Archive for the ‘Social marketing’ Category

Ok, lets not be afraid of the word’s stigma.  Blog posts needs to be jocks to play one of their main role well; provide organic traffic. Blog posts (aka jocks) need to be fresh, hot and popular.

Blog posts need to be jocks

Are your posts jocks? Do they meet the following criteria?

1- Freshness: fresh or not so fresh content.

2- Hot topic: hot or not topics.

3- Good old links: lots of links or just a few.

These are basically the criteria deciding your blog posts ranking on SERPs. Lets look at each of them a little bit more.

1-Freshness

Blog posts are indexed faster than traditional pages, that’s a given. The reason is they’re considered timely and fresh content. That’s Google’s QDF (Query Deserve Freshness) advantage.

Blog posts can accordingly benefit a small increase in position advantage in the SERP, in the short term if they also meet the 2 other criteria.

2- Hot topics

If a blog post is considered a hot topic by the search engines it will benefit from a better position in the SERP. If not, it will be considered not as hot and doesn’t get an advantage.

You may want to take advantage of this by focusing some of your posts around hot topics related to your industry, your site and your content.

The flip side; it’s very hard to get good SERP with your posts if they’re mundane topics: you may not want to use blog posts to issue plumbing advices in order to acquire traffic.

3-Good old links

If your blog posts gets lots of inbound links they’ll benefit from them by getting higher in the SERP. If they don’t get inbound links, there’s no advantage to posts.

Conclusion

If you use blog posts to get organic traffic you must meet these 3 criteria. If you’re missing 1 your blog posts will not rank well and if you’re missing 2 out of 3 you should maybe think to simply move them into traditional pages.

This is the 2nd of 3 posts from SES Chicago and the main trends taken from the conference. The previous one was about Landing Page Optimization.

Social media are primarily internet and mobile tools for consumer-generated discussions and the sharing of information. It can provide a way for you to be involved in the conversation about your product or service and influence the perception of your brand.

Various forms of social media include blogs, forums, Facebook and photo sharing. A recent example of success by means of social media is the Barak Obama Presidential Campaign’s use of all of the above to be involved in conversations in multiple demographics and get a read on voters’ needs, ultimately contributing to his presidential vote win.

When weighing up if social media is appropriate for your brand consider these points:

1. You must research your audience
2. You must have a strategy and take it seriously
3. You cannot control the conversation, you can only contribute value

Due to the fact that social media is a conversation online, without the advantages of face-to-face communication, such as being able to determine body language, tone, appearance etc. it can take time to build trust. It is important to respect your customer and avoid being too contrived. If customers smell a rat, you can anticipate a negative backlash.

This being said, if you can harness negativity and use it to your advantage social media is like a free focus group, which can provide you with information to enhance your product or service.

Launching into the realm of social media is a long term commitment and requires the involvement of only the most passionate people in your organization who have enough information to represent your brand accurately.

The third and last post from SES Chicago 2008 will be about Marketing Integration.

We thought we would share with you our top 5 6 favourite online marketing and optimization blogs of 2007. They will surely remain in our top for 2008 but if you have your own favourite feel free to share them with us. These are, in our humble opinion, the best of the best, the kind of posts and articles making you go hmmm.

• Web analytics: Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik needs to be read if you’re interested in website analytics. Avinash is also the author of Web Analytics and Hour a Day and he’s actually a consultant and Analytics Evangelist at Google. There are goldmines of useful information in your web analytics (you have one installed don’t you?) and Avinash shows you the ins and outs.
• Site Optimization: Jonathan Mendez’ blog and OTTO Digital’s blogs talk about landing page optimization, site optimization, in other words everything you can dream about online optimization. As Reflexity is heavily involved in that space it’s always interesting to read their findings and learn from their experiences. More than a must.
• Online media and marketing insights: Charlene Li’s blog talks about her experiences and findings about how social media, social marketing & networking are influencing the way business use these technologies online. Charlene is VP and principal analyst at Forrester Research and covers their social computing and web 2.0 research. Insightful.
• Viral Marketing, user experience and online advertising: Andrew Chen’s Futuristic Play will provide you with comments, tips, and ideas about users/customers acquisition and how to keep them. His blog is much more than that but these subjects alone will really be worth your time. We can’t wait to see what will be his next business!
• Persuasion, conversions & marketing: GrokDotCom’s blog posts are about online persuasion; from persuasive architecture to content persuasion/copywriting and everything in between. The goal is to make easier for people to convert into a sale, a registration or a lead. Tons of very valuable information.
• Online banking: Colin Henderson’s The Bank Watch brings a bowl of fresh air with the latest trends, news and experiences with online banking. Colin is a firm believer in embracing new technologies and ideas to reach consumers and enhance their experience. So are we. Kudos Colin!

Ok, so we had more a top 6 instead of a top 5. We couldn’t leave one out. Lets be original and call it our top 6.

What are your best blogs? We’re curious to know…