How To Make Effective Word of Mouth Advertising Campaigns
This article courtesy of Smart Company.
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.
SEO Just Got Easier!
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s the process of getting your website ranked on the first page of Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc…
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.
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Article Courtesy of EZLinkArticleSystem.
Microsoft and Yahoo Advertising Deal Approved
Originally written by Microsoft.
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.
Yahoo! and Microsoft will each provide customer support to different advertiser segments: Yahoo!’s sales team will exclusively support high volume advertisers, SEO and SEM agencies, and resellers and their clients. Microsoft will support self-service advertisers. In addition, Microsoft adCenter will be the platform for all search campaigns.
More volume, less effort.
Search ad inventory from Yahoo!, Microsoft, and their respective partners will be combined into a new unified search marketplace, giving advertisers of all sizes access to a combined audience of nearly 577 million searchers worldwide.1
Timing
Our aim is a high quality transition of advertisers and partners in at least the US prior to the 2010 holiday season. However, we may wait until 2011 if we determine this will be more effective.
Blogging for Business
Build your own profitable blog to boost your business profits, read more by clicking the picture above.
Thank God, a lot of businesses now have an online presence.
With an internet business, your service or products can reach different parts of the world – which means that your website can attract traffic for your business. In order to establish an online presence, blogging for business is of utmost importance for today and in the years to come.
Here are some useful blog tips that you can incorporate in your internet business :
- You must learn to use the right keywords – all the contents of your blogs should have the right or appropriate keywords. Effective blogging can also place your internet business among the top searches in the results of search engines.
- If you plan to use blogs for your internet business, you must be able to make posts regularly.Sporadic bloggers have no place on the net and so if you want your efforts to be rewarded, make sure that you post blogs frequently. If you forget to make posts, your blogs will not be very effective for your internet business.
- Your blogging efforts will be rewarded if the content is interesting. Through effective blogging, you can establish a good reputation for your business; and not only that, you can shout to the world your business expertise. If you want to gain a positive reputation, make sure that you post interesting blogs that are related to your business.
- Back links are valuable – to promote your business through the use of blogs, you have to give importance to back links. The blog post contents should be able to incorporate appropriate back links. By doing so, you can attract much traffic to your website in a more effective manner. You can get back links to your website by asking other bloggers to link to your blog, or make a comment on your site (or on their site).
Those are some simple tips that you can use for blogging. Indeed, blogging can be very useful for online business but only if you can post effective blogs.
At present, many owners of online businesses are now making use of blogs to promote their products and services. If you want to become successful online and at the same time a successful owner of a business, blogging can an effective method of getting your message or product out there.
Some say that blogs are not that hard to compose. To some individuals, it may be their way to share their personal experiences and everyday life. But according to some expert bloggers, you also need to consider the interests of the readers and online researchers. Remember that once you start posting blogs in your business website, you have to post frequently (at least once or twice a week) so that your customers and readers will not forget you or your business.
So what are you waiting for? Learn to make blogs now and become an effective blogger. Your business will surely benefit from the blogs that you post. If you want to learn more about effective blogging for business, you can easily conduct researches online because you can find a wealth of information there.
Blogging for business is one of the most effective means of making your business a success. Start making blogs now and you will profit in the future!
Designing A Web Crawler Friendly Web Site
The most successful online businesses all have one thing in common. They all knew how to make search engine optimization work for them.
Search engine optimization is the art and science of making websites attractive to the internet’s search engines. The first step in successfully achieving stellar search engine optimization is to lure search engine’s web crawlers to your website. Web crawlers are computer programs that the search engines use gather data and index information from the websites. The information the web crawlers gather is used to determine the ranking of a webpage.
One of the fastest ways to hamper a web crawler is to construct a website that has frames. Most search engines have crawlers that can’t penetrate the frames, if they can’t get into a webpage to read it then that webpage remains unindexed and unranked. Two search engines, Google and Inktome, have web crawlers that are capable of penetrating frames. Before submitting your website to a search engine do some research and find out if they have a crawler that is incapable of penetrating any frames.
If you have written frames into your URL it will probably be worth your effort to go back and rewrite your URL’s. Once you have rewritten your URLs you might be surprised to find that the new addresses are easier on humans as well as web crawlers, the frameless URLs are easier to type in documents as links and references.
Once you have rewritten your URL’s it is time to start submitting your website to search engines. Some webmasters like to use an automated search engine submission service. If you decide to go with the submission service you should be aware that there is likely to be a fee involved, the minimum fee is typically $100 dollars. This price should keep a few URLs on the search engines for a year, but for long term results you need to go beyond search engine submission services and develop your own search engine friendly site. Other webmasters like to avoid big fees by submitting their website to individual search engine on their own, but this can take a lot of time.
Once your webpage is submitted to a search engine you need to sit down and design a crawler page or more explicitly a site map. A crawler page is a webpage that contains nothing else expect links to every single page of your website. Use the title of each page as the as the link text. This will also give you some extra keywords that will help improve the ranking the crawlers assign to your website. Think of the crawler page as a site map to the rest of your website.
Typically, the crawler page won’t appear in the search results. This happens because the page doesn’t have enough text for the crawlers to give that individual page a high ranking, after all its nothing more then a portal to the rest of your site and your human users won’t need to use it. Don’t panic if it crawlers don’t instantly appear to index your website. There are a lot of websites available on the internet that need to be crawled, indexed, and then ranked. It can sometimes take up to three months for a web crawler to get to yours.
The Benefits of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Search engine optimization (SEO) can be a daunting process to learn for any person who is unfamiliar with it.
However, this process is one of the more important skills that you must learn and master if you plan on making some money on your online site or business. This seems like a tall order for a novice in the whole SEO game, but fortunately for you, there are a couple of things that you can learn about that can help you understand, and hopefully implement, the entire process to help improve your site’s ranking.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization is an important skill that will allow your website to get better rankings in search engines, such as Google, thereby making it easier for people to discover it. There are a lot of techniques and processes involved in SEO, which is why learning how it works first of all is the most important first step that you must take.
Basically, SEO helps online sites, or online businesses, increase their exposure on the web by making them easier to find through the search engine’s indexing software. It mates it easier to direct traffic to your site and business, improving your chances of receiving a steady stream of visitors to your website.
How is your site or page ranked?
Before your website can make full use of SEO, you must first get it indexed by search engines. How this works is that search engines find your website through the use of different indexing programs, such as crawlers or spiders that basically follow all links that lead to your site or page.
After this, your site or page will be analyzed and indexed based on algorithms and criteria set by the search engines, thereby giving your site its ranking. This can be achieved through effective link building, which requires you to create connections to other sites that have similar contents to that of your site.
Benefits of SEO for your site
One of the more obvious benefits of SEO is that It can help improve your site’s web ranking in search engines, thereby increasing the amount of web traffic that you website can generate. Since your site is now easier to locate in the web, it is a safe bet that there will be a significant change in the amount of visits from potential customers that your site can get. Keep in mind that making your site easier to find makes a whole lot of difference for your business’ survival, especially for those based online.
Avoid Black Hat SEO
Black Hat SEO is a form of Search Engine SPAM, and is one way of getting traffic directed to your website. However, this type of method will only work for a short period of time, and will ultimately lead to your site’s failure because the search engines will de-index your site.
This type of method works by literally tricking traffic to get redirected to your site through the use of some deceptive techniques, which directs “actual” visitors to the real content, and search engine spiders to keyword rich content.
Initially, this can generate some traffic to your site, but it will create some problems later on for your site, and if you choose not to do it right the first time, you’ll end up paying for it one way or another !
Learning how the entire SEO system works is your first step on managing your website’s ranking, especially if you are a beginner. Understanding how SEO works can help you determine the next steps you need to take in order to turn your online business into a complete success.
Should You DIY Your Small Business Website ?
Having your own online presence for your small business is essential to the growth of your company or business. As a small business owner should you outsource your website design or can you do this yourself ?
According to Smart Company, there are certain things that you can do yourself — but unless you want to turn your company into a web design and development company then the major tasks should be outsourced.
As a small business owner, here”s the things that you should seek assistance with:
- Website Design – unless you are a graphic designer, home made websites look like school projects nowdays
- Content Management - your website designer should incorporate a Content Management System (CMS) with your website, that you can update online. There are both free and paid services that you can use for this task. Your initial content should be put together by your web designer, and you can gradually take over it.
- Email Marketing – This is an advanced marketing technique that only a handful of small business owners can achieve. You can outsource your email marketing campaigns if you’re not confident to manage this service, but over time you should be able to learn this
- E-commerce – Best to have your website set up for you by a professional, and then take over the task once it’s set up.
- Search Engine Optimisation – I’d recommend that you seek out the help of a professional to set up your pages (and posts if running a blog) to maximise your search engine placement for your keywords, and then with a little learning you should be able to take over this task.
- Pay Per Click (PPC) Marketing — Adwords, etc. This is not a job for a beginner, as your wallet is tied directly to it. Your PPC Campaigns will need to match your landing pages, and having an opt-in form to capture your visitor’s interest will help to serve your business into the future. Get this wrong, and it will cost your business thousands of dollars, with no results to show for it.
And here’s a list of things that you can do yourself:
- Social Networking -
- Updating your content with new material each week - you should be releasing tips, strategies, topical news stories, and items of interest for your readers. This will help keep your website up to date with the Search Engines, and if your CMS is up and running then you might be able to hand this task over to someone more junior in your organisation.
Your Business needs to be online !
In this digital age people are flocking away from the Yellow Pages and using Search Engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc) faster than ever ! Simply put, you simply cannot afford to have your “bricks and mortar” business without a website presence.
According to online ezine Smart Company, (20 August 2009):
Forrester Research says that Australians spent $23 billion online in 2008, with estimated growth of 9% annually to $32 billion by 2012. eBay’s Deborah Sharkey quoted statistics from the Australian Payments and Clearing Association indicating that 43% of the $23 billion spent online in 2008 went overseas. It’s a worry statistic, although much of this is probably airline and other travel spending. Further statistics suggested that the percentage of total online spending that was staying within Australia was shrinking at a rapid pace, as large and small international retailers gain share.
Sharkey made the point that Australian retailers “simply can’t afford not to be online” and says they “face risk of global retailers targeting their customers with increasing success”.
“Australian retailers must evolve or be disrupted,” Sharkey said.
The trend of Australian spending going to international retailers (either directly or via fees for the platform) is not only a worry for Australian companies – it’s a worry for Australia.
What’s this mean for small business ?
It means that if you don’t catch up with the way people are doing business, then you’re going to miss out !
Fortunately getting a website up and running is no longer a difficult task. All this can be taken care of as a “turn-key solution” to your business needs.
However small businesses are wary of large web companies that offer the world and produce little or no results. They’ve heard stories of untold lost thousands of dollars to unscrupulous website design companies that don’t produce any valid results for the small business entrepreneur.
At Sure Fire Web, Brisbane web Design company, we produce quality websites that get your company found in the Search Engines within DAYS — not weeks or years. And the risk is small, just $500 deposit will get you going, and you’re covered by our quality of service guarantee.
So to avoid being left in the dust of your competitors, who are getting online and making more sales and earning the loyalty of new customers just contact us today to talk about your needs.
We’re ready to listen and get you online today !