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Social Networks, SEO, Blogs and Web 2.0; Building Your Online Presence Through eMarketing
INTRO:
As a company, you need to think of your online marketing efforts (aka emarketing) as expanding the reach of your web presence beyond your website. In order to do this, you, as a business owner, marketing person, or whatever your title is, need to see the entire Internet as your web site and need to start crafting and forming your message wherever you are mentioned online.
There are many avenues that you can use on the Web to craft that message and help extend the reach beyond your web site. Below is just a sample of ideas that you can use to help bring in more traffic to your site, but think of this is as just the tip of the iceberg. Im sure there are plenty of ideas / sites I neglected to mention here due to time, space and/or not knowing about it.
Google is your best friend. Research, research, research and read lots!
Good luck on your eMarketing endeavors.
BLOGS:
Blogs are extremely hot and are great for building trust with your prospects and customers. There are many companies that have blogs that talk about their products, tips and tricks, etc. You can start an "expert blog", that is, experts within your organization that would like to blog about your industry, be it commentary, news, tips and tricks, etc. All of this information would be indexed by search engines and make your company and website come up in the rankings. All the blogs could end up pointing to your company web sites.
People are using blogs more and more to find out information about whatever they are purchasing before they even arrive at your home page. A blog created by you could help in that. Implementing a software blog is very cheap (sometimes even free), however, it would require people to write blog entries 2 to 3 times a week to "keep it fresh" with both users and search engines.
SOCIAL NETWORKS:
Your company should have "pages" in a variety of social networks all giving some information about your company, products and services all pointing back to your main home page.
These social networks have a tremendous amount of users (users = traffic) that can be redirected to your site. Of course, you have to be careful as to what you post and how you present the data so that you don't get people "pissed off" at you in those networks, but they can help in not just bringing traffic, but online brand awareness.
Social networks that are popular and your company should look into include: Del.icio.us
Digg
Flickr Microsoft Live Spaces
My Space
NewsVine Twitter
Vox
YouTube
And this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are plenty more that can be leveraged to help bring in traffic and build online brand awareness.
PARTICIPATING IN NETWORKS / BLOGS / FORUMS:
Your company should have people researching the Internet for any mention of your company, reading where you are mentioned both good and bad. You should then "respond" to different blog entries, forums entries, and social network entries to tell your side of the story, of course, always pointing back to your home page.
Yes, this could be time consuming, but there are "software tools" out there that allow you to "know when someone speaks about you online" and see where that was posted and respond to it.
Twitter.com
Twitter.com is a simple free service that after you sign up, you have one question you can answer:
"What are you doing now?"
Basically, you have 140 characters to answer what you are doing now. That network has over 400,000 users currently telling everyone else what "they are doing now". Think of it as Micro-blogging.
People can also sign up to your feed and follow you to see what you are doing now. Seems pretty lame right? Well, you can follow Senator John Edwards (regardless of what you think of his politics) in Twitter.com to see what he is doing now. (http://twitter.com/johnedwards)
How can your company use that? What about announcing new products or services through Twitter?
Think of "press releases" or an entry like "Released new version of XXX application. Check out http://www.mycompany.com".
It could be a great and simple way of making announcements to a entire new set of people.
YouTube & Other Video Sites
If you have videos, post them to as many video sites as possible all linking back to your site, carefully crafting the keywords on them so that we can be ranked higher in the Search Engines.
Flickr & Other Image Sites
If you have images, you should be creating "photo galleries" on Flickr.com with keyword descriptions of your photographs all pointing back to your site.
Podcasts
Don't underestimate the power of a podcast. Podcasts, coupled with great keyword optimization and submission to the hundreds of podcasts directories out on the Internet, can not only bring in great traffic, but help you keep them there.
Of course, you need to provide quality content, but creating a podcast today is very simple and very low cost in comparison to other media (such as video). Think about using podcasting to offer tips and tricks, information about your products and/or services, plus a host of other things.
Conclusion
There are plenty of other ideas to help improve your traffic and your search engine ranking (such as properly naming your images, e.g. don't name them image1_something.gif, but something like "yourproduct_location_service.gif".), it just takes research and finding out what's out there.
Of course, it's not all as easy as described above. The potential downside of doing the above is:
#1 - It's a full time job.
#2 - Requires time & people.
#3 - Done incorrectly, you can be "black listed" from Search Engines or worst, create a PR nightmare for your company.
#4 - It requires a lot of research and being able to deal with constant changes, since the industry is constantly changing.
The positives:
#1 - Build traffic
#2 - Build brand awareness
#3 - Build your online presence
#4 - Be informed when dealing with consultants, agencies, etc.
One of the main reasons I decided to start learning about this is because of all the contradictory statements I have heard when dealing with different SEO agencies. By being informed, you can at least know when vendors are just 2 chapters ahead of you in the learning curve or if they are truly "experts".
One thing I realized thought, no one can be a "know it all expert". This business changes way too quickly for any vendor to tell you "they know it all and that you should listen to them blindly".
If you are looking for help with eMarketing, please feel free to contact me. Im about 4 chapters ahead of you and would love to help you out.
Until the next blog!
Cheers!
- Marcelo Lewin
http://blog.thedigitalmediadude.com/2007/05/21/social-networks-seo-blogs-and-web-20-building-your-online-presence-through-emarketing.aspx
Posted at 04:11PM May 21, 2007 by Marcelo Lewin in General | Comments[0]
