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3 Fast Tips to Share Your Small Business and Avoid Flat Advertising Techniques
Tuesday, March 3, 2013by The BWD Team in Advertising, Marketing, SEO
Advertising is one-directional: it’s typically a message delivered outward by a business at a certain cost and to a specific audience that falls flat. The ad itself isn’t likely to be valued for its own sake, and this form of marketing is easily recognizable by today’s consumers for its overtly commercial nature.
Good content, however, gives something back to the user. It gets them thinking about a topic that’s meaningful to them, leading them to realize how your product or services fits into their (or their business’) life or goals. Unsurprisingly, this is the only way to market brands, products, and services successfully on the internet in 2013, and especially for SEO. High quality content naturally gathers a great number of inbound links to a website as we’ve noted before, therefor driving up perceived value, referral traffic, and search engine rankings.
So instead of thinking about simply advertising your small business and making a small business internet marketing mistake, here are some tips on how to start sharing it and taking advantage of the new social web instead. Given a few hours of work each week, this form of marketing is often cheaper and more rewarding than traditional, flat advertising methods.
Have any questions? Feel free to reach out to us for individual strategy and more.
Tip 1: Network and build social capital through social media
Networking with the social web means “community strategy,” and it often ends up looking a lot like a digital web or constellaton.
People trust recommendations, and they trust them even more from individuals with high levels of social network influence. There are many glittering stars out there in the social media constellations, and when you produce content that they’re excited to share, they’ll drive a geometrically expanded number of users to your business. We generally call this process community building when one or more social networks are used.
These influential people aren’t necessarily looking for discounts as a reward; what motivates them is insider-status and getting to a great product or company “first.” While networking with these types of individuals and organizations may seem tricky at first, remain confident in the fact that if your business, products, or services are of the highest value, then your content will certainly follow through in demonstrating this to taste makers and social movers on the internet. Maintain reach outs by actively tagging your content, and using productivity tools to keep your finger on the pulse of their current conversations.
While these types of digital connections may be more obvious in some industries rather than others–for example a small local bakery vs. a mid-sized financial wealth firm–we’re happy to help you guide you and your business to the exact strategy you need to reach them. The results will not only affect your inbound traffic levels, but SEO as well.
Tagged with: Allrecipes, Facebook, Kohl's, Pinterest2 Comments
When we say “internet marketing” to most small businesses owners, we most often hear “search engine results.” So it’s no wonder that not only do most individuals consider SEO to be the holy grail of pursuit for small businesses and internet marketing, but that they pay good money to anyone who promises stellar and sometimes dubious results.
All too often our team receives forwarded emails from our clients from SEO “snake oil salesmen” offering guarantees to appear in the top three positions for a search term for an unreasonably strange sum. They’ll try to convince website owners that their websites aren’t properly optimized, and that the only way to succeed is by working with their company.
Not only are these statements almost always untrue, but these types of scammers only help to further muddle the truth about what makes “great” SEO, a complex process that we’ve discussed at length here on our blog. Here are four ways to avoid falling prey to the SEO trap as a small business owner or manager.
1. Realize the SEO frontier is just like the old wild west
Unfortunately, the world of online marketing is still in a formative, wild west era where anyone who throws up a banner can present themselves as an SEO expert. Without any sort of accreditation or accountability, unskilled and unscrupulous SEO “professionals” throng the marketplace–much like the miracle cures and soothing syrups used to stake out street corners in early American frontier towns.
While major players in the world of SEO have been actively trying to pursue a set of industry standards, best practices, and accountability, these individuals continue to take advantage of those who aren’t consistently vigilante and constantly in tune with the latest developments in the industry.
2. Recognize mediocre SEO practices immediately
In many cases, small businesses pay out tens of thousands of dollars for search engine optimization, with little comparative impact against what the organic results by the business by their own content marketing would have been anyways. SEO knowledge goes out of date rapidly, and a mediocre SEO practitioner may use obsolete gimmicks such as keyword metatags which no longer bear any weight in SEO, and repetitive content, a practice that actually can do harm to your search engine standing.
Your link building and internet marketing efforts should be part of a vast and diverse web, because it’s the only path to great SEO. Read our introductory “course” to link building–the only way to SEO in 2013– to gather a quick and thorough understanding now.
3. Understand the danger of unscrupulous SEO “experts” who think they can outwit Google
Even worse than the vaguely incompetent are the would-be wizards. Combining self-importance with the quest for quick money, they boast their unique insider’s ability to outwit the search algorithms. With no frame of reference, a small business may fall for this type of sales pitch, only to suffer drastic consequences a few weeks after the SEO “expert” has cashed their check and headed for the hills.
What kind of consequences? Google is continuously improving its ability to detect manipulative SEO practices (such as stuffing keywords into invisible parts of the website and “cloaking,” producing different page results for search engines and human visitors). Once these bad practices are recognized, Google will quietly impose penalties on a business, and suddenly the company’s website may find that it has dropped to the 50th page of search eresults. If the violations are bad enough, Google may even remove the site’s listing altogether.
4. Recognize good SEO and run with it
In the absence of any kind of external accreditation, businesses have to learn what to listen for when they seek help with optimizing their site. If you start to hear your SEO consultant talking about “fooling” Google, you know that you’ve got the wrong person. Look instead for someone who talks about fresh, original content and who has an interest in learning about the needs of your customers to produce excellent content marketing and link building, the only way to SEO in 2013. While there are some structural “best practices,” having mostly to do with clean code and unique tags, the main way to rise in page rankings is with honest quality. No shortcuts, no tricks, no secrets.
Do you think BWD might make the cut? Let us start working some strategy with you and your business immediately. There’s no cost for a consultation.
Tagged with: Google, scams, small business1 Comment
The rules of ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs) have changed. It’s no longer possible to easily buy your way to a top spot in Google’s organic search engine results pages, and the only way to excel in the modern world of internet marketing and SEO is through great content marketing and shareability.
The most recent updates to Google’s ranking algorithms, Penguin and Panda, have been the basis for a great deal of speculation and discussion about these types of changes to SEO in the last 12 months. However, all high level marketers now agree that great content marketing through blogging or another means is at the heart of SEO success.
If you’re on the fence, here are four reasons your company should’ve started blogging yesterday, and ways to think of content creation as much more than just a few blog posts per year:
1. Blogging & content marketing are not necessarily what you think they are
It’s time to put your business first and rid yourself of any preconceived notions about the frivolous nature and poor quality of blogging from the early days of the web. Today, content marketing actually involves producing a variety of formats based on desired effects and prospective audiences. For example, events like Felix Baumgartner’s daredevil free fall from the edge of space–released on YouTube for the launch of Red Bull’s Stratos line of energy drinks–are a modern example of very expensive content marketing. The video of his fall simultaneously broke many only viewing records, including 8 million live concurrent viewers from around the world at once, while also producing an amazing amount of buzz and marketing for Red Bull.
While most businesses don’t have the budget for this kind of stunt, you can be rest assured that developing content strategy and ideas for your business’ blog or other publications has the potential to be much simpler. Past academic thesis can work perfectly in serialized formats. Or consider the 100 case studies sitting somewhere on your company’s intranet for only a few potential clients to see each month! This type of high end content can bring new life, better search rankings, and more revenue to your business.
2. The only way to gather inbound links and excel on Google is through great content
Unless you’ve literally invented the greatest product since sliced bread, the number one factor in sending visitors to your website thanks to SEO or referral traffic is through inbound links. And what’s the best way to gather inbound links? Through fascinating, high quality content production and distribution on a blog or similar piece of technology. (Check out our Introduction to Link Building post for a quick primer.) Google’s latest updates indicate that its web crawlers will be more interested in conversations that are constantly evolving and adding value to the web, rather than online “brochures” thanks to a constant flow of content. It’s clear by now that static websites will and have become the “billboards” of the web that fade into the background, even with the best design and animation.
While these facts has proved to be true for many years in SEO, the Google Penguin and Panda updates of the last 12 months have truly sealed the deadly fate of these brochure-style sites.
3. Content marketing is the best way to build authority and gather new opportunities and customers
Great content marketing has less to do with an occasional blog post, and more to do with how marketers formulate strategy distribution. It involves finding where your target audience is already residing on the web, and involving them in industry conversations with fascinating, high quality information that sets your business as a clear leader in your industry.
We’ve developed and executed content marketing strategies for companies that would have never thought blogging was a sensible marketing solution 5 years ago. In this instance we incorporated a new blog and email newsletter to an industrial company’s existing website.
All too often managers and owners of small businesses tend to believe that “blogging” is not for them. This has proved to be especially true in the law, industrial, medical science, and the financial industries. While social media and blogs may be considered too “soft and fuzzy” in these spheres, professionals in these fields really should really frame their potential marketing work in terms of producing and distributing valuable white papers, industry reports, studies and much more instead, and whether they’re in a million dollar business or not.
4. Facebook search will factor in content and recommendations
Conversations and content will also be the basis of high rankings in social search, such as the upcoming Facebook graph search. The web has become the 21st century equivalent of the medieval market or the Middle Eastern bazaar. Blogs and social media networks have become more than a place to buy things and be entertained, as they’re now a place to confide, gather advice, and discover new things. This buzz will be essential to listings in the new Facebook search, because just like Google’s, Facebook’s algorithms will factor in conversations, content, and more. One of the easiest ways to fuel positive feedback for your listing is by taking an active role to ask customers to join in the conversation, either through blogging or social media outreach and community management. Excellent content marketing is just what your Facebook followers need to seal the deal and leave a positive review.
One of the best examples of a company that went from a small neighborhood shop to an international craze through content strategy–thanks to the hit American shows Sex in the City and SNL–is Magnolia Bakery, who kicked off the cupcake craze of the late 1990s and now maintains an active blog and social community continually fostering their popularity.
Great content marketing strategy’s next big challenge will be to reinvigorate the spheres of law, finance, industrial services, professional services, and medicine. The content is there, just waiting to come to life. All that’s needed is some great strategy and a beautiful platform.
Need some help to boost your content marketing strategy? Give us a shout and our experts will begin their work asap.
The Ultimate Twitter Marketing Setup for Small Businesses: TweetDeck, Topsy, Disqus, or Buffer
Wednesday, January 1, 2013by The BWD Team in Marketing, SEO, Twitter
Social media marketing is an essential and low cost form of marketing for small business, with one of the most affordable and high ROI options being the micro publishing service Twitter.
As a service that has been “traditionally” viewed as a platform for 140-character bites of content, Twitter provides the best conduit for professional conversation-making online as well. When we consider the fact that word of mouth marketing is the single most influential sales factor in many consumer and enterprise industries, it’s easy to realize that a great presence on Twitter is essential for a business’ success in 2013 and onwards.
While your typical Twitter activities probably include posting a link to your latest content on your website including blog posts, research, case studies, or any other type of content marketing, many small business owners and managers have yet to realize the potential that Twitter provides for in gathering new clients, building your company’s professional authority, and constructing a vast, healthy network of inbound links to elevate SEO and traffic to your website.
Think conversations, not 140 character serial publishing
Remember: your Twitter marketing should always be just one part of a greater inbound link building strategy that will also build SEO.
The first step towards this comprehensive and holistic approach in word of mouth marketing online is realizing that these types of services must be about conversations and not simple 140 character bites of our own content all day long. When we think about Twitter as a link-generating, conversation-buzzing platform, it’s easier to understand how this digital medium is really just like word-of-mouth marketing in the “real” world.
To this end, we really tell our clients to tweet about everything. Instead of thinking about how you can share 10 links to your website in a single day, start by framing various conversations that you think would be helpful in generating new clients, sales and more. Use hashtags and reach outs to other individuals or organizations on Twitter often. Did you mention a great company or vendor in your most recent piece of content? Mention them through the @username function and there’s a great chance that your shout out will be continuously shared from their own feed as well. Do you have a question for a competitor or colleague that you think might fascinate your followers or potential clients if it were on Twitter? Ask away! The possibilities here are endless: simply think about creating helpful and enriching conversations, not necessarily pure 140 character micro-publishing. As you may realize from our research this past month, the entirety of these techniques all fall under the umbrella of content marketing and link building–the gold standard in digital marketing–as well.
Here’s an example of this technique that helped BWD earn a new tweet on the @KISSmetrics feed, definitely giving our traffic a healthy boost of inbound traffic (and of course, search engine “juice.”)
@kissmetrics Thought you’d like the love in our latest article here: blogwhatdesign.com/2013/01/22/3-c…
#analytics #metrics #betterthanGOOGLE!
— BWD Inc.(@bwdinc) January 22, 2013
While Facebook certainly fosters conversations to a certain extent as well, it’s quite often the case that professional industries interact at a much quicker, and more detailed pace on Twitter thanks to its purely chronological nature, as opposed to Facebook’s more popularity-based distribution system through the news feed.
Calculating your social media ROI
While some may argue that tracking social media ROI is near impossible we argue that those types of agencies and individuals just aren’t doing their jobs very well. An analytics systems like KISSmetrics and others actually can pinpoint where social media users come from, how long they stay, when they come back, where they go from your website, how many dollars they spend, and more. If you can’t calculate social ROI with a tool like that, then we hate to say it, but your marketing team is just plain lazy.
Take a look at KISSmetric’s great infographic on tracking the ROI for social media here, and then read through our article about how analytics tools like this are essential to successful tracking of your investment in social media and other digital marketing.
Tagged with: KISSmetrics, link building, Topsy, TweetDeck6 Comments
3 Keys to Beginner’s Conversion Optimization for Small Business Websites (& the Money You’re Losing Without Them!)
Tuesday, January 1, 2013by The BWD Team in Marketing
While the art of the sale is ages old, digital tools have done quite a bit to innovate the entire process from start to finish. One of the most fundamental updates for marketing through these tools has been website conversion optimization and the resulting metric called “conversion rate“ used to denote those individuals who actually following through with a goal achievement–such as a sale–over the number of total browsers, or those just looking around.
As you can imagine, there are many many people simply “looking around” on any given website, and what a company like ours specializes in is getting those looky-loos to follow through with a positive outcome or goal achievement. All of the SEO, external advertising, or link-building in the world can send tons of traffic to a page, but how can you best ensure a sale once they arrive? This is the art of conversion optimization.
Prefer to outsource this to the experts? Send us an email and we’ll get started on your project right away.
Defining “conversion optimization” for small businesses
As you might expect, a “conversion” can involve a lot of different things for many different businesses. The one consistent factor is a goal achievement or positive outcome, small or large, for every successful conversion. While large goal achievements like a newly closed sale or a purchase of any kind online or off are best, smaller conversions such as a new email subscriber or social follower can be highly valuable as well. Sometimes these smaller conversions can lead to larger conversions later on, all acting as part of a “conversion funnel” throughout the digital sales process. At a minimum, it’s essential that your website enables some form of initial connection between the visitor and your brand.
While there are many robust solutions that control and segment the entire customer relationship after first contact known as CRM or customer relationship management systems for salesmen to continue following up with clients (our favorites are our favorites Infusionsoft or Streak), what we’re discussing today is more specific to the initial exposure a visitor has with your brand through your digital properties and the immediate outcome. What we want to do with great conversion optimization is not only get your visitors in the front door, but to the metaphorical cash register line–such as a contact form submission or e-commerce sale–as well.
Key #1: The importance of solid analytics in conversion optimization
What makes conversion optimization both fun and fascinating is the fact that statistics and analytics play such a major role throughout the entire process. While Google Analytics is–somewhat–free, we feel there are a host of other, higher quality systems out there at great value as well. While every business’ needs are different, we really love KISSMetrics right now starting at $49/month for our clients. It offers the most user friendly setup and customization we’ve seen yet, plus their API lets engineers (like ours!) create tracking for almost any kind of digital event–such as a click on a button, or a view on a contact form or shopping page–very easily.
7 Rookie Internet Marketing Mistakes for Small Businesses to Avoid
Wednesday, January 1, 2013by The BWD Team in Link Building, Marketing, SEO
When we say “internet marketing” we now mean everything from SEO, to social sharing, to general link building, to PPC, to community growth on social media, to CPM, to Pinterest marketing techniques and very strategy for visual social networks in general. Internet marketing can be as small as a Facebook “like” and as huge as a link to your website from CNN.com. It’s the building of your brand in every digital way possible to generate growth and revenue. It’s developing business relationships through social media or email that drive sales or your general authority within an industry. It encompasses guest appearances in real life or digitally (hello webinars!), and it can even be the single factor that makes or breaks your business.
Whew! What a list.
The new, holistic approaches to internet marketing–thanks to changes by Google and other search engines in the last 12 months–are enough to make anyone’s head spin, let alone a small business owner or manager who wears many different “business” hats everyday. Thankfully there are plenty of resources–such as this blo–to help you out along the way to internet marketing success, and in this article we’ll cover 7 rookie mistakes that we’ve found again and again in our nearly 10 years as internet professionals to make those first steps even easier.
Thinking of allocating a budget to outsource the entire process? Feel free to browse these guidelines and send us a message to see how you can streamline the growth of your business by focusing on what you do best instead.
#1 Failure to maintain an on-site strategy focused on quality content
There used to be a time in SEO history where cheap microsites fueled search engine results pages (SERPs) thanks to a huge network of inbound links from websites of a similar, cheap type. However, with Google’s Panda, Penguin, and other algorithimic updates last year, these types of link farms (along with cheap options to purchase batches of links) have been essentially wiped out from relevance.
The fact that these cheaper sites added no real value or quality to a users’ experience on their websites is what ultimately sealed their fate and failure with search engines. Instead, Google now strongly promotes websites and digital properties of the highest quality. Ranking websites on search engines with poorly created strategy or no consistently updated content whatsoever is now nearly impossible.
But what does having high quality content on a website actual entail? Google ranks quality based upon the:
- Quantity and quality of inbound links to the page (1 link from CNN = excellent, 100 link-farm links = bad)
- Quantity and quality of social signals linking to the page
- Grammar and spelling on the page
- Text formatting indications on the page (well organized text with subheads, bold, italics, bullet points is easy to read for readers, and translates into great quality)
- Length of content (masses of poorly written 200 character posts will always rank poorly against longer posts of varying length and higher quality)
- Outbound links from the page (link to relevant websites that are helpful for readers and enhance their experience)
This client maintains an excellent on-site strategy by regularly posting interesting content with a variety of media.
If you’re thinking that these parameters seem pretty subjective: you’re right, and we’ll never have clear-cut guidelines as to how Google ranks websites to ensure no one games the system. However, these parameters are general enough to help create the strategy necessary for valuable, search-driving marketing on-site. Take a look at our Intro to Linkbuilding article from last month to get some initial ideas flowing.
Tagged with: conversion, design, Facebook, strategy, Twitter, user experience5 Comments
3 Goals for Guaranteed Greater Revenue from your Website in 2013
Thursday, December 12, 2012by The BWD Team in Marketing
Our personal New Years resolutions may be made and quickly broken, but we’re certain that this set of digital goals for the New Year will not only be achieved with minimal investment, but will give the boost and return your business needs to hit unprecedented revenue goals in 2013.
While the term “monetization” might be a nice way for blog hobbyists to dream of unrealistic revenue goals with a poorly designed and functioning website, we find more excitement everyday in working with clients who are ready to take their digital projects to the next level to create real revenue goals. So, here’s what’s required to kick “monetization” out the door and start generating real business with real revenue with minimal investment in time and money in 2013.
Prefer to outsource any part of the techniques discussed here to a company of professionals? Contact us for a risk-free proposal.
Take Analytics Seriously: Set numeric goals, especially for social networks and conversions
It might seem obvious for businesses, but remember that numeric goals and analysis–known as analytics in the world of digital marketing and advertising–are the key to success for any digital project. The reward and satisfaction from hitting these types of goals with your business–especially if they’re realistic and well planned from the start–is always immensely satisfying.
Featured Portfolio Project: Restaurant MEAL. Restaurants and other local store fronts always have great opportunities for social network conversion and analytics as well, especially through visually focused networks like Facebook and Pinterest.
To start, the bottom line that businesses should be constantly checking is: what is my return on investment for this piece of digital marketing? Although “ROI” can be difficult to determine with social networks, we’ve found that simple numeric goals and tracking do an excellent job in getting started. Take the process here one step further by gathering data from potential clients from the start through better conversion tracking, and clearer analysis of this type of data so that you can turn “window shoppers” into buyers and “lurkers” into long time readers. Let us know at anytime if you’d like to take these ideas a step further by receiving a risk-free proposal.
- Facebook: Take a look at your rate of new “likes” for your Facebook page for the last 30 day period. What was the rate of growth for this period compared to the previous one? What do you think you did to help achieve that kind of growth? What can you do to increase that rate just a bit for the next 30 day period? Use your page insights to nail down these numbers, and set your goals. Consider investing a monetary budget into Facebook advertising, or just a bit more well-planned time into community building (which we’ve found often yields better results over paid!) To reinforce your efforts, check to see which of your Facebook posts were most popular and had the highest engagement rates. Why do you think that happened? How can you produce more posts of that type? Worried about the effects that EdgeRank has had on your reach counts? We’ve found that these updates have actually helped our clients, not hurt them: read more about that here.
- Twitter: Just like Facebook, do your best to figure out how many new followers you received in the last 30 day period (tsee our note on 3rd party trackers below), and work on increasing that rate either through strategically set budgets for time spent on community building on Twitter or paid Twitter Advertising. Check on which of your Tweets were retweeted or replied to most often, and why that might be. Are you reaching out and taking advantage of the link building benefits of Twitter? Since Twitter hasn’t yet provided great analytics tools for their business users, we love using TopsyPro to gather exciting insights and metrics into our clients’ Twitter data. Topsy lets us not only track other accounts, mentions, and retweets, but general phrases, hashtags, and other trends to see where and how discussions are heading on Twitter and how our Twitter marketing efforts are shaping up.
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Click to check out our most recent small business tips for Pinterest.
Pinterest: The metrics that count with this visual social network are repins and board followers. While Pinterest is certainly working in the right direction towards better “in house” insights for businesses starting with verified accounts linked to domains, take the time to do an estimation of your repins and new board followers in the latest 30 day period and work to beat those growth rates in the next 30 day period. What kinds of pins were really popular? How can you produce more of their type? We also have our eye on Curalate: a marketing tool suite for the visual web–especially Pinterest. Their portfolio of clients boast companies like Campbells, Gap, Michael Kors, and much more, even for small business! Take a look at the exciting ways in which their technology works in their welcome video here, and we’ll report back once we’ve enjoyed a complete campaign tracking Pinterest analytics with this service.
Tagged with: analytics, conversion, Facebook, goals, link building, Pinterest, social networks, Twitter1 Comment
An Introduction to the Art of Link Building: the Gold Standard in Internet Marketing and SEO
Thursday, December 12, 2012by The BWD Team in Link Building, Marketing, SEO
We’ve long explained to our clients that inbound link building is the gold standard in internet–and especially search engine–marketing, and the logic seems to be pretty clear: the entire purpose of having a website is to be digitally “seen” in order to drive sales or another cause. You may have a beautiful website, but if no one is linking to you, then you’re nearly nonexistent in digital terms. While this logic is simple, the actual process of getting those links to your website–a practice known as link building–is a bit more unclear, especially for business owners unfamiliar with internet marketing
So, let’s break it down. When we say “inbound link” we’re talking about any hyperlink that sends users from one website directly to yours. As you can imagine, inbound links can appear in an infinite number of ways such as shared content on Facebook, retweets on Twitter, referrals via a URL in a YouTube video, a pin on Pinterest re-pinned 100 times over, a strategically placed “read more” link in an email marketing campaign, and many, many other options. Inbound links can be paid or unpaid. Straight to your front page or to an individual blog post. They can be sent through an image or through a text link. And they can even be the deciding factor in what makes your brand an overnight viral sensation.
In this post we’ll discuss our link building and internet marketing mantras in addition to a number of great examples and free opportunities that business owners and managers can start taking advantage of immediately.
Your New Internet Marketing Mantra: Creativity, Relationships, Community, & Quality
One of the ultimate keys in creating powerful link building strategy is creativity. Within the last four months Google and other search engines’ algorithms have continued to prove that they are rewarding creative, meaningful, and high quality inbound links rather than craftily placed key words and anchor text to determine their search engine results pages. This type of old, cheap link building of the past is certainly dead, as many leading SEO companies have recently noted. Since the link building of today requires a bit more time, networking finesse, and creative effort, the strategy has commonly been rebranding as “link earning.” As a result it’s important to realize that link building both indirectly drives websites upwards in organic search engine results through SEO, while simultaneously yielding a continuous flower of new visitors directly through the new links as well.
Link building is a hugely important part of SEO. Whereas links could previously be purchased in easy, cheap batches, Google and Bing’s search algorithms have become amazingly complex, rewarding high quality links and remaining thoroughly properietary. Although we’ll never have a complete answer as to the technical details of these algorithms years of research and trend study has yielded some great indicators like those noted here.
While, there’s no cheap or easy way to get ahead with link building anymore, the good news is that fostering an active and interested community around your digital platforms and properties will create compounding results in which your followers are doing much of the link building work for you in the end. While we ultimately want each of our clients to reach this point, there are important first steps to take as you break into any industry and its digital communities and try to create that initial first spark.
Your link building and internet marketing efforts may sometime feel like a vast web, and that’s a good thing!
While a standard plan won’t work for every website–let alone two of a kind–there are many general guidelines or “mantras” that can help marketers big or small to move along in their link building strategy. As is the case in the physical world of management, powerful connections with individuals and communities are what yield the best results for your business. These ideas culminate in our mantra for link building of: creativity, relationship building, community growth, and high quality content. Here are some of the tenants and examples of this mantra in practice:
Tagged with: Adwords, Bing, Facebook, Federated Media, Google, linkeratti, TwitterLeave a Comment
Pinterest Business Tools: They’re Finally Here!
Friday, November 11, 2012by The BWD Team in Marketing, Pinterest
This week we were ecstatic (yes we really do love our jobs that much!) to find out that Pinterest has finally embraced small business by launching their new Pinterest for Business tool set.
Since its launch in March 2010, Pinterest has been the premier service for “scrap booking” online. Turning out to be so much more than a compilation of visual montages–or as Pinterest calls them: boards–Pinterest has allowed brands of all types to embrace a culture of social, visual sharing, thereby propelling business accounts’ revenue to levels previously unimagined.
With the new, soon-to-be-expanded tools for businesses, brands can now verify their domains so that pins are tracked consistently to the right account and web address. This feature ensures that content is easily discovered and tracked, not only creating a high quality experience for regular users but creating stellar returns for businesses as well.
All that’s needed to convert an existing account into a business account are a few clicks of their ever-colorful red buttons, acceptance of the new business terms of service, and the easy domain verification mentioned above. While all or most of our clients are already covered in the Pinterest-button-sharing department, feel free to let us know if you’d like some help placing your own Pinterest buttons.
Case Studies & Examples for Your Small Business
Our favorite part of this latest launch are the fascinating case studies Pinterest has released. For our content, publishing, and lifestyle driven clients, the Allrecipes case study perfectly details what these types of brands should be doing to draw mounds of high quality traffic to their domains from Pinterest:
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Allrecipes features promotions to pin their website throughout their design.
Community building: Allrecipes was able to make recipe contributors feel like a highly valued part of the “show” by featuring favorite recipes from the site directly on their Pinterest account, ensuring users’ creations are shared over and over.
- Easy discovery: Allrecipe’s boards easily lay out a variety of different cuisines, styles, and niches to quickly provide high quality content for all types of readers.
- Simple, direct functionality: Allrecipe’s Pinterest buttons are easy to spot, and the “pinning” process is advertised very well throughout the domain.
Allrecipes saw dramatic results. Within three months, more than 50,000 recipes were pinned resulting in 139 million Pinterest impressions, and clicks on Allrecipes’ Pinterest content increased more than 900%.
The Organized Interiors case study offered some great insight for our local and more brick-and-mortar small business clients. As an interior design company, their Pinterest campaign not only provided an amazing platform to create mood boards and design ideas with clients keeping costs low, but helped to build their authority among colleagues and future clients in the industry by showcasing their latest work as well. Even better, the great visual connectivity of Pinterest allowed the owner of Organized Interiors to discover a slew of new products, vendors, and business growth resources as well. Again, the results were more than significant. From Organized Interiors owner:
Pinterest has helped to push my business into the higher end market. I have more followers and several have requested me for projects. I signed on a new client to do a $40K bathroom remodel project from posting a board about a prior engagement. He pointed to one of my pins and said, ‘I want that bathroom, right now.’
Read more…
Tagged with: case studies, images, photos1 Comment
How to Beat Facebook’s EdgeRank War on Small Business Pages
Wednesday, November 11, 2012by The BWD Team in Facebook, Marketing
As previously avid consumers of Facebook’s free marketing products, small businesses are now facing the harsh reality that the social networking giant must now cash in on its large small business base to remain successful. While some have previously called Facebook a free advertising charity, others feel that page managers are facing a dubious reality by paying to reach followers that were once accessed for free.
While we know that Facebook pages have never reached their full audience–except for a small test in 2009–and any claims that Facebook is “gaming” the News Feed to provoke page owners to buy more ads are refuted in a recent blog post by the social network giant, many page managers aren’t convinced Facebook is playing fairly.
The company has somewhat thankfully responded rather quickly to the outrage created by these issues within the past month. It’s likely that Facebook recognizes now more than ever that not only are their future and current ad clients a valuable revenue source, but that it’s an interested user base that ensures any Facebook ad products actually work: pages use Facebook to reach interested followers, and followers also use Facebook because of the valuable content that pages provide.
Small business pages: a valuable revenue stream for Facebook
Graphics courtesy Reply.com.
It’s no surprise that Facebook is now aggresively pursuing ad dollars from this major market segment: in a recent email survey conducted by Reply, respondents overwhelmingly chose Facebook as the free social media platform they use to promote their business at 68.7 percent, but when it came time to answer the question as to which paid products from social media that they used as well, only 6.6 percent of survey replies answered Facebook while an overwhelming 74.3 percent replied “None.”
Facebook’s answer? Charge page managers at sliding scale rates to reach more of the followers their pages once reached via highly prized news feeds–the now golden standard in social marketing as opposed to sidebar placements–and overcome their “EdgeRank” controlled placement.
Tagged with: Facebook advertising, promoted posts, social media marketing2 Comments
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