a huge leap. Only .7% of the stories actually make the Digg homepage.

The larger Social Media websites offer the ability to reach a large amount of people and gain traffic, but you have to also utilize the niche sites. There are many micro-communities or vertical portals that can provide you with precisely targeted traffic. These niche sites can point people who already are interested in your topic to your site, versus targeting a broad range of topics. Utilizing sites like Yelp, WebMd, Etsy, Care2 and many, many more can provide large benefits as well.

Time! Time! And More Time!

The overall "keynote" that was repeated across the board was unanimous ? Time! Social Media Marketing isn't simply submitting some pages from your website to some sites. You need to approach a Social Media Marketing campaign just as you would an organic search engine optimization program.

• Start Research and lots of it
• Create interesting and wanted content
• Optimize your titles and descriptions for votes
• Take advantage of your friends and networks
• Monitor results

Social Media Marketing when done correctly can not only drive traffic to your website, but build links, brand awareness and search visibility, ultimately leading to better rankings on the search engines.

Google Analytics Tips #1 - Link Tagging

So you have migrated from your expensive, non-functional, Analytics software to the free Google Analytics software. But now what do you do? There is a lot of information that you need to absorb when learning analytics, but how do you take advantage of it all? First off I recommend reading through the Google Analytics Support Center. There is tons of information here filled with interesting tips and tricks you can do with Google Analytics. So I thought I would save you some time learning analytics and share some interesting tips and tricks you can perform with Google Analytics to better track what is going on with your site.

Link Tagging in Google Analytics

Google Analytics offers a link tagging feature that let's you tag any link on your site. How does this help? Have you ever wondered how many visitors leave your site from Downloads, Outgoing Links, PDF's or even outgoing emails? Well with a simple piece of code you can do just that.

If you have noticed I began all link tags with "outgoing". Why did I do this? This can help you to sort all outgoing links within the Google Analytics interface. Where do I see this data within Google Analytics?

1) Log Into Your Account
2) On the Left Navigation in the interface click > Content
3) Then Select > Top Content
4) Then in this search box at the bottom type in whatever outgoing links you are looking for. So if you are looking for outgoing emails search outgoing_email and this will give you all instances of people using your email.

Why is this Helpful?

Tracking outgoing links, email, pdf or other downloads can help you get a handle on what people are looking for when they come to your site. It can also help you place the outgoing links, email, PDF or other downloads in better spots on your site, allowing you to have better control of the Usability of your site. After all, you don't want people leaving your site if it has no benefit to you!

Why Your Web Developer Should Not Implement Your SEO

Last Winter I met with a company that had a second page search position on Google for its most important target phrase. Bringing them up to the first page seemed relatively easy. Optimize relevant content and links. Add new in-bound links. And first page Google search positions should come soon thereafter.

Instead the marketing director decided to use the Web developer of their new site for search optimization. The developer offered the service and bragged about the top search positions it achieved for it clients. The company I was speaking with did not understand how the search positions the developer bragged about were not nearly as competitive as the phrase her company was targeting.

In Summer the new Web site launched. It was search engine friendly. It was optimized with keyword-filled page specific titles. Meta descriptions and meta keywords were filled in. A keyword-filled Site Map was included.

The Result ? the site could not be found in Google and search referral traffic collapsed.

What went wrong?

What happened was that the Web developer was using badly outdated search optimization techniques. The Web developer did search optimization in good faith. But the developer was not up to date with the always rapidly changing search engine algorithms.

Though technically the site was search optimized, the Web developer did not take steps to make sure the most important target phrases are identified and featured on the site. They optimized the content given to them by the client, but failed to revise the content for search engines.

The page titles began with the same seven keywords so that Google looked at the site and saw that none of its pages had any distinguishing keywords. The first 4 to 8 words in a page title are huge for search positioning. But if they are the same on every page, what makes them unique in the eyes of a search engine?

The site lacks keywords in text links. These are important to telling search engines what topics individual pages focus on.

The Home page lacks content and keywords entirely. The Home page is your most important page for search engines.

All this added up to search optimization that had no impact on search engines. The programmers who optimized the site did not take care of the details that generate search visibility.

Unless you are doing search engine optimization all the time, consistently measuring and analyzing search positions and traffic, then you will not see how Google and the other search engines are changing.

Web developers are designers and programmers. Typically they are not marketers. Programmers make decisions that do not necessarily work well with search engines. For example we constantly fight with Web developers to do search engine friendly re-directs rather than the 302 re-directs developers typically program. The programming difference is minor. But the affect on search engines makes the difference between search visibility or not.

Web developers are concerned more with technology developments, rather than evolving search optimization practices such as Social Media Marketing.

Web developers usually do not become involved with content development. Whereas Content is King for search optimization.

Developers mean well. However E-Power's experience with Web developers is that they should stick to design and programming. Online marketing is a totally different discipline.

If you want to compete for the growing business available from your market using search engines, then you need an organization dedicated to search optimization doing it every day.