Archive for June, 2008
Selling products at your events? - Google Products, just do it!
If you are selling products, event tickets or promotional merchandise online; then you should be listed on Google Products. When people search for products online, Google runs a keyword search in Google Products and gets the top searches on the first page (spots 1 or 11). If your products are on Google Products, you’ll get a higher ranking chance, and consequently more traffic. It is generally estimated that almost 10% of a product sites traffic comes through this channel. Which is huge, so if you haven’t listed already, make sure you do so as soon as you can. Nobody wants to miss out on those potential sales just because the target customers couldn’t find you.
Basically, its an interactive shopping service where customers can find and rate your products etc. When you are submitting your products to Google Products, make sure you write the information correctly. Add your feed with the product’s description, pictures, url, price etc. Make sure you use relevant keywords in the title and descriptions. Also, keep in mind that if your prices are good you’ll get a higher ranking - so don’t add exuberant prices without evaluating competitive sellers. The better your price the better your ratings will be and consequently the better the search rankings.
Some people recommend that you should update your feed regularly - keep changing it on a weekly or monthly basis. This brings you back up in the rankings and keeps Google from forgetting about you. When it comes to search phrases which the Google word data base recognize as representing commercial intent, results are displayed relative to recency and relevance, not authority as they are in content search. So, keep it fresh, you can assign this job to someone else if you don’t have time for it yourself.
To get started, just visit this link and follow the process: http://www.google.com/base/help/sellongoogle.html
Can sharing be a marketing technique?
Who would have thought a few years ago that sharing content with others would become so easy? Now we have blogging software for sharing ideas, Youtube for sharing video clips, Flickr for sharing photos, and great services like del.icio.us and stumbleupon that let us filter the best content from the web in groups.
But a common question I get asked is this - how do we manage content that is our IP, content pertinent to our event and businesses? Do we just publish it into the public domain freely?
Brad Fallon stated at a recent STOMPERNET conference that in the next 12 months alone, more content will be published for public consumption than has been published the history of time. The reason is that everyone can publish now days and not just the media barons.
That said I think its fair to say that whatever it is you are doing it’s been done before. The question you need to be asking yourself with the surge in open (social) media and content sharing is this; If you do keep what you are doing for your events (business) locked behind a firewall and your competitors don’t. Who is going to prosper over the next 5 years.
I know who I would be betting on and invite readers to comment on who they would put their money on. We will delve into this further in future posts.
I believe sharing content is very important - at a recent conference we discussed the fact that over 60% of media content being consumed by the new generation of people is content that was discovered and shared by their friends.
Sharing information that would be useful to people and to their friends is not just an important emerging way of promoting events or getting the word out about something, but to create credibility among people who would want to find you and follow you over time. The social web makes it incredibly easy to find the truth about a person - if a person wants to be perceived as an expert, that expertise will truly be tested with the strategies employed when sharing content.
Here are some of my own recommendations on content sharing:
1- Be Authentic and Consistent. This is incredibly important - the best strategy for sharing content is to genuinely want others to grow to understand and appreciate the space in which you are an expert. If you keep focused on this mindset, and on the subject matter that you want people talking about, you will find yourself sharing very relevant material about that subject consistently.
2- Share incredible content. Having content by yourself doesnt make you the expert - your expertise comes from how you have interpreted, thought about, and applied that content over years. So its ok to give your content away - this is the best way to build meaningful relationships with your potential consumer base.
3- Share content meant for learning. You should think about sharing both content which represents the cutting-edge stream of thought in your subject, but also content that allows newbies to get excited about what you’re talking about. This will not only increase the community of people who follow you but also enable you to start conversations with the experts on the best paths of teaching new comers. A community of participants starts to evolve from these interactions.
4- Time your multi-media content. What you are sharing at any given time is going to be perceived as how you are thinking about the subject at that time. The content starts becoming what you are exploring or what you are excited about, and that in itself gives your audience a hint about who you are. While creating a full roadmap of how you will “unfold” content may not be a nice idea, it is very important to share similar content across all mediums. E.g. if you are sharing links on del.icio.us and also videos on youtube, then make sure they are all touching on similar topics at any given point in time.
How do these techniques tie back into marketing and promotion? What you are trying to aim for here is to become a reliable source of good knowledge about a subject matter - if people can begin to expect good things from you, they are likely to invite their friends to follow you as well.
You will over time become the go-to authority on your subject, and if people trust the content you share to be good, they are also likely to trust you when you talk about your events, your services and your products.
Video Marketing Case-Study
Since we’ve been discussing the importance of using videos as an integral part of your marketing strategies, I thought I’d share a case-study with you. A number of companies have been engaging audiences in activity based marketing to build viral campaigns. We all saw the red Gmail envelope exchange hands all across the globe, didn’t we?
The Heinz ketchup campaign specifically stands out. Here is a summary of what they did:
- They first checked to see where there market was. Youtube had a significant presence of their demographics, so they built a competition for Youtube users.
- They designed the competition perfectly: there was an incentive for the winner ($57,000 cash prize). The competition was to design an ad campaign for Heinz. A win-win for all.
- They got popular bloggers to spread the word.
- They played with the right mental triggers and feelings: association, loyalty, fun, good moments.
- They got smashing responses in thousands of participations. Anticipation and hype kept growing until they finalized the winner (has a link to the winning video as well).
- They finished off with great Ads and an incredible amount of media attention and hype.
- They let those feelings of association translate into brand attributes that those participants feel about Heinz. They got themselves a horde lifetime customers!
How to get other bloggers to pay attention?
The blogosphere is fascinating - on the one-hand it is an open environment of people sharing interesting ideas between micro-mediums of influence, and on the other blog-based business are making bloggers increasingly more political in how they interact with others.
The best analogy for blogging I have heard is that its no different to a dinner party where all the guests were knowledgeable on a particular topic. Throughout the evening conversations, comments, retorts, statements, stories & lessons would be traded. As the night wore on it would become evident to all those present that the knowledge base and more importantly the ability to articulate this knowledge was not equal across all participants. In fact it would be most probable that one or two of the parties at the table will have established themselves as unrivaled authorities on certain subject matter.
Blogging is, in my view, a very large dinner party that spans the world and it never ends.
So if you have an event you’d like to promote, what is the best way to get other bloggers and influencers to engage into a conversation with you about it? You have to be in a conversation in order to be considered an authoritarian contributor to it, right?
Here’s a few tips:
- Dont be anonymous to a blogger - get to know them. Bloggers dont like being used as a promotion tool. You cant make that as a premise of knowing them. Most bloggers write because they want to meet interesting people and share ideas with them, they too are looking for conversations with other bloggers who can challenge them and their views. So to begin with try to establish a relationship with bloggers you respect by participating as a commenter and also otherwise.
- Make it easy for the blogger to research you. Bloggers have a lot of demand on their attention from people trying to get in touch with them. They will try to make very quick decisions on whether or not they want to get to know you. So make sure you are active enough in social media that it is easy to discover who you really are. Consistency in your online activities will help other bloggers form quick opinions on who you are and if they want to enter into a conversation with you or not. Remember, cream always rises to the top if it’s in the bottle.
- Request, dont ask. Even if you know a blogger well, dont ask or expect them to talk about your event or product. What you want to focus on is just talking to your friend, the blogger, and talking about your new product to that friend alone. Whether that person chooses to share it onwards with his friends or community is entirely his or her choice.
- Make life easy for the blogger. Again, bloggers have very limited attention to give to your product, so if there is a set-up time involved in them getting into your product (for example, maybe people need to sign up and set up their profiles to use it) try to spend the time to do that for them. Other bloggers will appreciate that and then pay a little more attention to what actually matters.
- Refer to interesting incidents from the blog. Each blog has interesting incidents happening in it - E.g. maybe they wrote about something that was controversial and there was a big debate on the topic in the comments. Only people who follow that blog would actually remember such things, and if you can refer to one of those incidents (maybe to show which side of the fence you stand) the blogger would appreciate that and understand that you are not just an anonymous one-time visitor.
- Refer to the bloggers thesis. Every blogger talks about a particular subject, and every blogger has a core set of beliefs related to that subject. Maybe that bloggers has a particular definition of conversational marketing. Maybe he or she has invented terms they use frequently in posts. Only people who follow a blog frequently would understand this. When you are communicating with another blogger, make sure you touch on those important parts and give your position on them. This would also help him or her treat you like a regular reader.
- Feel free to polarize, but make sure you can. If you also have a blog, feel free to take something that another blogger wrote and polarize yourself against it by arguing a point against his argument. But do this only if you really have something to say, because doing this will not only give you a critical eye from that blogger, but also his or her audience. If you survive their critical analysis of your counter-argument, though, you will win to earn their respect in future interactions.
Most importantly, though, remember that the aim is for all your interactions in the social media space to create additional value to the overall sharing of thought. Dont be evil, and play fair, and people will be fair to you when you need them to be.
How submisions to Ezine articles can help
I haven’t been an active promoter of article sharing, but since we discuss social media strategies here, it is important to talk about what content sharing sites can do for your business. We market online to get to the top page ranks in Google. We want to get to the top page ranks so that we direct more traffic to our sites. We want more traffic to our sites so that we can convert more customers. We want more customers so that we can make more money.
Ezine articles can help us achieve these steps by bringing our articles to the top. It does a double placement of your articles and also provides you with readership stats of these articles. At first I was under the impression that it accepted junk content - but to my surprise, they are on the contrary very strict about the quality of content. Your articles have to be a hundred percent original and valuable to get accepted there. They have to be informative so that the readers can learn from them. You can not be too sales-pitchy - you can only add three links to your sites within the article.
The way to make the best out of Ezine articles is by creating articles with a high keyword density. Make sure you invest time in figuring out the right keyword phrases for your market and place them in these articles appropriately. With the right keywords, your chances of getting to top Google searches is going to increase. The more content you have on Ezine, the more visibility it will give to your site.
Always try to end your articles with a call to action or incentive to follow your website link. Tie this in with the rest of your marketing strategies - you will be surprised at how much traffic this alone can generate for you.
A Side note: To establish if an article is unique, all you need to do is copy a sentence from the article and search for it in Google with inverted commas on both sides, “like this”. Google will show all pages on the internet that have the exact same sentence, so if there are any results you’ll have the same article on another page somewhere.
Making Friends in the online Social Networks
If you can remember the first time you signed up for Facebook and you had no friends or very few. You hear all these strategies for utilizing these platforms but with few friends to start with, its kind of hard to be taken seriously.
I am often asked where to start?
Social marketing is all about getting the most out of social networks. Here are some important friending techniques to be aware of:
Step 1 - Creating your networks
First of all, create your presence on different social networks like facebook, MySpace and Linkedin. Set up your accounts and customize your pages.
Step 2- Adding people to your network
Once you have your pages all set up, you need to get people onto your network. First of all make sure you can distinctly define what kind of people you would want to add as friends. These will be people who can benefit your business in any way. People who are part of your market segments, people who are domain experts, people who can benefit you through synergies, people who are influential in the industry, people who look up to you as an expert.. etc
There are different levels of potential friends on social networks: First of all, add all of those people that you know directly. If you know someone, then approach them in an a way you would to a real human being and not a robot. That is, introduce yourself.
I get friends requests all the time from spammers who use automated software for friending or cut and paste the same message to hundreds of people they find in other people’s friend networks. Be realistic - thats no way to befriend people. Be warned that if you do this you can be locked out of the platform for spamming, your IP address can be blocked from ever accessing the domain again. Recipients can click a link in each request that says, “report as spam”. A few of these reports against your name and you’re out of the game.
So when finding old acquaintances out of the blue, approach them like you would if you had seen them in a crowded bar. I’m assuming that if you come across them after a long while; you would walk over, re-introduce yourself and engage them in brief conversation after which you would initiate a desire to share contact details to remain in contact.
Its no different in these online networks, except that the crowded bar extends across the globe and its open 24/7 and you don’t need to exchange contact details. You simply send a friend request.
Next, you can introduce yourself to the friends of your friends by letting them know who you know in common. It’s not recommended to say “hi, I am a friend of John Smiths do you want to be friends on Facebook” - although a lot of folks do adopt this tactic.
I prefer to look at the persons profile to find something in common. I then introduce myself on the basis of our common friend and try to reference the topic that person seems interested in. Its an idea to be positive and complimentary where you can and end your comment with a question so it’s easy for the recipient to reply. If done right you can come back at their reply and before you know it you’re no longer strangers - so at a convenient time you can ask them if they would like to hook up as friends.
Thirdly you can search for groups in whatever niche you’re into and invite the people in these groups to become friends. Its recommended to join the group first and always contribute to the conversations in the group in an intelligent way before attempting to friend its members.
Expand your network as much as you possibly can.
Follow and be followed:
Find people that you want to have on your lists and follow them on twitter and other social network sites. Later, send them invites - a good percentage of them will accept. Social networking is all about following and being followed. Its about giving first and then expecting something in return. The more you follow and the more you contribute towards adding value to the more you will be followed in return.
The rule of thumb is the more value you bring to other people’s daily lives by what you do and say; the more people will follow you. Its no different to life offline, really except its far less forgiving than real life.
Web2.0 platforms take life as it has always been and makes it possible to maintain relationships with far more people that the offline world ever could. It takes away the factors of space, distances, traveling and communication logistics - and viola, there is no limit to the number of people you can befriend online. Um, yes, you will need high-speed internet though. This changes the social dynamics somewhat, which I will go into in another post but the thing you need to be careful about is that in the online world everything is recorded.
Everything you do leaves a footprint so there is less room for error. Offline if you say something you regret to someone, the damage can be limited to those who hear you say it first hand, those that hear what you said second hand and to a lesser extent those who hear it third hand.
Make the same mistake online and what you did or said can haunt you for life, so be careful.
A good writeup from the blogging world around us…
What Social Networking Can Do For You - Social networking is literally the way of the future.
You tube & using Online Video In Your Marketing - Part 2
This is a continuation of my previous post on using videos for your marketing campaign. I’m going to discuss a tool that can help you get your videos out. Traffic Geyser has been specifically designed just for improving search engine rankings and is thus a useful tool to have. If the success of your business depends on how much traffic is directed to your sites, then consider Traffic Geyser an important investment in your marketing efforts.
- it bookmarks your video submissions automatically and creates podcasts to directories
- it help increase Google rankings by increasing your visibility
- it has a wide distribution to multiple video sharing sites. Almost as soon as you upload your video here, it directs it to all these sites for you.
To get people to visit your sites after watching your videos is important to measure the success of your video campaigns. You should (whenever possible) add elements of your brand (e.g. logo) to the screen, either throughout the video (in a corner) or at the end. This helps people remember your brand. The other thing that you should almost always do is show your URL and speak it out verbally as well.
If you have made the video well, then you probably have a call to action for the viewers. This can be anything from signing up to follow you, visit your website, buy your products, become member of your online community, subscribe to your blog or spread the video to their friends.
If you can add a “cliffhanger” moment for them at the end, that may compel them to visit your site or wait anxiously for your next video. Make them interesting and interactive.
Another important thing to keep in mind is that you should add your URL to the video description as well. This is where they can easily click to visit your site and learn more about your products or services. Videos are incredibly powerful and we all need to form our own video sharing strategies and learn from each others successes.
The bottom line with an auto submission tool like traffic geyser is that it places your video onto the pages of other high pages rank video content sharing sites in one load, saving you hours if doing it for individual sites. Traffic geyser teach you how to load videos in a way that ensures the page it loads them onto is set for maximum SEO for the key words you want people to find you under.
When someone searches these keywords the video content sharing website pages (some like you tube have a base page rank of 8 ) are going to be listed well before a page on your website ever would. It stands to reason that if you load your videos onto 45 different webpages at the same time and send a few links to these pages that some of these pages will rank well for your keywords in a short period of time.
Remember these pages are not your pages that will be ranking but your video will be on them. In a sense you have hijacked these high PR pages, commandeered them placing your video in between the visitor searching your keywords and the page that ranks highly through a solid base page rank. If your video has your website address on it and your include a call to action to bring people to your site its got to be the next best thing to your own page ranking in the top spots.
I have posted videos in traffic Geyser and after firing a few links to the page from articles I post in content sharing sites that also have a high page rank. My videos have literally been appearing in the number one ranked position in Google in less than 45 minutes. This is for key phrases that would have taken months to get my own web pages into top rankings.
You tube & using Online Video In Your Marketing - Part 1
What if I told you that by adding one more element to your marketing efforts, you can potentially;
- Increase your traffic by at least 20%
- Increase your search engine rankings significantly
- Increase your outreach and visibility significantly
- Increase your brand value significantly
- Make your customer interactions much more direct and personal
What would you say? That special something has a tested ROI of at least 150%. Yep, you’ve guessed it - I’m talking about videos. Yes, videos! We’ve all heard of Youtube and other such video sharing sites.
Whenever we’re working, researching or doing just about anything, we turn to Google. Its ironic how much we use it. Its almost like our lifeline. NOW IMAGINE this: the size of Youtube in terms of daily page views is DOUBLE that of Google. Can you believe that? Its pretty awesome, isn’t it?
The numbers of viewers and regular users of video online are massive to say the least. This crowd is averaging an age of 30 years and has people from all age, gender and location demographics. Half of the videos are watched on video sharing sites, and the other half are watched on other people’s blogs and websites.
I want this to be an important part of every marketing campaign that I see. You have to leverage the power of videos for your launch and see how it amplifies your sales. Depending on how well you execute it, you should be able to see measurable increases in your bottom-lines. This is a very powerful medium of communication so use it well. Some pointers:
1- The key here is to produce good quality videos. Make sure its something others would want to share with their friends. Make sure it is interesting enough to make them want to watch through it. It shouldn’t be too long. Make it short and crisp. Keep the file size to a maximum of 100 MB.
2- If you are launching a product; make how-to videos and propose your product as a solution. How-to videos are the fastest growing category of online videos. Make sure you add good descriptions and relevant tags to your videos.
3- Once you have made videos, integrate them into your social marketing campaign, your Facebook profile, your MySpace page, your blogs. your website and other content sharing sites.
4- Place your videos in multiple video sharing and content sharing sites. This will increase your search engine rankings. Make sure your videos have their own consistent personality and voice.
5- Having a video in your website will increase its search rankings as well, compared to those sites that do not have videos. The algorithms that are run give weight to rich content. So add your videos to your main company website as well.
6- If you have a website or blog that attracts good traffic, embed your videos there and set them to auto-play. In this way the video traffic will increase, subsequently increasing its visibility amongst your market. You can create short videos or infomercials that are quick to produce and can add value to your branding efforts. Whenever anything in your site or about your product requires clarification, explain it to them in the form of videos.
7- Use Tube Mogul to upload your video to multiple video sharing sites at the same time. Its a free site that distributes your content for you and provides you with accurate stats regarding your videos. These stats are useful for measuring the effect and value of your videos to your overall business. So, its great for tracking your videos and your competitors videos as well. You can also monitor comments and ratings on your videos by viewers.
When you’re building your launch strategies, make sure you have a solid plan of how you can leverage videos to your advantage. Different people use this tool in different ways for their business, so it all depends on what you’re selling and what industry you are in. Good luck and happy shooting.
Facebook 3 - Promoting your business
Gone are the days of traditional marketing. The strength of your Facebook presence is going to define how effectively you can promote your business, products, events or services to your market. Remember, Facebook is just the tool - you are the marketer who has to get it right.
Since we have already talked about Facebook profiles, groups and pages in our previous post, lets just quickly go through the fourth important element in promoting your business - the Social Ads. These are additional paid branding options within Facebook, to allow you to reach a wider network and reinforce your branding.
These ads can be shown based on your specific demographic and keyword requirements. It is an incredibly cost effective channel for marketing to niche segments based on pay per click (or view) modalities. Spots are given based on bids so make sure your bids aren’t too low, or you may risk losing to competitors. Because of its excessively focused placement, it is bound to get great traffic to your sites. You can make these ads interesting by adding a picture and tagline that will appeal to your market
Get yourself some ad spots before the big market players jump in with their endlessly deep pockets.
Facebook 1- setting it up for your business
At first I thought the FaceBook hype and romance would fade away as newer and better social applications kept trotting along - until I used it myself. For businesses, FaceBook has a lot of revenue potential as it is a wealth of deep relationships based consumer data.
Having said that, its important to note that you can’t just jump into the bandwagon and start marketing there - its a gradual process.
Facebook Profile: Your first step to creating a presence there is your facebook profile - this is a personal profile of ‘you’ not your business. You need to have a personal element to your business if you want room in these social networking sites. This personal touch makes your business seem more human and thus likable. So, in Facebook, your personal profile should be about you - the image that you want to share with your networks. Eventually, when people start following you, they will also become interested in your business. But initially, make sure you get your personal profile right. Here are some tips for that:
- Add aspects of your personality that may seem interesting to your market or may help build credibility. You have to make people want to be your real friend.
- Make your profile visible and open so that people that you know can easily find and contact you. E.g. its a good idea to list down your colleges and school names so that you can find your old classmates from there. Same goes for past work experiences. Old friends can become great resources for your business.
- When you are filling out your profile, make sure you take special care to fill the activities and interests sections.
- Enlist your websites in your profile, so that people who are interested in finding out more about you know where to go.
- Make it as personal and real as possible. Put up a real picture of you instead of an avatar or a cartoon image. Get real - get focused.
- Your profile can later have multiple facebook pages for the different aspects of your business. But you have to make sure that you have just one Facebook profile for you as an individual.
Facebook Pages:
Next off, once you have your Facebook profile all set up, you can build as many separate pages as you want for your businesses, products, events or launches. You can customize and design your pages around your business and position yourself as an expert, if you want. These pages are meant for businesses, so they have ‘fans’ instead of ‘friends’ in them. I’m going to discuss how you can find and make friends and bring them to your pages later on.
Facebook pages are an incredibly powerful tool for marketing. They’re free platforms and spaces for your business right in the middle of your targeted customers. A few pointers about Facebook pages:
- To build a Facebook page, go through the simple process of creating a new page (facebook.com/business) anyone can view Facebook pages and can search for them using search engines.
- You can make as many Facebook pages as you want - theres no limit to the number of pages you can create for your business(s). Although, keep in mind that pages have to be for real entities.
- You can make your pages interesting by adding pictures, applications, posts and links (to your sites). Whenever you change something on your page, an update is sent to all of the fans of the page in their news feeds.
- When you have your basic page set up, allow the community to build around it. Let people join, become fans, upload photos, write on the wall - make them feel like its their space. All of these activities become incentives of their friends to join, when they get to read about the activities on their news feeds.
- Make everything an experience. Make the pages interesting and interactive so that they appeal to or empower your targeted audiences. If you’re launching an event, make an event page and get the prospects to contribute to the event setup. You have to give people reasons for being a part of your community. This goes back to your initial relationship building strategies and techniques.
The other elements of Facebook like their walls are simple enough to understand once you have the basic profile and pages set up. Walls are just places where you can communicate with others with messages or comments. Now that you have it all set up, in the next two posts I’m going to talk about how to network using Facebook and how to Promote your products or launches on Facebook.
MySpace
FaceBook 
BeBo
Linked In
Pownce
Twitter
Friendfeed
Tumblr
Second Brain 
Wink
Live Journal
Simpy
Get Boo
Net Vouz
Yahoo
HelloTxt
YouTube
del.icio.us
Digg
Stumble Upon
Technorati
Furl
Reddit