November 27, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
Internet marketing pros know the steps to take to get their offers on page one of Google. Notice that I said steps, I didn’t say secrets or tricks or gimmicks or anything like that. If you want to build a bookshelf from IKEA, all you have to do is read the instructions. If you follow them exactly, you’ll end up with a bookshelf that looks like the picture on the box. Anyone can do the same thing and that’s how it is with internet marketing.
There are marketers who make six or seven figure incomes on the internet. There’s no trick to it. If you can use a computer, you can replicate the steps it takes to get there. So why isn’t everyone who tries internet marketing making six or seven figure incomes?
It’s because they either don’t know the steps or they are not willing to take them. If you are one of the people who aren’t willing to do what it takes, all I can say is good luck in your next endeavor. Maybe that won’t take any work either. To those who don’t know the steps I’ll say, you’re just like me! I should say say you’re just like I was a year ago at this time.
Since then I’ve studied the pros and learned how to get my promotions on page one of Google. That’s the key. If you are on page one, 80% of people will find you. Only 20% move on to page two.
Parts 1 & 2 of this series covered keywords and back links. In part 3 we’ll take a look at blogging can help in getting our promotions onto page one. (Notice I use the word promotions. A promotion might be an article, a web site, a Squidoo lens, etc. Whichever it is, it’s promoting something you’re trying to sell)
Google gives weight to blogs because they are written by real people. There are hundreds, even thousands of blog sites to which you can contribute but the largest are blogspot.com and Wordpress.com. These are generic and cover topics that range from A to Z. It’s free to start a blog on one of these or any of a thousand others.
What you will do with your blog is write about something related to your promotion and include a link to one of your articles that in turn links to your promotion. Your article will rank higher now and offer a more powerful back link for your promotion. Then, in your promotion, make a link back to your blog. The cycle is article links to promotion, promotion links to blog, blog links to article.
This way, you will have all one-way links. Google likes one-way links more than two-way or reciprocal links. The more articles and blogs you have, the more back links will be pointing to your promotion and the higher your page rank will be.
I hope these tips are helpful. The internet market is so vast and so many transactions take place every day that there’s plenty of business and plenty of money to be made for all of us. Learn how to get your fair share.
To learn about an easy to follow, step by step guide to to getting your articles on page one, read How To Get On Google Page One.
If you are serious about marketing via the internet, you’ve got to get your product on page one of Google. Are your articles on Google’s first page? Get ready to learn how to get your articles on page one!
For more information, read How To Get On Google Page One.
November 21, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
Smart pricing has changed Adsense. Publishers are seeing lower per click payouts and are lamenting the inability of their old methods and systems to produce a profit under the current circumstances. The old guard of Adsense gurus, meanwhile, continues to hold tight to a perspective born before smart pricing became a reality. They continue to encourage new publishers to follow their methods for Adsense success. Others have overreacted, announcing that Adsense is no longer a viable moneymaking opportunity. Some have even argued that smart pricing killed Adsense. The old guard gurus are merely protecting their own best interests. As long as they can pretend nothing meaningful has changed, the longer they can continue selling their systems and software. Those tolling death bells for Adsense are stirring up controversy for the sake of promoting click-flipping and other wealth-production strategies. The only people who seem to have it right are those publishers who have noticed that the old Adsense gravy train has run out of steam and who have discovered that the future of Adsense lies in treating it differently than before. Instead of proclaiming the death of Adsense, savvy users are taking a different approach to the changed environment. Adsense still has a place and can still be a valuable part of a successful overall strategy. However, the previously embraced strategies that were premised on constructing lower-quality sites en masse and monetizing them exclusively with Adsense are no longer tenable. Instead, Adsense can be used as one of a multiplicity of revenue-producing tactics on smart sites designed to provide visitors with real value. Earlier Adsense techniques were based on sending mass traffic to a site and collecting ad clicks exclusively. In many cases, for more detail visit to www.yourgoogleincome.com the sites were actually designed in a way that aimed to make people want to leave rapidly, using Adsense ad blocks as an escape route. Smart pricing has decreased the per click payout of such prices by such a substantial margin that one cannot hope to profit from those strategies in any meaningful way. Instead, smart publishers will create better sites that really interact with visitors in a meaningful way. Relevant contextual advertising fills the role of one many services offered to visitors. Instead of being the only way to make a dime, Adsense can be used as part of a full roster of moneymaking opportunities. Not only does this strategy allow webmasters to effectively tap into to other revenue sources (some of which are more valuable than Adsense ever was in its heyday), for more detail visit to www.adsense-dollar-factory.com it also comports with Adsense own recommendations for improving per click values in a smart pricing environment. There are more ways to make money and one can make more money with Adsense at the same time. Regardless of what some might be announcing, there is no reason to give up on Adsense. You just need to use it differently. Adsense has changed. Do not believe those who tell you that business as usual will still work like a charm. Adsense is not, however, dead. It is still a strong and vibrant means by which to earn. The old Adsense business models are dead. They just do not do the trick anymore. You can make money with Adsense, but it will require the use of strategies that merge appropriately with the current environment and trends. Sites that seek to provide real value to visitors can make use of multiple revenue earning strategies including Adsense and will succeed regardless of smart pricing adjustments.
November 20, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
What is Google Adsense?Google Adsense is a fast and easy way for website publishers of all sizes to display relevant Google ads on their website’s content pages and earn money. – Google, July 2006through some clever java script and coding, Google matches content on sites to related ads. Adsense is a great program that allows webmasters to earn income through ad revenue by doing absolutely nothing but post content. Adsense is actually a really great program for those who maintain blogs, as blogs get updated all the time and the Adsense possibilities are almost limitless.How to Use Google AdsenseGoogle utilizes its search technology to serve ads based on website content, the user’s geographical location, and other factors. – Google Adsense, It’s quick and easy to sign up for Google Adsense. Simply go to the Google homepage, and you’ll find everything you need to start using this program. Of course, before you can use Google Adsense you have to have a web site first! Google Adsense can actually help increase traffic to your site, for more detail visit to www.youradsenseprofits.com because your site will get a better ranking within the Google search engine. Using feeds, Google Adsense works automatically, which means no effort at all is required on your part. By signing up and putting some code into your site, you can collect revenue for doing absolutely nothing.Adsense has become a popular method of placing advertising on a website because the ads are less intrusive than most banners, and the content of the ads is often relevant to the website. – Google Adsense, July 2006How to Make Money from Google AdsenseAdsense delivers relevant text and image ads that are precisely targeted to your site and your site content. And when you add a Google search box to your site, Adsense delivers relevant text ads that are targeted to the Google search results pages generated by your visitors’ search request. – Google, Google Adsense is incredibly easy to use, for more detail visit to www.googleatmcash.com completely effortless on your part. Google even features helpful tools that allow you to check your daily Adsense profits. The best part of Adsense is that it costs you nothing, not even time. Once you get Adsense set up, you’re done. All you have to do is sit back and collect the profits.You can run Google ads on all or just some of your pages, using Adsense strategically to complement your direct sales team. You’ll pay nothing, spend little time on set-up, and have no maintenance worries. You can use Adsense for a day, a month or for however long it pleases you to make a profit-it’s your choice. – Google, July 2006The more pages that have Google Adsense ads on your web site means more profits for you, because you can gain earnings on each and every page that is viewed even if you do nothing. Google Adsense can help boost the page views on your site, and of course bring a little extra income for your pockets. It’s easy to use and requires no work on your end but it can bring in some much-needed revenue. It’s easy, it’s free to use, and you are required to do very little to bring in much-needed web traffic and extra income. So why not give Google Adsense a try?
November 20, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
This article will list the rest of the 4 criteria that the product must meet before you even consider promoting it. I have listed the first 4 criteria on the part 1 of this article so do go and read it if you have not read yet. The rest of the criteria are below:
5. Does the affiliate program pay you good commissions for your effort? You will want to be paid well for all the effort, time and money that you will be investing on promoting the products. As a rule, do not go for any affiliate products that will pay you less than 50% in commissions.
6. Does the affiliate program allow you to earn multiple affiliate income streams at once? There are some programs that have 2 tier or 3 tier system. What the merchant do is that they will sell the customer another product after they have make the first purchase. If the customer buys both the products, you will be paid commissions for both the products. Do look out for this kind of affiliate program.
7. Does the affiliate program track correctly and pays on time? You will want to join a program that will be able to track that you have make a sale and credit the commissions to your account. Another factor is to take note that the affiliate program pays you on time.
8. Does the merchant’s website have a good strong sales letter and good conversion rates? You will want to ask the merchant what is the conversion rate of their website. The 2nd thing that you should do is to read the sales letter yourself and see whether you will be tempted to buy the products or not.
So these are the 8 criteria that the affiliate product must meet before you even bother to promote it. It might seem to be a little troublesome to go through all these criteria just to find a product to promote. But do not be lazy. It will be worth your time and effort if you go through the criteria to set certain standards for yourself on the kinds of products that you will promote. This will saves you lots of time and money in the long term.
Zack Lim is an up and coming affiliate marketer who owns http://www.MyAffiliateMarketingOnline.com providing information on Affiliate Marketing. To get Free “7 Days to Affiliate Marketing” course, go to http://www.MyAffiliateMarketingOnline.com
November 20, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
You have decided to do affiliate marketing, so you have put in all your time and effort in finding out what are the niches that you want to be in and knowing what is the things that your niche market wants. You have already do some research and you have a good understanding of your niche market.
The next step that you will naturally do is to select a good affiliate product. There are lots of websites that will promote different kinds of affiliate programs. If you are currently using a product which you think is a very good product, do check out whether is there any affiliate programs or not? You can earn extra income by just telling your friend so that they will enjoy the same experiences as you.
But if you do not use the product yourself, you will have to do some research on the product that you are going to promote. Once you have found the product that you are going to promote, there are a few things that you have to do. You have to check out the merchant’s sales pages that you will sending your traffic to, checking on whether the company is reliable or not, checking on is there any complain against them or not, how often do they pay their affiliates, how will they pay the affiliates etc. All these are important as it will make sure that you not face any problems when you start to invest your time and effort to promote their products.
You can also get in contact with their affiliate manager if they have one. Do ask for whether they have any additional advertising materials that will be able to help you in promoting the products better. You can also personally feel and experience the kind of support that they will be giving.
Zack Lim is an up and coming affiliate marketer who owns http://www.MyAffiliateMarketingOnline.com providing information on Affiliate Marketing. To get Free “7 Days to Affiliate Marketing” course, go to http://www.MyAffiliateMarketingOnline.com
November 20, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
In social media years, blogs are practically ancient. The term “weblog,” later shortened to blog, dates all the way back to 1997.
Technorati now tracks more than 112 million blogs, meaning they are clearly no longer “the next big thing.” Much of the social media buzz is now devoted to social networks like Facebook, which recently announced its membership had grown to 200 million, and Twitter, a micro-blogging site which attracted 7 million unique visitors in February, according to Nielsen Online. (Micro-blogging is a blogging variant that limits authors to 140-character missives.)
Yet many companies see blogs as a sort of senior statesman of social media, one that is central to their strategies of fostering closer relationships with their customers, rather than a medium with waning influence. In fact, they use newer channels such as Twitter to promote their blogs.
In the early part of the decade, social media activity centered around blogs because “that’s where the conversations were happening,” says Paul Chaney, president of the International Blogging and New Media Association and author of the blog Conversational Media Marketing. “Conversations are more distributed now, but blogs are like a base of operations from which you foray into other channels.”
All of the companies interviewed for this piece support this view. They agree that, compared to channels like Facebook and Twitter, blogs offer companies more ownership and control of their brands. Twitter, with its length limit of 140 characters, doesn’t lend itself to the types of involved discussions that are possible on blogs. Because blogs are also more easily accessed by Google and other search engines, they boost a company’s profile through search engine optimization.
“Our blogs are home base. Whether I am on Facebook or Twitter or any other social site, most of my conversation is still going to happen on the corporate blog,” says Bryan Rhoads, a digital strategist with Intel’s Social Media Center of Excellence.
“Companies that are focused on joining conversations with customers are going to communities that already have customer bases and becoming relevant in those conversations,” says Bob Pearson, president of the Blog Council and former vice president of Communities and Conversations at Dell. They can then direct those customers to their blogs, which are “the ultimate story-telling mechanism.”
How do these companies and others position their blogs in an ever-shifting social media landscape?
Dell
The PC manufacturer started a blog program in July of 2006, at the behest of CEO Michael Dell, in response to its then well-documented struggles with declining customer satisfaction levels. The company spent a few months reading “thousands and thousands” of posts before publishing a post of its own. This research not only gave Dell a sense of how to “blogify” content, it helped the company develop a plan for solving the tech support issues for its products.
“You can be as transparent and conversational as possible, but if you don’t get the right people and processes in place that are committed to actually helping customers, it won’t do you a bit of good,” says Chief Blogger Lionel Menchaca.
Menchaca typically identifies an owner or co-owners of a blog, who become responsible for that blog’s content. About 100 employees contribute to Dell’s 15 blogs (four of which are in languages other than English), estimates Menchaca.
Some of the keys to the blogs’ success: providing a basic training course for all beginning bloggers, enlisting “passionate” employees, and conducting weekly content meetings during which core bloggers compare notes on relevant activities within Dell, comments of Dell blog readers and trends being discussed in the broader blogosphere.
“We try to balance all three of these content areas,” says Menchaca. “We’re most effective when we strike that balance. If we lean too heavily on what Dell bloggers want to talk about, (the blogs) can become a one-way microphone rather than a conversation.”
Other channels complement blogs rather than compete with them, says Menchaca. Each Dell blog has a complementary Twitter account. Menchaca oversees the account for the Direct2Dell blog, which has nearly 5,000 followers. Popular posts are often “re-Tweeted” (posted on other Twitter accounts). Though that kind of republication can occur via Google Reader or RSS feeds, Menchaca says “there is more sharing” on Twitter.
The biggest challenges around a broad social media strategy involve connecting the various channels, both to “bring content from all of our channels to different audiences as it becomes relevant to them” and to help Dell plumb the decentralized content for insights. It’s also tough simply making time to devote to all of the core channels, says Menchaca.
Lenovo
Lenovo launched its first blog, Design Matters by David Hill, vice president of Design, in June of 2006. Since then, the program has expanded to encompass eight blogs. Ray Gorman, the company’s executive director of External Communications, had to recruit bloggers initially. But thanks to internal promotion of the blogs, including posting them on the company intranet, employees now often ask to blog. The main criteria: enthusiasm and a commitment to keep content fresh and oversee comments.
Lenovo looks at a number of traditional Web metrics, including unique visits, page views, Technorati rankings and RSS subscriptions, to assess the popularity of its blogs. Gorman pays a lot of attention to ratio of comments and the number of words in comments, which he says indicate a high level of reader engagement. When Hill recently asked his readers what features they’d like to see in a ThinkPad netbook, he received 80-plus comments in one week, some of them nearly 1,000 words long.
“We pride ourselves on having a technically astute customer base. By offering them this platform, we give them an opportunity to share their expertise with us. That’s invaluable. You can host focus groups at great expense, you can run online surveys, you can do a lot of polling, but you won’t get the kind of rich stuff (you will get from blog comments),” says Gorman.
Like Menchaca, Gorman sees “great symbiosis” between Levono’s blogs and their supporting Twitter accounts. Lenovo closely monitors Twitter for any signs of customer dissatisfaction and increasingly for what Gorman calls “detection of desire.” So, for instance, Lenovo can enter into a dialogue with customers who might be Tweeting about shopping for a laptop.
On Twitter and in blogs, Gorman says it’s important to inject some personality into communications. “If all I see from one of my favorite brands is coupons, coupons, coupons, it’s really of no interest. I take more interest in seeing a brand with a personality behind it reach out and say ‘Hey we’re sorry your flight is delayed. Here’s the reason why’ and offer to help,” he says. “If all you do is promote, it starts to get the look and feel of a microphone.”Understanding the roles different channels play is a key challenge in social media strategy, says Gorman. “We are all guilty at some times of saying, ‘Oh, it’s social media.’ But there are subtleties in the different channels, and you need to understand those if you want to communicate effectively.”
Intel
Intel’s blogging program started with internal employee blogs but added public-facing blogs in 2007. The first public blog involved Intel’s own IT department sharing its best practices. This “from the trenches” approach remains popular, with the company’s latest blog featuring employees blogging about their jobs in hopes of attracting talented hires.
“The strategy has always been to get our employees talking, not just use the blogs as a broadcast vehicle for marketing or PR. So we have a lot of our internal experts sharing what they know, “ Rhoads says.
One of Intel’s biggest challenges is tweaking its site design so that readers can more easily locate posts of interest, he says. “We have so many conversations going on, we need to find better ways to help folks find that information. I don’t think you’re entirely aware of the huge information pyramid you’re at the top of when you visit the blog home page.”
Like Lenovo’s Gorman, Rhoads says it’s important to differentiate between channels and craft appropriate strategies for each. “If you’re on a Facebook fan page or application, that’s different from a Twitter conversation with me or my peers, which is different than the blogs.”
Smaller companies face different challenges than Intel, which because of its market position was pretty sure it could build a blog program and expect folks to come, acknowledges Rhoads. Echoing the comments of The Blog Council’s Pearson, he says SMBs should reach out first to their customers on sites like Facebook.
“Are (your customers) engaged in existing communities? You don’t have to build it. The point is participation and getting out there and communicating with customers wherever they are. If you are well engaged in those places, then maybe it is time to have a corporate blog,” he says.
SAP
SAP employs a different blog strategy, centered around a virtual community in which partners, customers and other external sources outnumber SAP employees. Only about a third of the 4,800 bloggers in the network work for the company, says Mark Yolton, senior vice president of the SAP Community Network. A developer network, begun when SAP introduced its NetWeaver middleware in 2003, predated the broader network.
Anyone can read the blogs, though one must become a community member to post comments or apply to write a blog. (The five-minute registration process involves filling out an online form, says Yolton.)
“We have lot of smart people at SAP, but we don’t have all of the smart people. We want to hear insights from others, especially from our customers and partners,” says Yolton. “Maybe a manufacturer in Mexico can help a chemical company in India apply some operational best practices or use their SAP software in a different way.”
There’s an online form where any community member can apply to become a blogger. If an application is approved, the member becomes a “junior” blogger, whose posts are moderated more closely than those of “expert” bloggers. Junior bloggers also receive basic instruction on how to use the blogging tools and some tips on tone and content. (The latter is especially helpful for bloggers who are not native English speakers, Yolton says, a key consideration for a multinational company like SAP.)
When expert bloggers click “publish,” their posts go live immediately. Some of the experts are ultimately asked to serve as moderators who vet the contents of junior blogger posts and upgrade junior bloggers to expert status. Most blogs are viewed once live by SAP employees who can respond quickly to issues if needed. Any community member can flag posts as inappropriate or questionable, and flagged posts receive review priority. However, says Yolton, bloggers are never censored except to ensure their topics are relevant to the community.
Like the other sources featured in this article, Yolton says blogs provide a more robust reading experience than Twitter and other channels. “Blogs are a freeform medium in which you can express opinions, experiences and insights in a much richer way than you could through Twitter or other channels.”
Ann was a leading media authority on automated teller machines before coming to IT Business Edge to cover tech alignment and business value. Read her blog to get information on aligning business beyond the software and the apps. Follow her on Twitter @all1ann
November 20, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
In social media years, blogs are practically ancient. The term “weblog,” later shortened to blog, dates all the way back to 1997.
Technorati now tracks more than 112 million blogs, meaning they are clearly no longer “the next big thing.” Much of the social media buzz is now devoted to social networks like Facebook, which recently announced its membership had grown to 200 million, and Twitter, a micro-blogging site which attracted 7 million unique visitors in February, according to Nielsen Online. (Micro-blogging is a blogging variant that limits authors to 140-character missives.)
Yet many companies see blogs as a sort of senior statesman of social media, one that is central to their strategies of fostering closer relationships with their customers, rather than a medium with waning influence. In fact, they use newer channels such as Twitter to promote their blogs.
In the early part of the decade, social media activity centered around blogs because “that’s where the conversations were happening,” says Paul Chaney, president of the International Blogging and New Media Association and author of the blog Conversational Media Marketing. “Conversations are more distributed now, but blogs are like a base of operations from which you foray into other channels.”
All of the companies interviewed for this piece support this view. They agree that, compared to channels like Facebook and Twitter, blogs offer companies more ownership and control of their brands. Twitter, with its length limit of 140 characters, doesn’t lend itself to the types of involved discussions that are possible on blogs. Because blogs are also more easily accessed by Google and other search engines, they boost a company’s profile through search engine optimization.
“Our blogs are home base. Whether I am on Facebook or Twitter or any other social site, most of my conversation is still going to happen on the corporate blog,” says Bryan Rhoads, a digital strategist with Intel’s Social Media Center of Excellence.
“Companies that are focused on joining conversations with customers are going to communities that already have customer bases and becoming relevant in those conversations,” says Bob Pearson, president of the Blog Council and former vice president of Communities and Conversations at Dell. They can then direct those customers to their blogs, which are “the ultimate story-telling mechanism.”
How do these companies and others position their blogs in an ever-shifting social media landscape?
Dell
The PC manufacturer started a blog program in July of 2006, at the behest of CEO Michael Dell, in response to its then well-documented struggles with declining customer satisfaction levels. The company spent a few months reading “thousands and thousands” of posts before publishing a post of its own. This research not only gave Dell a sense of how to “blogify” content, it helped the company develop a plan for solving the tech support issues for its products.
“You can be as transparent and conversational as possible, but if you don’t get the right people and processes in place that are committed to actually helping customers, it won’t do you a bit of good,” says Chief Blogger Lionel Menchaca.
Menchaca typically identifies an owner or co-owners of a blog, who become responsible for that blog’s content. About 100 employees contribute to Dell’s 15 blogs (four of which are in languages other than English), estimates Menchaca.
Some of the keys to the blogs’ success: providing a basic training course for all beginning bloggers, enlisting “passionate” employees, and conducting weekly content meetings during which core bloggers compare notes on relevant activities within Dell, comments of Dell blog readers and trends being discussed in the broader blogosphere.
“We try to balance all three of these content areas,” says Menchaca. “We’re most effective when we strike that balance. If we lean too heavily on what Dell bloggers want to talk about, (the blogs) can become a one-way microphone rather than a conversation.”
Other channels complement blogs rather than compete with them, says Menchaca. Each Dell blog has a complementary Twitter account. Menchaca oversees the account for the Direct2Dell blog, which has nearly 5,000 followers. Popular posts are often “re-Tweeted” (posted on other Twitter accounts). Though that kind of republication can occur via Google Reader or RSS feeds, Menchaca says “there is more sharing” on Twitter.
The biggest challenges around a broad social media strategy involve connecting the various channels, both to “bring content from all of our channels to different audiences as it becomes relevant to them” and to help Dell plumb the decentralized content for insights. It’s also tough simply making time to devote to all of the core channels, says Menchaca.
Lenovo
Lenovo launched its first blog, Design Matters by David Hill, vice president of Design, in June of 2006. Since then, the program has expanded to encompass eight blogs. Ray Gorman, the company’s executive director of External Communications, had to recruit bloggers initially. But thanks to internal promotion of the blogs, including posting them on the company intranet, employees now often ask to blog. The main criteria: enthusiasm and a commitment to keep content fresh and oversee comments.
Lenovo looks at a number of traditional Web metrics, including unique visits, page views, Technorati rankings and RSS subscriptions, to assess the popularity of its blogs. Gorman pays a lot of attention to ratio of comments and the number of words in comments, which he says indicate a high level of reader engagement. When Hill recently asked his readers what features they’d like to see in a ThinkPad netbook, he received 80-plus comments in one week, some of them nearly 1,000 words long.
“We pride ourselves on having a technically astute customer base. By offering them this platform, we give them an opportunity to share their expertise with us. That’s invaluable. You can host focus groups at great expense, you can run online surveys, you can do a lot of polling, but you won’t get the kind of rich stuff (you will get from blog comments),” says Gorman.
Like Menchaca, Gorman sees “great symbiosis” between Levono’s blogs and their supporting Twitter accounts. Lenovo closely monitors Twitter for any signs of customer dissatisfaction and increasingly for what Gorman calls “detection of desire.” So, for instance, Lenovo can enter into a dialogue with customers who might be Tweeting about shopping for a laptop.
On Twitter and in blogs, Gorman says it’s important to inject some personality into communications. “If all I see from one of my favorite brands is coupons, coupons, coupons, it’s really of no interest. I take more interest in seeing a brand with a personality behind it reach out and say ‘Hey we’re sorry your flight is delayed. Here’s the reason why’ and offer to help,” he says. “If all you do is promote, it starts to get the look and feel of a microphone.”Understanding the roles different channels play is a key challenge in social media strategy, says Gorman. “We are all guilty at some times of saying, ‘Oh, it’s social media.’ But there are subtleties in the different channels, and you need to understand those if you want to communicate effectively.”
Intel
Intel’s blogging program started with internal employee blogs but added public-facing blogs in 2007. The first public blog involved Intel’s own IT department sharing its best practices. This “from the trenches” approach remains popular, with the company’s latest blog featuring employees blogging about their jobs in hopes of attracting talented hires.
“The strategy has always been to get our employees talking, not just use the blogs as a broadcast vehicle for marketing or PR. So we have a lot of our internal experts sharing what they know, “ Rhoads says.
One of Intel’s biggest challenges is tweaking its site design so that readers can more easily locate posts of interest, he says. “We have so many conversations going on, we need to find better ways to help folks find that information. I don’t think you’re entirely aware of the huge information pyramid you’re at the top of when you visit the blog home page.”
Like Lenovo’s Gorman, Rhoads says it’s important to differentiate between channels and craft appropriate strategies for each. “If you’re on a Facebook fan page or application, that’s different from a Twitter conversation with me or my peers, which is different than the blogs.”
Smaller companies face different challenges than Intel, which because of its market position was pretty sure it could build a blog program and expect folks to come, acknowledges Rhoads. Echoing the comments of The Blog Council’s Pearson, he says SMBs should reach out first to their customers on sites like Facebook.
“Are (your customers) engaged in existing communities? You don’t have to build it. The point is participation and getting out there and communicating with customers wherever they are. If you are well engaged in those places, then maybe it is time to have a corporate blog,” he says.
SAP
SAP employs a different blog strategy, centered around a virtual community in which partners, customers and other external sources outnumber SAP employees. Only about a third of the 4,800 bloggers in the network work for the company, says Mark Yolton, senior vice president of the SAP Community Network. A developer network, begun when SAP introduced its NetWeaver middleware in 2003, predated the broader network.
Anyone can read the blogs, though one must become a community member to post comments or apply to write a blog. (The five-minute registration process involves filling out an online form, says Yolton.)
“We have lot of smart people at SAP, but we don’t have all of the smart people. We want to hear insights from others, especially from our customers and partners,” says Yolton. “Maybe a manufacturer in Mexico can help a chemical company in India apply some operational best practices or use their SAP software in a different way.”
There’s an online form where any community member can apply to become a blogger. If an application is approved, the member becomes a “junior” blogger, whose posts are moderated more closely than those of “expert” bloggers. Junior bloggers also receive basic instruction on how to use the blogging tools and some tips on tone and content. (The latter is especially helpful for bloggers who are not native English speakers, Yolton says, a key consideration for a multinational company like SAP.)
When expert bloggers click “publish,” their posts go live immediately. Some of the experts are ultimately asked to serve as moderators who vet the contents of junior blogger posts and upgrade junior bloggers to expert status. Most blogs are viewed once live by SAP employees who can respond quickly to issues if needed. Any community member can flag posts as inappropriate or questionable, and flagged posts receive review priority. However, says Yolton, bloggers are never censored except to ensure their topics are relevant to the community.
Like the other sources featured in this article, Yolton says blogs provide a more robust reading experience than Twitter and other channels. “Blogs are a freeform medium in which you can express opinions, experiences and insights in a much richer way than you could through Twitter or other channels.”
Ann was a leading media authority on automated teller machines before coming to IT Business Edge to cover tech alignment and business value. Read her blog to get information on aligning business beyond the software and the apps. Follow her on Twitter @all1ann
November 20, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
In social media years, blogs are practically ancient. The term “weblog,” later shortened to blog, dates all the way back to 1997.
Technorati now tracks more than 112 million blogs, meaning they are clearly no longer “the next big thing.” Much of the social media buzz is now devoted to social networks like Facebook, which recently announced its membership had grown to 200 million, and Twitter, a micro-blogging site which attracted 7 million unique visitors in February, according to Nielsen Online. (Micro-blogging is a blogging variant that limits authors to 140-character missives.)
Yet many companies see blogs as a sort of senior statesman of social media, one that is central to their strategies of fostering closer relationships with their customers, rather than a medium with waning influence. In fact, they use newer channels such as Twitter to promote their blogs.
In the early part of the decade, social media activity centered around blogs because “that’s where the conversations were happening,” says Paul Chaney, president of the International Blogging and New Media Association and author of the blog Conversational Media Marketing. “Conversations are more distributed now, but blogs are like a base of operations from which you foray into other channels.”
All of the companies interviewed for this piece support this view. They agree that, compared to channels like Facebook and Twitter, blogs offer companies more ownership and control of their brands. Twitter, with its length limit of 140 characters, doesn’t lend itself to the types of involved discussions that are possible on blogs. Because blogs are also more easily accessed by Google and other search engines, they boost a company’s profile through search engine optimization.
“Our blogs are home base. Whether I am on Facebook or Twitter or any other social site, most of my conversation is still going to happen on the corporate blog,” says Bryan Rhoads, a digital strategist with Intel’s Social Media Center of Excellence.
“Companies that are focused on joining conversations with customers are going to communities that already have customer bases and becoming relevant in those conversations,” says Bob Pearson, president of the Blog Council and former vice president of Communities and Conversations at Dell. They can then direct those customers to their blogs, which are “the ultimate story-telling mechanism.”
How do these companies and others position their blogs in an ever-shifting social media landscape?
Dell
The PC manufacturer started a blog program in July of 2006, at the behest of CEO Michael Dell, in response to its then well-documented struggles with declining customer satisfaction levels. The company spent a few months reading “thousands and thousands” of posts before publishing a post of its own. This research not only gave Dell a sense of how to “blogify” content, it helped the company develop a plan for solving the tech support issues for its products.
“You can be as transparent and conversational as possible, but if you don’t get the right people and processes in place that are committed to actually helping customers, it won’t do you a bit of good,” says Chief Blogger Lionel Menchaca.
Menchaca typically identifies an owner or co-owners of a blog, who become responsible for that blog’s content. About 100 employees contribute to Dell’s 15 blogs (four of which are in languages other than English), estimates Menchaca.
Some of the keys to the blogs’ success: providing a basic training course for all beginning bloggers, enlisting “passionate” employees, and conducting weekly content meetings during which core bloggers compare notes on relevant activities within Dell, comments of Dell blog readers and trends being discussed in the broader blogosphere.
“We try to balance all three of these content areas,” says Menchaca. “We’re most effective when we strike that balance. If we lean too heavily on what Dell bloggers want to talk about, (the blogs) can become a one-way microphone rather than a conversation.”
Other channels complement blogs rather than compete with them, says Menchaca. Each Dell blog has a complementary Twitter account. Menchaca oversees the account for the Direct2Dell blog, which has nearly 5,000 followers. Popular posts are often “re-Tweeted” (posted on other Twitter accounts). Though that kind of republication can occur via Google Reader or RSS feeds, Menchaca says “there is more sharing” on Twitter.
The biggest challenges around a broad social media strategy involve connecting the various channels, both to “bring content from all of our channels to different audiences as it becomes relevant to them” and to help Dell plumb the decentralized content for insights. It’s also tough simply making time to devote to all of the core channels, says Menchaca.
Lenovo
Lenovo launched its first blog, Design Matters by David Hill, vice president of Design, in June of 2006. Since then, the program has expanded to encompass eight blogs. Ray Gorman, the company’s executive director of External Communications, had to recruit bloggers initially. But thanks to internal promotion of the blogs, including posting them on the company intranet, employees now often ask to blog. The main criteria: enthusiasm and a commitment to keep content fresh and oversee comments.
Lenovo looks at a number of traditional Web metrics, including unique visits, page views, Technorati rankings and RSS subscriptions, to assess the popularity of its blogs. Gorman pays a lot of attention to ratio of comments and the number of words in comments, which he says indicate a high level of reader engagement. When Hill recently asked his readers what features they’d like to see in a ThinkPad netbook, he received 80-plus comments in one week, some of them nearly 1,000 words long.
“We pride ourselves on having a technically astute customer base. By offering them this platform, we give them an opportunity to share their expertise with us. That’s invaluable. You can host focus groups at great expense, you can run online surveys, you can do a lot of polling, but you won’t get the kind of rich stuff (you will get from blog comments),” says Gorman.
Like Menchaca, Gorman sees “great symbiosis” between Levono’s blogs and their supporting Twitter accounts. Lenovo closely monitors Twitter for any signs of customer dissatisfaction and increasingly for what Gorman calls “detection of desire.” So, for instance, Lenovo can enter into a dialogue with customers who might be Tweeting about shopping for a laptop.
On Twitter and in blogs, Gorman says it’s important to inject some personality into communications. “If all I see from one of my favorite brands is coupons, coupons, coupons, it’s really of no interest. I take more interest in seeing a brand with a personality behind it reach out and say ‘Hey we’re sorry your flight is delayed. Here’s the reason why’ and offer to help,” he says. “If all you do is promote, it starts to get the look and feel of a microphone.”Understanding the roles different channels play is a key challenge in social media strategy, says Gorman. “We are all guilty at some times of saying, ‘Oh, it’s social media.’ But there are subtleties in the different channels, and you need to understand those if you want to communicate effectively.”
Intel
Intel’s blogging program started with internal employee blogs but added public-facing blogs in 2007. The first public blog involved Intel’s own IT department sharing its best practices. This “from the trenches” approach remains popular, with the company’s latest blog featuring employees blogging about their jobs in hopes of attracting talented hires.
“The strategy has always been to get our employees talking, not just use the blogs as a broadcast vehicle for marketing or PR. So we have a lot of our internal experts sharing what they know, “ Rhoads says.
One of Intel’s biggest challenges is tweaking its site design so that readers can more easily locate posts of interest, he says. “We have so many conversations going on, we need to find better ways to help folks find that information. I don’t think you’re entirely aware of the huge information pyramid you’re at the top of when you visit the blog home page.”
Like Lenovo’s Gorman, Rhoads says it’s important to differentiate between channels and craft appropriate strategies for each. “If you’re on a Facebook fan page or application, that’s different from a Twitter conversation with me or my peers, which is different than the blogs.”
Smaller companies face different challenges than Intel, which because of its market position was pretty sure it could build a blog program and expect folks to come, acknowledges Rhoads. Echoing the comments of The Blog Council’s Pearson, he says SMBs should reach out first to their customers on sites like Facebook.
“Are (your customers) engaged in existing communities? You don’t have to build it. The point is participation and getting out there and communicating with customers wherever they are. If you are well engaged in those places, then maybe it is time to have a corporate blog,” he says.
SAP
SAP employs a different blog strategy, centered around a virtual community in which partners, customers and other external sources outnumber SAP employees. Only about a third of the 4,800 bloggers in the network work for the company, says Mark Yolton, senior vice president of the SAP Community Network. A developer network, begun when SAP introduced its NetWeaver middleware in 2003, predated the broader network.
Anyone can read the blogs, though one must become a community member to post comments or apply to write a blog. (The five-minute registration process involves filling out an online form, says Yolton.)
“We have lot of smart people at SAP, but we don’t have all of the smart people. We want to hear insights from others, especially from our customers and partners,” says Yolton. “Maybe a manufacturer in Mexico can help a chemical company in India apply some operational best practices or use their SAP software in a different way.”
There’s an online form where any community member can apply to become a blogger. If an application is approved, the member becomes a “junior” blogger, whose posts are moderated more closely than those of “expert” bloggers. Junior bloggers also receive basic instruction on how to use the blogging tools and some tips on tone and content. (The latter is especially helpful for bloggers who are not native English speakers, Yolton says, a key consideration for a multinational company like SAP.)
When expert bloggers click “publish,” their posts go live immediately. Some of the experts are ultimately asked to serve as moderators who vet the contents of junior blogger posts and upgrade junior bloggers to expert status. Most blogs are viewed once live by SAP employees who can respond quickly to issues if needed. Any community member can flag posts as inappropriate or questionable, and flagged posts receive review priority. However, says Yolton, bloggers are never censored except to ensure their topics are relevant to the community.
Like the other sources featured in this article, Yolton says blogs provide a more robust reading experience than Twitter and other channels. “Blogs are a freeform medium in which you can express opinions, experiences and insights in a much richer way than you could through Twitter or other channels.”
Ann was a leading media authority on automated teller machines before coming to IT Business Edge to cover tech alignment and business value. Read her blog to get information on aligning business beyond the software and the apps. Follow her on Twitter @all1ann
November 20, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
In social media years, blogs are practically ancient. The term “weblog,” later shortened to blog, dates all the way back to 1997.
Technorati now tracks more than 112 million blogs, meaning they are clearly no longer “the next big thing.” Much of the social media buzz is now devoted to social networks like Facebook, which recently announced its membership had grown to 200 million, and Twitter, a micro-blogging site which attracted 7 million unique visitors in February, according to Nielsen Online. (Micro-blogging is a blogging variant that limits authors to 140-character missives.)
Yet many companies see blogs as a sort of senior statesman of social media, one that is central to their strategies of fostering closer relationships with their customers, rather than a medium with waning influence. In fact, they use newer channels such as Twitter to promote their blogs.
In the early part of the decade, social media activity centered around blogs because “that’s where the conversations were happening,” says Paul Chaney, president of the International Blogging and New Media Association and author of the blog Conversational Media Marketing. “Conversations are more distributed now, but blogs are like a base of operations from which you foray into other channels.”
All of the companies interviewed for this piece support this view. They agree that, compared to channels like Facebook and Twitter, blogs offer companies more ownership and control of their brands. Twitter, with its length limit of 140 characters, doesn’t lend itself to the types of involved discussions that are possible on blogs. Because blogs are also more easily accessed by Google and other search engines, they boost a company’s profile through search engine optimization.
“Our blogs are home base. Whether I am on Facebook or Twitter or any other social site, most of my conversation is still going to happen on the corporate blog,” says Bryan Rhoads, a digital strategist with Intel’s Social Media Center of Excellence.
“Companies that are focused on joining conversations with customers are going to communities that already have customer bases and becoming relevant in those conversations,” says Bob Pearson, president of the Blog Council and former vice president of Communities and Conversations at Dell. They can then direct those customers to their blogs, which are “the ultimate story-telling mechanism.”
How do these companies and others position their blogs in an ever-shifting social media landscape?
Dell
The PC manufacturer started a blog program in July of 2006, at the behest of CEO Michael Dell, in response to its then well-documented struggles with declining customer satisfaction levels. The company spent a few months reading “thousands and thousands” of posts before publishing a post of its own. This research not only gave Dell a sense of how to “blogify” content, it helped the company develop a plan for solving the tech support issues for its products.
“You can be as transparent and conversational as possible, but if you don’t get the right people and processes in place that are committed to actually helping customers, it won’t do you a bit of good,” says Chief Blogger Lionel Menchaca.
Menchaca typically identifies an owner or co-owners of a blog, who become responsible for that blog’s content. About 100 employees contribute to Dell’s 15 blogs (four of which are in languages other than English), estimates Menchaca.
Some of the keys to the blogs’ success: providing a basic training course for all beginning bloggers, enlisting “passionate” employees, and conducting weekly content meetings during which core bloggers compare notes on relevant activities within Dell, comments of Dell blog readers and trends being discussed in the broader blogosphere.
“We try to balance all three of these content areas,” says Menchaca. “We’re most effective when we strike that balance. If we lean too heavily on what Dell bloggers want to talk about, (the blogs) can become a one-way microphone rather than a conversation.”
Other channels complement blogs rather than compete with them, says Menchaca. Each Dell blog has a complementary Twitter account. Menchaca oversees the account for the Direct2Dell blog, which has nearly 5,000 followers. Popular posts are often “re-Tweeted” (posted on other Twitter accounts). Though that kind of republication can occur via Google Reader or RSS feeds, Menchaca says “there is more sharing” on Twitter.
The biggest challenges around a broad social media strategy involve connecting the various channels, both to “bring content from all of our channels to different audiences as it becomes relevant to them” and to help Dell plumb the decentralized content for insights. It’s also tough simply making time to devote to all of the core channels, says Menchaca.
Lenovo
Lenovo launched its first blog, Design Matters by David Hill, vice president of Design, in June of 2006. Since then, the program has expanded to encompass eight blogs. Ray Gorman, the company’s executive director of External Communications, had to recruit bloggers initially. But thanks to internal promotion of the blogs, including posting them on the company intranet, employees now often ask to blog. The main criteria: enthusiasm and a commitment to keep content fresh and oversee comments.
Lenovo looks at a number of traditional Web metrics, including unique visits, page views, Technorati rankings and RSS subscriptions, to assess the popularity of its blogs. Gorman pays a lot of attention to ratio of comments and the number of words in comments, which he says indicate a high level of reader engagement. When Hill recently asked his readers what features they’d like to see in a ThinkPad netbook, he received 80-plus comments in one week, some of them nearly 1,000 words long.
“We pride ourselves on having a technically astute customer base. By offering them this platform, we give them an opportunity to share their expertise with us. That’s invaluable. You can host focus groups at great expense, you can run online surveys, you can do a lot of polling, but you won’t get the kind of rich stuff (you will get from blog comments),” says Gorman.
Like Menchaca, Gorman sees “great symbiosis” between Levono’s blogs and their supporting Twitter accounts. Lenovo closely monitors Twitter for any signs of customer dissatisfaction and increasingly for what Gorman calls “detection of desire.” So, for instance, Lenovo can enter into a dialogue with customers who might be Tweeting about shopping for a laptop.
On Twitter and in blogs, Gorman says it’s important to inject some personality into communications. “If all I see from one of my favorite brands is coupons, coupons, coupons, it’s really of no interest. I take more interest in seeing a brand with a personality behind it reach out and say ‘Hey we’re sorry your flight is delayed. Here’s the reason why’ and offer to help,” he says. “If all you do is promote, it starts to get the look and feel of a microphone.”Understanding the roles different channels play is a key challenge in social media strategy, says Gorman. “We are all guilty at some times of saying, ‘Oh, it’s social media.’ But there are subtleties in the different channels, and you need to understand those if you want to communicate effectively.”
Intel
Intel’s blogging program started with internal employee blogs but added public-facing blogs in 2007. The first public blog involved Intel’s own IT department sharing its best practices. This “from the trenches” approach remains popular, with the company’s latest blog featuring employees blogging about their jobs in hopes of attracting talented hires.
“The strategy has always been to get our employees talking, not just use the blogs as a broadcast vehicle for marketing or PR. So we have a lot of our internal experts sharing what they know, “ Rhoads says.
One of Intel’s biggest challenges is tweaking its site design so that readers can more easily locate posts of interest, he says. “We have so many conversations going on, we need to find better ways to help folks find that information. I don’t think you’re entirely aware of the huge information pyramid you’re at the top of when you visit the blog home page.”
Like Lenovo’s Gorman, Rhoads says it’s important to differentiate between channels and craft appropriate strategies for each. “If you’re on a Facebook fan page or application, that’s different from a Twitter conversation with me or my peers, which is different than the blogs.”
Smaller companies face different challenges than Intel, which because of its market position was pretty sure it could build a blog program and expect folks to come, acknowledges Rhoads. Echoing the comments of The Blog Council’s Pearson, he says SMBs should reach out first to their customers on sites like Facebook.
“Are (your customers) engaged in existing communities? You don’t have to build it. The point is participation and getting out there and communicating with customers wherever they are. If you are well engaged in those places, then maybe it is time to have a corporate blog,” he says.
SAP
SAP employs a different blog strategy, centered around a virtual community in which partners, customers and other external sources outnumber SAP employees. Only about a third of the 4,800 bloggers in the network work for the company, says Mark Yolton, senior vice president of the SAP Community Network. A developer network, begun when SAP introduced its NetWeaver middleware in 2003, predated the broader network.
Anyone can read the blogs, though one must become a community member to post comments or apply to write a blog. (The five-minute registration process involves filling out an online form, says Yolton.)
“We have lot of smart people at SAP, but we don’t have all of the smart people. We want to hear insights from others, especially from our customers and partners,” says Yolton. “Maybe a manufacturer in Mexico can help a chemical company in India apply some operational best practices or use their SAP software in a different way.”
There’s an online form where any community member can apply to become a blogger. If an application is approved, the member becomes a “junior” blogger, whose posts are moderated more closely than those of “expert” bloggers. Junior bloggers also receive basic instruction on how to use the blogging tools and some tips on tone and content. (The latter is especially helpful for bloggers who are not native English speakers, Yolton says, a key consideration for a multinational company like SAP.)
When expert bloggers click “publish,” their posts go live immediately. Some of the experts are ultimately asked to serve as moderators who vet the contents of junior blogger posts and upgrade junior bloggers to expert status. Most blogs are viewed once live by SAP employees who can respond quickly to issues if needed. Any community member can flag posts as inappropriate or questionable, and flagged posts receive review priority. However, says Yolton, bloggers are never censored except to ensure their topics are relevant to the community.
Like the other sources featured in this article, Yolton says blogs provide a more robust reading experience than Twitter and other channels. “Blogs are a freeform medium in which you can express opinions, experiences and insights in a much richer way than you could through Twitter or other channels.”
Ann was a leading media authority on automated teller machines before coming to IT Business Edge to cover tech alignment and business value. Read her blog to get information on aligning business beyond the software and the apps. Follow her on Twitter @all1ann
6 Reasons To Avoid The Social Media News Release Part I
November 20, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment
The Social Media News Release is a template available for the sole purpose of incorporating social media and multimedia into press releases. And while it may sound like an absolutely ingenious idea, it probably is not the best use of time and money for your business. Here are 6 reasons why using a SMNR may be one of the biggest mistakes you are making.
1. People Do not Read Them. Let s face it, this is not the best way to get your information out to the general public. The number of people who actually view releases on news release websites is quite small. There are better ways to reach your potential customers that are not nearly as expensive or time-consuming.
2. They are Expensive. The optimal use of an SMNR is to send a Social Media News Release with Multimedia, and It is expensive. Even a limited distribution will cost you hundreds of dollars at minimum. Compare this to the cost of writing a blog, which will also allow you to include images and video. The blog is far cheaper and gives you a much higher return on your investment.
3. There is No Critical Mass. One of the most important aspects of marketing with social media is that you can gather a huge number of like-minded or like-interested people in the same place. If you use an SMNR to send your information out to 500 websites, you may only get one or two comments on each website. If that is the case then your interested parties are not talking to each other, which defeats the purpose of social media marketing. Not to mention the time and tedium involved in responding to comments on each of the 500 websites to which your release was sent. Consider instead how you might get those 500 commenters to have a conversation with each other.
4. They Do not Help Your SEO. The whole point of news releases in general is to get inbound links to your site. And while SMNRs contain links, those links are not optimized and generally link to resources other than your website. Use the online Press Release Grader to see how your SMNR release stands up. You will most likely find that you have too many links, and that diminishes the effectiveness of your release greatly.
5. They Do not Help You Reach Your Goals. The whole point of marketing your business is to get people to come to your website and get them to buy your products. So why would you spend money to put your information on another website? We have already noted that SMNRs generally do not result in optimal links to your site, so there is really no sense in using them for that purpose.
6. They Do not Allow You to Use Your Own Mutlimedia Accounts. Did you know that if you want to include a video in your SMNR then you have to upload that video to the news release service s YouTube account? That is right! Never mind that you have already uploaded the video to your own account; now you have to upload it to theirs as well. This means that your video is sitting in an account with thousands of other videos that are not at all related to your product or service. So if a potential customer actually finds your videos and wants to see more from your business, he has to search a lot harder than if all of your videos were lumped together in your account. Another problem is similar to the one we mentioned in #3. The comments left on the new release service s account are separate from the ones left on your account, so your commenters do not have the opportunity to interact with one another. And you have to visit your video in both places to respond to all of the comments.
You are much better off simply creating your own release, without images or video, and sending it over the wire, specially if you do not have the know-how to optimize them. Save the really cool release for your own website where you have control over what happens to it. You will save time and money, and the results will be greatly beneficial.
Filed under Social Media · Tagged with Avoid, Commenters, Critical Mass, Images, Inbound Links, Ingenious Idea, Interested Parties, Marketing Social, Media, Media Marketing, Media News, Multimedia, News, News Release, News Releases, part, People, Press Releases, Reasons, Release, Seo, Social, Social Marketing, Sole Purpose, Tedium, Time And Money, Use Of Time