Jurevicious Studios

Specializing in the Unique and Intriguing

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Social Media Marketing for the Holidays

As a business owner, you’ve likely been using the internet to market to customers and social media fans throughout the year.  With the holidays approaching though, it’s time to kick your strategies into high gear.  There will be more shoppers out on the web than ever this year, which is why that’s where a lot of your marketing should be as well.  To make the most of this holiday season, be sure you’ve covered each of the following five steps.

Stock Up on Social Media Fans

First and foremost, you have to get your fan counts to an all-time high.  Encourage current fans to share your content in order to get a boost in exposure and offer website visitors more content to Like and Follow.  If you’re really hurting for fans, try investing in a fan package from a social media fan service.  With a package like this, you can get thousands of targeted fans delivered right to your social media pages.  With such a huge increase in fans, you’re sure to expand your marketing potential for the holidays. 

  If you can’t afford to give each of your profiles a fan package, prioritize them for the biggest effect.  Focus on the social media sites you update most regularly first.  This list is often prioritized as such:

  1. Twitter:  Go for a big package here, as these followers check their feeds regularly and so will have a high rate of exposure to your marketing.

  2.  Facebook:  Your next priority should be Facebook because of the high number of people sharing content and connecting.  There is a good possibility that new fans from a package will connect you to even more branches of potential fans.  Also, it’s a great place to share multimedia content- which is great for showing off products for sale.

  3.  Pinterest:  If your pictures make your products look tempting or interesting, then a Pinterest follower package may work for your company.

  4.  YouTube:  If you put out videos now and then, it might be a good idea to get a few more fans to see your company’s Christmas message or holiday charity project.  Use it to make viewers want to share in your holiday spirit.

  Get Your Products on Recommended Gift Lists

There are a lot of news sites, blogs, and e-zines out there recommending products for the holidays.  If you sell a product, you’ll want to make sure it gets on a few of them.  Submit your product for review at the e-zine sites and blogs and send the news sites a press release.  You can also create your own recommendations list on your company blog.  It might also be a good idea to recommend a product each day leading up to the holidays on your social media pages.

  Create Holiday Shopping Related Content

Speaking of blogs and articles; make sure you have your own up and running.  In fact, during the holiday season, you should be optimizing for your site’s searchable keywords like crazy.  Add content to your site that talks about products and gets those words to come up for your company in the search engines.  Try tying your topic into the holidays somehow.  You can suggest gifts, explain practical winter tips, or get inspired by some other aspect, like religion.  This can give you lots of ideas for new articles, blogs, and videos that people will be out searching for.  Keep an eye on your Google ranking in particular, since that’s where most of your traffic will come from (in terms of search engines).  Also, don’t forget some mobile-friendly content.  With more people shopping online, and more people shopping from mobile devices, you’ll want to accommodate the trend with a long, narrow page design and lots of big, touchable buttons.

  Increase Ads

Even if you have a lot of fans, there are still plenty of other people who aren’t one of your fans and who may not come across your social media page or website on their own.  You probably already have ads up in a few places, but you might want to consider increasing your ad budget for the holidays.  Of course, you’ll want to get your order in as soon as possible, as holiday ad space may become limited quickly.  If you have the money for it, get your ad on all the popular shopping sites, like Amazon, Ebay, and Google.  You may also want to increase your investment in backlinks in the form of contextual links in articles, blogs, presentations, and/or videos posted around the web- preferably on high PR sites.

  Get Coupons/Discounts Out to Fans

Once you have your name out there and have informed your social media fans and the rest of the web about your great products, it’s time to give them a tempting invitation.  Get coupons and other discount details into regular profile updates.  This way, for fans who were considering a purchase, they now have that added push that makes them click to your site.  Once there, hopefully your site design will be engaging enough to keep them there and lead them to a purchase.  You could even give fans discounts for getting a friend to click your link or share your content.  This way, not only are you instigating a purchase but also a cheap and highly effective marketing boost.

Hopefully, you’re already getting busy for the holidays, but if not, put these steps into action soon.  If you’re not sure you can afford them, think about your usual holiday traffic.  If you consider your normal winter boost and multiply it with the effects of more social media marketing, wouldn’t it most likely increase your profits?  Not only that, but for every fan you pick up this season, they are likely to be there throughout the next year, and maybe even stick around long enough for the next holiday boost.  Get fans for the holiday season now, to help your business for years to come.

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How to Advertise When Your Audience is Using Multiple Devices

With all of the advances in mobile technology over the past decade, humans have become very good at one thing – multitasking. Unfortunately, that ability and our confidence in it gets us into trouble sometimes. Many people think they can go seventy miles per hour on a highway while also texting their friend about their ETA. This type of multitasking is not safe, though the portability of smart phones certainly makes it easy. Other types of multitasking are not nearly as dangerous, and they do actually make our lives easier. For example, many people watching TV at a given moment in the United States are also browsing their laptop or touch pad.

  This integration of activities is often in the viewer’s favor. If they see something on TV that they’d like to learn more about, they have the entire Internet at their fingertips. They can also tune out whichever device they’d like to during loading times or commercial breaks. This certainly seems like it would work against the advertisers, but in fact, there is a silver lining to the complex cloud of multitasking. Yes, media consumers can tune out devices when they choose to. However, digital and traditional advertisers now have the ability to reach them on multiple levels.

  One of the most recent technological launches that spurred the general conversation of multitasking and advertising was the recent pairing of Android and Google TV. Now, users can browse YouTube videos on the Android. When they find something they like, they can “push” it right onto their television digitally. They don’t need to hook up any extra HDMI cables, and most importantly, they don’t need to interrupt what they’re doing to search for a video.

  If you’re an advertiser, or even if you’ve recently launched your very first campaign for your business, you might be getting nervous. It’s hard enough to reach your audience when they’re paying attention. Now, they might not even be doing that. However, there are four important things to remember when you’re creating a campaign that might be either ignored or enhanced with integration such as that of Google TV and Android. Before you even develop your campaign, take the following into consideration.

  Multitasking is Nothing New

Never before could we browse the depths of the Internet on our phones with our computers in our laps while watching TV on mute with the radio blaring after we’ve paused the Netflix video playing on our tablet. Yes, this is an exaggeration, but it’s truly incredible how much media we can consume today. In fact, a recent study by Forrester showed that 85% of tablet users browsed the web while watching TV.  However, when you really think about it, it’s nothing new. Twenty years ago, we could have just as easily been watching TV while reading the latest Vogue and checking on the pot roast every ten minutes. In fact, the change might make it even easier for you to reach your consumers. Before, you couldn’t have featured an advertisement on the pot roast. Now, every distraction is equipped with ad technology.  This should help you feel better about the overwhelming feeling that you can’t seem to grab their attention – not much has changed.

  Integration is Necessary

Now that you’re comfortable with the idea, it’s time to plan your approach. The most important part of your advertising plan is to integrate all of your communication efforts so that they mirror each other on each device. Hopefully you’ll be getting a lot of YouTube hits now that they can be pushed right onto an HD flat screen television. Optimize your newfound popularity by driving people watching TV to your YouTube channel. In doing so, make sure the voice and style of the TV spot and YouTube channel match so that people will remember your brand more easily.

  It can be difficult to think of a design or even a concept that will work across different platforms. Make sure your team is equipped to handle design, advertising, and digital concepts before trying to create an integrated campaign, and call in an expert if necessary. The key to keeping a consistent brand across these platforms is to keep your team working together. Make sure your Facebook manager isn’t working separately from your iPad app manager. If nothing else, host weekly meetings so that the managers for each separate platform are on the same page. It’s a lot of work, but it will give the consumer a better brand experience.

  Interaction is Important

It is well known in the world of advertising that the best way to change the thoughts and opinions of your target audience is to interact with them. It’s easy to see a commercial and totally block it out, but it’s much harder to ignore a branded game or even a direct call to action. When people are multitasking across multiple devices, it’s easier for you to interact with them across multiple channels. For example, your TV commercial might recommend that viewers visit the Facebook page to redeem a special coupon or watch an exclusive video. That will get you more Facebook fans and increase traffic to your site in the end. With the new integration of Google TV and Android, you could show a TV commercial that previews a funny or interesting YouTube video on your channel. Without missing a beat, viewers can pull up the video on their phone and play it on their TV during the next commercial break. You should be able to increase the amount of web traffic you receive and brand recognition at the same time.

If you’re a digital advertiser, the ability for your audience to multitask might seem like the end of your ability to reach them. However, the situation actually presents a unique opportunity for your company to create a consistent and far-reaching brand image. Instead of giving up on your efforts to reach your consumers, reach them from every angle with new integrations like that of Google TV and Android. Your brand will be more memorable, and you’ll even learn valuable information about the habits of your audience.

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YouTube to Expand Channel Offerings for Popular Niches

YouTube was once a place for silly videos of babies laughing, cats playing instruments, and flash mob dances. While hundreds of these videos can still be found on the site, YouTube is slowly becoming more serious in its efforts to provide quality entertainment for its users. Yes, it’s easy to spend hours online browsing videos of dogs doing funny things on YouTube. However, YouTube wants to change the way we spend our time on the site. Instead of acting as a time-waster, the site wants to become a go-to resource for actual, planned entertainment that provides value to its viewers.

Since Google bought YouTube in 2006, the search engine giant has been trying to make it a more polished and organized site for videos. Last year, YouTube started featuring original channels. These channels feature highly produced and high quality videos sponsored by YouTube itself. The strategy was meant to attract TV viewers in the hopes that they’d visit YouTube instead of turning on their television. It’s not a completely outrageous vision, as many people do connect to Netflix or DVR systems instead of flipping through the channels. However, the folks at YouTube do understand that the older generation will be less likely to get rid of their TV’s any time soon. For that reason, they are aiming their efforts at viewers under the age of 35.

YouTube is investing in quality by creating channels for companies with serious major media experience. These videos are not your run-of-the-mill shaky cameras filming a thunderstorm YouTube clips. They will be of equal quality to the major shows currently on television, and they will carry advertisements. Some of the major channels include Grantland by ESPN, a comedy channel called Jash by Sarah Silverman and Michael Cera, and Daily Glow by Everday Health.

Already, YouTube has seen quantifiable success since its introduction of channels last year. Its top 25 channels average one million views per week. For content that is not released at such a high level of quality, one million views in total is outrageous. The site has also successfully increased the number of time users spend on it by one billion hours.

Since there is so much viewership on YouTube’s new channels and so many advertising dollars being poured into the new strategy, you might be wondering how you can use them to your company’s advantage. Right now, the YouTube channels are reserved for media companies with a lot of clout. Unless you’re a media giant like ESPN or even Sarah Silverman, a YouTube channel might not be in the cards just yet. In the meantime, you can try thinking about which channels you’d like to buy advertising on. Each channel is highly targeted, so it’s easy to find one with the niche audience that you might be looking for. Global head of content at YouTube, Robert Kyncl, explained that he thinks every interest will soon have a dedicated YouTube channel.

While you might not be ready to create a YouTube channel for your company now, we can assume that someday YouTube might reach out and offer high quality production services for smaller companies. You might be able to pay for the production to be featured on YouTube with your own channel. There is no telling if and when that time will come, but should it happen, it’s good to be prepared. Thinking about how you might design your own YouTube channel can get you in the right mindset for other sites as well.

If you have the opportunity to create your own high-quality YouTube channel someday, consider the following:

Think about Your Advertisers

If you create a YouTube channel, you could get a large amount of revenue from advertisers. Advertising on YouTube is becoming more popular. Digital advertising companies are increasing their spending by almost 50% to $2.9 billion this year, so advertisements should be a factor in your decision on content. Without letting it get in the way of your creative vision, try considering what topics advertisers would like to be associated with. Creating your videos accordingly could seriously pay off in the long run.

Think about Your Audience

Of course, you should consider the likes and interests of the people who will be watching your YouTube channel as well. Think outside the box to appeal to them without simply producing a lengthy advertisement. Whether you produce how-to videos about outdoor living as a camping gear retailer or a comedy series that is only loosely related to the product or service your company provides, each video needs to be valuable and related. To make sure your channel becomes popular, you need to ensure that every video ties in to the previous as if it were featured on a real TV channel. Without continuity, you might as well be uploading videos individually without the help of the channel, because users won’t come back for more.

Create Content that Ties Into to Other Media Channels 

Your YouTube channel cannot bring you success if it stands alone. Without any indication that it is tied to your company, you’ll only build revenue from ads without actually building your brand. For example, ESPN makes it clear that Grantland is affiliated. Whether you declare it right in the video or direct users to each video from your own site, you need to make sure your channel is sufficiently branded. Otherwise, you’re missing out on a major opportunity to advertise on a whole new level.

Unless you work for a company that currently has a show on TV or has appeared in the public eye many times over major media outlets, you probably won’t be offered a YouTube channel any time soon. However, thinking about how you’ll approach the task should the opportunity arise will make you feel prepared, and it will also help you brainstorm your brand in new and interesting ways. Thinking about your audience and which advertisers might want to work with you could put your company in a new light and help you develop strategies outside of a YouTube channel. With or without channels, YouTube is still a valuable resource for strengthening your social media presence and increasing your popularity with social media users.

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Google's Latest Update Targets EMD’s

If you know anything at all about search engine optimization (SEO), you know how crucial your Google page ranking is to your site’s success. When you are trying to increase the amount of web traffic to your site, you’ll want to make sure your link comes up as high as possible on the list of search results. Few people find new sites on the Internet by remembering a URL word-for-word and typing it into the navigation bar. Instead, they throw some keywords into Google and hope for the best. Often, they get the best, as Google has made it their mission to essentially read the minds of its users and give them exactly what they were looking for every single time.

  Rightfully so, Google keeps its search engine algorithm a secret. That way, people who own websites will strive to be on the top of the list by creating valuable content and garnering unique visitors instead of finding sneaky ways to trick the system. Of course, people do still try to find sneaky ways to get to the top, and trying to figure out how Google ranks pages is actually a thrilling mystery to solve for SEO experts.

  There are a few things we do know about Google page rank, and you can effectively use these to get higher on the list. Keyword density, backlinks, and link clicks on the actual Google results list are all more or less proven ways to get your page closer to the top. However, there is one factor that experts aren’t entirely sure about. Dr. Pete from SEOMoz has started keeping track of EMD’s on search results to find out whether or not they have an impact.

  EMD’s are Exact-Match Domains. When you create an EMD, you place the keywords to be searched right in the domain name. For example, if you want people to find your site when they’re looking to buy designer bags, your domain name would literally be buydesignerbags.com (or any other domain extension). This has been a known strategy for some time now, but only recently have people started tracking its success to find out whether or not it’s truly part of Google’s algorithm.

  Analyses show that websites with logical EMD’s do tend to do well on search engine results because when the keywords are in the URL, the ranking is higher. However, experts also noticed a recent update that changed the ranking for many of these sites. Sites with EMD’s that made sense for the brand tended to stay the same after the update, while others that were clearly aimed at bringing traffic dropped down on the list. For example, craftsupplies.com might do a lot better than make-money-online-right-now.com. Keep in mind that these are only estimations, since Google’s treatment of EMD’s is a secret. Though, the changes might align with the update.

  So, EMD’s might be an effective way to boost your search engine ranking, but you should probably try to make sure it sounds natural. The experts at SEOMoz explain that there are a few important factors you should consider when making an EMD:

  Dashes

There is a simple rule to follow when considering using dashes in your domain name. The more dashes you have, the more likely it is that you are spam. Double dashes are an almost guaranteed sign that a website is spam, since these have always allowed spammers to buy popular potential domain names for cheap because no one else wanted to include so many dashes. Whatever you do—unless you are in fact a spammer—avoid the double dash.

Single dashes are rarely acceptable, but you could use them as long as it was absolutely necessary. Using one between two words might be necessary as a hyphen, but never use more than that.

  Word Count

Another technique often employed by spammers is a large amount of words in a single domain name. BuySellCheapGoldFreeOnline.com is suspicious even to the most naïve web surfer. For .net domains, try sticking to 2-3 keywords per domain name. A worthy alternative for the listed domain might be “sellgold.net.” Since there are more .com domains on the web and therefore more competition, you should limit your .com domains to no more than four words. “Sellgoldonline.com” would work just fine in this case.

  Domain Extension

Stick to the top-level domain extensions if you want to get more web traffic and catch the eyes of your customers. While .com, .net, and .org are the most popular domains, many more actually exist. These might be cheaper options, but they will diminish your website’s credibility and make your pages look like spam. Domains such as .mobi, .travel and .info are not always credible.

  Budget

You might be tempted to buy a domain that already exists to fit your keyword requirements exactly. For the absolute best domain name out there, you can expect to spend approximately 10% to 15% of your overall budget. If the perfect domain is your ultimate goal, there’s no reason not to splurge on it. However, take a moment to consider your advertising budget. Depending on your confidence in the quality of your website, your money might be more effective with a low-cost domain and a high quality advertising campaign. Determine where most of your profit will come from. If getting more web traffic is your ultimate goal, then domain name matters a lot and your budget should reflect that. The same might not be true if you’re looking to make sales and build your brand.

  Creating or purchasing an EMD for your domain is as simple as thinking of which keywords someone might search to find you and then making sure those keywords are in your domain name in the right order. No one can be certain, but experts think that EMD’s might have something to do with higher search engine rankings. There’s nothing wrong with using an EMD for your site, but a recent update by Google suggests that they might be trying to weed out the spammers based on web addresses. Be careful when creating your domain name, as Google’s opinion of your site is the most important one.

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Facebook Gives Marketers More Access to Fans

As Facebook begins using more of its users’ personal data than ever before, the users are getting nervous while the marketers are getting excited. Of course, no one wants to bear the guilt of infringing on someone else’s privacy, but at the same time, Facebook makes its privacy policy clear. If people are uncomfortable about what type of data the social media site is using, they shouldn’t be signing in. Facebook’s access to the personal data of 900 million people is every company’s fantasy. The social media site can keep track of what people are talking about, who and where those people are, what their interests are, and even what they’re buying.

  Recently, Facebook changed its privacy policy so that companies could reach out to certain users based on the email address or phone number they listed on their profile. Additionally, the social media site began allowing marketers to see users’ surfing habits on other sites to gain a better understanding of their overall habits online and in real life.

  Since so many users trust Facebook with their personal information, the site still maintains that it does not give advertisers access to the actual info. In other words, Facebook might aggregate the data and sell it to these companies, but it will not let the companies browse through the data on their own. Marketers cannot see a person’s profile pic matched with their email address, interests list, phone number, and relationship status. Instead, it might offer the average age of users in a certain area or show them which gender is talking most about the latest Smartphone release.

  The changes are certainly making Facebook users feel violated, but how do marketers feel about the updates? With the endless amount of data available through the social media site, marketers would be wise to take advantage of its offerings. Instead of hosting focus groups or surveys, Facebook provides them with a quick and easy answer to the questions they might have about their target market. Not only is the information readily available, it’s also honest. One concern that marketers have during focus groups is that participants are subconsciously altering their answers to appear a certain way. Of course people can lie over Facebook, but very few people probably fabricate their age, relationship status, interests, or topics of conversations.

  If you’re looking to use Facebook’s new privacy changes to make your marketing more effective, you’ll have the following abilities:

  See How Your Facebook Ads are Working

It seems impossible to be able to find out exactly how effective your advertising was down to the dollar. However, as with many other marketing fantasies, Facebook has made this a reality. After determining and calculating which users saw the Facebook ads, a company called Datalogix can then find out exactly which of those people bought items at the brick and mortar locations of the store. So far, the company has worked with fifty different Facebook marketing campaigns to find out who the ads are working on and how. In 70% of those campaigns, $1 that was spent on the advertising yielded $3 in actual sales. For many companies, this data is monumental. The ability to get an accurate estimate of ROI is unprecedented in the marketing world.

  For example, if you were selling your own brand of hair products at a single location, Datalogix would aggregate the users who were seeing your ads on Facebook alone. Then, based on the number of sales you made in a given time period, they could use the Facebook users’ personal information to determine which sales were directly based on Facebook ads. This would give you insight into whether you should increase, decrease, or leave your Facebook marketing budget alone. In the case of the fifty campaigns already studied, it sounds like the successful 70% would want to increase their budget to achieve an even higher ROI.

  Use Existing Emails to Target Specific Groups

If you feel weird about gaining access to the email addresses of your target audience through their Facebook accounts, that doesn’t mean you have to forego Facebook’s email targeting services altogether. In September, Facebook added a marketing feature that allowed marketers to use their own existing list of email addresses to target ads. So, if you’ve collected a list of email addresses at an event, through a mailing list or at the point of sale, you can have Facebook look up certain information about these users which will give you a better idea of what to send them. When many email addresses on your list are abstract names like “[email protected],” you can only infer certain information about the owner of the address. Yes, they like dogs, but how old are they, what is their gender and what other interests do they have outside the realm of canines? Facebook can find the answers to these questions for you, so you can then send highly targeted emails.

  Feature Facebook Ads on Other Sites

While not available yet to marketers, Facebook began experimenting with a new feature this summer. Soon enough, Facebook ads might actually appear on other website and mobile apps. When people are logged into apps such as Spotify or websites such as Zynga with their Facebook accounts, the social media site can place highly targeted ads in these locations. For the most part, the tiny Facebook ads next to the news feed are minimal and barely invasive. However, if they begin appearing on other sites, Facebook will have the opportunity to make more hard-hitting ads without compromising their own site’s layout and credibility.

  Facebook has an entire world of data about customers around the globe at its fingertips. However, it has to walk a fine line so as not to upset its users and drive them away to different social media options. Until Facebook crosses that line and becomes the least popular site on the Internet, marketers can use information on the social site to reach people more effectively. If you’re a marketer or are simply looking to advertise your business more effectively and drive sales using Facebook, it’s about time you looked into the wide range of options available.

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What is Evergreen Content and How Can it Bring You Traffic?

We all love a good topical or celebrity gossip article every now and then. Whether it’s about the 2012 presidential campaign or Snooki’s latest choice of flip flops, content that is new and current has its place on the World Wide Web. While articles like this are relevant and popular, will anyone still be reading them in ten years, or even five? Even one year sounds like a stretch for many popular articles on the Internet. If you’re not pumping out celebrity news and pop culture references on your site, your content still might go stale over time. For that reason, it’s important that you focus on making evergreen content.

  Like an evergreen tree stays green throughout the seasons, content that is considered evergreen will remain useful and popular on the Internet for years to come no matter how society might change over time. Evergreen content is perpetually relevant. This content tends to be more informational than anything else, and it is never news-related. You’ll need to think of topics that relate directly to your industry if you want to drive traffic with evergreen posts. In some industries, evergreen content is more difficult to think of than in others. Some common evergreen article topics include:   

  ·        How-To Articles – Obviously a how-to post about using a cell phone isn’t evergreen since technology is always changing, but consider more unchanging topics such as “how-to tie your shoes” or “how-to do a proper sit-up, “

·        Historical Articles – Content about people, places or things in history will always be relevant, and you won’t even need to perform maintenance since the information will never change.

·        Encyclopedic, Informational, Dictionary or Reference Articles – Defining certain aspects of your industry or creating reference-style material is another way to make your content evergreen. If your website is food-related, consider defining and explaining items like the “emulsion blender” or the spice “garam masala.” People will probably look things like these up when they need them for recipes, and your post will always be there.

  To be considered evergreen, your article doesn’t have to be useful forever. Even articles that are useful to readers a year from today will have garnered more traffic than those that were popular for a week. Especially if you have a popular site, you probably notice that you get a lot of views within the first 24-hours of posting. After that, the viewers slow down, and after a month you’re barely getting any new ones. If this sounds familiar, it’s time you tried making posts that were more evergreen.

  There are multiple ways that evergreen content will bring your website more traffic:

  Long Life Cycle

When you post content that is not evergreen, people might visit it a lot once it’s first published. After that, interest will die down. In a year or more, visitors might stumble upon the page and see that no one has commented on it since it was posted, and while it might be slightly useful, it is essentially dead. On the other hand, evergreen content lives on for years. People will comment on it consistently, which is a signal for new visitors that the article is worth reading. It will also be shared more on social sites and have a higher search engine ranking. This is considered a life cycle because the process of someone finding the page, reading it, then sharing it will happen over and over again.

  Link Building Potential

Your evergreen content will be linked back to for as long as it’s available. Other websites might reference it, which means visitors will be redirected there, and those visitors will then share it with others. The links will create and endless web of traffic that all leads back to your site. Even press channels might cite your article, because it will provide them with consistent information even when the topic is not popular on other websites.

  Brand Establishment

Even if the rest of the content on your company’s blog or website is topical, offering your audience evergreen content will get your name out to people who don’t normally read your posts. The evergreen content will serve as the bait for people to come to your site even if they aren’t inherently interested in the industry you write about. When they visit your site, they might see what value you provide, and they could become regular visitors. If you are consistently posting evergreen content on a wide variety of topics, you will become the go-to site for such information. Websites like eHow and About.com have done this well, as they are a trusted source for quick, accurate, and timeless articles.

  Higher Search Engine Ranking

When all of these benefits combine, it means that you’ll have a higher ranking on Google and other search engines. Your consistent traffic, wide range of backlinks, and the amount of shares your page has will put it high up on a list of search results. When your page is near the top, you are guaranteed more traffic. Similarly, the more people that click through on the Google results, the higher up you’ll go. When your evergreen content is on the front page of a Google search, it will be a consistent source of high quality traffic for years to come.

  Even if you only create one or two evergreen articles for your website, it will increase the amount of traffic you get, which will increase sales and overall profit. With just a few evergreen articles, you can draw people to your site consistently and prove that your content is valuable. With a whole website of evergreen content, you can build a foundation for sustainable web traffic and a website with a high level of authority. In addition to attracting traffic to your website, providing your readers with evergreen content will help build your brand on search engines and in the minds of consumers, build a consistent audience, and build your business to expand beyond its current limits. Start brainstorming, because evergreen content could be the key to the continued success of your website.

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Will Twitter Stop Counting Your Followers with the Dream Metric?

Since the beginning of Twitter, success has been measured by followers. Whether or not this was the most effective way to measure how popular people or brands were, it fell into place partly to reflect the way Facebook success was measured. However, the two platforms are vastly different, so this measurement might not be entirely correct. If your company has hundreds of followers, do you really know how many of them are actively reading your tweets? According to recent inquiries into the matter, not many of them.

  There are half a billion accounts on Twitter. Ideally for your brand, this would mean that a half a billion people are signing into the site every day and reading their Twitter feed. Instead, there are only 140 million users signing in on a regular basis, and most of the half a billion users created an account and forgot about it.

  So, is counting your followers really a logical way to measure your success on Twitter? Definitely not, and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams is trying to brainstorm ways to do it better. He suggested the dream metric, which is a measurement of how many people really see your Tweet. This is a great idea in theory, but how is that number even measured? Twitter doesn’t have the ability to measure the number of viewers for each Tweet, so other calculations will have to be used to arrive at this number.

  Soon enough, the number of followers for your personal or your company’s Twitter won’t matter. Though no decision has been reached on what will matter, the following options are being tossed around at the Twitter headquarters:

  Only Real Followers Counted

Though this is an obvious solution, it’s a tough one to swallow. Last year, Newt Gingrich was accused of getting fake followers in order to make himself seem more popular on Twitter. He battled these rumors successfully, and there was really no way to prove it either way. Followers are followers, and whether or not they were fake was not immediately obvious to fellow users. If Twitter suddenly changed up the game and only included active users in your followers, your numbers would drop significantly. Lady Gaga and Obama’s followers would drop by 70%.If you own a small company, you might have barely any followers left by the end of the switch.

  This might be an easy way to see how many people really read your Tweets and are actively involved with your brand on the site, but it’s such a huge switch that many Twitter users would be devastated. And, since there is nothing to compare these new numbers to, popularity would suddenly be impossible to gauge. Twitter might lose hundreds of users this way, and their goal is certainly not to bring the company down in flames. This is an option, but will be avoided if possible.

  Measure Success in Retweets

This option actually makes a little bit more sense. Instead of drastically altering the number of followers on each Twitter account, the founders could add a second metric, Williams’ “dream metric”, to display how many times a users’ posts were retweeted. So, if Lady Gaga tweets something and it is retweeted 100,000 times, that is an accurate way to see how many people read the original. If your company tweeted and it was retweeted 10 times, the popularity comparison is accurate. Sure, it’s sad, but 10,000 more people care about Lady Gaga than your company. Whether you like it or not, it’s an accurate measure of success and a good way to compare overall popularity.

  Again, this metric of measurement is accurate, but there’s another problem with it. Already, people say things like “RT if you like this” in the tweets as a way of asking people to retweet their thoughts. This is annoying now, and it will only get worse with the dream metric. People will begin posting for retweets instead of fans, and Twitter could lose thousands of followers fed up with the new popularity contest. The Twitter feed could become downright unreadable with cries for attention and irrelevant promotions.

  A Combination of the Two

Instead of moving to an entirely new system, Twitter does have the option to integrate these two new methods of measurement and combine it with the current follower count. Users and companies could keep their original follower count, which would include both active and inactive users, but could hide this number from the main page. That way, followers wouldn’t use it to determine the success of other users. In other words, hiding the followers would wean Twitter users off of their reliance on total followers as a measurement of success. They could also put it next to the number of active followers. However, it would be too easy to do the math, and it would be almost more embarrassing than only showing your active users.

  In addition to being an embarrassment, combining all three measurement metrics on a person or company’s Twitter page would start to make it look like a math problem. There would be too many totals, and people would only need to do simple math to see the flaws in the measurements of popularity that people are using.

  While no one can predict just what Twitter will do to make the measurement of success more accurate, one thing is for sure. Your total number of followers might become irrelevant soon enough. There are benefits to this though, as you can begin making more accurate goals and your Twitter follower count will be on a more fair and even playing ground. Though none of the above solutions completely solve the problem, Twitter will need to find an appropriate one soon, as people are starting to see through the number of followers. Depending on how popular your brand or company is in real life, the change will either help or hurt your overall success and popularity on Twitter.

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Five Reasons to Allow Guest Posts on Your Blog

It’s a fact of life in the blogosphere that as soon as your blog attracts even a few followers, one or more will want to post as a guest blogger. This is opposed to allowing comments on your posts, which you presumably allow; a guest blogger originates content that is at the same level of the hierarchy as your own posts. While such a request, as well as the whole idea of it, might rub you the wrong way, there are several good reasons to allow guest blog postings.

Reactions

You post a blog with the purpose, presumably, of getting people to read it. The fact that someone else wants to post alongside you is certainly an indication that someone is reading your stuff. A request to post is a somewhat more invested action than simply sticking something in the “Comments” box; as you know, the contents of the Comment box are not usually the stuff of deep thought or profound wisdom, and at their worst, sound like the ravings of someone who has been hit on the head too often. Yes, your guest blogger can be a raving nutjob, too, but you don’t have to allow his content intact (you can edit it) or at all (you can refuse it). It’s still your blog.

Feedback

If your blog presents a particular point of view or a given opinion (your own, presumably), that will dictate the tone and substance of the comments you receive. Most will fall into two fairly predictable categories: endorsement or disagreement (and since this is the Internet, those will be in the form of “AWESOME, DUDE!!! or “YOU SUCK!!!”—very little in between). Pretty soon, you have a polarized debate whether you wanted one or not. Having a guest blogger post his own opinion can be very healthy for whatever discussions you’ve generated so far. Chances are, you’ll see the issues you’ve been discussing from an unexpected perspective; certainly, your readers and followers will. Hearing from someone else can be a breath of fresh air.

Furthermore, a person wanting to guest post is often trying to dispute or even refute your stated positions or opinions. This creates a no-lose scenario for you: either he’ll sound like an idiot or a crazy person, thus reinforcing and validating what you have to say without your having to lift a finger--you’ll sound like the voice of reason by contrast; or he’ll offer reasonable and cogent arguments, which will give you and your readers food for thought and discussion.

Relief From Responsibility

Keeping up a blog can be exhausting. Sometimes you have nothing to say! If you’ve attracted followers, however, the last thing you want to do is have them drift away because you aren’t offering them fresh content in a regular basis. A guest blogger can not only relieve you of your responsibility to make regular posts but also help to revitalize a flagging creative interest. It can be very interesting to step back from you own blog for a day or two and watch the fur fly (or, if you prefer, enjoy the impassioned yet erudite debate generated by your guest blogger).

One interesting side effect of having a guest blogger who disagrees with you is that he becomes an avatar for all those people who post comments disagreeing with you, full of capital letters, exclamation points, spelling that would shame a third-grader, and badly constructed emoticons. In this way, he can actually calm things down. Similarly, if he basically agrees with you but expresses himself a bit differently, he can serve as the lightning rod instead of you for a little while.

  If you have a proprietary feeling about your blog, it may go against your grain to turn it over to another person, even for a brief period. But you still control all of the content. If your guest blogger says something that you don’t want to appear, simply edit it or delete it. If you want his post to appear but you want to be certain that no one thinks his wack-job opinion is your own, put “GUEST POST BY XXX” at the head of the post.

Blog Followers

Many people who want to post as guest bloggers will have blogs and followers of their own. This means that your guest’s followers will, at least as long as he posts on your blog, be followers of your blog as well. You just might attract and retain some of your guest’s followers for yourself. You should definitely be aware, if you’re not already, that “followers” aren’t just “those who agree with you” or even close to it. Therefore, even if your guest has as his stated purpose for his guest post, “Watch as I show this moron why he’s totally wrong,” not everybody who comes along for the ride will be in agreement with him—they might be inclined to be on your side.

No Such Thing as Too Much Information

If your blog isn’t of the “debating” variety—as in, you just want to share information, not elicit debate—then allowing guest posters is a no-brainer. That other guy may have information you don’t—a hiking blog might benefit from new information on trails or hiking shoes; a cooking blog from recipes or where to buy the best vegetables.

Some people—too many, probably—regard their blogs as nothing more than opportunities to sound off. While that can be fun and even therapeutic, the opportunity for conversation is often lost. Very little conversation occurs through a bullhorn, so you’re missing out if you treat your blog as a soapbox or a bully pulpit. There are people out there who don’t know things that you do—one of the purposes of a blog—but also, they know things that you don’t. Allowing guest posters is a way to talk with those people from whom you could learn something. It also sends the message to your followers that you aren’t interested in just preaching, or in narcissistically broadcasting yourself, but would like to form a mini-Web community based on a common interest.  This technique may give you more bloggers on your turf, but it will also help get traffic to your blog.

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Can Bing Really Bring It When it Comes to Site Traffic?

Google is by far the most prominent search engine on the Internet. In fact, it is easily the most prominent website period. People have been using the word “Google” as a verb for years, and companies around the world strive to be at the top of a search result list on the site. It stomped out other search engines such as Ask.com and Yahoo, but there is one competitor that isn’t going down without a fight. Bing is a search engine that was developed by Microsoft in 2009. It was originally called Windows Live Search among other things, but the company strategically chose a shorter and more fun name to compete with that of Google.

Bing is similar to Google in that it documents and indexes information about searches, results, and users to create more effective results lists. If you own a company and your website is a prominent feature, you probably spend a lot of your time thinking about ways to get your site up higher on the list of Google search results. The strategic move makes sense, as the site has a billion unique visitors monthly. However, it might be worth focusing some of your attention on Bing. While it doesn’t have the unparalleled popularity that Google does, it might become a viable search option in the near future. There are a few reasons why Bing might slowly start to overtake Google, or at least become a contender for searches.

Bing is Still Creating Its Indexes

Bing as a website has only been around for approximately three years. When you consider how much information must be collected to create an effective search engine, that’s not very long at all. A search engine must index every piece of information in the world that anyone could become curious about. It’s actually difficult to search for something on Google that isn’t there. Google has been around for a lot longer, so it has more complete indexes of information. Every search teaches Google something new, so it is simply a wiser program. For all we know, Bing might be just as good if not better than Google was three years into its life cycle.

By ignoring the possibility for Bing’s growth and development, your company might be too late to join the list of search results. While Google keeps its search engine ranking system secret, it’s a safe bet that the oldest sites have more weight than a simple WordPress created a few hours ago. Making sure your site is on Bing now might give you success in the near future.

Bing Provides Social Integration

Word of mouth is by far the most effective form of advertising. If you’re going to try a new hair product or restaurant, you certainly won’t rely solely on the information presented in a TV commercial or even a set of online reviews. Instead, you’ll ask for the opinion of your closest friends. Friends usually share similar interests, which is why adding a social aspect to a list of search results is so revolutionary.

This is probably the one thing that Google did wrong. Google Plus was developed with this concept in mind, but it missed the mark because it doesn’t have the power of a popular social media site behind it. If you are a member of Google Plus, you can see which of your fellow Google Plus users liked a certain result in a search results list. However, these are not always close friends, because not everyone has joined the site yet. Bing did the same thing but used Facebook to outshine Google.

Since Bing is integrated with Facebook, you can see which of your Facebook friends liked the search results. Of course, we’ve all had our Facebook pages for years now, so our Facebook friends are our true friends, and we can trust their opinions. Anyone would be much more likely to pick a retail store based on the recommendation of their stylish sister on Facebook versus their estranged coworker on Google Plus.

As for your website, this means that becoming part of Bing’s search result index will give you the opportunity to be recommended personally by friends of the searcher. This is the most valuable way you can be promoted, and Bing will only grow in popularity because of it.

Getting towards the top of a list of Google search results should certainly be a priority of yours, but don’t forget to consider the power of Bing. While it might not be the most effective search engine to drive traffic to your site now, there are a few reasons it could begin to grow, so you should try to get on top of the trend before it even begins.

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Do Presidential Candidates Buy Web Traffic?

You know internet marketing is important when presidential candidates start devoting more of their time and attention to it.  The media seems focused on which US Presidential candidate can pull in the most Twitter Followers, Facebook Fans, YouTube Subscriptions and website hits.  Many seem to rely on these almost like poll figures, though the truth is, that traffic could have come from anywhere.  Because huge packages of web traffic can now be bought, people are watching the presidential internet rankings closely to determine which candidate truly has the internet majority.

  When Presidents Buy Web Visitors, They Get Votes

The benefits of web traffic for this year’s candidates are far more valuable than you might realize.  It’s not just a vague number, but a link to more powerful influencing.  For example, with targeted web traffic, that person might subscribe to the candidate’s social media feeds, opt in for emails, and maybe even give up their home address.  With this information, the candidate’s team has added contacts to their direct mail lists.  With some great debating and packaging, those can lead to campaign donations and ultimately, votes.  Plus, when it comes to social media, much of their traffic will do some campaigning of their own by commenting, Liking, reTweeting, and sharing.  That means by buying just one hit for just one of their websites, it could snowball into a powerful campaigning force.

  Getting Targeted Traffic Means Reaching Their Demographic

Just like advertisers, campaign managers are constantly polling the public to determine what each demographic wants from the next president. By getting targeted traffic from each group, they are trying to reach, they increase their chances of getting the kind of exposure they want and with whom.  That means they can set up a campaign site geared towards mom’s and then purchase their traffic within that group.  They can then repeat this process, with a website and content to match and influence the traffic they are directing there.  Through these sites, they can start up a conversation on the talking points they want to hit with each audience, giving them even more information they need to reach that crowd outside of the web.  Of course, eventually they hope the hits they see will generate more organically, but it’s a great way to get a jump on the crowd they want. 

  Better Page Ranking for Reputation Management

The reputation of our future president is always held under the microscope by the media and political commentators, but for most of the internet crowd, Google controls what they see.  In order to get the page they want at the top when someone searches Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, they have to put constant efforts into search engine optimization.  There are a lot of people badmouthing both the incumbent and the challenger.  That means they need to put out a lot of positive content out there for the various hot button topics that are trending.  Otherwise, the top spot for the search terms Mitt Romney could be a blog called Mitt Romney Doesn’t Understand Middle Class America.  In order to sink that title and get people to their official site or one of their many positive satellite sites, they have to get new content written, published, and then a lot of traffic clicking on it.  When a better page ranking affects this important of a campaign, candidates will pay dearly for it.

  The Candidate with the Early Lead

Back in January, even with Republican candidates entertaining the masses with their controversial debates, Barak Obama had a commanding lead, when it comes to web traffic that is.  According to Nielsen, he had a shocking 4.2 million unique visitors!  Mitt Romney trailed Ron Paul with 773,000 visitors.  The most recent numbers (yes people are tracking this) showed that Obama is still in the lead, beating Romney each week with almost five times as many unique hits.  While some attribute the President’s internet popularity to the young demographic, with most of his traffic coming through Facebook, that’s not the only thing keeping him in the lead.  His campaign staff members are making sure to exhaust every search engine optimization opportunity they have and Romney will have to cover considerable ground in order to catch up.  That’s why his recent explosion of Twitter Followers has caught the attention of skeptics.  He had only 690,000 Twitter Followers last Friday and Obama had 18 million.  Then, Romney started getting 3,000 to 4,000 new Followers every day.  By the end of just that weekend, he had 100,000 new Followers.  Instead of a lot of new fans, he got stuck with a scandal with rumors flying about whether or not he bought those Followers.  Many of the new Followers have been found to be fake accounts and bots, which take even more of a toll since they obviously won’t be contributing to the Romney campaign any time soon.  Some Republicans even argue that it was the work of a Liberal buying fake fans to ruin Romney’s reputation.

  People who buy web visitors are not uncommon.  It’s a regular practice in the world of SEO, whether for celebrity sites or simply business owners trying to sell their products.  If you want to get noticed on the web, you have to get website hits.  If you need to buy web traffic in order to compete with the huge corporations who can purchase their page rankings with ease, then why wouldn’t you?  Now imagine that same argument but applied to a candidate for the President of the United States.  Getting noticed and getting web traffic just got a lot more important.  So are the candidates buying web traffic? Most likely.  Is it a matter of ethics?  Probably not, but more a matter of marketing.