This is Part I of a 2 Part Post.

As traditional marketing methods become more ineffective and costly, many business owners and marketers are asking how they can best capitalize on marketing their business on the web.  For some marketers, an effective internet marketing strategy, was not thought out before they jumped at the opportunity to market their businesses online and unfortunately, without regrouping and building the fundamentals the powerful business results that a strategy can afford won’t ever be realized by them.

Don’t let this be the case for your business.

I have 8 steps to share with you (4 Steps today) that will help you to build the fundamentals and implement a successful strategy needed for internet marketing regardless of what niche your business is in and regardless of the size of your business:

Step #1 – Establish Your Initial Keyword Strategy

Keywords are the basic backbone of the Internet and the starting point.  The way consumers find businesses online through search engines has become routine and a habit, and you can optimize your website around the keywords that are relevant to your business and which keywords consumers will likely find your business from.

Your chances of getting found by people searching using those keywords will drive more qualified traffic to your website.  You’ll want to determine the popularity and competitiveness of certain keywords and then test and analyze how well they perform (how effective they are at leading visitors to your website).

So how do you determine which keywords will maximize your potential to draw in targeted leads, from search engines, to your site?

The ongoing process of keyword research, if you commit, will give you valuable insight into product demand and industry trends.  The more comprehensive your keyword research efforts, the better you will be able to organically grow traffic, which in turn, will save you from spending money to generate traffic to your website through pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns such as Google Adwords.

There are 3 steps involved in creating a keyword strategy:

Step 1 – Create a List of 3-5 Keywords Relevant to Your Business 

The rule of thumb here is that large companies are searched by their brand name and small and mid-sized businesses are typically searched by phrases core to what product they sell or service they offer.

Step 2 - Choose Keywords Based on Their Difficulty and Relevance

Keep in mind that the greater the volume of searches on a keyword, the more competitive it is and for small and mid-sized businesses, you want to choose less competitive keywords, more specifically related to your business so you can rank higher.  The Google Keyword Tool will help you determine keyword competitiveness.  Watch a video on how to choose the right keywords.

Try different keywords to see which ones work best for you.  

Step 3 - Optimize Your Site Around Your Keywords

With respect to the content, here is where you will incorporate your chosen keywords into your website.

Step #2 – Optimize Your Website

With keywords chosen, the next logical step is to optimize your site for search.  Once you have optimized your site so that you are on the first few pages, you have achieved the main goal of SEO.

Let’s discuss Search Engine Optimization (SEO):

SEO is worth doing first because it can be improved quickly.  The 2 distinct categories of SEO are:

1. On Page SEO – How well your website’s content is presented to search engines can be improved immediately.
2. Off Page SEO – Your sites “authority” on the web (determined by what other websites say about your site) can take time to improve.

Here are 2 free SEO tools to use to find out how well optimized your  website is:

1) Website Grader  2) Vrank.com 

Both of these tools offer great free tips to improve your sites’ SEO weaknesses.

Step # 3 – Create a Content Strategy 

As you have developed a clear sense of your businesses’ keywords and optimized your website for search engines, you’re ready to attract more visitors.  The way to attract people to your business is by sharing your expertise, experiences and  resources through content.

Content marketing requires a strategy which defines your channels like blogs for example.  WordPress and Blogger are the most popular blogging platforms, are very easy to use via content management system (CMS) and offer a way to add content without having to know any HTML code.  Other blogging platforms include Posterous, TypePad and Drupal.

Some Considerations About Blogging for Your Business

One of the main purposes of your business blog is to offer your prospects and customers a means to engage with your brand.  Your goal should be to publish articles that serve as a resource for solutions to their pain points and answers to their questions, much in the same way an industry magazine would be written.

Other examples of content to add to your portfolio include eBooks, white papers or research reports that can all be used to generate leads based on offers with calls-to-action that you include in them.

Whatever channels you decide are right for your business should be defined within your content strategy,

Step #4 – Promote Content and Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy 

Social media channels like Google+, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube will require distinct plans within your Social Media Marketing Strategy.  These outlets will allow your prospects and customers to communicate directly with your employees and your business can experience significant growth if managed properly.

How-to Monitor Social Media

Spending considerable time focused on listening to the buzz online related to your industry is key so that you can decide when to respond.  These tools will help you monitor your business and industry mentions in social media:

Google Alerts: Delivered to your email inbox, these help you track mentions of your brand and relevant keywords all over the web.

Twitter: TwitterSearch or HootSuite both have monitoring features where you can monitor mentions of your brand.

Google Reader and RSS Feeds: When you set up RSS feeds in Google Reader of searches of your brand or industry keywords in other popular social media sites such as Flickr, Digg, Delicious, etc. you can scan the results in your reader daily for mentions.

Facebook Insights: You can use your Fan Pages’ Facebook Insights Dashboard to show you stats such as fan growth and page views to gauge your pages’ interaction and engagement.

For more information about how to use social media for business, access DigiStream Media’s FREE eBook Download 

Remember to check back on February 20th for Part II and Steps 4 through 8!

Which steps do you find most effective and why?

The possibilities are endless on how you can create intriguing videos and here are a few ways of using YouTube to drive traffic to your website that you should use once you commit, the top three of which are described below.

Top Way #1 – Identify the Keywords that Need to be Included in the Video

YouTube is the worlds 2nd largest search engine.  It has hundreds of millions a user a day and every day thousands of hours of video content are added. YouTube is 4th largest web property in the world and is on the path to become the source of advertising and publishing new content.

Use the most highly searched, relevant keywords in your video title and description. There are tools that you can use to help you discover the keywords that are relevant to your business.

You can change your video’s title and description at any time if you find that the video is no longer coming up high in searches or if you want to explore a new “keyword market.”  The right keywords will get you ranked higher in both YouTube and search engine searches.

When thinking of a title for your video, you should consider descriptive, eye catching phrases that the user would think of inserting in the search field in a search Engine.  Possibly adding dates, time, location or something more unique and specific can drive higher ranking to your video.

When you add a description to your video, try to use complete sentences, add details like place, location, dates and something the user can relate to.  When adding tags to your video always be consistent, use descriptive keywords and avoid keyword stuffing.

YouTube highly recommends using there Insight tool which gives results of demographics and data that can give you a better hand on whats working and whats not.  Insight will help generate reports that tell you where there traffic is arriving from, what keywords are being searched and provide data that will help you see which target audience is viewing your video.

Top Way #2 – Include a Transcript of the Video

The transcript makes it easier for search engine spiders to identify the topic of your video, so indexing is more accurate, and any keywords in the dialog of your video get included, too, which can translate to higher ranking.  Transcripts should be saved in the .txt format and can be uploaded using the Edit Captions button on your video’s YouTube page.

Follow this link to find a few very useful tips on how to create free high quality captions and check out a screenshot of what the Captions screen looks like:

 Top Way #3  - Include a Call to Action

Perhaps the most important tip is to include a call to action in your video. In other words, tell the viewer what you want them to do (visit your site), why they should do so (for example, to purchase the product you’ve just showcased), and give them the means to do it.

There are several ways to go about it. There is a call-to-action overlay that you can customize to take viewers directly to your site from within the video.

In addition, remember to include your domain name in the description – use the complete URL to create an automatic hyperlink. You can also add annotations to your video.

These small, pop-up boxes can be used for things like recommending other related videos of yours, reminding viewers to subscribe to your channel and to like and share the video.

Bonus - Top Way #4

Backlinks are important in YouTube rankings, just as they are for all search engines. Make sure that you link to your video and to your channel from outside sources, including your own site, other social networking sites, and forums or discussion boards in which you participate – just be sure that linking doesn’t violate any terms of agreement for these boards. You might also explore some of the other ways of gaining backlinks, such as link sharing and asking bloggers who write on relevant topics if they would be willing to link to you.

Bonus Plus – Top Way #5

One of the greatest ways to drive higher traffic to your video is to share your video with the world.  Share videos with members of the community, experiment with annotations and always have a section for user feedback.

Another key to sharing your video and driving traffic is to use the embed feature and post your video on other social media network sites, blogs and video hosting sites.

Setting up and using a YouTube channel can benefit every type of business. It is one more way to engage your customers, build your brand, drive traffic and rank higher in search engines.

Let me hear from you…Using the tips above, how do you envision maximizing your ultimate success?

This is Part II of my 2 Part blog series.  To view Part I, click here.

In my last blog post, I revealed how important it is to make sure you have a good idea of how your clients are using mobile technology, and how if you don’t know, it will be valuable to do some market research or perform a survey of your clients’ mobile habits.

Once these questions have been addressed, and you have established that it makes sense to include mobile in your marketing mix, you can get started planning the mobile campaign. You must begin by establishing which mobile channel best suits your marketing goals and your target market.

Once all these things have been accomplished you should determine what your mobile marketing message will be and how you will integrate your mobile marketing campaign into the rest of your marketing efforts.

Here are tips #4 through #6 to start your mobile marketing channel selection, message development and mobile evaluation:

Tip 4 – Establish Which Mobile Channels Best Suit Your Marketing Goals and Your Target Market

and

Tip 5 – Determine Your Mobile Marketing Message

I’ve added ‘Integration Tips’ so you can see how to integrate your mobile marketing campaign into the rest of your marketing efforts.

Some of the mobile channels I will discuss are represented in the matrix illustration using concentric rings, leading to the brand at the bottom:

Mobile Website: The way people engage with mobile marketing starts with them accessing your website on their mobile device.

Integration Tip: One way to integrate your mobile marketing with your mass media and outdoor marketing, is to place banners and ads that reference your mobile friendly site at bus stops, subway stations and on billboards.  People have idle time in these places and your ads will get traction.

Mobile E-mail: Your email campaigns need to be optimized for mobile considering many people access their email via mobile device.  You will want to : 1) Test your e-mail messages on a couple different mobile devices 2) Use compelling subject lines that include the important information in the fist 30 characters. 3) Include your brand name in your ‘Subject’ line 4) Send a text alternative to html e-mails, and include a link to an online version of the e-mail (this way people can click the link if they have trouble viewing the email).

Integration Tip: Mention any promotion you are sending in e-mails on your home page, and include a link to the online version e-mail to integrate your e-mail campaign with your website.

Short Messaging Service (SMS) (Text Messaging): Text messaging rather than reaching your customers through a phone call with up to 160 characters of text (many phones will activate text to make it clickable) that is similar to a short email is a great way to broadcast your promotions.

HAVE A TELEPHONE LIST? If you have access to your customers’ mobile telephone numbers, you can send them a text message.  If you have promoted to the mobile list previously, you can create an intriguing follow-up message with an attractive new offer.  

DON’T HAVE A TELEPHONE LIST? You can use your other marketing channels to encourage your customers to interact with your brand by sending a text message to a short code number to get a special offer.  This kind of mobile marketing is location-based and has short life cycle.      

When users send the text message a computer replies with a code or password they can give the cashier to receive the discount. This is a good way to build up a list of mobile phone numbers that you can use later with other more targeted text messaging campaigns.

Integration Tip: It is a good idea to allow people opt in to your marketing messages by sending the recipients a text message that also confirms their number and makes the offer, like this: “Our customer database lists this your mobile phone number. Reply with ‘OK’ to receive coupons & other messages at this number.”

Picture Messaging (MMS): These type of messages must be of high value to your customers since they cause users higher fees than text messages.  As compared to text messages, picture messages are more versatile as they include pictures, animation, text and sound and are traditionally sent form a mobile number to an email account. Like in text messages, most phones will recognize and activate text to make it clickable if it is a phone number, web link or short code.

Integration Tip: Encourage users to sign up and receive new product notifications or birthday e-mails on their cell phone on your website. Include links to the website in the picture message that encourage the recipients to view the site from their mobile phone.

Location Based Marketing: To take in-store promotions one-step further and remind customers of advertised deals or create special incentives for mobile users, location based marketing, will reach customers when they are in within range of a physical store location.  This is achieved when messages are sent to the phone via bluetooth or Infrared technologies but has limited range. 

If your customers interact very frequently with your brand, using GPS enabled cell phones to send users targeted e-mails or text messages based on your location is acceptable BUT if they are not, then this way is considered intrusive and personal so it is not advised.

Mobile Pay-Per-Click:  As your ad is displayed along side regular search results, as a paid listing, when users click through to get to your site, you are charged a fee. You bid on keyword terms that are related to your product offering and when users search for those terms, your ad is displayed.  

You are given a certain number of characters to describe your products and you can link the advertisement to any page on your website.

Mobile Pay-per-Click prices are still reasonable since it is so new and there’s less competition on keyword phrases.  Search engines and third party providers are still testing different means of displaying these ads so now is the time to build up a history with the Pay-per-Click providers and beginning to learn the ropes.

Integration Tip: Whenever you run a special promotion or marketing campaign you should update your Pay-per-Click advertisements.  You may decide to bid on different keywords associated with your promotion or you may need to change the text of the advertisement to reflect the new marketing message or promotion.

Mobile Banner Ads: Mobile banner ads, are purchased from a third party provider on a ‘cost per million’ basis, are linked to your site and are shown on other sites as a means of generating revenue.   The number of times your ad is shown, its ‘impressions,’ affects how much you pay instead of weather your ad is clicked on or not.

The third party provider will allow you to select different filters that affect how, when and to whom your ad is displayed. The number of filters you set will also effect your cost per million (CPM).  Mobile banner ads make for good branding.

Integration Tip: Your banner ads need to reinforce your brand without users having to click thru to your site since you are paying by the impression.  Keep your banners updated with the same marketing messages that you are using in other marketing channels.  

Other mobile channels include: Mobile Apps | Bluetooth Marketing | Geo Location | Augmented Reality and 2-D Codes.

Tip 6 - Evaluate Mobile Success 

Test. Test. Test.  You should expect to test various campaigns and allow at least 3 mos. before benchmarking.  As mobile marketing is new, it will take time to get a good read on its reach and a return.  You should do a few different one-time campaigns to give your customers and prospects time to catch on and create the ‘buzz’.

Your mobile marketing efforts will impact the success of your other marketing campaigns.  Mobile should be creating indirect benefits to your sales volume both online and in your brick-and-mortar location.

You can use web analytics tools to track the online portions of your mobile campaign.

It’s important to use an integrated marketing strategy that incorporates the mobile channels that make sense for your particular business and to craft proper messaging that coincides with your other marketing messages online and offline.

Share how you are planning, integrating and evaluating mobile marketing strategies with us…

Many businesses are hyper-focused in their online marketing on getting more visitor traffic to their website.  Yes, website traffic is a good thing.  But, traffic is only the first half of the online marketing profitability equation.

It is possible to be getting plenty of traffic to your website… but lose money.

Seriously?  How can that be?

Examples where even plentiful traffic is not enough…

One reason that is more common than you think is that a company’s cost/benefit metrics are upside down.  That simply means it is costing them more to acquire a customer (or an opt-in) than what they will make from that customer or opt-in. Sadly, some companies don’t know their numbers.  Make sure you know how to determine your online profitability. Another reason you can be getting gobs of traffic, but not have much to show for it (like leads, customers and revenue), is you are not effectively “converting” the traffic into a lead, or a customer. This is what I call website persuasion:  Persuading website visitors to do what you want them to do—to call you, to download a free report, to sign up for your newsletter, to buy something, to leave a comment, etc.

Ways to Improve Your Website’s Persuasiveness

Here are 3 great tips for improving the persuasiveness of your website:

Vital Way #1 – Determine Your Primary Goal 

What do you want to accomplish (primarily) with your website visitor?  Yes, there are many things you may hope to do with them, but pick one primary one.  Then, you need to make sure everything works toward that end.  Confucius said:  “He who aim at nothing… hit it every time.”

Vital Way #2 – Create a Path

For a website visitor, your site is like visiting a new city.  It is all new and needing to be explored to know what’s there. It is much easier, and less stressful for them if you intentionally lead them from A to B to C, rather than them having to figure it out.  Guess what?  They won’t try (at least for very long). Worse yet, you have 3 or 4 A’s on your site, all, clamoring for attention.

For them, it is like visiting a tourist town, driving down the main road and getting assaulted on both sides of the road by flashing signs from every hotel (Stay here!!!  Vacancy!!  Special Discount!!  Stop now!!!), every restaurant, (Eat here!! Kids eat free!!  Voted best!!)  tourist store, and attraction. That may be what your website is doing without you knowing it.  Too many competing choices will lead them to turn around and go somewhere else.

Here are some helpful tools you can use to insure that you have created an easy path for your website visitor:

Heat Map.  A heat map of your website helps you determine if you have too many areas of your website competing for the attention of the visitor.  It also helps you determine if the thing you want them to focus on is actually getting noticed.  Services like Feng-Guior Crazy Egg can provide you a heat map for your website.

Live or Video Recording.  A software program like Clicktale will actually record visitor interactions on your site.  It will show you where they look, in what order, where they click, etc.  A service called UserTesting.com will have volunteers go to your site and provide video recorded feedback on what they experienced.

Google Analytics.  Google Analytics will help you determine if your site is accomplishing your goal by giving you valuable data– like the visitor’s on-page time, or bounce rate.  If people are only staying on your site for 23 seconds, that is an indication that at least one of the problems may be a poor path.

Vital Way  #3 – Maximize the Prime Website Real Estate

Studies tell us that on average a website visitor assesses your site in under 8 seconds to decide whether to explore further or move on.  It is therefore critical to put your most important information “above the fold.” This is an old newspaper term that’s made a successful transition into the digital world.

It referred to the information that appeared on the top half of the page, “above the fold”. It’s the most highly read piece of the newspaper.

The area on a webpage that is “above the fold” is that information which appears on the screen when a reader lands on your page.  Any information that requires a reader to scroll down is “below the fold.” Be sure that your most critical and important information appears above the fold—many readers never scroll any further so deliver your prime information up top and prominently.

Need more website ideas? Need more great ideas for improving your website?  Download the Website Persuasion Checklist.  It’s free… and full of valuable tips to improve the effectiveness of your website.

Ok, your turn.  What things have you experienced on a website that have kept you from staying (or opting in, or buying something)?

This is Part II of my 2 part post on ways site maps improve SEO ranking.  If you’d like to read Part I click here.

Using site maps is an often-overlooked method of boosting search engine ranking. It’s convenient for crawlers to gather all your information, so it gets indexed faster.

By reflecting changed content, it gets this data onto the search engines faster, too. In part I of this series, we looked at a couple of ways in which site maps help improve SEO rankings. There is another element that is perhaps the most useful of all.

That element is the ability of site maps to inform search engines of changes to the site. These changes are identified faster via a site map, relative to the crawling of individual content pages, through which changes may not even be identified at all.

With the information encoded in the XML site map, web crawlers will learn how often parts of your site are updated. For example, if you have a weekly blog post, the crawler will know to return weekly to get the new link.

This can improve your ranking simply because your site is visited more often, rather than by chance.

Build Your Site Map Online

Sitemaps are becoming more important in search engine algorithms, so it makes sense to incorporate good site maps into your site. You can use a site map building tool or software to make it easy to do.

Your webmaster should review the site maps before you publish them to ensure they are complete and error-free.

Here are the details you will need to complete the free Online Site map Generator:

For very large sites, multiple, smaller site maps are the best approach. This is also helpful if you have different types of content, such as videos, image galleries, or news updates.

By classifying them through different site maps, search engine crawlers will be able to index the links even faster, benefitting you.

In addition to XML format site maps, stored in the root of your domain, you should have HTML formatted site maps as well, for the convenience of your visitors. By increasing the usability of your site, so that visitors can always find what they are looking for, you’ll have more satisfied customers or readers.

This site map helps you, or your developer, too, because it is like a snapshot of the site. When it is time to make updates or changes, having the site map to refer to makes it easier to plan and organize.

Smart site maps are one of the easiest ways to increase search engine ranking. They do so by gathering in one place all of the information that crawlers are looking for.

It makes it possible for all the pages of even very large sites to be identified and classified, which isn’t the case if the pages must be found separately by the crawler. A sitemap creates internal links, which boost ranking, and provides better context for them so they can be indexed correctly.

Hidden links, broken links, and poor site structure can lead to pages being overlooked, but a site map compensates for these issues. Furthermore, site maps let crawlers know how often the site should be checked for updates, so they come back more often, keeping your ranking high.

How will you take action to generate or improve your site maps?

Facebook has announced that users have until Feb 2^nd to make mandatory changes to their personal profile before the existing format is converted over to a new “Timeline” format.  While most of the changes are purely cosmetic, a main change in functionality is occurring.

Previously Facebook pages showed the entries and postings made from the last week.  Facebook has stored all the entries you ever made since you created your account.  Now your past postings, entries, pictures and comments will be fully viewable to any of your current subscribers or viewers.

You can edit your profile in advance of this change to ensure you are showing your best possible online image.

Listed below are 6 tips to prepare for the new changes with the addition of Timeline:

Tip #1 – Update in Advance

Update your personal Facebook profile page in advance of the mandatory conversion next week to remove embarrassing pictures & posts or simply manage/clean up the look & feel of your profile.  Your new timeline will replace your profile, but all your stories and photos will still be there.

If you want to see how your timeline appears to other people, click the gear menu at the top of your timeline, and select “View As.”  You can choose to see how your timeline appears to a specific friend or the public.

Tip #2 – Insert a New “Cover” Photo

Select a photo for the new “Cover” for your Facebook profile.  The cover is the new larger rectangular shaped graphic positioned as a footer at the top of the page.

Your existing profile picture will appear in the lower left hand corner partially covering part of the larger graphic.  Just like profile pictures, your cover photos are public.

Tip #3 – Edit Old Posts, First

Start with the oldest Facebook posts first, since it will take a long time for all the posts to load, and during this process it is hard to edit them since the page keeps scrolling and moving.  My own profile took 20 minutes to fully load postings dating back to 2009.

Tip #4 – Change Dates

You can change the date of when pictures are posted to match the actual event (great for photos that were added later such as vacation pictures.

Tip #5 – Set Aside Time

Leave plenty of time to work on this.  It took an hour and a half to make all the changes to clean up my profile.  You have the ability to hide or delete the previous posts.

Tip #6 – Business Pages

Updating a personal profile does not update any Business pages that are linked to it.  Facebook has hinted at plans to update business pages with the Timeline feature, but has yet to announce a date.

Get Timeline Now.

To get timeline, simply go to the Introducing Timeline page and click “Get Timeline.” Or you can wait until you see an announcement at the top of your profile.

Check out this Timeline Guide from Mashable.

Do any of these tips apply to you? Can you offer any additional tips?

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a critical component of doing business on the web.  If your site or business isn’t among the first 100 to come up in a search, potential customers simply aren’t going to find you.

You can approach SEO by doing it yourself, or you can choose to work with a consultant, but either way there are a few fundamental rules that must be followed if you are going to be successful in boosting your search engine ranking.

Rule 1 – Keep Content Relevant

You must have a minimum of 500 words of content on your website. 800 to 1000 is better. More content means more keywords and a better ratio of keyword density.

Search engines will often de-rank sites which overuse keywords, so if you have more content, you’ve got more room to include keywords. You can boost your content by adding a blog, a video page, or a news section.

Keep the content relevant, at least tangentially, to your business.

Rule 2 – Create Content for Search Engines and Humans

Don’t forget about your human visitors in your enthusiasm to optimize search results. Your content still needs to be interesting, readable, and informative, or you are going to lose all the potential customers you’ve just gained through using SEO.

Write for people first, and then revise as needed to ensure that you’ve satisfied your SEO goals as well.

Rule 3 – Work on Your Keyword Density

Keyword density should fall at 2 to 4 percent of your total word count. That is, for every 100 words, keywords will appear 2 to 4 times.

Keywords that are hidden in coding are often picked up by search engines, as well. Now you can see why a site with 500 words or fewer is much harder to optimize for search.

There are free online keyword density analyzers like the one shown below that can evaluate your site for you. If your current content’s density is too low or high, rework it to meet the target.  Test you keywords now.

Rule 4 – Draw Them Into Your Posts and Website Copy

The use of keywords with H1, H2, and H3 tags draws the attention of search engine spiders, which crawl the web gathering content. A nice way to use them is in titles and subheadings, which also make content more readable for your visitors.

Most people won’t read a block of text unless something draws them in. It is likely that your pages will be scanned by your visitors, so giving them titles and headings which are relevant helps them to find what they’re looking for.

That keeps them on your site, hopefully looking more closely at what you have to offer.

These 4 rules should be kept in mind as you are building and updating your website. SEO should be in the forefront of your mind at all times.

Keep a list of keywords, and refer to keyword generators to add ones that you may not have thought of. Be alert to keywords in the materials of your competitors.

With just a bit of attention to SEO, you’ll organically gain more traffic and be able to grow your business.

Do any of these 4 basics already work for you? Can you offer additional tips?

These days, every business needs to utilize the power of social media in order to compete successfully.  The huge popularity of social sites has made them a superior way to connect with customers and to network with others in your field or industry.

There are lots of businesses and individuals who are struggling with how to incorporate Social Media and it can all turn into a big mess very quickly if it is not set up and maintained professionally and efficiently.

Whether you outsource your social media management or manage it in-house, in order to have the best success, planning your strategy carefully, and documenting it, is key.

Below are seven essential framework components for an effective social media marketing strategy.

Essential # 1 – Executive Summary

This may be the only document your CEO or a prospective investor may review so it should be written as a summary of all of the components of your plan.

Begin with a general overview of your intentions for the social media marketing strategy.  You will want to create short sections that address the problem, the solution, the opportunity, competitive advantages, a handful of bullet points that describe how you will monetize social media, who the core members of the team are, the economics of social media marketing, and funding required and the milestones the organization hopes to achieve using the funds.

This may also include elements such as customer outreach, integration with your existing websites and blogs, distribution of digital content (if relevant), and development of customer loyalty through engagement.

Essential # 2 – Goals and Objectives 

Next, consider what the primary goals and objectives of the strategy will be. This may depend on your area of business – for example, if you are an author, one objective may be to connect with your fans. In general, the three goals of any marketing strategy are to raise brand awareness, to engage customers and build a community, and to transform anonymous traffic into customers.

Essential # 3 – Target Audience 

Your target audience is your current customers and potential customers, who should be described in detail in this section. One of the goals being to gain new customers, you may need to do some research to determine what the demographics are of your potential customer base.

Essential # 4 – Locations and Sites

Here, detail on which social networking channels you intend to develop a presence. While it is advisable to participate in all the major sites, you must consider the time required to keep up.

It is important to research and consider social sites that are indigenous to your and your target markets’ niche.  As social media grows, there are more and more networks added almost monthly.

You will be reaching your target audience with your messages and posts in the places where they prefer.

Having a presence that is erratically updated, or used only for advertising purposes without engaging your followers, is worse than not having a presence at all.

Tip: It makes sense to at least secure your business name at the main sites, to keep others from taking it and to have it on hand when you are able to begin participating.

Essential # 5 – Controls 

Once you fully understand how followers and fans interact with your brand on the social networks you choose, you should detail what areas of each of the networks you will monitor.  Many of these social sites will act as a “second home” to your website and the reactions to content your business posts should be closely monitored.

You be able to identify evangelists for your business fairly quickly if you listen and engage in that order.

Essential # 6 – Tactics

This is where you will describe in more detail what type of content you will include at each site.  In this section, go into some detail about how each site will be used, including how often it will be updated, what interactions will be had with followers – such as question-and-answer sessions, promotional specials, and contests – and what followers will and will not be permitted to do.

It may also be worthwhile to come up with some ground rules about how you will handle any adverse events or inappropriate postings that might arise.

Your content creation efforts, if done properly, will result in leads to your site.  Here’s an idea of how the social media content you create will effect your lead generation:

Essential # 7 – Reporting, Measuring, and Analytics (ROI) 

In order to determine the effectiveness of your social media marketing, you need to gather and analyze data during the 3 distinct stages you set it up in: 1) Launch, 2) Management and 3) Optimization.  You will collect number of visitors and followers, success rates of different types of promotions, and the like.

Much of this data is easily available to you by looking at your profile’s statistics.  Keeping track of metrics such as these, and evaluating regularly for trends and shifts, will enable to you to adjust your strategy as needed.

Social media is effectively a requirement for any business that wants to stay competitive.  By compiling a wise plan and strategy from the outset, you give yourself the highest chances of running a successful social media marketing campaign.

It should be done in writing so that it can be referred to, but can be rewritten at any time as new needs develop.  It should be measured by taking into consideration how much your customers are worth to your business as compared to how much it will take for you to run a social media marketing campaign.

Bonus Essential #8 – Social Media Marketing Plan Graphic

It’s always a good idea to create a visual aid for easy reference.  Here’s an actual rendering for one of our clients’:

 How will these essentials help you to keep your social media on track and what other essentials does your plan include?

This is Part I of my 2 part series on how to start your mobile marketing.  On February 6, 2012,  I will post Part II.

By 2014, it is projected that more people will access web content using mobile technology than do so using a desktop computer.  That means, the time is now for your businesses to get your site optimized for mobile use, and to begin integrating your inbound marketing strategies with your mobile website, Smartphone Apps, QR codes and text messaging so that you can start taking full advantage of mobile’s opportunities, maximize your sales and lead capture.

The most active population group using mobile phones is 25-45 years old, so don’t limit your mobile marketing initiatives to the younger demographics.

These seven tips will get you started with a holistic mobile marketing approach.

Tip 1 – Write a Use-Based Mobile Marketing Strategy

Plan your mobile marketing strategy based on how people use their mobile devices.  Do some market research or perform a survey of your clients’ mobile habits.

You should evaluate how your target market is using mobile technology and how mobile marketing will uniquely allow you to reach your marketing goals.  For example, a very common use is to locate a restaurant or other business that is local to where the person is located at the time, utilizing the GPS functionality of the device.

If you want them to choose your location, make sure that your online directory listings are up-to-date, accurate, and are search engine optimized (SEO).  If you don’t have online directory listings, or have nit claimed your business, get them immediately.

If you own a restaurant for example, you will want to be on online directories like Yelp, Google Places, Zagat.com, Citysearch.com, Opentable.com, or Insiderpages.com.

Here’s what a well-optimized online directory listing looks like:

Yelp is a review site.  Reviews include a 5 star rating system.

Tip 2 – Integrate Mobile in the Marketing Mix

Once you establish whether or not mobile marketing is appropriate for your marketing campaign you should integrate your mobile marketing with your mass media and outdoors marketing by placing banners and ads that reference your mobile friendly site in places where people might have idle time with their phone, like at bus stops, in subway stations and on billboards.

To help you to keep the distinction between outbound and inbound marketing distinct top of mind, here is a cool infographic:

Tip 3 – Optimize Your Website for Mobile

One of the easiest ways to begin mobile marketing is to ensure that your website is usable on mobile devices.  First, you need a site that is optimized for mobile devices.  Most companies have a separate site designed for mobile than is used for computer Internet browser access.

The elements of a dynamic website are different from what is considered amazing for a mobile site.   However, you don’t need to do this if you optimize your main site.  The trick is to make it attractive and functional to both kinds of visitors. You may wish to engage a web designer rather than trying to do it yourself.

However you go about putting the site together, be sure to test it on all the major platforms to ensure it works as intended.  Micro-formats are a newer class of open-data formats can be used to adapt existing data so that it’s more flexible for use across multiple platforms.  By automating processes, it allows websites to be more dynamic and adaptable – key elements for mobile.

Here are some tips to optimize your mobile website for SEO:

• Keep Consistent With Your Brand - The mobile version of your site should have a look that is familiar from your main site. This is an element of branding and will make you more memorable to customers. Most companies and brands haven’t set up a mobile site yet, but a good number have. so you can learn from the best ones (and the worst).

*Don’t use a lot of images because large images slow a page down and slow experience lead to higher bounce rates.

*Remember to keep your navigation simple, your call-to-action above the mobile fold and text input to a minimum.

• Use HTML 5 on your main site make optimization easy - HTML5, the first update to the HTML coding language since 1999, has been designed to describe content better.  It introduces new tags, and more flexible tagging rules, which increase the information that is sent to the viewing window.  More descriptive tags mean better SEO, too.
• Design for Multiple Handsets - Keep a database of mobile phones and ensure that your site will look good on them.  A site designed for a Nokia phone won’t look good on an iPhone ad vice-versa.
• Create Page headers in XHTML format - Be sure that your page, whether a dedicated mobile page or a subdomain of your main site, uses this format.
• Optimize your XML site map for mobile URLs - Just as with a desktop site map, the mobile site map is an important element of SEO and should not be neglected. The procedure for doing so is described in detail at Google’s webmaster toolspage
• Use an “M-Dot” URL - An “m-dot” URl (ex: m.abc.com.), will help Google recognize and index your mobile site separately from your standard one.
• Test Your Mobile Website - Google’s GoMo site, lets you plug in your URL to see how it looks on a mobile phone.  You should also listen to feedback from your customers, especially to learn about site performance and functionality so you can tweak accordingly.

Ebay has a very nice and simple navigation and they use large type and few images:

There is no time to waste in terms of getting your business website ready for mobile.  The early adopter gets the customer.

These few tips are some of the basics that you need to know in order to optimize your website to attract and keep those customers who do most of their web browsing by mobile and plan a mobile marketing strategy that complements your current inbound marketing activities.

In the next blog post, I will describe the different mobile marketing channels and provide tips on using them and I will show you how to bring all of this together for evaluating and testing your success.

What mobile marketing plans have you considered or implemented and what tips do you have?

You already know that a strong presence on social networking sites is essential for building relationships and ultimately promoting your business.  It’s key to connecting with customers, and can be used to move your business’ website up in search engine rankings.

Google +, the social network powered by Google, as a recent entry into the realm of social networking, has quickly gained a large following.  With so many people on board with Google +, sharing profiles and supplying Google with the intelligence to see what people share with their friends or what blogs people read, its no wonder that now Google can directly see how people interact with their friends.

There are benefits of business planning around Google+, because it will boost your position in search and with just a few marketing best practices, you can increase your chances of people clicking onto your site.  Much like a traditional SEO build, it is important to understand the variables which you can control.

Here are five ways to ensure Google + helps with your search engine rankings:

#1 – Fully Complete Your Profile

Spiders, the web-crawling programs that search engines use to gather their data, pull from certain elements of the profile page, so it is in your best interests to fill out your profile completely.  For the profile name, use your business name exactly for the best results; this is the SEO title.

The first 45 characters or so of the Brief Description and the Introduction show up in Google search results, so make sure that they include descriptive keywords.  The links shown in the other profiles section and recommended links section, to the right of the screen, may be used in search results, the top three being especially important.  Make sure these are relevant keywords.

#2 – Connect Your Personal Profile to Your External Content

The simplest method is to include your email address on each page of content that you want linked.  Be sure that email address is in your Google + profile, and the content will be automatically linked.  You can also create coded links to your Google + profile on your content pages, and add those pages to the ‘Contributor To’ section of your Google + profile.

#3 – Connect Your Google + Page  to Your Website

The way to get people to follow your page is accomplished by adding a Google + badge, a customizable widget that helps you connect your site to your Google+ page. “The Google+ badge helps you grow your audience on Google+ and shows more recommendations in Google search by letting people add you to their circles and +1 your page, all without leaving your site,” says Google.

The instructions for doing this are at the Google developer’s page.  You can also use code to add a hidden link between your page and Google +, but your visitors won’t be able to go directly to your profile, making the badge the better choice.

#4 – Encourage +1 Clicks 

+1 is Google’s way for users to fast-share content. Websites that use Google’s +1 button generate 3.5 times more traffic from Google+ than websites that don’t have the button.

Simply by clicking the button, the page is added to that user’s profile page.  They’re given the option of adding a comment and posting to their circles as well.

The number of +1s that your page gets is listed in search results.  Make it super easy and quick for a visitor to share your content on social media sites by displaying the +1 button on each page of content, including your home page, so that your visitors never have to go looking for it.

Use the Google+ share button as a call-to-action on your blog that helps remind your visitors that their online connections might be interested in your content as well.

#5 – Gain More Followers

The more followers you have, the higher your content pages (connected to your profile as described above) will rank.  In addition to including a link to your Google + profile on your own site, include it anywhere else that you are active, including other social networking and media sites, forums and message boards where you are active (as long as it’s allowed by terms of service), and in your email signature line.

The popularity of Google + and its integration with the entire Google family of pages and functions makes it a vital component of your online marketing strategy.  Whatever your line of business, your search engine ranking can make a huge difference in your success so make sure you are:

1. Finding people
2. Following people back
3. Sharing interesting content
4. Sharing your updates with your friends via email (you can share outside of gmail

How will these few tips, help your business to harness the power of Google + and help move it up the search ranks?