Mad 4 Blog

On May 2, Yahoo debuted a Marketing Dashboard for small businesses. This interface allows managers of small businesses to localize all of their website promotions and social networking strategies so that it’s easier to access and oversee all from one place. Clearly, Yahoo is hoping to be that place.

The dashboard offers such features as:

• Campaign tracking, with a focus on SEO and SEM
• Search engine optimization reports, showing where your business really stands with sites like Yahoo, Google and more
• Live online feedback aggregated from Facebook, Twitter and other sources
• Technical support 24 hours a day, with free and paid options
• Traffic analytics reports showing how a company’s website is performing
• News from across the World Wide Web that’s regularly updated and specific to the needs of small businesses

Yahoo hopes to provide those in charge of interactive marketing with a clear-cut, easy-to-understand platform by which they can monitor and analyze all of their online advertising in one central location.

Some may say that Yahoo is a little behind the curve with launching new systems for collecting website and social marketing data – most preexisting companies have, hopefully, already established a way to monitor their marketing by now. But hopefully Yahoo can introduce new formulas and improve upon existing platforms after looking at what’s popular or what doesn’t seem to work for other, similar dashboards. By directly facing the competition with more established options, like Google Analytics, they may be forced to step up to the plate with a system that’s truly a viable and rewarding options for those in charge of small business marketing on the Web.

What do you think? Will this help Yahoo stay relevant in a fast-changing field that’s dominated by such social media titans as Google? Or is it just a desperate bid to keep up with the status quo?

Last week we talked about why and how Google Alerts is an important tool when it comes to brand marketing and management. So now are you ready to try it out?

Here’s how to do it:

1. Visit Google.com/alerts

2. There are five forms to fill out:

• Search query (the word or phrase as you’d want it searched – with correct spelling and punctuation; Google search tools apply, so use “ “ around your phrase for an identical match)
• Result type (such as videos, blogs, news, etc.)
• How often (you can choose daily, weekly or as it happens and get periodic round-ups from an automated scope of the Web)
• How many (you can choose from only the best results (best matches, newest, most relevant) or all results)
• Deliver to (this is your e-mail address; if you choose “as it happens” and expect a lot of results, you may want to create a label, filter or unique e-mail address to receive your alerts to keep from cluttering your inbox)

3. Next you hit “Create Alert” and you’re brought to a page saying that you’ll receive the e-mail for confirmation before the alerts begin.

4. When you receive the confirmation e-mail (which should happen pretty immediately), you just have to click a link that says “Verify” and you’re all set. Just be sure you don’t click the link under it, which is to cancel your alert!

5. Now you should start receiving any relevant notices as soon as they happen. You can visit the same website and click “Manage Alerts” anytime to change your settings. Accuracy and effectiveness may take some tinkering but are worth the more specific matches to satisfy your searches.

Setting up and monitoring Google Alerts is just one of the services that comes along with our website development, social media management, search engine optimization and interactive marketing. Let us know if you have any other questions about how to amplify and administrate your presence online!

Whether it’s from a vendor, customer or your competition, you want to know about the word-of-mouth buzz going on about you. And honest feedback isn’t always easy to receive. People are not always going to head to the source by calling you, visiting your website or putting a message on your Facebook business page wall. Just because you create public forums for colleagues, customers and clients to discuss your brand doesn’t mean the conversation isn’t continuing elsewhere.

With today’s fast-paced social media growth, and countless spaces to monitor online, it’s hard for you to stay on top of every instance where your name is coming up in the world – even if you do a periodic search for your name or your business’s. The most effective way to keep up with what’s being said about you on the Internet is to create a Google Alert.

You simply set up an account through Google and type in the key words or phrases pertinent, specifically, to your company. (This is also useful to do for your own name and perhaps some of your competitors as well.) Whenever these certain codes come up anywhere on the Internet, Google sends you an e-mail “alert” telling you about it. Then you can check out what’s being said immediately.

This can help you be more active in any conversations about your business. You can network with people who are interested in your brand or seeking more information. You can also more actively engage with any and all claims and commiserations about your products and services. This can help you stay on the ball and take part in your overall brand marketing and management. Plus, showing that you’re interested in hearing what people have to say and improving or engaging based on those details always garners a great response from the public.

Ready to get started? Check back next week and we’ll walk you through how to do it!

As the new year kicks off, we’re looking at some exciting growth and new developments around the office at Mad 4 Marketing. One thing we started at the end of 2011 was staffing up the company, which included introducing new team member Damon. Damon has been professionally involved with the Internet since the early 1990s and has worked on major sites like the WSJ and TigerDirect, to name a few. Now he’s leading our interactive marketing division, which helps you attract and retain clients via the power of the Web.

With the addition of Damon, we’re able to continue buying ad space online, helping you market your website and build relationships via social networking. The best part about expanding our work on these services is that we’re able to provide you with extremely measurable results on pay-per-click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. This means we can also better predict how certain tactics will improve your existing and developing online advertising strategies. We’ve got the numbers on hand and we’re excited to show our clients how our efforts can help you gain a following, drive traffic to your site, track information and even complete sales online.

When managing a blog, whether it’s independently operated or hosted on your company’s website, one of the responsibilities is handling the comments that visitors leave. As a casual blog reader, you probably didn’t think too much about the behind-the-scenes process when you browsed comments or left your own. But when it comes time for you to be in charge of your own blog, knowing the consequences of your comment management choices can actually do a world of good for your website marketing.

The first decision you need to make is whether or not you’ll allow comments. Most blog servers offer this option (along with a few others covered below). If you decide not to let visitors comment, the responsibility is taken off your shoulders. But it can be a downfall for two primary reasons:

• First, it dissuades activity. Your blog’s readers may not feel as engaged with your content. They might not form an attachment with your website that makes them want to come back. On the other hand, if they’re able to read comments and leave their own, they might return to follow a conversation or simply because they feel involved and like you want to hear their feedback.

• Second, you’ll wind up with a static webpage that only generates new material whenever you post a blog (let’s say once a week). But when you let readers leave comments, new text is often added to the site. This not only entreats visitors to come back to the same blog post more than once, but also boosts your ranking with search engines that give credit to sites that are often updated. (This is why you also want to ask questions and invite guests to leave comments in your post.)

If you do want to allow comments, the biggest downfall is that you then have to moderate them. You can set up some flags so that sexually explicit or otherwise offensive comments are automatically taken down. But you may also have to read through and manually delete certain comments. You can have the blog set up so that it asks your permission to approve or deny every single comment that’s submitted before it goes live on your site. But some visitors don’t like to wait to see their comment posted, and it’s also more labor-intensive for you.

There are other quality control options that you can choose from most standard comment settings. One choice is to only let members of the website leave comments. Sometimes this means joining your site by creating a specific ID, but other times this can mean logging in via Gmail or Facebook. In this case, anonymous commenting is often not allowed and people may feel more restricted to voice opinions. Another option is asking potential commentators to pass a word verification check, which is designed to deter spambots (computer-generated spam robots) and confirm that you’re a human visitor.

Need advice on how to set up a blog – and then make it work hard to promote your business? Mad 4 Marketing knows the tips and tricks to boost your traffic and search engine rankings. Don’t hesitate to Contact Us.

These days, it seems like everyone has a blog. In fact, most business websites would not be complete without one. The trick is to stand out from the herd—because in today’s fast-developing and competitive world of websites, just having a blog is only status quo. In fact, it may even be a waste of time and money if your voice is only going to get lost.

But before you can adequately market your blog, you have to understand the reasoning behind it. Not all techniques are suitable for all blog types, so what you use should be determined by the site’s overall goal. Some people build a blog in order to increase traffic to their website, while others create blogs in order to generate revenue. Of course, many blogs are also stand-alone pages created to exist as singular discussion forums.

In terms of marketing, most blogs are used to enhance SEO. They help business-oriented websites attract attention, build brands and communicate with prospective clientele. With this in mind, here are three top tips for marketing your blog:

1) Create an e-Newsletter.

Whether or not your company already sends out a regular newsletter, embedding links to your blog or even re-posting eye-catching selections from its posts might engage current e-mail recipients while informing new subscribers that the blog even exists. You can also see who’s using the links to click through to the blog to determine which posts and topics are generating the most interest. Just remember, re-posting your blog posts in full is a bad idea; it deters readers from ever actually needing to visit your website.

2) Build a Community.

Having individuals visit your blog on a regular basis is excellent. But each lone reader is actually an opportunity to expand your entire community. The first thing you want to do is inspire readers to leave comments so that they can bond with other forum members, who can serve as a reason for readers to return. This can often be done by including interesting topics and asking questions directly within the content of your post. You’ll also want to visit blogs similar to your own and get to know the readership there; as discussed above, it’s easy to make connections and participate by replying to others or leaving your own comments. You can also ask these website owners if they’d like to participate in cross-posting, guest posting, link exchanges or other ideas that allow websites serving the same readership to gain exposure on your blog while you contribute a new voice to theirs. In blogging, there is a focus on community, not a sense of competitiveness—and this benefits everyone in your interest group or business field.

3) Ensure Consistency and Quality.

No matter how well you succeed in attracting readers to your blog, your endeavors can never succeed if visitors only stop by once. In the blogging world as much as in the real world, first impressions are vital. To keep readers coming back again and again, an attractive website with appealing content is necessary. Next week, we further discuss how to encourage return readers and turn them into customers and clients–or just loyal fans.

So come back next week to find part two of the Top Ways to Market Your Blog.

Rebranding can breathe new life into a business and attract new customers. It can also help keep your company current with trends in the marketplace. In 2008, InterMedia became Mad 4 Marketing, so we are definitely familiar with the hurdles of designing, building and exposing a new brand. We know exactly how tricky it can be to spread the word, establish key messages and ensure client retention. But with today’s digital marketing options, rebranding is made even simpler with the help of a few key strategies.

Cost-Effective, Automated Rebranding

First and foremost, using the Internet to establish rebranding is an incredibly cost-effective way to make many people aware of the change. You’ve already got the real estate to advertise it: your own website. Naturally, you don’t want visitors to arrive at your address one day and see that there’s been a complete overhaul. They’ll probably assume they’re in the wrong place and leave altogether. So in weeks and months prior to your rebranding, be sure to let visitors know what they can expect down the line.

Changing your website address entirely? You can retain some of your presence online by setting up an automatic redirect from your old site to your new site. Or, you can leave the old website up but change the homepage to explain where you’ve moved and why. Letting readers click through manually can make an even more solid impression, while providing necessary information. Remind them to also change their bookmarks and links!

Keywords and Consistent Messaging

Today, many businesses earn referrals and acquire clients directly through their website. Naturally, you don’t want to sacrifice your strong online presence or lose incoming traffic when you change your content or location. The only way to combat this is to have an advance plan for SEO. As a large part of your rebranding efforts, remember to target words and phrases that can be used throughout all advertising efforts and tied back into Pay-Per-Click (PPC). Researching effective keywords may take some trial and error as you watch how traffic lands on your new site’s pages. Then you can adapt your PPC investments accordingly to keep your new website at the top of search engine lists.

However, by evaluating where traffic comes from and how it moves through your old website in the months prior to your new brand’s launch, you should be able to deduct which keywords should be carried over, what should be ditched and which content should be carried over directly to your new page—with a change of names, of course. Careful analytics before and after your rebranding process will help you utilize the strongest possible keywords to grab online traffic and express your new message to all visitors.

Using the Power of Links

Aside from keywords and targeted content, another quick way to loan strength to your new page is to build link connections with influential websites. By having many pages linking to your site, especially heavily populated websites, you’ll not only receive direct references from those locations but this will also cause search engines to rank your website higher by association. Once again, web analytics play a large role in this process. You can track who’s been landing on your page and from where to determine all of the major sites who link to yours. Rebranding is a great excuse to reach out to everyone who used to link to your old website and asking them to update their links–while announcing your rebranding initiative.

Of course, it’s also a good time to make new connections and develop contacts online. Figure out which websites might be interested to hear about your rebranding and provide them with all necessary information to promote you. A great way to encourage promotion is to offer a link exchange with them, so that your website is returning the favor to help strengthen them. You may want to come up with other incentives for this kind of partnership, or directly purchase a link. Powerful websites may take your offer more seriously if you begin by linking to them first as a show of good faith. Linking without reciprocation to relevant websites may make them take notice of your page organically while they’re doing their own analytics follow-up.

The most important piece of advice to remember is to be patient. As with all steps in the rebranding process, gaining a solid footing online through redirects, links and keywords may take time. But by utilizing available web analytics and other resources–including your own contacts and existing website–rebranding your business can be much more efficient and affordable.

Search engine optimization is not a science; it is more of an art. While rigid mathematic equations and research methods are used to derive the formulas that rank web pages, the best path to getting your website ranked amongst the top few is still very subjective and controversial.

One ongoing debate considers how selective a page should be when you’re trying to stuff it with key words. Some SEO analysts believe that one page can be so tightly written that several key words can be incorporated–meaning that the page will come up first in organic listings for each key word. Others seem to think that having several key phrases will detract from the article, because the focus isn’t as exact.

For example, search engine optimization specialist Mike Moran recently stated that a page trying to promote more than one key word at a time will not only be less effective—it might actually confuse the search engine, and lead to lower ranking. For example, if we wanted to write this article about Mad 4 Marketing and M4M, then that would be okay because they’re essentially the same word and wouldn’t detract from each other. The same thing goes if we want readers to locate this page to learn about search engine optimization, but also used SEO. However, if we wanted this page to be optimized for Mad 4 Marketing and search engine optimization, therefore stuffing the text equally with both of these phrases, Moran believes that our primary message would be unclear, and this would make our page weak. In other words, having more than one key word would be like wearing a bright blouse with a colorful purse and a pair of patterned pumps: it’s just too much, and the objective eye (the search engine) doesn’t know where to look.

Moran’s argument makes sense; there’s no denying that a highly targeted one-key-word web page won’t do well. However, when you consolidate space and use several related key words throughout the same page, you’re also reducing the size of your website and the amount of work that goes into it (aka, saving time and money). Scripting a new page for each potential target key word is indeed a lot of work—but the real question is, will it pay off?

Some say it’s too hard to build a massive site with a page per key word. Others say it’s nearly impossible to get the rankings you want otherwise. Mad 4 Marketing would love to hear what you think is the best way to optimize your website. Are you all about single key words, or are you getting results with multiple-lead pages?

It’s pretty clear that we feel confident of the many benefits of blogging here at Mad4Marketing, which is why you’re reading our blog about marketing right now! Creating a blog on your website is a valuable way to gain readership, increase traffic and improve your search ranking. At Mad4Marketing we create SEO-strong blogs for our clients’ websites to increase visibility and brand awareness with a stronger web presence. If your company owns a website to advertise its services or wares, you already own pivotal Internet real estate—and setting up a blog will help you make the most of it.

•    Gain Readership – Generating steady content on your site keeps readers coming back for more, instead of seeing what you’re about once and then moving on. Humorous content, inventive stories and informative articles are popular, but sometimes readers are just intrigued to see the inner workings of your company and follow your business plan. Whichever angle your choose for your blog, just make sure your content is smart and original to keep readers enticed.

•    Increase Traffic – When a website regularly posts fresh content, search engines give it more weight for relevancy, and may list it higher among resulting search links. This is just one element of the complex formula dedicated to ranking pages, but if your competitor has a similar yet stagnant website while yours is dynamic, you’re likely to get first dibs on readers. Increased traffic is also vital if your website features advertising as a means to supplement business costs.

•    Improve SEO Rankings – Another way that blogs can help you improve search engine optimization is if you use relevant business phrases often within the body of your blog. Infusing your blog posts with key words will make your website rank higher when people search for those services and phrases online. There’s only so much text you can fit on any tasteful webpage, but blog content is limitless and gives you more opportunity to repeat your message and plug SEO.

It’s also important to update frequently. Many experts recommend that blogs be updated at least three times a week, and every day if possible. But more important than quantity is the quality of your posts, which is why it’s also sometimes more relevant to write when you have something to say rather than as much as possible. For less than three blog posts per week, we recommend asserting a regular schedule—and sticking to it! Earn return visits by adhering to your schedule so that readers will begin to follow your weekly postings (you can tell when this is successful if your website traffic spikes on the days blog posts go up). For example, Mad4Marketing is responsible for the Satori Living blog, which is updated twice weekly on Tuesdays and Thursdays to promote the premiere eco-friendly apartment rental community in Fort Lauderdale. Prospective tenants come to the Satori Living blog to learn about the Satori apartments and amenities, and we hope to encourage residents to come back again every week for information about local events, restaurant reviews and neighborhood highlights.

Whether for e-commerce purposes or just to draw customers to your company’s site for information, blogging is a surefire way to gain momentum and success with your website. We’ll continue to give you advice for improving your website and utilizing modern marketing techniques online through this blog, so visit us here every Monday morning to kick off your week with marketing tips, anecdotes and insights. (See what we did there? And you can do it, too.)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of obtaining natural search engine rankings to drive visitors to your website. There are several important factors that search engines such as Google and Yahoo take into consideration when deciding which websites to display at the top of search engine queries:
• Inbound Links are the single most important factor within search engine algorithms and the best kind of inbound links to have are one way inbound links from websites that have a Google page rank of 3 or higher.
• Website Architecture is another key factor in search engine optimization. It is critical that websites be built in cascading style sheets (CSS). The beauty of CSS is that it greatly reduces the code to text ratio by placing the code for the page design in a separate file which allows search engine robots to more quickly read your web pages and find the text and keywords.
• Content is King. Once you have a website with clean code with a lot of inbound links, you then want to have enough content to naturally infuse all of the keywords that you want your website to get ranked for.  Many people make the mistake of thinking that being ranked for 10-15 keywords is sufficient. In the world of Search Engine Optimization, every industry has thousands of keywords that people put into Google and Yahoo to find similar services and products. To find the keywords that people put into search engines to find your particular products or services visit http://www.google.com/insights/search/#.
These are just the basics of Search Engine Optimization, there are many other intricacies to the process that I will continue to expand upon in my next blog. In the meantime if you are looking to build a new website or want to drive visitors to your website via SEO contact me today at tiffany@mad4marketing.com for a free SEO website benchmarking and analysis.