Archive for January, 2009
Advanced Business Blogging Webinar by Hubspot Review
Posted by seo in Bloggging, search engine optimization, social media on January 24, 2009
I attended a webinar today on advanced business blogging by Hubspot. Don’t let the advanced part in the title scare you away. Hubspot, an online marketing company similar to emarketed, does a great job on providing webinars. Today’s webinar focused on blogging and can be viewed here. A few notes about the actual webinar that really made this interesting. First they had a powerpoint of the webinar that can be accessed here through SlideShare and a live video feed of the presenter that was being pulled from Mogulus. You can view Hubspot’s channel here. Mogulus provides a free service and a paid version which removes the advertisements. There were no advertisements on the webinar but when I viewed the video on Mogulus there were advertisements. So I’m assuming that Hubspot is using the free version. They have over 800 viewers on the webinar today! You can view all of their shows on their Mogulus channel or here on their site. Hubspot also integrated their Twitter account into the presentation so you could ask questions through Twitter during the webinar. There were also links to Facebook and LinkedIn as well from the webinar page. These are all free tools that any one can use. The use of these social media tools was very impressive and is definately something that we’re looking to integrate into our next version of our emarketed site. They were able to utlize these free services which can be used by anyone: Twitter, SlideShare, Facebook, & Mogulus
Ok, lets get into some of the key points from the webinar. A lot of the content which I’m proud to say has been discussed by emarketed in past blogs. Hubspot goes into why you should blog with 5 keys to a successful blogging:
1. Pick your target personas
2. Create a mix of posts
3. Write great posts
4. Sustain it
5. Spread it
One of the great take aways from this webinar is that your SEO (search engine optimization) efforts can start from your blog. You should write content that relates to your products and/or services. One thing to remember though is that SEO takes time and this is the same for writing blog posts. You will not see the direct results of your blog writing for several months. You also have to promote your blog once it’s up. It’s the same for your website which our clients are starting to understand. People will not just magically stumble across your blog when you write content. It must be promoted. Some of the methods Hubspot discussed were the following: post to twitter, comment on other blogs, post to facebook, start building a list of subscribers to your blog. They also had a great tip about using images through Flickr so I took their advice for this blog post. We do not always uses images in blog posts but I can see how it makes the blog easier to read with an image.
For more information regarding the webinar you’ll have to watch it at the following link.
Great Example of a Catchy Blog Headline
Just read an interesting blog post that I thought I’d blog about. First of all I subscribe to about 20 blogs and they all get fed into my Google Reader which is great. I also just added a gadget to my iGoogle home page so the most recent blog posts are displayed. Now I’m not able to read all of these everyday but I do read headlines and this headline caught my eye today. The topic was something I’m interested in but it was also tied into a movie that I like which was a double whammy for me. So of course I read the article. Here’s the headline and a link to the blog post:
What Jason Bourne Can Teach You About Social Media
With the amount of conent out there you have to figure out ways to get people to read your content and having a great topic is sometimes not enought. So try and figure out the double whammy for your niche and I’ll do the same.
How to work with a search marketing company or consultant
Posted by seo in Google, Search 101, Search Marketing, paid search on January 13, 2009
I thought this topic would be relavant to our customers as well as others out there that work with a search marketing company or consultant. I recently spoke to one of our paid search and search engine optimization (SEO) customers today and discovered some interesting data. The orginal intent of the call was to followup on a new 800 number to better track the calls coming through. The customer went on to discuss what keywords are most effective for their paid search and SEO campaigins. This customer surveys all potential customers to find out what search engine they found them on, what keyword was specifically used to find them, and what state they’re calling from. With these 3 pieces of data we were able to make adjustments in real time to their paid search campaign. The SEO campaign does not have this flexibility but when it’s time to renew thier SEO campaign we can add some of these words to their campagin. So make sure to keep your search marketing company up to date on what’s working for you. The more information you can provide, the better the company or consultant will be able to fine tune the search marketing campaign. This could be done through a weekly phone call or a weekly email. If you’re not already tracking this information, start today. It’s your money so you might as well get the best value out of your marketing spend.
Here’s a list of some helpful things you can do yourself to get the most out of your search marketing campaign:
- Track site traffic through free Google Analytics
- Use free Google Webmaster Tools (You might need some help from a webmaster to get this initially setup)
- Track your data on a spread sheet (what search engines you were found on, what words, was it organic or a paid search ad?, etc.)
- Stay in touch with your search marketing company on a weekly basis
- Stay current with search marketing trends by reading blogs like ours and one or all of these: Search Engine Land, Search Engine Guide, or SEOMoz (I currently subscribe to these and 6 others through Google Reader which is a nice way to feed all of these sites into one reader.
- Request your paid search log-ins for Google, Yahoo, and MSN and log-in yourself to see what’s working and what words are being advertised. Some search marketing companies will not give this information out and provide generic reports. At emarketed we give access to your accounts if you request this information. You can login and run all types of reports to find out what’s working and what’s not.
Well that’s it for now. I will post more tips to this post in the future so stay tuned. Please also feel free to comment if you have some ideas that can help.
Facebook Advertising Case Study
Posted by seo in Search Marketing, facebook on January 10, 2009
We just launched a Facebook advertising campaign today targeting a demographic that likes to drink alcohol and/or use drugs. It will be interesting to see how this campaign does. The campaign is for a drug rehabilitation center located in Orange County, California. The ad management page is below along with a copy of the ad and the demographics. It’s currently targeting close to two hundred and fifty thousand Facebook users with an ad spend set for $100 per day. The cost per click (CPC) is set to 0.55 cents a click. Stay tuned for updates on this campaign.
Facebook advertising ad
Facebook advertising ad manager
Twitter Overloaded & Hacked
Well Twitter must be growing considerably in the last few weeks. I’ve gotten the below screen a few times in the last few days. It’s only up for a few seconds at this point and when I refresh my browser its working properly. I recently saw Twitter being used on CNN for a news program the other day where Tweets were being streamed in real time below the news anchor. I believe they must be screening what’s showing up on national TV though. The Twitter stream was actually for the CNN reporter. And of course McCain and Obama used Twitter in their campaigns. I believe Obama is still the number one user in Twitter with over 100k in followers. I actually just tried to pull the Twitter page for Barack Obama up and received another error which is also pasted below. Twitter must be experiencing some serious growth pains. I actually just found out that some hackers were able to hack into Barack Obama, Britney Spears, and Fox News personal Twitter accounts along with 33 other high profile people. Twitter has also had problems unrelated to this latest attack a few days ago with hackers sending out phishing tweets to get users to click links to enter in personal information to win free prizes. Click here to read the full article. I’m sure Twitter will continue to be tested as it grows in 2009. Stay tuned for more Twitter news!
Twitter Overload Error
Twitter Error for Barak Obama Page
List of Lists for 2009 Marketing Predictions
Posted by seo in Search Marketing on January 7, 2009
Just started to browse this list of lists for 2009 marketing predictions put together by Search Engine Land. You could spend a week going through these lists. If you’re in a hurry I’d focus on these:
- 2009 Web Predictions by Website Magazine
- Search Shifts and Predictions for 2009 by Search Engine Watch
- eMarketer’s Predictions for 2009
- Digital Marketing Opportunities in 2009
- Social Media Predictions 2009
That should be a fairly comprehensive list to get 2009 off to a great start and get you on track to bringing in new business through your marketing efforts. Stay tuned for emarketed’s 2009 prediction list.
Google AdWords Editor Update
Posted by seo in Google, paid search on January 7, 2009
Google is at it again with another update for the Google AdWords Editor. I look forward to testing this out. First page bid estimates for your keywords is now used in this version while the minimum cost-per-click (CPC) bids are no longer used. The quality score is now displayed for your keywords. You can also now change the language and location for the Keyword Opportunities tool within the Google AdWords Editor. There are some other updates but these are the biggest.
Here’s a quick recap for you newbies out there that aren’t sure what I’m talking about. This tool allows you to manage your Google AdWords account offline through a software interface. If your managing 100 words or less than this tool might not be for you. It’s really geared for larger campaigns and is idea for search marketing companies or consultants that manage multiple accounts. Some of the more tedious work such as updating your ads online can be done fairly quicking with the editor. All you need to do is download the software and install. It will ask you for your user and password and then it will download your AdWords account info so that you can start editing. Your changes are pushed through to your account when you save your data.
Twitter Buzz!
Posted by seo in Search Marketing, social media, twitter on January 1, 2009
Well I contine to here more about Twitter and have started to get caught up in the buzz myself. As of this writing we have 518 followers and are following 2,000. In short, for you newbies out there that haven’t started tweeting, Twitter is a live way to follow other companies/individuals and also a way for yourself to update people following you with short blurbs (140 characters or less). We have actually hit a cap with the amount of companies/people we can follow. There’s nothing about this as far as I can tell on the Twitter site but after digging around online a bit I found that we have to increase our followers in order to follow more. I’m not sure exactly how many more followers we have to have but it’s a little frustrating at this point since I’m continuing to come across others I’d like to add to our company twitter profile. After reading a great article by Guy Kawasaki who we follow on Twitter, How To Use Twitter as Twool (a must read if you’re interested in Twitter), I was compelled to setup a twitter account for my name as well so I can start gathering a following and following others with my name, Matt Ramage (Click my name if you’d like to follow me!). This was just setup last night so no jokes on how I have no followers at the moment. Guy, in case you don’t know, is a successful author/blogger who has a huge following on Twitter! Over 41k following him at this moment. Guy also runs an online magazine I just discovered yesterday called Alltop which is basically a huge RSS feed of resources from various magazines.
Back to the Twitter buzz! Sites are now poping up to provide various services to enhance your Twitter experience. You can read about the main ones if you click the article that Guy wrote above. There are stand alone applications and also extensions you can add to your browser to help with notifications, managing multiple twitter profiles, reading twitts, and much more. emarketed has also setup a stand alone Twitter feed blog using WordPress and twitter feed so that every time we update twitter our blog gets posted to with fresh content for the search engines. We also have this same feed working off this blog so that everytime we post to our search marketing blog it will post on Twitter with a link to our new blog post. Well that’s it for now on Twitter. I’ll let Guy show you some other helpful Twitter Tips!
If you found this blog post helpful please start following us on Twitter by clicking here or inviting your friends to follow us if you’re already an emarketed follower.
Here’s one last resource that I believe I’ve posted before but it has over 140 different Twitter tools! Click here to view this resource.
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- What Bothers You About Facebook? August 20, 2010
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