Northwest Center for Change offers comprehensive outpatient services to individuals and their families who are struggling with chemical dependency. Their long-term approach, along with family participation, is unique and proven to increase.
We are glad that they wanted us to help them with their website redesign needs and also online marketing strategies.
Please follow the progress here.
It’s not easy going through the jungle that is social media. Though it seems simple at first, everything is just constantly updated that just as you’re getting used to one social networking site, another hip and upcoming social networking site came up.
In the past, I’ve often given advices mostly on a specific type of social networking site. While nowadays, social networking sites are popping everywhere like daisies, these three points should be able to be applied in any type of social networking sites.
So, here my three quick guides to survive in the jungle of social media:
1. Timeliness is Relevance
The world of social media is scarily fast-paced. One day something is trending, next day it’s old news. If a company fails to update instantly, then other new stuff will pile up, covering the relevancy of the company’s message.
2. Focus on building relationship, not sales
People do not use social media (social networking) for the means of being marketed for. People use social networking to make relationships. So, don’t expect instant sales, instead focus on maintaining the company’s image to create loyal followers.
3. Not everything is about you
Social media is about a relationship between the consumer and the business. Just like any relationship, when one refuses to think about the other person’s needs, it fails. Therefore, when making posts or updates, make it through the consumer’s eyes. Is this information relevant to their needs in relation to the product/service the business offers?
When thinking about blogging, take off your hat as a business owner or marketing manager and instead try to think like a magazine publisher.
The goal of your business blog should be to publish articles that are not promotional but instead share industry expertise, much in the way a column or an article in an industry magazine would.
Think about what you are writing and the words you are using. Don’t use industry jargon that only you and your employees would understand. Just as you did when brainstorming keywords, think of the words your customers would use to describe your business and use those keywords in your blog posts.
The Duwamish Yacht Club was established in 1978 on its location 4.5 miles up the Duwamish River from Elliott Bay in the South Park Community of Seattle.
The club decided to redesign their website and also by adding more features (member portal, calendar, online sign up for event, etc) for their members.
You can follow the progress here.
Twitter is a social network on which users share short, 140-character messages with each other. Users “follow” or subscribe to each other and can receive messages from each other via multiple technology devices including desktop computers, smart phones, and text messages.
As mentioned previously, for business, it is best to use Twitter‟s free search engine, Twitter Search to search for your business, competitors, and industry mentions on Twitter.
Understanding how and if people are talking about your business and industry will give you enough information to determine if you should invest the time to start and manage a Twitter account for your business.
If you decide that Twitter is right for your business, you can visit Twitter.com to sign up for a free account.
Here are a few tips for setting up a business Twitter account:
Through the blog post that I wrote back in April, I expressed the growing development of Facebook Ads in the marketing world. So, I wasn’t all that surprise to see a headline from Mashable.com a few days ago that said, “Facebook To Take Number 1 Spot in Display Ad Market This Year [REPORT]”
Although much speculation had prophesized the success of Facebook in Advertising, the report seems to display that the prophecy is on its way to be fulfilled. The article by Todd Wasserman of Mashable.com was based on a research done by eMarketer. In the report, researchers predict that Facebook will grow its net US display revenues in 2011 by another 80.9% and reaching an estimate of $2.19 billion. With this growth, Facebook will be overthrowing Yahoo! as the country’s no.1 display ad-selling company.
David Hallerman, a principal analyst of eMarketer commented on the revelation, “Facebook’s supreme popularity—both in terms of numbers of people and amount of time they spend there—creates a plethora of display ad impressions, mainly for its unique form of banners…And that popularity is also boosting what advertisers will pay for its display ads.”
Aside from Facebook, eMarketer also report that Google is also showing a solid growth this year with double the revenues in display ad compared to 2010.
Images on a web page can certainly enhance user experience. However, when inserting images into your website, you should keep in mind the following:
A well-constructed blog post should include several key components:
The URL of a web page is its web address. The URL structure of a website is about how the different URLs connect with each other.
Unfortunately, improving your URL structure is one of the more difficult aspects of on-page website optimization. The methods of fixing these issues depend entirely on the back-end parts of your website, such as your content management system or programming framework. Nevertheless, if you have a competent developer by your side, having him or her tackle these issues can significantly improve your SEO. Your best approach might be to hand your developer the following list.
Here are the Principles of Good URL Structure:
Create static URLs, not dynamic ones. This means that the URL for one of your pages should be the same, no matter what. Check if you see different URLs for the same page in your website. If there are, you can look into how to create static URLs with your web server software. Do a Google search on “create static URL” + (name of your server software)
Overall, dedicated landing pages are clearly effective. Depending on the scale of the campaign, their effectiveness can appear lesser or greater. At the same time, as with many other tactics presented in this report, the reader should keep in mind that benchmark survey respondents are likely on average more experienced and successful Landing Page Optimization practitioners, and therefore their results are above average.
The key takeaway from this simple chart is that close to half of the marketers that used Dedicated Landing Pages found them to be very effective – definitively showing that the opportunity does exist.
