Internet Marketing Blog by Noon-an-Night

Social media can bring you lots of visitors. When done correctly, it can also bring you lots of visitors. If you are interested in taking your site to the next level by using social media, here are a handful of tips that you need to think about in order to succeed in the social media game:

Go to the right places: If your website is all about cars, do you think you would have any success promoting it on a social network dedicated to indie music? I think you know the answer, but in case you’re still a little foggy since it’s the Monday after a long weekend, the answer is NO! Before you even try to promote any of your own content, be sure that the places you are spending time are related to what the topic of the website you want to promote. And if you are planning on using a general network (such as Twitter), make sure that the people you are connected to have an interest in what you want to promote.

Them first, you later: In this content, the term them refers to the community. Before you run out and start firing off content, you need to get accepted into the community. Social networks are a tight knit group of people. Even on larger social networks, there are small groups of tightly connected people that you want to target. However, you’re not the first person has had thought of using social media to promote your own website, and before these people are going to give your content any attention, you need to prove that you’re also interested in them.

Lists still work: Although there are plenty of bloggers within the Internet marketing world that have criticized the use of lists as linkbait, outside of that very small circle, lists are still as effective as ever at attracting links. Don’t believe me? Just take a walk down a magazine aisle and look at the covers. Do you happen to see a lot of numbered lists? The answer will always be yes. In the offline world, lists sell magazine. In the online world, lists attract visitors and links.

A picture is worth a 1000 words: Like in the example above, if you need proof that this works, just look at the offline world again. Every magazine cover has a big picture of someone (or something) that matters to its target audience. If you want people to notice your content, pick at least one (if not more) great looking, relevant image and use it within the piece of content you are going to promote.

Are you targeting sites that fit your website?
Because it’s arguably the most well-known social media website, most people who are new to the world of social media automatically want to target Digg. However, before you start obsessing over getting to the front page of Digg, you need to decide if Digg is actually a good fit for your website. In many cases, the content of your website simply won’t appeal to Diggers. In many other cases, you may be able to generate a lot of traffic, but you want get the links that you were expecting. If you decide Digg isn’t the best fit for your website, don’t worry! There are plenty of other social media websites (many of which are niche), so you just need to take some time to find the ones that best fit your website.

Are you simply trying to copy your larger competitors?
If you’ve taken the time to study how your competitors are succeeding on social media websites, you have probably noticed that many of their top stories are news related. Once you figured this out, you probably ran out and tried to copy them. However, chances are this strategy didn’t work very well for you.

The simple truth is that you most likely don’t have the audience or resources to go toe-to-toe with your larger competitors. Therefore, since you beat them head-on, you need to get creative and develop your own approach to social media. Although it may require work on your part, smaller blogs and websites can still succeed on social media websites as long as they take the time to come up with creative and original content that people will want to read and talk about with others.

Do you have a goal for your social media efforts?
If you don’t have a goal for the visitors you generate from social media, how can you ever be successful at it? While getting thousands of visitors in twenty-four hours may make you feel good, if they all hit the back button within thirty seconds of landing on your site, you’re not doing anything except running up your server costs.

Before you start cooking up content to promote, you need to decide what you want to accomplish. For most, it’s one of two things: increase return visitors (by converting them into RSS subscribers, recipients of your email newsletter, etc) or attracting new links. If you decide you want to increase return visitors, you need to optimize the pages you promote to emphasize your RSS feed, email newsletter, etc. If you’re going after links, make sure the content you are creating is actually linkbait.

Since I wrote my post last month about social media not always being the answer, I thought it was only fair to show that when people understand social and use it properly, it can be a huge advantage for them.

On SEL yesterday, there was an excellent post that demonstrated how powerful social media can be in the hands of people that get it. The post was an interview with Teresa Boardman. Teresa is a Minnesota real estate agent and broker. She has been using the internet to market herself and her services for over five years.

The thing that really stuck out to me about her blog is that instead of creating a purely commercial blog that tries to stuff her marketing message down peoples’ throats, she has created a blog that provides truly valuable and interesting information to her target demographic. She sums up why anyone targeting a local market should take this approach:

I do have a base of local readers. Locals find my blog and they do read it. I get comments sometimes at the grocery store and at local businesses. I have also gotten clients referred by local business owners. My blog establishes me as a kind of go to person for local real estate.

The other issue that really stood out to me as I read through the interview was Teresa’s attitude toward internet marketing. I’ve worked with quite a few small business owners, and unfortunately, more often than not, when I suggest an internet marketing strategy that involves their participation, they decline because they feel it will simply turn into another distraction they have to deal with. However, I wish that they could understand that if they do it correctly, activities such as blogging could lead to the point where you feel as Teresa does:

I don’t have time for open houses and they don’t give me near the ROI as writing blog posts does. There isn’t time during my working hours to do anything that doesn’t directly or indirectly generate revenue.

So, what separates Teresa from other individuals or businesses that try to use social media? If I had to pinpoint one single factor, it would have to be that she realizes social media activities are something you haven’t to invest time into. Although her online activities most likely only accounted for a fraction of her business for quite some time when she started out, she has stuck with it and the internet now accounts for 80% of her business. As I’ve tried to emphasize several times, social media is a marathon and not a sprint. While you will almost never see instant results, if you invest time into it, good things will start to happen down the road!

In the middle of last month, I made a post which was titled Social Media is Not Always the Answer. Although it was a bit of a rant, my main point was that social media isn’t a magic cure for businesses.

Yesterday, Jennifer Laycock made a post on the Search Engine Guide blog that took this concept a step further.

Jennifer used her grandfather as the central example of her post. When he opened up the first independent insurance agency in the small town she grew up in, he focused on building real relationships with people. By treating people as people instead of simply customers, he was not only able to retain a strong base of customers, but also to benefit from the word of mouth marketing his loyal customers happily spread.

Although it’s hard for many internet marketers to relate to someone who started the first independent insurance agency in a small town, there is a lot you can learn about social media and networking from his story. Whether you’re using Twitter, Facebook, a blog or any other form of social media, you really need to keep one thing in mind: focus on building meaningful relationships. While you probably won’t see any instant results, if you’re patient and keep that goal in mind, the time you invest into social media will pay off significantly in the long run.

Yesterday, a post from the Compete blog addressed Twitter’s significant growth over the last several months. It states that Twitter is currently attracting over one million people every month.

One of the last sentences in the article is: Interestingly, Twitter’s strategy of letting developers re-purpose its data may help the service reach the tipping point by making Twitter’s value more accessible.

I completely agree with this statement.

Summize is a great example of the type of tool that can be created around Twitter thanks to their open approach. It is a great tool that adds real value to Twitter and only continues to get better.

In it’s most basic form, Summize allows you to perform real-time searches of Twitter. However, that is just the tip of the iceberg.

Summize also offers a great advanced search page, as shown below:

Of all its features, I think the most valuable is its new local search feature. By using the advanced search page or simply typing a query like Facebook near:dallas, you can find all of the local Twitter conversations in that area.

If Twitter continues to grow and begins to achieve a mainstream status, local search could be an extremely powerful Reputation Management tool for local and regional business owners.

As regular readers know, I’ve been bullish on the future of video for quite some time. However, it’s important for internet marketers to understand that users interact differently with video content than they do with traditional, text web content.

SEL made a post today about a survey by ClipBlast. The goal of the survey is to understand how people find video content.

Of those surveyed, almost half had no preferred method, indicating that many consumers either have limited experience with online video, or possibly no experience they could recall. So while YouTube has exploded in popularity, and broadband adoption continues to climb, many consumers simply lack familiarity with this space.

The post goes on to discuss the preferred discovery method of the other half of the survey:

Among the 530 respondents who had a definite opinion, “discovery” is the primary means that they get to video online (28 percent), followed closely by recommendations from friends (27 percent). Some 22 percent rely on search engines. Roughly 10 percent get video from people they know only online - through social networks and the like. Relatively smaller percentages receive video from unsolicited email and RSS feeds, to which they have subscribed (5 percent, respectively).

So, why is there such a stark contrast between the engagement of users with video and traditional web content? SEL offers the following explanation:

One aspect of the video web to consider is the fact that, right now at least, video is largely an entertainment medium. This stands in stark contrast to the broader web, which offers a mix of entertainment, information, commerce, and social interaction. The information gap may start to close as people become more familiar with broadcast news clips and how-to sites such as Howcast. But for now, video is mostly about diversion, and that may not sync well with typical search behavior.

I agree with this explanation, and feel that it emphasizes why it’s so important to make a truly “viral video.” Although the phrase gets overused, it’s still true that when it comes to video, word of mouth between friends is still the best way to get attention. While it’s possible to optimize your videos for things like Google’s Universal Search, nothing beats get an endorsement from a user’s friend.

As I was reading through my feeds this morning, I realized how tired I am of reading the same regurgitated statements about the power of social media. I was so tired of reading the same type of posts that I actually removed about twenty-five feeds from my reader.

Before this turns into a rant, let me make myself clear. If you have a content site that earns revenue through advertising, feel free to write content and submit it to sites like Digg all day long. This will help you drive up your pageviews and give you the ability to charge more for your ad units.

The thing that I’m tired of is “social media experts” convincing real businesses that all they need to do is start blogging and add a few social media icons (ex. Digg button) to their posts and they’ll see floods of new customers showing up at their office. Not only is this advice totally wrong, but when it fails, it gives that business owner a bad perception of all internet marketers.

While there are successful examples of tools like blogs being used to increase the revenue of a business (English Cut), this is not a common achievement.

Consultants: Whether your specialty is SEO, social media or something else, it’s time to start treating your clients with more respect. Instead of driving useless traffic or spamming your “friends” to Digg a low quality post, you need to start focusing on converting visitors into customers. One visitor that makes a transaction with a company (whether it’s using their services or purchasing an actual product) is worth more than a 1000 visitors that hit the back button after visiting one page.

While it takes more than stuffing Friend Connect onto a site, with a little creativity, you can help your clients develop that sites that engage visitors and will convert them into customers!

For quite some time now, we’ve all been hearing about how great social media is and the monumental impact its going to have on the internet. While there have been quite a few success stories, the majority of social media applications are pretty much hype. They may be entertaining and even a little bit useful, but if they suddenly disappeared one day, I think we’d all go on living our lives without any problems.

Now, imagine for a second if Google and other search engines suddenly disappeared from the internet. What would we do? Where would we go for information? This disappearance of search engines would cause a huge problem, where the majority of social media applications would not.

Although it’s far from being the first time this has come up in a discussion, I read a very interesting post yesterday about social bookmarking (which is one of the most useful applications that has come out of the Web 2.0 age) and its impact on the future of search.

The post is extremely long, and since I know most people don’t like to spend their time reading very long posts, I’ll discuss the key points in a summary for you here.

The post (which although long, actually summarizes an even longer paper) looks at whether or not social bookmarking can have an impact on the quality of search. To research this, the authors collected a huge amount of data and divided it into eleven different “groups.”

From all of their research, they found that the most significant area that social bookmarking could impact search is providing users of search engines with the freshest (and therefore most relevant) results. While Google has made steps towards this by ranking many blog posts higher for search queries, social bookmarking could ensure that the results were not only new, but also very relevant and reliable.

So, while the authors of the post feel that social bookmarking is currently too small to make a significant, positive difference to search, it is interesting to think about the possibility of it having a big impact on search down the road.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you are well aware that I think interactive mediums such as online video advertising are going to play a big role in the future of the internet. In fact, many people are already having a lot of success using web video in different ways.

I came across a great post on SEL today about the results of using online video to advertise condominiums. Just so you have all the details, here’s the description the columnist gave of the company involved in this project:

One agency we work with specializes in marketing and sales for large-scale condominium developments—and the individual SMBs who manage those properties.

So, what were the results of this project? Although he provides several different metrics, the one that caught my eye was conversions (actions-to-views ratios) of almost 40%. As anyone who’s ever worked with different advertising mediums knows, this is an impressive conversion rate!

In addition to the description of this project, the columnist also covers some tips for creating successful videos. However, I’ve already previously covered those tips and more right here on the Noon-an-Night blog.

Judging by many of the conversations I’ve had, most people still don’t understand what Twitter is. Additionally, the small percentage that does understand Twitter still have a hard time seeing it as a useful tool

Although Twitter is growing, a post from Hitwise today showed that it’s still a niche website (as demonstrated by the graph and analysis below):

The chart makes the growth look impressive - and it is. However, to put things into context, the site ranked #439 among Social Networks and Forums last week and #4309 among All Categories of websites.

While one of the beauties of Twitter is that is offers so many methods of access and interaction, this same flexibility makes it very difficult to explain to someone who has never used it before.

Even though it’s hard to provide concrete examples of Twitter’s usefulness, that’s exactly what Chris Winfield did today in his “Let’s Get Social” column on Search Engine Land.

To demonstrate the the value of Twitter, Chris used it to write his column. Within an hour, he had over eighty responses to four questions that he asked, along with additional input.

The four questions he asked for the article were:

• “How can twitter help marketers?”
• “Have you ever bought anything because of twitter?” bonus points for: what? :)”
• “What is the best tool you have used to track buzz or conversations on twitter?”

After receiving his responses, he was able to compile them into an excellent column, which I highly recommend you read.

If you’ve never used Twitter, hopefully his column will finally help you grasp the concept of Twitter. Additionally, if you’re a regular user, this column will probably have at least one usage idea you’ve never thought about before!