Digital Marketing Blog

Favorite FREE Social Media Tools for 2010

 

It seems that there are more Social Media Tools on the market today than there are Starbucks, so it's more important now than ever to save time (and money) to find the tools that excite even most experienced Social Mediaphiles.

That's why ymarketing would like to share some of our favorite (and free!) Social Media Tools for 2010, in no particular order. Some of these tools have been out for some time, while others are brand spanking new. The purpose of this blog is to promote Social Media tools that will make your life easier and more fun, thus the categories will be somewhat random, but their effectiveness will not. Enjoy!

 

Great all-in-one comprehensive browser for real-time and social web. Tweetdeck allows users to open their Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace accounts all in one directory.

  Productivity enhancement service for Social Media users. Hootsuite Helps organize, schedule, and deliver content through Facebook and Twitter.

  bit.ly is one of the first, and still our favorite, URL shortener for tracking and analytics.

  Voice interface technology that let's you instantly acces your Facebook and Twitter accounts simply by speaking into your phone. Vlingo is a great hands free option for mobile tweeting on the go.

Allows multiple people to communicate through corporate Twitter accounts and stay in sync while doing so. No dropped balls with CoTweet, no stepping on each other's toes.

flickr creative commons search is a great place to find free photos (under a creative commons license) that you can use in blog posts, presentations, etc.

Great competitive intelligence for twitter is what Topsy gives you. Keep your social media ear to the ground with this excellent tracking tool. 

Want to see how popular you are on twitter? Wefollow allows you to view categorical rankings of who's hot on Twitter. 

 

 

For those of you who are interested in everything social media tools, and want a few suggestions of some great paid tools, here you go:

  Flowtown is a super cool tool allows you to take a random person's email address and quickly determine what social networks that person is on, as well as name, age, gender, and occupation. (I believe it costs $15 a month)

Dashboard program for your Social Media account, Swix promote it as Google Analytics for Social Media. We love the scorecard aspect of it. ($10 a month)

 

 

 

 

For more information visit ymarketing.com, follow @ymarketing on Twitter or call 877.736.4321 x707

Lead Capture for just the Cost of a Click: Google Adwords Contact Form Extension

 

The ymarketing Paid Search Team recently read an update to the beta for Google Lead Generation Forms in paid search ads at SEOroundtable.com. Have you ever wished you could easily increase leads for just the cost of a click? Google is testing it out with Google AdWords Contact Form Extensions to normal AdWords ads. The current leads are phone number based with three custom fields. Delivery of these ads is via email as a moment and clients are committed to contact the lead within 24 hours.

We have noticed the Mortgage and Entertainment Industries testing In the new Contact Form Extension. We have also seen other bloggers and paid search companies mention these ad format updates such as this blog post from DailyRadar.com

Things to know about the AdWords Contact Form

• It will only associate with ads in the #1 position.
• The Leads will be priced with the Max CPC Bid during beta test.
• About the form: Requires Phone Number Collection, up to three custom questions, questions shown will be determined by Google quality algorithm.

Get whitelisted into the Program through your AdWords Account Manager at Google and start getting your phone leads from Google AdWords!

Here are some sites that like the new Google Contact Form Adwords Feature: searchengineland.com, insideaffiliates.com, seroundtable.com

Here's a site that dislikes the new Google Contact Form AdWords Feature: blog.hubspot.com

SEO specialist ymarketing thinks:
This is worth testing. We want to see the results of the beta ASAP!
Do you have "real experience or results to share about your experience with this beta?"

What do you think?
Contact Us or Leave a Comment!

For more information visit ymarketing.com, follow @ymarketing on Twitter or call 877.736.4321 x707

Why Businesses Must Blog | ymarketing

 

As I talk about the virtues of social media marketing and blogging in particular, with business owners from 20-person companies to marketing executives representing Fortune 1000 enterprises, I frequently encounter the same objections when it comes to Business Blogging:

• "I just don't get it. How would blogging possibly help us reach our business goals?"

• "Blogging is fine for other people, but we're serious about driving our business forward and need to spend our time marketing."

• "Who has time to blog unless they're unemployed?"

And just recently I heard my favorite objection yet:

• "Don't some people blog when just a simple tweet would do?" (a hip reference to Twitter and its 140-character limit and a shot directed at the long-windedness of some bloggers, all rolled into one!)

All of these are legitimate questions and objections (and they all have equally legitimate answers, hopefully answered in this post).

Businesses that don't invest in blogging are losing out on a huge opportunity. 

Here are the top six (6) reasons Why Businesses Must Blog, in order to thrive in 2009 and beyond, in order of importance:

1. Increase Search Equity. Search Engines crawlers (affectionately known as "spiders") scour the internet for food daily; their favorite meals consist of text, headlines (H1 tags), meta data, page titles and links with descriptive anchor text. Well-crafted blogs are a virtual feast. The search engines behind these spiders don't really care if a newly discovered page is a blog or a regular web page; what they're particularly interested in is new, unique, well-crafted content. Blog posts between 200-400 words with good use of headlines, descriptive anchor text and relevant keywords are a virtual Olive Garden to the search engine spiders in a sea of soup kitchens. So the domains these Blogs reside on are rewarded with deposits in their search equity account. If your blog is on your company site (i.e. blog.yourcompanyname.com) then your site benefits and accrues the search equity; if you use a "free" blog site (i.e. yourcompanyname.blogspot.com) then Google or some other webhost gets the benefit. If you need more convincing that using a "free" service is a bad idea for your business, read Top Reasons Why Business Blogs Shouldn't Be On BlogSpot.com.

2. Increase Website Traffic. The clients who we have worked with to setup and properly promote integrated blogs (blog.yourcompanyname.com) have seen their traffic increase between 300% and 2,000%. The effect of these traffic gains - although by itself quite dramatic - is that the number of inbound links multiplies and additional search equity is applied. Since starting our blog (blog.ymarketing.com) we've seen our amount of content pages indexed on Google and Bing triple, and the blog has played a direct role in tripling the number of quality inbound links to ymarketing.com.

3. Increase Search Engine Spider Crawl Frequency. The question of "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it fall" has an application in the world of search: if a website gets updated and no search engine spider comes by to re-index the site, then the change didn't really do your business any good. We've seen clients increase their crawl frequency from monthly to several times a week; I have to attribute this primarily to the addition of an integrated blog, and the results are that changes to the site (i.e. meta data testing, new content pages, news updates, etc.) get indexed nearly immediately, so we can get a read on what changes had a positive impact right away. The whole process of test, read and refine is greatly accelerated.

4. Increase Sharing and Word of Mouth. Have you noticed that people typically don't share product information on Facebook? Not too many people "Digg" company information sheets, right? And most of the Internet population resists the temptation to "bookmark" the "About Us" page on your site. People like to share things that are of interest to them on a personal level, and things they think their peers and friends would be interested in. This is true for B-to-B as well. Blogs make it easy for people to share with others. They give site visitors a reason to connect on an emotional level. In our research we have collected data that proves that referred visitors are between 1.5X and 4X more likely to convert into a qualified lead or new customer than general website traffic, so the financial, rational argument for sharing can be made. When we setup client blogs we include the most popular business sharing tools as buttons to make tweeting, digging and sharing on Facebook and LinkedIn as easy as emailing a friend.

5. Qualify Leads before they ever make contact. I recently experienced this myself. A prospect for our business read a comment that I wrote on someone else's blog, liked the line of thinking of my comment as much if not more than the original author, followed the link I provided back to our blog, read several posts, agreed with our approach and philosophy, then contacted us as a well-read, highly-informed qualified prospect. That is happening more and more, and would not have been possible let alone probable before we started blogging.

6. Build Community. The reason most people think of first ("You blog so that you build a community of like-minded individuals, promote discussion, etc.") is actually my #6 reason Businesses Must Blog. Let's be real: If you're not the size of Microsoft, Cisco or Netflix, the community construction aspect of blogging is going to take a while to fully develop. But it will, as long as you make the decision to start blogging, continue to publish quality content, and invite others to participate in the conversation.

A Word on Blogging Best Practices

The Best Practices of Blogging recommend that you spend equal portions of your time reading the blogs of others, commenting on those other blogs, and crafting your own. So if you can only invest, say, two hours a week to this valuable new pursuit of blogging, be sure you start with 1 half hour into finding and reading other people's blogs of interest to you and your business goals, a half hour or more leaving comments and asking questions on those blogs, and an equal amount of time writing your own posts.

Leaving Blog Bread Crumbs

Taking a cue from would-be social media pioneers Hansel & Gretel... One of the best ways to build a community in the early days of blogging is to include a bread crumb - a link to your blog - every time you read and comment on someone else's relevant post or blog. An example:

"A very interesting and provocative idea about the greening of marketing, Michael. I thought you were absolutely right on your assessment of the topic of how direct mail impacts our environment, but consider this one idea you may have missed: Search is the new direct mail. I've written about this topic at http://blog.ymarketing.com/?Tag=inbound%20marketing and invite you to have a look..."

That way when interested readers see your comment and agree with your point of view or unique insight, they'll follow your link and discover your blog.

What do you think... What did we miss? What are the compelling reasons for business to blog that we neglected to include?

For more information visit ymarketing.com, follow @ymarketing on Twitter or call 877.736.4321 x707

Time for a new approach: Inbound Marketing

 

You've read the news. It's everywhere. The traditional approach to marketing is dying. Examine the predominant media and tactics that make up "traditional marketing": Newspapers, TV, Radio, Print, Direct Mail, Out of Home, etc. and you'll quickly realize like I did that they are all "outbound" tactics - an approach Seth Godin famously coined as "Interruption Marketing" - the tactics that work only if they interrupt you to get your attention. Call it "Outbound Marketing", "Interruption-based" or simply "What we've always done"; the truth is that the lives of consumers have changed-- as well as their response to advertising and marketing. And the reality is, our marketing efforts need to adapt accordingly..

So what works better?

Inbound Marketing stands in the opposite corner of the marketing world as an approach that does not depend on interruption, rather it depends on someone actively seeking you out for information on a topic, service, offering or product. Inbound Marketing is a term defined by Forrester as "The delivery of targeted or customized marketing messages and offers within the context of a customer-initiated interaction. " In practical application, Inbound Marketing involves the strategy of leveraging SEO (Search Engine Optimization), SEM/PPC (Paid Search), Blogging and Social Media to drive increased traffic, leads and revenue to a business.

Attract highly qualified customers to your business like a magnet

Instead of having telemarketers make endless calls and direct mailers send countless mail pieces pestering decision makers - without any sense of timing, when that decision maker may be in market - the Inbound strategy works by getting your business found by those actively seeking the services, solutions and products you offer, when they're in market.

Leverage existing customer interactions

Forrester goes on to say that, "Enterprising companies are turning to their sales and service interactions as a primary means for cross-sell, up-sell, and retention activities. These channels present an opportunity where: 1) the customer is actively engaged - by choice; 2) customer needs are more transparent; and 3) the ‘right time' might be now."

This is perhaps the strongest argument for a new approach. Let's face it: Consumer have the control these days. They have more channels, more choices, more information sources than ever before. Like it not, The Marketer and The Company are not regaining control anytime soon. The task for savvy marketers today is to educate, add value, and enable the decision making process.

What's on your mind?

Have an interruption marketing horror story to share? Or a great example of a company embracing Inbound Marketing and Customer Interaction on the web? Share your thoughts here. Be sure to sign your name (unattributed comments will not be published.)

For more information visit ymarketing.com, follow @ymarketing on Twitter or call 877.736.4321 x707