Marketing Ideas to “Like” on Facebook

Who else isn’t on Facebook? The popularity of this social networking site provides great potential that a savvy marketer can harness. After all, Facebook is one of the most visited sites in the world, second only to Google. Although Facebook is primarily a place where friends and associates can connect and get tabs on each other’s lives (via status updates, photos, etc.), you can also use Facebook to make connections to customers and help promote awareness and support for your business or brand.

The thing is, building a Facebook page for your business does not guarantee success. You don’t simply post a promotion and hope that people will come and “like” you. You have to give your promotions a bit of a push so that people will see it and share it with their friends. The key element in marketing through Facebook is having a definite strategy that will actively target customers and work to promote the exposure of your brand/company.

Here are some marketing ideas or tips for you to remember when you’re marketing on Facebook:

• No hard-sell sales pitches. Facebook is a social networking site and people will not view you to kindly if you come in to pitch your product. What you need to be doing is attraction marketing – drawing Facebook users into your site because you are offering rewards, something entertaining or something informative.
• Create an interesting profile. Fill up the bio, and regularly post wall status updates and photos. What you need is to have sincere and genuine participation. The bio will tell others about you and what you do. The regular updates will give you regular exposure to your market, if these allow your updates to come into their newsfeeds. You should also avoid looking too “corporate” – instead your profile should aim to show that your business is focused on its customers and that customers can come to ask questions or make complaints and expect a ready answer.
• Create a Fan Page and build your fan-base. Fan pages let others “like” your page by building a solid fan base. You can start by messaging your existing Facebook friends about your new Facebook profile. You can also use bonuses, discount coupons or a free e-book that Facebook users can get if they “like” your page. Once you have a fan-base, make sure that your profile content is always fresh, interesting and informative. For your Facebook updates, mix fun facts with your regular corporate news. Initiate discussions with your fans and get them involved, while letting them feel that they are important to your business. Work to ensure that your updates appear on your fans’ newsfeed since this is also another way to promote your page to other Facebook users.
• Create quality content. There’s what is called the 80/20 rule, where 80% of your content should be personal or instructional, with only 20% subtly speaking about your products. Post articles in your Facebook blog, as well as your other blogs (if you have these). Post a message that is valuable to the reader – whether it entertains or educates the readers. This can encourage readers to go to your website, where you can provide more information about the value of your product.
• Maintain the interest of your fans. Think up of ways to keep your fans involved and interested in your Facebook Fan page and your brand. You can make use of games, competitions, raffles, promotions and polls to maintain your fans’ interests. Be creative! Remember, the more entertaining the entries, the more chances that it will go viral – with existing fans sharing your link to others and saying, “Hey, look at this great stuff!” or “Hey, this is too funny you have to watch this.”

Some examples of promos/competitions include:

- For a self-storage unit: a contest for the top three messiest and cramped garages. Contestants will be asked to post photos of their garage and have friends like their photos. This makes great viral content, as contestants (and supporters) will post requests on their Facebook page, asking other friends to vote for his entry.

- Oreo Cookies: a bid to set a Guinness Book of World records for the “most number of likes in Facebook within 24 hours”. This keeps Facebook fans interested and involved.

- Target: a contest where college students use products found in Target to decorate their room.

- A local mall: Facebook contest of who has the best Halloween costume.

- News site: Offer of access exclusive to “Facebook fans only” or access to content that is not displayed in the website.

- For a clothing line: Competition on the best styling using the products or displaying pictures of fans that use the products. The promotion could also include content regarding fashion do’s and don’ts, as well as product galleries that fans can view, like and comment about.

- Other promotions may include discount vouchers, games and apps and freebies.

Of course, you have to think about what it the best promotion for your kind of business. When you have a promotion, post messages to your fan base: at the beginning of the promotion, during the promotion and a few days before the promotion is about to end.

One other avenue to explore is making use of videos on YouTube. This can help attract traffic to your Facebook page and eventually to your website. A classic example of a successful use of YouTube would be the “Will It Blend” videos by BlendTec, which went viral due to the fact that the videos were about trying to blend all kinds of stuff using the company’s blender. If your videos are compelling and interesting enough, your fans will be the one to spread the word for you.

• Link events offsite to your Facebook profile. Send event notifications and invites that fans can respond to. You can set up events such as parties or workshops about matters related to your business.
• Provide support. This includes other social networking sites such as Twitter, as well as your own company website. To ensure added visibility, you also should make use of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques.

These are just some tips on how you can market using Facebook. If you want help in promoting your product, building your website and generating traffic, Adaptivity Pro is here to provide top-notch support, which includes providing Utah SEO-rich content. Adaptivity Pro is a SEO and Salt Lake City Web Design firm located in Salt Lake City. They have extensive experience in providing quality websites that are search-engine friendly and professionally designed.

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Personal Reputation Management

Controlling What the Internet Says About You

The World Wide Web is a very public place – and it’s often quite hard to control what’s placed in Google and other sites. And you must remember that Google and other search engines are not simply search engines. The internet and its many uses has transformed search engines and also made them reputation engines.

Building and Managing an Online Reputation

When potential employers and customers want your work and professional history, when a reporter wants to cover your story or business, when a prospective date wants to know more about you and basically, when others want to know about you or your business, it’s the internet (primarily Google) they will turn to.

You may have posted something rash in your social networking account (such as a picture of you drunk and happily holding a bottle of beer). Someone may have posted similarly malicious and damaging pictures or stories about you. Or a disgruntled customer may have badmouthed your products or services and posted it on a forum or a blog. Even if your case does not post things that are that damaging, you still want to make sure that what’s out there will show you in the best possible light. It’s so easy to multiply this exposure. The more salacious the gossip, the more it will be searched and linked to and the more this kind of negative information can be more easily found in the internet.

If you’re not careful, what others may find in the internet may not be the things you want them to see. It’s like a skeleton in the closet – only available for every person interested to search and find. That is why reputation management is very important, especially for those who are just starting a career or are in-between jobs. Being able to manage your reputation can also protect you against online defamation of your character – something that is very possible since the laws regarding online character defamation are not as hard and fast at the moment.

So don’t wait until you see a flurry of negative and potentially damaging things about you or your company. Take a proactive stand against personal reputation management – while it’s early, you can start implementing a strategy to build positive content for you in the internet.

Some simple reminders and tips about personal reputation management

Although the internet is very public, you have the power and the ability to control your Google (and other search engine) results. Here are a few tips on how you can do this:

• Google your name. Find out what’s already out there. That way, you know what you have to contend with and you can start taking proactive measures towards protecting your reputation.
• If you find sites that show your name, you can request the website’s administrator to remove content. There are a number of people search websites that provide listings of your Internet footprint, or simply, the information available when someone makes a search of your name. These websites allow individuals to contact them and make a request in order to have their information removed.
• Write it up. One way towards owning content available in the web is to start writing through a blog. You can buy your own name as a domain and build a blog using this domain. With blogs, you can put in content as often as you want and need to. And since a blog has a single URL, Google will notice that you are regularly generating content. This will result in higher Google rankings if you’re wise about using keywords (via Search Engine Optimization). However, you should note that if you do decide to blog, you should be able to update your blog regularly. It wouldn’t do much for you to start a blog and leave it at one or two entries for a long stretch of time. You can also use methods that will drive up SEO value – such as using backlinks and other strategies.

You can also write for other blogs. Doing a guest post on more popular blogs can help take the top search results spot when your name is searched. When giving your bio, be sure to use embedded links that link back to the sites you have.

• Join the right social networks. There’s Facebook and MySpace for a start. But these are not the only places for you to network. You can look towards other social networks such as LinkedIn, Delicious, YouTube, Twitter, FriendFeed or Flickr. You can also think about building your own through facilities provided by Ning.com. The best use of these social networks is to regularly participate – that means acquiring lots of friends, posting on your wall regularly, posting pictures and videos and encouraging others to comment on your posts and pictures.

When building your profile, you can use your own name and not rely on aliases. This way, your username is also searchable through Google. Also, avoid the temptation of stuffing your profiles and posts with SEO-rich keywords. Your posts and entries should look natural so as to avoid the risk of being banned from the site.

• Fight the negative with the positive. Aim to own more content and work towards driving these at the top of Google searches – especially the top ten to twenty hits on Google. You can’t always control what’s being said about you in the internet, but if your controlled content gets the top searches in the web, you can more or less minimize the damage that may be caused by negative content by reducing the visibility of the sites that post negative content.
• Take part in communities. Join blog communities which share your interests or the topics you blog about. When you take part in the community – by discussing relevant issues – you may meet new blog friends who can be interested in writing and promoting about you.
• Give out a free eBook. This will increase the number of visitors in your blog or website. You don’t actually need to require lead generation forms – the free eBook will increase your rating Google-wise due to the increased traffic to your site. Also, if you put in the right triggers, you can encourage people to link and share this free eBook.

Personal Reputation Management is key in ensuring that when anyone searches your name, you provide them with the right information about you. If you need help in building your website, Adaptivity Pro is here to help you. Adaptivity Pro is a Utah Web design and SEO company based in Salt Lake City. Adaptivity Pro is an expert Utah SEO provider that can control your Google rankings. We’ll help you monitor your online reputation and manage SEO-rich content.

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A Review of Article Distribution Websites

Sending articles through article distribution websites is not the best link building strategy but an effective one for search engine optimization. Article distribution websites are third-party sites that host articles and provide links back to your website. These sites contain an unbelievably wide range of topics, ranging from your love life, decorating your home, doing well in business, taking care of your pet and so many others. Some of these sites require that you produce original copy that is relevant and interesting for your intended audience.

Producing relevant, quality and unique articles peppered with targeted keywords and having it accepted by article directories will result in more traffic to your website. The articles will help more people know about you and your products or services, get them interested about how you can help them and then direct them to your website. In short, article marketing helps to get the word out there about you.

You can effectively promote your website through article distribution sites. When you submit an article, you have an author bio or resource box at the end of the article – this drives targeted traffic right where you want it – your site. Also, since you have more incoming links to your website through article directories and other strategies it will help with your SEO rankings.

Some article submission sites host your articles for free, while others charge a small fee. Please note that the site’s higher website traffic rankings can also mean more readers who will be looking into your articles.

The key is to find the article submission sites that are most effective in helping you increase your website traffic. Here are some of the article submission sites you can consider:

Sites with higher website traffic rankings will undoubtedly provide more readers for your articles.

-          EzineArticles.com. This is perhaps the most popular of website submission articles and it seems that Google really likes it so much that articles in this site invariably get good results. Alexa agrees, saying that EzineArticles provides the most volume of traffic when it comes to website submission articles. EzineArticles comes with an easy to use interface and provides statistics on views. However, due to the popularity of EzineArticles you will have a lot of competition from other writers. Also, EzineArticles is not as strict in the area of editorial oversight – this attracts volumes of poor writing that may turn off readers. It may also be hard for readers to get to your writer’s bio.

-          IdeaMarketers.com. This free content directory and online article site claims to be a site with one of the most visitors and is effective for obtaining publicity for your business. It allows writers to post their resource box and website links. This not only hosts articles but also books and e-books, audios, videos and press releases. With ideamarketers.com you get free publicity and establish yourself as an expert in areas your target audience is interested in. What’s more, this site gives access to others so that they can reprint it or publish it as long as they have the author’s permission and the author’s bio and contact information are mentioned along with the reprint. The primary market for these would be researchers and those who want to get content for their website, newsletter or other publications. This, in turn, would get the original author more links into his website.

-          Buzzle.com. This article submission website promises “Intelligent life on the web.” Buzzle.com gives you both search engine exposure (with good Google results for SEO-strategic articles) and backlinks to your website or blog. Buzzle also provides you with a report of the number of views in a month and a wide choice of topic categories. However, the editorial team has to review your article and this may take a couple of days before your article comes out. If your article does not pass standards, they will simply delete the article – no notifications to you about the rejection (so you need to make sure you have saved the article). Also, Alexa shows that Buzzle has a bounce rate of approximately 65%.

-          GoArticles.com. GoArticles.com is one of the popular article and professional-looking submission sites that allow great results from search engines and allows you to link your website or blog on your article bio. Go Articles also allow others to publish the articles but require them to also include your bio, enabling you to get extra exposure if your article is interesting enough. Go Articles have guidelines, though. Articles should be from 200 to 2,500 words. The articles should also be relevant and useful and not purely commercial or promotional – it should also not contain anything illegal, pornographic or inflammatory.  Go Articles may produce lower click through rates than more popular article submission sites like EzineArticles.com but if you want to diversify, it is also a good choice.

-          Amazines.com. This site is free for you to join and to submit articles to. It has the standard rules you can usually expect from article submission sites – there is a minimum and maximum number of words required, it also bans any pornographic, illegal and inflammatory content. You are also not allowed to submit articles that are blatant advertisements or promotions. You can also buy advertising space. However, the search results may not be as attractive as other popular article directories.

-          ArticlesBase.com. You can submit and publish articles for free in this article directory and contains unique features to keep you (and readers – interested). It allows viewers to get RSS updates on your articles and to also syndicate the articles so that viewers can share your articles by pasting it on their clipboard. The spacing between advertisements and content is also wide enough so that the ads don’t distract from the text. ArticlesBase enables you and visitors to share content via social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and so on. You can also post up to three hyperlinks – not just on your writer bio but also on your article.

Adaptivity Pro Web Design and Internet Company specialize in design work, programming and search engine optimization activity to provide the best return on investment for businesses. They do everything possible to get businesses their results in a reasonable time. Adaptivity Pro researches all the internet marketing options and see’s what will work best for each of their clients and gets the job done. They are based in Salt Lake City, Utah and has helped businesses with Salt Lake City web design and SEO.

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