Successful Business in Today’s Economy by Blogging & Social Media

Successful businesses in today’s economy have created a strong online presence by merging their blogs with social media, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, & LinkedIn as the major places.

Having your business online is extremely important, as there are approximately 1.6 billion users of the web and with these statistics instead of being the needle in a haystack, you want to have your business up front and ready to rock and roll.

Remember how we used to look in the phone book & Yellow Pages to find a business that would fulfill our need. Whether it is in the same city or across the world, now, most people hop online to find what they are looking for.

Business blogging is the first key, it’s the main hub. From there reaching out through social networking helps create a personal bond, which is very important. Remember how you will drive across town to go to this restaurant that treats you like royalty, even when you could go down the street. It’s all about building relationships mixed with outstanding services & products. These are the keys to thriving in today’s economy.

You have to go the extra mile to win customers and keep them! We here at EWebbMM understand this and can help create an online presence to help drive traffic to your doorstep. Just be sure to give your customers the best care and they will continue to return!

CoraLyn Hughes

3 Reasons Why Companies Twitter

You’ve heard all the fuss about Twitter and wonder what can an entrepreneur, a large company, mid-size/small business or a solopreneur (where you are your business) can gain from using Twitter?

#1 – Building Followers

The other day we heard an interesting story of a company called Kogi Korean Barbecue. They have a truck that drives throughout the Los Angeles area catering to night-time customers that want food to come to them. Due to traffic and other unforeseen delays they were not always in the same place at the right time.

They started to think Outside-The-Box… a light bulb went on and they started using Twitter to add up-to-date information on where they were at, going to be next and if there was a delay. Doing this they have created a following of over 31,000 in their niche and have grown their business.

#2 – Customer Service

You’re thinking how do you use Twitter for customer service? We here at EwebMM know how to keep an eye on what people are saying about your company or you on Twitter. Whether this is positive or negative feedback, both are important in responding to.

ComCast was keeping an eye on what people had to say about them and wanted to improve their customer relations. Their goals of wanting to listen to the feedback and help their customers in any way they could really improved their customer relations right there and then. They now have over 22,000 followers and are showing their customers they care!

#3 – Finding Prospects – Leading To Sales

Through Social Media it is about growing and building relationships. Some people all they do is market and push their products constantly. It’s kind of like being in the store and the customer service person keeps suggesting this product or another. You just want them to go away.

First it is important to pinpoint your potential customers by finding out the prospects that need a solution to what your product or service is offering. Then engage people, offer a solution, run contests & offer coupons. As you do this, people will retweet your offers & contests and this can grow exponentially driving more business & sales to you via Twitter followers and email sign-ups on your website.

Recently SoupPlantation and Sweet Tomatoes restaurants launched a social media campaign.

The goals of their program is to increase customer loyalty, drive store traffic & raise the general level of conversation surrounding the brand online through promotions, coupons & customer service.

Many entrepreneurs & businesses are turning to social media in helping bring in new business and take care of their existing business, they all understand why social networking & why using Twitter is so important.

CoraLyn Hughes

Social Media Marketing can be for Brick and Mortar Businesses

In an economy where small business is fighting to stay alive, Social Media Marketing can be effectively leveraged for brick and mortar business. It’s too many times that we look at social media marketing as a playground for kids to hang out. Most social media platforms are actually garbage. Yep, you heard it here first. If I were to have the ideal social media platform built, it would be more responsive, more efficient and it would definitely have a category to focus on the brick and mortar business owner.

Here’s the deal. Social media marketing is about relationships and interaction. With this in mind, where are you spending your marketing budget? Let’s try a tougher question, where are you spending your marketing budget for relationship marketing?

Ahh, got ya on that one right? Most business owners will say, “I spend advertising dollars on the yellow pages, the newspaper, radio and maybe television. But it’s rare if you hear a business owner say, “My marketing dollars are invested in Web 2.0 SEO Social Media Marketing.”

Imagine, business owners who would actually spend money on targeted marketing placement instead of the marketing placement that is subjected to random exposure, like most brick and mortar business owners do today.

Mint Social Media Marketing

I discovered a method of social media marketing for brick and mortar businesses, which I have dubbed “Mint Social Media Marketing.” You see, there is your average social media marketing and management and there is Mint Social Media Marketing and Management.

Mint is simply your ability to to be like an ATM machine in your marketing or, like the US Mint. Which would you rather own? That’s right. An ATM machine has random people coming to it, day in and day out, taking from it but rarely every putting anything into it.

The US Mint only has the top people depositing their money and they put more in, than they take from it.

So, would you like the social media marketing for your brick and mortar business to be an ATM drainer, or a Mint money maker? If you chose the mint, then it is time you begin to build a strategy for a full scale social media, relationship marketing campaign for your Brick and Mortar business. In this section of our site, I will be posting many articles that talk about this topic but don’t allow the social media marketing spider web take you hostage.

Here’s what I mean. Social Media Marketing Campaigns can be very time consuming and we want our message or website to be shown on as many of those locations as possible. If you are spending too much time in one location, then you are simply doing what you are currently doing in your existing business… standing in one place!

It is important to have team that has experience, the exposure and the reach to create a strategic social media marketing campaign for your brick and mortar business. I was even one of those who fell into the trap of doing all of this work on my own. Then I engaged with CoraLyn Hughes, our executive virtual assistant, Mike Silva our Lead Project Manager and Paul Counts our SEO Specialist. Together we are able to create a dominating social media marketing campaign for our own businesses as well as, our clients online and brick and mortar businesses.

You see, when you have the team in place, the sky’s the limit. When you are a lone wolf, you have lonely social media experiences. Check it out, click the green box at the top right of this site, then, when you reach the next page, click the green report button and look through all of our other media and resources that can help YOU NOT lose business this year.

Business Blog Customization: Customizing WordPress Themes

Understanding WordPress Functions

Business blogging can be difficult to the untrained marketer, but once you understand the full functionality of a blogging platform, business blog customization using a WordPress theme can be very rewarding.

WordPress is a blogging software that is free to download that must be installed into a domain’s C-Panel in order to fuction properly online. With the many thousands of themes and plugins to chose from, it can be difficult to know where to start.

I would not try to insult your intelligence by implying that I will be able to teach you everything you need to know in this one article. But, it is my hopes to help you lay the ground work in understanding where to begin to create the fundamental building blocks for business blog customization.

There are a few main functions and applications on a WordPress blog to get it to communicate properly with the rest of the web. That’s right, I said communicate. You see, a blog is not merely another website. It is an interactive communication tool that allows business owners and marketers to speak with the market place through multiple channels.

The main functions of a WordPress blog you would want to be educated on are as follows:

1. Plugins: Let’s just say that these little pieces of software allow our blogs to have many functions to increase our chances of developing a stream of traffic, as well as, it allows us to simplify certain tasks on our blogging platforms while posting.
   
2. Widgets: No, these are not just little elements of nothing. The widget is what you see in the sidebar and sometimes in the header and footer area of the blog. They appear to be little boxes with information in them, because that is exactly what they are. They allow us to separate that information so that it stays the same on every page of our site, while not conflicting with the body content of our posts.
   
3. RSS Feeds: I’ve always said, it’s not always important to know how something works, just simply know that it works. RSS feeds are like little news channels, within our blogs, that send out updates any time we decide to make a change on our blog. Imagine, every time you update or add a new post, your readers get a notification on their favorite news feed, in their internet browser and, sometimes, even right on their desktop!
4. Themes: The theme is the most important and the least functional piece of the blog. Basically, you scower the internet, or even WordPress.org for a theme that matches up with the context of your business, install it into your blogging platform and you now have what used to take ages; a fully functional website is built within seconds. The theme should always be easy on the eyes, better to have a white background in the content areas and should be neatly arranged, so not to confuse the reader of the functionality of the blog itself.

There are other more “High Tech” aspects to blogging, but this general overview should suffice for the purposes of this tutorial.

Customize Your WordPress Blog

Your WordPress blog is highly customizable. Although there are many elements such as CSS, PHP and Stylesheets to be concerned with, only skilled bloggers and web masters should really mess with these things, considering any wrong move could render your blog useless.

But, you do have the ability to customize it with custom header graaphics, the name of your business, your own email subscription form as well as, you can pick and chose which plugins you would want in there.

The plugins should be chosen carefully, as adding too many plugins could slow down the load time of your blog which would cause for a poor experience for your readers. Many plugins are available for free download and you can install the zip files that they are stored in, directly into your blog through your dashboard.

A few of my favorite and most used plugins are:

1. The All In One SEO Plugin
2. Dig-EZ
3. Zemanta

The All In One SEO Plugin allows for a blogger to add a title and description to each post, as well as a seperate set of keywords to help the search engines and pinging sites to find the description that YOU want them to list when they rank your blog in the search engines and blog directories. It’s important that these descriptions contain your keywords, in order to place properly in the search engine listings when a reader searches your keyword phrase.

The Dig-EZ plugin will display a dig social bookmarking button at the top of each of your blog posts. Your readers, who have Dig accounts, will click that button every time they read a post of yours that they like or, “Dig It”. This will add a listing about your blog in one of the most popular social bookmarking sites, where thousands of people discuss many different blog topics. Dig submissions show up very well in the search engines, which would indirectly lead more visitors back to your blog… cool stuff

The Zemanta plugin is one of the newest out there. I don’t see many bloggers using it, but it does have many advantages; such as:

1. It will show you relevant keywords to your blog posts which will tell you if you are on the right track and you can use those by adding them to your post.

2. It will display a series of images that you can chose to have one image show up at the top of your blog post.

3. It will provide you with anchor text, which supplies you with outgoing links to high ranking information sites, by opening in a new browser window, the search engines love that!

4. It also applies a “re-blog”  function to the bottom of each of your blog posts, so that your reader can pull an excerpt from your post, post it to there blog, where it will link back to yours… I do hope you can see the potential for even more targeted traffic with that!

All of the functions I have discussed above can easily be had and you can have a blog online, with content on it and showing up in the top of the search engines within a matter of hours. I have proven time and again that blogs can be set up in twenty minutes or so and I can have my posts show up in Google within a matter of twelve minutes.

This isn’t impossible and is rather easy, if you understand the full potential and functionallity of a WordPress Blog Web 2.0 site. Virtual Assistants are very important in this process as well, to continuously manage the blog, post content and social bookmark the blog to the thousands of locations around the Web.

That’s why eWeb Marketing Management has it’s very own in house, Executive Virtual Assistant CoraLyn Hughes on Staff . CoraLyn is a blog expert and along with our SEO development team headed by top SEO Specialist Paul Counts, as well as myself… our blogging and web 2.0 capabilities are virtually un matched.

Entrepreneurs will lose busiess this year. By not leveraging the proper technologies and placing all of their stock in brochure sites, they are missing the guaranteed targeted traffic they could have by leveraging web 2.0 technology. Click the green box at the top right of the site. eWeb’s main hub will open in a new window.

Read more informative and crucial articles there, but also click the “Get Free Report” button on that site. A PDF file will open in a new window and you can save it and give it to your friends and colleagues. I wrote this report showing you why traditional media is personally allowing you to lose business this year and it WILL at that.

I hope you have enjoyed this post and be sure to check back often and bookmark this site to stay up to date.

Web Design Layout Tutorial Part One: Define the Purpose of Your Website

Defining a Web Site :

The very first step in designing a Web site is to define it. To properly define a site there are three questions that must be answered.

1. Who is the end user
2. Who is the owner or client of the website
3. What functionality will be necessary for that user or client

Too many times I see half-cocked web designers rush right into building a website with a bunch of bells and whistles, that is obviously built by someone who thinks flash and bling is kind. Guess what? When people have a slow modem connection and there is a bunch of flash components to a website, it sucks.

I try to keep it clean here, but there is nothing more annoying than waiting for a webpage to load. It takes me back to hearing echos of the AOL dial up sounds of a fax machine and dial tone. Today, most people have a fairly high internet connection speed. But, the only time flash should be used on a site is, if it is a site that is intended for big corporations to see from the comfort of their office building, where their internet connection speed is at business grade.

Now that we’ve covered what you don’t do for the end user, let’s talk about the owner of the site. If you are creating a site for a family to post a bunch of photos on or perhaps, to write blog posts on; there would have to be some basic functionality of loading photos, blog posts and maybe some embedded videos. You would want it to be streamlined and easy to use.

Building websites isn’t just about something that looks pretty on the internet. We have to keep the owner of the site and the user in mind at all times during the planning, building and launching phase of the project. This tutorial feels like I am writing it for my students, but it is necessary to put this out there in as much detail as possible. That’s why, in part two throug (whatever number I stop at) I will consult with eWeb Marketing Management’s Head of Web Development, Keith Dennis to fill you in on more YOU should know about web design layout.

And to find out how your business is going to lose money this year [WARNING] click the green box at the top right of this site. You will be redirected to our home site, where you will find a similar green box. On that one, simply click the get free report button and a PDF file will open in a new window.

I spent some time writing you a report I think you will find urgent and will help you out.

SEO Meta Tag Analyzer

There are a lot of tools out there claiming to analyze the validity and relevancy of Meta Tags for SEO optimization, which would allow you to rank better in the search engines. Before you go spending your money on these tools, be sure to read this article in its entirety.

It used to be that you could use Oracle or Google’s Keyword Tool, perhaps even Word Tracker to do proper SEO Meta Tag Analyzation, simply by searching the relevancy of your keyword terms. Now, with Google’s heightened algorythmic changes, it become increasingly difficult. With that said, SEO meta tag analyzer tools become obsolete almost immediately after they hit the market.

Even some of the top sites that rank very high in the Google SERPs, that sell these tools, warn that their tools may not be working properly because of changes that Google has made, yet they continue to sell these tools. In this article I am going to show you a very quick way to figure out if you are using the proper meta tags, tell you how irrelevant keyword density is, show you how to improve your search engine ranking and tell you exactly what the search engine spiders are looking for… PHEW, that’s a lot of stuff!

Search Engine Ranking

Search Engine Ranking is a commonly misused term and I’m not going to bore you with the text book definition, because then you would see I do not have enough room on this blog to record it properly. But to sum it up, your SERP depends on a few factors:

1. Inbound and outbound link relevancy: that simply means; are you linking to sites that talk about the same stuff as you and are they doing the same, as well as, does the site that is linking to you rank high?

2. Are your meta keywords listed in the order of relevancy to one another as well as, is your meta description placing those keywords in the same order that you have them listed? This is tricky so I will give you an example.

Title: Pet Supplies for Dog Trainers

Keywords: dog training supplies, dog training collars, dog shock collars

Description: Pet supplies for dog trainers are not easy to find when dog
training supplies are in low demand. Dog training collars like shock collars
are increasingly becoming obsolete, find out why.

Notice that the title starts broad for supplies for dog trainers, yet the title is targeted as to the type of pet supplies. Then, I went from dog training supplies, to a more defined type such as dog collars. To break it down to a more defined type of collar, I suggest “dog shock collars”. Then, when I typed the description, all of the keywords, including the title, were listed in the same order of relevancy and sub categories. That is the right way!

That brings us to:

3. Always be sure that your meta keywords, description and title, as well as your H tags in body content, follow the same seed category to targeted category as I have done in the example above. This is more important than you could possibly know. Google is all about relevancy and since they own over 59% of the search engine market share, it would be wise to work along with their guidelines.

The next question I am always asked is, “Bob, how far do I need to go with keyword density in my content?

Keyword Density

Keyword density is something that every SEO pro seems to put a lot of focus on and there has been a lot of testing done on keyword density as well. Guess what? It’s virtually irrelevant. As long as your keywords show up once or twice throughout your content, you should be fine. You definitely do not want to list all of your keywords back to back in your content and you really don’t want more than two or three keywords in any body of content.

Many people will claim that they can optimize your content for keyword density and that their H tags and meta information will help you to climb to the top of the search engines. Well, Google has already showed us, through extensive testing, that keyword density is irrelevant and that you can suggest the order of significance of your keywords using H tags, but they are going to pick and chose what they think is the most relevant dependent on what the searcher searches for.

I almost forgot. The whole rumor about “Google uses your meta description under your listing in the search engine?” BZZZZ… wrong. Google crawls your content and picks an excerpt of what it thinks is the most relevant. If it happens to be your meta description then so be it, but it is usually unlikely that it will. This brings us to our next topic:

Search Engine Spiders

Funny little creatures these Search Engine Spiders. They are rightfully named, because these little guys go out to your sight page source file and look at virtually every word, every line of every paragraph, including your links, where those links go, how they rank, what links are coming back to you and so on, and so on.

Guess what? If you are an SEO pro and you are doing your job, who cares about search engine spiders?! If you are a website or blog owner and you are following the above mentioned rules or you are writing great content, or even have a top level SEO working on your sites… then don’t worry about it. Sometimes it’s not important to know how something works, just know that it is working to benefit you and the readers who are searching for your keyword phrases.

If you have all of your ducks in a row, those darned ole’ search engine spiders will make sure that you show up in the SERPS.

Search engine optimization and meta tags don’t need to be analyzed by everyone who has a website on the internet. Simply write unique, quality content that holds true and relevant to your keywords and keyword phrases and don’t use any duplicate content and you’ll find that one of the least difficult things to do online is ranking in the search engines.

One of the most difficult things to do is know which keywords and keyword phrases to have your content SEO optimized and SEO meta tag your site for. But THAT, is a story for another day. eWeb handles a lot of very complex SEO and we have tapped the first page of Google from 12 minutes- 4 hours of posting new content. We have two of the best SEO guys in the industry. But we also write some pretty informative reports and we don’t even make you sign up or anything.

There is a green box at the top right of this site. Click on it and it will take you to a site where you see one just like it. Click on that report button on the next site, and a PDF report will open in a new window that you can read, save and feel free to pass on to your friends. It will be well worth your time to learn how “Your Business Will Lose Profits this Year”

Traffic and Lead Generation: How to Get Guaranteed Targeted Traffic

It’s not a myth that traffic and lead generation can be a difficult task, if you do not know how to do it properly. The first thing we need to do is create a system that will show you how to get guaranteed targeted traffic, but more importantly, is to get you guaranteed targeted traffic to your website, blog, opt-in page and sales page.

I’d like to start backward and work my way forward a bit. It’s important to know where you will be when you accomplish the end goal of developing a targeted traffic generation system. Although we think that getting thousands of people on our subscriber list is important, that’s actually not the case.

An email database is supposed to be made up of a list of people who are interested in your products and services, are interested in what you have to say and feel like they have built a relationship with you, whether that is due to commenting on your blog, reading your newsletter or, purchasing your products.

Targeted Email Campaigns

Building a targeted email campaign is less complex than it sounds. Many marketers tend to over complicate this process and there really is no cookie cutter approach to it for any given industry. I always follow the same methods for building a targeted email campaign and I will lay it out in detail below this part of our article:

Constructing a Targeted Email Campaign

There are two types of targeted email campaigns:

1. Broadcast Campaigns

2. Auto responder Campaigns.

Let’s start with the broadcast campaign. Sometimes we think that it is important to pre-load an auto responder with multiple emails that will span over weeks or even months. This is not always the case. You see, for some campaigns, we are looking for a short lived series of messages that go out until we decide to promote something different. You would see
this, mainly, when a marketer is doing a product launch.

Product Launch email series are for a certain, short amount of time that will only continue until the day of the launch. What you would want to do in this case is covered in the bullet points just below:

1. Pre-Launch Targeted Email Campaign:

This is a series of emails that will be written to send out a week or two before you launch your new product or service. Do not program these into your auto responder. It is better to do a manual broadcast on this, so that all of your subscribers, no matter when they signed up; will receive them at the same time.

2. Launch Targeted Email Campaign:

This is a series of emails that will be written to send out the week before and the week of your product launch. Once again, these would be broadcasts that are sent out manually to ensure that all of your subscribers receive these on the dates specified through your launch management.

3. Follow-Up Targeted Email Campaign:

Never leave the sale on the table. Sometimes your subscribers missed the launch date. You can do a followup email series to ensure they have the opportunity to purchase your product or service. What is more important, is the follow up targeted email campaign that you send to those who made the purchase.

Send them unexpected bonuses, new tips, updates, an offer to ask you questions, or invite them to a live tele-seminar for Q&A. The follow up sequence to your buyers will make them feel you appreciate their business and will have them waiting for more that you have to offer.

The second of your two types of targeted email campaigns is the auto responder campaign. This is typically a series of emails that you pre-write that have a targeted focus on one product, service, or newsletter. Think about it this way. You have decided to write a newsletter for your subscribers. Wouldn’t it be nice if new subscribers would receive a newsletter that you write last year, which would lead them into a whole year’s worth of content?

This will help you to build a steady communication channel for every new subscriber that signs up on your email list.

Next, imagine you marketed a product to your list that sold extremely well. If you have this email series programmed into your auto responder, it will continue to sell that product for you to every new subscriber that comes through. You can also send them to past archived blog posts, videos, articles and more. This will help you to continue to make profits from past products that you have promoted and your business becomes something that is virtually on auto pilot.

Targeted Banner Advertising

Targeted Banner Advertising is still an efficient way to generated guaranteed targeted traffic, if it is leveraged properly. Targeted banner advertising is simply, placing a banner advertisement of your company’s product or logo, placed on a website or page that is relevant to your product or service, that a reader is able to click on to arrive at your sales page, opt-in page or website.

Many people use banner advertising wrong. It can not possibly be targeted to generate guaranteed targeted traffic, if it is not placed in a location where your targeted market visits. A prime example of placing advertisements in useless locations may surprise you. These useless advertising places are:

1. The Newspaper
2. The Yellow Pages
3. Banner Sharing Sites

You see, the three examples above, which are more traditional, are appearing in places where the focus of the traffic is not on your particular product, service or industry. An example of places where banner advertising would work are as follows:

1. Magazine specific to your market
2. Websites or web pages that other people own, that are specific to your market
3. Google Ad Words

That last one, Google Ad Words, should be handled by a professional advertising and marketing firm, where it can become increasingly difficult to maintain a campaign. Google does allow for banner advertising on their clients’ Ad Sense locations, but there is a quantitative system for doing this properly without losing your shirt over the deal.

I’ve written a special report called “Why Your Business Will Lose Money this Year” and you can find it by going to our home website at eWeb Marketing Management. This report is very quick to read and there is no need to sign any forms to receive it. Simply click the green button on any page of the site that says “Click Here for Free Report”. I do hope that this article and blog has been helpful to you and know that eWeb Marketing Management is always here for you and you can contact us at any time.