In today’s online market place it is important for all business and entrepreneurs to realize that the playing field has changed quite drastically over the last few years. There are many new platforms and websites that businesses can eagerly leverage to drive new exposure, traffic and eye balls than there ever has been before. Social Media Marketing technology has made it much easier to become visible online and it is up to you as a business owner to take advantage of this technology.


Launching a blog and having an active Twitter and Facebook account go hand in hand. If you don’t understand why that is not important yet just realize that having both is the first step to building new qualified website visitors. At the very least make it a point to have both created as soon as possible and worry how to incorporate into your marketing strategy after, your audience is waiting. After you launch your blog there are many sure fire ways to build new networks of happy customers and potential clients. Twitter and Facebook will be a nice meeting place for them to join and meet but it will be the blog that gets them there. When you launch a blog and start writing new posts you will most likely have to get those blog posts out there a bit at first to start building up new loyal readers. Once you have your Facebook and Twitter accounts all built with nice little links and great profile images you can sync the Twitter account along with your Facebook fan page. What this will ultimately do is eliminate one step for yourself. As you drop your blog post link into your Facebook fan page it will automatically create a link in your Twitter account for you. This is one great and convenient way to not only drive targeted visitors to your website from a variety of Twitter users but also build up your Facebook fan page as well.

This takes time so it is important to start doing it now and be consistent with it. Online marketing takes time to grow like anything else. Over time you will slowly start to build up followers on your Twitter account and fans on your Facebook page. As the search engines evolve even more they will require an element of social interaction through all the various social platforms in order to really help your SEO efforts.

If you are a small local business owner and you are still contemplating if you should launch a blog for your business stop procrastinating and just launch it. The search engine optimization benefits will help you website a great deal at the very least. You have absolutely zero to loose and much to gain from launching a blog on your businesses website. A blog is not just for larger businesses anymore. They can be used for many different reasons. It is important to realize that a blog is a direct extension of your business and can act as the voice for your brand.

Take the first step and launch the blog directly on your website and get one post per week just to get things started. If you already have a list of targeted keywords for your business over time you can start to target blog posts around specific keywords and really start to generate some quality traffic. Small business owners need to realize that there are no rules to launching a blog. You can write about anything and everything you want. Some people use their blog to let their audience know what type of company they are. You can write about everything from what happens in the office all the way to specific resources that your audience can use each day. It is entirely up to you. Over time you will figure out how to structure your blog posts and what to write about to keep visitors on your website. The advantage of building your blog on your website is that you get the visitors landing on your website so you can add elements to create a sense of urgency to get website visitors to submit their information for a lead to make a purchase or come directly to your physical or online store. It all depends on your business goals.

Launching a business blog does not have to be difficult. You don’t have to get scared that something won’t work out how you planned. Half the battle is simply getting up and doing it. Once you have the blog it might be wise to schedule out your blog posts. If you plan on being conservative with your frequency you could very well come up with small handful of topics you could write about for that particular month. You don’t have to write everyday when you first start. You very well could if you want but just getting some new material in the blog on a monthly basis is a good start regardless.

When you set up your blog RSS feed you’ll have to decide whether you want that feed to publish as a full text feed or a summary. The full text will publish your entire blog post within the RSS feed while the summary will post just a couple of paragraphs and link back to your blog post. There are advantages and disadvantages to both methods. RSS feeds that offer summaries tend to receive more click throughs back to the website, but that’s really the only major benefit – and it may not be a benefit at all if a high click through rate means a lower overall readership.

Here is a video that I found (an older one but still very good!) about RSS Feeds:

Anyway, continuing the tips regarding full text feeds will likely lead to more subscribers. This increases your overall readership and gives you wider distribution of your blog content. Plus, you are more likely to get links from your readers. Also, full text RSS feeds get republished in full, which means any links within those blog posts have greater potential to pass link juice back to you as part of your off site search engine optimziation efforts (aka. link building) Some blog lists and feed directories are picky about partial lists and may leave you out if you deliver your RSS feeds in summary.

Finally, potential re-publishers like full text feeds because it allows them to keep visitors on their site. That means more potential inbound links for you. Should you publish your feeds as full text or summary? It depends. Do you want to increase your SEO advantages? If so then publish the full text. If you value more click throughs back to your blog from those feeds then publish your feeds in summary.

YouTube now has a way for webmasters to allow site visitors to upload YouTube videos directly to their websites. But the program is designed for news sites like CNN.com and Huffington Post. That doesn’t mean that bloggers can’t participate, however. I think the program will likely be available to most websites in some sense.

But what is YouTube Direct? YouTube Direct is a platform that gives webmasters the ability to get user generated video content without developing their own application.

Here is a video that clearly explains YouTube Direct:

There are some advantages to being able to do this. First, you can keep your site visitors on your site a little longer. But, even better than that, you can have videos uploaded directly to your website instead of you going to YouTube and embedding videos, which can be a time consuming process. The big question is, will YouTube Direct provide webmasters and marketers with any search engine optimization benefits.

I think so, possibly. If videos are uploaded to your website then it’s possible that the search engines will index those versions of the videos. The videos will still exist on YouTube’s servers, but if you use Google Customized Search then visitors will be able to search your website to find video content. And, more importantly, searchers using the search engines to search for video content related to your niche may find it in the SERPs. That’s a huge ‘may’.

The other possibility is that searchers looking for video content will find those videos on YouTube and will have to click over to your site from there. It remains to be seen just how many SEO benefits webmasters will receive from YouTube Direct. Even without SEO benefits, however, it looks like a good deal. I’m just hoping for the best.

So what’s the fastest growing demographic on Facebook? It’s not the college crowd. And it’s not high schoolers or teenie boppers. Thirtysomething? Nope. Not them either.

The fastest growing segment on Facebook is actually 55 years and older. Them’s the old guys! (sorry I had to say it

Well, they’re baby boomers. Aren’t they supposed to be technology challenged? If they are, it’s not evident because they’re flocking to Facebook and hanging out there, either to look cool in front of their children or because they have a genuine interest in social media. I’m guessing it’s the latter because we all know their children don’t think they’re cool.

Here is some great Facebook demographic information from Mashable from this past July:

But here’s the deal. They’re going there and so should you. Especially if your target market is 45 plus. Or if your target market is the 20-30 year old group. Why 20-30? Because that group consists of the children of the 45 plus group and if you get the parents you’ll get the children. It is social media, after all.

Social media, and that includes Facebook, is more than just a big social networking party with old friends and colleagues. There are also search engine optimization benefits to do business through Facebook and other social media sites such as building search engine and visitor trust over time. But the real benefit is branding and strategic marketing. Savvy marketers are learning how to use all online media to their advantage. Start now and when the next generation becomes consumers, it will be commonplace. You’ll already know how to play the game.

It’s not often you hear a search engine optimization person like myself say that social media provides better search results (at least not at the moment in the search industry), but I can see an instance where social search may of benefit to a searcher and where the big three search giants might fail. So this is a theory post, if any of you have ever actually tested social search versus traditional search to try to find a song or artist based on a song lyric, please let everyone know

If you are looking for the lyrics to a song and you can’t remember the artist’s name, the title of the song, the name of the album that song was featured in, or the lyrics. Let’s say you can hear the melody in your head and you can remember a part of the lyrics but not enough that when you search query what you think you remember you’ll get the results you want. Ever have that happen? You’re trying to remember a song lyric and can’t?

Well, with social search you can just send up what you remember and ask the crowd to help. Someone else may remember the song based on the butchered lyrics you provide and help you. That’s because humans possess intelligence and robots do not (or search engine bots looking for lyrics based on pages that it can or can’t locate on the web). So ask the question at Yahoo! Answers or within your Facebook or Twitter networks…you never know what you will get back as answers!

Here’s an interesting number – 9%. Are you a part of it?

According to Small Business Newz, only 9% of small businesses are using Twitter for marketing. But, 32% more are planning to incorporate social media into their marketing plans. Twitter will no doubt be included in that. You should consider it too.

There are more reasons than meet the eye that a small business owner would want to use Twitter in their marketing plans. One very good reason is for search engine optimization purposes. And, no, I’m not talking about some new link building scheme. I AM talking about a new way of getting ranked in the search engines for your important content.

As noted yesterday, both Bing and Google are in discussions with Twitter and Facebook about including updates in search results. Once that happens, and it’s already started to happen, then you’ll have one more way to land on page 1 of the search results for the keywords that you are targeting. While traffic will not be routed directly to your website from the search results, it will be routed indirectly through Twitter, which is fast becoming one of the web’s most important tools for marketing for small businesses. Capture an audience on Twitter and you will surely see your visitors, brand and sales rise.