Social Media is an Important Part of Your Marketing Mix, but Not the Only One.

Social media marketing is not a replacement for other marketing tactics and we highly recommend that you continue to do what has worked for you in the past.

Traditional marketing activities that still work for you, like advertising in a newspaper, sending direct mail and attending networking events, are still essential.

However, for most, social media marketing is now a critical component of an effective marketing strategy.
In fact, social media marketing works best when combined with other marketing activities, especially email marketing.

Read more

Traditional vs. Social Media Marketing

Traditional Marketing 101

Most everyone thinks of marketing as the business of promoting and selling products or services.

Marketers commonly refer to a “funnel” to describe the way they attract new prospects and convert them into customers.
What Do We Mean By Funnel?

Traditionally, we've prioritized our limited resources and time on trying to find and convert new prospects (the top of the funnel).

Keeping those hard-earned customers (the bottom of the funnel) has often been an afterthought.

That’s because, until recently, there was little we could do to keep existing customers that was drastically different from the tactics used to attract new ones.

Historically, the best you could do after turning a prospect into a customer was to provide a great customer experience and just hope they come back to buy more—and bring their friends with them.

But technology, namely social media and email, has changed the game.

There’s little doubt that technology has changed our lives, the way we are influenced and how we influence others. But for marketing, it’s more than just doing the same old thing using new tools. Social media marketing isn't your grandmother's marketing—it's different from what most of us have traditionally learned about marketing.


Social Media Marketing — Flip that Funnel
Social Media Marketing is about recognizing that your existing customers are your best assets.

And technology now enables us to influence consumer behavior both before and after the sale.

With low-cost and easy-to-use tools like social media and email, you no longer have to hope that customers come back and bring their friends with them.

Now you can reach out to your existing customers to remind them to come back, and make word-of-mouth as easy as clicking the share, like, or tweet buttons.

Bottom line: successful businesses understand that marketing does not end with the sale, but rather it begins after the first sale (the bottom of the traditional sales funnel).

Joseph Jaffe, one of our favorite authors, calls this "Flipping the Funnel." (We just call it smart.)

Read more

Social Media & Email Marketing Go Great Together

A report from Monetate, an e-commerce software firm, has found that email marketing is still driving more overall sales than social media efforts.

But there’s no need to start grappling your forehead and deleting Facebook Pages left and right. It’s important to keep in mind that all of these channels work together, not against each other.

Social media sites, in general, are a far more casual environment that can help build brand awareness, provide bite-size bits of industry information, and create communities among your customers.

That said, email has the advantage of directly reaching a single person. Not only that, you can use analytics to see what that person clicks and opens, which are statistics you can use to segment your list and direct different customers to personalized destinations.

So, if you're asking yourself the question, Don't be late contact us.

Read more

Google Once Again Claims 67% Search Market Share

It’s hardly headline news that Google is by far the most popular search engine for users in the U.S. and most of the world. But what is headline worthy: for two of the past three months, Google has owned 67 percent of the U.S. search market.

Google hit the unprecedented search market share of 67 percent for the first time in November 2012, then dipped slightly to 66.7 percent in December, only to rebound to 67 percent in January, comScore reported.
In January 2012, Google’s search market share was still the far and away leader in the U.S., at 65.6 percent.
As we reported earlier this month, Google is the most popular search engine globally. That same report also revealed that Yandex had passed Bing to become the fourth most used search engine, behind Baidu and Yahoo, respectively.

Despite a renewed push with TV commercials promoting the Bing It On challenge, it seems U.S. users aren’t being convinced to break the Google habit. But it’s not all bad news for Google’s closest U.S. rival.
Bing reached a new milestone as well – 16.5 percent (up from 16.3 percent in December). In January 2012, Bing's U.S. search market share stood at 15.2 percent.

Microsoft’s search engine is still miles behind Google, even when you add in Yahoo’s Bing-powered search market share. Search results powered by Google totaled 69.3 percent in January, up from 69.1 percent in December, while Bing-powered searches held steady from December at 25.6 percent.

As for Yahoo, CEO Marissa Mayer has made no secret that she’s not happy with the Microsoft-Yahoo search deal, which has seen Yahoo and Bing basically swapping search market share over the past two years, rather than eat into Google’s gigantic lead. Holding to form, Bing went up, and Yahoo went down in January.
Yahoo’s search market share dropped from 12.2 percent in December to 12.1 percent in January. Yahoo’s search market share stood at 14.1 percent in January 2012. Yahoo has lost search market share 13 out of the last 16 months and has been dropping year-over-year dating back to January 2007, when Yahoo was at 28.1 percent.

Ask’s search market share dropped to 2.8 percent in January, down from 3 percent in December. AOL also declined – from 1.8 percent in December to 1.7 percent in January.

The number of core searches jumped to 17.6 billion in January, an increase of 11 percent compared to December. Google sites led the way with 13.1 billion searches (up 11 percent) followed by Microsoft sites with 3.2 billion searches (up 12 percent), Yahoo sites with 2.3 billion (up 9 percent), Ask Network with 536 million, and AOL with 331 million (up 7 percent).

Read more

A Hallway Page: What Roll Participate in SEO

A Hallway Page is used to index to a group of pages that you would like the search engine spiders to find. Once a search engine spider indexes the hallway page, it should also follow all the links on that hallway page and in turn index those pages as well. Might be it's like site-map page

When this hallway page is submitted to a search engine, the search engine's spider travels down the page and branches off to these links indexing those pages you really want indexed.


Generally Hallway Page can be defined as a website that comprises of all the links to all those enhanced webpages which you have distinctly enhanced for several google separately. Hallway Page can also be called as index webpages indexing the bunch of webpages especially meant to be spotted out by the robots.

Benefits of Hallway Page, It's work really well in enhancing your online look for motor pagerank because at times google give better ranks to those webpages which have already gotten better score by the online look for motor spiders.

Read more

Microsoft's new apps add search tools to Excel, Word

Microsoft last week announced the availability of five new Bing apps for its Office 2013 and Office 365 products. The apps' January 31 arrival came on the heels of the refreshed Office products themselves, which were released on January 29 as both traditional standalone purchases and a subscription-based service.


It remains to be seen how customers will take to the new model, in which users pay perpetual fees in exchange for enhanced cloud functionality, greater license flexibility and access to the latest releases. Any apprehensions about subscription costs, though, won't carry over to the new Bing products, as Microsoft has offered them for free. The apps are intended to inject search functionality into Word and Excel document-creating. They join similar Bing tools already available for Windows 8, Windows Phone and Xbox.

Bing Maps for Office allows Excel users to plot location data onto live, interactive Bing maps. It includes data visualization options, such as translating various column values into different-sized shapes on the map. Users can use either a mouse or touch-based gestures to manipulate the map's view, which can be pinched in to the street level or zoomed out to a bird's eye perspective. 


Bing Finance for Office is a beta product that allows users to create finance portfolio tables in Excel. Stock symbols can be input and fields can be customized to display a wide range of content, including live price updates.
Bing News Search for Office lets users search for news and videos from within Word documents. Results can be inserted into the document with a single click and favorite searches can be saved for later use. 

The last of the five new offerings, Bing Image Search for Office allows users to launch a Web search from within Word by typing into a search box or by selecting text within the document. The app can also insert search returns into the document with a single click. 

According to Microsoft's most recent quarterly earnings, the company's Online Services Division, which is responsible for Bing, posted a mixed performance, increasing its revenue but remaining unprofitable overall. The new Bing apps won't change this picture on their own, but they offer synergies that could help Microsoft's search engine gain market share. Though some users have turned to alternatives such as GoogleDocs and OpenOffice, the Office suite is still among the business world's most ubiquitous and essential tools. If the new apps socialize users to rely on Bing, Microsoft could see incremental gains. According to the most recent numbers from data analytics firm comScore, Bing has achieved positive growth of late but remains a distant second to Google. 

Read more

Twitter Search Lets You Once Again Find Old Tweets

In a post today, Twitter says that some older tweets are now going to be available. How far back? That’s not said; but, it seems like tweets that are particularly popular or notable will be available. From Twitter’s post:

As we roll this out over the coming days, the Tweets that you’ll see in search results represent a fairly small percentage of total Tweets ever sent. We look at a variety of types of engagement, like favorites, retweets and clicks, to determine which Tweets to show.

Have You Met Twitter’s Advanced Search?

I had more luck when I used Twitter’s advanced search feature. There, I was able to narrow my search to tweets made just by the @barackobama account for “four more years,” and that brought the famous tweet up:

Read more

Seven Quick Tips For Using Social Media In Your Small Business

Today, I’m going to share real briefly with you the idea of giving you seven quick tips for using social media for your small business. As entrepreneurs, as solopreneurs, as home-based business professionals, as Internet marketers, whatever it is, social media is clearly here to stay. The reality is social media is being dominated by the large brands and by these enormous viral offers that are out there. What’s interesting is that we as small business owners can actually tap in to the enormous strength and stream of prospects on the web right alongside the big companies. It’s truly a way to be able to have a level playing field because social media opportunity is a very low point of entry to get in and market to. The key is knowing a few simple tricks and tips that will help you be able to compete.

Facebook & Twitter

Let’s talk about those right now, the seven quick tips for you using social media in your small business. I’m going talk first about Facebook and Twitter. You might think this is pretty obvious, Aaron. Here’s the reality, Facebook and Twitter are powerful mediums if you don’t make a simple mistake that many small businesses do. They try to be like the big guys. That doesn’t make sense because you do not have the brand, you do not have the recognition, nor the financial resources to compete. They can get away with just putting a logo that they worked for many years to brand. You can’t. It’s called Facebook not Logobook, so don’t go faceless. It’s important to make sure that people can connect you and your staff or your team. The other thing is that it’s about personal connection. People like the idea that with Facebook and Twitter they get to know who they’re doing business with. This gives us as small businesses an advantage to the big companies.

Candid Open Conversations

The other beautiful thing about social media is it opens up an opportunity for people to be able to have candid open conversations. Think about this for just a minute. If you have a retail store and a customer walks in do you say hello to them first or do you immediately bombard them with offers, sales pitches, throwing new products at them, a sales rack at them, of course not. My question is why do people find that in their mind that is a logical thing to do in online business? It doesn’t make any sense. You have to make sure that you are friendly and you have to invite people like you’re inviting them into your home and get to know them and let them get to know you before you ask them to business with you.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

A picture is worth a thousand words. We’ve all heard this so many times, but people don’t include pictures in their social media. Look, if you have a cupcake business, show the pictures, don’t tell me what kind they are. If you have a business where you have lots of clients that you’ve helped or they’ve lost weight because of what you’ve done, show before and after pictures. Remember, a picture is worth a thousand words and you need to do it. People are very visual these days, so it’s super important to do this.

You Are The Expert

You’re an expert. People need to see you as the expert. One thing that small business owners typically aren’t very good at is bragging, bragging about themselves, whether you’re a hair stylist, whether you’re a creative director, whether you’re a web developer, whether you’re a public speaker, you have to learn to brag about what you’re great at so people know what you’re the expert in. You have to let your potential clients and customers know what you’re great at. You can do this by offering them tips and tricks, hints. You can also comment on the industry that you’re in as a whole. You can offer a debate about people. Let me tell you something, when you offer debates it’s a fine line about forcing your particular opinion on people. Put your common sense cap on, go the common sense corner, and then just be logical.

YouTube

YouTube, another powerful tool. Once you started showcasing why your business is somebody that they want to work with; why your business is friendly; why they’re welcome and invited into your home, if you will; then you need to show them through YouTube the different ways that you can help them. It’s a great channel to help you begin to build more relationships with the people that you’re talking to.

Ask For Recommendations

Ask for recommendations from people. Listen, it’s important that you tell people, “Look, if you like my product or service refer it to a friend.” Ask them to give you testimonials, to talk about their personal experiences. Ask for it because this is just more social proof that will show that you are the expert.

Why Friends & Family Matter

I want to tell you why your friends and family actually really do matter. People don’t understand this. When your friends and family are on your social media platforms they have friends and those friends are your potential customers, and those friends’ friends are your potential customers. It’s important that no matter what you do you’re always professional. You operate in a professional manner. You become personable, and that you always remember the golden rule. Even if they don’t do business with you, you treat them with respect so that you can gain referrals. Your friends and family absolutely matter because they are an extension of you which gives you even a broader, bigger reach.

I hope that these seven quick tips for social media have helped you just to try to put things into perspective and give you a reminder. I appreciate you all. Remember, success is a choice.

To Your Success visit: News Source

Read more

How to Make Shutdown Shortcut for Windows 8 PC

This is very nice tips to create easily windows shortcut to shutdown the PC

Normally Window 8 PC Shutdown by moving mouse in bottom right corner of PC to bring up charm bar. Select the setting charm allow you to then select power option and finally shutdown.

If you point, it takes four steps to shutdown, rather than two steps in previous versions of window. Therefore creating simple shortcut might be useful.

On the start screen click on desktop tab. Then right click anywhere on desktop and select New > Shortcut. In the box type

shutdown -s -f -t 0


And click next. You can leave shortcut name as shutdown or you can change to something else like Power off PC.

Now you have shortcut,when it clicked will immediately shutdown Window 8 PC.
You can also change the shortcut icon to something better. Right click on shortcut and select properties.

Select change icon and choose something more suitable.
Also you can right click on shortcut and select pin to start.
Then go to start screen to see shutdown tab is created. This will also allow you to shut down your pc in just one step.

Read more

How Panda-Proof Your Website

Since Panda first hit the scene two years ago, thousands of sites have been mauled. SEO forums are littered with site owners who have seen six figure revenue websites and their entire livelihoods evaporate overnight, largely because they didn’t take Panda seriously.

Last year Google unleashed the most aggressive campaign of major algorithm updates ever in its crusade to battle rank spam. This year looks to be more of the same.

When you have a business or blog hosted online, you need steady and huge amount of traffic to the site. It should also be user friendly to drive the traffic. Attracting organic traffic from search engines can be the effective and cheapest way. But post panda effect, online marketers feel attracting traffic from search engines has become relatively tough. Google panda is a set of algorithms designed to get rid of low quality hosting websites or which are less user friendly.

Five Tips in Panda-proofing Your Website

• Avoid depending on auto generated content, this content are not on the favorites of search engines. If a search engines recognizes such content on your site, it will be regarded as spam content. And you might lose your traffic. 
•  
• Try to write unique content as your posts every time, pay specific attention on the length of the posts as well. A well detailed and lengthy post is entitled to be useful to the user as it will contain more information on that specific topic. The length of the posts should be at least 400 words and get rid of all the articles which have low content from the search results. You should also note that Google panda causes a wide-site penalty as opposed to page-by –page penalty. So, if one of the pages has low quality the whole site might be shut down. 
•  
• Get rid of all the pages that add little or no value to the site, such as disclaimer, about us, contact. Either assigns no index tags to all these pages or Robots.txt to stop crawling of these pages where ever possible.
•  
• Learn and implement SEO techniques on the site. A well researched and applied search engine optimization is likely to have positive impact on the site. Prior to writing the posts do a thorough research of all the high searched rich keywords and try including them in your post. But avoid stuffing keywords in the posts; this may affect the quality of your site. Build quality back links to your site. While looking for the back links be aware the Back links should be within your niche and from popular and authorized sites else they won’t be adding any benefits.
•  
• Building social media relations can be handier in tackling the panda effect. You can start with creating pages on popular social platforms such Google+, Face book, twitter and Digg. Link back these pages with your site and add various share bottoms on the site. Social trust adds huge difference to the rankings, specially +1 vote of Google. Google can give you high ranking based on these votes even if the posts may not be optimized, owing to the trust of the user on the social networks.

Read more

Google updates Currents app, adds breaking news, quick Edition browsing and more

No matter where you fall on the print vs digital divide, there's no contesting the appeal of an easy-to-read magazine-like layout. Which is why Google's Currents app has plenty of charm for publishers looking for an auto-formatting solution.

Released a little over a year ago and updated to version 2.0 just today (Android-only), the platform now features a bevy of improvements, now adding in an Edition sidebar for quick browsing access based on genres, the ability to swipe vertically for in-Edition scrolling and horizontally to navigate to other "titles," a custom filter for highlighting sections of interest, a starring system for saving news of note, a Google News-curated breaking news section and, lastly, a new catalog design. If you're tiring of Flipboard or just feel you need a change from contentious redesigns, go ahead and download it at the source below.

Source: Google Play

Read more