1] Your Website Looks Exactly Like Your Competitors Websites

You need to ensure that your website (and in fact your business overall) is clearly differentiated from your competition. If your website is the same as your competitors, it won’t help your product or service stand out from the crowd.

2] You’ve Spent Too Long Worrying About The Look Of  The Website

People want information and they want it fast. While most good looking website will get a visitors attention, it wont keep them reading or convert them into a lead. At the end of the day, they are visiting to get answers to their questions, you will generate more business more quickly by playing with the content, rather than the design.

3] Your Website Content Is All About You Rather Than The Customer

An effective website is filled with information that potential clients will consider highly valuable. Make sure your content is written for them and is not just about you or your company.
Think the way they do: Why are they interested in your solution?
What questions are they likely to have?
Write content that answers their questions, and presents what ever you sell as the answer.

4] You Don’t Have Any Way To Drive Traffic To Your Website

Just creating a website isn’t enough. You need to drive traffic. There are many ways to do this: You can optimise your website to perform better in Google Searches; advertise using pay per click advertising such as Google AdWords; send email broadcasts; generate links from other websites; and use online and offline PR.

5] You Don’t Have Any Ways To Capture Visitors Contact Details

You must have some form of data capture on your website, even if it’s only as simple as a newsletter sign-up. When you have someone;’s contact details, you know that they are a prospective client and you can then carry out direct marketing to them.

The easiest way to get people’s data is to offer them something free in return, such as a piece of free information like a report, a booklet or tips, or maybe an industry guide.

People who really want the information will happily hand over their name and email address to get it. They are effectively declaring themselves a qualified lead, worthy of following up and spending sales time on.

OpenNetworker.com helps you build larger, more diverse and more valuable networks on the world’s top social networking sites. People who are part of OpenNetworker.com are people like you – they know the incredible value of being open to new opportunities and new connections – and are some of the world’s most helpful and connected people.
Each social networking site has its own OpenNetworker.com Invite Me List.
There are Invite Me Lists for LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Ecademy and more.

http://www.aweber.com

The top rated email marketing software that’s easy to use & only $1 to try. Send email newsletters & autoresponders and more importantly build your customer list.

http://www.hootsuite.com

Social Media Dashboard. With HootSuite, you can monitor keywords, manage multiple Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Ping.fm and WordPress profiles, schedule messages, and measure your success.

http://www.twitbacks.com

In less than 2 minutes… Brand yourself on Twitter by creating your very own Twitter background.

http://www.twuffer.com

Twuffer allows the Twitter user to compose a list of future tweets, and schedule their release.

http://www.wildfireapp.com

With Wildfire companies & agencies can easily build & launch social media marketing campaigns within minutes. Campaign formats include quizzes, contests, coupons, virtual gifts and more. Easy-to-use design features enable you to create layouts & designs that fit your needs, publish your social media marketing campaign on Facebook Fan Pages, Twitter and your Website with just a few clicks.

http://www.surveymonkey.com

We make it easy for your customers to provide the feedback you need to move business forward:

• Measure customer satisfaction
• Get feedback on new or existing products
• Understand purchase behavior

http://www.animoto.com

Turn your photos & videos into pure amazing. Animoto automatically produces beautifully orchestrated, completely unique  video pieces from your photos, video clips and music. Fast, free and shockingly easy.

http://www.lastpass.com

LastPass is an online password manager and form filler that makes web browsing easier and more secure. Generate unique passwords and have lastpass remember them, Iphone and Andriod apps.

http://www.dropbox.com

Dropbox allows you to sync your files online and across your computers automatically.

• 2GB (8GB max) of online storage for free, with up to 100GB available to paying customers.
• Sync files of any size or type. Automatically syncs when new files or changes are detected.
• Sync Windows, Mac, and Linux computers.

http://www.woopra.com

Best and most simple to read analytic software for your website (FREE)

http://www.jing.com

Take a picture or make a short video of what you see on your computer monitor and share it instantly via web, email, IM, Twitter or your blog, simple and free, Jing is the perfect way to enhance your fast-paced online conversations.

http://www.picnik.com

Picnik is photo editing online, in your browser. It give real people photo editing superpowers.
It’s fast, easy and offer tons of powerful tools.

http://www.flickr.com

Flickr is almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world.

Google sites handle about 88 billion searches each month. YouTube is the second most popular search engine second only to Google. Facebook is now over 600 million users. Twitter has nearly 200 million accounts. LinkedIn is at 101 million users and FourSquare grew 3,400% in 2010.
The variety of options for customer marketing and engagement ranging from social media to SEO to email marketing to online advertising can be overwhelming. As a result, some of the most common online marketing questions I hear from client side marketers revolve around, “How to decide which tactics are best?”

Answering that question starts with a clear understanding of goals, customers and a flexible online marketing strategy that assembles the right mix of tactics and measurement practices. Most companies are looking for more customers and to retain those they have, but the question is,
“How to acquire and engage customers more efficiently, more effectively?”

A big part of the answer is through the intersection of social media, SEO and content marketing. If Social Media and SEO fit together like peanut butter and jelly then content is the bread that holds them together. Content Marketing is a crucial part of a social media strategy and therefore an understanding of customer-centric social content is essential.

Find Out More About Content Marketing By Reading The Rest Of  This Post Here

The most powerful content tool is also the oldest. It’s the tool that brought us some of the most compelling moments in history—from fallen leaders to pop-culture confessions. It’s the tool that made Oprah arguably one of the most powerful brands on the planet. And the same one that Barbara Walters used to reach the most influential people of our time.

Your Content Advantage: The Interview

Yes, the interview. Powerful interviews create timeless content. Yet when it comes to blogging, we neglect to use our most powerful weapons. Master blog interview tactics and your content will surely make an impact—in any situation.

Read The FULL Post Here
http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/11-ways-to-improve-your-blog-posts-with-interviews

Consider these stats: Google sites handle about 88 billion queries a month but did you know, twitter is approaching 20 billion?

Facebook added over 200 million users in less than a year and Hitwise has reported that Facebook tops Google in weekly web traffic.

Social media is hot, but is by no means mutually exclusive of search. Search has expanded beyond Google and marketers must now consider other search channels such as internal Facebook search and online marketing mobile search as channels where customers are looking.

The intersection of search engine and social media innovations are in flux with dynamics of changing consumer preferences for information discovery, consumption and sharing.  The blur of all this change is an opportunity for brands and marketers to engage an active online marketing strategy that converges the disciplines of search, social media, content and online public relations.

I believe the future of marketing brings the best of these disciplines together. To meet consumer needs, whether it’s B2B or B2C, it’s inevitable that PR will know SEO and Social Media Marketers with be versed in media relations.

Because there are so many information sources online, sales cycles are getting longer. Customers expect more than being presented with features and benefits followed by a call to action.

For marketers, it’s not better to just give more. “Better” is better. Better content, better visibility in all the places customers might looking or influenced by. It also means a better experience in brand / consumer interactions.

For example, searchers expect not only to find what they’re looking for on a search engine, but to interact with the results through commenting, rating, joining as well as buying. A purchase is just the start of social engagement with customers and customer marketing with social media continues to be a growth area.

Active online marketing pays attention to those customer needs and creates a dynamic cycle of social and search interaction. Creating customer experiences that are easily discovered through search or social and continuously evaluating what works and what doesn’t will inform marketer’s subsequent editorial, optimization and social media marketing efforts.

There are so many changes and much to look forward to in 2011. Here are three areas in particular (of many) that I think marketers should pay attention to in the coming year:

Online Marketing Content – This area has been popularized in the past year by people like Joe Pulizzi of Content Marketing Institute and brands are indeed adopting a publisher model of marketing through content. Content extends beyond the browser and includes mobile, social and any other kind of search.  This will only continue and get increasingly competitive for those that can afford to scale original content creation.

Content Curation – The sheer volume of online marketing content out there now is overwhelming with social publishing platforms online and mobile making it incredibly easy to create and share. Original content creation is expensive to scale and creatively challenging in the long term. Content curation serves as an efficient model for marketers to engage consumers as a source of signal amongst the noise. Note: our client HiveFire offers a very good content curation tool for enabling this.

Social Commerce – Companies like Minneapolis based Alvenda are empowering ecommerce on Facebook with brands like Brooks Brothers, Delta Airlines and Best Buy. It’s still early days for social commerce but if companies can make it part of the social experience, I think it will serve as true channel for Social Media ROI.

I think the future of online marketing is dynamic, challenging and full of promise for companies that can commit themselves to a process of testing, engagement, coordinating cross channel efforts and refinement.

What would your sixty second tip on the future of online marketing be?

This FourSquare-like program allows you to make recommendations that then get shared with your friends.

Smartly, Hotpot pushes Places, getting business owners to claim their free listings to help Google build their efforts in the online Yellow Pages space, while using social networking to build reviews for their products.

You can add Google Hotpot reviews on your smart phone by using Google Maps for Mobile, so they have the mobile thing included as well. And Hotpot also has its own Twitter account to friend people – it should not be long before there is a tie in for users to Tweet their reviews.

“More than 20 percent of Google searches now have a local intent, and it’s clear that finding information about what’s immediately around you is important…. With Google Hotpot, we’re excited to take local search to the next level by making it more personal with recommendations powered by you and your friends,” the Hotpot blog stated.

When I signed up they took me through my Gmail contacts and allowed me to pick the friends from there I wanted included in my Hotpot account. Will have to wait to see if they are emailed about it thus getting more people to join up.

What Google (Hot Pocket) Google Hotpot really is, is another layer.

It’s another layer to Google’s growing onion of social-local that already includes the likes of Google Places (now representing 50 million businesses), Google Latitude (no, really, give me your exact coordinates), Google Social Search (Peer Pressure:2010) and others. The problem is, sometimes layers don’t feel like layers. When piled one on top of another, they feel like concrete walls. And then people begin to feel a little claustrophobic.”

How popular this Google Hotpot effort in social media becomes has yet to be determined.

You  may notice that this checklist isn’t that concerned with SEO. Don’t take that to mean Search Engine Optimization isn’t to be heavily considered with a social media marketing effort.  At the same time, not all social media efforts need to be SEO focused.

Social Media Organization

Assess the human resources and internal political situation

• Who is your executive sponsor?
• How will other key staff benefit from social media adoption and how will it best be shared in the organization?
• What does your phase 1 & 2 social media team look like?
• Who is already involved with social media activities in the organization?
• Who are your assets and who are your liabilities?

Listening

Establish an ongoing listening program

• Brand centric concepts like company name, products, services, executives.
• Customer centric concepts like informal references to brand, products, services and topics of interest to their needs.
• Prospects – what kinds of questions are prospective customers asking online?
• Competitors – monitor competing company social participation for comparison and for opportunity.

Considerations:
• Software – Social media monitoring, publishing, dashboard management, promotion, analytics/tracking and measurement.
• People – Is there a social media manager or community manage? If not, who will manage the listening effort?
• Workflow & effect on other departments – When listening efforts uncover customer service issues, sales opportunities, recruiting or media opportunities, are appropriate departments aware they will be involved?

Social Media Goals

Define objectives according to business goals

• Customer engagement – Listening and learning from customers also involves interaction. What social media guidelines have been defined for employee interactions on the social web? How will you know such engagement activity is successful?
• Uncover sales opportunity – Determine baseline measurements for prospecting conversations and set goals based on potential.
• Customer service – Can social participation help improve customer service?  Will there be staff to monitor social channels and empowered to solve problems there?

Considerations:
• Benchmarks – Goal setting will take some exploration and benchmark measurements need to start somewhere. Evolve and revisit.
• KPIs – What are the proxies to success? Mentions, links, traffic, interactions, retweets, fans, friends, followers? Trend them, don’t just take snapshots.
• Measurement – Determine what you can reasonably measure and against what standard? Social media data can overwhelm, so be sure you can filter what’s meaningful out of the noise.
• Reporting – Figure out what the folks upstairs are most motivated by and give it to them. Use reporting to close the feedback loop with community managers and customer facing staff so they can see the social media effect of their efforts.

Social Media Audience

Understand the people you’re trying to reach

• Develop personas based on what you already know as well as the information collected from social media listening and direct engagement.
• Identify preferences for information discovery, consumption and sharing.

Considerations:
• Needs – What are the information and engagement needs of the people you’re trying to connect with?
• Preferred channels – Where do your customers spend time and what are the strongest influences?
• Media types – Understanding whether there’s a preferred media type can be very effective for engagement and encouraging sharing. Video is popular, but not always appropriate. Images, text and rich media
• Social behaviors – Do customers create, share, curate or lurk? Do they behave differently on different social channels?
• Methods of communicating preferences are pretty important. Sending a Tweet might be ok with some people, while others prefer a private message or email.

Social Media Strategy

Document the plan for reaching goals and for being a more social organization

• Content – Decide what socially distributed content you can commit to. Decide how content created as a result of social interactions and sharing can be leveraged for marketing online.
• Engagement – Will customer engagement via social channels be a phased approach or will you “launch” a campaign and maintain? Decide whether to lead or react to information streams picked up via social media monitoring and participation in social communities.
• Vision & communication – Develop your vision for what the company and brand stands for in the context of the social web. How will that be communicated? What social media guidelines are in place regarding messaging for employees and social media teams?

Considerations:
• React or Lead – Listening solely to gain information that guides social activities is very different that taking a stand and leading customers to social channels. Most corporate social media marketing is a mix but leadership on the social web is lacking overall amongst brands and is therefore a stark opportunity.
• Content – Allocate resources for content creation guided by a social editorial schedule.
• Community engagement – Hire or train a community manager? Develop social media guidelines for employees.
• Reporting/dashboard – Social media monitoring tools that can trend high level data provide priceless feedback for executives.

Tactics/Tools

Commit to social media channels and tools

• Social networks  - Identify appropriate social networks and participate. Create training materials internally for employees along with guidelines for commenting, sharing, etc.
• Blogging – There are rare instances when companies shouldn’t have a blog of some kind.  Blogs can effectively serve as a hub for social participation in multiple channels.
• Media sharing – Make it easy for content to be shared amongst social news, bookmarking, networks and Twitter.
• Microcontent – Leverage Twitter messaging right along with any other content promoted via social channels.

Considerations:
• Which social networks – Social media monitoring and first hand participation will provide insight into which social networks make the most sense for growing networks and reaching customers.
• Fan page or group? According to purpose a Facebook fan page or group should be created. Fan pages are best for companies and group pages tend to work best for special interest groups or associations.
• Coordination between social channels – Most companies operate social activities in silos and do not coordinate. Working together, message distribution and reach can be amplified significantly, if content is coordinated between channels.

Measurement

Define measurement tools, metrics & reporting

• Tools - Measurement for a large organization using one tool isn’t practical, despite what software vendors will tell you. The best tool might not be “the best tool” for your company when ease of use and implementation means broader adoption compared to something that’s best in class.
• Account for testing – Companies that have not implemented formal social participation would do well to create accounts for testing and training purposes. These accounts may or may not reflect the brand. This gives an opportunity for training before launching more explicit programs.
• Identify success metrics – How will you know your social media efforts are successful? Identify metrics that are meaningful to reaching your business goals as well as outcomes.
• Adjustable goals – Understand that while you set initial goals, when the “rubber hits the road” most companies find there is a need to adjust objectives as they come to better understand the nature of social participation amongst their customer base.
• What does ROI mean to you? A return on investment with social media marketing means different things to different companies. It’s not all about increasing revenue, although it should never be understated how important being able to associate efforts to business outcomes is. Lowering costs are just as valuable as increasing top of the funnel leads and sales.
• Reporting formats & distribution – From dashboards to executive level summaries, it’s important to create report formats that are meaningful to the different stakeholders in your organization.

Considerations:
• Levels of organizational reporting – With a small company, reporting is pretty straightforward, but with large or complex organizations, decisions need to be made as to whether reporting is segmented for specific business units, divisions or even departments. That adds extra workload so be ready to make the case.
• Centralized and distributed – Companies that operate their social media initiatives all from corporate tend to focus on aggregated reporting for the business overall. When social media is a function of different business entities within the company, reporting is specific to those areas but must also be rolled up to an executive summary for management.
• Software – There are a wide variety of social media monitoring software to choose from as well as software for the management of social media assets, promotion and analytics.  Choose wisely, be open to testing and understand that while you might want the best in class, if it can’t be implemented in a practical way across your organization, you might need to go with something that you can actually use, right now.
• Human analysis & management – As with web analytics, social media analytics reaps the biggest rewards when there is an analytics specialist to “make sense” of the data. While such an expense might not seem likely at the start, it’s something that should be planned for as the social media program gains momentum.

Q4DMBAYP474E

The ad network hails from serial entrepreneur Gurbaksh Chanal, a proven veteran in the ad space. Most recently, Chanal sold ad network BlueLithium for $300 million to Yahoo in cash in 2007. At the time, BlueLithium was the fifth largest ad network in the U.S. and the second largest in the U.K.

RadiumOne’s approach to better targeted advertising is through social data, using a process it calls, “social retargeting.” So, RadiumOne will analyze social interactions to create segments of people — called “social clusters” — who know each other and have interests in common. These groups will help the company serve ads based on whether an individual shares similar qualities and interests with a brand’s existing customer base.

Essentially, it’s word of mouth marketing as applied to advertisements. RadiumOne is so confident in its approach that it promises to refund the full cost of campaigns should it not outperform its competitors.

Online advertising is a thriving business on the rise in the U.S — $12.1 billion was spent on online ads in the first six months of 2010. Layering social data over ad displays is likely something marketers and brands will salivate over, especially if the technology yields its promised higher conversion rates.

Part 1 | Keep it Simple
Part 2 | Don’t Go Alone
Part 3 | Think Like Them
Part 4 | Get Clicks!
Part 5 | Build Relationships
Part 6 | Promote Your Business Website
Part 7 | Keep it Fresh
Part 8 | Test Drive
Part 9 | Analyze
Part 10 | Keep Learning

In writing this short and simple online business website guide, I had to make an assumption. That assumption is that you don’t have a web site now (and know you desperately need one) or you already have a web site that you’re tired of apologizing for because you know it’s outdated and not to your standards. If you fall into one of those two categories, read on!

Take a few minutes and review the Creating a Business Website series. When you’re finished, you’ll have the best possible advice for saving time and money when it comes to creating or recreating a professional web site and online presence.

You’ll learn how to make the process easier on yourself, how much web design costs, how to get help, how to create compelling web content, how to be found on Google, how to utilize email marketing, how to get more people to visit your business website, how to incorporate a blog to greatly increase your online visibility, maintenance made easy, an introduction to Google Analytics (web stats), and the most popular resources to maximize for the most effective small business website.

Part 1 | Keep it Simple
Part 2 | Don’t Go Alone
Part 3 | Think Like Them
Part 4 | Get Clicks!
Part 5 | Build Relationships
Part 6 | Promote Your Business Website
Part 7 | Keep it Fresh
Part 8 | Test Drive
Part 9 | Analyze
Part 10 | Keep Learning

In writing this short and simple online business website guide, I had to make an assumption. That assumption is that you don’t have a web site now (and know you desperately need one) or you already have a web site that you’re tired of apologizing for because you know it’s outdated and not to your standards. If you fall into one of those two categories, read on!

Take a few minutes and review the Creating a Business Website series. When you’re finished, you’ll have the best possible advice for saving time and money when it comes to creating or recreating a professional web site and online presence.

You’ll learn how to make the process easier on yourself, how much web design costs, how to get help, how to create compelling web content, how to be found on Google, how to utilize email marketing, how to get more people to visit your business website, how to incorporate a blog to greatly increase your online visibility, maintenance made easy, an introduction to Google Analytics (web stats), and the most popular resources to maximize for the most effective small business website.