Monthly Archives: April 2010

Small Business and Social Media

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Through Social Media marketing, big brands can be outsmarted without making huge investments, and small brands can make big names for themselves.

Blendtec was a relatively unknown company selling $400 high-performance blenders. After seeing CEO Tom Dickson testing the machines by blending two-by-fours, Marketing Director George Wright had a brilliant idea for a series of viral videos. He started to blend everyday objects—glow sticks, iPhones, iPad, Rubik’s Cubes, and television remote controls—and posted the videos to media-sharing sites such as YouTube (see below).

The videos have now been watched more than 100 million times and have garnered the company a ton of press and buzz.

Another example is a small specialty baker in New Jersey, Pink Cake Box, that leverages nearly every type of social media that exists to build a substantial brand. Employees write a blog that features images and videos of their unique cakes.

They post the photos to Flickr and the videos to the company’s YouTube channel. Pink Cake Box has more than 1,300 followers on Twitter, and more than 1,400 fans on Facebook.

Whether you are part of a small, medium, or giant business, or are an individual entrepreneur, your customers are using social media, and there’s no reason you shouldn’t be, too. It costs almost nothing, it’s easy to get started, and it can have an enormous financial impact on your business.

vBidLive Redesign Project

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We have the opportunity to work on vBidLive new skin and landing page.

vBidLive is the only online marketplace where service providers compete to win your business. Just post your service work order, desired time and price, and invite your preferred service providers to compete for your service work/project.

Wait for the new website relaunched soon.

Sound Body Fitness Blog

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We have the opportunity to create a personal blog for a great and aspiring entrepreneur – Katie Wygant.

Katie Wygant is also the owner of Sound Body Fitness.

Sound Body Fitness was created for men and women who are seeking to learn about and develop exercise and eating habits that will lead to a healthier life. We provide our clients highly effective Nutrition and Fitness Training that yields fast, safe and long-lasting results. Our small group programs provide cost effective fitness and nutrition training that is guaranteed to help you achieve your fitness goals.

Our approach grows out of our passion for results-oriented, progressive fitness combined with nutritional education. We don’t rely on gimmicks or diet fads, preferring to work with clients to create a healthy overall lifestyle.

Sound Body trainers keep their workouts creative and diverse and the nutritional education interesting and to the point. Enjoy a mix of circuit training, core rehabilitation, total body conditioning, boot camp exercises, cross-fit, yoga, Pilates and more.

Wait for the new launched BLOG soon.

Measuring Social Media ROI

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A lot of businesses want to measure the ROI of their social media campaigns, but they don’t know where to start.

Measuring social media ROI isn’t impossible, but it can be difficult because many of the pieces that need to be evaluated are difficult to track.

Let’s start by defining clear goals!

What do you want to increase? What do you want to measure? Where are you now?

If you want to measure web traffic, Google Analytics is a good way to start. It’s free and it can provide a really powerful baseline for a variety of different factors. You can track incoming links and then the activities of the users they send, which can be helpful.

PostRank Analytics is a suite of tools measures social engagement on other platforms and services. What’s nice about PostRank is that instead of just a raw number, you can actually see the messages and comments from other sites that contribute to your stats.

If your ultimate measurement is sales for instance, look at your sales level. If it has increased, look at the number of referrers on your e-commerce site (assuming you can track this data) from your website or Twitter or the number of coupons used that were given away in a Facebook campaign to start calculating which sales stemmed from your social media campaigns.

Making the data usable is the hardest part. After you have defined your baseline, you need to take the metrics from your monitoring tools and see how they correlate to higher sales, better customer retention, or whatever your primary markers for output are.

Recommended Website Structure

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One of the things I do before submitting a website to search engines is I make sure it is structured correctly for search engine compliance and human usability.

The list below summarizes the most common mistakes people make when designing their website.

All of these factors can affect your search engine rankings. If you’ve already submitted your website to the search engines and aren’t getting the results you expected, these are some likely reasons why.

The good news is that you can make changes to improve your rankings.

Follow the recommendation below and you will gain better position in search engine.

  • Flash and other Multimedia Objects.
    Flash applications and other multimedia objects CANNOT be indexed by search engines. If a website contains only Flash, for example, we would need to either develop a set of templates that can be read by search engines or analyze the Flash apps in order to encode the HTML templates with text that is readable by the search engines. On the same note, if a website uses Flash for its primary navigation but has no backup plain HTML for links, we would need to develop standard HTML navigation or at least a site map

  • Frames
    Many websites simply do not index framed pages. Of those that do (Google is among them), frequently what people forget is that if a person comes directly to one of your framed pages, they won’t be able to navigate from there to the rest of the website. Frames, in general, are not recommended.

  • Robots.txt Format
    The absence of a robots.txt will generally not deter search engines from indexing website, but an improperly formatted robots.txt will stop the engines at the first page of the website. The robots.txt should be used primarily to limit the content that is indexed by the search engines.

  • URL Format
    The format and length of a URL can have an effect on whether the page is indexed or not. Some engines will not index a URL that contains characters such as question marks, ampersands and other odd characters. The length of the URL should always be limited as much as possible. We should also remember that people may want to bookmark certain URLs in the website or type them in manually.
  • Keywords in URL
    Whenever possible, try to use keywords that are used in the meta tags, title and content of the page in the URL of the page.
  • Internal Linking
    Search engines do not follow JavaScript, Flash, and CSS links. It is imperative that even if these flashy elements are used for primary navigation that a backup set of plain HTML links is written for the search engines.

  • Download Speed
    Download speed is not only important to users, but to search engines as well. Measure the load speed of the pages within the website to find problem pages. If your website takes longer than 5 seconds to load, you are forcing the user to decide whether or not they want to stay or not. Search engines will also have a problem indexing your website because of their built-in time-out tolerance levels.

  • Total Size
    There are two things to consider when deciding what is an appropriate total size of a document on the web: your target demographics and search engines. While it may be perfectly acceptable to your target demographic to include intense graphics, multimedia, flash objects, etc. it is never acceptable to search engines.

    As it pertains to whether or not a web page CAN be thoroughly indexed by a search engine, the general rule of thumb is that the combined total of all HTML, text, graphics, etc. should not exceed 60-100kb.

  • Use External JavaScripts
    Search engines do not understand JavaScript, but they do count the overall page weights against you for having JavaScript. It is important, therefore, to move as much JavaScript out of the main HTML into external JavaScript files as possible.

Social Media Performs Better at Creating Awareness for Small Businesses

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Here is a re-post of a great article on Social Media from HubSpot.

73% of the small businesses surveyed hoped to identify and attract new customers using social media, and 61% said they were able to do so.

Social media performed better for small businesses when it came to developing awareness of their organizations, with 56% hoping to do this and 52% accomplishing it.  Where social media was on target for these organizations is in staying engaged with current customers and collaborating more effectively externally with partners, colleagues, and suppliers.

It’s important to note that success using social media will vary, depending on how much effort is put into those tactics. For example, you can’t create a blog, write only sporadic posts and expect to have it succeed. You must regularly write posts that educate and inform and then share those posts via Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media networks. While you’re at it, share articles and content by other experts in the industry. Doing those things will help increase the level of trust people have in you and will pull more clients and customers to you.

Social media success also depends on whether an organization’s customers and clients use such networks. LinkedIn may be preferred over Twitter, podcasts may be preferred over video, and blogs might be preferred over Facebook fan pages. The key is to determine which avenues your customers and clients prefer and then focus your efforts there. Try a tactic, measure the results, adapt your plan as necessary.


Read more: http://www.hubspot.com/marketing-hubs/marketing-charts/social-media-performance-meets-expectations/

Website Speed is Google’s Next Ranking Factor

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At PubCon, Matt Cutts from Google said there is strong lobbying in Google to introduce a new ranking factor into the algorithm. The new ranking factor has to do with how fast a site or page loads.

He explained that Google’s co-founders want searching to be real fast, as if you are flipping through a magazine. Part of this is making sure faster web pages rank better than slower ones. Matt explained that page speed is a factor in the search ad AdWords quality score and there is currently a strong push to make it a factor in the organic ranking algorithm.

Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs.

While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point. We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing. If you haven’t seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site.

We encourage you to start looking at your site’s speed, not only to improve your ranking in search engines, but also to improve everyone’s experience on the Internet.