Best of the Net: SEO, Marketing and Social

Everyone seems to be talking about online marketing these days and while it’s true that online marketing is important for SME’s, offline marketing definitely shouldn’t be forgotten about. In fact, there are a lot of offline marketing techniques that can really jumpstart your business and the good news is that a lot of them are not only cheap, but will easily generate a huge ROI.

With businesses investing in SEO, PPC, Social Media or Directory listings are finding their ROI’s diminish quite expediently, we’re here to highlight some of the most effective offline marketing strategies that you should be using to generate a serious amount of buzz around your small business.

Cablevision

Even though the internet is a popular method of advertising, advertising on cable is still a great means of reaching consumers. While the introduction of the digital video recorder has made advertising on cable different, it is by no means difficult or expensive. The low cost of advertising on cable is very attractive and, since many people are still using cable television for advertising late nights, you could even come up with an infomercial suitable for your business goals.

Offline Newsletters

Whether you have been running a newsletter for your company or organization for a long time, or you are thinking about doing one, you may wonder about whether you should run advertising in newsletters. Or perhaps you are looking to run ads in someone else’s newsletter, and want to know whether it is a good use of your money. Well, there is real value to running advertising in newsletters, making it a win-win for both parties.

Depending upon how many ads you run, and how much you are able to charge, you can get money for your costs in running your newsletter, and even more money that can go towards your business, or towards you making more money in your profession. Old timers still read local Traders and would certainly entertain your newsletter as well.

Social Is Hot, Though

There are thousands of social media sites found on the Internet today. With over a billion social media site users actively taking part in these sites, it only makes sense that businesses should strive to maintain a good marketing presence through them. Social media sites allow businesses to communicate with consumers through an assortment of mediums including texts, photos, and videos. If businesses use these sites in the correct manner, they can stay in constant contact with existing customers as well as reach new ones.

Ok, so why not advertise your business through offline social events if social media is still hot? We’re scratching our heads asking the same darn thing. Advertise your business at skating parties which will get shared online; seems to make sense, yet others aren’t thinking too far outside their budget zone.

Learn more at http://thecmiteam.com.

Promoting a site for Google requires a different tack than promoting a site for human viewers. Google is getting better at determining a site’s worth all the time. They update their algorithms multiple times a day, with major changes happening roughly once a month. This is good news. Every change in Google’s search protocol means that they are getting better at learning what your site is about and figuring out which search queries best match your content. They are getting a clearer view of the real value of your site.

Imagine you own a store that sells leather jackets, a real one with walls and a door, and you name it ‘The Hard-Wear Store’ to be edgy. Let’s say people in your town aren’t that bright, and they get the wrong idea. They visit your store looking for hammers and nails, light bulbs and ladders. Every time a new customer comes through the door, you make a tally mark on a piece of paper. You’re doing great, according to the tally sheet. You’ve only got 10 people a day coming in to check out your leather jackets, but 20 more people coming in to look for hardware stuff. 30 people a day, that’s great! You start to promote your store, claiming you are entertaining 30 customers a day, three times what a normal leather jacket store gets. Even the mayor stopped by your store last week (looking for lug nuts, but that’s not important).

This is not a terrible situation, provided you are the leather jacket dealer. You’re wasting some of your energy getting the wrong kind of customers, but maybe some of them decide to get leather jackets while they’re at your store. But what if you are the owner of a hardware store in the same town and you’ve been seeing fewer visitors since they started getting confused by the new store? What if you own another leather jacket store, and everyone in town only knows about ‘The Hard-Wear Store’ even though you carry the coolest fringed jackets around? The internet’s not a zero-sum game, there are enough customers and links out on the internet for everyone. But there is a good reason Google doesn’t want people knowing their exact search algorithm. They want a clear picture of the internet to give the best results for searchers. When you fake it, like a leather store pretending to be a hardware store, you help muddy the internet waters.

In the early days of the internet, nobody was designing sites or creating links for the benefit of robots. Good sites on the net were popular because they had visitors that told their friends and linked to them on their own websites. Bad sites fell by the wayside without visitors or links from other sites. The internet got big enough that ‘survival of the fittest’ could hardly last. Businesses realized how valuable the internet was and how lucrative it could be to be on top of Google rankings even if users weren’t spontaneously linking to your site or visiting on their own. Thus SEO, and an arms race between optimizers and search engines, started.

Manual action on spam (generally removal of spam sites from Google’s cache) through 9/2012 from Google’s ‘Fighting Spam’ page inside their ‘How Search Works’ site. Blue data points are for ‘Pure Spam’. Taken from http://www.google.com/insidesearch/howsearchworks/fighting-spam.html

SEOs often lament algorithm changes since it makes their jobs harder, but I welcome them. Every step gets us closer to a spam-free internet. It’s a little scary for those people whose jobs are to get sites higher in the rankings, but also means that interesting, popular content may soon be king again. The idea of an internet where the interesting and useful are top dog makes me happier than a kid at Christmas. The idea of millions of useless link network sites lying around the internet, created in a hurry simply to push a Thai Cialis company’s rankings up one spot makes me sadder than piles of wrapping paper the day after.

The secret ingredients in marketing a site for real people and the Google of the future are talent and patience. Unfortunately, these two traits have been absent from traditional SEO since it’s inception. You need a good product, good content, and a good site to be popular. This takes talent. You also need for people to realize what you have is worthwhile. This takes patience. Here’s hoping we can find some of both in our SEO work.

Joe Dawson works and writes for Printing Peach, a Canadian customer-service focused company that specializes in printing, web design, and SEO/SEM.

Ever wanted to give your company or service a bit of a marketing push offline but have been put off by the lengthy and expensive process of doing so? If you take into account the time spent trying to put everything together then you can’t really be blamed!

First you will need to find a graphic designer local to you who can create a flyer of leaflet which can satisfy your needs, and then take into account the time they will take to produce the design, not to mention the cost they’re likely to charge!

Next you need to go through the lengthy process of finding a printer who can make the desired number of printed copies, delivered to you, in the format and style that you want. Bear in mind here that some printing firms will take many weeks to process all of this, and it won’t be cheap either!

Finally you will need to then find a company who will then deliver flyers for you, in the area you want. Again this is a very important part of the process if you’re looking to go down the route of direct marketing, using door to door methods. You may be forgiven at this point for wanting to scream at someone, or wishing you never even got involved with the whole marketing process!

Thankfully however there is another way. Design Print Post is a company which takes care of the whole process, from start to finish. Their unique service means that you don’t need to spend excessive time, and money, looking for each of the services required to carry out offline marketing. In a sense they provide the whole process for you, from start to finish, in one package.

Say for example you had just opened up a flower delivery service in a small town. Maybe you feel that no-one knows you exist right now (maybe you’re tucked away in a small avenue which doesn’t get so much visibility from pedestrians). Perhaps you feel that you need a bit of a direct marketing push – you want someone to go and spread the word about what it is your flower delivery service does, where it does it, and how much it charges. You decide that a flyer campaign would be great, targeting houses in the local area. However you have some stumbling points – you’re new in the area and don’t have any graphic design contacts, or printers, or marketers. This is where Design Print Post will come in handy – the flower delivery service can simply get in touch with them and explain what they need. All they need to give is the details of the leaflet (company logo, if they have one, address, contact number, what they want to promote), the size flyer they require, and the number (and if necessary type) of people to deliver to. This enables the flower company to concentrate on what they know, and to focus on selling and running their business. They can leave the marketing in the capable hands of Design Print Post, who will take care of all their marketing needs.