Ask Tanzz: Internet Marketing Mentor

Feed on the Feeds - Instead of going to umpteen places to check content that is relevant and that you want to monitor, subscribe to those sources so that the information that you’re looking for is delivered to you as and when they’re available. The simplest and easiest form of Feed to subscribe is the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and the option to subscribe to an RSS is found on most content sites – News, Alerts, Blogs, Discussions etc. You can even track articles and discussion on the same on your page in Wikipedia using an RSS feed.

The above is more than enough to kick start your online media monitoring initiative.

If you’re among those who think that LinkedIn is a poor cousin or a bad imitation of the Facebooks, Twitters and YouTubes of this world, then you’re missing out on an incredibly powerful medium which when used for the right reasons will catapult your business/career to a completely different level.

More than the 75m odd users who are on this medium, it is the quality and influence of those users which is the attraction of LinkedIn. The average user of this platform earns over $100k a year and are some of the most influential decision makers there are.

To be honest, I also was having a LinkedIn profile for quite sometime without knowing what do with it until I had the chance to meet this remarkable person called Rick Itzkowich. Rick truly changed my perception about the tool and now I’m one of its biggest fans.

Thought it’s worth to share some of my thoughts about this potent tool with you folks.

What the heck is it after all?
Actually only a minority of the users do really know what it is and how it is supposed to be used. To put it simply, it is a relationship network which gives you visibility and credibility which ultimately leads to profitability because people need to be aware of you and should trust you before they do business with you. LinkedIn provides the platform to do just that.

Why LinkedIn?
As Rick says, the power of LinkedIn manifests in the solution of a simple problem which is,

You don’t know who all the people that you know, know.

And with LinkedIn, you get to know that. Now isn’t that exciting? For instance, how cool it will be if a person who you want to get in touch with dearly is already connected to a person who is in your contact list? Also what if you could identify unknown areas of activity of a person you already know but never thought about it because the context of that connection is entirely a different one? And so goes the scenarios..

Spam Shy: One of the things which LinkedIn visualized quite early in its inception is that it has to be tightly guarded against potential spammers and abusers. The comfort level that the top level executives and highly influential people have on this platform is ample testimony on how successful the tool is at this. Its vision of placing quality over quantity and preferring class over mass is getting relevant by the day. Ask Facebook and Twitter.

They do this not by posing as a strict disciplinarian up front with a long list of don’t or taboos; the policing is implicit and so you wouldn’t realize the perils of improper conduct until you indulge in it and the damage is done. It expects a certain level of conduct which keeps miscreants at an arm’s distance.

Essentials: Here are some of the basics that you need with the tool.

- Identify your purpose or the objective of using the tool and make sure that it matches with the intrinsic nature of the tool or else you’ll be wasting your time.

- Put up a decent profile by focusing on your areas of strength in strategic places. This is so important since LinkedIn is also widely used as a highly targeted search engine which works on keywords.

- Follow a certain level of etiquette on introductions, referrals and recommendations.

Advanced: Once you’ve gotten familiarized, you need to take it to another level with advanced features such as,

- Groups which is a really effective feature of the tool for building a community of sorts and becoming a credible voice.

- Professional applications like Blogs, Polls and Status updates which have to be used strategically.

- Referral Sources and Referral Partners, that bring you leads and customers over an extended period of time instead of just direct customers.

Now if you want to take online business networking to another level, you would do well to master this incredibly powerful medium. The caveat is that it’s definitely not meant for someone who is in it for the quick buck. You need to have a long term strategy as well as a day to day tactical action plan to make use of the tool.

You can get the roadmap on how to use and leverage the power of this grossly understated medium and thereby convert your relationships into opportunities, business success and profits by getting your hands on LinkedIn Power, a one of its kind work by the LinkedIn guy himself, Rick Itzkowich. The value of this work is in not just the fact that it makes getting accustomed to the tool a heck of a lot easy since as you know the tool doesn’t have the best of interfaces and its complexity can be a bit daunting for a new user. It also takes the training of the tool to a level of mastery that only a small minority can claim of. I would wholly endorse this piece of work.

Happy connecting.

Cheers
TM

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The prospect of getting listed on the first page of a Search Engine (or Google – let’s be specific) can seem a daunting task. That’s logical considering how vast an ocean Google really is. But with a bit of smart optimization the task is quite achievable. There are a number of SEO tactics that you can employ to work your site up the Google listings, the most effective among them being getting backlinks to your site.

First let’s quickly examine why sites get to the top of SERPs. They do so mainly due to 2 reasons – their on-site factors and off-site factors. On-site factors mainly involve keyword density – whether relevant keywords are being used in the URL, title, heading, description and content of the site. Even more important are the off-site factors like page rank, backlinks and directory listing. So the primary reason for those sites having a top search listing is that they have a lot of sites linking back to them and each of those links act as a citation or a vote to the site it is pointing to.

You can check the number of links pointing back to your site by searching for the following phrases:

Google: link: Yoursite URL
Yahoo: linkdomain: Yoursite URL

** Yahoo normally gives a more detailed result on the links. That doesn’t make it better Search Engine than Google though

Now it doesn’t suffice that you have tons of backlinks to your site. What also matters is the quality of the sites from where you’re getting the backlinks. It is like saying that the weight of a citation or a vote depends on who is giving it. So a citation from apple.com would mean much more than one from any xyz.com. Straight forward, right? For that matter, if you happen to get a backlink from apple.com, you’ll be done with your SEO for life. Pretty easy folks!!

Ok more seriously, the value of a backlink goes up dramatically when it happens to come from a higher page ranked source. As a matter of fact, getting a backlink from a site ranked 1 place higher than another is equalivalent to getting 100 backlinks from the latter. Hence what you need is both quantity and quality of backlinks. A page rank is a measurement to give insight into a site’s global link popularity which goes back to how many sites are linking back to them as well as the importance of those sites. That explains the relationship between a page rank and backlinks.

Along with link popularity, it also important to have link reputation which is to do with anchor text. The anchor text is the word or phrase on which the backlink exists and it should contain the keywords that you’re competing for. Care should also taken that the anchor text is relevant to the content on the site to which the link is pointing to or else you might get penalised sooner or later. And with SEO it always makes sense to look long term as it is built over a period of time.

You can build backlinks through a variety of ways. Some of them are,

Social Bookmarking - A lot of the social bookmarking sites have got good page ranks which helps (Eg: Squidoo, Hubpages, Digg)
Social Networking sites - Look for pages which are indexed by search engines (Eg: Fan pages on Facebook).
Article submission – To article directories with good page rank. Make sure that the articles link back to your site on relevant anchor texts and are unique enough (Eg: EzineArticles, GoArticles, Buzzle).
Video submission – Video is the in thing and tons of them are watched everyday on video sharing sites. Though videos and podcasts aren’t indexed by search engines, this can be overcome by having a keyword rich filename, title and description (Eg: YouTube, DailyMotion, LiveVideo).
Forums in the niche – Being an active participant in discussions on popular forums will get you noticed and your resource box/signature will take care of the backlinks.
Directory Listing – There are popular site listings on almost all categories and these are highly sought after (Yahoo Directory, DMOZ)

Now if all these seem arduous and complicated, take a moment and analyse how much it is worth. It works much better than paid Ads in more ways than one. Firstly it is much lighter on your wallet comparatively as you’ll be spending a fraction of the amount and secondly it persists unlike paid Ads which will stop showing the moment you don’t pay for them. Of course it takes time and is not an overnight solution like paid Ads. But you’re incrementally improving your page rank by consistently building backlinks and that helps you in the long run. It takes you to the top in time and keeps you there. That’s why it is worth all the time and effort.

So folks, bring on those cloaks or hooks or whatever and start building links. There is no better way to get on top of Google; and it goes without saying what that is worth, alright?

Cheers
TM

* As a tool, I found this search engine optimization software which looks cool.

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As widely accepted, the twin prerequisites of your blog setup is that,

- It should be on a self hosted account &
- The blogging platform should be WordPress.

So after you have setup the WordPress blog on your site, you need to maximize its capabilities by having the desired additional features. As you know, the advantage of the WordPress blogging platform is that it is designed as a content management system with the ability to run widgets and plugins. And unless you’re doing this, you’ll not be leveraging the potential of the platform.

Now there are hundreds and hundreds of WordPress plugins that are available for all kinds of purposes like SEO, performance optimization, appearance and so on. But I would like to focus on those plugins which enable Web 2.0 which in simple terms means anything that facilitates user interaction. And what better way of social marketing there is than eliciting user interaction?

Ok, let’s jump straight into the top 7 WordPress plugins for social media and Web 2.0.

1. What Would Seth Godin Do?
Weird name for a plugin, but an effective one alright. What it does is it creates a message to your first-second-third-time visitors to remind them to subscribe to your feed. And once you’ve set it up for 3 visits, it stops after that and so the visitor isn’t bugged all the time. People won’t mind this provided you’re giving quality content time and again.

2. Popularity Contest:
This is a cool plugin that tracks the popularity of your posts and gives really good details on what your visitors do on your site. It can be used as a tracking tool for understanding the mood and behaviour of your visitors so that you can optimize it accordingly.

3. WP Greet Box: It’s a simple plugin that displays a greeting to the visitors of your site based on where they’re coming from. For example if the user is coming through a link on Facebook, it greets him/her as a Facebook user and gives them the option to connect with you if you are not connected already.

4a. Disqus Comment System: It’s a smart commenting system which replaces the default commenting system on WordPress. The power of this tool is that it allows users to login with their social media accounts and then when they make a comment, it is shared with their contacts on those media which gives your post endorsement which can spread virally.

4b. Thank me later: Another plugin related to comments. Can’t be used along side Disqus as the two are incompatible. What it does is whenever somebody posts a comment on your site, it sends out a message to the person thanking him and the cool thing about this is that it can be configured in a way that it waits for a day or two before sending the mail so that it looks natural and it is completely customisable. Sort of an ingenious autoresponder.

5. Auto Social Poster: This is not free and so is meant for really serious bloggers. It automates the posting on social bookmarking sites as and when a new blog entry is published. Not only that you can create multiple accounts and randomise on which account to post from to make it look real and original.

6. Follow me: It is a simple plugin which makes having all the countless social media profiles on your site unnecessary. It shows a small tab when clicked lists all your social media profiles for the user to follow if he/she wishes so. It keeps the site clean and uncluttered.

7. Share Buttons: These are quick and easy plugins which provide buttons to share your blog content to the various social media. The ones that I use are Tweetme and Facebook share. Very easy and point in click once activated. There are tools by which you can integrate and automate your social media updates. but they are meant for advanced users only.

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As an internet marketer, you are spoilt for choice when it comes to the methods that you can employ to advertise. There are scores of them and each one has its own set of pros and cons. But it’s important that you have an overall picture of the marketing environment because it helps you categorize the options available and understand the strengths and pitfalls of each before you draw out your marketing strategy.

Let’s examine the two major areas namely, Search engines and Social media.

Search Engines
Search engines are unarguably the primary marketing avenue due to their sheer global reach. It is the first stop for people looking for anything under the sun. The global coverage of search engines is 92% which means that 92 out of 100 people on the web use them. This market is dominated by Google (65%) followed by Yahoo(12%) and Microsoft Bing(10%). Digging further, marketing options on the search engines are broadly two – SEO and PPC.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
These are the organic results based on the user’s search keywords and is based on a number of factors both on your site as well as off your site. Though it takes considerable effort to get your site optimised for search engines and get on top, nothing gives better exposure to your business if you achieve this. You’re not paying the search engines to get this listing since you’ve reached there on merit so to speak.

PPC (Pay Per Click)
The faster way to get on top of search engine listings is to use sponsored advertising in which you pay for your Ads. This could be either PPC where you pay everytime a user clicks on your Ad or PPM where you are charged for a specified number of times your Ad is shown on the search engine’s content network. PPC is far more effective than PPM since it is targetted to an audience who is actively looking for products and services. PPM Ads are placed on websites which have content related to the Ad that you have and so the user might not be actively seeking for them. The best part of PPC/PPM is that it can be used to laser target your market based on geography and timing.

Which brings us to the next big marketing medium which is literally exploding the web and giving a serious challenge to the search engines in the battle for marketing medium supremacy. Yes, the booming world of social media.

Social Media
Statistics show that people frequent and spend more time on social media than search engines or even their emails. But have this translated to them being a viable alternative as a marketing medium? The answer is a resounding yes. The attraction of social media is that it provides a platform for like-minded people to gather which generates a sense of community. The viral nature of the connection between individuals and groups gives this medium an incredible amount of power. Added to this is the possibility of targeting the market based on demographic factors like age, gender, likes and dislikes, company or even social status is something the search engines cannot claim to.

Facebook with over 500 million users worldwide is head and shoulders above the competition in this field. Other big players in this niche are MySpace, Twitter (micro-blogging site) and LinkedIn (more targeted to professional networks). Most of the social media do have paid advertising (PPC/PPM) as well but it works more like the content network attached to the search engines. But this is rapidly changing which is why it presents such a potent challenge to the search engines.

Blurring of boundaries
That said, the distinction between the search engines and social media are getting more and more blurred as the respective players are filling the missing gaps in their portfolio. This is exemplified by Google’s acquisition of the video sharing site YouTube which broadens their video search capabilities and the Web 2.0 features plus their venture into the social media with Buzz.

The key is to coordinate your search engine optimization and social media, creating the maximum synergy between the two through an integrated approach. Not only does search engine optimization help you promote your website, it also helps you promote your social media content. Your website and your social media together constitute your web presence, and search engine optimization helps you to market your overall web presence. And conversely, social media helps your search engine optimization efforts with the off page factors discussed earlier. To conclude, both search engine and social media are indispensable to your internet marketing strategy and you’ll be missing out on a huge market if you overlook either of them.

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