General Social Media Tips from LA Marketing YPD Media

 The world of social media has opened to doors to a plethora of opportunities for consumers to share their thoughts and opinions on everything from the weather and politics to adorable photos of cats where photo-shopped hipster glasses. When it comes to social media for businesses, professionals must take care to enact a more structured approach to the information that is shared and the interactions they engage in with prospective clients and customers. Marketing agencies everywhere are taking note. The top LA marketing firms are paying attention to what’s happening in social media.

When businesses enact a “one foot in the door” approach to social media they tend to fail. The social media audience requires genuine interactions and consistency to stay interested. Potential buyers and customers need valuable information that is interesting and shareable. Common sense approaches to high quality content will increase both your search and social media visibility. The convergence of social media and search engine optimization (SEO) is a powerful thing. Here are some tips from my Los Angeles marketing firm to help you harness the powers of Social SEO:

Facebook:

·         Think outside the box. Facebook users are constantly bombarded with boring advertisements and ho-hum content. Present a visually exciting page that will catch the eye of potential customers and regularly follow up with engaging and relevant content to keep followers

·         Be a good host. Facebook users are under no obligation to like your page. When a user fans your page they virtually declare to everyone in their social web that they like your product, brand, business, etc. A little thank you can go a long way.

Twitter:

·         Pay attention to the comments about your business, brand, or product. Make sure to pay attention to your target market and prospective clients to see what they’re sharing and following.

·         Ask engaging questions that get prospective customers involved. Honest sharing shows users you’re listening.

·         Respond to requests, comments (good and bad), and compliments in real time.                 

·         Persistence pays off. Engage with your community regularly. Gaining followers and creating quality content takes time, don’t waste it by dropping the ball on your social media interactions.

Pinterest:

·         Create engaging content by using compelling images that stir a reaction in your target audience.

·         Use hashtags (ex: #hashtag) when you create pins and tweet those pins. Social media intertwines so make the most of it.

·         When a user repins one of your pins, take care to follow that user. You’ll gain new fans by paying attention to whose watching you.

Tell me! How do you interact with clients on the various social media platforms? What negatives and positives have you encountered through social media for your business? Do you have any favorites? Do you have any tips or tricks of your own?

Bee for the Day

There is nothing that I can write that will do justice for how amazing Bee for the Day is. They made our day unbelievably special and stress free by providing the highest quality of service. Not only was Brooke, Heather, and Shell extremely organized, but they ensured that any little whim was taken care of promptly and efficiently.

One of the largest benefits to the Bees is how well they work with everyone. They keep you on time without rushing you. It's your day after all, but they make sure you are aware of every situation and they are prepared for everything which makes you feel all the more ready for any situation. From the timing of walking down the aisle to when we did the garter toss and cake cutting, the Bees kept everything spaced out so we were able to relax, mingle, and entertain while still keeping traditions alive.

Example: It's hard to know when to get everything rolling along. We weren't sure when to escort the grandmas in or the parents, but the Bees had our back. They got us lined up and ready to roll.

Example: Receiving line, they helped the ushers keep the flow of people steady so it didn't take too long and we still got time to say hi and thank you to everyone. They then helped direct us where to go next for pictures and even helped line us up so we could get full family pictures (even extended family) while still remaining on time and ready to go the reception.

Example: We were starving after the ceremony, so we had a little pizza to tide us over. A groomsman had gotten some pizza sauce on his tie. Heather was able to get her emergency kit and get the pizza sauce out like it was never even there. We still had a long night of pictures ahead.

Example: Several times during the night guests had questions, vendors had questions, and they were all able to go to  the Bees for answers. This allowed us to relax, allowed our parents to enjoy the night, and saved us from worrying about the details that can drag you down. We just enjoyed every minute while they coordinated behind the scenes.

Talking with both sets of parents and grandparents after the wedding, they had thought it was silly to have a wedding coordinator. They were HAPPILY wrong! They could not imagine what the wedding would have been like without them. The simplicity that they brought to the rehearsal, ceremony, and reception were underestimated. If there is one thing you do, get the Bees. They honestly made this experience the best time of my/our lives. I couldn't be happier with the way things went and a huge thank you goes out to the Bees.

These ladies are experts at what they do. I can not recommend them enough.

Website: http://beefortheday.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bftdtoledo

Review: SEO Failure? Where to Point the Fingers

Many companies as well as clients have a difficult time accepting that they may have been the reason for an SEO failure. In most situations, the blame goes immediately to the SEO company, department, or expert, and rightfully so. These are the people in charge of making sure SEO succeeds, so these are the people that will most likely take the blame (and be happy to do it). However, it’s important to realize that just because they are forced (in a sense) to take the blame doesn’t mean they are actually to blame.

The Client vs. The Expert vs. Google: Who Is Really to Blame for an SEO Failure?

If you want to be an informed client or informed SEO expert, it’s important to see all different sides to a failure and consider all different outcomes. Below explains the three different parties that are most likely to be at fault and some of the reasons and instances that might put them in that position.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-failure-where-to-point-the-fingers/62873/

The rest of the article is great. It has comparisons of whom is to blame - the client or the SEO company. The most common failure is done by the search engine optimization company. They try to find a quick method and often end up getting initial results before failing as a black hat method.

Black Hat Tactics. Any black hat tactic that is used—cloaking, keyword stuffing, duplicate content, etc.—is entirely the fault of the SEO department such as link farms for backlinks.

Poor Communication. Those in charge of SEO need to make sure that they are communicating with the client. The client might not always know that they should be asking about a particular method or approach, so it’s your job to keep them completely in the loop. This will often spark questions and will help keep that partnership between client and agency/expert strong. If an SEO simply decides not to communicate a change with the client and the client doesn’t like it in the future, that’s the SEO’s fault.

General Laziness. This might seem obvious, but as with anything, an SEO agency or expert can get lazy and just not feel like helping. It’s as simple as that.

False Guarantees. Many SEOs give false guarantees such as “Number 1 Ranking in One Month Or Your Money Back.” If an agency couldn’t deliver on this, it’s their own fault because they should know that guarantees are not possible in SEO.

Read more on the article site to find out more common methods of how to identify where the failures occur.

How To Use Location Based Marketing Strategy

Entrepreneurs and businesses are always looking for new and effective techniques for conveying their business messages and promotional content to users that are most likely to be interested in their products and services. However, most of the Small and Medium Enterprises don’t have big funds to deliver their marketing material to potential customers. Location based marketing strategies are very effective in such situations and many of the businesses opt for it.

Before you opt for location based marketing you should know that it is not a piece of cake and proper knowledge is required to get the most out of it. It can be really tricky, even if you have lots of web experience. One of the sure shot techniques for achieving desired result from location based marketing is by hiring an IT outsourcing company and letting them do the work for you. You just have to make sure that they have enough experience and proven capabilities required for your projects success.

Mentioned below are some of the geo-targeting tips that have proved to be very effective in the past for many enterprises.

MarketMeSuite Software: Use this software to find out the keywords that are most relevant to your business and target the customers who are specifically looking for services provided by you in your area of functioning.

Use enhanced SEO based on geo-targeting: You can run targeted IP address beta tests using Google Adwords to improve your returns from your Pay-Per-Click campaigns. Further, you can always offer location based deals and promos to check the effectiveness of your tactics.

Localized domains: You should buy the domain extensions of your website for countries where you want to target customers. Make these websites deal in local currencies as this will create more trust and comfortable environment for visitors.

Use Nearby Tweets: This is a great website that allows you to see what people are talking about in any particular city. You can search for anything that is related to your business and join the conversation where it is happening. You can talk to them and get very useful information such as their likes and dislikes etc. Further, you can also invite them to visit your business and try out your specialties or any newly launched products.

Have a nice Mobile presence: Users are shifting more and more towards mobile devices for things that they usually did on computer systems. This makes it very important for you to have a mobile friendly website which appears in results when people search for services and products offered by you.

There are many more things that you can do to market your business more effectively in local area but these would be enough for now. They will help you in starting a really effective and result oriented location based marketing campaign for your business. You can go for more options and techniques once you have applied these and start understanding how things work in location based marketing.

About the Author: Chris Miller is a blogger cum web developer @ a leading Software development company, Xicom which provides , software development outsourcing, web application development services, software development, outsourced IT services & BPO.

Content Development Guidelines from Ragan.com

Hello fellow content developers,

I am going to paraphrase an article I read today on Ragan.com. I found the article via twitter and it looked like something worthy of your eyes so I encourage you to take a look at the original article and not just my review and summary.

Timeliness

Deadlines are nearly as important as the actual content the writer produces. If you can’t be on time, then you’re just causing more work for me and I can’t have that. I don’t have time to chase you down looking for content that I assigned a week ago and I’m sure most business owners feel the same way.

Posting content should be done on a regular basis - this means weekly, every Friday  the first Monday of the month, daily, every second Tuesday - it doesn't matter as long as it is regular so people know what to expect and when to come back.

Voice

A good writer has a definitive voice. In short, you can typically tell they wrote something by their style and delivery. I tend to avoid generic content writers as they are a dime a dozen. I’m looking for something distinctive in a writer’s delivery and ability to tell a story. This writer stands out from the pack by being creative, unique and a cut above the rest.

For example the voice that I use in my writing is very personal and informal to say the least. I write like I am talking to you guys face to face. I've never been an eloquent writer, but I have always been real and raw. If I don't like something, I say I don't like something with a reason behind it.

Adaptability

Writing academic papers might require a more fact-driven and dry approach than producing blog content. A good writer knows how to differentiate the two. Good writers are able to adapt their voice and style based on where the content is being published. Bad writers carry the same style across all formats and this doesn’t really lend itself to producing content across multiple channels. They might be great at blogging, but you’ll need a second writer to produce whitepapers, e-books or research papers.

I typically like writers who are adaptable enough to create content across multiple channels as well as in different formats.

Your audience is going to change over time. Their taste, your industry, something new will come out and force you into changing exactly what you are writing about or how you are writing it. This means that the person whom is more able to adapt to change will succeed far easier and far more likely than someone resisting said change.

Research

The best content uses statistics or facts to drive home the point the writer is trying to convey. Does your writer use numbers or facts in his writing? If it looks like the writer could open up Word and write the article without referencing anything, the content generally isn’t up to the standard we’re looking for. We want someone who can research any topic in order to produce a great piece of content.

Obviously they aren’t going to be experts at everything, but you won’t be able to tell based on their writing alone.

Content development is a lot like writing a paper from school. If you are not an expert with definitive, provable answers, then you need to get sources that are reputable behind you. You don't need to write in MLA or APA format, but you should be able to reference other industry leading people, companies, or blogs that will back you up.

Availability

I don’t want a writer who is booked solid weeks in advance. I need someone that has the flexibility to deliver content when I need it. We’re not talking about placing unreasonable demands on time, but a 500-word blog post isn’t something I want to wait a week for. If the writer can’t turn around most short projects within 48 hours or so, I tend to move on to those who can. This is one of the most profound arguments for hiring professional, full-time writers rather than hobbyists and those that use content as a means to derive a second form of income.

It shouldn't take long for you to write a good, high quality article under 500 words. You should be able to crank these out for your clients or company because without this type of production, the industry or news can move too fast. Think about it, when was the last time you read an article that was a week past due on something that had occurred. No one wants to read old news because they've already heard it and people have moved on.

Read more at http://www.jeffbullas.com/2013/02/21/unlocking-the-secrets-to-finding-great-writers-to-produce-your-content/#f14f7yGQGGOuykCr.99 

How often do your competitors engage with others?

One very important piece to remember is that your competitors will be engaging with their users in a digital environment. It's very important to analyze how they do this so you can leverage their success or learn from their failure.

Remember that social media is not a one-way broadcasting system. You will probably be able to see the difference in overall engagement between your competitors that are responding to their followers and fans vs. the ones that are not. Regardless of what your competitors are doing, you should always make it a point to engage with your social media audience by responding to mentions and direct messages on Twitter, replying to comments on your Facebook wall and Google+ posts, and replying to comments on posts within LinkedIn groups.

I utilize tools from Hubspot, Google Alerts, and my own eyes to monitor them accurately. I am of course a cheap skate or someone who doesn't invest in tools outside of the open source / free world. If I did end up doing this full time, I would grab Hubspot, Google Analytics premium, and probably something similar to Rival HQ where I could monitor statistics of my competitors. 

Check out monitor backlinks if you are wondering where their backlinks occur from - I've found that super helpful.

When brands have better products to offer

Brands We Care About

A recent study by Havas Media shows only 20% of brands have the potential to influence our life and wellbeing. In the UK 95% of consumers don’t care if a brand stops existing; we want brands to connect to us at a personal level rather than stand for products alone. So what do we expect from them today?

When brands have better products to offer

When Google was created back in 1998, the international online community was already familiar with Yahoo and Alta Vista as search engines, and the introduction of yet another oddly-named search engine wasn’t met with any great celebration – the same with the then MSN search engine. However, as Google progressed, it soon became apparent that the technology being used and developed was able to deliver more accurate search results than its rivals, and the market shares of the 3 main engines started to change, with Google soon becoming more in favour than the others.

Fairly soon after Google’s rise to popularity, people started using the word “Google” to refer to an Internet search in general, and now you’ll hear “I’ll Google it” as the common phrase for a search online, as opposed to “I’ll search for it”, or even “ I’ll Bing it”/”I’ll Yahoo it”.

Other vivid examples of brands that became common nouns because of their standing within the communities they cater to are “Hoover” as opposed to the term ‘vaccuum’ and “Xerox” used to name any automated copying machine. Rarely do you hear of people “vacuuming” their lounge, and “copying” their documents.

When brands build an emotional connection

More than ever we want brands to focus on real things rather than plunge us into imaginary worlds. Dove’s Real Women campaign by Unilever, which highlights different body shapes and sizes rather than models, has the potential to encourage women to buy because it let them co-create the brand and be part of it. At Unilever, changing the perception of marketing also meant changing how employees talk about customers. For many brands, customers are simply targets but talking this way can build no emotional connection. We have a stronger emotional attachment to products if the company treats us with respect and has a human idea behind its brand.

While some brands use corporate promotional gifts to pull in more business, others are changing the message they send and the way they treat their clients. Time and statistics show we only care about brands that we feel are created to make our life easier and happier. 

Havas Media study: http://www.havasmedia.com/2011/11/meaningful-brands-havas-media-launches-global-results/

Image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Google_wordmark.svg

  

Google Adwords PPC Pay per Click Overview

With Google AdWords becoming a much more saturated form of marketing, strategizing and optimizing campaigns and ads is increasingly important. Google appreciates the user experience, therefor understanding exactly what advertising techniques and strategies that Google likes best is sort of a guessing game. Google’s “Best Practices” help guide us advertisers in proper techniques and red flags for improving ROI. In order to achieve the best results it takes a lot of time and dedication to keep up on trends, rules, and monitoring results. Keep in mind that social campaigns and ads have different strategies and rules (read more on best practices for social ads.) While long term optimization for these Ads takes a lot of time and dedication, there are a few basics that every advertiser should know and follow:

Unique Selling Proposition

Identify what makes your brand special, what kind of unique value does your product offer? Like any form of advertising it’s important to separate yourself from the completion. Make sure you include your value in the copy of your ads. Remind your customers why they should choose you over someone else. Try to be specific as well, quantify your value – do you offer free shipping? 10% off? Including pricing, promotions, or exclusive offers draw your customer in. This is especially important as fewer people click on paid advertising. Make you’re clicks count as qualified leads. Vague offerings may generate higher click counts but likely result in lower conversion rates. It’s important to get customers who are actually interested in converting to click on your ad.

Drive Action With Your Ads

The number one way to drive ROI is through a strong call to action. If your ad doesn’t clearly state what the customer should do, it won’t return as well. Using strong wording that demands an action be taken will drive customers to convert. Depending on the type of action you have strategized for your ads, this could mean “Call Now!” “Visit Your Local Store Today” “Buy Online Now” or even “Request More Information Here.”

Implement Keywords

There are two main benefits for including your keywords. The first is to increase relevance to your user (note that I said Google is basing everything on the user experience), and secondly, that keywords that match up appear in bold, drawing even more attention to your ads and increasing the likelihood that your customer will click on your ad. The more relevant Google thinks your ad is the better placements you’ll get.  

Quality Score

Another element that goes into creating a killer text ad is relevancy, or “Quality Score.” The landing page experience has a huge effect on this, thus affected conversion rates, bounce rates, and infinite number of other elements. If your landing page doesn’t have much to do with your ad or keywords Google will rank your ad poorly. Make sure your ad links to a page that has relevant content, keywords, and conversion opportunity.  If someone searches “gold sneakers” and you have a category page dedicated specifically to gold sneaker, you’d want to choose that as your destination URL instead of the home page or purple t-shirts page.

Targeting Management

Targeting is a bit broad considering the different methods you can use to target an Adwords Campaign. This can include device type, placements, locations, etc. In reference to writing ads though, device type is one of the most important for conversion rates. For example, people searching on mobile devices are more likely to click on ads with shorter, more direct content (obviously since they’re screens are smaller). Also keep in mind if you site is not mobile enables, driving traffic back to your site is probably not the best strategy. In fact, for mobile devices, you should probably have a separate campaign anyways (unless you’re opted into enhanced campaigns which is really a whole other story). Adding in click to call extensions, or phone numbers is important as well for mobile campaigns.

While these elements are important for increasing your ad ROI, there are always more options for optimizing your spend to get the most for your money. For more information on digital advertising tips, techniques, and trends, check out my author page.

Modern SEO Look

Comments, forums posting or directory submissions are now outdated techniques. If you're using these methods, you must be careful now. However Guest Blogging / Guest Posting is something that is more popular nowadays as it is getting importance in various search engines including search giant Google.

So don't waste your time is searching for blogs having no worth in search engines. Save your time and money. Hire us to do the rest of job, we'll choose the most relevant blogs having Good Google PageRank, DA and organic visibility.

By passing of time Search Engine Optimization is becoming more advance complicated. You've to follow the modern techniques to get good visibility in search engines. With the launch of PANDA & Penguin, backlinking process has become most difficult. As Google says: Earn links instead of building scrap links.

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~ guestblogging2013@gmail.com

How to Boost SEO Efforts with AdWords PPC Campaigns

Search engine optimization is among the most popular ways to promote one’s business online. Search engine optimization, which is commonly referred to in shorthand as SEO, includes editing a website to incorporate targeted keywords that are related to the site or business’ industry, as well as generating links to the site and building a social media network around the site among other techniques. The end goal is to increase traffic to the website by increasing the website’s rankings for targeted keywords on major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo!. One common technique used to boost a website’s popularity on these websites is a PPC, or Pay Per Click, campaign. 

A PPC campaign is an advertising campaign. Instead of placing the ads on television, the radio or the newspaper, the ads are placed on search engines. If you ever search for something on Google, you will notice that there are text ads on the top and the side of the search results. These are ads that were created using AdWords, which is Google’s advertising platform for business owners. Any individual can simply create an account with Google to begin building his advertising campaign. However, ad costs vary according to the account holder’s daily budget, as well as the price of the keywords one targets during these campaigns. For example, a website owner that sells gourmet goods will create ads that appear when Google users search for “gourmet cheeses” or “French wine.” When a Google user clicks on one of these ads, the account holder and website owner must pay Google because this is essentially paying for traffic to the website.

Additionally, creating a campaign with AdWords can help increase your SEO efforts. Chris Bergstrom, the president of the leading search engine optimization company Bergstrom SEO, recommends that individuals interested in this type of advertising do their research beforehand. It is vital that business owners conduct thorough keyword analysis to ensure that the keywords they are targeting, and consequently paying for, will lead to conversions, which leads to greater revenue. Beyond these benefits, AdWords campaigns can lead to greater SERP (search engine result page) CTR (click through rates), as well as ideas for optimizing landing pages.

If you are interested in learning more about the benefits of AdWords campaigns, visit the website of Bergstrom SEO at www.bergstrom-seo.com. Chris Bergstrom has led his team to the forefront of search engine optimization techniques and practices. Contact one of their representatives today for further information.

Creating A Road Map To Market Your Startup

This article has been in my bookmarks since January 17th and I wanted to clean up my bookmarks bar so here is an amazing article on marketing your startup and executing that plan by Ilya Pozin. The original article is still on linkedin. I find this is useful in any company looking at re-branding their marketing approach or even just confirming that their current plan is being executed properly and efficiently.

Spreading the word can be challenging when you’re new to an industry, don’t have a big budget, and have little help--but it’s possible.

You’ll need to set goals, work backwards, and create something that spreads on its own. All of this is much easier if you have a good product to start with.

While this may seem a bit overwhelming, don’t be nervous. Here’s a basic road map to follow, but be sure to tweak it to best meet your needs:

1. Focus on a niche market. This can be a location, like Los Angeles, or potentially a smaller group within your target audience. By choosing a specific niche, pain points of your target customer will be much easily understood, allowing you to market to them more effectively. Another positive point for a niche market is they are also much cheaper to market to. As a rule of thumb, the wider net you cast, the more money you will spend. Only expand after you’ve mastered marketing to a small group first.

2. Set goals. Goals come in all shapes and sizes, and they’re a key piece in the marketing puzzle. Whether your goal is financial or based on the number of users or customers you’re seeking to gain, it’s important to make sure it’s on the agenda and within reach. Keep in mind that goals usually vary from company to company.

3. Build a budget. Once you’ve chosen your goal or goals, you must set a marketing budget to accomplish them. Even if you have little to no funds for your budget, marketing is still possible--it may just require a little more time and creativity. This step is critical to your marketing success.

4. Define a conversion rate. When reaching out to a number of prospects, it’s crucial to consider how many will actually convert into paying customer. Make a smart assumption and try not to be overly ambitious. If possible, it’s helpful to conduct a survey by asking people what they would do. This will allow you to gain a far more accurate assumption.

5. Start brainstorming. This is everyone’s favorite part! Use this time to figure out the best ways to reach your potential customer. It often helps to be creative and come up with as many ideas as possible. Consider two main points: where your customers congregate and how you plan to reach them.

6. Test then execute. We’ll just say your startup is an online craft-supply store. Instead of carrying a variety of products and marketing to everyone who does crafts, you followed step one and decided to sell only sewing supplies to crafters in Washington. You set a goal to sell 100 sewing machines and use those profits to expand. Your marketing budget was set at $5,000 to accomplish your goal. You made a safe assumption that out of 100 potential customers, only one will purchase, a one percent conversion rate.

After this test, you know in order to sell 100 sewing machines, you’ll need to market to 10,000 crafters in Washington.

You've come up with a list of ideas of how to reach 10,000 crafters in Washington for $5,000. For the next steps, allocate a small piece of your budget to test your most viable ideas. It’s always a good idea to try each marketing campaign with a small amount before you spend your entire budget. If the response and conversion rate is equal to or better than you assumed, go all in.

7. Compel users to spread the word. Word-of-mouth marketing can be huge for a startup. It will allow you to interact with your target customers on a more personal level than other larger companies. Fortunately, social media has made this easier, but there are also other outlets like blogging and email newsletters. Consider the tactics that will do the most for your brand by enticing users to share content and invite friends through special incentives.

8. Make it exclusive. Being a part of something new and exclusive is likely to excite your potential customers. Limit your invites to targeted early adopters and allow them to become your brand advocates to help you improve your product along the way.

9. Target influencers. You will find success by identifying thought leaders in your niche and regularly interacting with them. Focus on getting these influencers to try and enjoy your product, so they can spread the word about it to a larger network. Social media platforms like Twitter are perfect for this kind of expression.

It’s also important to to follow bloggers and journalists--they will also act as an outlet to share your product. Search for writers within your niche and build a relationship with them through email or social media.

Keep in mind that marketing your startup is all about adapting. Be sure to take these steps and adjust them to the needs of your product. You will be more successful if you have the right tools and goals in place to measure against. While some things may fail, be sure to learn from your mistakes and change your strategy.

(Image Courtesy Of DearEdward on Flickr)

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Ilya Pozin

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How To Use PPC Landing Pages For Higher Conversions & Lower CPC

Did you know that you can pay less and get more? This works very well in such system like Google Adwords. By improving and specs of your landing page, you can significantly increase the success of the PPC campaign, while reducing its price. Let's compare the right and wrong landing pages and see why your ads on Google should lead to the promotion specific landing page and not to homepage, registration or cart page and how it will influence on the conversion. Below is infographics, which includes a detailed description.

The wrong way

1.       Poor message match from unfocused or content sparse pages the quality score and ad rank. This requires you to pay a higher cost-per-click.

2.      Your homepage has too many interaction points. This increases the bounce rate and leads people to wander off your conversion funnel path.

3.      Shopping carts are too much of a hard sell. Buyers need some seduction before they will commit to the purchase.

4.      Registration pages are usually dry with sparse information. An interstitial click-through page would prepare them for the conversion goal.

5.      Rebound traffic: The result of 2, 3 and 4 is to drive prospects to the back button which places them in comparison shopping mode back on the results page. Driving your visitors to your competitor’s ads can’t be good for business.

The right way

1.      Strong message match from the landing page gives you a high quality score, lower cost-per-click and a better ad rank.

2.      The focus and simplicity of your landing page greets your visitors with confidence, reducing bounce rate and increasing engagement.

3.      Click-through landing pages are used to extend your ad massage, providing the info required to make a conversion decision. They are passed on to the cart or registration page only after they have expressed final interest in the product/service.

4.      Lead generation landing pages swap a giveaway (ebook, whitepaper, webinar) in exchange for personal details. The whole page is designed with this in mind vs. a homepage that may only designate a small portion of the sidebar.

Conversion

Utilize your confirmation page to expend your success. Post-conversion marketing involves guiding your new customer to immerse themselves deeper in your sphere of influence.

Ask them to follow you on Twitter/Facebook, download a free (branded) resource, opt-in to a newsletter or visit another relevant page.

By using promotion specific landing page you can increase your page’s quality score, ad rank, conversion rate and decrease your bounce rate and PPC campaign’s cost. The choice is yours.

Author bio: Korah Morrison, writer on College-Paper.org that helps students achieve their academic goals.

Pinterest: 5 Ways to Harvest Pinterest's Awesome SEO and Social Power

Pinterest is the web's fastest growing social media site with more than 10.5 million unique visitors and growing daily.  It's grown a massive 4000% in just six months and is already turning a tidy profit – something that the other social leaders never achieved in the early days.  Why?  Pinterest is addictive.  It whips users into a sharing frenzy.  It allows you to upload all your e-Commerce pics, whack a price tag on them and then make a sale in a single click – and on the flip side, gets buyers whipped into a buying frenzy and empowers them to check the product and price and buy in a single click, and oh how they're buying!  Great for business, but also great for small business SEO.  Pinterest users don't just share your content; they share your link with that single click. So, how do you harvest the awesome SEO power of Pinterest?

Link well

Once you've set up your boards, upload your photos and infographics to your boards and include your link (Pinterest also allows for deep linking but doesn't display the whole link).  Be sure to add keywords to your image descriptions and board names so that your boards will be found by search engines.

Tag well

Use #tags to add your pins to Pinterest keyword searches, this will GREATLY increase the number of shares you receive.  Use @tags to bring your pins to the attention of potential sharers (especially those with lots of followers).  To @tag a popular pinner, simply follow any one of their boards.

Organize well

Making your boards visually appealing will encourage users to dig deep into your content and to share more.  Make board topics highly relevant and keep content on each board interesting and original.  Over time, your boards may start to look identical to your competitors – being specific and adding original content will make them stand out. 

Sell Well

Pinterest has an outstanding CTR, use it.  Label all e-Commerce products with a keyword rich and well written description.  Product description writing is an art, do it well.  Include a unique name or product code, postage details and other relevant information in your product description.  Add a price tag to each picture by typing the $ symbol and the price and clicking "pin it".

Share Well

Pinterest makes pinning easy.  Integrate Pinterest with your existing social media by searching for the app in each medium.  Encourage your social media likers and followers to add the "pin it" button to their browser and on mobile devices.  Add Follow buttons to your website by visiting the Pinterest Goodies tab and most of all, interact with other pinners, enjoy the experience, get addicted and share in the bounty of this social phenomenon.

Author Bio.

Dana Flannery is a Social Media Marketing and Small Business SEO Specialist with content marketing firm Talk About Creative.  Talk About Creative provides bespoke content driven SEO strategies to business.

Bootstrap, WebKit, and Blink

How are frameworks like Bootstrap going to handle the changes from WebKit and Blink?

Google just announced that it is forking WebKit and launching this fork as Blink. As Google describes it, Blink is “an inclusive open source community” and ”a new rendering engine based on WebKit” that will, over time, “naturally evolve in different directions.” Blink, Google says, will be all about speed and simplicity. It will soon make its way from Chromium to the various Chrome release channels, so users will see the first Blink-powered version of Chrome appear on their desktops, phones and tablets in the near future.

THE “COLLABORATION HAS BEEN FANTASTIC”

Currently, the majority of WebKit reviewers are from Google (95), with Apple coming in second (59), followed by a number of other companies, including Blackberry, Intel, Nokia, Samsung, Adobe and Netflix.

From Chromium on Blink

WebKit is a lightweight yet powerful rendering engine that emerged out of KHTML in 2001. Its flexibility, performance and thoughtful design made it the obvious choice for Chromium's rendering engine back when we started. Thanks to the hard work by all in the community, WebKit has thrived and kept pace with the web platform’s growing capabilities since then.

However, Chromium uses a different multi-process architecture than other WebKit-based browsers, and supporting multiple architectures over the years has led to increasing complexity for both the WebKit and Chromium projects. This has slowed down the collective pace of innovation - so today, we are introducing Blink, a new open source rendering engine based on WebKit.

Blink's Mission:

To improve the open web through
technical innovation and good citizenship

What are your thoughts?



Update from Opera whom just switched to WebKit a few weeks ago

We are happy to see that the web is becoming ever more open and accessible for developers. It is a fast moving platform that needs continuous and rapid updating. After some discussions with our counterparts at Google, we are looking forward to contribute back to the open source project that is Blink, just as we would to any other open source project we feel could use our input.

So it appears as though Opera is behind this new movement.


So what does this mean for Bootstrap and other CSS Frameworks? It appears that they will need to revisit their roots and code up for blink. They already have specific pieces in there to reflect webkit so changing to blink shouldn't take more than an afternoon - assuming that find and replace is working sweetly.

I know I'll be interested in this new engine from the start - anything that improves performance is great - even if it means more IE hacks - err - gracefully degrading.