The OMG 20 Step Guide to Going Digital
1. Buy a domain name
2. Get a website created
3. Add plenty of interesting content to your website
4. Set up a news/ blog area where new and fresh content can be added regularly
5. Amend your META tags (title, description, and keywords) with keywords that people are searching for (See Keyword Research)
6. Disperse the odd keyword around your website within titles, e.g. we trekked up Mt Kilimanjaro as a challenge for charity and our personal development
7. Include powerful imagery to coincide with your text
8. Add social bookmarks to the end of your articles, enabling people to share your content and images on social networks
9. Set up accounts on the main social networking sites Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, Pinterest & Google +. Include icons on your website. Automate your social media updates for increased productivity
10. Publish content on the social networks about your business and industry news and ideas with links back to your business website
11. Allow people to interact with your website, give them free whitepapers and allow them to sign up to the newsletter for further interaction
12. Email your growing email list with a fortnightly/ monthly newsletter, branded and packed with current material about your business and the industry as a whole
13. Update your business cards to reflect your web, email and social media presence
14. Write and publish articles on popular article directories such as http://ezinearticles.com/
15. Submit your URL to Google for listing, as well as other major search engines
16. Submit your URL to directories. Include keywords, description and title
17. Use PR wire to distribute a press release about your business ethos and summary of your websites intent. Add a unique element for reader interest
18. Start using Google Analytics to measure traffic to the website, and how people use your website. Any improvements can be identified from Google Analytics. Fro marketers this is a priceless utility in improving your marketing strategy in the long term
19. Find a software tool for measuring your ranking in search engines. Watch your rankings as you follow the above steps for digital success
20. Measure all of your activities and cut out the areas or techniques that are not working so well and improve on those that are. Try different methods of engaging your readers such as competitions, guest bloggers, freebies and voucher codes for increased traffic.
Each business is different so techniques will vary; as long as you are finding out what works, and what doesn’t you can improve on your previous successful campaigns.
Viral Marketing – A Fresh Approach
You’re all over Facebook, Twitter & even Linked In like a rash. You’ve heard some companies whisper their successes in viral marketing, and you know briefly how to put a video onto YouTube.
Don’t wait another day to embrace this increasingly powerful approach to online marketing.
After reading this, I guarantee you will have picked up something new and interesting. An idea or a technique you’ll be eager to try out. So, from the start here is what OMG would recommend to get started in viral marketing.
- BRANDING! Open a company account on YouTube, Vimeo, and Daily Motion. Include your company logo and a brief bio of what your company do where possible. In this bio include SEO friendly keywords.
- AD SENSE! It’s good to be aware of ad sense in YouTube. For monetising your videos from the off you can incorporate this. However, your videos will have an advert plastered over them. Worth knowing about in case you wish to earn money from the video itself.
- BE REGULAR! With viral marketing as with social media keep a regular video posting schedule. Whether it’s fortnightly or monthly, keep streaming your content.
- Plan your video content in advance! You may want to talk through existing material, such as packages, or posts in the blog for example.
- OPTIMISE! On You Tube and Daily Motion you have the ability to write about the video during the upload process. Fill this out with keywords, links and a comprehensive summary of what the video is looking to achieve. This part of the marketing is crucial to adding SEO to your viral campaign and tying it neatly into your existing website with links back to it.
- SPECIALIST VIDEO SHARING! On Vimeo they advise you to sign up for PRO account to market your business on the growing video sharing community. Vimeo is quite a tight knit community at the moment and the Pro account costs $199 a yr. With this you get a lot of handy features including the SEO friendly URL’s to support your video and a customisable video page.
- BE SOCIAL! Don’t forget You Tube; Vimeo & Daily Motion are all social networks too. So reply to any comments you get on your videos as this will further encourage your marketing campaign.
- CROSS PROMOTE! Include links to your channels on your email signature, website and social networks for increased exposure.
- QUALITY CONTENT! Don’t forget the quality of your video content is just as if not more important than the marketing that surrounds it. Keep it fresh and fun. If you can add humour to your viral campaign even better!
- FREEBIES/ COMPETITIONS! Another powerful viral marketing technique besides video is competitions or freebies. We recommend you plan this carefully. Make sure you show your terms clearly and advertise on all your networks.
For a great example of the powerful viral marketing to showcase a product take a look here.
If you are new to viral marketing these tips will get your company out there on a popular platform with highly engaged traffic. With all elements of viral marketing, whether you use videos, competitions, or vouchers the key to success is originality and giving something back to your audience.
I Dream of Google
Yes, I probably do need to get out more. Dreaming about Google? Well, it’s the pinnacle of all online marketing. Essentially, we want your business to be number one in Google, talked about all over Facebook, Twitter and Linked In. We want to make you the hub of all knowledge, and the go to for your customers who are thinking about your product and services. Naturally.
So, the dream is very much alive with Google, as one of the major players of all online activity. This doesn’t look set to change either, as statistics by Harrison Weber have revealed Google dominate 76% of logins together with Facebook.
For any business, getting into the top spot of Google is a key priority. However, many business owners lack the know how or the time it takes to do so. Have a re think about what you want to invest in your business. If you want to double traffic to your website and generate leads read on. If you want to learn the importance of search marketing and embrace digital marketing read on. If you don’t have the time, but know you should be doing something, go here.
OK, your keen to get into the top spot of Google, but you haven’t got a clue where to start.
• First things first, think about your business and what key phrases come to mind when you describe what it’s about. Research those keywords for their popularity. Make sure there are little competing companies using those keywords. Ideally adding your area to the mix of keywords will help you rank higher.
• Now look at your website, run an audit of its strengths and weaknesses. Have you got title tags in place? Is there a clear description in the META tags? A decent SEO web audit will tell you this.
• Run through an SEO checklist which is right here.
• Optimise your website for a customer not Google, whilst including the odd keyword throughout your entire website. Be page specific with certain keywords that feature in the content of the page. This will help you avoid the Panda and the Penguin.
• Set up your pages on the website with Pay Per Click in mind. Easily read, strong call to action in place and plenty of visual stimulation. Remember, attention spans on the internet are very short.
• Test responsiveness and popularity for your chosen keywords or phrases using Google Analytics and a reliable rank report.
• Using data from organic search visits plan an unbreakable SEO strategy for your existing site.
All of the above have been tried and tested and should give you a great place to start your SEO. Remember, your content must be updated regularly and any social media needs to be kept up to date and little and often. Together with regularly checking your analytics to see what people do on your site; and if they go where you want them to, you have every chance of success in Google and other search engines.
Facebook Timeline Update
News Feed
The News Feed is focused on engaging Facebook to spread greater awareness of your company. For example, you post a photo or status and a fan would like it, which then appears in their newsfeed for their friends to see, which you would hope their friends would engage in.
Custom Tabs
The content strategy for custom/landing tabs was focused on engaging visitors with a clear call to action. This used to be the option choice to get people liking your page.
Now with Timeline, Facebook allows you more freedom to tell your companies story and build a sense of growth and individualism.
No Default Landing Tabs
With Timeline you no longer have the ability to set a default tab for non-fans. Default tabs in the past were primarily used as a way to increase fan conversion rates on a Page. This is now done with a cover image, highlights, and other ways to make that first impression. Here is a breakdown of the latest features likely to affect your Facebook strategy:
Simplify your Profile Picture
The new profile pictures are 200 x 200 px square. This means it’s impossible to fit a call-to-action (as many companies did on the old format of brand Pages/profile pictures). Even more so in Timeline’s thumbnail which is now a tiny 30px image. You don’t have to include your brand’s name in the profile picture, as the brand’s Timeline name travels anywhere that the profile picture goes. A logo alone will do the trick.
Your Company History
Timeline lets visitors interact with your story from the moment the company was founded/started/ launched, right to the middle, and the modern day. Facebook users can flip through your history in a variety of ways. The main way is via the dated sidebar on the right, so try your best to fill in the gaps in your company history. Milestones are one of the easiest ways to fill in your Timeline.
Create Milestones
Before now, anything posted on a Facebook Page was immediately tagged with the date of when it was posted. Milestones however let you to select the date a post was intended. So, whether you’ve changed headquarters or launched a campaign on TV, or redesigned your logo, you can direct people to it by creating milestones for that chunk of company history.
Highlights and Pins for ‘Look at Me’ Appeal
FB Pages of old Facebook admins could not control how posts were displayed on their Page and visitors could see updates in reverse chronological order or by Facebook’s Edge rank. A confusing system at best.
Pinning a status, photo or video gives admins control on the company story. Focusing on what the company are proud of or need you to know about first and foremost by moving a post story to the top of your Facebook Timeline. When you pin something to the top of your Timeline it stays for seven days, or until you unpin it, so think carefully about what you want to feature at the top each week. Each week, you can feature one post at the top of your Timeline, so it will be one of the first things that your visitors see when they visit your Page. To pin a story at the top of the Timeline, hover over the pencil icon at the top right hand corner of any post and select ‘Pin to Top’.
Timeline now allows you to control feature specific posts on your Timeline through Highlighting or Pinning. Highlighting turns any story, which normally occupies a single column, into a full-width story. This is perfect for large horizontal photos (dimensions for highlighted photos are 846px by 403px).
Recommendations
The test of any decent company is the reviews of its previous and current customers. Where ‘recommendations’ have always been around they are now far more visible in the current Timeline format. Monitor this like a hawk, and encourage people to add theirs so your company has a gleaming social testimonial for all to see.
Offers
Very recently Facebook updated Timeline to include Offers. This allows Admins to offer discounts and through the Status update area. The Offer option appears on the right hand side of the update options. Offers are only available on certain Pages, this may have something to do with the category selected when the Page was set up or the number of fans a page has. This is powerful way of engaging fans, and will help drive new people to your business. It will also get fans talking about your page when offers are shared with friends of fans.
Photos are Gold
Facebook Timeline is much more visual than before and it’s about the company story told over time, rather than what’s happening now. Where possible, it’s best to focus on telling that story through images photos and other visual content. If you are trying to fill in your Timeline and need some inspiration take a look at Relentless Energy Drink, their Timeline is full of interesting, and visual content.
Social Media: Why It’s More Than Just a Bandwagon!
You’ve heard it over and over again but perhaps you’re not convinced. Twitter this, Facebook that put a video on You Tube! You might want to scream at the ‘it’ crowd that are now tweeting this and liking that but there is method to the social madness.
They are harnessing the huge potential from these online hang outs and with 800 million active users on Facebook and 140 million on Twitter, companies can no longer afford to ignore social media. The people are ready and waiting to be marketed to.
Question is how can you entice them to your website and get them interested in your product and services? Well there are a number of ways you do this, here are a few pointers:
- » Update regularly. Statuses and tweets are your link to the masses; make sure they see your message regularly.
- » Build a relationship with your potential customers by sharing information instead of selling on your social networks.
- » Interact with fans who interact with you.
- » Mix up your media for an interesting and engaging company profile for people to follow
- » Find influencers and communities around your brand or industry. Follow them and their followers and become involved in their communities
- » Use pictures and links back to specific webpages for provocative messages about your brand or products.
- » Pop your social media buttons on your signature, and printed materials.
- » Include a feature on your newsletters about a unique idea featured only in your social networks (Twitter competition, Facebook coupon, etc.).
- » Use popular social networking mentions such as #ff to promote others you like in return for a mention across their network.
- » Use http://timely.is for engaging with users at peak times.
- » Make a social media schedule and stick to it. Short & Sweet on a daily basis is best.
Those juicy tips should keep you busy for a while, and kick start your social media campaign. If you need any help with your social media marketing don’t be afraid to ask OMG for a helping hand.
Our Twitter page is https://twitter.com/#!/OMGurus
Our Facebook page is https://www.facebook.com/onlinemarketinggurus
Penguin Update from Google… And No we’re Not Joking!
Officially launched on Tuesday 24th April, Google released its latest war on web spam through the Penguin Algorithm.
You may be wondering what all the fuss is about if you’re a wise webmaster who is totally clued up on avoiding spam techniques and Panda punches.
If however, you have noticed a recent decrease in traffic and a significant drop in all your rankings the chances are the Penguin has got you.
Avoid and Recover!
With all Google algorithms prevention is ideal. To avoid getting penalised by the Penguin, take some time out to look through your website top to bottom to check for the following No No’s:
Cloaking– A website that looks completely different to a person than to a search engine.
Keyword Stuffing – You have your keywords repeated over and over and over… all over your website to the point of spam alert!
Shallow Content – Lacking substance and depth. No one wants to swim in puddle so make sure your website is a deep pool of useful appropriate information.
Hidden Text – Text that people won’t see because of colours but search engines can see in the code.
Ouch!
If you think you have been ‘Penguined’ there are steps you can take to get on the road to recovery, and put your website back where it belongs. Firstly, go through and remove and correct the problem spam areas on your website. Next, if you haven’t already got access to Google Webmaster Central, now is the time to get logged in. You may have received messages from Google about the Penguin affecting your website and any number of items may have been flagged up that need your urgent attention.
In the rare case you find your website was affected, but you have been as good as gold with your optimisation you can rectify this. Breathe deeply, and go here. Simple.
By following our advice you should see things return to normal in a month or so.
