The Social Media Landscape

On February 26 I gave a brief presentation co-sponsored by North Coast Small Business Development Center and the Redwood Technology Consortium’s Internet Marketing Group. As the title suggests it was a high level overview of the current state of social media marketing and my opinions on what works and what doesn’t. The slideshow isn’t that informative, but here it is in any case. Links to resources mentioned are below.

Resources Mentioned

I think the core of my talk is the section on Content Marketing. That’s the new buzzword but for years the mantra has been Content is King and it’s essentially the same concept: Create valuable content whether it’s with a blog, newsletter, training videos, white papers, case studies, even testimonials. Embed that stuff in your site (good for SEO) and then post about those things on as many places and platforms as you can.  Social Media Marketing should have 2 goals:

  1. Get people to market for you: If you provide value they will.
  2. Drive traffic to your site where you can control the experience (capture leads and/or conduct transactions).

I would love to hear your experiences with making social media marketing effective and efficient. And any great tools you discover along the way. Add your comments below! And as always, please share this post on your networks.

 

Anchor Text Explained

I post a lot on Facebook and Twitter about social media. But if you’re interested in getting more quality traffic to your site through search engines such as Google and Bing, then working on search engine optimization (SEO) is still very important.

There are basically 2 major categories of SEO: 1) On-site optimization which involves building in keywords, properly structuring content and other factors and 2) Off-site link building. A key component to #2 is optimizing what is called anchor text. That is the text that a person sees as a link pointing to your site. The intricacies of anchor text can be hard to grasp and for me to explain. But this video by Rand Fishkin of Seomoz provides a clear tutorial on what anchor text is, why it’s important and how to go about getting links with properly formed text. Enjoy!

Wistia

Google Spams Itself?

I love Google, don’t get me wrong. I use their services for all kinds of things and what they do in general is astounding. Have you seen Google Wave (video), yet? But WTF? I have some Google alerts and I wasn’t getting any on a specific term that I know had daily news. So I checked the Spam folder and sure enough, there they were. Google’s spam filter thought the email the Google alert system was sending out was SPAM!

As a web host that provides email services I am fully aware of how difficult it is to be one step ahead of the spammers, filtering out the bad, letting through the good. But I am always hearing how good Gmail is. But even they have problems.