Word-of-mouth marketing firm TGarage was founded by William Saxton, Roger Lowe and Paul Rhodes after they discovered the power of using Web 2.0 in conjunction with traditional marketing techniques.

The company offers a number of services including SEO, reputation management and social media marketing. Rhodes says small businesses can improve their brand recognition if they harness the power of word-of-mouth.

Can you describe how the business started?

All three of us had similar backgrounds, and came to the realisation there hadn’t been a lot of innovation in communication channels over the past 10 or so years. If you look back, TV and print had branched out with bus shelter advertisements, and other media formats, but nothing revolutionary was happening. We saw the feedback from traditional media wasn’t as strong, and we wanted to explore that.

So we were noticing these trends, and then also saw consumers moving towards wanting to engage with brands and have conversations with them on networks like Twitter. We figured if you talked to them and engaged them, it can be very powerful and they can then be persuasive and be advocates.

How did that lead to word-of-mouth?

The trend of course was formed around users engaging with social networks like Facebook. But word-of-mouth has always been around even before social networks. So we thought there was a good avenue to combine the two.

The whole internet trend is very much about people engaging in normal groups, and forums, etc, and businesses have taken advantage of that with viral campaigns. So we take that as the basis of our campaigns, both offline and online, and we focus on small groups.

So break it down for our readers, what do you do for a word-of-mouth campaign?

The first thing we try to do is find out what a company wants to achieve, what the messages are, and their key demographics, so we know which areas to target.

So we identify those demographics and then we give them something to share, which could be both virtual and physical. So a virtual piece would be like a viral video featuring the product with interactive features, physically it could be samples of products and so on, and then we have internet campaigns where these people can go and share their opinions.

So often we’ll use the real world to give out the product and then direct them to the internet to share that, through social networks or our own site or whatever. The internet isn’t the focus, it’s just a tool.

Can you give an example?

We recently had a campaign for a nasal decongestant for children – quite a strategic challenge. In their market they are very much the number two player, but thought they had a much better product. So obviously challenging the market leader is a big effort, and they said they didn’t want to spend too much money on their message.

So we immediately targeted the key demographic – mother’s groups. We identified over 5,000 groups we could use to spread the product. We showed them the product, allowed them to try it out, and then provided them with a site they could go to in order to share their opinions. It has to be a big campaign, it can’t be small, and I think we achieved that. We didn’t directly advertise, we just showed them the product and then got them to talk about it.

So you combine the internet and real world marketing?

That’s right, the internet can’t just work on its own, and is just a conduit to helping propagate word-of-mouth. You have to understand corporations are quite sensitive to having too much consumer generated media on their sites because you can’t control what people say. So that’s why we use physical demonstrations as well as the site, so we can influence that decision before a post even appears online.

So in the case of the nasal decongestant we would give them samples, and then only then would we direct them to a portal where they can post about what they’ve tried. Of course they could post on Facebook and so on but if the trial is done well that won’t matter.

For businesses wanting to create a word-of-mouth campaign, what do they need to do?

The first thing is that you have to identify a way in which your product is remarkable. This is word-of-mouth, it’s powerful, and people are only going to talk about things that are very good or very bad, they have no reason to make things up and that is why review sites have done so well.

Then you really need to think about who your advocates can be and the influencers for that brand. That’s part of the job we do, identifying demographics. You can use an existing database for this.

Then after you’ve done that you invite that database to participate in a program, usually offline, and then go from there. You can combine this with print advertising, and call-to-action type of programs where there is an incentive to get online and talk about it… like rewards and so on.

Keep in mind that word-of-mouth is often the number one way a company has achieved knowledge about a product, and is often in the top three. It’s a key factor for getting your name out there, and a driver for whether your brand is successful. Don’t discount it.

However there are 4 common myths that may be detrimental to your understanding of the whole Search Engine Optimisation process.

Some of the approaches that used to be effective before may no longer be useful today, since the market and search engine crawlers are smarter. Let’s debunk some of the basic myths and make the necessary improvements in your site to boost sales for long.

Myth #1 : SEO Involves Techniques That Fool Search Engines

Fooling search engines mean that you are also fooling human users.

Real SEO techniques involve more than just optimizing content, using marketing schemes and getting additional links. A number of tactics can be used depending on the people that you are attracting to your site.

Some of the useful strategies that can be used for SEO to last a long time may also include: competitive analysis, search marketing strategy, keyword analysis, web design, user experience, creative copy writing, ongoing link building, HTML code optimization, ongoing content development, web analytics and conversion analysis.

Myth #2 : Search Engines Aren’t Used That Much

Based on research, around 4.9 billion searches are done every month by 133 million unique searchers.

Search engines have become one of the most common tools used for people to gain information. The majority of internet users rely on search engines to get to different web sites, pages and companies. Search engines lead you to different online businesses and shops where you can find the information or product that you need.

You need to determine how useful and relevant your content is in the market, then aim on becoming an authority in the industry.

Myth #3 : SEO Doesn’t Work Because You Do Not Have Many Visitors

Keep in mind that SEO doesn’t promise instant and significant results.

You have to use the different marketing tools and strategies together with the approaches and SEO to make everything work together. Experts recommend that you spend about 6 months after the implementation phase to evaluate the results of SEO.

You also have to ensure that your web site can back up all the methods you have incorporated. If your site is not easy to navigate, does not have sound and unique content and is not relevant to the people you are targeting, then your SEO efforts will be rendered useless.

Myth #4 : SEO Happens Only Once

SEO takes time to develop and you need to evaluate and assess each approach to determine if it should be improved. Search engines view about 100 to 200 factors or signals to know its relevance as well as decide how to categorized search results. You have to give SEO constant attention because there are several other sites and pages that also promise unique content, entertaining media and other tools to entice the target market.

Always brainstorm on how you can further improve your techniques like integrating with other offline and online marketing, creating new content, building new links and refining your optimization approaches. If you have spent some time, money and effort creating the groundwork for your SEO, you have to ensure that operations continue to function and drive the right clients into your web site. SEO is not a one – time event. It needs to be refined every now and then, weekly is best.

Conclusion

SEO is an ongoing process that takes time and dedication to develop. You don’t have to believe everything that is written on SEO, but some of the essentials remain.

One of those essentials is getting quality backlinks to your site.

If you can write a simple article to distribute to article directories on the internet, then you can start building your own backlinks without effort in a very short space of time.

- – -

Article may be reproduced with permission by www.surefireweb.com so long as all links are intact and a direct link back this this article is mainatained.

Practicing SEO means getting your website to rank top in the organic search engine result “for a particular keyword phrase” so as to get endless flow of free traffic to your website.

Imagine if you sell gifts, and you rank #1 in Google’s search result for “buy cheap Christmas presents”. What can that do to your sales?

Different search engines have different search algorithm. In the SEO industry, we are mainly concerned about getting top ranking in Google because Googles owns more than 80% of the search engine market share.

Notice that I quote the phrase “for a particular keyword phrase”? Before you even think about SEO, you must first know what keyword phrase you want to get your web page to ranked for. This is why keyword research and backlinks to your website are vitally important.

How to get your website rank top for a particular keyword phrase in Google?

Technically, you can get any web page (not just website) into the first page of Google by building lots of backlinks to that web page using THAT particular keyword phrase as the anchor text.

For example, if you want to rank top for the keyword phrase “buy cheap Christmas presents”, you need to have lots of backlinks to your web page using “buy cheap Christmas presents” as the anchor text.

By the way, do you notice that I always use the word “web page” instead of “website”?

Google views every web page as independent content, meaning technically, if you have a website about dog, you can add a web page about stomach pain and get that web page to rank top for stomach pain, even though your website is about dog!

Don’t agree? Just look at Wikipedia.com and Ezinearticles.com. They have articles in all kinds of categories. But almost all of them are ranking well in Google.

Other important factors besides backlinks

Technically, it is possible to bulldoze your way to the first page of Google simply by building enormous amount of SEO backlinks to your web page, disregarding all other SEO factors. But you really need enormous amount of backlinks, probably 100 times more than your closest competitor.

Think of SEO as a scoring system. If you don’t practice all other SEO techniques and simply build SEO backlinks, it will be as if you score 0 for all other fields on the score card and to beat your competitors, your backlink score alone has to be higher than your competitors’ total score.

On the other hand, if you score well on ‘other SEO factors’ at the same time, you don’t have to build that many backlinks. And the ‘other SEO factors’ are definitely easier to accomplish than link building.

The “other SEO factors” are:

#1 – The title tag

In a html source code, a title tag looks something like this:

<title>Title of your web page</title>

If you want to optimize for “buy cheap Christmas presents”, you must include “buy cheap Christmas presents” in the title tag, as near to the starting line as possible.

#2 – Keywords in the description meta tag

In a html source code, a description meta tag looks something like this:

<meta name=”Description” content=”Your Description About The Page.”>

If you want to optimize for “buy cheap Christmas presents”, you must include “buy cheap Christmas presents” in the description meta tag, as near to the starting line as possible.

#3 – Keywords in the url

The best is to have a website named buycheapChristmaspresents.com. But if you have many keywords to optimize, buying a domain name for each of them can be very costly. If so, you should at least name the web page as yourdomain.com/buy-cheap-Christmas-presents.html

#4 – Keywords within the content

If you want to optimize for “buy cheap Christmas presents”, try to include “buy cheap Christmas presents” at least once in the first paragraph, once in the last paragraph and a few within the content.

There is no strict rule on this but minimally, you should include the exact keyword at least once in the entire content.

#5 – Website authority

If you have been reading up on SEO, you must have heard of Authority Site. The idea is if your site is an Authority Site, the search engine will send tons of traffic for all kinds of keyword phrases to you, pretty much like what Wikipedia and Ezinearticles have established now.

Website authority is at domain level. Meaning if your domain is an authority site, all other web pages in this domain will benefit.

2 important factors that affect website authority are:

1) The age of the site

There is nothing you can do with the age of your site. You just have to be patience, and you need to have a long term vision for your website. Don’t build one site, chuck it away after 3 months and start another one.

2) The amount of backlinks to the homepage and internal pages, especially backlinks from other authority sites.

The difference between SEO backlinks (as discussed earlier) and backlinks for site authority (as mentioned here) is that the former is keyword specific, i.e., you have to include the keywords in the anchor text. For backlinks to boost site authority, any dofollow backlink will count. They can be keyword-specific anchor link or simply a URL link. Of course, all the SEO backlinks that you’ve established will help to boost your site authority.

Don’t just rely on ezArticleLink system. Try to build more backlinks, at least to the homepage, using other link building strategies. (For a detailed list of other link building methods, read this.)

Fundamentally, that’s all you need to know about SEO. I’m serious! Armed with these basic knowledge, I already gained hundreds of top positions in Google.

- – -

Article Courtesy of EZLinkArticleSystem.

The Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance is a major initiative between our companies to create a competitive choice in search for advertisers and consumers. The combined scale will assist both companies in speeding the pace of innovation to improve the search user experience, as well as help advertisers get better results and help improve monetization for partners.

The online advertising industry continued to perform well during the past 12 months even though traditional advertising markets struggled to repeat past successes, an industry leader has claimed.

The comments come as the Interactive Advertising Bureau reveals online advertising spending increased by just 9.4% during 2009, compared to the 27% rise during the previous year.

IAB chief executive Paul Fisher says the industry has continued to outplay the print and television markets, with companies opting to advertise online even while cutting back on traditional ad market spending.

In figures released today, the IAB said spending rose 9.4% during 2009 to $1.87 billion, down from last year’s 27% increase and from 34.5% in 2007.

“The GFC was without doubt the biggest impact on the industry in 2009, and were not immune to it at all,” Fisher says. “It did not have an impact on us, yes, but this wasn’t as big an impact as the other mediums experienced. We’ve managed to produce an exceptionally strong result.”

However, Fisher contrasts this against the result in the overall media advertising industry, which shrank by 8% during 2009.

Free to air television spending dropped 7.9% to $3.4 billion, newspaper advertising spending fell 16% to $3.46 billion while the capital city radio advertising market dropped 2.7% to $626 million.

“The biggest thing to realise from these figures is that the slowdown in the online industry is being compared to the days when we were recording 50% growth every year. And of course as the market grows to $2 billion, that’s going to slow.”

The biggest decline was in the online classified ads market, which fell by 2.3% to $429.8 million. Fisher says this is because this market is dominated by the property and recruitment industries, which both experienced declines during the financial crisis.

However, Fisher still says the overall result for online advertising was strong and that trend should continue over the year.

“The trend we are seeing is that market departments are still continuing to invest in online even when they are pulling out of traditional markets. We didn’t flatten out or go backwards. Companies are realising that even though they’ve trimmed budgets, they still have to invest in online.”

Other figures from the IAB show the search and directories market, which is dominated by Google, rose by an estimated 17% to $944 million. General display ad spending also increased by 7.1% to $498 million.

Fisher says he expects the industry to record 15% growth over the year surpassing $2 billion, with the search and directories market to grow by up to 20%.

“I think these figures show marketers are becoming more and more aware that consumers are spending more time online and interact with a variety of different formats of ads.”

“We’ve really got world leading online creative in this country, and it’s definitely showing up online, and more brand advertisers are realising they can do some really great things on the internet.”