Posted by David Wells | Comments

Digital Marketing Zen #15 – On Page SEO Optimization

In this episode of The Digital Marketing Zen Podcast, David Wells discusses various on page factors that you can easily change to influence your sites search engine rankings. It runs about 17 minutes long and has some neat little bits of information, that I hope you will enjoy. Please feel free to add your 2 cents in the comments below or call in and leave a message at the Digital Marketing Zen line (617) 299 -1232.

(click through to see the player. [ ] short code is messed up on my main page for some reason…. any ideas on that? =P)

[display_podcast]

Shownotes

- See show #12 for SEO 101 with Robert Enriquez

- On page Optimization is very important and should be your second step after keyword research

- Its Niche, NOT “NITCH”

- Title Tags, H1, Alt tags, Image Title Tags, Bolding Links (<strong>)

- Content – If you are serious about SEO keep your content fresh. I recommend a post per week at LEAST. Make sure you use interal linking within your content.

- Google Analytics

- Google Webmaster tools

- XML Sitemap Maker

- Google may or may not shoot a missile at you.

- Different Sitemaps you can upload for blogs.

Posted by David Wells | Comments

The ROI of Social Media

The ROI of Social Media seems to be a hot issue on the minds of most business owners and for good reason. If I were planning to allocate my scarce resources (money.. or even scarcer time) I sure would like some reassurance as to how much money I will receive in return. This is a fundamental human reaction that ties in with fear. Fear of the unknown, Going into uncharted waters, which can be scary and stop many from venturing far from the shore. On the flip side the biggest “risks” or being the pioneer of something new, often then to lead to the biggest rewards.

Okay, inspirational words aside, what is the ROI of Social media? Well, lets first examine the ROI of that billboard your company has put up, or the print ads you are running, how about those TV spots? The truth of the matter is that the ROI for all marketing activities have been wish-washy at best. It is simply impossible to measure and take into account all the complexities of how customers interact, view, interpret, and make their buying decisions. Not to mention trying to put an arbitrary dollar sign on it. (Anyone who claims they can, keep them close, as 2012 is fast approaching)

When it comes to Digital Marketing and Social Media, there has never been a more measurable marketing discipline. Click throughs, impressions, traffic, bounce rates, specific customer journeys through a site, and other analytical data paint a pretty vivid picture. Not only that, they can give you some great actionable insights into what to tweak and areas to improve upon.

Two Ways to Measuring Social Media ROI

The C.R.E.A.M. Approach.

Tracking back the specific click throughs in your purchasing funnel through your analytics. Then using this to determine which converting customer came from which social media platform. This works well for E-commerce and lead generation focused businesses because their determined goal equates directly to $$. On the other hand, brick and mortar businesses do not always have this luxury. Without some type of specific end goal to assign a dollar sign to this type of analysis is impossible. (This is why email newsletters or some measurable call to action is a must on any businesses site)

What about brand centric websites that do not generate direct sales through their website? Good Question. There are numerous “media metrics” that can be assigned to social media efforts. Metrics such as impressions, sentiment, share of voice, engagement, followers, friends, and the like. None equate to hard number though. It’s almost like a faith based initiative.

While you may not be able to see a direct increase in sales, you may be able to deduce some cost savings or other spill over effects.

The Spill Over / Cost Savings Approach

These metrics fail to translate directly into money signs, so the importance may escape the number crunchers in your next meeting. But don’t give up, the potential savings can be huge for companies transitioning archiac forms of business services to new agile social media platforms. One example (as played out as it is) is how Comcast took on a new approach to customer service by using twitter to engage with customer complaints and thus reducing the load on their call centers.

6 cost saving concepts to factor into your social media ROI

• The branding potential – saves money needed on potential advertising
• Increased customer service - cut costs of call centers and other bleeding departments
• Increased customer engagement – brand evangelists spread W.O.M. with more credibility that the company could ever muster on its own.
• Strengthening of existing customer relationship – Whats the lifetime value of your customer? How have your efforts made retention easier / more cost effective?
• Being viewed as an industry leader – lower time and money spend on chasing leads. If you are the obvious expert people will be banging at your door.
• The long term SEO benefits – Cut costs on Pay per click models.

You can slice and dice social media metrics in a variety of ways. So it is important to decide which factors you are going to measure against when the time comes to figure out your ROI throughout the course of your social media efforts.

Posted by David Wells | Comments

Digital Marketing Zen #14 – Social Media Tools of the Trade

In this episode I talk about a couple of my favorite tools that I use on a daily basis to streamline many tedious, repetitive social media tasks. I also get into the business benefits of using foursquare as a free customer loyalty system for any brick and mortar business. Also a rant on how it spams my twitter streams.

Runtime about 16minutes

[display_podcast]

Shownotes:

Hootsuite – All in one social media dashboard. Watch my tutorial on Hootsuite

Twitterfeed – feed RSS content to different social media outlets

Ping.fm – Aggregate updates for close to 60 social media networks at one time

Pixelpipe - I reference this as pixel bytes but its pipes… silly me. With this you can blast out audio/video/picture content to over 100 sites simultaneously.

FourSquare – Location based social network that has been gaining traction lately.

If you enjoyed the show make sure to subscribe over in itunes

Call in and leave you thoughts on the Digital Marketing Zen Hotline at (617) 299-1232 and I’ll put you in the show!

Posted by David Wells | Comments

The Digital Marketing & Social Media Video Collection

In efforts to become one of the go to places on the web for all things digital marketing and social media, The Digital Marketing Zen Videos section is now open for business! I have been collecting the best of the best in Digital Marketing talks from across the web.

Sharing Videos on Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, and the like is all well and good, but those messages seem to get lost in the ether quickly.

So, I have decided to house the videos that I have seen that have inspired, taught, or amazing me in my travels across the internet should have a permanent home. This is that home.

The Categories for the Videos Section include :

• Augmented Reality
• Design
• Digital Marketing
• Pay Per Click
• Search Engine Optimization
• Social Media
• Web Analytics
• Original Digital Marketing Zen Videos

So go ahead and check it out. Let me know what you think, and most importantly suggest other videos that have inspired you in your social media or digital marketing efforts.

Posted by David Wells | Comments

How to Socialize your Browser, Streamline your life

There are many different ways to update your social networks, but some are much easier than others. This post is designed to be a guide on how to share content with various social networks with just a few clicks.

One of the main reasons people use as an excuse not to get involved with social media is that “I simply don’t have the time”.

Well, after you read this post there will be NO excuse as to why you are not sharing the content that you consume on a daily basis with the various social media networks you may or may not be a part of.

It is time to streamline

Copying links, venturing to the site, logging in, pasting your link, and clicking update are a thing of the past. There are tools out there that will facilitate the ability your ability to share content without having to venture to them.

Enter Browser plugins, They have been around a long time but are rarely adopted by people because they simply don’t know that they exist. So if you have ever been doing something online and thought “There has GOT to be a better way“, there probably is. Do a quick search for what your problem is and add the word plugin to it. You will be amazed at how many free plugins exist out there to suite many needs.

Don’t work harder, Work SMARTER, stupid.

Plugins that facilitate Social Sharing

Shareaholic – A browser plugin that is

Hootsuite – A bookmarklet from Hootsuite. This is my personal favorite sharing tool.

Sharethis – Another Bookmarklet that allows sharing across multiple sites.

There are likely many more plugins out there. These are the best that I have found on my journeys through the interwebs.

How to socialize your browser

1. Download FireFox or Google chrome
2. Go to sharethis.com and/or shareaholic.com.
3. For sharethis you will need to drag the bookmarklet to your Favoites bar in your browser.
4. For shareaholic you are going to download the firefox or chrome extension.
5. Now that you have either installed, Navigate to a page/post that you want to share, click the button, and boom its done. As easy as that.
6. *Note that ShareThis, Sharaholic, and hootsuite require that you sing up an account with them to use. Don’t worry its FREE! They will ask for your login credentials once and Keep them, as long as your cookies are enabled.
7. Now Share content with the world with no hassle.

Now you are set up to Share content with the rest of the Web. Sharing relevant content wth followers and groups is a powerful social media strategy that facilitates user engagement.

A Couple things to remember when sharing content

Posted by David Wells | Comments

Using Hootsuite to Create a Rich Social Media Dashboard

I have been consulting with clients about the virtues of Hootsuite for some time now and have decided to create a walk through on how to set up hootsuite and how to use it to aggregate your social media updates and to monitor the twitter fire hose of information.

Hootsuite is a powerful twitter client that allows you to customize the twitter streams you see to get the data FAST. Think of it like the ultimate web based Twitter Dashboard.

In the video I run through the initial set up. I then dive deep into how to use the tabs, columns, different search strings, how to autopost rss feeds and why you should be doing so.

Using HootSuite to Create a Rich Social Media Dashboard from David Wells on Vimeo.

Benefits to using Hootsuite

• The ability to aggregate your social media networks
• Use it as a url shortening service
• Tracking clickthrough stats on shortened urls
• Scheduling out Tweeting/status updates for campaigns
• Auto feeding rss content into your twitter, facebook or Linkedin profile
• Ping.FM intergration allowing for syndication across 50+ social media sites…
• Easily sharing with the bookmarklet/browser plugins
• Easy access across multiple computers due to it being web based
• Derr…. It’s FREE (for the time being)
• AND now Wordpress blog integration announced today Jan 6th 2010

What about other twitter clients?

What makes Hootsuite better than tweetdeck and its counterparts is the ability to lay out the information in a tab like format. The tabs give the ability to set up multiple custom twitter search queries that makes for an amazing twitter listening platform.

One of the tabs I use in my hootsuite (as explained in the video) is a Q&A tab. This allows me to search anyone talking about social media, marketing, seo, or ppc in twitter. The search queries look like this:

• “marketing ? -http” (the -http takes out people linking to things and leaves only questions)
• “social media ? -http”
• “Your brand” ? -http
• “Your competitors brand”
• etc. (there are so many ways you can do this. I explain in the video at the 3:28 mark)

Remember a core principle of social media is GIVING before you get anything

I would highly recommend setting up certain tabs with phrases and questions that relate to your industry. Believe me people are shouting into twitter with questions ALL the time. If you can send them a quick answer they will thank you for it and most likely follow you, maybe even refer a friend to you for help. (WHAT? A business lead on twitter? perposterious!)

While there is an iphone application for hootsuite currently available, I can imagine that an android counterpart is soon to come.

Using Hootsuite as a social media dashboard

So what are you waiting for?

Go use it and stop complaining that you don’t understand twitter. It’s 2010 for Gods sake!

Posted by David Wells | Comments

How to aggregate Social Media Photo Sharing with MobyPicture

MobyPicture is a photo sharing site that allows users to send out one photo via email, mms, or uploading directly online and having it distributed over a vast number of photo sharing and blogging platforms.

A lot of people use Twitpic, Yfrog, Twitgoo, TweetPhoto, Img.ly, but they are all lacking syndication with other social media sites. Mobypicture fills that gap by aggregating Flickr, Facebook,  Blogger, Wordpress, Twitter, LiveJournal, Youtube, Tumblr, Brightkite, Vimeo, Forusquare.

It’s easy to set up (in video below) and an excellent way to share photos and videos with people in one simple message.

To use MobyPicture all you have to do is send the picture via email or mms to your custom mobypicture email address (usernamer.password@mobypicture.com) with the subject as the message you want associated with that picture. Mobypicture handles the rest and blasts it out to the services of your choosing.

My Video Tutorial on MobyPicture.com

Posted by David Wells | Comments

Digital Marketing Zen #13 – SEO 101 with Robert Enriquez

In this episode of Digital Marketing Zen, I interview Robert Enriquez, Founder of Search Exchange (an internet marketing conference here in Charlotte). Robert is a master link builder and online reputation management expert and knows his SEO. You can Follow him @NC_SEO & @SearchExchange

We talk about where to get started if you are new to SEO (Search Engine Optimization), What tools to use for keyword research, advanced keyword research techniques using Google Adwords, and we take a look at the implications of real time search for SEO. Runtime 16min.

 

 Digital Marketing Zen #13 - SEO 101 with Robert Enriquez: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (144)

Shownotes

3:20 First thing to do when starting SEO. Keyword Research!

3:48 Tools for Keyword research. Wordtracker.  Google Adwords Keyword tool.

4:20 Advanced Keyword research by running a google adwords campiagn to get accurate impressions.

5:15 Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics and you receive a 100 dollar Google Adwords gift certificate.(So many Googles in that sentence!)

7:15 What is the biggest mistakes that most people make with SEO?

9:10 Implications of real time search on search engine optimization.

11:00 Link building tips from Robert : Merchant Circle, PRlog.org, Ezine Articles.

15:20 Search Exchange 3 day conference with Chris Brogan and Lee Oden Keynoting. May 17th 2010.