Creative Website Marketing

Monday, May 25, 2009

Five Social Media Strategies Your Business Can Use Right Now to Improve Customer Loyaly

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...

* You can create a Twitter account and release special coupons, discounts and exclusive products to your followers. Don't regularly schedule a weekly or daily update -- use the power of suprise to keep them guessing.

* Set up a Facebook page for your brand and use it to promote the personalities of your people. Link to their personal profiles and watch the viral power of Facebook generate more exposure for your brand/website.

* List all of your upcoming tradeshow appearances, product release dates, company anniversary, and other important dates on Google Calendar, and then share away.

* Set up your job postings and career listings over to LinkedIn and use the power of recommendations to qualify your applicants.

* Promote your product demonstrations, personalities, and your differentiators on YouTube. Let your customer service people tell the customer success stories.

Monday, March 09, 2009

Diversify your web marketing strategy from complete Google dependence

Image via CrunchBase

There is no doubt that Google AdWords is a great delivery mechanism for targeted traffic and leads - it definitely works. If you're not careful, tho, you can find your budget soaring and your PPC charges continually increasing -- without a similar increasing conversion rate.

You may wake up one day and also find your organic traffic from Google has dipped. You check your links and see that Google now only considers half of them valid.

Now you've got steadily increasing PPC charges, reduced conversion rates, and a drop in organic traffic from the one search engine which seems to matter.

What do you do? Well, hopefully, you've done some things outside of the Googleverse which could help sustain you in such a dire situation.

Some simple things any size business can do to diversify yourself from complete Google dependence:

* Establish a presence for your business on LinkedIn and Facebook. Don't just dabble. Build a great page on these social networks. Use widgets to add content to your pages and try to initiate interaction with other members as you build your network. There are many other social networks but start with the most popular.

* Write decent PR and distribute it everywhere. Link from your social network pages.

* Create your own industry-related search engine using a source other than Google (Eurekster for example, though they were closing in on the dead pool last I read on TechCrunch) and include a link on your site, in your blog, and social network pages.

* Add some listings in Craigslist. Make sure they are legitimate ads and not just spammy linking -- it's a great place to recruit local talent. Facebook now offers the Oodle service, a competitor to Craigslist.

* Start creating a database of prospects. Do a regular postcard mailing, inviting them to visit your website, try out your services, or attend a webinar. Don't ever count out traditional marketing means. You can use GoTo Meeting or Webex for your webinars.

Monday, January 05, 2009

2009: tech products I won't live without

Inspiration: TechCrunch

My must-have apps include Google Reader, Skype, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Last.fm, Google Bookmarks, and Picasa. Very heavy on the Google front -- and Gmail is nearly taking over for my 10+ years on Yahoo! Mail. In 2009 I will be searching for the perfect social network aggregator/updating tool.

Other applications I would use:

* I've mentioned before that it would be nice to have a Google Reader Radio, where you could listen to your headlines in the car, and then using some speech-rec technology, tell it to "read" out loud or "ignore". That would be cool.

* An app perfect for new year's: it would track goals for each of these different focuses: health, financial, creative, social, spiritual and career. Perhaps a radar graph would be the best visual. Each focus would be linked to a website/service which specailizes in the topic. For example, financial could be tied to your mint.com service, and social might be tied to your facebook profile. Career could be linked to LinkedIn. Spiritual wouldn't have to be faith-related, it might be yoga training, meditation, or book-reading.

Saturday, January 03, 2009

Three web resolutions to hope for...

* Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Ask need to get together and form something which can compete with Google. Throw in MySpace as well. Google will probably get Facebook and Twitter. We may see a very different landscape toward the end of 2009, after the current economic crisis shakes out. What will this mean for SEO? More of the same: keep fine tuning your content and keep experimenting socially.

* Google needs to add a tagging mechanism to its' toolbar. This way, people can tag websites and Google can use the data to help define sites contextually. Taggers can build reputations and their tags can carry more weight.

* Blogger needs to build in a simple way to bring the blogger WYSIWYG into your own domain. One step publishing to a specific path on a website. Add a script to your website to pull in the blog and everyone's happy.