Archive for July, 2010

What is social marketing? Some questions about it…?

I’m having a hard time understanding what exactly social marketing is. I know that it is a technique used by an organization to address a social cause and which seeks to influence public opinion and behavior so that society, not the organization, benefits.

Here are my questions…
Is this an example: The employees of a large corporation that manufactures and sells say, scientific calculators (or any product other than bikes), volunteer to ride their bikes to work in order to decrease carbon emissions. This information is noted on the company website and given to the local news media.

In my opinion, the action of these employees may influence some members of the public to ride their bikes to work, so society benefits by (small-scale) reduced carbon emissions. Therefore, I think this is social marketing. Am I correct?

In the case above, the corporation does not sell more of its product, but does earn goodwill. So, isn’t the corporation benefiting indirectly? Is an indirect benefit an acceptable result of social marketing?

Here’s another example: This corporation donates its scientific calculators to the local schools. The corporation does not profit financially because it is a donation (I’m ignoring the tax benefit of donations here), but again, earns goodwill. This scenario doesn’t influence behavior but does benefit society (the students). Is this considered social marketing?

One more question:
I’ve seen the term ‘social media marketing’, which refers to companies and/or their employees using social networking, such as blogs, to keep the public informed about their products, interests, citizenship. Are social marketing and social media marketing the same?

Thanks!

It is somewhat a grey area, but I would not consider your examples (the bikes and the calculators) to not be social marketing. I would consider the bikes example to be "image and reputation management." Like you said, actions designed to earn goodwill with the firm’s stakeholders.

The local schools example could be social marketing if the firm uses that example in commercials designed to increase sales.

When you use the term social marketing, you are talking about the company’s products.

I would consider social marketing the following:

The calculator company starts a campaign and promises to donate 5% of each calculator sold to the XXX environmental preservation fund.

The calculators are advertised as manufactured with 50% recycled materials.

I tend to view social marketing as some type of marketing plan designed to appeal to "social citizens" with the intent of the increasing sales and also benefitting some type of social cause.

But Steve Nash shows why he is B2B MVP to Tyreke Evans !! (100105) Kings VS Suns

[www.nbacard.net] But Steve Nash shows why he is Back 2 Back MVP to Tyreke Evans !! (100105) Sacramento Kings VS Phoenix Suns

Duration : 0:5:8

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What Is Social Media Marketing?

http://www.rawironperformancemarketing.com.au Raw Iron Performance Marketing .
This is you give you a bit of a overview of social media marketing and help you to understand it if you owner a small business. there will be more coming that will go in-depth.

Duration : 0:2:30

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Google’s Matt Cutts | How to Get Better Visibility on Google

USA TODAY’s Jefferson Graham interviews Google engineer Matt Cutts on how to get your site to the top of Google with 5 basic, common sense SEO tips. Matt Cutts guests on the USA TODAY Talking Tech web video show. New episodes air weekly at http://tech.usatoday.com

Duration : 0:4:57

Read more…

SEO is Very Complex and It’s Permanently Extending!

The importance of choosing the right SEO is greater than many of us can imagine. Search engine optimizing is what keeps your site indexed and ranked by search engines and ensures you a good amount of traffic. Without it, your website is either dead, or struggling for survival, hoping to be noticed.

The area of SEO is very complex and it’s permanently extending. New companies and consultants seem to appear out of the blue. SEOs use a wide variety of search engine optimizing tactics, with different efficiency levels. Consequently, before hiring an SEO consultant, for more details visit to www.the20seotools.com it is very important to make sure you’ll be getting what you need. Apart from what you’ll be able to find out from the SEO itself, you can also perform a previous research on your own.

Things to find out on your own

• Find out for how long has the company been in business. This should be listed on their website.
• Search their website for previous projects to find out whether they have a marketing related experience.
• A reliable company also has client testimonials and case studies to prove they are able to keep their customers satisfied.
• Be skeptical with companies that email you out of the blue to advertise their SEO services.
• Beware of SEO companies that claim they can provide a #1 ranking guarantee. Ranking is determined by many factors that are beyond the SEO’s control.
• Beware of SEOs that claim they have a priority submit or special relationships with Google or other search engines. There’s no such thing.

Things to ask the SEO consultant

Do they include link building in their SEO services?

A professional SEO consultant doesn’t limit to building keyword rich content, but also incoming links from relevant website to increase your PageRank.

What are they doing for website conversion enhancement?

A high traffic is meaningless unless your website provides what the users are looking for. A good SEO consultant uses several conversion enhancement techniques, such as copywriting strategies, site usability, call to action tactics and advanced conversion reporting.

Do they help you with calculating your ROI (Return of Investment)?

SEO services can be quite expensive and you need to calculate your potential returns. ROI depends on various factors, such as target population, size of your market place, for more details visit to www.offline-promotion.com the sales value of your services and the number of people searching for them on the Internet etc. An experienced SEO should be able to help you predict your ROI.

Do they use SEO best practice and anti-spam methods?

There are many SEOs that use various strategies to trick search engines in thinking your page is more relevant than it actually is. No SEO consultant will admit to using spamming and other unethical strategies, so you can’t ask him the question directly. However, ask as many questions as possible about the methods they will be using and make sure you receive straight answers.

Do they put a limit on the number of search phrases?

Many SEOs have a limited number of phrases they will optimize for. However, if you’re paying a monthly retainer to the SEO Company, they shouldn’t do this. Even though there are a few phrases more important than others, the rest shouldn’t be neglected either.

The first thing a good SEO consultant will do is perform an analysis on the current state of your website and provide a Website Analyzing report. Further analysis should be performed on a regular basis and your website traffic should be permanently monitored. A professional consultant understands the difference between bulk traffic, getting to your website for irrelevant keywords, and qualified traffic. Making the right choice will provide you with qualified traffic, as well as well-structured pages and a high usability level.

micky
http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/seo-is-very-complex-and-its-permanently-extending-725731.html

3 Things You Must Know About Internet Marketing

Internet marketing is not easy and that is why most businesses, especially home business, that exist on the Internet are always looking to do something that will put them ahead of the competition.

Like the real-world market, the Internet is always changing either due to user habits and preferences or due to technology and policy changes. Hence, there is always the need for better, improved Internet marketing solutions. There are some common approaches to building an Internet marketing strategy that run common for many businesses.

At the core, all Internet marketing is fixed on one goal and that is to increase the number of unique visitors a website receives in one day. Effective Internet marketing solutions use many ways to assure this.

The first is to improve the visibility of the business on major search engines because that is where customers begin their search. The second is to attract targeted traffic. This means it is more important to get visitors interested in your products and services rather than casual browser who just happened to come across your website.

Effective Internet marketing solutions will also take into account that competitors are doing the same thing and how to get over that obstacle.

Online competition will often force you to revise your business policies and pricing structure, or provide incentives to beat the competition.

Effective Internet marketing solutions must always be focused on improving visibility and exposure of your business. Some techniques that can help you do this are included below.

Search Engine Submission

There are many specialized search engines out there, besides the popular ones. List your website on as many of them as seems relevant to you. Note that some search engines are very specialized. So there is no point in submitting your website dealing in herbal medicine on a search engine that specializes in Formula 1 racing.

Affiliate Marketing

The fastest way of multiplying your representatives and web recognition quotient is to go for affiliate marketing. With a good product you could have thousands of affiliates busy promoting your business and you do not even have to do much besides pay them their commissions.
Link Exchange/Building

Besides the search engine rank of your website, link popularity will also attack Internet users. Higher link popularity will automatically get you a better page rank, again increasing your website exposure and visibility.

Email

The oldest form of Internet communication, before the website and the blog, is still the most effective Internet marketing solution. Emails may be personalized to make every recipient feel that they are being addressed individually.

Like all other business activities, it will take time to develop and then fine tune effective Internet marketing solutions. You must periodically revise all that you are doing to make sure that everything is on track.

Alvin Phang
http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/3-things-you-must-know-about-internet-marketing-90489.html

"part 1: Email Marketing Basics"

Now you may have heard the saying “the money is in the list”. Today, I’m going to start off with discussing what email marketing is all about and give you a basic heads-up on the subject. In the next two lessons, I’ll also discuss email marketing strategies and the tools (including a complete walkthrough) for setting up and managing your very own email marketing campaign .

Let’s start with the barebones of email marketing, and how it so important for anyone wanting to do business online.

Online Business and Email Marketing

The first point you must remember is that email marketing is just a tool – not a new concept of doing business like Web 2.0 but a time-tested, hardened method for generating profits. In other words, email marketing is just like any other online business tool – affiliate programs, pay-per-click advertising, sales letters, minisites – one of many assets at your disposal.

What makes email marketing so interesting (and important) is its focus on building a positive relationship with your customers. From a marketing perspective, email marketing is simply an online extension of the traditional marketing principle of acquiring “prospects” by taking their contact information and then sending them promotional information via email.

Think product catalogs, magazine subscriptions (advertising within a magazine is the “promotional material”) and newspapers (classifieds) – all of these involve the same two steps:

Acquiring the prospect’s contact information (either by offering a freebie or a discount, or just by asking).

Send regular promotional offers to the “list” – a collection of prospects whose contact information you have.

This is ridiculously simple. There are many more levels and much more depth to the subject (and we will be covering all of it today and in the next two lessons), but this is the essence of it.

The issue that immediately comes out of this is:

What motivation does the prospect have, first for providing their contact details, and second, for buying any products that are pitched to her?

None at all .

Consider a social parallel – if you go up to a complete stranger and ask them to give you their name and email address (or worse, their home address as well) so that you can send them emails about what to buy, your chances of success are going to be very, very slim.

Instead, you have to give the prospect a reason to hand over her email address. More so to tell you her name. And an even better reason for the permission to send her any sort of product or service promotions.

In other words, you have to use the principles of “Permission Marketing” (a term popularized by Seth Godin) – provide the prospect with a valuable enough proposition for her to consider giving you the permission to “market” to her i.e. sell to her.

All of this leads to the first principle of email marketing:

Before anything else, give the subscriber something that she respects and values.

Creating Value .

Everyone has problems. Everyone is looking for answers to these problems.

Marketing – effective marketing – is positioning your product as THE solution to a particular problem.

Combine this with the first principle of email marketing, and you have situation where your first task is to create value for the prospect. In some cases, the “promise” and “proof” of a solution can be enough (like a sales letter). In other cases, you might want to try providing a rudimentary solution in the form of providing some information, and build that value over time by continuously giving more and more to your prospects (like an email newsletter).

Email marketing is all about providing useful information to your subscribers. First, you encourage them to give you their email addresses by promising a solution to their problems (for example, a short report on the real estate market if you are targeting investors). In turn, this translates into permission given by the subscriber to allow you to send them further information via email.

The central core of this whole process is valuable, relevant information. Information that the subscriber is interested in. Information that the subscriber needs .

Now many marketers make a hash out of providing valuable information and instead concentrate on “selling” to the list. Do NOT make that mistake. You first priority is to develop a bond of trust with your subscribers – this will only happen if you learn to give first and foremost.

Building Trust .

Once you’ve learned how to give, you’re ready to build your “list” by using any one or more of a number of lead generation techniques, all of which involve driving traffic to a special “landing page” where you make your “information pitch” (as opposed to a sales pitch) and request the prospect’s name and email address.

But building your list isn’t the only thing you must do. Almost simultaneously, from the moment you have convinced someone to hand over their email address, you are on the road of building a positive relationship with your list. A relationship that is based on trust, where trust can include the following:

Your subscribers consider you an expert in your field (and therefore someone they are inclined to believe and listen to).

Your subscribers implicitly trust you to treat them fairly – this results from a commitment to give first, and sell later. In other words, invest time and effort in your list, and make it show.

Your subscribers expect quality from you, and by extension, they consider any products or services you promote as valuable.

This trust is paramount in email marketing. If you can gain the trust of your subscribers, they will respond to your product offers (provided that you are selling something valuable and not just trash) and, eventually, make you rich. The money really is in the list.

In the third lesson of this series where I discuss advanced email marketing strategies, I’ll cover in detail how you can follow simple steps to ensure that your subscribers trust you, and also a checklist of things that can break that trust (i.e. a NOT to do checklist).

Repeat Customers .

The greatest value in email marketing is that of repeat customers. In other words, through email marketing you can basically send product promotions to your list regularly and continue making money out of the same core list of subscribers.

Of course, it’s a bit more complicated in that, but this principle of acquiring repeat customers is enlightening because it showcases an important fact about business:

You can market different products to the same group of people. If you position it right over a period of time, you will have a situation where a certain group of people are buying new products from you every few months.

Now this works, but only if you are able to identify your “target market” and are creating products and services that are the answers to the types of problems your subscribers need solutions to. Failing to do that will result in unhappy subscribers and a cold list – a list full of subscribers that are not interested in your emails, don’t want to buy what you are selling and are generally ignoring your emails.

Building a list you can contact again and again for continuing profits needs a lot of effort to build and maintain. A large part of creating repeat customers in email marketing is to maintain a long-term relationship with your list – this involves regularly providing information that is useful to your subscribers.

When following email marketing, do not forget that other rules of marketing still apply – if you don’t give your customer what they want, they won’t hang around your website (or in this case, on your list) anymore.

A measly one time only investment ends all your traffic woes, fattens your list, boosts your sales, increases your profits without having to spend an additional red dime AND increases your free time! You’ve read the copy, the proof, testimonials, and endorsement by leading SEO experts. I think you’ll agree, this could possibly be the best investment you’ll ever make

sebastian foss
http://www.articlesbase.com/online-promotion-articles/quotpart-1-email-marketing-basicsquot-106767.html

Why Do I Need Help From Internet Marketing Agencies?

This is a very common question that internet marketing agencies get. With all the website design software available and inexpensive hosting many small business owners don’t really see the need for help when marketing their small business online.

Yes you can build a webpage with many of the free software programs available or purchase a more sophisticated web design software. There is also hosting available.

All you have to do is ftp the web pages you build to the server. The home page is always the index file.

Remember to build a good deep linking structure by linking each page together and all of them back to the home page. It is also a good idea to put links in the content to link to similar pages. Setting this type of a linking structure can keep people on your website much longer.

Install the script for your auto responder into the contact page so you can catch all the valuable contact info of your visitors. Depending upon the amount of traffic you intend to drive to your site you can use a 3rd party auto responder for a monthly fee. The most efficient is to buy your own software and ftp it to your server.

With this in place you can set up an email marketing campaign which can prove to be your most valuable revenue source if marketed effectively.

Now you must drive traffic to this beautiful site you built. There are multiple internet marketing strategies you need to implement. They target different traffic sources so each needs to be considered. Also some internet marketing strategies are effective immediately like PPC, PPI, PPA etc. Beware that these types of campaigns can add up a large bill very quickly so keep a close eye on these daily.

Some take a little more time like some deep linking campaigns and search engine marketing but these can prove to be the best internet advertising in the long run.

Don’t forget the social media networks which are becoming very popular with you tube ranking in as the second largest search engine for information now on the internet.

Now comes time for the tweaking, to maximize ROI. Install the script of a good statistics program that you prefer so you can begin to analyze data and see which internet marketing strategies campaigns are working best for you. Remember if your tracking script is in php code and your index extension is htm or html you must rename it to php or your tracking code will not read properly.

If all of these things are something you understand and excel at then I do not see why you need any help from internet marketing agencies in marketing your small business online.

Sherrie Chastain
http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-articles/why-do-i-need-help-from-internet-marketing-agencies-687696.html

Lists of a Specific SEO Technique

Ethics in the purest sense is an internal compass which points the SEO practitioner to the most honest and above board way to do business. Many major companies both national a global,   for more detail go to: www.offline-promotion.com. have ethics officers which define ethical behavior and set the corporate culture. Ethics concerns the interaction with the legal frame work of a company’s home nation as it interacts with client’s cultural prerogatives.

Within SEO/SEM much effort has been expended to link ethics to SEO/SEM techniques. In this case the specific ethical abstraction is the interface between all available SEO/SEM technology and the various search engines’ definition of allowable techniques. Those SEO/SEM methods supported by the search engine standards are considered ethical SEO. The remainder is rated as unethical simply because they are not approved by the search engines. Under this paradigm, search engines are assuming the role of the moral authority.

Potential SEO/SEM clients and search engine users do not have a topical understanding of SEO/SEM to effectively evaluate these questions. It is therefore up to the SEO/SEM practitioner and the search engine company executives to define this answer. Search engine companies, in order to drive revenue, depend on displaying a relevant web site list to the inquirer. Consultants, in order to develop clientele, for more detail go to: www.search-engine-premiere.com. Must provide techniques to place their client’s web site at the top of those lists.

If an SEO consultant strictly adheres to approved search engine optimization methods is that consultant serving the best interests of his client? The goal must be to get listed faster and higher than the client’s competition. Is using unapproved SEO techniques bad business or counterproductive? If the SEO/SEM consultant uses deceptive techniques as define by the search engines but achieves the clients goals are those efforts serving the end user and the client by creating a desired connection?

If the search engine company is aware that users are not obtaining relevant search lists because of a specific SEO technique, should they declare that technique unethical? Is an SEO technique unethical merely because it is not serving the best interests of the search engine? Surely the search engine company can modify ranking algorithms to limit the impact of specific techniques which do not serve their best interests; however, does that give them the right to be the moral compass?

http://www.keyword-swipe.com

http://www.sitemap-makers.com

Do not allow the ethics question to confuse the importance of basic SEO. Ethics is not about technology it is about using poor business practices which fail to serve the Internet community. If there is an ethics to SEO/SEM it must be about win-win. Search engines and SEO/SEM consultants win when they jointly generate lists which contain quality information. Users win when they get what they ask for. Web owners win when they get conversions.

Munish Awasthi
http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/lists-of-a-specific-seo-technique-729853.html

Internet Video Marketing in Their Campaigns With Great Success!

Everyone who is not living in a cave must have heard about Internet Video Marketing and I can assure you that this is not one of the latest Fads, which keep appearing on the Internet scene every week.

Video marketing is here to stay and the success of Pipeline Profits venture by Brock Felt and Buck Rive has proved this as a fact. Brock & Buck were relatively unknown marketers who suddenly appeared in the Internet marketing scene and used Internet Video Marketing in their campaigns, with great Success. They used videos from the Somerset event and captured the attention of a large number of audiences. The people who came to view these videos were then given attractive incentives to subscribe to their mailing lists, for more details visit to www.outsource-beginners.com which became quite large in a very short period of time. Then there are some other well-known marketers who have used Internet video marketing to reap huge profits. Some of these big name marketers are John Reese, Joel Comm. and Michael Cheney.

I still remember how Joel Comm. used Google videos to create awareness about his Adsense Template Packages and Michael Cheney started his Cheney’s Marketing News. Michael was clever enough to make it viral by allowing his videos to be placed on any site around the web and thus generated a large number of links pointing to his site

There are some other people who have started sending video mails to their customers. In this way they were able to capture the attention of their customers who had become immune to text mails. Receiving video mails is so intriguing that it makes a person curious and thus he is forced to open up his mail and see what it contains. Thus the marketer is able to get his message to the customer while the customer is happy because he got something, which was pleasing and appealed to him.

Internet marketers have started to understand the power of “Internet Video Marketing “ and thus a large number of services and courses are coming up which promise to help marketers in their video marketing campaigns. These services offer to create professional videos for these marketers and help them gain maximum benefits from their video marketing campaigns.
Internet Marketers, for more details visit to www.internet-marketing-word.com who are still unable to grasp the power and uses of Internet Video Marketing, now have access to courses which help them to understand and apply Video marketing to their online business and thus be able to compete with other marketers who have already started using this as part of their marketing campaigns.

The message here is that, you can either educate yourself or start using Internet Video Marketing in your campaigns or get left behind by your competitors. If you want more internet marketing information, get this free DVD.

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virender kumar
http://www.articlesbase.com/networking-articles/internet-video-marketing-in-their-campaigns-with-great-success-720964.html