How and When to Use Social Media Channels

Most marketers focus upon two major concerns; HOW do they make money for their organisation and WHY do some marketing channels make more money that others.

When social media channels were first introduced every marketer adopted this new marketing concept and exploited the possibilities to solve their HOW and WHY concerns. Some notable organisations claimed spectacular results. However, engaging in Social Media marketing is a challenge particularly in integrating it into a companies existing marketing plan and to meet company expectations on profitability, and it's not for everyone.

THE GOALS OF SOCIAL MEDIA ARE MISUNDERSTOOD

Most marketers do not understand the dynamics that social media may not be the appropriate medium to engage in the promotion of their product or service. There are characteristics and special audience requirements to consider for each social media channel that will be discussed in this article for blobs and social media.

Most large organisations in the market place, activity engage in Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn but, usually, the promotion only accounts for less than 1%-2% of total revenues.

IS SOCIAL MEDIA RIGHT FOR YOUR ORGANISATION?

There are some pre-requisites required before you engage in social media:

1. Know thyself - know your enemy as well as yourself
2. Know your goals - have clear, achievable and measurable metrics
3. Know your limits - set limits and do not exceed them.
4. Create a clear, simple and proper marketing message or narrative.

Once your organisation has answered these questions, then all organisations should ask themselves and develop four fundamental questions.

1. Is engagement in social medium right for my organisation?
2. What is the appropriate match of social medium to my marketing message?
3. Develop a four step social media strategy targeted to the product/message
4. Develop appropriate metrics for measurable and growth.

Companies and organisations should adopt a reality check and not get drawn into the latest and greatest money earning fade pushed out by so called experts. Perform a reality check and ask yourselves is this right for the business. Decide what time, labour and budget will be allocated and do a "reality check" on the benefits.

THE INTENT OF SOCIAL MEDIA CHANNELS

Social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn were never intended to be a marketing channel - they were created for like-minded people to share like-minded experiences and referrals and not for marketing campaigns - although some recommendations from friends, fans

Although these incremental sales might be useful but do come at an expense in time and resources. LinkedIn was conceived as a professional job seeking channel, Twitter was conceived as a immediate sharing experience focused on the immediacy factor. The exception is Google. Google + (Plus) was created as a marketing tool and is having a hard time establishing itself in the marketing place because of that. Users in the social sphere are not yet ready to accept marketing material. They want to give advice, recommend data, product and news too friends, fans and followers and share superior knowledge.

Likes are not sales.

CLEAR AND CONSISTENT MARKETING MESSAGE

The marketing message is the board speak, the messaging of its representatives and the publicity language of its advertising departments and representatives that will determine the marketing message.

The essence of social media is which channel will communicate who you are most effectively. Treating all social media channels equally to carry your message will just drain all your efforts, resources and budgets. So its best to identify first which medium will deliver the best results in communicating your message.

BLOGS VERSUS WEBSITES AS SOCIAL MEDIUM CHANNELS

Blogs are one of the best ways to communicate information and attract organic or natural search visitors. Websites do not change that often but blogs do or they should do. Blogs are more active and casual in presenting information and people tend to link to blogs as the information is usually current and up to date. Studies have shown that Blogs get more visitors than websites, get more links that websites, get more pages viewed and overall convert more that websites. From an SEO viewpoint blogs are fantastic for search engines to discover, crawl, index and return results to users' queries.

The One Way Link Building Strategy

Today everyone wants to use the one way link building strategy on their websites but there are still controversies on the right method to do this. Text link building is the most commonly used SEO technique with the aim of benefiting commercial websites. There is absolutely no doubt that increasing the popularity of your link using this method is among the best ways through which you can gain backlinks but doing it is not just that easy. For you to be able to build one way links on your website you first have to create quality content and then use the key words that you desire in it. The content that you create will then be used in different websites on the internet.

You can write an article that you will then submit to the article directories on the internet. You can also have a press release that will be syndicated on the web. An online newsletter submitted to the social media is another way to do this. There so many other quality content that you can use. The most important thing when building one way links for your website is that you should use the keywords in certain places on the content. The keywords will act as the text link building tools as well as the anchor text and be your backlinks when applicable.

Using articles to promote websites is perhaps the most common link building strategy that is used. This effectively leads to one way link building for you website and increase your online presence. As you use this method you should ensure that the selected keywords appear in crucial parts such as the title, first paragraph, the article body and at the last paragraph. The keywords should also appear as anchor text in the "About the Author" section of the article. By submitting an article to the article directories you will have given them content that their readers can read about. In return they will give you the "About the Author" section where you will introduce yourself and give links to your website.

If you decide to use press releases instead you will have to write a different content from the articles. This includes news about your company's event, products and services. You must ensure that the press release is rich in keyword content before it is syndicated on the web. You will be given a section known as "boilerplate" where you can introduce the company at the bottom of the press release. As in the article ensure that you have the keywords in the title, first paragraph, the main body of the press release and towards the end. Ensure that you use the keywords as anchor text in the "boilerplate" section of the press release.

Understanding Shared Hosting

Almost everyone has "surfed" the Internet or World Wide Web, and has enjoyed the millions of pages of information, entertainment and activity possible on such a universal technology. Because of the global ability of the Internet, there are millions of people who want to create their own websites and web pages. How do they do this? It requires a server or web hosting company to deliver access to the Internet.

Where can a consumer or company go to get a server? Not many people can afford their own servers, or maintain them in a stable and secure manner. Because of this there are millions of web hosting companies with their own servers operating around the clock. Servers, however, are used in a variety of ways to provide an individual or company with the services they need. Generally, they are "dedicated", "shared" or "virtual" servers.

The determination of whether a consumer requires a dedicated or a shared hosting provider usually depends upon their budget and their needs. A shared server provides the client with a segment of the server, and requires them to share an IP address with the other sites on the same server. This is generally not a problem, but shared hosting can make it difficult for certain pages to appear, such as those with the HTTPS prefix, or secured pages. Additionally, shared hosting may prevent a site from using its own SSL certificate, which may prevent certain users from accessing the site.

Why do people use shared hosting? It is significantly less expensive to use a shared server than a dedicated one, and if a company or individual would like to provide information, commentary, news or other information only, then shared hosting is probably their best method. If a great deal of e-commerce, data base or other secure information will be handled on a daily basis a dedicated server may make the process simpler.

Where do you find shared hosting? There are literally millions of providers around the world, but the best will have guaranteed services, such as security, technical support and allow for numerous operating systems to be employed by their various clients. For example, shared hosting companies should be able to work with Linux as well as Microsoft Windows.

Visitors to a web hosting review site can find a comprehensive listing or directory of both dedicated and shared hosting companies. All of the companies have been screened for reliability, security and a high level of customer satisfaction. They narrow down the list of shared hosting providers to only those guaranteed to deliver the best services available and provide direct links to each of the companies mentioned.

Compare Web Hosts is a premier web hosting directory that provides you with accurate and unbiased information on web hosting services on the Internet. For more information, visit http://www.CompareWebHosts.com.

Internet Marketing Advertising Requirements

The art of improving your internet marketing advertising prowess takes a lot of guts and experience. If you have not acquired both yet, it greatly helps if you ask for a hand or two for certain tasks that you find hard to do. The following are some of the internet marketing requirements that can help you.

Content

Content is one of the most important foundations of an internet marketing advertising website. If you want to acquire spot-on information that you can display on your web pages, you are advised to give out accurate details about what you want to be displayed on your business website. That way, the staff members can also generate the appropriate contents for your site.

Keyword Generation

To generate keywords, you may use the online keyword creation tools. The free ones can somehow generate satisfactory results. However, if you are planning to use more accurate and more effective keywords, it may be a good idea to opt for the premium versions of these keyword creation tools. Aside from giving you more relevant keywords, these tools can help you rank higher among the websites that are included in the indices of the search engines.

Media

Media are important components of the business websites. Like the content, it is important that you display website media that says a lot about what your business website is about. That way, you can increase the level of relevance that your business website has in relation to your target topic. In the long run, this can help improve your online visibility when the users look for your business website using any search engine.

 

Research

Research is one of the most important foundations that you can get to improve your business website appearance. You may ask online researchers to do this task for you if you find it hard to comply with the requirement because of your busy professional schedule. By doing so, you are highly assured that the content will be highly relevant to the message that you want to convey to your potential target audience.

Affiliates

Looking for connections and establishing a good professional relationship with other internet marketing advertising companies do take a while before they blossom into a well-develop network of affiliates. However, when this happens, you are assured that you will never go wrong with it because there is no way but to further expand your potential target population using this method.

Site Ranking

Simply put, site ranking is the frequency of appearance that your business website has in relation to a certain spot in the online realm. Higher site ranking for your site implies better marketing potential for your entire business.

These are just some of the basic requirements that you have to fulfill to assure a fairly competitive online business. From that point, you may always opt to do better for your business website by finding innovations and performing regular updates for it.

Web Design Tutorials - Making It Simple For Everyone

A web page is a lot like a text document where it can be really simple or highly complicated. But unlike documents, web pages can be highly dynamic or interactive if you want to impress the people viewing the page. The overall design of the web page is all up to you but it would help a lot if you can read web design tutorials such as this so you can come up with a website that has a modern design or at least something that reflects your own creativity. If you do not yet know how to make a website, this tutorial can also give you an idea on how making a web design is like.

A good way to keep up with the modern web design trends is to simply check out popular blogs and websites all over the web. Web directories like Alexa and Technorati are great sources of popular sites. You will notice that some of the websites have simple layouts to put more emphasis on the content while other sites look more out-of-the-box because they are promoting products or services. Don't forget that you may find other fancy websites by searching on Google. Be creative with the keywords and use Google Image Search to find screenshots of templates that you may even be able to download and use yourself.

The objective here is to find a good website that uses a layout that could actually suit your upcoming web design. To make a positive impact though, you should make your site unique so it doesn't look as if you copied the design of a very popular website. The trick is to take note of the layout of the website that you like to use as a basis of your design. Take note of the location of the important elements like the navigational bar, header, text and supporting images and graphics.

Once you visualized a layout, proceed to visualizing a theme for your design. The color scheme is an important part of the theme because it helps you restrict the design to a certain combination of colors. There are plenty of online color palette generators that effectively create good color combinations so you can, for instance, use one color for the background and another color for header text. These colors help you decide what the other elements of your site should look like.

There are a few benefits in taking this design approach. First of all, you can plan your web design even before you check out guides that teach you how to create a website. Second, it will be a lot easier to code your site since you already finalized your web design and all you really have to do is to continue coding until the site preview matches the design you visualized.