Driving Traffic and Profit

Twitter may have started as a general social networking platform, but soon its potential for business growth was realized and there has been no looking back ever since. Its ability for b2c and b2b lead generation is astonishing and every online / offline business must incorporate Twitter into their internet marketing programme.

Twitter is a text based micro-blogging website with many innovative features to publicize your business. It provides you with a ready platform to build a network of target audience by creating a huge follower base. You can tweet and share interesting information about your business and perform twitter analysis on your target audience for social media optimization. Below are some Twitter best practices to best optimize your website for higher rankings.

• The first and foremost thing you need to do in order to make your website more visible is add a Twitter widget to your website/ blog so that when a visitor clicks on it he/she will be added as a follower, whom you can keep updated with regular interesting tweets.
• Follow people to encourage them to follow you back. In order to generate relevant rather than random followers, personalize your company profile on Twitter by creating a relevant background image for a professional first impression.
• Customize your profile icon to incorporate your business relevancy and choose a user name relevant to your business. If possible add your location and a brief bio of your company in your profile.
• Make your tweets viral by posting interesting and informative content that people would want to retweet on. Use popular keywords and terms to encourage back tweets. Using humor and posting helpful information that others are looking for can generate you some fast loyal follower base.
• Get listed on the Twitter Yellow Pages and use the same to track down a geographical and categorized list of followers.
• Regularly check who is following you and keep in touch with them by following them back.
• To encourage retweeting, tweet your link multiple times and from different accounts. A tweet from the boss himself or from an authority person in the company carries a lot of weight and boosts retweeting that finally leads to b2c and b2b lead generation.

Twitter in future could go the Facebook way and introduce PPC/ adwords management to streamline social media marketing, and if that happens you don’t want to lose out on the golden opportunity. These Twitter marketing best practices can take your business to the next level. If you find the entire practice too tiring or time consuming, there is always the option to outsource SEO Twitter activity to an organic SEO company who specialize in this kind of social marketing techniques.

Social Networking sites have emerged as an important medium for making contacts, b2b lead generation and expanding business these days. Among all the social networking sites, LinkedIn is where you should be if you are seriously looking at making new contacts, b2b lead generation and marketing your company. So how to take maximum benefit from your profile on LinkedIn? Here are some of the things you can do to optimize your company’s presence on LinkedIn:

Update your Profile: Give detailed information complete with your photograph in your profile. Keep it updated with the latest work that you have done. Add widgets to provide a link to your blog or twitter account. Not only that you can also add your company’s logo along with its address and phone number.

Customize Your URL and Labels: LinkedIn pages usually get higher ranking in search engines. So use this opportunity to market yourself fully. Use a great keyword as part of your URL. If you already have some brand image for your company, you can customize your URL with your company’s name. Similarly LinkedIn provides you with the option to customize your labels like “My Blog”, “My Portfolio”. Instead of using the generic labels for them, change them to a suitable text: like changing default “My Blog” with your actual blog name. These small changes help in getting more traffic to your LinkedIn page. But to make all this work you need to select “Full View” option in your public profile setting.

Get Recommendations: Getting recommendations is one great way of promoting yourself and your company. Get in touch with people you have worked with, your previous clients as well as current clients and ask them to recommend you.

Build a Good Contacts Database: Use your LinkedIn account to find people you know or would like to know and work with. Get in touch with your previous colleagues, your school mates, your college mates and previous employers. Once you are done and added them as your contacts, you can go through their network. You can find lots of useful information and contacts which will be beneficial to you. For e.g.: if you find some contact in your friend’s account that will be good for your business, you can ask your friend to introduce you to him. This way you will not only get to meet a good contact but also get some credibility and authenticity attached to you.

Use Public Forums to Get in Touch: You can use your knowledge to reply to queries posted in the question and answer section. This way you can display your expertise in your area of work. Do not use this forum to promote your company, answer in an unbiased way. Alternatively you can use the same section to post queries to know your customer better. Participate in discussions, write articles or share articles in your field of work which will be of interest to your customers.

You can undertake all this work on your own or outsource SEO Internet Marketing to an organic SEO company. They can professionally do adwords management for you and also take up all your social media optimization and viral marketing needs for a reasonable fee. At BVM Internet Marketing – SEO Company Bangalore, we pride ourself at giving the customer a hassle free, quality, outsource SEO experience.

When you use the Google Adwords key tool to select the right keywords for your business, the default search setting of the keywords is broad search. But did you know that you would be probably spending a large part of your marketing dollars for non targeted keywords even without realizing it because of the broad search type settings of the keywords.

Let’s take an example of the search phrase: “shopping deal”

1. Broad search: Your text ad in adwords will show not only for keyword “shopping deal” but also for keywords like “shopping”, “deal” , “hot shopping deal”, “shopping weekend deal” . As you can observe the targeting of keywords is very liberal and the marketing budget can be exhausted very quickly.

2. Exact search: The ad will show only and only for the keyword [shopping deal]. Though this is the exact target keyword, but it is very restrictive in nature and one would need to add too many keywords of similar nature and if one does not, then its a missed opportunity.

3. Phrase search: However if you want to be slightly liberal and target all keyphrases which has the phrase “shopping deal” then its better to opt for phrase search. So the ad will show for key phrases like “hot shopping deal”, “shopping deal Chicago”, etc. Phrase search along with the appropriate negative keywords is pretty effective.

4. Negative keywords: One should include negative keywords like free, jobs, etc. Like if you are selecting keywords related to buying of some software, then you would want -free as a negative keyword. This will ensure that any users searching for the key phrase along with the word free in it are not shown the text ad.

If you have had some other experience with the adowords keyword tool, feel free to share here.

So is Search Engine Optimization a myth or does it really help in improving the rankings and hence result in more traffic, leads and revenue? How is it different from paid advertising via Google Adwords?

Well you can buy traffic via Google Adwords or other PPC ads of other search engines like Yahoo Search Marketing. However, if you can truly earn traffic by investing in a good website, quality content and do search engine optimization, you will be a winner in the long run.

One should not try and do optimization for too many high traffic keywords but research the right keywords relevant to the business so that only well targeted and focused traffic is achieved and conversions are high.

With PPC advertising via Adwords one can burn lot of cash very quickly and it will probably work only for high ticket items. However, if the product or service price and profit margin is not very high one has to play the SEO cat and mouse game with the search engines. With SEO there is an initial spike in marketing spend but once the ranks have been achieved for the right keywords, one can drastically cut down the online marketing budget and spend a small amount each month or quarter to sustain the ranks else the competition will takeover.

Another big thing is the high CTRs. If one achieves the top 5 ranks in the search results, then the click through rates can be as high as 60% to 90%! And in Adwords, if someone achieves a click through rate of just 1%, it’s a job well done. So you can understand that if someone is only relying on Adwords, then a large chunk of traffic and potential customers are going untapped!

As a part of launch strategy or a short term traffic spike strategy Google Adwords make perfect sense. However, one should also be meticulously planning for SEO as a long term strategy. Many businesses even achieve as high as 80 to 90% of their overall traffic from keyword based search traffic from different search engines and there is no reason why you also cannot achieve high traffic via search engine optimization techniques.

Recently we successfully completed a SEO project for a client in the hotel industry in California, USA. We achieved top 3 spots for some competitive and very very relevant keywords for the client business. Life is Good !

I think in online marketing having a local context can help tremendously. Even if one has a national level business and has a national level marketing plan, it will still make sense to try and have local faces of the business online and then market based on local conditions including using techniques of local search engine optimization.

The chances of success increase manifold since by thinking local one is able to reduce the competition to a great level.

Did not someone say “Think Global. Act Local”.  I think it holds true for online marketing too !!

Often I find people getting worked up and worried about immediate returns from investment into the social media.

I think organizations should invest in building and engaging communities around their products and services more from a long term perspective. Expecting immediate returns like from an adwords campaign or an email marketing campaign will most likely lead to disappointment and one runs the risk of striking off Social Media Marketing from one’s marketing road map. Hence having the right expectations from social media marketing is extremely important.

One has to build and grow the community but the key is that the organization ENGAGES with the community. How will you be useful for the community that will listen to you on a regular basis. Are you providing them useful info alerts in a timely manner? Are you providing them customer support via social media channel? Can they get hot deals and exclusive discounts only via the particular channel ???

Once the organization understands the objective of engagement with its audience via social media and pursues it diligently, the consumers will respond warmly and the community will grow.

One of the basic and well known internet marketing technique is to continually pump in quality content on your website to drive SEO traffic on the website.

However, the cost of full time content writers or even outsourced content writers can be quite daunting. One way to acquire low cost content and then refurbish it slightly or use it as is to buy PLR content.

The concept of PLR content is that you can use the content for your need but the ownership rights remain with the authors. You cannot further resell the PLR content.

You can buy PLR content from www.contentmixi.com and other PLR websites.

The next best option of getting content would be to use freelancer content writers on a per article basis.

Of late the search experience has not been great…often the good websites are coming in page 2 and 3…. This had led to the following chain of thoughts:

Let’s take the scenario of buying digital cameras…. My search result expectation would be manufacturers of the digital cameras which would give me info on the latest models and best prices, or a few comparison websites from media companies to provide neutral views….

However if this ideal case scenario truly happened then the manufacturing companies would not need to spend on ppc ads …. That would lead to great revenue loss for search engines… Hence search engines have to keep tweaking the algos to give a fair chance to even not so great websites to feature in the top 10 search results. That would mean that some of the manufacturing and important websites will have to spend on ppc else their business will suffer..

Now if search engines do not ensure good search experience users will switch over !!

Hence the search engines have to constantly balance the act of optimizing user experience and revenue !

Info as on 5th September 2009:

Thought this would be useful info for the readers:

This info is as on 5th September, 2009.