Blogging is a HUGE global phenomena and I’m sure all of you have heard that blogging is the biggest thing to hit the web in the last few years. I know some of you are still wondering how on earth I am going to sell Social media or a blog to my boss. Well today is your lucky day because we are going to have a look at the marketing power of blogs!

1. If your blog is purely for business, you can give yourself a pat on your back, the reason being a blog differs in many ways from normal web sites that you can find on the internet. Blogs are like an online journal, it is extremely easy to add information, and they are normally updated quite regularly. They are rather informal and more personalized
2. Content is “king” because it is the critical element that will make or break your blog. Always make sure to write with your readers in mind. Try and make your content as interesting as possible for the reader to make sure they will come back to your blog. The content can be a news article about your industry, product updates, interviews etc. If you do not hook the reader immediately, they are not going to subscribe and they will not buy your products or services.
3. Blogs provide the necessary marketing power for you to create a buzz about your new products or services.
4. The audience for a blog is normally specific and targeted. You can provide product updates, how-to articles, and other relevant information to your customers. Prospective customers who see your blog will be encouraged by your commitment to good customer service.
5. If customers do pose questions with regards to your products or services, this will give you the opportunity to communicate and start building a relationship with the client.
6. Blogs help you to personalize your business. You can make your customers feel the warmth and comfort talking with you and buying from you. The style of a blog is basically informal you can therefore write posts in your own voice. Remember no formality and “corporate speak” in a blog! If you write in your own voice it will give your business more of a human face and the reader will see there is a “real person” behind the blog!
7. A blog will drive traffic to your “sales” website. You can make use of links and strategic keywords to redirect the client to a specific landing page on your “sales” website.

I hope you are convinced to sell social media or a blog to your boss. Just remember the golden rule of a blog is to have fun with your blog and to speak in your own language.

Good luck in selling Social media to your boss!

PPC is an acronym for Pay Per Click. PPC is a method of advertising where the advertiser selects a set of keywords or phrases they would like to bid on and they only pay when someone clicks on their ads, hence the term pay per click. Pay per click marketing uses search engines to advertise on such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. Many people have chosen to steer clear of PPC advertising just because they have heard horror stories about how expensive PPC can be, but the simple truth is that a well executed campaign will earn you a high return on investment.

Today I am going to educate you on the many advantages of Pay per click advertising and what sets it apart from search engine optimisation. So for those of you out there who feel ambivalent about PPC advertising, I offer you the following points to consider:

• PPC advertising is quick and easy to implement, you simply select your keywords and phrases and how much you would like to bid on them and you are on your way. There is no hassle or fuss as Google Adwords (The Google PPC advertising tool) makes the process of uploading your keywords a simplistic one. This is especially advantageous when you have a promotion/sale or there is an event you would like to capitalise on such as the world cup as you can write many ads for one keyword and pause them just as easily when the event is over. While developing a sites search engine optimisation on the other hand could require months in many cases
• You should be pleased to know that with PPC you only pay when someone clicks on your ads and not for each impression (each time your ad is viewed is one impression)
• Google assigns a Quality Score to each keyword, depending on how good your quality score is you will pay far less per click than what you are actually bidding for on that specific keyword. So PPC is not as expensive as some believe it to be after all
• You have complete control of your budget, you decide what to spend and when, for example if you feel a keyword is out of control you have the power to reign it in by decreasing your bid cap or simply pause it or if a keyword is doing really well and is highly profitable you may want to increase the budget to broaden its reach. It is completely in your hands
• You can write highly relevant ads suited to your product and relevant to your list of keywords thus ensuring that you receive highly qualified traffic that are most likely interested in your product or service. Organic listings (SEO) does not have ads that briefly describe your product so the traffic to an organic listing is not as qualified as it would be with PPC
• With PPC advertising even if a user does not click on your ad they will still see it on the Google landscape (impression) when they search for a keyword your are bidding on, so you achieve brand awareness and remember an impression costs you noting at all
• The Pay per click method of advertising generates immediate results whereas SEO is time consuming and is more suited to achieving longer term results.
• With PPC you can choose the language you want your ad to display in and also can target many geographical locations whilst you cannot do this with SEO
• The biggest advantage of PPC for me and what really sets it apart from SEO is that PPC is completely measurable. Google Adwords allows you to generate accurate reports on pretty much any statistic you require from your number of clicks, impressions, cost, conversions, conversion rate and click through rate. You can also get reports on your budget and return on investment.

So with all these advantages I think it’s pretty clear that Pay per click advertising can achieve phenomenal results for you or your business if executed well. Well, now I have armed you with some cold hard facts so that you can go in confidence to your boss and motivate him to try PPC advertising remembering that with more and more businesses are choosing to market their products online, one of them may be your competitor, so why not get a head start.

Your company has a website; it is looking great but was it constructed correctly? Are people finding your products on the internet? A lot of web design agencies do not construct websites correctly and use outdated methods.

Does your company website feature organically on major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and/or Bing? In other words do people find your company’s website when they search for something relevant to your company’s products or services on a search engine? If the answer is no, then your company really need to consider optimizing the website to perform better organically.

Most website traffic originates from search engines. Most of these users find what they are looking for within the first page or first few pages of search results. What this means is you should strive to get your company’s website up into the first 30 listings for relevant search phrases. Internet users often trust organic listings more than paid for results (PPC) as they find these more relevant to what they are looking for.

So how should you convince your boss to buy SEO?
I would focus on the benefits below when drafting up a proposal.

• SEO will increase traffic to your company’s website
  More people will find your website thus the traffic to the website will increase.
• It’s not as expensive as PPC advertising in the long run
  Requires the least amount of capital for the maximum exposure of your website
• Increased visibility
  If a website is optimized it will increase the visibility on search results
• Measure results
  Traffic from search engines in your statistical program
• Long term positioning
  Listings in result pages are more permanent and not only bound to budget

4 Common mistakes on websites which affect your website’s organic position

Images that are links
A lot of designers create links with images for their navigation. These should be text as robots do not have the ability to understand images and cannot calculate the link’s relevance to its destination

Incorrect use of JavaScript
By using JavaScript to display content via mouse events on a web page you make it virtually impossible for robots to index your information as robots cannot perform mouse events on your website.

No use of title tags
The title tag is one of the most important on page factors for search engine optimization. The title describes the element it’s placed on which means that search engines can make more sense of it.

No use of headings
Search Bots use heading tags to make sense of a chunk of data/content. When using heading tags it is easier for robots to categorize a page.

Search Engine Optimization is a long term project as the affect might not be seen immediately but are worth the wait. For immediate results you should consider PPC but running both ads and doing SEO will yield the best results. In our next blog entry Noleen will go in to detail on Pay per Click Advertising and what sets it apart from Search Engine Optimization.

I know this has probably been discussed so many times online that everyone is an expert on the topic by now. Everybody understands the strengths and weaknesses of either form of marketing by now… But then why is it still so difficult to sell it to some top management executives or directors? If everyone knows about the awesome benefits of online marketing why are so few companies really harnessing its powers?

The answer is most people don’t understand it or have bad experiences of marketing online. The key here is simple, just like with any other traditional marketing your strategy needs to be clearly defined but before we go into that lets look at the two different forms.

Traditional marketing can be defined as any form advertising that was used prior to the Internet. The lines are definitely being blurred but this is a good rule of thumb to live by. Classic forms of this are radio, TV, billboards and flyers. Anything since then that is served using an Internet connection can be classified as an online marketing.  Online marketing includes search engine marketing, banner advertising, email marketing and quite a few more.

Now where these fundamentally differ is in the goals that they achieve. Traditional marketing has most of its power vested in building and broadening reach of businesses brands. This is definitely a key factor that no company could survive without. Online marketing on the other hand is a form of direct marketing, which means that the audience has the chance to directly respond to advertising as they are exposed to it. This vastly increases ROI as users are able to respond while they experience a need compare to traditional where they need to remember it so they can respond to it later.

Another factor that sets apart the two forms of advertising is measurability. Online marketing is the clear winner when it comes to measurability as it takes place in an environment that allows us to track our customers from the adverts they click on till they perform actions that are valuable to our business. Traditional marketing has developed some forms of tracking but they have stumbling blocks, one of the biggest being that they rely on human memory. People forget the tracking telephone number you offer them or they forget to claim the discount code which kills most tools you have to track traditional adverts. This means you will only ever be able to see a sample of the users that traditional marketing generates.

The high ROI of online marketing means even SME’s can take advantage of it and yield great results from it. They can also measure exactly where their leads are originating from and optimize their campaigns accordingly. When it come to corporate companies the combination of traditional marketing and online marketing means that prospective customers manage to find you after you have stimulated a need with traditional marketing. Not only that but the branding power of your traditional marketing campaign means that your visitors from online marketing will convert into leads or sales far higher than when using only one form.

So how do you convince your boss? Well you now have some facts to use and my favorite is measurability. The fact that you can launch an online marketing campaign and track every lead or sale generate by it means that you will be able to demonstrate the benefits even when you implement a smaller test campaign.

Directors need to make a business run sustainably and this means that it comes down to numbers for them. If you can show them the return on investment that online marketing generates they would be crazy not to buy into the idea.

If you have just spent a sizeable sum of money building a website, you may have cottoned on to the fact that like it or not, we all live in the age of technology. The Internet has become the hub of communication be it emailing, sharing photos and information or searching for products and services. However the question is where do you go from here and how will you possibly reach your target market?

If people are not aware of your brand how will they find your website and ultimately your product or service? The key is to be visible and accessible to them at the time that they are searching for specific product or service.

Online Marketing is certainly the most targeted and cost effective method of advertising and is also the most measurable. This all sounds great and easy to understand for some of us but most people out  there in the great big world don’t know what online marketing is and how it works. This lack of understanding is the main reason why people have steered clear of online marketing. But I ask you, in a world that is progressing and forging ahead into the realm of technology can you or your business afford to be left behind?

This week we will talk about selling online marketing to your boss, which might not be as easy as it sounds. It is very difficult to convince someone that online marketing works well if implemented correctly, especially if they do not understand what it is and why they need it. Sometimes people only grasp what it is and how it works when they see it in practise and when it starts yielding results for their company.

We will go on to discuss the following point

• The Difference between online marketing and traditional marketing,
• Common mistakes  made on website and why businesses should have their website optimised for search engines,
• The advantages of Pay Per Click advertising, how it works and what sets it apart from  Search Engine Optimization.
• Social Media and why you need it in your company and how to make it work for you.

With all these facts and examples you can confidently go to your boss and motivate him to invest in online marketing.