Amy Sherwood

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Posts by Amy Sherwood

Twitter – Innovative / Social media marketing / Corporate marketing Strategy / Online Reputation

The recent times have seen a lot of talks, discussions and debates over Twitter and its emerging role. Increasing number of companies are also logging on to Twitter to market their products and services whilst staying touch with the customers. At times, Twitter has evolved as a common platform for interacting with each rather than logging on to a corporate website or emailing….This form has been slowly gaining preference over traditional ways of registering complaint or for praising a particular service. Meanwhile the corporate see it as a means of getting to know their standing and rating amongst the people in general and at times see it as means to rectify their image and reputation. All these channels hold viable only if the corporate identities decide to reach out to their customers in through this channel of social media marketing.

Foremost, you would need to study your market – both online and offline, understanding their behaviour especially whether they would be inclined to opt Twitter as an acceptable platform for interaction. If at all Twitter stands accepted as marketing channel, the companies need to pay attention to few crucial points such as the requirement of an authentic corporate identity for which you may need to link the account to your corporate website to give it an identity status. Also you may need to appoint an experienced and seasoned person who can very well tweet and solve customer grievances & issues without landing into controversies of any sort which could make matters a lot worse. The Twitter account would be required to be updated on regular basis which again would be a reflection of your professionalism and customer oriented values.

You will come across many corporate accounts which have a viable presence on Twitter and have been quite active in getting a following while they keep marketing their products, services and even answering queries to a great satisfaction. To name a few accounts which could be to checked out accounts of @DellOutlet, @MotoDeals, @WholeFoods, @HTC, @Starbucks etc which have very effectively and successful in doing so. Apart from sharing information on new products, offers and deal, they even solve customer misgivings and share a whole lot of tips with them as well. Though the platform is very formal, the factor of trust and authenticity is extremely vital. A slight slip off and the case may require the help of professional online reputation managers to clear erase off the negative image on the Internet.

Well, Twitter could be simply the medium, its effective use can be highlighted by Zappos, who had its CEO interacting with Twitters personally and also gifted 10 pairs of shoes randomly to some of those who were online. This could be an intuitive gesture by a company who had recently opened a Twitter account ….nevertheless it has grabbed an opportunity to reach out its customers in a brilliant and a master stroke of marketing.

Social Media inclusive of Twitter could very well be developed by the companies to interact with customers. On the other hand, for the companies it could be a testing platform as they put forward their marketing strategies and skills. What more could the companies need over a direct interactive platform which does not cost much while shows results in almost no time and also has no geographical barriers constraining the market size.

Previous Post: Affiliates Sites and Online Reputation

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Web 3.0 – Unimaginable Technological Advancements

World Wide Web and information have been interlinked in an inevitable way. If Web1.0 is called a library of information, Web 2.0 allows the world to catch up with each and stay in contact, Web 3.0 will allow you to stay connected as well as effectively retrieve the information from the Internet which basically matches your query and satisfies you thoroughly.

Web 3.0 is enhanced with APIs and mashups so as to provide the user with the best matched response to his query and even allied and related information which could help him even further. For example if you wish to know about a university and a course, the Web 3.0 will provide you information on the course offered in the specified university but along with it you will get to know other universities which offer the same course, similar courses and various other alternatives ways of learning that course. At the same time you can also get links of education counselors, education loans, scope of learning that degree and so on. With the use of mashup, you will be able to view the exact location of the university on the map. In all, you will be able to get a thorough overview of the keyword you have entered….Pretty interesting.

While people take some time to absorb a new technology, you can very well expect the development of technology to develop at a faster rate ….people while hardly blink an eyelid and find enhancements and advancements in the same.

It is very likely that the web will make use of user history and begin displaying things depending upon the keywords you have entered into the browser. In all, you will find the need to communicate with the Internet all the time for smallest of needs and requirements ranging from entertainment, shopping needs, recreation options, education and apart from staying connected with people around the globe.

Staying connected, networking, online shopping, ecommerce and whole lot of activities hover around the Internet and the World Wide Web technology….But a judicious use of this is what should be aimed for and it is in our hands to accept or reject a particular technology. We are human beings after all, the need to communicate and interact is utmost important and essential…but how and to what extent is something which we need to decide upon.

What all you need to do to become a successful SEO consultant?

If you are into SEO business and thinking it to be too difficult then hold on and do not quit. Yes, you too can be a successful SEO consultant, but you need to do real work. To set a hallmark in this field you must acquire enough knowledge and experience to enhance your SEO skills.

As a SEO consultant you should build useful and meaningful web sites as well as help promote the content to set up links. Create the site with no technical obstructions. You have to identify target audiences and be aware of market segmentation. Thus, you must do what is essential in order to achieve long-lasting results by abiding by the guiding principles put forth by the major search engines.

Therefore, role of a good SEO consultant is to build quality and accessible web sites that have rich content. To achieve high rankings make sure you have a great copy. For an effective web copy, you should do thorough keyword research; use the keywords in the appropriate areas, and of course get quality links.

Furthermore, you should build the web site with the right structure, that is, with good information architecture or site structure, internal linking, and content. The content may also include a blog, a glossary of terms, press releases, product category sections, and the like.

You are also required to find the relevant, powerful links needed to attain authority with the search engines, and reach out to a number of webmasters and ask them to link to your web site. Thus, you must work on social media marketing techniques as they are not only easy, but also are an effective way to generate relevant links.

Most importantly, you need to be aware of the fact that the search engines change their rules often, so a strategy that worked in the past may not work tomorrow. Therefore, be alert and persistently focus on improving your SEO skills.

Choose the Right Keywords and Bring Targeted Traffic to Your Web Site

Keywords are the words and phrases that web surfers use in search engines when they search for web sites that sell certain products or services, or relate to particular topics.

Right selection of the keywords can help build your business and optimise your web site so that it turns up close to the top of the search engine results pages. Thus, it involves making a list of keywords that can drive Targeted traffic to your site and are commonly searched for.

Here are some techniques that will help you to determine what keywords and phrases you should select, if possible before building your site.

1. You must make a list of keywords or search words and phrases that your prospective customers might use when they look for your product or service. Make sure that you include similar words as well as common misspellings.

2. When selecting keywords, try not to limit yourself to single words. Remember that the majority of people search using multiple words that consist of two or more words so as to get more targeted results.

3. Search these keywords in order to find your competitors on the major search engines. Also, review the competitors’ web sites for the keywords they are using.

4. If you have site with web analytics software then check the keywords that surfers make use of to view your web site.

5. You may visit Wordtracker web site. This site will help you select the appropriate keywords and key phrases. Wordtracker brings together a database of words and phrases that are usually searched by the people.

6. You can also use Yahoo’s search term suggestion tool or Google’s key word suggestion tool to determine a list of keywords to use on your web site.

Once you have the list of keywords, you need to priorities them. Check which are the most important ones? Make sure that you use these keywords in the web page content, file names, internal hyperlinks, and the like.

Article Marketing—Helps you to Popularise your Website

Article marketing is one of the best ways to drive targeted traffic to your website and convince visitors or consumers that you are the best answer to their requirements.

Article marketing is a form of advertising in which companies write short articles relevant to their respective industry. These articles are made available for sharing and publication in online marketplace.

Each article consists of a bio box and byline that contain references and contact information about the author’s business. The major factor to get the most out of an article written is writing a good, interesting and informative article.

Thus, if you want to popularise your website then you must consider article marketing. It is because well written articles are released for free distribution and hence, have the potential to augment your business credibility within its market. Moreover, article marketing will help to attract new clients.

Furthermore, another great advantage of article marketing is that your site gets inbound links. The majority of professional SEOs make use of article marketing as a way to drive their clients’ web sites to the top of the major search engines.

SEOs consider the fact that a web site’s rank in the search engines will move up as it gets more backlinks. For that reason, writing and distributing relevant articles that contain a link to your website within the bio box will result in obtaining more backlinks to your site. Hence, it has become a trend in online marketing to write articles specifically for SEO purposes.

Thus, SEO together with article marketing will help you to popularise your web site, increasing its rank within the search engines.

How effective is Affiliate Marketing?

Undoubtedly, effective implementation of Affiliate marketing can make you earn lots of money. There are numerous benefits for your company when operating an affiliate program that consist of driving Targeted traffic to your site, increased sales, plus increased brand awareness.

To take advantage of affiliate marketing, you must understand what all goes into it?

Affiliate marketing is an Online marketing practice in which a business treats and motivates one or more affiliates for online customers brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts. In other words, affiliate marketing is a great method for making profits all the way through revenue sharing associations involving online merchants and content web sites.

This online marketing technique drives products and services out to the customer across the World Wide Web. This creates more opportunities for the merchants to generate sales, for the affiliates to make income from their web sites, and for consumers to easily locate the products and services they want to buy online.

Moreover, merchants go for affiliate marketing because in the majority cases it uses a "pay for performance" method. In this method the merchant does not incur any marketing expenses unless results are accrued. A number of businesses, such as Amazon.com owe much of their success to this online marketing method.

What’s more, affiliate marketing method offers an efficient and scalable market network. An affiliate program enables you to collect some assessable data on each affiliate or the affiliate program all together. This will help you to estimate the performance of the affiliate program.

Thus, it would be apt to say that affiliate marketing is a cost-efficient as well as measurable method of delivering long-term results.

Free Listing on Directory – Not even PPC

As per the press release GetThatWholesale.com offers free listings on the A new online wholesale directory. There will not be any Pay Per Click (PPC) charges of any kind for the service.Traditionally the wholesale directory either charge inclusion fee or PPC charges. In some cases both fees may be added.Being free would help listing and thus it can be very comprehensive listingThe directories must provide a very comprehensive list of the product / service providers.Let us watch the success of the directory

Negative keywords in Pay Per Click Campaign

Negative keywords prevent your PPC ads from appearing in search engine results. Use of these often helps your pay per click ads not to show up in search engine results for non relevant keywords. Thus, adding negative keywords not only saves your money and but also draws quality targeted traffic to your web site. Negative keywords improve the performance of your PPC advertisement in search engines.

For Example-

Pet sitters – cinema, classics, cleaning etc…

Hygiene product: reviews, travel, paints, wholesale, furniture etc…

When to use negative keywords?

Whenever you do a keyword research look for negative keywords related to that keyword, this is one of the easy steps to do it in the beginning of your keyword research which saves your time and money.

Adding negative keywords help in qualified clicks preventing unnecessary displays of your ad. Use phrase and exact match for your keyword phrases, this helps on negative keywords and increase quality traffic.

Fighting out Pay Per Click Myths

Pay per click is an important tool of Internet marketing. A keyword optimized and cleverly set budget can see through a great online business. But there are myths attached the pay per click approach –

Number one page rank is the best

Pay per click is about conversions and ROI. Being number one is a waste if it does not fetch you good click-through rate and eventually conversions.

The natural page rankings are affected by pay per click

The ad text displayed does not act as anchor text; it only is an advertising punch.

Pay per click only helps major businesses

This is far from fact as small business really benefits from pay per click through good campaign and landing page design.

Pay per click is a short term tool

If PPC is promoting your company well with good ROI then it can be for keeps.

Pay per click is not a life long process

With constantly evolving business needs; pay per click requires constant monitoring, change and hence regular optimisation.

Click Fraud Detection

Click Fraud is an inevitable aspect of any business and pay per click is no exception. Making money through ‘black hat’ techniques of business could be the prime aim of some. How do you escape being a victim of any such pay per click fraud/crime? There are some simple clever ways to reduce pay per click or online marketing frauds.

Don’t be in a hurry to pay. Delaying payment may save you from the fraud.
Keep your computer free from any bad software and stay away from the prying eyes of software trackers that eye every transaction you make or even every site you visit.
Delay in divulging business details to a prospective supplier can also check on a fraud helping you to get more concrete information about your dealer/supplier.
Study the contract thoroughly; you might overlook some business virus which otherwise might look simple and repetitive.

Social Media Optimisation : What and How?

Social Media Optimization

What is Social Media Optimization (SMO)?

Social media optimization (SMO) is a technique of marketing in which you market your website in various social networking sites like MySpace, Youtube, Digg etc. Also known as Web 2.0 marketing, SMO acts as a powerful tool to increase the traffic and page ranking of your website. It engages a wider audience through excessive promotion via the public portals. The success of SMO lies in its interactive content sharing through mediums like blogs, video files and more.

Why use Social Media Optimization (SMO)?

Social media optimization, sometimes referred as social book-marking, is about building a relationship between your website and a wide group of potential customer. Social media if effectively used can consistently direct a substantial amount of traffic. Some of its advantages are

Increased traffic to your website
Increased public awareness of your site and product
Increased brand value
Increased inbound link
Increased ranking due to increased inbound and back links

Thus, social media optimization promotes your business by increasing high user awareness through social sites. This subsequently acts as the marketing strategy for incremental promotion of your product translating into increased conversion.

What are the parameters used by Social media optimization (SMO)?

Social media optimization follows the newer version of the ‘word of mouth’ technique where people have been replaced by social networking sites. The content is spread in the form of pictures, movie clips, blogs and more. This technique is known as viral marketing where user awareness of the site spreads across different community site. Some methodologies/functionalities used by SMO are

Social book-marking using buttons like ‘Digg this’
Using YouTube videos
Interaction through social network sites like Hi5 and Facebook
Sharing audio and picture files
Blogging
Frequently updating data using RSS feed
Promotion through news groups, newsletters, e-mails and forums

What is Social Media Optimization service?

Social media optimization (SMO) service customizes a complete social media website with optimized pages for the network socialite and search engine. The SMO activity would ideally involve the following steps:

Increasing the site linkability by making it social media friendly
Creating awareness through viral marketing
Using free/paid advertisements as a promotional tool
Customizing application to geographical locations
Creating brand awareness by integrating blogs, newsgroups etc
Community building

How is Social Media Optimization (SMO) advantageous than Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

SMO and SEO both have a substantial influence on the web traffic. While SEO focuses on website content, links, structure etc to increase the page ranking, SMO is more about networking through social media. Though SEO is equally effective, SMO is more popular due to the following

Easy to implement and needs no expert
Result can be seen immediately
Good profiling leads to heavy traffic
No fee charged
Structure of the website not so important
Internet community functionalities can be effectively used
Gains maximum exposure
Encourages online participation by the audience
Visual presentation is more important than the content