For me, this is not true.  I’m a big proponent of specific marketing strategies for each individual company depending on its own unique business model.

Many companies I work with use online marketing as its main strategy for reaching prospective customers, and research has shown that this is becoming the de facto method for leveraging reach vs dollars invested.

Other companies rely more on broadcast media to reach a wide audience and historically this has served them very well.  And, as of today, continues to serve them very well.  So, why change?  Well… that’s probably a post for another day but suffice it to say that for many companies a solid strategy of diversified tactics works best for most medium to larger sized companies.

Enjoy Jacqueline’s fine work:

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – According to an Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and Forrester Research Inc. survey of national advertisers, marketers continue to lack confidence in the effectiveness of TV ads and, although they will continue to use 30-second spots, they are looking for an overhaul in the fundamentals. The root of the dissatisfaction stems from the current measurement techniques for TV ads, an interest in more targeted ads, and the desire for less ad clutter and more relevance.

Among the 100 advertisers surveyed, most said their TV ad spending will remain flat this year and that 41 percent of their media budgets will go to television, versus 58 percent of their budgets last year.

Highlighting the lack of confidence, 62 percent of respondents said TV ads have become less effective in the past two years. The main hurdle for advertisers is clutter and so 69 percent of marketers would like fewer commercials per pod. There was also dissatisfaction expressed for the metrics of measurement for commercials, and 82 percent of advertisers were in favor of ratings for individual commercials.

However, most advertisers still believe in the power of the 30-second spot, with only 19 percent believing these spots will be dead in 10 years – this is down from 28 percent last year. Targeting consumers is a concern for more than 78 percent of advertisers and 59 percent said they would pay a premium for it.

Finally, 75 percent of respondents believe that interactive television will be an effective source of lead generation, but only 28 percent plan to spend more on interactive TV ads in 2010.

I read a lot.  Books, magazines, blogs (tons of blogs), newspapers,  white papers (that’s a fancy shmancy name for a multi page article or document), e-books, etc.  I received the Dispatch every day, Business First every week,  had subscriptions to 8 magazines (I did keep one subscription, it’s an important one), received post updates by email on 42 blogs (no, I’m not exaggerating) as well as reading the backs of countless cereal boxes and happy meal bags.

The newspapers cost $410.48 per year.

The magazines cost $185.00 per year.

If you’re still with me, that’s $595.48 per year.

As far as the billion hours claim… that might be a bit of a stretch.  However, I will tell you that most of what is printed (and I subsequently paid for) I didn’t really care about.  And with due respect to our hometown newspaper, it has become not much more than a pamphlet with  several ads that aren’t appealing to me. Sorry. The point is, it takes a bunch of time to page through newspapers and magazines just to find the stuff that is pertinent to me.  And, it costs a lot too.

If I’m being honest, the money saving is great but I would pay for good content.  Writers and publishers need to earn a living just like the rest of us I think.  Good topic for another post, huh? But, anyway, its the time saved and being able to drill down to exactly what I’m interested in that really excites me.

And, being bombarded with dozens of emails every day from blogs I subscribe to wasn’t much better.  Too much noise.  I needed to be able to see through the clutter to get to exactly what I wanted in as quick a time possible. We are all busy.

Introducing Google Reader (no, it’s not new… far from it actually) and RSS feeds.  Visit Feedburner to get your own account and go here to learn more about how RSS and Feeds work to make your life so much easier.

By the way, all of this stuff is free. And mega easy.

So, here’s how you can use this information.  Visit one of your favorite blogs, let’s just say Mashable, which happens to be one of mine.  On the right hand side you’ll see a little orange square with the letters RSS underneath it. Click on it.

Up pops the subscription page. There are several choices.  Click on +Google.

Up pops the Add to Google Page.  Choose Add to Google Reader.

That’s it!  Your are now subscribed to this blog.  You can repeat for virtually any newspaper, blog or magazine out there. Recently it was announced that individual web pages will be available for subscription through RSS feeds. Cool.

Now you control your content.  All in one place.  Quickly scan all of your different feed subscriptions and the headlines (and first part of the article if you choose)  and decide what you want to read.  You can also Star the articles you really like.  You can share articles with others. You can write notes.

It doesn’t get any easier, quicker or more efficient if you’re a reader like me.

One final tip:  If you use an iPhone or Blackberry (I use an iPhone personally) then you can download Feed Apps that bring the power and simplicity of Google Reader right to your mobile phone.  I use an app simply called Feeds and love it.  Everything is well categorized and the user interface is so easy to navigate.

How do you use RSS and Google Reader?  Would love to hear your ideas and suggestions.

50 Way to use Twitter for Business

Facebook was originally started as a sort of exclusive social networking site that was only for the students of Harvard. Created by students, for students, it gave them a place to connect with one another and exchange information and ideas. Before long there were new networks formed and more schools on board. Today, Facebook is open to anyone that is over the age 13 and is estimated to have over 350 million active users around the world. These users are organized roughly by the networks to which they belong, which can be regional, social, political, religious or any other number of things. Companies have networks for their employees, retailers have networks for their consumers, music artists and bands have networks for their fans. Regardless of who your target market is, there is a network for that, and each network connects with endless other networks, making Facebook Marketing a goldmine for getting your company name and image out there.

The beauty of Facebook of an online marketer is that word travels so quickly across it. If Jane becomes a fan of your company today, it will be posted on all of her friends’ news feeds, with a link to your company. Anyone of her friends that clicks on the link, and becomes a fan now has an update on all of their friends’ pages, who then, in turn click on the link and share your company name and info with all of their friends. Unless Jane and her friend are only friends with all of the same people, this can get information to literally thousands of people in less time than it takes to make dinner. Just think, you can be a nobody at lunch, but a super star by supper. Few other types of marketing can offer that. Facebook marketing has an incredibly wide reach.

So how, as a small business can you take advantage of the viral goodness that is Facebook marketing?   How can you translate the social networking giant into more click-thru’s and conversions for your site? Much like any independent person wanting to connect with friends, your first step is to join Facebook. Set up a page for your company. Give information about your company and make sure that you include your company’s homepage. Once your page is set up, you will need to start connecting with others. Search for networks that you think would be interested in what you have to sell or say, and join them. Set up your own page, if you do not already have one, and start finding friends. Once you have a good base of people, become a fan of your own company. This will post information about your company on every one of your friends’ pages.

Meta data is information that is not visible to the casual observer but that identifies what language a site is written in, what it is about and keywords that apply to that site to the search engines. Meta data can be viewed by looking at the source code of any website. To view the Meta data, go to “View” in your web browser and then click on “source”. A window will open with a huge amount of information, much of which makes no sense to the untrained eye. Toward the top of this, you will see many lines which start out with the word “meta”. This is information that identifies that a site is written in html or xhtml, what the site is about and what keywords are related to that site. Search engines use this information to attempt to provide the most accurate results for keyword searches that people perform.

Having the right Meta data in the header of your website can greatly improve your website traffic and help to eliminate visitors from getting to your site in error and immediately leaving. While all website traffic is good, traffic that stays and looks around is much more valuable to any website than visitors that immediately click away are. Your Meta data, or Meta tags as they are called, give you an excellent opportunity to identify and state the purpose of your site. One of these tags is your Meta description. This description will appear in search engine directories, as the description of what your website is about. Using that information, potential visitors can make an educated decision about whether your site is what they think it is, and whether or not they want to visit it.

Meta keywords are used to help search engines determine what your site is about, so that they will know if a keyword that someone searches on applies to your site or not. By matching the keywords in your Meta data to the keywords being searched for, the search engine can determine whether or not to display your site in the list of results. Unlike keywords which appear in your regular content, keywords in your Meta data do not need to be in sentences or any other type of text. They can be added in a long string in every possible combination that you believe someone might potentially search on to get to your site. For instance, if your site sells embroidered backpacks, you might use the words backpack, backpacks, embroidered backpack, embroidered backpacks, bookbag and bookbags to identify your site.

If your store in the real world wasn’t getting enough business from the casual passersby, you would advertise to get people in, right? You would put up a billboard or two, get listed in your yellow pages, maybe take out an ad in the paper or even buy some commercial airtime on the local radio station. Before long, customers would be bound to stop in. By hitting your local area and getting the word out to all of your neighbors, you are bound to bring in some new business. On the internet, the world is your neighborhood. There is no street corner that you can put a sign up on, no local radio station to run a commercial on. If you want people to come to you, you will need them to find you when they type a keyword into a search engine, like Google, or Yahoo. They won’t be searching for your name; they will be searching for your product, so you need the search engines to find your site when people search for your keyword. SEO for small business is how you make this happen

Search engines aren’t like people. They aren’t drawn in by fancy decorations, or free food. They don’t care what color your carpet is or that you offer parking validation. Search engines scour the internet, looking for websites that most closely match the search terms that a user has entered. If someone searches for “edible camera cases”, you can bet that those search engines are looking for sites that reference edible camera cases. They will search the name of the websites – www.ediblecameracases.com? Sounds like a winner to a search engine! –, they will “read” through the content of the site – 101 Recipes for Edible Camera Cases? Score! -, they will look and see if there are links back to your site for that keyword phrase – linked on the Top 10 Edible Camera Case Companies in Des Moines? That’ll work! -, and then they rank their results and spit them out for the end user. The sites in the number one and number two spots might not be the best places to get an edible camera case at all, but they were the sites that had the best SEO for it. SEO for small business makes the difference between people finding you and you sitting in a room full of edible camera cases, all by yourself, wishing that you had gotten less of the banana flavored cases.

Chances are you want traffic.  To get traffic, you will need to optimize your site for the search engines. Once you have it optimized, you will want to keep it optimized.  Once you begin to understand that Search Engine Optimization is an ongoing marketing process, your website will start to achieve much improved traffic rankings and your bottom line will thank you!

Where SEO has been king in online marketing for the last several years, many businesses are now combining their search engine efforts with a well constructed Social Media Marketing campaign with powerful results.

Social media now has more than a half billion users between the various platforms available, making it one of the largest audiences available in the world. Smart marketers saw the explosive growth of this new form of communication and have already begun developing social media marketing best practices.

The most important thing to realize before engaging in any form of social media marketing is that you do not control the message. Much like a game of telephone, you get to make the original statement, but as it makes its rounds through the social network, it is the members that will cultivate and mold the message.

A smart social media marketer knows who their audience is, targets the correct networks and engages in a give and take dialogue with the members, shaping the message. For example, you may start a blog and post articles about products, practices or trends impacting your industry.

People may visit your blog and comment on it. The comments might not always support your view or your company. Rather than quashing those comments and keeping only the positive, it is smart to respond intelligently in the comments and allow a dialogue. Although you may not agree with all of the posters, the more posters that are there, the more people there will be that are learning about your company. And you might be surprised, you might learn a thing or two about your company or industry along the way too. This is one of the most important social media practices out there.

Another important thing to commit to before engaging in any social media marketing is that you must be honest about who and what you are. People are wise to companies trying to pose as multiple other personas who all claim to love “XYZ” company.

Be yourself, and be upfront about the fact that you are who you are. Trying to deceive a social network is almost certainly destined for failure and that failure may come at a much greater price than you can possible withstand as a business. When the internet turns on you, it is hard to get it to turn back! Companies that are upfront about who and what they are on blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites may grow more slowly, but that growth will be sustainable, and those “friends” and “followers” are not likely to turn on you for being you.

One final principle to remember in your social media marketing is that this is not normal sales. People don’t log into Facebook or read Twitter to have someone try and talk them into buying their kids the latest and greatest toys. They don’t want someone to start a chat with them that is a hard sell to switch cellular carriers. They come to have a place to connect with others who are likeminded – or even sometimes not so likeminded.

They want to be able to learn, and explore and discuss whatever is on their mind. By allowing your social network members to do just that, you are establishing a rapport that has not been seen between proprietor and customer since the days of the mom and pop shop.

But then comes the tough bit,  you need to increase fans, keep them interested, get them to contribute, keep the page going on peak of all your other hard work, don’t let it get boring, not be too personality promotional,  How on earth can you think of all that and run your business?

Well, don’t be worry, here’s a rapid list of 10 tips you can post on your Facebook Fan page to keep it interesting and give confidence communication.

1: Questions:
Keep update your status every day, but rather than telling people currently what are you doing? Ask them a question daily. It’s clear by looking at the statuses of people on Face book (whether individuals or businesses) that asking a question gives a huge reply. Let your fans and contacts feel involved, you can ask them a question related to your business right now.

2: Videos:
It doesn’t even have to be your video, it could be a video from Google or YouTube, funny video related to your niche, or a music video if you like, but video can do more help than words sometimes do. If you have your own video, then even better; either way, break up the repetitiveness of your page with the odd video to remain things interesting.

3: Links on page:
You start a fan page to endorse your business, But people soon switch off if your page is nothing more than a catalog of links to your website, so show them that you’re not just in it for you. Post links to other websites, interesting blogs about your industry, funny stories, and news items. If some of these sites fit in to your fans too, then you’ll inspire faithfulness and may get the same in return.

4: Requests for more fans:
Don’t hesitate to ask your fans to use the ’share’ button or the ’suggest to friends’ link to share your page’s details with their Facebook friends. It may not have happened to them to do so, and if you don’t ask, you don’t get!

5: Links to discussions forums:
If your forum on your page isn’t getting the responses and traffic you want, it may be that visitors just are not noticing it, Post links to interesting discussions on your Fan Page wall and ask your fans to comment on them.

6: Photos and Images:
Once more, a good way to break up the persistent words of a fan page, photos and images tell your fans more about you and your business. Post photos of your premises, clients, products, services, charts, in fact whatever thing that you have that is related to your business.

7: Links to your web blog:
If you use web or Networked Blogs, you can do this repeatedly, but even if you don’t, when you post a new blog, link to it from your Fan page, give confidence comments and contributions, keep in mind, no asking, no getting.

8: Events:
Use the events label to place details of time responsive special offers, open days, launch days and more. It’s an frequently forgotten tab but can be very helpful if you think about it.

9: Notes:
The notes label can be used for lots of dissimilar things; small blog posts, testimonials, quotes,  whatever thing that is too big to be post as a status update. It is another way to add additional attention to your fan page

10: Say thanks to your fans:
If your fans are interacting, then it is worth taking the time out to post a public thank you to them every so frequently. You can do this by posting a status update. You could go one additional and present prizes or giveaways to a pair of fans per month, given to those who interrelate the most and the best.

So here you have it, a quick and dirty list of tips to remain your Facebook Fan Page interesting. Without interaction and interest, a page rapidly becomes nothing more than a list of links, with no inherent value at all. Do not let your Fan page fade away.

Content is King. Content is King. Content is King.

Writing is a creative process, it takes a little time, but once written it will spread virally to hundreds, maybe thousands of other sites and the benefits are permanent. The links back to your website from creating remarkable content can also be permanent.  Google loves freshly baked content and your search engine optimization (SEO) will improve as well.

Getting Started with 3 Content Marketing Strategies:

1. Article Marketing

Very simple. Write excellent articles on subjects related to your area of expertise.  “How To” articles are always a great way to start.  Oh, and spend almost as much time creating a great Title as writing the article itself.  Your article title should be compelling and make people want to click through to see more.

Article Title tips:

• Answer a question you get asked frequently:  “How to Write an Effective “How To” Article in 5 Easy Steps.”
• Use numbers: “7 Quick Tips for Keeping the Weight off this Holiday Season.”
• Use a little fear: “Don’t Become a Victim of Your Own Ingorance: The 3 Hidden Dangers of Not Getting Your Annual Physical.”

After your article is written it’s time to get it out there for people to see.  Here’s what to do with it:

• Post it on your blog
• Post it on your social media sites (Facebook and LinkedIn)
• Tweet it to your followers
• Submit to article directories like EZineArticles, Self Growth and Article Base.

Make sure when submitting to article directories that you take some time to complete the Resource Box.  The resource box is the section at the end of the article where you can promote yourself a bit, provide a short bio and a link or two back to your website or blog.

Article marketing is an excellent method of building high quality one way links back to your site and building your credibility online.  Writing remarkable content not only stamps you as an expert in your filed but over time can create an enormous amount of traffic to your site with pre-sold visitors.

Next action: Start writing.

2. Blogging for Business

Blogging is another great way to drive traffic to your website.  Often taken for granted or deemed as not that important by those to unfamiliar with online marketing best practices.  The first recommendation I make to a new SEO consulting client is to get a blog integrated into their site if they don’t have one already.  It they do have one, my next recommendation is to start writing in it consistently.  Make the style all your own and don’t stress over getting everything perfect.

A couple of blog tips:

• Blog posts can be one sentence or two pages, it depends on your content and purpose.  Write concisely and build your post around one central theme.  Try to stay on track so you don’t lose your reader half way through the post.
• Blogs are not full length articles or EBooks.  Most blog posts are 300 to 700 words.  They can be longer (the one you’re reading certainly is!)  if the message you’re conveying simply takes more words to get across.  The point is to let the post be done when you’ve finished covering your topic. Don’t set measurements like, “I’m not gonna finish this post until I’ve written at least 800 words.”  When you’re done, you’re done.
• Make your blog easy for your readers to share (look in the upper right hand corner of this post for the “share/save” button) and also easy to subscribe to (now look to the right and you’ll see “Subscribe to RSS Feeds” and also “Find Us On Facebook.”

3. Participating and Getting Involved

Keeping your ear to the ground and being actively involved in the conversation has never been more important.  It turns out, whether you’re participating or not, the conversation about you, your company, product, service and competition is going on anyway.  Want some influence?  Get involved.

Here’s how:

• Start commenting on relevant blogs in your industry and/or where your prospective customers are hanging out.  You can find great blogs by visiting Technorati or Alltop and typing in related keywords to what you’re looking for.  Learn how to Claim your blog on Technorati by reading a previous post.
  • Become familiar with some of the higher authority blogs that allow comments by reading them for a week or two.  You’ll learn who you like and who you don’t pretty quickly.
  • When adding comments, what you don’t want to write is, “great post,” and that’s it.  Even worse is, “great post, now come look at what I’m selling by clicking here.”  What you DO want to do is add to the post; extend the conversation by adding your own thoughts and unique take on the author’s topic.  Even disagreeing or throwing in a little controversy is a great way to go, as long as you’re not being controversial just to get a rise out of everyone and you have a good reason for why you feel the way you do.

• Create Profiles and become active in a few social bookmarking sites.  Namely, Digg, StumbleUpon and Delicious.  Reddit is also great.  Doing this will ensure that your website gets indexed by the search engines almost immediately if it hasn’t been already.  It also builds high quality, one way links back to your site which improves your SEO and can really drive a bunch of traffic as well.  Having unique and interesting content on your site will naturally earn you additional links from other websites and blogs that will want to link back to you.
• Create a Facebook Fan Page, optimize your profile and get involved in the LinkedIn community and start building a following on Twitter.  Each of these are immensely important to your success online but require much more time than we have here to go through in detail.  To start… get started.  Any questions on moving forward after that let me know and I’ll be happy to help.
• Use Twitter Search to type in keywords to find out what’s going on…right now. Again, participate in the conversation, comment, and get involved.  Twitter search is a great tool, take advantage of it.

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