Approaching market research

Market Research is where all successful sales and marketing strategies are born.  It enables businesses to set the direction for their web marketing campaign, draft prospect personas, prepare their sales playbook and draft a clear marketing message just to mention a few.  Needless to say, it is crucial to take the time and actually get it done right – trouble is that this is where a lot of web marketers often black out.  Are we to approach marketing research with costly focus groups with online marketing experts and isn’t that how the top guns do it?

Now focus groups behind two-way mirrors may indeed be the approach that the top guns are taking but keep in mind that we all have access to something a lot better – the Internet!  Yes we can all get this type of research done with lower cost and across a wider scope.  Let’s check out a simple and straightforward approach to go about it – if you are looking for specific tool and strategies you may want to check out our recommended tools for online market research.

Getting Market Research done

Now prior to getting into the strategies and tools that you can look into for getting market research done, there are several things that you need to consider which would help you approach the task with a straightforward and effective methodology

Determine exactly what information you are looking to unravel – identify the specific things that you need to know for effective web marketing. Don’t try to get it all answered in one go.  Otherwise you are not going to find out anything meaningful.  Here are a couple of things that you ought to figure out while breaking them down into specific categories relevant to your business:

• The competitors that you’ll have to deal with
• Are you trying to solve a real issue that people are really dealing with?
• Any dissatisfaction people are having in the kind of products or services that they offer?
• In what way do your targeted prospects usually prefer to communicate or lookup information?
• How much money people are willing to spend for the products or services that they offer
• Is your product or service enticing or interesting enough?
• Psychographic and demographics

Come up with questions and think about how they are going to be answered by prospects – determine what questions you need to ask to get a comprehensive data (including follow-up questions).  There’s nothing worse than having marketing research done only to realize later on that you’ve missed out on some logical questions that would have helped you understand your market better and having to do it all over again. Take the time to go through hypothetical conversations and prepare all the questions that you will need to ask before starting your research.

Seek out the individuals that are best suited for your market research – research in online marketing can be targeted towards buyers instead of leads or online users in general.  If this is the case, you need to consider key characteristics that these people possess.

The best approach to asking questions for your research – What is the best and most effective way to ask your questions among online marketing prospects?

• Surveys
• Twitter – do you have a large number of Twitter followers?
• E-mail – do you have an email list that presents suitable contacts for your marketing research?

Analysis – of course to make sense of all the information you’ve collected, you’ll have to analyze it and this has to be properly done according to the kind of information you’ve been gathering which could either be qualitative or quantitative in nature.  For instance, let’s say you are looking for quantitative data about how much interest is out there for the product or service that you are offering, you need to look at the number of people who responded positively versus those who’ve responded negatively or otherwise had shown indifference in order to decide whether to push through or scrap the project.  In the case of qualitative data, you may want to consider the qualities that most of your target prospects find most valuable or the number of ways they are actually making use of your product or service and seek out new means of utilization that you overlooked to consider as well as identify issues that people are having regarding your product or service and how to rectify it or further improve it!

One needs to think of market research as a consistent and on-going process.  The insights and information you acquired will likely yield more interesting questions that have to be asked.  Take every opportunity to communicate with target customers and find out all that you can about their needs and what you can do to best address it.

Original Article

Website Design Quirks

 The last thing that you want to do in website design is to annoy people and yet why is it that you’ll still find a lot of websites out there packed with elements that users can’t help but hate? Maybe it has something to do with the demands and strain of having to design your own website (or the excitement of it depending on how you look at it), its easy to overlook the quirks that you’ve actually experienced as a website user.  Unfortunately the poor user experience that such web design quirks provide can lead to poor lead conversions, high web page abandonment, poor reputations and low search engine listing positions.  Do you suspect that you could somehow be annoying your web marketing prospects – why not check out some of the top things people can possibly hate                                                                                           about your website?

 Your Web design and development – What can people possibly hate about it?

 Using a “Contact Us” form as only means of contact – Put yourself in the shoes of your website visitors. You are interested and in need of the products or services offered, or you need assistance and dealing with problems following your investment, but all you have is an online form after which you’ll have no other choice but to wait for a response and left wondering if you will ever get one.  There’s nothing wrong with having a “Contact Us” form and it’s a great way to come up with a great opt-in email list but it is no substitute for clear and reliable contact information.

Pop-up advertisements – This one is a no brainer and probably the most apparent.  Never the less, it’s important to get it out of the way in online marketing – pop-ups are downright annoying and yes it may help you acquire a couple of subscribers for your mailing list but is it a good trade-off when it annoys so many of your website visitors, causing them to leave without even looking at what you have to offer?  Turn website traffic into profitable leads with quality content and interesting offers. Call to actions instead of annoying tricks!

Web page automatically plays multimedia content - never force anything on your website visitors because that would just be plain rude.  Let them decide which multimedia content to play and be considerate. Some people may be checking your website at their workplace or prefers to browse in silence – what do you suppose is going to happen if you impose your multimedia content on them?  They will likely look for the “Back” button and press it without even looking at what you have to offer!

Unnecessary animations – it typically takes 3 seconds for users to orient themselves on any given web page and decide whether to stay or leave.  Wasting this time with irrelevant animation, flashy advertisements and interactive media that has nothing to do with your business is a bad idea.  The whole thing detracts from the focus of internet marketing so its often better to not have those things and approach website design with quality and relevant content and clearly feature the things that they can do on the website.

Incomprehensible “About Us” Page - Is your “About Us” page something that your general audience will easily understand or is it full of fancy and unintelligible terms?  Your “About Us” page is typically where website visitors go if they are looking to know more about your business and its not going to do you any good if the content appears unintelligible for them.

Titles do not match the content – When creating content for internet marketing, you may already know the importance of coming up with great and enticing titles.  Good titles bring in traffic from search engines, emails and RSS feeds as they check out the things that you have to offer.  But wait – what happens when titles lead them to something totally unrelated?  Don’t be at all surprised if they quickly abandon your website in disappointment.  While great titles are important – it’s a different story when you are misleading people with it.

Sliders that take a long time to load – If you want to feature various images effectively in a limited space then sliders are a great way to do that but only if it is done correctly!  Sliders that take too long to load and opens up a new page every time someone clicks on it is an annoying feature.

Flash – Many businesses use flash on their website design which can present some significant problems in the web marketing perspective.  The issue with flash is not in its limitations and you’ll see a lot of websites out there with stunning visuals because of it.  It’s just that search engines are unable to read it so it’s not going to get indexed.  Flash animations also typically take too long to load and would certainly annoy people looking for specific information on your website.

Misleading CTA (Call to Action) – CTAs should always be truthful and perfectly suit the expectation of your website visitors as they complete checkout and redeem your offers.  How would you feel if a CTA on a business website promised you a 25 percent discount but then you found out that you can only redeem if you’ve spent $500 and more.  How frustrating is that?  Well certainly frustrating enough to destroy your business reputation along with conversions and what little hope there is for making a profit!

SEO Driven Content – If you’ve been in web design and web marketing for quite some time, you may recall that there was a time when it was good practice to flood your website with paragraphs filled with keyword dense content that don’t really make sense.  Such content are solely meant for bots or search engine crawlers and even though search engine algorithms had become far more sophisticated than they were a decade ago, a lot of people in the online marketing business are still doing the same thing – creating content for search engine crawlers instead of actual users who are bound to doubt the reputation of your website (not to mention the fact that major search engines like Google will actually flag you for such a thing.  Invest in quality and useful content that your users will actually find helpful and valuable!

Original Article

Social Proof – What is it all about and how it relates to social media marketing?

A person’s decision to buy or invest in a particular product or service online can be influenced by various factors – among the most significant of which is social proof and how you can leverage your social media marketing efforts with it.  Statistics from Google shows that approximately 70 percent of online consumers check out product reviews prior to actually buying something online.  More than 60 percent of these people purchase products or services from websites that have reviews or ratings by previous consumers or clients. Online reviews and ratings are just one kind of social proof that you can find online in social networks and shows just how much people can be influenced by purchasing decision and experiences of others which clearly demonstrates its power as an online marketing concept and one that business owners need to leverage.

So what exactly is social proof?  Also known as “social influence”, it is the idea that people can be influenced to conform to the purchasing decision of others.  It’s a validation that consumers often need saying that “if other people are buying or investing in it and are finding much satisfaction for doing so, then I trust that I should as well”.  You can use such a validation as a powerful motivator in your online marketing efforts for your business website and various networks life Facebook and Twitter to effectively influencing the purchasing decisions of your prospects and website visitors.

Now social proof as a marketing concept actually isn’t new and it is not only limited to web marketing.  For instance, you’ll find television shows playing recorded laughter and applause for the audience, to better instil the perception that they are worthy of laughter or applause.  You will also find books boasting the thousands of copies a particular title had sold, elevating it’s recommendation it as a worthy read.  The rise of social networks and social media marketing had only made it easier to exploit and leverage as a marketing tool.

Sources of Social Proof

• Users – approval from actual users of a particular product or service in the form of reviews, testimonials and case studies
• Experts – approval from credible and reputable experts
• Celebrities – endorsements from popular and well-known personalities
• Friends
• Group or Crowd wisdom – approval from a group of people or organization

Leveraging social proof for social media marketing

• Mentions via social media networks can be an excellent source for social proof – Monitor social media networks like Facebook and track positive mentions about your business and feature it for all your prospects to see.
• Embedded Tweets – Twitter features embeddable tweets that you can use to leverage social proof.  If you find positive tweets about your business, you can embed such tweets on your business website or case studies to credibility and authority.
• Social plugins –  Plugins for social networks like Facebook presents an excellent way to leverage social proof from friends or groups of people.  Such plugins in the case of Facebook includes the recommendation plugin, Activity Feed and Like Box which you could link to your blog or website which presents your social proof to the forefront.
• User-generated content – Existing customers can be an excellent source of social proof for your business.  Avid fans are often more than happy to do these things for you which means less work on your hands. What’s more is that user generated content is often perceived as more positive and genuine yielding more conversion rates.
• Social Media Follow or Share Features – Follow and share buttons on social networks make it easier for subscribers and fans to share your content.  Make use of it!  Ensure that you have follow/share buttons on all the web content that you create – that means everything from landing pages and eBooks to blog posts.  If it is easier for people to follow and share our content then the more likely it is for them to share it with people greatly improving your reach and spreading social proof that will benefit your business.
• Statistics – What are your business’ most notable statistics?  Do you have an impressive number of blog subscribers?  How long have you been in business?  Is your high customer satisfaction rate something to brag about?  All of these statistics are excellent possible sources of social proof.
• Notable mentions via social media and blogs – Blogs and social media can be an excellent source of expert social proof and it’s something that you shouldn’t overlook.  See to it that you keep on top of things and make it more social media marketing friendly.
• Ratings and Reviews for Products and Services
• Testimonials and Case Studies
• Advertising via Social media networks

Indeed social proof and your marketing efforts via social networks is a crucial resource that no one in the online marketing business should ever overlook.  To improve your chances of success in web marketing, one must do all that they can to leverage it!  Take those great tweets, reviews, case studies and testimonials to the forefront. They are not going to do you any good if people are not able to see it!

Original Article

Customer Persona and its Significance in Web Design

A common mistake that people make in their web design and development is that they make it all about them instead of focusing more on their customers or buyers.  After all, the point of having a website for your business is to attract prospects which you can market to as profitable leads and hopefully convert into actual customers or buyers.  Thus it makes perfect sense for such websites  to cater to the kind of web experience suited for their targeted prospects.  They often subconsciously ask themselves            “ What is in there for me?” when checking out your website.  To succeed in web marketing, one has to deliver a website design experience that clearly presents all the great things that your website and business has to                                                                           offer and why they should care.

Indeed it is vital to approach web development, design, experience and content with your prospects in mind.  As a matter of fact, there is strong correlation between making a sale and how much time a prospect spends on a business website engaged on what it offers.  So how exactly do you approach website development in such a way that you are putting the personas of your prospects first, greatly improving results in web marketing?

Now before you even think about website development or redesigning an existing website, one should take into account the personas of their prospects (marketing personas or buyer personas).  These personas are taken by dividing your targeted prospects into specific groups that fictionally represent your ideal buyers or customers based on actual data taken from audience demographics and behaviour online, along with valuable insights about their needs, concerns, motivation and history.

Let’s say that you are a looking to bring in new business for a hotel through web marketing – you’ll have various different prospect personas to target which includes:

• Event planning
• Vacations for family and friends
• Business travelers or corporate travelers
• Newly-weds planning their wedding reception

As you can see, each of the personas mentioned above have distinct preferences and interest.  Having your website address these personas in general will doom it to fail in answering the important question – “What’s in it for them?”  It would be best to approach web design with the intention of directly addressing the specific interest and needs of a particular type of prospect that you are targeting, resulting in a much more personalized and comprehensive website that effective fulfills your business goals.

How to identify prospect personas for your business

• Demographics – Begin developing prospect personas by looking into your current consumer base and pinpoint the most common customers or buyers in your line of business.  Depending on the kind of business that you are into, you can have as little as 2 or as much as 20 different types of personas. Provide descriptions for each one with as much detail as possible such as their name, industry and the jobs or roles that they take.
• Needs and concerns – What concerns do they have or what issues are they trying to get hold of a solution for?  What current trends are there in your market that may affect their business or personal lives?  What information do they need?
• Behavior – What do these people do online?  Are they actively using social networks like Twitter and Facebook?  What keywords do they usually use when doing online searches?  What products or services do they usually look up online and how do these people usually make use of these products or services?

Identifying key prospect personas for your business can take a lot of  time and effort but it’s certainly well worth it.  The information acquired can prove immensely valuable not only in website design and web development but in all other web marketing channels like lead generation and nurturing, social media marketing and e-mail marketing.  In order to succeed in your online marketing campaign, one would need to adopt a marketing message or content that caters to the needs of a specific prospect persona.

Web Design for Prospect Persona

Alright, so you now understand the significance of prospect personas and how to acquire such information and what makes these people tick.  How do you integrate all these in web design in order to provide a personalized and truly profitable experience?  Well there are certainly several ways that you can look into:

• “Choose your own adventure” theme for your website homepage - it is perhaps the easiest and most comprehensive approach to integrating prospective personas to website design. Provide links in your homepage that would enable visitors to tell you who they are and allow your website to provide individual users with the kind of experience and content most relevant to them.
• Creating personalized pages for every prospect persona – customized landing pages that suit the needs and interest of every targeted prospect persona is where your “choose your own adventure” links should lead to.  Featuring such pages in your web development efforts will enable businesses to feature content, offers, messages and media content that best appeals to a specific segment or prospect persona.  
• Creating and featuring content that offers value and sparks the interest of each prospective persona – this includes everything from special offers like eBooks, demos, webinars and blog posts.

Original Article

 What can our Google Adwords PPC Management services do for you?

Would you like to discover the fastest way to drive streams of highly targeted buyers to your website in the next 24 hours and have the phone ringing like a smoke alarm in an Aussie barbecue? Just before I get into that, we want to let you in on a little secret – websites don’t make money. It’s not about the sausage, it’s about the sizzle and it’s not about the website, it’s about the visitors you get to your website.

Now you’ve probably heard of Google Adwords and you know that you can setup a campaign yourself or you can send one of your staff to attend courses on how to effectively run your campaign. We can tell you now that around 96 percent of all people that come to us for Adwords management that have an existing campaign have been doing it wrong and wasting fistful of money every day. It’s not about how many visitors you get to your website but rather it’s about getting highly targeted leads that will be more likely to buy your product or service.  Sure we can send 2 million visitors to your website tomorrow but if no one buys that would be a waste of time and money so we would rather send 200 targeted visitors to your website tomorrow and have 100 of them pick up the phone, send you an e-mail or buy something giving you better returns on your marketing dollar and make more profit.

So how do you get more targeted visitors to actually pick up the phone, e-mail or buy from you? It all starts with tracking and this is where 99 percent of Adwords managers drop the proverbial ball. Think Big Online is the only company in Australia that has developed a state of the art tracking system that tracks every visitor on your website so that you know which types of people actually convert into sales. Once we know this, we start targeting more of these people to increase your return of investment.

Now you may be wondering, why is tracking so important? Well It’s because you can’t improve something that you’re not measuring. If you are running an Adwords campaign and not measuring which keywords and ads turn into phone calls, then you are burning money - money that you could be spending on a holiday in Bali, ski trip to France or a shiny new car. You see that is where we are different - aside from driving floods of visitors to your website, we track everything so it’s simple for you to see that you are making money on everything we do.

Imagine when you get reports at the end of the month and you can see that for every $1,000 you invest outwards, you get $10,000 back in sales. How many thousands of dollars  would you invest? Think Big Online offers you all that and more!

Think Big Online Google Adwords PPC Management Services

As a full-service internet marketing company, our Google Adwords PPC Management Services here at Think Big Online includes:

• In-depth keyword research (we target unlimited keywords)
• Competition analysis
• Tracking for all e-mails and phone calls
• Full month reporting for position, traffic and leads

Here at Think Big Online, we guarantee that you won’t have to worry about dealing with any sleazy salesman, false promises and big stupid technical terms. We fully intend to bring our clients more leads for less and more sales resulting to higher return on investment and more money in their pocket. Some clients benefit in the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year from the services that we offer. Go ahead and get in touch with our PPC consultants today for nothing less than excellent and truly profitable results.

Original Article

All about search engine optimisation

Okay so you got your website online and are now waiting for the sales to come in. Problem is all those sales don’t just magically come in do they? If you’ve been in the web marketing business for quite some time, you would know all too well the importance of web traffic and search engine optimization.

You see, no matter how wiz bang and fantastic your website is you can’t make sales without traffic. Traffic is like blood and if you don’t have any, you’re dead – the same thing can practically be said about web traffic and any business looking to establish a profitable presence online. Don’t worry though because, you’ve just discovered the company that can help you get to number one in the search engines, make more sales and more profit even if you have no idea where to start. Yes you too can be driving thousands of visitors to your website every month like our other clients here at Think Big Online.

Think Big Online Search Engine Optimisation Services

Now you don’t really have to be a geek or anything like that to succeed in search engine optimisation and effectively generate the web traffic you need. Think Big Online can help you rank high in the eyes of major search engines – imagine getting ranked at the top and getting 5, 10 or even 50 sales or phone calls per day and you can’t keep up with the orders. That would be a good problem to have. Just before making the video posted above, one of our SEO clients called us up and said that they are going to have to put on more staff because of the amount of new businesses his site is generating!

Make no mistake though – we are not offering a push button BS system that will make you millions of dollars while you sleep. There is simply no such thing because SEO takes consistent sustained effort to get your rankings and sales up and your investments down. With Think Big Online you get genuine solid guidance and a done for you proven SEO strategy that will get you ranking faster and higher than ever before. Think about what it will be like when you shoot past your competition in the rankings and get the phone ringing off the hook.

As a full-service internet marketing company, our search engine optimisation services here at Think Big Online include:

• Keyword research (we target unlimited keywords)
• Competition analysis
• On-site and off-site optimisation
• Google places optimisation
• Full month reporting on position traffic and leads

Some of the great things that can be said about our SEO services is that unlike many of our competitors we don’t charge any setup fees. We don’t confuse our clients with big stupid technical terms either and offer any false promises like a sleazy salesman - only more leads for less, more sales, higher returns on investment and more money in your pocket. Many of our clients benefit in the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year from the same exact service we are offering. So why not get in touch with us today and one of our SEO consultants will give you a call straight back.

You may be a bit skeptical because we know there are some other companies out there that promise the world and don’t deliver results. Get in touch with us today and we assure you that you won’t have to worry about any of that. We guarantee results and if we don’t think we can help you get to position 1 and drive floods of traffic to your website, we’ll let you know right away no hard feelings. With Think Big Online, you can be sure about getting every bit your money’s worth in effective and highly profitable results in search engine optimisation!

Original Article

Video Marketing and Youtube Analytics

The process of creating video content for your video marketing efforts can be a grueling and tedious undertaking demanding hours of work tuning and editing. There is also the matter of actually promoting your videos so that your prospective customers can actually find, view and share it online. It is fortunate then that for people in the business of marketing with videos, Youtube offers a good and detailed analytics report enabling web marketing professionals to easily figure out what is actually working and what’s not (and why). If you are not taking advantage of such features in your video online marketing efforts then you can bet that you are leaving a lot of stones unturned.

Youtube’s video marketing analytics enable people to determine valuable demographics giving you important information about the people viewing your videos, where these people are from and track down sources for finding people who are likely to view your content as well as determine how long your audience have been watching your videos (are they watching the whole thing?) with Retention reports. All these information will prove invaluable in providing you with insights empowering your efforts in coming up with content that appeal better to your targeted viewers and helping you hit your goals when it comes to effective marketing with videos. In order to access the Youtube  analytics report, all you have to do is visit www.youtube.com/analytics and log on to your account. Let’s take a good look at some of the most important insights offered by the Youtube analytics report and how you can make good use of them.

Youtube Video Marketing Demographics Report

As mentioned earlier, demographics is one of the significant features offered by the Youtube analytics report. It tells you a couple of things about the viewers of your videos such as their age group and gender. Let’s say you are targeting female viewers that are in their midtwenties for your video online marketing campaign but demographics show that most of your viewers are men that are in their midthirties. It tells you that you have a problem with your tailored video content and the demographics report is an excellent resource that you can tap into to determine if you are actually expressing your message to your target viewers effectively.

 Now if you find yourself in a similar predicament to the situation mentioned above, you have to improve your efforts at tailoring your content to captivate the attention of a particular gender or age group. Assess the manner in which you intend to present your message through your videos. This includes the pace, style and editing methods that you are implementing. Older audiences tend to favor videos of traditional presentation that are informative and slow paced as they generally have a longer attention span. Viewers of the younger generation generally prefer video content that is flashy, aesthetically focused and fast-paced.

Views and Sources Report

Okay so you’ve uploaded your videos and are now tracking the number of views you are getting and where its from as well as its number of likes and subscribers. Knowing which channels to effectively embed your videos can prove invaluable to success in video marketing. Analytics can tell you exactly where your video is gaining a lot of exposure (blogs, social media networks or directly on Youtube). This is important simply because your number of views, subscribers and likes is a solid indicator of your success and effectiveness in marketing with videos.

These are but a few of the things that Youtube’s analytic report offers you. The creation of good video content for video web marketing demands a lot of time, effort and resources.Being able to keep track of your video’s demographics, source and statistics can go a long way in the careful planning and effective execution of video web marketing campaigns. This is just what the Youtube Analytics offers for people in the video marketing business.

Original Article

Social media marketing campaign – is it a good idea?

Social media seems to be the last place one ought to do any automation as social media marketing demands a high level of transparency and engagement to succeed. There is no way that you can automate the “human element” and you can’t have a robot represent your business in social networks right? Despite the significance of lending a personal touch to your business presence in web marketing and social networking, automation doesn’t need to be harmful to your online marketing efforts across various social networking platforms. Automate it just right and it can prove beneficial to your business although this begs the question, how does one go about doing this though?

Automating your social media efforts

Social media marketing tools

Look around and you’ll find that there are practically hundreds of tools out there aimed at enabling people to automate their web marketing efforts across social networks. Be wary of using them though – practice and get the feel of a particular tool before going all out and automating your posts and updates least you end up doing something disastrous like ending up posting hundreds of content in a single day. Of course even with the right tools you’ll have to allocate ample time and effort to keep your social media campaigns well supplied with the “human element” in the form of interesting posts and comments engaging followers and fans.

Content diversity

You probably have various fans and followers connected to your business across various social networks. The last thing you should be doing is bore them to tears by automatically putting up the same content across various social networking platforms. Consider the leverage that a particular social network offers and diversify your content. For example:

• Google+ is a good platform for publishing and sharing visual content
• LinkedIn has proven to be an effective platform for lead generation
• Facebook is a great place to explain and convey your thoughts and ideas regarding your content, products or services and niche market.  Use it as an opportunity to engage fans and followers with comments and insights eliciting more engagement and traffic

 Never forget your roots

Success in social media only comes to those who had shown dedication in interacting and engaging their fans and followers. Think twice before automating anything and approach it with the sole intention of supplementing your social media marketing efforts or you may end up having to deal with serious backfire or backlash which can adversely affect your brand or business. Users of social networks are immediately turned off with the slightest suspicion that they are dealing with a robot or automated system. Make sure that you are quickly and reliably notified every time you receive a message, comment or replies among your fans and followers which would enable you to push out content that is genuinely “you” and be able to provide quick and reliable responses.

 Automatically scheduling content, posts and updates at the right moments

Among the significant perks of automation in online marketing when it comes to social networking is that it provides the added convenience of scheduling your posts and updates. You need to consider a couple of things though – when are fans are followers more likely to interact with your brand or business? Keep track and anticipate such times. After all, you wouldn’t want to create a stir on Twitter garnering a lot of responses and reactions from your fans and followers and not be around to respond to them because you’ve just decided to take a couple of days off.

Automation in your web marketing efforts across social networks is not necessarily bad. One only needs to learn to properly and appropriately use it in moderation.

Original Article

Quality Content and its significance in today’s Competitive World of Internet Marketing

Quality is king! You’ve probably heard a lot of people in the internet marketing business say it like it’s a motto or an old saying but many still fail to appreciate or simply doubt its significance thinking that the technical side of SEO or social media marketing is enough to achieve their goals.  If that sounds a lot like you then you ought to think otherwise or else your web marketing efforts are going to be buried alive. Here are a couple of reasons highlighting the significance of quality content and why its more important than ever especially this year 2012 wherein  the web marketing scene had and is expected to see a lot of changes.

Reasons why your business is sure to hit the curb without quality content in internet marketing

Facebook’s Timeline – demanding more quality content

By now you’ve probably heard of Facebook’s new feature called “Timeline” and with it come significant changes in internet marketing and social media marketing. Strategies like daily posts and updates are out the window as News Feeds only feature the latest updates. Same goes for spamming users with shallow and uninteresting messages or updates meant to merely grab attention as the network cracks hard on users found to be guilty of spamming their contacts. Quality content is the way to go if you are looking to succeed in your web marketing efforts with Facebook as it shows users that you are actually contributing something remarkable, useful or interesting in people’s eyes.

The brief shelf life of social media updates

Studies conducted by URL shortening services like Bitly indicates that average time it takes for a tweet to reach the end of its shelf life after reaching its peak is approximately 2.8 hours with Facebook updates  averaging slightly longer at 3.2 hours. It’s not to say that you just need to post a lot more to keep your brand or business to the top (your fans or followers will surely notice and be annoyed if you are sending the same updates over and over again) bit more importantly, you need to introduce quality and diverse content. Doing so will help you keep your fans or followers clicking, liking and sharing your content effectively increasing your business presence.

Google – cracking down on those who are merely farming content

Google’s efforts at targeting websites that spam junk and uninteresting content with low quality that is littered with ads practically guarantees that any business guilty of the latter are going to get kicked into the curb. What this tell us is that one cannot rely on SEO strategies and methodologies alone. You need to pair it with high quality and valuable content to be truly effective. Let’s say that the world of web marketing is place where you don’t want any junk content lying around.

More and more businesses are expected to jump in on the content bandwagon

Given the circumstances mentioned above, its easy to see why more and more businesses are predicted to step up their game and begin nailing the creation of quality content. As the world of online marketing, SEO and social media marketing becomes more adept at putting up and distributing such content, one can expect to have to put up with more clutter content making it difficult for business to stand out. The only way to do so would be to come up with content that is truly remarkable and outweighs the ones being featured by your competitors.

External production of content by niche authorities or industry experts

Ever heard of guest blogging? Well its exactly what it sounds like – you invite niche authorities or industry experts to generate content for your website which will add value and authority to your business. In the same way, one would also convey their willingness to do the same thing and contribute content for the blogs or websites of industry experts which will show the online marketing community that you are not only open to conveying your insights and ideas but this will also give your business a good inbound link. Needless to say, these are leverages that would be forever out of your reach if you fail to appreciate and implement the significance of quality content in internet marketing.

Original Article

SEO or search engine optimization can be nothing short of a mystery for many people in the web marketing business especially those who are still starting out and establishing a business presence online. Many choose to employ specialists in the internet marketing business but end up even more puzzled about how the process of optimizing your website for the search engines actually work and what the authorities in the business can do for you. It’s always good to get a grasp on the mystery surrounding search engine optimization and if like so many others you are entrusting the task to good and reputable professionals, then they should be able to explain how their services work in a way that their clients will easily comprehend. If such service providers are unable to or in any way unwilling to do so, then it’s a good idea to look somewhere else for your online marketing needs

SEO Services and the process of search engine optimization

SEO is basically a process aimed at boosting the visibility of a business website on search engines improving its profitability. As mentioned earlier, it is a fairly complex process and can come as nothing short of a “mystery” for many people. It can also be described as a tedious task requiring consistent and on-going effort to stay on top – as you may already know, people rarely go beyond the first few pages of an SERP (Search Engine Results Page) which makes it crucial for businesses to land their web pages on the top translating to more opportunities to generate sales and profits. Thus it is easy to see that search engine optimization is an utmost necessity if you are looking to succeed in the web marketing business but how does one actually go about it though and what can SEO service providers or internet marketing agencies do for you?

Good and reputable online marketing agencies or search engine optimization service providers offer an array of web marketing solutions enabling your business site to gain a good and formidable rank winning the favor of major search engines like Google and Yahoo. This includes among other things:

• On-page optimization which basically concerns the structuring your website to be read and recognized easily by search engines.
• Off-page optimization refers to creation of links on other reputable and relevant websites which takes users back to your website which is also important because search engines interpret this as a vote of confidence affecting the reputation and the value offered by your website.
• Social media marketing solutions which takes advantage of the power of social media networks enabling business owners to reach out to a vast number of potential customers (their contacts, the contacts of their contacts, the contacts of their contacts of their contacts and so on…)

Your choice in SEO Services Providers

Just as it is with any other service provider, one should be careful when it comes to choosing an online marketing agency for their needs. As mentioned earlier, search engine optimization experts should be capable of explaining and fully disclosing what it is that they are actually doing for you and how it works in a manner that you would easily comprehend. Of course you also need to check out reputation and experience – a good and simple way of doing this is to check out their website and see how visible they are in their niche market (how can you expect to get your website on the top when they can even get their own website there?). More importantly, it would be best to opt for SEO service providers that have no qualms about guaranteeing effective results which is something you would reasonably expect out of good and reputable search engine optimization service providers and web marketing agencies like Think Big Online giving you every bit your money’s worth.

Original Article