Using Social Media For Success Online

Welcome to Part 2 of our tips & tricks mini-tutorials. This time it’s about inbound marketing and social media.

With inbound marketing we are taking advantage of the way people want to communicate today. We all search for products and services everyday but are we able to find you or your competition? Search engines deal with hundreds of millions of searches per day. We read blogs and tap our social networks to find answers to questions, solutions and product recommendations. Inbound marketing is about making it easy for people to find what you have to offer online. There are 4 distinct stages to successful inbound marketing: create quality content, optimize the content for search engines AND humans, promote it strategically then analyze the results.

Content Creation for Social Networking in Business
Content can come in hundreds of guises. It can be blogs, e-books, white papers, video and photos, advice or tutorials like this. At oneweb we produce tons of content, for this site and others, that’s how we aim to keep your interest in our services and products. When you’re creating a lot of content try to publish on various channels, making sure you optimize for those different channels. Just to illustrate the importance of content creation, here is a piece of data. Companies that blog generate 55 percent more visitor traffic. You may well ask, why is that? Blogging allows you to talk about topics that are more appealing to people and allows you to make more interesting correlations. You can use long tailed keywords, you can attract more inbound links and you can use the comments section to generate conversations. Your blog helps you become more interesting on social media as well. Take the content that you create on your blog and you share it on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon and other networks. The way we at oneweb transform our blog readers into leads is by using ‘calls to action’ at the end of each of our blog posts. You’ll notice that this blog post has a three ‘calls to action’ inviting you to contact us, comment on the post and/or share the post with your social network thereby generating leads and hopefully new business opportunities.

Optimizing Your Content
The second step in our inbound marketing methodology is optimizing your content. Optimization really includes two elements: on-page optimization and off-page optimization. On-page search engine optimization (SEO) refers to the elements on your site such as page title, meta tags, descriptions, and alt tags. Off-page SEO refers to the ‘authority’ of your website, measured by the number of inbound links you can accumulate, this will elevate you in the eyes of search engines and place you higher on the results pages. If you want to get deeper in to this, you can look at the different SEO elements on your page. They need to be consistent: the same keywords should be present in the page title, the URL, and the description. If you are curious about how your website is performing, if you have all those elements and if they’re working, oneweb offers services in validation, error checking and fixing, usability testing and SEO reporting, contact us for more details.

Content Promotion
The third part of our inbound marketing methodology is promoting your content. Once you start creating really valuable and remarkable content, you need to find ways to share it. It’s no coincidence that some our clients’ companies that blog and manipulate social media have increased visitor traffic by up to 79 percent. If you have something meaningful to write about on your blog, you will be more interesting on social networks. Use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg and Delicious. Get them working for you. So where should YOU share your content? What channels should YOU utilize? You will need to experiment with this part because it differs from site to site. A few general methods that everyone can use are:

• Invite readers to “Like” your post on Facebook. Provide a button in your e-books, blog posts & emails.
• Offer the option for readers to retweet your content.
• Maximize the traction you are getting from email marketing by testing different subject lines.
• Allow comments. You may get a load of spam but actual visitor comments are invaluable and give you an idea of how you are doing.

Analyzing Results
Creating content, optimizing it and promoting it is all very well, but in order to improve results and drive success, you will need to be constantly measuring results. To do that, you need to track not only the number of visits you’re getting, but also the number of leads. There are many tools out there to help you track and analyze visitors and data. The most comprehensive are provided by Google and are generally free to use. At oneweb all of our websites come with monthly visitor statistics reports for you to see what’s working and what isn’t. Get in touch with us today and find out what oneweb can do for your business online.

Remember, get the most out your website by manipulating social media networks and steer those inbound links to your content!

Should you wish to save or print a copy of this post, then click the .PDF logo here and download a copy. Thanks for your interest in our tutorials for online success, we would love to hear from you, whether feedback, ideas for future tutorials or questions, so please leave us some comments. See you next time.

Get blogging and start #winning

Hey guys. This is part 1 of our ongoing tips & tricks tutorials about #winning online. oneweb can offer sound advice, drawn from years of online experience, and we love to pass this information on to you guys. Here are some valuable tips for blogging.

The first one is that the title should be keyword rich. You want to use good keywords – keywords that your readers are searching for – in your titles. Most of the things we’ve seen and tested show that having an image in every article is good. It makes it more visually appealing. It gives people something to gravitate towards rather than just a whole bunch of text on the page.

We would always recommend using both e-mail and RSS subscriptions. oneweb can build you an RSS facility to include in your site. There are also ways to do email subscriptions which we can help you with. When you publish a new blog article, it can automatically go to the people subscribing to the blog by e-mail. For us, about a third of our blog subscribers are by e-mail. Other sites have 70-80% of their blog readers subscribing by email. Some clients use RSS, some use email more, and you should have both of those available to make sure that you’re making it as easy as possible for people to get your blog content if they’re interested in it.

The other thing that’s really important is leveraging calls to action in order to drive more traffic to your landing pages. It’s important to have a call to action in every article, and that’s basically a link to something where people can register, opt-in, start a trial, buy a product, something like that to get them moving down the sales and marketing process. I can tell you that by adding calls to action to our blog, we almost tripled the number of leads we were getting from it. People often ask us, how do I get more comments? Some of the great ways to do that: ask a question at the end of the article or be controversial. The more controversial you are, the more comments you will get. I know that from experience. Also, leave part of the issue untouched. If you completely cover a topic, you’re not really leaving room for people to add something to it.

If you need article ideas, check your sent items in your email. Most people, businesses and marketers are getting questions all day long from customers and potential customers about all sorts of things. Checking and seeing how you’ve answered those questions can be a great way to cover popular topics. You can also look at FAQs from your sales people. I also think it’s important engage the whole company and not dump all the blogging and content-creation responsibility on one person. How do you engage the whole company? We’ve tried a bunch of things here at oneweb and have quite a few different people who are writing for our blog. We do contests. We do public praise. We’ve certainly been able to gather a lot of support from our team. We’ve built it into some of the employee goals for a couple of different groups in the company.

Get everyone addicted to the process of blogging, the feedback and the positive loop that can happen by publishing an article. oneweb are here to help you. Blogging has become an essential component in the pursuit of online success. Contact us today for help, support, guidance, whatever you need really, and let us help you take your website to a whole new level.

Remember, the search engines are looking for ‘new and relevant content’ from you so give it to them!

 
Should you wish to save or print a copy of this post, then click the .PDF logo here and download a copy. Thanks for your interest in our tutorials for online success, we would love to hear from you, whether feedback, ideas for future tutorials or questions, so please leave us some comments. See you next time.