Mad 4 Blog

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!

Starting this month and continuing over the next few weeks, Google AdWords is introducing some changes that are meant to make it even easier to use the popular website-promoting and ad-placement tool. As ever, the latest slew of updates targets two critical factors: becoming more accurate and becoming more user-friendly.

The primary adjustment is to its secretive algorithm, which determines how to rank and analyze certain keywords in order to match and rank content.

For starters, AdWords will now allow advertisers to place ads based on more specific keywords. Instead of trying to match content using less descriptive means, marketers can choose the narrowest and most niche keywords so that their creative appears only next to extremely specific phrases and articles. And, of course, they’ll be able to track how certain keywords fare as compared to others in order to determine what those designations should be. Google is calling this option “next-gen keyword contextual targeting.”

And it’s important to note that this upgrade is coming along with a new and easy to use display grid that makes it simple to manage and monitor these campaigns.

In terms of targeting and tweaking campaigns, Google will be releasing a visualization aid that shows marketers how their campaign is faring on a grid that will help them quickly locate and assess the information they’ve collected. This graphic map plugs into analytics data and can be reorganized according to specific features that are an individual advertiser’s top priorities, such as keyword, location or topic. The Google AdWords visualization aid provides a bird’s eye view of trends, clusters and other historical data.

What do you think of these updates? And what other changes do you think AdWords still needs to stay at the top of its game in an increasingly competitive Web marketing world?

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.