The Fool-Proof Way to Fund Your Online Business

You need a solid business plan. For instance, what are you selling and how do you plan to market it? What are your overhead costs? This should be a simple, cost and profit balance sheet. On one side, list the money that you will need, and on the other side, list a profit estimate (if you have one).

When you have an airtight business plan, you leave little up to chance. You will need to make sure that you add six months of overhead (at least) to your cost sheet to enable your business to “float” if the profit isn’t flowing in.

This is where we start to talk about funding sources. Will you save in a savings account? Will you invest in stock? Find private investors?

The less money you require for start-up, the safer your funding choice can be. The safest and most conventional method is a savings account. These are not high yielding, but they are secure. If you need a lot of capital, you may have to resort to “riskier ” funding: stock investment with a high yield, or private investors. These choices have the potential to be high-yielding sources, but they can also be high risk.

Private investors like to see a “growth potential plan”, which reads almost like a job interview on paper. Where do you see your company in 3 years? 5 years? 10 years? How do you plan to make that happen? Make sure you provide examples of companies- like yours- who have been successful.

Funding an online business can be intimidating, but when you have an airtight business plan, it makes the overall process fool-proof.

source: niceblogger

Your Website Visitors Are Talking to You

Continuously improving your Web presence to increase ROI should be the goal, right? OK, but how do you get your potential customers to talk to you so you know what to improve? If you are willing to dig into a little data, you can find out how people interact with your site and where the problems are that need attention. Here are a few pieces of Google Analytics data that you can use to interpret what your visitors are trying to tell you.

Bounce Rate

With a high bounce rate, the visitor is saying, “This site isn’t relevant to me – I’m outta here.” The bounce rate number is just the percentage of single page visits, meaning that all those people left your site without looking past the page they landed on. It’s possible that this means your landing page just isn’t interesting. More likely, it means the people landing on your site were led to believe they would find something different when they clicked on your paid advertisement or organic search listing. If you are getting a high bounce rate, look at what your ads are promising. Make sure your landing page fulfills the promise in the ad.

New vs. Returning Visitors

A high number of returning visitors says, “Your site is engaging enough that I think I’ll come back for more.” New visitors are a good indicator that more people are finding your site, but getting them to return is the part that takes work. Ask yourself what you are putting out there that will bring people back again and again. A really good blog is one great way to do this.

Time on Site

A higher time on site tells you your site keeps visitors from leaving. This could mean you offer plenty of things to explore. But be careful. When I logged into analytics on one of my sites this morning, I found most people were staying for three minutes or so. Then there was this one visit that lasted for three hours. I’m guessing that somebody left their browser open on my site while they left the house for a while. So I obviously didn’t give that visit much attention.

Pages Per Visit

This says, “The first point of contact was interesting enough to make me want to look around.” If you have high average page views, you have done a good job of sending the right people to the site and presenting the information in an interesting way. It might also mean you have created a page structure conducive to further exploration.

Traffic Sources

This is very valuable because it shows you the ways customers come to your site. If they are all coming from Google, then your search engine optimization campaign is working. If you see a huge influx of website traffic from a partner site, you could look into ways to increase your visibility on that partner site.

Content

This is where your visitors tell you which content they like best. You are also able to see how they interact with their favorite content by looking at bounce rate, how many of them left the site from that page, etc. If you notice a certain topic always trends to the top, it should probably be a main focus of your content.

The best companies are those that listen to the customer. Google Analytics provides all this wonderful data to help companies do just that. We just have to be willing to dig in a little.

source: seo.com

7 Reasons You Should Still Be Using Sphinn

Many people have noticed during the last 12 months that Sphinn has gradually become less of a force within the search industry. I have to admit, I’ve been one of the users who used Sphinn heavily in the early days – but during the last 6-12 months have found myself visiting the site far less frequently.

Having been involved in a Sphinn meeting at SMX Advanced last week and following Matt McGee’s announcement of Sphinn 2.2, I thought it would be a good idea to list some ideas about why you should still be using Sphinn.

1) Traffic – yes, traffic may have tailed off recently, but there’s very few website’s out there which will send as much targeted and high-quality traffic as Sphinn.

In 2009, Sphinn was the fourth biggest traffic source to SEOptimise with an impressive 14,322 visits. An average bounce rate of 81.86% is also excellent for a social media website referral (especially considering they are looking to just read a single news item), suggesting the quality is high. This should be a good enough reason alone to use Sphinn!

2) Links – at worst, for a homepage story you get a followed link from Sphinn.com. But if you can generate that much targeted traffic, it’s likely to be picked up by other bloggers too and mentioned in some weekly roundup posts.

3) Keep up-to-date on latest news – for many people visits to Sphinn and subscribing to blogs via RSS has been replaced by the sharing of links on Twitter. However, tweets are easy to miss – if you keep an eye on the Sphinn homepage it’s easier to pick out the main stories of a day or week.

4) Train your SEM team – similar to the above, but everyone wants their team to stay up-to-date with the latest trends and news within the industry. The downside is that this can be very costly and time-consuming. Sphinn stories are generally aimed at all levels of understanding, so monitoring homepage content can be a great way of making sure your team picks up a few tips and tricks.

5) Get involved in some great discussions – homepage stories can generate some great comments and debates. This is something which smaller SEO blogs may not have the influence to generate themselves with such an audience, so it’s a great way to get some feedback and discussion started.

6) Build relationships within the industry – Twitter’s very good for this too, but if you can interact with industry contacts and promote each others content, then this can be a great way of building some very useful contacts.

7) Build a reputation as a top Sphinner – you don’t necessarily have to write great content to become recognised as a top Sphinner. But by picking out stories which frequently make the homepage, you can start to build a reputation which may be useful both within the industry and to potential clients.

But what does Sphinn need to improve?
Matt has asked for feedback on the Sphinn blog, but here are some quick thoughts which I think would help to get Sphinn back on track:

• Continue to mix editor choice stories onto the homepage – sometimes it can take 3 days for a story to be promoted to the homepage of Sphinn. For news and time-based stories this is too slow, this may have been and gone by the time you get to read about it otherwise. Some stories submitted towards or over the weekend need a little push too, as getting votes Friday to Sunday can be too difficult sometimes.
• Bring back the top users list – this is currently behind the paid members area, but having this freely available makes the site more competitive and gives a greater motivation to submit. This should help to improve the number and quality of submissions.
• Better integration with Twitter - Twitter is clearly one of the main reasons why the popularity of Sphinn has suffered. If there was a way in which Sphinn could be integrated to reward Twitter users in a similar way to Tweetmeme – then it gives more of a reason for users to use both Sphinn and Twitter – as opposed to one or the other.
• Sphinn iPhone app – I’m not sure if this is just me, but I would find an iPhone app to be an easier way to read Sphinn on the move, rather than having to use the browser instead. Or perhaps I just need an iPad! :D

source: seoptimise

Visualize More Links and Traffic — Ranking the Best SEO Infographics

Creating and publishing infographics has become the new fad for attracting linkbait and traffic. In the last year, we’ve watched the craze for infographics skyrocket as can be seen by this screenshot from Google trends below for the keywords ‘infographic’ and ‘infographics.’

Not only have social media marketers taken up the infographic craze, but SEOs as well. Infographics, done well, can build a large portfolio of quality links. I’ve since noticed many SEO companies who are developing infographics for their clients and pushing them in the social media sphere.

When I discovered that so many SEO infographics already exist, I decided to rate them. David McCandless, at informationisbeautiful.net, revealed four criteria when evaluating information design:

1. Interestingness - Is the content relevant and original, such that the viewer sees value in it?
2. Integrity - Can I trust the content?
3. Form - Is it pleasing to the eye?
4. Function - Is this information useful and useable?

Take a look at his infographic about infographics:

Below, you’ll see some of the best infographics I could find about online marketing. I’ve rated them by giving pluses (+) for each category discussed above.

SEO Infographics

Elliance has, by far, the most search marketing infographics. The infographics cover everything from PDF Optimization to Keyword Clustering. I found most of the infographics contained quality graphics and interesting ideas, but they slightly lacked in functionality — meaning, most of the concepts presented are low-level, basic concepts that most SEOs should already know.

SEO Factors

• Interestingness: +
• Integrity: +
• Form: +
• Function: +

Long Tail SEO

• Interestingness: +
• Integrity: +
• Form: +
• Function: ++

Link Juice

• Interestingness: +
• Integrity:
• Form: +++
• Function: +

Google PageRank Explained

I found this infographic very beneficial in visualizing the Internet in terms of PageRank. PageRank is valued exponentially. While it’s easy to increase PageRank by 1 at the bottom of the mountain (e.g., from 2 to 3), it becomes much harder to increase by 1 (e.g., from 6 to 7) as you move up the mountain.

• Interestingness: ++
• Integrity: +
• Form: +
• Function: +++

Wired Magazine published an interactive infographic about the life of a blog post. With a flash-based, interactive spin, Wired has covered all the avenues of blogging as it moves around the Web, being picked up by search engines, data miners, and social bookmarks. If you haven’t seen it I suggest you check it out.

The Life Cycle of a Blog Post

• Interestingness: ++
• Integrity: ++
• Form: +++
• Function: +

Similar to Wired’s infographic above, The Social Media Effect by Infographicworld.com, shows the travels of content as it makes it’s way through the social media world. My favorite part of this particular infographic is how all the arrows, eventually, point to a Google search engine result for that story. It’s a nice way of showing that great content will bring in lots of quality links.

The Social Media Effect

• Interestingness: ++
• Integrity: +
• Form: ++
• Function: +

Rank Fishkin, from SEOMoz.org, created some pretty creative infographics. Although they are not the most visually appealing, they share some really creative insights about SEO. Great job, Rand.

Professions at the Intersection of Technology, Marketing & Statistics

This is true that SEOs need to wear many hats.

• Interestingness: +++
• Integrity: ++
• Form: +
• Function: ++

How SEOs Spend Their Time

• Interestingness: ++
• Integrity: +++! Those of you working directly with clients know how true this infographic is
• Form: +
• Function: +

Scatterplot of SEO Tactics

This is one of my favorite infographics as it is really helpful for SEOs to know how to spend their time.

• Interestingness: +++
• Integrity: ++
• Form: +
• Function: ++

The Size of the Mobile Market

We’ve seen the mobile market skyrocket in the last few years. Astonishingly, there are only 1.4 billion internet users compared with 4 billion mobile phone users. Any business would do well to understand how to tap into the mobile market. With the influx of smart phones, we’re making sure our clients show up on mobile searches.

• Interestingness: ++
• Integrity: +
• Form: ++
• Function: +

Individuals and Their Online Identities

Flowtown created an interesting infographic about how people utilize the Internet to manage their personal identities. Interesting quote: “Search engines and social media sites now play a central role in building one’s identity online.”

• Interestingness: +++
• Integrity: ++
• Form: ++
• Function: +

Google Facts and Figures

Although Pingdom’s infographic about Google doesn’t entirely pertain to SEO, I thought it was a great visualization of numbers. It is interesting to note how Google’s innovative search technology has made it the leader among search engines.

• Interestingness: +
• Integrity: ++
• Form: ++
• Function: ++

DIYSEO has, by far, some of the most visually creative SEO infographics out there. Most of the infographics show how SEO is a must-have in Internet marketing. While I’m only showing three here, DIYSEO has lots more. Go over to the site to check them out.

The Case of Disappearing Ink

Interesting visual graph displaying search methods by demographic:

• Interestingness: ++
• Integrity: ++
• Form: +++
• Function: +

Value of SEO v. PPC

This quote emphasizes the importance of SEO: “When buying, PPC links produce 25% less conversion than SEO.”

• Interestingness: ++
• Integrity: ++
• Form: +++
• Function: +

SEO ROI is King

It’s nice to know that SEO holds the largest ROI.

• Interestingness: ++
• Integrity: ++
• Form: +++
• Function: +

SEO FAQs – A Guide

Datadial.net created the most comprehensive SEO infographic. While it doesn’t offer much original material, it covers everything from keyword research to SEO tactics. It’s a nice way to sum up the basics of SEO in one graphic.

• Interestingness: +
• Integrity: +
• Form: +
• Function: ++

Well, there you have it — a semi-complete list of the best SEO infographics out there.

source: seo.com

5 Simple tips to efficient user engagement on social media

Okay, engagement is cliché, forget about it. Think of it this way. If you’re a website / product / service owner, how would you measure success with engagement on social media ? One often repeated factor is social media engagement. Build a community around your site on social media, and if you can retain the community with a good chunk of loyal folks, you’re half way through.

Once you create a community, you could do anything with it. Sell stuff, branch out to different levels, you could diversify to different products – anything. The community remains the core.

But that’s easily said than done. Building a community is most important as well as most difficult.

To develop a rich community, certain factors are very crucial

Lets take some ideas.

Stickyness is essential in a community

A community is only as good as a bunch of random people is the users are not sticking to your website. That is they need to come back to your site. There are many tactics to ensure stickyness like exclusivity, bonuses, points system etc. Regardless of the strategy, the core idea is that users/ clients should directly get involved in the core product.

Emotional attachment with the reader

There is essentially only one reason why a reader would come back to your site. Emotional attachment with the site. There are several ways why a user would feel emotionally attached to your site, it could be your picture or your style of talking or the content itself. Whatever it be, emotional attachment to your site is a must.

Engagement is key within the community

Engagement is crucial. What many people don’t realize is that you cannot sell a product or service without letting the user feel that “he is the one”. Every website/product makes a typical user feel or reinforce that he is the right user for the product. Many a times a user carries this mindset in his mind and only needs a reinforcement. Sometimes it could be persuasion with a material benefit or something similar. Either way, the user should feel important as the product.

And social media is the best tool available to build a community and engage uses within.

Here are 5 tips that will help you create a great community with rich user engagement.

1. Brands should come down to the user’s level and be with them

Brands/products/services or websites not easily can adjust to the idea of coming down to the user’s level.  Why ? Because they are insecure doing it. Because most of the times, the user is at a level that is genuine and real. They criticize, they swear, they rip you apart and do all that – and brands cannot stand all that. Their mentality is “We made a product with a great deal of effort – and we deserver a win for the efforts”. Not always true. Unless the brand-and-user come into a straight line in unison, the equation never gets balanced.

2. Make the user feel important, right in the middle of everything

Who does that ? Successful brands. And quite honestly, not everyone can do it because it requires great deal of humility, patience and precise calculation. Either because its too much deal with or because its too risky, most people ignore it. If its a website, and the owner is on social media, he doesn’t answer silly questions being asked to him on the channels. Which is a fail. You are on social media because you’d like to answer those silly questions and questions will always be silly. So if you’re up to it, take it head on otherwise, don’t even bother to try.

3. Formulate a content strategy around the user not your product

Simple mistake isn’t it ? Most folks first decide the product (as they should rightly do) and then figure out ways to attract people. Go the other way around. First find out what attracts people and then create/tweak your product to match their expectations. Easy way out.

4. Engagement doesn’t mean asking questions

Many folks have recently joined Twitter and what they do normally is ask questions to get people to answer. What happens usually is that none or only  few answers. The reason ? Credibility. Anyone who’s making a big evident joke out there is obviously trying to get your attention, and you don’t want that person to be you. Instead, figure out how you can get friendly with the users, be one among them before asking questions. Asking questions is fine but make sure that users trust you and would genuinely be interested in answering them.

5. Engagement probably is the wrong term. How about “Marriage” ?

Okay, lame joke that one. But the idea is that engagement today means another bait. Which is wrong. It shouldn’t be. Social media is an open space and instead of engagement, times have come that both parties, irrespective who’s on the giver-donor side, should commit to each other. Because that is where several other important factors come into picture. A much more transparent and just environment that will provide a win-win situation for each.

So user engagement though technically sounds as a one sided process, really is a dialogue, not definitely a monologue. It might sound very easy from an outsider’s view but nurturing values such as trust, transparency and commitment is not easy in a community. If at all anything, they are the factors that matters most today in social media community management and user engagement strategies.

source: dailybloggr

Major Social Media & Search Engine Relationships

Adding real-time search and social search to the mix in the search engine world has created a number of new opportunities for marketers that want to do a better job of reaching customers. With new data sharing announcements happening fairly regularly, it can paint an interesting picture when you lay out the relationships between major social networks and search engines. It’s not unlike the search engine relationship chart from Bruce Clay I remember from several years ago documenting the relationships between Inktomi, Yahoo, Lycos, Alta Vista, Excite, HotBot, Direct Hit/Teoma, Northern Light and even Google. Not many of those are still around.

As the diagram above illustrates, the major data sharing for real-time search is between the social sites Twitter and Facebook and the major search engines Google, Yahoo and Bing. To be more specific:

Yahoo announced yesterday that they would significantly enhance their relationship with Facebook. According to Yahoo’s Jim Stoneham, VP Communities, “People who use Yahoo! and Facebook can now link their accounts to view and share updates with friends across both networks”.

Yahoo is expected to launch similar cross platform sharing functionality with Twitter and other social sites in the coming months according to MediaPost.

That kind of cross sharing relationship blurs the lines between social and search even more than the one–way integration of social media sites like Twitter and Facebook into Google and Bing search results.

When search engines used to syndicate search results from different sources or even each other, it was important to know how to get web pages included in those sources so they would appear in search results where customers were looking.  As the major search engines update their data sources for real-time search and even socially influenced search, there’s an opportunity for marketers to understand how their participation on the social web can continue to provide signal and even content for the major search engines.

It doesn’t take much to see that some of the solutions for inclusion and earning top visibility are technical and related to publishing platforms, feeds and certain types of formats. Others are qualitative based on network size, type and topical focus. In the end, what matters is not just the changes search engines make to gain market share over each other, but the ways in which consumers respond in their information discovery, consumption and sharing behaviors.

While the effect of real-time search on current marketing programs isn’t anywhere as near as substantial as search marketing or even social media marketing, it’s an area that smart marketers would do well to monitor and experiment with.

source: toprankblog

10 Steps to Optimize Your Content Marketing Strategy

SES New York kicked off with an excellent keynote presentation by David Meerman Scott (interview) followed by a panel on Digital Asset Optimization including Mark Knowles, Chris Boggs and myself. Richard Zwicky moderated.

The rising importance of optimizing one’s digital assets came out of Google and other search engines’ decision to start including information and file types from other sources than their main search index. Some queries trigger search results that go beyond web pages, MS Office docs and PDF files to include sources such as images, blog posts, news, video thumbnails, books and shopping.

While many SEOs were responding to the changed landscape of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) and optimizing for other file types, many others were already optimizing holistically under the premise of, “What can be searched on can be optimized“.

Most companies are not wired to create the variety of content that can achieve top visibility on search engines. In most cases, search engine optimization efforts are focused on content and digital assets that are currently in place.  Being able to get more marketing impact out of existing content is as much a driver of digital asset optimizationas it is a part of a holistic strategy that matches up with the opportunities presented by an ever changing search results page.

In the DAO session at SES New York I presented a historical perspective on digital asset optimization based on when TopRank  started writing about it in 2007. I also talked about the changed search landscape that now includes personal, real-time, social and mobile search. I also discussed the following TopRank 10 Step DAO Content Strategy:

Search & Social Media Keyword Research

Anticipating demand via search is traditionally handled by keyword research tools such Google’s tools, Bing or services like Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery.

As advertising and media placements can drive search, so can social conversations. Social media monitoring tools can help marketers conduct social keyword research as a compliment to search engine based keyword research.

Find out what key language and key topics are being discussed on the social web and you’ll have invaluable insight into content ideas that can provide value for both social media marketing and search engine optimization.

Analyze Search Results Landscape

The output of Universal and real-time search results are not persistent. For example, a search for a particular phrase one day might yield news and image results and on another day display only web pages.

It’s useful to monitor the search results landscape for keyword phrases that you’re after. Understanding the mix of data sources besides the main search engine index can help with the allocation of optimization resources.

If news and real-time results are most common, it may make more sense to focus on content promotion there versus images or video.

Define Buyer Personas & Buying Cycle

Understanding the needs of your customer is marketing 101. Search marketers are becoming more sophisticated in their understanding of customer profiles and developing personas to represent who you’re trying to attract via search is an important step in a content strategy.

Knowing what kind of content and what type of digital asset your customers will best respond to can improve effectivness at driving traffic from the search visibility you’ve achieved through SEO.

The buying cycle is another dimension that warrants attention to make sure you’re creating, promoting and optimizing content that is relevant to where your customers are in their search/research process. Broad concepts usually represent early stages of research versus more specific phrases which often indicate a buyer is closer to purchase.

Inventory Existing Content & Assets

With a more holistic SEO effort, especially one that will incorporate digital assets, it’s important to have a baseline understanding of what you have to work with. Taking inventory of your content and digital assets is something we’ve been recommending for over 3 years and it’s an essential first step.

Having an understanding of current content and digital assets can also uncover content that is ripe for re-purposing. A common example is video that can be deconstructed into multiple, short form videos, single images, transcribed into text or splitting the audio off into a podcast.

Develop an Editorial Plan for New Content

Understanding your search and social media keywords, buyer personas and the assets you have to work with will help identify what new content you’ll need to create.

Adopting the perspective of a publisher, not just a marketer, will help resource allocation, planning and goals/measurement for content creation.

For example, rather than just sending out a press release and publishing a blog post with a new product announcement, a company might, based on search/social keyword research and an understanding of their buyer personas, decide to create a resource page for journalists that includes links to relevant resources, a standard press release, images, PowerPoint, video, past media coverage, executive interviews, audio snippets, demo and appropriate media relations contact info. It would be made easy to bookmark or share this resource page as well.

The assets being linked to from the resource page would be hosted either on the corporate site, optimized of course, or hosted on 3rd party media sharing sites such as Flicrk, YouTube, SlideShare, DocStoc, PRWeb and others.

This provides a richer experience as well as numerous options for interaction. It also offers multiple, potential entry points into the resource page via search, since the optimized digital assets can rank in search results on their own and link to the destination content on the corporate web site.

Map Keywords to Content & Digital Assets

The functional process of implementing search/social keyword research is to map those concepts to the content and assets you have. This helps manage the initial keyword optimization process.

Mapping keywords to the editorial plan is also a useful guide for the future creation and optimization of content. Not only are web pages, images, video and other assets optimized for search, but optimized for customers.

Operationalize Content & Digital Media Creation with SEO

SEO and digital asset optimization are not one-time events. Keyword demand will change and of course, new content and media will be published. To ensure keyword optimization of new content, it’s important to incorporate SEO with established content creation and promotion processes.

That might be updating the corporate styleguide with SEO and keyword usage rules or it might mean making programming changes to the web site’s content management system to prompt content creators with keyword cues when adding text or other media.

Develop Off Page Digital Assets

The beauty of social content is of course, that it’s social! Sharing should be easy and encouraged. Hosting some digital assets on social media sharing sites such as those mentioned above (Flickr, YouTube, Slideshare, DocStoc) can introduce your optimized content to new audiences and attract both traffic and links. More relevant links mean better search engine visibility and web site visitors.

Promote/Syndicate via Distribution Channels

How will anyone know you have excellent content and digital assets if you don’t promote? Dedicate a fixed and persistent effort to developing social networks where your customers and influentials spend their time on the social web. Do the same with social media sharing web sites so that when you post a new video on YouTube for example, your network there can be notified.

Developing distribution channels for content will significantly improve reach and the likelihood of your content being passed on, shared and made socially popular. Email newsletters, RSS, Ping.fm and TwitterFeed services are good examples of content distribution services that help promote content efficiently.

Ongoing Measurement with Web, Social and Search Analytics

Search marketing professionals are well aware of the value from web and search analytics that measure search visibility performance as well as web site interactions and conversions. The importance of social media monitoring and analytics is also essential for a DAO Content strategy.

On the front end, social media monitoring tools can help you identify conversations and influentials that are meaningful to the topics and customers your marketing efforts are trying to reach. Social keyword research can in part, be accomplished by some social media monitoring tools. Those same tools are essential for measuring the social impact of your digital asset and social media optimization efforts.

A simple cycle would be one where you’ve identified new keyword topics beginning to buzz on the social web and taking that cue to create content. Promote that content through your social networks and use social media monitoring to track the effects of your content contributions to the larger conversation on the topic. Use web analytics to measure any increase in search based traffic based on the growing popularity and awareness of the topic based in part, on your contributions and social interactions.

With an Optimized Content Strategy, there’s good news and bad news.

The good news is that by following these 10 steps, a significant impact can be achieved in overall authority for the topics and keyword concepts focused on as well as the ability to attract new business, media coverage and employees.

The bad news is that it’s not easy. Making the commitment to serving customers with content and media on an ongoing basis, indefinitely without the initial ability to forecast ROI will make many companies say, “Great idea and it makes sense, but not for us.”

However, those companies that make the effort to really understand and implement these fundamental concepts are making an investment with a payoff that is very long term and with momentum, very signifcant. Some companies will be able to “come out of nowhere” and dominate their category by following these 10 guidelines for an optimized content marketing strategy.

source: toprankblog

5 Steps to Build a Twitter Marketing Strategy

So you want to succeed with Twitter eh? Before you run off and chase shiny butterflies and little blue birds, take a seat and collect yourself. Then read the following tips on creating a potential Twitter marketing strategy that will help you become more productive and successful using Twitter for business.

First things first. Who are you trying to connect with?

1. Describe your target audience on Twitter.  If you’re not an active participant on Twitter, then research. Do the homework and write it down, including Twitter handles of actual target users. If you’ve been able to go so far as develop a persona that represents your customers that spend time on Twitter or social media sites in general, that’s even better.

The first step in scoring is knowing all about the goal.

2. What outcomes are expected from Twitter participation? Besides being able to say you have 50,000 followers, of course. Incidentally, we experiment with Twitter accounts and those that have a substantial number of followers do not always result in the the most retweets and web site visits. This is important in the fans/friends/followers game. It’s not how many connections you have, it’s who you’re connected with that determines the propagation of tweets, spread of links, traffic, etc.

It’s essential to know how success with Twitter will be measured. If it’s just follower counts, heck those could probably be purchased. (Which TopRankMarketing does NOT recommend)  However, that would be a fake network without effect.

Where does Twitter fit in?

3. Where does Twitter fit within your overall online marketing strategy? Is Twitter meant to be a customer service tool? Brand monitoring? Monitoring for sales opportunities? Promotion of other corporate social activities? (ie blogging, Facebook, YouTube, Etc) Does it support some other communications function?

As a communications and social networking tool, Twitter can connect with customers, prospects, journalists, employees, candidates, investors and marketing partners. Understanding where Twitter fits within the overall mix of online marketing and communications will help with: allocating monitoring and engagement resources, establishing a working social media policy, workflow management and reporting. You may very well find a number of synergies available through Twitter, such as connecting with journalists and bloggers for PR purposes but also encouraging link usage when citing the company to assist with SEO efforts.

Twitter is a tool and only as useful as the tactics you use.

4. A firm grasp of the first three steps really needs to be addressed before useful tactics should be implemented. If all you do is focus on Twitter popularity tactics without addressing a plan for reaching other goals (hopefully being popular isn’t the sole goal) then the investment in time and effort becomes more like guesswork.

First and foremost for tactics, the Twitter page needs to be designed and optimized. If a business has the expectation to be perceived in a significant way, then the Twitter page needs to avoid looking insignificant. Tweets need to be diverse, yet follow a theme that is consistent to the messaging and audience goal. Kudos to customers and offering tips are great but alone are not going to attract followers fast.

There are a few tactics with Twitter that are almost always a good idea regardless of the audience, goals and overall plan:

• Having a persona or target profile in mind, research Twitter users and follow them.
• Associate the Twitter account with something else that is social, such as a YouTube Channel, Facebook Fan Page and/or a blog.
• Make an effort to link to a small number of high quality and creatively written resources, daily. Mornings are best. Brand these with a hashtag like #yourbrandtips, where “yourbrand” is the brand within your company that this Twitter account is focused on. It could also be a behavior or action. Ex:  #niketips or #runningtips.
• Schedule a #yourbrandtips Twitter event every month, two weeks or weekly. This would be run like #blogchat where a real person from your company hosts a chat on Twitter about topics relevant to your offering and useful to who you’re trying to reach. Ideally there would be influential guests involved so that their tweets attract new followers to your brand’s Twitter account.
• The company should really post their twitter handle everywhere their web site address is posted.
• Find a way to ask followers questions, then use those answers in blog posts, which are promoted via the business twitter account.
• Create a Twitter list of a segment of the target audience. One list for each segment. Then solicit followers asking for recommendations of people that belong in the “segment one” list or “segment two” list. Ex:  ”librarians” or “network administrators”. Mention that anyone who retweets a link to the list can get added to that list – provided they belong. Lists must be relevant and managed to be of any use. Promote lists with Listorious.com.
• Use #FollowFridays or #FF to recognize people that retweet the brand’s Twitter content the most. Also mention influential Twitter accounts that you have had some connection with. They might retweet the #FF and expose the brand Twitter account to new audiences.

Measure twice, Tweet once.

5. Measurement with Twitter can be tricky such as identifying referrers via various URL shortening services, but it’s the most important. By “measurement”, I also mean monitoring on an ongoing basis, not just counting outcomes or KPIs. Followers is just one dimension. Based on what the brand is trying to achieve, a mix of data points and measurement tools should be implemented. Some example metrics:

• Tweets published
• Retweets & potential reach from those retweets
• New targeted Twitter users that are followed by the brand’s Twitter account
• New followers of the brand’s Twitter account acquired
• Direct traffic from Twitter to brand’s web pages. URL shortening services should be used like bit.ly
• Mentions of the brand in Tweets without links
• How many lists the brand Twitter account is included in
• What new Twitter users has the brand’s Twitter account added to it’s own organized lists?
• How many engagements or discussions the brand’s Twitter account has with other users
• Connections (follow, retweet, @message, DM) with targeted Twitter users

Example Tools:

• search.twitter.com
• social media monitoring like socialmention.com, trackur.com, scoutlabs, Techrigy SM2, Radian6
• Web analytics
• bit.ly
• cotweet.com, hootsuite.com, tweetdeck.com

Obviously, there are many other tools for Twitter out there, including overall social media marketing campaign management tools such as: Wildfire, Objective Marketer, Spredfast, SocialTalk, pop.to and others.

Sure, you can “experiment” with tools like Twitter and find your specific strategy as you go, but you could also find productivity and valuable connections a lot sooner (as well as effective time and resource management) if you create a plan that addresses who you’re trying to reach on Twitter, what goals you hope to achieve and a plan for getting there. Make no mistake, there will always be a component of on-demand and real time  or opportunistic marketing with Twitter. The platform is still so new that the community is finding new and innovative uses every day. You might find new uses too, so don’t get too committed to a single focus in your Twitter efforts. Be flexible, curious and willing to participate.

Some tactics are always a good idea and some will reveal themselves as you develop your Twitter network and participate with the community.  Measuring success on Twitter has everything to do with goals, so make sure you’ve spent at least a little time figuring out where Twitter fits in with your overall social media marketing strategy and then what tools make the most sense to use when measuring success.

source: toprankblog

12 Ways to Find Brands & Companies on Twitter

A big question for marketers that want to connect with businesses on Twitter is that they often don’t know where to look.  Part of the rub is that Twitter is predominantly a service used by individuals, not companies.   While you can use search.twitter.com advanced features to find individuals using specific criteria, it can be more productive for finding companies or commercial users of Twitter via a managed list.

Here are a few resources for finding Twitter accounts for brands, companies, executives, analysts and journalists via directories and lists. Update: We’ve added the WeFollow Directory recently launched by Kevin Rose:

WeFollow – Kevin Rose from Digg started this user powered directory of Twitter users organized into categories with rankings based on the number of users. Inclusion is based purely on users submitting themselves by Tweeting an @wefollow and hashtags describing what 3 categories to associate that user with.

Twibs.com - Alphabetical Directory and search engine of 5,368 businesses on Twitter with a voting option to see which profiles are featured on the home page. Each business Twitter account has a profile showing latest Tweets and others’ Tweets about that user.

Twellow.com – Directory and search engine of Twitter users. Allows customization of profiles, categories and addition of links to other social services. Grabs publicly available messages from Twitter then analyzes and organizes them into the categories found at Twellow.com. Users can add themselves also.  Features “Twellowhood” to find local Tweeple.

Tracking Twitter - The Electric Artists Twitter Tracker is a real-time listing of the top media, entertainment, and consumer product feeds EA is following on Twitter  - Broken down into the following categories: Brands, Media, Television and Celebrities.

A Wiki of Social Media Marketing Examples - This list published by Peter Kim shows much more than Twitter, but you can sort the list of brands using social media by type, then scroll down to the “Microblogging” section.

Media on Twitter – This is a wiki created by @PRsarahevans with the help of a few friends as a resource of contact information for journalists and bloggers around the world. 

Other useful Twitter user discovery lists and directories include:

Social Brand Index - Jonathan Kash maintiains this index of Twitter accounts sorted by: Business, Education, Entertainment, Executives & Notable Individuals, For Consumers, Government & Politics, Housing Market, Media, Non-Profit, Organizations, Service Providers, Social Properties, Technology and Travel.

Analyst Twitter Directory  - Listing of industry Analysts on Twitter by Carter Lusher of SageCircle.

Brands That Tweet – Collection of brand names Twitter accounts from Paul Dunay. Many of the accounts listed are squatters and not managed by the brands.

C-Level Tweeters – Another collection from Paul Dunay of CEOs, CTO’s and CMO’s. There are many more in the comments.

The Ultimate List of Moms on Twitter –  Wendy Piersall has assembled this list of Tweeting moms plus many more additions in the comments.

Ultimate Small Business Twitter List – Anita Campbell and friends have compiled this list of  people and organizations to consider following on Twitter if you want to keep your finger on the pulse of small businesses.

Which topical or categorically specific Twitter directories, wikis or lists did we miss?

source: toprankblog