A common question I have received from people who are in the process of starting a blog is, which widgets should I use in my blog? This is a great question since you want your blog to be useful but not be overwhelming with widgets and things all over the blog.
In my opinion the most important widgets would be social media sharing buttons such as: Facebook, Twitter, Digg and Delicious. This widgets will allow posts that readers like to be shared throughout the social media sites and receive more traffic in the process. Along with these I believe an RSS feed is a must for any blog. This will allow people to subscribe to your blog.
After the widgets above are added you can look through and find a few more that are useful for your target market. This will be different from each market but the most important thing is to not add to many things to your blog. You want your blog to be easy to navigate and find the useful posts readers are looking for.
What widgets do you like to use or see on blogs?
I assume by now your company has starting using some social media sites as marketing tools such as, Facebook and Twitter. Also at this point your company should be blogging as well.
These are two great new marketing techniques that reach a target market and can be optimized by combining the two. For example this means when you post a new post on your blog you tweet a link to it. Also you should have all of the social media widgets on your blog so that other people can share posts that they found interesting or helpful.
By combining the new marketing techniques on the internet you can better optimize your marketing strategy and get your word out to your market fast.
Facebook just launched a new site that looks like it can be a large help for the marketing departments of companies. This site is called Facebook for Business.
This website will help marketers understand and use all of Facebook’s different marketing tools from pages, ads, sponsored stories and platforms. These are all topics that some marketers may not even have known about or did not know how to use them. For example many marketers have found ads on Facebook to be hard to set up, but this new site makes it easier.
As your business moves to the new social media sites such as, Google+, it is important to remember to keep using Facebook as well. This new website from Facebook looks like a great tool for marketers.
Photo Credit: paul.klintworth from Flickr Creative Commons
Comcast offers an interesting marketing technique for business called Comcast Spotlight. This service places advertisements on some network TV channels on Comcast as well as online advertising on websites such as Vehix and Infinity.
This may be a good strategy for marketing if your company has a large budget for advertising, if not there are other free or low cost ways to reach your target market such as blogs, social media marketing, email marketing and many more.
People has become great at ignoring interruption advertising which is what commercials on TV is. This is one reason I say Comcast Spotlight may not be a great choice for every business.
Along with TV ads, Comcast spotlight places advertisements online on a select group of websites that reach your target market. This is also only a good strategy if your company has a budget to spend. If not, you can reach your same target market by the techniques I mentioned above and in previous posts. Comcast Spotlight may be something you want to look into, but seems like the lazy way to advertising instead of blogging and social media marketing.
Photo credit: alykat from Flickr Creative Commons
I have noticed a problem when trying to use my SEO add ons in Firefox after an update. Usually it takes awhile before these add ons work with the newest version and now that Firefox updates automatically this is an even bigger problem. I saw a great post that solved this problem by SEOmoz and I thought I would post a link to it and share, in case anyone else noticed this problem as well. Check it out here: How to Build Your Own Thumbdrive SEO Browser.
Another great marketing technique that is free as long as you have a website is to create a useful forum. As I discussed in my last post, a forum is a great way to create content on your site as well as start a community around your brand and company. It is also important for a few employees to get involved with the forum to show that your company is reading what people are saying. Also do not worry if people say some negative things this will not hurt your brand and will help show that your company is not perfect. As long as you respond to these comments it can help the whole image of your company.
A well designed forum with different built in sections will keep users coming back every chance they get and will allow them to see your site and to read about your company. A forum is one of the great new marketing techniques that few companies think to try out.
This is a little different than most of my posts, but I found this to be an interesting example. I have followed the Dave Matthews Band for many years and have never really thought of them as a marketing genius until recently. Their marketing must be working as they have successfully created a large following and have been the top ticket selling artists for many years. How did they do this?
The Dave Matthews Band did this by always creating a relationship with their fans and of course by creating and playing music that their fans would like. Unlike most bands they focused on the live concerts side instead of albums sales as their main source of income. This is a great marketing idea for a band and I am surprised other bands have not starting following their lead.
They also used a great marketing technique that not many other bands would even think of doing, allowing fans to record their concerts and trade tapes for free. Most bands would see this as a loss of their music as people get their songs for free but it has created a whole community focused on collecting great tapes of the band’s biggest shows. This is closely related to new marketing techniques since it started an online community such as Ants Marching. This site was first created to allow people to share the tapes they recorded but quickly turned into a forum where fans would talk about the band and many other things as well. This is a great marketing strategy as the band has created a community that is devoted to their product which is music in this example.
The band has also used social networking as a marketing technique. The band has a Twitter and Facebook account where they share news and updates about the band with all of their fans, as well as share interesting things such as music that they think their fans would also like. Along with the band’s twitter, bassist Stefan Lessard has a personal Twitter where he communicates with the fans personally. This is a great marketing technique that makes the fans see that the band really cares about the fans and listen to what they have to say.
These are the reasons I think that the Dave Matthews Band is a marketing genius. Whether you like their music or not I think marketers can learn from their success and maybe put some of their marketing techniques to use in their company as well.
Photo Credit: Nitrodog from Flickr
SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization, is a large topic that could have a whole blog explaining it. I will go over the basics here and explain what is involved to answer the question: what is SEO?
The objective behind SEO is to optimize your website in order to allow your website to appear higher in the search results. This is an important marketing technique since a large amount of people look for new products or services online and primarily use a search engine to find these.
There are two types of SEO, which are onsite SEO and offsite SEO. Onsite SEO is all about doing keyword research to find the best keywords related to your site so potential customers can find your site when they type keywords in the search engines. Once the best keywords are chosen for your site, the next step in SEO is to optimize these keywords in the sites content.
In order to optimize keywords on the site you can add the keywords to the headings and alt tags for the images. These keywords need to make sense since Google will blocked sites that do keyword stuffing. A great way to keep keywords appearing in your content is to create a blog and use these words in your log posts.
Offsite SEO is mainly link building to raise your Page Rank. This is important because the more links you have linking to your site the better your site looks to Google. Although it is better to have high Page Rank sites linking to our site as this will rank yours better. As your Page Rank raises your site will appear higher in the search results for those keywords you optimized in your onsite SEO.
This is a very basic outline of what SEO is and what it is used for. I will post more detailed posts about SEO but it can become a very complicated topic. Are you uses these SEO techniques for your site?
I have seen all over internet, as I read some different marketing blogs, the same question over and over: Is a blog important for a marketing plan? The quick answer is YES. I will go over a few of the different marketing techniques a blog can be used for and why a blog can be a great ROI (Return on Investment) for your marketing plan.
Blogging is not only important because of the large amount of new ones being made daily but they are also important to learn about other companies. Through blogging you can reach a whole different part of your market than offline marketing techniques. This seems obvious but some people do not think of a blog this way. People are reading more and more blogs than before in order to get their news and to read about companies before they buy a new product or service. It is important to remember as you start blogging that people do not want to read posts only about your products and company. You need to create great content in every blog post that helps people and makes them trust your company and have them want to check back and subscribe to your blog.
Blogging is also great for your marketing plan in the market research area. As I have said in earlier posts, you can use a blog to read what people are saying about your company and your competition as well as what your competition is blogging about. This is a marketers dream, to be able to know what both customers and your competition is saying.
A large reason why blogs are a great ROI for any marketing plan is that they are free to start and only require your time to create some content. What other type of offline marketing technique is free and can reach such a large market? Not many if any other marketing techniques. So if your company does not have a blog you should really consider taking the few hours a week in order to start one and to post great content to it. You can even post to your blog on your iPhone while you are away from your computer!
Photo credit: BasBoerman on Flickr Creative Commons
Blogging is not only a great marketing technique in order to get your business name out their with great content, but blogging is also a great way to watch the competition and your market in general.
By putting quotes around your company’s name or products in a blog search engine you can see all of the blog that are written about your company and products. This is a great marketing tool in order to conduct some market research and see what people are saying. Also I good marketing technique would be to comment in on some of these blogs that mention your business. This shows people that you care what is being said and that you do read other people’s blogs as well.
Another way you can use blogs to help your marketing technique is to watch your competition. You can do this by seeing what they are writing about in their blog and if people like to read it. It may be a good idea to run their blog through the website grader along with running yours through as well to compare. You can also puts quotes around your competitions name in blog search engines to see what people are saying about your competition in your market.
Blogs are a great tool to conduct some market research to see what people are saying about your business and to see what your competition is saying.
New Marketing Techniques 