Many people don’t have the stay power, stamina (read: uneventful personal life), or discipline to become an active Twitter user for their business.  If you’re on the verge of bailing on the Twitter world, please continue reading for a few tips on how to make the most of Tweeting in your business marketing plan.  If these still aren’t enough for you; check out an expert Tweeter at Twitip.com .

Bring Relevant Content to the Table.

So we live in a Tundra called Des Moines - don’t tweet about the 4 feet of snow in your driveway…unless you’re a plowing company.  If you’re a dry cleaner, don’t offer advice on which local salsa class to take.  Do however give quick tips for at home removal of those pesky red wine stains or pen explosions.  Remember to follow up the advice with a reminder that dry cleaning is still needed (I don’t want you losing all of your business!) or an offer to use on their next “not so easy” stain.   Offering a unique perspective will help gain trust with users and authentication in their eyes.

Give Shout Outs!

If a business recognizes your work with them in a tweet, make sure to reciprocate the favor at some point. Acknowledging fans and other businesses are important. Little updates like; “thanks @btsmiley for the SEO title optimization tip yesterday, we’ve seen great success with it today!” or “having a power lunch with “D&D Deli” to discuss Twitter and Facebook marketing strategies, hope I get dessert!” are fun ways to give others in the community a boost and make you seem more “real” as a user -  I ate at D&D today too…perhaps I saw the Blue Traffic team!

 Be Real.

Create a voice. In some businesses more than one person is doing the tweeting.  Blogging factual, stiff information one day and witty or inappropriate tweets the next day might confuse users.  Figure out what kind of user you are and stick to it. 

What’s your purpose for Tweeting?

Are you looking to expand your customer base?  Interact with fans of your business?  Attempting a new brand?  Once you clearly define this intention making purposely and unique Tweets will be MUCH easier.  This will help you decide if you’re the type of business to offer tips of the day, weekly discounts, funny store anticdotes and so on.  Setting expectations is the most important part of a successful advertising and marketing campaign.  Figure this out first. 

Tweet and Tweet often.

Daily is best.  Pick a time - I recommend morning.  Studies show most professionals spend the first hour of their day getting organized.  Checking Twitter is generally in this hour if they’re a faithful user.  Remember that you have to be committed to making a difference.  Does once a week or twice a month hurt you?  Probably not…but consistency is best.  Humans are creatures of habit.  Let the Twitter world know you’re there each day, on time.  If you aren’t logging into your Twitter account at least 3 times a week, you’re a passive user.  Maybe you’re more into social media than pigskin like I am - nonetheless, increase your knowledge and you’ll be a better user for it!

The beauty of being an internet marketer is that if you know what you’re doing, for the most part the work speaks for itself.  I wish the best of luck to marketers trying to prove ROI’s for things like sponsoring a golf tournament, running a billboard ad or even just a simple flyer campaign.  Now I understand that a marketing mix is important but I’m certainly not complaining about having the ability to provide in-depth statistics that backs up the work I do.

I was in a meeting with a client recently and after a brief discussion about our search engine optimization efforts the marketing director looked at me and said, “What am I getting for the money I spend with you guys?”  Fair question, to the point, I loved it.  Over the next hour I explained and showed him a mix of the following things…

“Before you weren’t there, now you are there, and this is the amount of traffic it’s bringing…” - Search engine optimization and organic rankings are fun to discuss.  We use special software that tracks where a site ranked across the search engines when we started work and where it ranks when we’re finished.  The analytics will speak for themselves with traffic increases and specifically increases in traffic from Google/Yahoo!/Bing.  If you want to really fascinate the client you can even show them how many different phrases people use to search for their site, how many visitors are being brought by each phrase, how long they spent on the site, the pages they visited, etc.  A top level analytics tool will also allow you to follow the organic traffic and track conversions (purchase, form filled out, etc.).

“Your ad shows up here and appears for all of these phrases.  It was shown X times and received Y clicks at $Z/click last month.” - Pay-per-click campaigns are pretty cut and dry.  The SE’s provide numbers on impressions/clicks for each key phrase and also the average position in which the ad was shown.  Google also provides conversion tracking tools so you can follow a visitor from the time they are brought to your site until the time they “convert” (buy something, contact you, etc.). 

Obviously this is the tip of the iceberg as far as online marketing strategies go but it’s Friday and I’m tired of writing!  Many of the things mentioned above can also be tracked on banner advertising, email marketing, cost per lead campaigns, etc. 

The ability to track online marketing efforts with great accuracy holds us very accountable as internet marketers.  Good work will produce good results and will leave those skeptical marketing directors feeling much better about spending their money on the Internet.

You might be familiar with a little sporting event a couple weeks back called the SuperBowl.  Although we weren’t entirely let down by my personal favorite; the commercials, we were lacking one first stringer and it’s variety of pop culture co-stars.  Pepsi where were you?    Although Pepsi realizes the effectiveness of a Super bowl Campaign, they stated; “In 2010, each of our beverage brands has a strategy and marketing platform that will be less about a singular event and more about a movement.”  They are now moving those dollars to a social media platform to help develop relationships with their customers, not just display that Britney Spears enjoys their fizzy drink and can sing catchy tunes in their commercials.  Will others follow suit this year?  I expect so. 

So what areas might be of growth or focus this year?  Per my research, most marketers point to various common themes; mobile being a large player.  If you don’t already you’ll soon carry all the internet access you’ll need each day in your pocket.  This needs to be capitalized on better, it’s time.   Social media platforms will start to blend.  With the recent Buzz and Wave products, It  won’t be a surprise if we see the first social media hybrid come from Google.  As the brands start blending it will also be important for businesses to make their social marketing stamp - many are already doing a great job of this, think companies known for their twitter deal of the day.  Social marketers will also focus reaching the market that needs to be reached right now….mainly, women. 

Although most experts agree with this at least being “A” year, if not “THE” year of social marketing, others find it difficult to decipher where social marketing begins and ends from an execution standpoint and from a forum perspective.  After all social marketing isn’t just limited to Twitter and Facebook.   As those that see the importance in the social marketing movement taking the reins, we’ll see innovation.  This being the biggest and most calculated trend to affect us in many years allows us to anticipate this movement to really roar in 2010’s year of the tiger.

Last month the Google blog published a post illuminating the role of synonyms in search, and the conclusive results were rather exciting. After analyzing search statistics from all 100 languages Google supports, it was found that synonyms play an essential role in approximately 70 percent of all searches. Furthermore, only two percent of synonym-related searches yielded faulty or misleading results, meaning if users are searching for it, there’s a 98 percent chance Google is coming through with accurate results.

This revelation won’t have much of an effect on some industries, particularly those where the majority of users already know how to conduct an accurate search. Examples of this might be in the car industry, where users are most likely to search the following nouns: Cars, trucks, vans, SUVs, sports utility vehicles, automobiles or vehicles. That the auto industry has been around for generations means new labels are seldom applied to the automobile, unless it reflects brand names (e.g. Dodge Stratus).

Seo consultants are more likely to exploit synonyms in emerging markets where dubious terms linger, as well as with untapped brand abbreviations. For instance, if an online athletic clothing store wanted to sell more products from a brand like Under Armour, it would be wise to target not only “Under Armour clothing” but also “UA clothing.”

Understandably, our primary focus is to please the search engines in order to achieve the improved rankings that will please our clients.  However, much can be gained from paying close attention to how users are actually searching for our clients’ products. Going beyond basic keyword research and identifying common synonyms in search engine queries enables you to achieve top rankings for more phrases, while increasing web traffic for clients and boosting their ROI. 

The worst part about the game was that it wasn’t that much fun to win if you were hiding. As you crouched behind the bushes you’d sometimes see or hear “it” looking for you and the other hiders, but if “it” couldn’t find you, you’d start to get a little bored. Maybe you’d whistle or yell to make things a little more interesting, but often times the person looking for you was no Sherlock Holmes and eventually you’d just come out in the open to end the agony.

Search marketing is a little bit like hide and seek. You put a lot of time and effort into building, updating and maintaining your company’s online presence and then you sit back and wait for customers to find you. While you aren’t really trying to hide from them, after a while it isn’t much fun if you are not found. You know people are searching the Internet, looking for the products and services your company offers. But often times if  they don’t know your company name or your website address, they just can’t  find you and they end up on a competitor’s site.

After a while, it’s not much fun for you when your potential customers seem to find everyone else but you. You try to whistle or yell a little to promote your company online, but nothing seems to grab their attention. And do you remember when you were “it” how you improved your chances of finding everyone else? In some cases, you might have accidentally on purpose snuck a peek as everyone ran to their hiding spots. Unfortunately it was usually too dark outside or there were too many hiders and good hiding spots, and your quick peek didn’t do you much good.

The search engines do something similar. They sneak in and take a peek at your website, hoping to uncover the clues that will bring your hidden website into the light where they can display your pages and URL’s in their search results. Unfortunately most websites do a really good job of hiding. They don’t have unique page titles, original content, good site architecture, or links from other websites. Unknowingly, these sites have found the best hiding spots.

But just like playing hide and seek, hiding for too long gets lonely. Search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising can fix that problem. When you are ready to help them find you, these forms of online marketing are a great place to start. Now, are you ready to come out from behind that tree?

A recent survey given to some of the top SEO’s in the world proved the importance of external links.  Two of the five biggest factors affecting search results were External Link Popularity (quantity/quality of links point to your site) and Keyword Focused Anchor Text From External Links (having your key phrase in the anchor texts of links that point to your site).  Recently, rumors have spread that Google’s #1 factor when ranking a site is External Link Popularity.  If that doesn’t get your attention then I don’t know what will!

So the question becomes, what’s the best strategy for obtaining a large number of links from quality sites?  Well, there are plenty of strategies ranging from link partnerships to paid links to creating amazingly useful sites that people want to link to because they provide great information (think Wikipedia or CNN).  Personally, I think the best way to obtain “juicy links” is to use the tool we are trying to please…the search engine.

Any site that is willing to provide a link (be it for free or paid) is going to have one of the following phrases on one of its pages: “submit your site”, “enter your url”, “add your web site”.  So for a client who happens to be a used car dealer in Chicago, I will go to Google and search this: “submit your site” used car dealer chicago.  The first result is an online shopping site and when I click it takes me directly to their Automotive section and I am able to click on Submit Link, enter my information and Ta-Da…I’ve just created a quality external link to my site!

Granted, this sounds like something a five year old could do but there are some important factors to keep in mind.  When Google looks at links pointing to your site it looks at the Google PageRank of this page and then assigns a “value” to the link.  Sites with high PageRank’s obviously give more valuable links.  Another factor will be the issue of reciprocal links, many of these sites will ask that you also link back to them.  In my experience this isn’t a big deal as long as the site is respectable.  I would suggest just creating a Resources or Friends page on your site for these reciprocal links.

SEOMOZ.org has taken this strategy to the next level with their Juicy Link Finder tool.  This tool has taken the information from searches like the one explained above and put all of these linking sites into a massive database.  When using Juicy Link Finder all one must do is type in their key phrase and JLF then spits out a massive list of sites sorted by PageRank.  It’s a very nice tool but only for serious search engine optimizers as it’s part of the SEOMOZ Pro Membership.

In conclusion, external link building is important, PageRank is important and the anchor text of the links pointing to your site is important.  Just in the past few years Google has taken this from a small part of their algorithm to arguably the #1 factor for achieving rankings.  Don’t get left behind…build some links!

Reputation management is more than just eliminating damaging articles and blogs on the first few pages of a search result listing, Reputation Management is responding to this negativity with positive comments, responses, or articles to show your business in a brighter light.  Blog master, Alyssa Gregory at Sitepoint.com seems to coin the process best; “ORM (Online Reputation Management) is the process of following online references to a brand, company, person or service while having a plan in place to deal with any negative feedback. You can think of it as a three-step process, although they may not always occur in this order: 1. Monitor - ongoing research, 2. Evaluate - consider the feedback, source, outlet to come to a decision about the risk, and 3. Act - comment, rebut, draft a formal response, or simply ignore”

There are a few ways to help prevent the need for intense damage control by filling up Google’s first page with information you want your customer’s to find.  Getting your registered website under a branded domain and providing a relevant and frequent blog are the first steps.  These personally written antidotes about your business or ideals, with your businesses name scattered across them will earn their way to Google’s heart quickly.  In additional to business specific blogs, social networking is the next best way to spread your name like wildfire.  I’ve spoken of the importance of Facebook previously on this site and its efficient way at reaching a broad audience quickly.  Myspace, Twitter, Wikipedia profiles, and LinkedIn are other great methods of professionally networking your business.  These consistently appear high in search results per their large international following.  Under the same concept, Snapfish, Kodak Gallery, and other photo displaying mediums can create a face or photo with your brand.   

In addition to these tried and true methods, consider link building.  Kaboodle, Digg, and StumbleUpon are all great examples of quality sites accepting your article reviews and kudos to help increase the number and quality of incoming links from external sources, thus increasing the web page’s link popularity and search engine placement.  If all of these methods are still trying your patience, head straight to the horses mouth and submit your links directly to Google, Bing, and Yahoo themselves. 

Many SEO and Internet Marketing companies seem to be selling this new service like hot cakes.  If it’s not something you’re currently willing to bank roll, consider the 16 free reputation management tools from the experts at Sitepoint.com. You might already be using Google Blog Search - check out similar, BlogPulse and Technorati.  This ORM expert also elaborates on Twitter and link monitoring followed by a list of other useful free tools.

Make sure you have your best face forward for that fateful first Google meeting!

Here at Blue Traffic we handle websites of all sizes, from a dozen pages to several thousand pages. Similarly, we honor a variety of agreements, from a few hours of SEO work a month to projects that require several hours a week the entire year round. Ideally, you could devote several hours to each individual page, affording you ample time to conduct satisfactory keyword research,  rewrite page titles, develop informed unique content, and maybe even sprinkle a few internal links there within.

That, of course, is the ideal scenario. And as any internet marketer will attest, few projects are accompanied by ideal circumstances.

Thus, when only limited hours can be spread across a colossal project, it’s imperative you diligently assign your time to worthwhile tasks. Last year, Stephen Spencer of Netconcepts authored an article about “Thin Slicing” that is, in my opinion, the key to achieving impressive results when time is of the essence.

The more things change the more they stay the same, as the saying goes, and from my professional experience, this holds true in search engine optimization. Even despite the mind-boggling innovation taking place in the Google and Microsoft search departments, a few primary factors continue to dictate organic rankings. That isn’t to say the other strategies don’t work - because many of them do - but a select few have a greater impact in the grand scheme of things.

Chief among them is the almighty albeit unspectacular page title. There are hundreds of proven SEO strategies and one hundred times as many opinions of what truly works. However, when time is short and you have no room  for bold experimentation, take some advice from Stephen Spencer and focus on the paramount impact area – page titles.

Like in cinema and literature, a good title can yield lucrative results, even if there is no substance behind the name. In the search engine arena, a good title will garner you improved rankings and hopefully increased web traffic. Even if there are thousands of titles to be edited and no time to plug in keywords to find that ideal fit for each page, merely reviewing the makeup of a page, taking an educated guess, and plugging that in as the new title will be more beneficial than having hundreds or thousands of generic or redundant page titles working against one another.

So when the clock is ticking toward zero, turn to your clutch playmaker - the page title.

A few years ago I read a book titled Call to Action by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg. Much of it pointed to developing pages, paths, and content based on the anticipated “personas” of your visitors. If you had a good idea of who your visitors were, you could lead similar ones down a path toward a conversion based on their needs. While this was the first book on the subject I’d read, it never seemed like a practical approach for small business owners and for those on a tight web marketing budget. At the same time, the concepts appeared to work well for bigger companies like the diamond store in their main case study.

I am currently reading another book by the Eisenberg brothers titled Waiting For Your Cat To Bark. This one again builds on the personas approach to improving conversions, but so far it is an easier and more practical read. I am hoping to find that it also includes some information we can use to help the companies we work with.

One of the best books I have found on the subject of improving conversions comes from Seth Godin. If you don’t follow Seth’s blog or read his books, I’d highly recommend you check them out. Surprisingly to me, most of our customers are not familiar with Seth’s work - even though I think he has one of the greatest marketing minds of our time. Anyway, the book I am referring to is an older one  (from 1999) titled Permission Marketing and it is all about learning how to get permission from your potential customers to market to them now and in the future - in exchange for giving them something of value.

We’ve applied Godin’s Permission Marketing principles to dozens of websites via an email marketing tool called Aweber (affiliate link). This tool is a great way to capture leads and improve website conversions by getting some basic information about your site visitors. On just one of our customer’s sites they are averaging over 700 leads per month using this tool (a great value for about $20 per month to start).

Converting website visitors into leads is a big topic of discussion and we are just getting started here in Des Moines. It makes sense that customers are much more interested in learning how to turn traffic into leads rather than just building more traffic - and I can see this becoming a bigger part of our service offerings in the future. As always, I’ll keep you updated on our progress and we’d like to get your feedback on the subject too!

In 2010 I Want…Real-Time Search To Go Away - This is no good for searchers or search marketers because to put it simply…it’s confusing!  Not only are results cluttered and messy but in many instances the results lack any relevance to the search.  Also, what’s the point of having relevant content, unique meta data, quality link structures and spider-friendly sites when all it takes to get to the top of the SERPs is a 140-character phrase.  Let’s leave the real-time idea to Twitter!

In 2010 I Want…Small Search Engines To Shine - A world with multiple search engines competing for market share is a world that I want to live in.  Unfortunately, all signs point to an Internet that features two major search engines: Google and YaBing (or Binghoo or Number Two or Google’s ugly step-brother, whichever you prefer).  Multiple search engines receiving heavy traffic means more opportunities for small and medium sized companies to compete with the big boys.  If we continue on this pace Google will inevitably own the entire search market at some point and all of us SEO’s will be competing for rankings on one single search engine.  No thanks!

In 2010 I Want…SEO Spending Forecasts To Be Accurate - Everyone continues to say that dollars spent on interactive marketing and SEO/PPC/social media in particular will continue to increase in 2010 and for the next few years.  Many companies, especially in smaller markets, did not spend a single dime on online marketing in 2009 so there are plenty of opportunities for our industry to continue growing.  The key will be to stay a step ahead of the competition and as always, provide value to the client!

Let’s keep our fingers crossed for another booming year of interactive marketing! 

From all of us here at Blue Traffic, may you have a happy, safe and profitable 2010.

Happy New Year!