Tag Archive for: Marketing

Do You Need a Gravatar?

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We all use different ways to identify ourselves online. Most use their websites or social media pages. The problem is, once you go outside of your own domains and comment on blogs or forums, you become, for all intents and purposes, anonymous. Not so if you use a Gravatar, or ‘Globally Recognized Avatar’.

What is a Gravatar?

A Gravatar allows you to make a sort of ‘brand’ image of yourself by concisely providing a visual summation of the identity and personality of your choice.

The trick is choosing one that works best for your business, whether it is a standard head and shoulders photograph of you or your brand or product’s logo.

Everyone knows that blogs and forums are some of the most useful resources one can have to keep in touch with the trends and technical issues of their industry or areas of interest. What many may also realize is the comments sections on these posts are sometimes even more useful than reading the articles.

If you take a moment to look at comments sections, there are usually three different types of commenters.

  1. Spammers – The posters who leave generic comments that are often irrelevant.
  2. The Interested – Posters who appear to have a genuine interest in the subject, but are not usually very informed.
  3. The “Experts” – The people who post relevant and informative comments.

You will notice the Experts almost always have a Gravatar next to their names.

How Do I Create a Gravatar?

Creating a gravatar is as quick as it is easy and free. If you have a WordPress account, it’s as simple as logging in to Gravatar.com. If you don’t have a WordPress account, you can just associate your Gravatar with your email address.

After that, all there is to do is set up a profile with a suitable image and a few personal or business details. You can even add links to existing blogs, websites and social media pages.

Now, anywhere you comment, you will have your Gravatar next to it.

What Are The Benefits of Gravatars?

If you participate in comments sections frequently, you will begin to be recognized by others in the industry. This is why it is essential to have a professional looking image. This will help raise awareness of all of your pages, as well as their reputations inside the area of interest.

Considering it takes almost no time, and Gravatar doesn’t send you waves of spam e-mail, there’s really no reason not to sign up. You’ll be surprised by just how much your Gravatar does for you.

 

If you need more persuading to check out Gravatar, check out Alistair Harris’ article at ClickThrough.

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Why You Need a Mobile Optimized Site

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Where is your phone? If you’re reading this, there is a good chance it’s in your hand. Over the past few years, Internet users have made a huge shift to mobile browsing as tablets and smart phones have made it easier to access the web while running errands, dining out or even talking with your friends.

This is why it’s important to make sure your website is optimized for mobile browsers. With almost fifty percent  of your audience using mobile devices as their primary way to browse the web, not having a mobile optimized website can cost you serious traffic and money.

So what do you do if you don’t have an optimized site for smart phones and tablets?

Well first, don’t just create a miniaturized version of your site. Users don’t want to be forced to try to pinpoint tiny buttons with their clumsy fingers and they definitely don’t want to read walls of text. Even more important is making sure the site loads quickly. Over half of all mobile users expect websites to load as quickly, if not even faster, on their mobile devices as they do on their computers. To make your site load quickly, make your mobile homepage streamlined with only essential content with minimum JavaScript and CSS files.

When optimizing your site for the Internet, it is also important to make sure your website works properly on every device. Ensuring your site supports every mobile operating system protects every visitor from having a bad experience with the site.

If you don’t already have a developer with experience in mobile sites, it’s time to get one. If anything, it is a little late. Your competition most likely already has an optimized version of their website for mobile devices and if your site isn’t ready for mobile browsing, your customers will leave you for your competition.  While it may seem daunting and costly to update your site for mobile surfing, making sure your customers have a pleasant experience with your site will save you much more money.

 

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How to Use Psychological Triggers to Go Viral

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If you haven’t seen the political quiz website ISideWith, you really should give it a look. It won’t change how you’re going to vote in November, but it is a perfect case study in great viral marketing because, as Rand Fishkin points out, it has two important psychological triggers.

First, sharing is simple and obvious. They have made it easy for you to share the quiz on almost any social site with bright and attractive buttons. They even tell you how many people have taken the quiz because of your sharing. Showing how your sharing has influenced others plays on your ego and the desire to know how many people care about what you share.

Second, they ask you how your results made you feel. When you give them feedback, they create a ready-to-share Facebook post for you. By allowing you to not just share your results, but customizing it with your own reactions, ISideWith plays on the way people use Facebook to share how they feel. People don’t always share what they are doing or interested in, but most people share how they feel. Capitalizing on emotions is a smart way to make people want to share your content.

The site isn’t perfect – no site is – but it takes advantage of the emotions people invest in politics to make their content as shareable as possible, thereby maximizing the chances of going viral. By knowing the psychologies of your audience rather than just their activities, you can make them want to share your site with the world.

 

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Content Marketing and Its Long Term Benefits

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While building links is a common strategy for gaining exposure, focusing less on link building can actually earn you more links. Content marketing produces links, but it also improves your brand image and can make key connections that will net you more exposure than before.

These four content marketing advantages all naturally make links, which means less time focusing on link acquisition.

  1. Creating Large Amounts of Targeted Traffic: Producing great content that gets posted to popular websites gets you a large amount of traffic and exposure, but what good is exposure when it’s aimed at the wrong people? Since Google Penguin, the links of real value are those that make you visible to your market demographic. You can do this by understanding what trustable websites look like, considering audiences when evaluating a Web site, working with publishers before creating content and working with the most influential contributors to a site.
  2. Engaging Social Media: Sharing your content on social media sites helps you gain wide exposure as well as allowing you to fit your product to the needs of niche audiences. If you can get your content repeatedly shared, you can help establish your brand and its value. This can be achieved by optimizing your content for social media.  Allow visitors to link to social media sites with appropriate but non-distracting buttons on your content. Consider how the content will look when shared, and use eye-catching images. You may even consider buying ads on social media sites where your target audiences gather.
  3. Create Immediate Conversion Opportunities: By distributing content with positive brand information, you can create easy opportunities for conversions. Remember, all content you create draws people closer to your brand. Be sure to make it easy to subscribe to your RSS feed or email list and collect email addresses by making users give them to receive more content.
  4. Encourage Brand Advocacy: All content creates an opportunity to connect with your audience. The larger the audience you get, the more people you need to share your content. By getting people to repeatedly share your content, they are improving your brand’s reputation. This leads to more potential customers, which in turn leads to more potential advocates. Create advocates by always responding to feedback – positive or negative. Make it easy for people to get involved. Allow the community to help create content. If they believe in the content on your site, they will share it.

Content marketing is a sustainable strategy with long-term rewards. You always want to stand out. Unique, valuable and exciting content helps distinguish a brand in a way linking campaigns can’t.

To read more about content marketing, look at Loren Baker’s article at Search Engine Watch

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The Seven Most Common Mistakes for Startups

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Many startup companies make the same mistakes when conducting their sales campaign. We’re here to help you avoid them. Here are the seven most common mistakes for startups. While some of these may sound like common sense, knowing these ahead of time and knowing how to fix them can save your company a lot of trouble.

  1. Not Understanding Your Customer: Treating all clients as the same is a huge mistake many startups make. It is easy to make assumptions about what your customers will want but they will all have unique concerns and problems that have to be dealt with in a personalized way. Not every customer responds to the same sales pitch. Asking questions early on will allow you to answer their questions and sell them on your service.
  2. Not Selling: Rather than focusing on the extras and luxuries of your product, pinpoint the ways it will solve that specific client’s problems. This means asking the questions that will tell you what the customer needs. Showing a few ways your product will directly benefit a potential client goes a lot further than telling them about what you plan to put into the product later.
  3. Being Absent: Failing to meet potential customers in real life to close the sale means missing two of the most essential experiences for a startup. Not meeting in person hinders the ability to directly connect with clients and build long term relationships. It also means not hearing the specific concerns of the customer, which is easily the best way to improve what you are selling.
  4. Failing to Follow Up: After you give your pitch, follow up. While it seems that giving your pitch and traveling onto the next potential client increases prospective customers, moving on actually makes the clients forget about you. Don’t harass your leads, but keeping your product fresh in their memory until they make up their mind never hurts.
  5. No Process: Tracking basic information such as phone calls and emails, connections to decision makers, closed deals and deal values is an essential activity for startups, but many forget to do it. Having a process in place means knowing where you stand with all potential customers.
  6. Charging the Wrong Amount: While skewing prices cheaper seems like it would make your product more attractive, it can sometimes make customers question its value. Don’t undercharge. Set your price at one that will allow for a sustainable business and reflects the value of your product. Attract customers with what your product does, not how cheap it is.
  7. Not Asking For a Sale: If you have been in contact with a potential client for a relatively long period of time, don’t be afraid to ask for the sale. If you’ve put effort into establishing a relationship with the potential client, they should be happy to close the deal.

While startup founders come from all walks of life, knowing how to be an effective sales person is required to make a product succeed. Even if you’ve already made one of these mistakes, they are easily fixable. With these problems solved, you’ll be well on your way to making your service a reality.

 

You can read more in Steli Efti’s article at TechCrunch

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How To Make The Best Design The First Time

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No designer wants to spend hours and hours doing unnecessary revisions and redesigns. You especially don’t want your client to throw out an idea at first glance. We know making the “best” design for your client’s specific needs on the first try is almost impossible but that doesn’t mean your first designs can’t have the potential to become the best design. With these few simple steps, you can make sure your designs have potential from the beginning and, hopefully, provide better designs for your client.

  1. Know Your Brand: Designers often ignore this step. It’s easy to think, when starting out as a designer, that the brand you’re working for doesn’t matter on the first try. They will just give you tons of revisions either way, right? Wrong. Knowing the business and the brand you’re creating for gives you a better understanding of what they need. Once you know what they need, you can give them what they want. Knowing a brand means knowing who they want to attract. By doing the research, you can help solve the client’s problems.
  2. Know the Industry: There are a few reasons you want to know what is happening in a client’s industry. To begin with, design is incredibly trendy and what is “in” right now varies by industry. You want to make sure your client sticks out in a positive and logical way. Don’t try to blend in but don’t let your design be the equivalent of a Hawaiian shirt at a formal event. Secondly, while knowing what is popular with your client’s industry is important, it is also essential to know what is attractive to their customers. Your design should focus as much on their needs as it does the client’s.  Researching the industry lets you know what people in that industry want and reveals what needs to be improved.
  3. Be Creative: When faced with creating something new, we all look for inspiration. Designers usually go online and look at other designs anywhere from blogs to showcases. After finding something that inspires us, many accidentally end up copying the original source. Using inspiration does not mean changing small features of another design to make an almost identical but subtly different design. It means being creative with what inspired you. You can borrow some things but you want your inspiration to push you to try something new. Good creativity and good design lead to innovation.
  4. Details, Details, Details: Rushing to get a design finished can lead to silly mistakes that are absolutely avoidable. While focusing on the layout is important, the details are just as essential. You don’t want to have a beautiful design with a misspelled banner or a typo in a sidebar. Some clients will brush off little mistakes like these, as they are easy to fix, but many will be less forgiving. If these mistakes are easy to fix after you’ve shown the design, they should have been fixed before you showed it.
  5. Explain Your Design: We, as designers, love to understand what we create and why we did it. The problem is, we’re often bad at communicating this to others. Sending an explanation of your design when you submit it allows you to answer most of the client’s questions before they can ask them. It shows intent and purpose behind the design. While a confusing design with no explanation will almost certainly be refused before you can defend it, allowing the client to understand it from the outset will help them see potential in the design, and offer their own opinions,

Every design will need revisions but there is no reason to fear them. However, if you make the best design you can for your client’s needs on the first submission, you will likely find they are more willing to work with what you created. Communicating with clients and trying to give them what they want, rather than what you like, will make your clients happy and could open up more room for creative freedom later.

 

For more ideas on how to improve your designs, go to Kendra Gains’ article at webdesignerdepot.com

 

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Universal Search – The Next Step in SERPs

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The search engines evolve, as does most modern technology.  The latest revision in search engine result pages is the “universal search”.  This is the displaying of results for searches in not just web site links, but images, maps, videos, blogs, and more.

The universal search allows a large breadth of information to be given that is relevant to any search done.  For SEOs, this means adjusting approach on how to get relevant information out onto the web.

When trying to publicize information about something you want people to discover, to make sure you can be found by different areas within this universal search you’ll want to make sure you go across multiple areas with your information publication.  This can be done through audio, video, blogging, social media – or getting creative and doing it in unique ways.

It all comes down to doing good marketing, just online.  As the web evolves, so must our online marketing.  For more good information on the universal search, check out this article by Ron Jones at Search Engine Watch.

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UK Tabloid Daily Mirror is Thinking of Humans

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I love this story, mainly because it touches on the element that so many SEOs (and marketers) miss – connecting with people.  It’s actually a tabloid that has attracted attention for making sure their focus is more on people than on search engines.

It’s great as a reminder – marketing should always be about thinking of connecting with people, not just crunching numbers.  If you only think of figures (traffic numbers, PPC costs, number of unique visitors) then you’ll likely lose a lot.  If you keep your focus on the people who visit your site, chances are you’ll gain many more fans (and revenue).

More info available also from The Guardian.

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Highest Traffic Keywords Do Not Always Bring Profit

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It seems like the focus for a lot of internet marketers is finding that top trafficked keyword.  However, this can be a mistake by not focusing on the true marketing involved.  In some cases, the top traffic keyword is not one that will bring conversions.

Putting focus purely on the traffic numbers for keyword research is the reason many internet marketers are not able to pull the profit numbers many others do.  Making sure you focus on the consumer and their intent more than the pure traffic size is key.

This can be done more quickly using PPC, but at a price.  And in SEO, solid keyword research must be done to target proper keywords – a mistake here will cost a lot of time and money.

Evan LaPointe goes into a bit more detail about all of these factors at Search Engine Land.  At any rate, it’s good to remember that the focus should be on the human experience, not just the analytics numbers.

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Search Engine Optimization is a Changing Animal

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Nowadays the web is getting more and more attention.  People are realizing that businesses are made by being found online.  The methods of doing that are through creating good web pages, having an online presence through blogs, social media, online advertising.  And tied into almost all of this is search engine optimization.

If a business uses any of the other means (social media, blogging, site design), then it all comes down to wanting to be found online, to gain a presence.  And this ties into SEO.  Whether or not you realize it, if you have a Facebook account, you’re helping one site or another with search engine optimization.  Every link you post makes a difference.  On Twitter, any link posted can have an impact on visitors and the search engine listings.

Anything online will make a difference in SEO.  The key to doing good search engine optimization on purpose (as opposed to on accident, as a surprising number of sites have done) is to continue learning what changes impact the search engines.  As it is now, social media is starting to have an effect.  But that doesn’t mean you just need to put one post and you’ll shoot up three pages.  The trick is learning how it all ties together.

A good SEO stays educated on many aspects of the internet.  Just because you learn the basics doesn’t mean you’ll still be an expert SEO four years later (or even one year later).  The internet is a changing beast, and knowing these changes can make a big difference in your placement online.

And if you choose to hire someone else to do the search engine optimization for you, make sure that you’re happy with how educated they are on these changes.  Learning the basics of SEO is easy – but mastering it is more than just a few steps above that.

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