Blog Comments – Why You Want Them and How to Handle Them

Blog comments from your readers keep your blog exciting and energetic. They contribute to a discussion. They help you refine your posts until you come down to the exact message you are trying to convey and have explained it thoroughly. Blog comments make your blog more popular as well. Here is how you should approach the subject of blog comments.

1. Encourage blog comments.

Ask questions in the body of your post about your topic. Request opinions on the topics you are covering. People like to have their say, and they will jump at the chance. You can also add a wrap-up question at the end of your blog post to get people in the mood to interact with your material.

2. Comment on comments.

Read the comments on your blog and comment on them if you see fit. Some comments are so much fluff and contribute little or nothing to the conversation. However, if you find a comment that makes a good point or asks a question that you would like to answer, make an appropriate comment. People who know you are reading their comments often come back again and again to continue the conversation.

3. Delete unwanted comments.

You should leave as many comments as possible, but some comments are just not appropriate. They may be offensive in some way, such as obscene language or crude humor. They may be hurtful, such as racial slurs or slander. You really have to think about whether you want your blog associated with that kind of talk.

Other types of blog comments you might want to delete are those which add nothing to the conversation. They may say something as inconsequential as “interesting blog,” without saying what they found interesting or adding any new thoughts to the conversation. They may be off-topic altogether. It is amazing to see when people post blog comments that have nothing whatsoever to do with the subject of the blog.

4. Pick up ideas for new blogs posts.

Blog comments that bring up compelling questions might be fodder for new blog posts of their own. You may have more to say about the idea than you can write out in a short comment. Taking note of this information is a great practice because it sparks your creativity in coming up with new and interesting blog posts. Furthermore, when you use someone’s comment to base an entire blog post on, that reader will often become a regular visitor to your blog. Handling blog comments correctly increases the exposure of your blog each time, and increases the amount of marketing you can do with it.

Blog Letters by Kosta Kostov

Content or Keywords: Which Is More Important to SERP Rankings?

A very large emphasis is placed on keywords in search engine optimization, and rightly so. It is the keywords that the search engines pick up on in order to identify your webpage. However, there is one thing that you should never forget. Keywords are meaningless without relevant content.

If you have ventured past the first search engine results, you have probably seen entries that looked like gobbledygook. You read the description of the article under the link, and it is just a jumble of keyword phrases. Sometimes, the keyword phrases are related, and sometimes they are random.

If you have ever clicked on these links, merely out of curiosity, you have found that they are keyword dumps. You are lured to the page; sometimes the ploy is to get you to click on advertising there to make them money. There is no value added to your online experience. These websites are a waste of your time.

In years past, it was very common to see these pages near the top of the search engine results pages. Their keyword-rich structure attracted the search engines to them easily. However, search engines have become more discriminatory in their indexing practices more recently. They have changed their algorithms so that they catch these keyword dumps and banish them from the top results spots. In fact, if Google catches such a webpage in operation, they will ban them from the rankings altogether.

That is why it is important to keep content in mind when you are working with an SEO campaign. Keywords are fine, and the search engines cannot index your website without them. Yet, if you overuse them, they are more detrimental than helpful. Google is getting better and better at recognizing what is meaningful and what is not. You need real content on your website so your keywords are placed in a relevant setting.

Of course, you surely do not plan to set up a webpage with nothing but random keywords. You have a business to run, and that is not it. Where you do have to be careful is in the way you use the keywords you are going to use. Make sure to write in the same tone and by the same grammatical rules as you do when you are not doing SEO. There is an art to putting in the keywords unobtrusively, but you can do it with practice.

Just to make it clear, keywords and content are both important, and indeed they are essential to good SERP rankings. If you need any more incentive to write clean, naturally-flowing website copy, just remember that people who enjoy reading your words will stay on your site long enough to think about making a purchase. When you find the right balance between structure and substance, you will get all the results you want – both in rankings and in user interactions.

Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Group Buying Websites – The Plus and Minus of Massive Coupon Sales

There is a new thing on the Internet called group buying or social buying, and it is changing the way many people find businesses new to them. Group buying offers a way to reach a large audience in a short amount of time with no upfront costs in most cases. Yet, you have to evaluate for yourself whether social buying is an avenue you want to go down.

Here is how it works:

You contact the group coupon service and work with their representative to set up an online ad. You choose a deal you want to offer to customers who opt in to your group coupon. It is important at this point to find out how much the group coupon service will charge you. It will be a percentage, it can be as much as 50 percent. Then, you supply photos and contribute to the text that will go into the ad.

On one specific day, your ad will be featured and will go out to the inboxes of all the members of the group buying membership who are targeted with your ad. The social part comes next. The point of group buying is to share the coupon news with others. Members are encouraged to share the group coupon through social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, or through emails to friends.

People accept the group coupon and set up to buy it if it goes through. This is how group coupons keep you from spending money without seeing customers. The group coupon will not be functional unless enough people sign up for it. The numbers come in all day, and if they reach your goal, the deal goes into effect. If not, you pay nothing for the service.

If the coupon deal goes through, all those people get their group coupon for the agreed upon price, and you get a check or deposit for the price they have paid minus the coupon service’s take. Customers are soon at your place of business to present their printed-off coupon or show you the coupon on their mobile device. You get new customers quickly and easily if everything works the way it should.

The trouble is that the numbers do not always add up to an immediate benefit for you. Remember that percentage the group coupon company takes to set up the ad and send it out to all their membership? That is somewhere in the neighborhood of up to 50 percent of the cost the customers are paying you for your products or services coupons.

Take into consideration that you have already dropped the price of your products enough to make them worthy of interest on social networking sites, and the result is that you are giving away a large portion of the amount you would ordinarily get for the product or service. If the product or service has a large market-up, or is a service that costs you little to offer, you should be fine. However, it is important to take all the total cost to you into account before you start a group coupon campaign.

Is it easy to set up a group coupon ad? It certainly is. Can group buying bring you a large number of new customers? That is a definite possibility. Can group coupons get you in trouble on your bottom line? Be aware that this could be a consideration. You need to structure the price point of your deal so that you will be happy when the group coupon members are sending invites to all their friends and followers. Otherwise, putting out a group coupon may turn into a real nightmare for your company.

Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Tie Your Marketing Video to Nostalgia to Go Viral With Baby Boomers

The Baby Boomers represent a very large segment of the market for many products and services. If you want to reach them with viral video marketing, you need to find subjects that speak to that generation. Here are a few facts to consider when you try making your video go viral with this crowd.

1. Baby Boomers remember certain products from their childhoods that are now obsolete or gone.

If you get a chance to show Baby Boomers a product from their past, they will enjoy looking at it. They will share the experience with others whom they know remember the same thing. This works best if the item is one that is rare or unusual now, but was common back in the day.

A great way to find out about these little items is to have a chat with a Baby Boomer and let her reminisce about the past. If you are a Baby Boomer, think back about your daily life and look at old pictures. You are bound to find old products that you had forgotten existed. Your video will be even more popular if you can show these products in action.

2. Social, cultural and political attitudes have been in a state of change throughout the lives of the Baby Boomers.

If you can aim your camera at the remaining evidence of a cultural revolution or a social shift in attitude in the past decades, you can capture the hearts and minds of the Baby Boomer generation. This group of people wants to be seen as intelligent, sensitive and caring people, and they want to see signs that their efforts to reform the world made a difference. Looking at signs of past successes reminds them that they can have a great affect on the world. It stirs them up and makes them want to share. Your marketing video will go viral in no time.

3. Baby Boomers like to see styles of dress and appearance that they had all but forgotten.

You can touch this group with images of people dressed and made up in the same ways that they saw them in past years. To get accurate portrayals, look at old photos or home movies. Make a compilation video, incorporating your own marketing message. You could also use the details of the images to make up period-accurate dress and style for a nostalgic-looking video you make yourself.

The Baby Boomer generation is a group with money to spend. They are particularly prone to purchasing health products and services, retirement homes and leisure products. What is more, they are a great market for general products such as cars, clothes and furnishings. Target them for your viral video by using nostalgia to wonderfully engage them with your company.

Free Stock Photo: FreePhotos.com

Social Media Interactions – The Trouble with a One-Way Approach

Consider the fact that interactions are communications or activities that take place between people. You would not know this if you tried to figure it out by analyzing what passes in some companies for social media interactions. If your company is not engaging your Friends or Followers, you might as well be taking out a billboard on the highway. Social networking sites are not the place for one-way communications.

One-Way Is the Lazy Way

Putting out one-way messages is the lazy way of using social media channels. You post your updates or make your Tweets, and do not bother to see what others are saying about them. That takes away one step right away. Then, you do not have to make any kind of response, and you have gotten rid of much more work, right?

That might be true, but easy is not always better. Full engagement is the way to make an impact on your social community. Otherwise, your posts appear as nothing but white noise, droning on in the background but generating no interest or buzz. People use white noise machines to help them go to sleep; do you really want to watch your audience drift off to slumber regarding you, your industry and your products?

One-Way Is the Selfish Way

Talking all the time about me, me, me gets you nowhere on social media websites. People are grateful for attention paid to them. They want to believe that their opinions, ideas, stories, and lives matter to their Friends. If you are so concerned with your marketing messages that you ignore the people around you on the social media site, you are only damaging your campaign. Curiously enough, you help yourself more on social networks when you think of others.

When you spend time listening to the concerns of others, you have several advantages. First and foremost, you can build relationships which are the heart and soul of social media marketing. Second, you can gain information about your products or services that will help you to improve them. Finally, you have the opportunity to provide a higher level of customer support than ever before, gaining you loyalty and trust for your brand. In the end, you will only win if you listen at least as much as you talk.

Image: Ambro / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Viral Video Status – A Secondary Concern

Everyone wants their videos to go viral, and why not? It is a great way to get your message out to hundreds of thousands or even millions of viewers in a very short time. Viral video is certainly an effective way to market your products if you can. There is only one problem: a lot of video that is made up to be viral video simply falls flat.

Much of the supposed viral video content is silly and stupid. That would be excusable if it were funny, but much of it fails in that regard as well. A video created with the sole purpose of making it reach viral status often misses the mark, maybe because it is trying just a little too hard.

It is easy to fall into the trap of pursuing the viral video into inane ideas, shoddy performances and shaky video production values. When your focus is on making something outrageous enough to catch fire with the audiences, you can lose all sight of the brand image you want to present to the public.

A better alternative is to place your emphasis on creating good, quality videos. It is okay to think about the possibility that your video might be seen by millions of people, but if you leave that as a secondary concern, your videos may actually have a better chance of achieving it.

Think of it this way – it is just like the kid in junior high school that wanted to be popular and tried way too hard. The harder he tried to be liked, the more desperate he seemed. In the end, nobody wanted to be his friend at all. You do not want your company to be that guy.

Instead, be the confident one who is relaxed in the knowledge that he is likeable, and does not have to keep shouting it into everyone’s faces to be noticed. This one lets his character speak for itself. You should too.

That is not to say that you should not promote your video through as many channels as you want to, or even that you should have a low-key video. Your video can and should be as interesting, funny, entertaining, outrageous or silly as you want it to be. Just do not sacrifice the quality of your content to promote an idea because you think it will go viral.

If your content is great, and you execute it well, you will have an excellent chance of having a viral video on your hands. You might have to promote it through other channels such as the social media networks and blogs, but it can happen. Keep the viral aspect secondary and focus on quality content. Your videos will be more viewer-friendly and you will have a shot at reaching that elusive viral zone.

Woman Holding Video Camera by Petr Kratochvil

Grouping Your Customers for Better Internet Marketing Campaigns

You already know that one of the best ways to succeed in an Internet marketing campaign is to have a highly targeted audience. You want to reach the people who are going to buy without hesitation because you strike a chord with them. One of the best ways to find these people is to group your present and potential customers into natural sets of consumers.

Some easy groupings can be done when you keep lists of the customers who buy different types of products. For example, you might sell two products – weight loss and bodybuilding supplements. Sort your customers by which of your two products they prefer to buy. Then, when you get a new product in either line, you will know which group to target with that marketing campaign.

If you are an Internet based business, or you ship products to faraway places, you might group people by location. You might sell the same things in different places, but your approach may not be the same from one place to another. A Midwest location might respond well to a marketing campaign highlighting traditional values, while a West Coast location might feel better about a campaign featuring earth-friendly values.

Another way to group your customers is by the way they interact with you. Are they a Facebook group, a Twitter following or do they actually come into your place of business? The ways you talk to them will determine how you approach them to get your sales message across. It will determine whether you are going to launch an information-based campaign or a more directly sales-oriented communication, as well as where you meet up with them in real or cyber space.

You can group potential customers by how they find you. Analytics software can show you how they get to your website, whether they came from another website or what search term they used if they came by search. Once you learn how they reached you, you can get an idea of their interests.

For the theoretical weight loss and bodybuilding supplement company listed above, they might notice that most of their traffic is coming from weightlifting sites. They could use that information one of two ways. Either they could focus on that group of customers and target them more heavily with the bodybuilding products, or they could put forth a renewed effort to get more action on the weight loss side of the business.

No matter how you group your customers or potential customers, there are many ways to use the lists and information. One thing is certain. The more you know about the people who might buy your products, the more products you stand to sell.

Image: jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The Homepage Conundrum – Working Out the Possibilities

You cannot be all things to all people, and neither can your homepage. Your Internet marketing campaign will have better success if you nail down exactly the right amount of content and optimization on your website’s homepage. You obviously want to put your best foot forward, but you cannot show everything on the first page. This creates a puzzle that you have to figure out to make the most of that single most important page on your site.

Main Keywords

The homepage is the place for your main keywords. These are the keywords most identified with your company, your product or your service. You only have room for just so many main keywords, so make them count. Do not make them overly general, and make sure they relate specifically to your niche. It should be natural to incorporate them into your homepage content.

Keywords from Additional Pages

Each of the subordinate pages on your site will have specific keywords that go logically with their subject. Those pages will be optimized for those keywords or keyword phrases very easily, since the range of choices will be limited. Yet you cannot include all these keywords from all those pages on your homepage, especially if you have many pages on your site. The best solution is to use as many keywords from the ancillary pages as possible without disrupting the flow of the content on your homepage.

Product Descriptions

Unless you have a very small website, product descriptions are best left for secondary pages. You can mention products. You might want to put in a clickable link so visitors to your website can move on to the mentioned product if they are interested. However, the main theme of the homepage should be a general overview of your company and products, not intimate details of each and every one.

Video

Video is a great addition to your homepage. An interesting introductory video will keep your visitors happy long enough to look around your site and to discover the benefits of your products. That being said, there might be such a thing as too much video on your homepage in some cases. Mixed media usually works the best, so you capture the audience that likes to read as well as the audience that enjoys video and photos. You have to know your target demographic, though, in case yours prefers only watching video.

Your design, layout and navigational tools are also important, but not really part of your content. The most important thing about content and optimization on your homepage is to balance the general with the specific. Your overall theme should be the general, with hints of the specific information waiting on the inner pages. When you have found a good balance of ideas and images, you will have solved the puzzle of the homepage.

Image: renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Low Volume Keywords – Where Less Is More

Many companies make the mistake of leaning too heavily on high volume keywords. These are the keyword phrases that are searched by large numbers of people each day. The terms tend to be more general and common. They are words you hear often. It might seem natural that these are the keywords you would want to use for your SEO and PPC. Yet, low volume keywords can be very helpful in your Internet marketing campaign.

Low volume keywords are the keyword phrases that are not so common. They are more specific and well-defined. Less people are searching for them every day, but they are still being searched by someone. This brings up one of the advantages of low volume keywords – you get a narrower, more highly targeted segment of the market clicking on your link when you use such specific keywords. These people do not just want something in the family of what you sell; they want exactly what you sell.

Another reason low volume keyword phrases are so helpful in Internet marketing is that they make inexpensive Pay per Click keywords. There are usually fewer people bidding on them in the first place, so your base cost is cheaper. Then, you will get fewer clicks per day, so you will have lower costs for that reason as well.

In this case, fewer clicks work out well, partly because you are not paying for a lot of unnecessary clicks as you would with high volume keywords. When people click a very specific keyword, they are usually more motivated to learn more and even to buy.

Low volume keyword phrases can also be used to boost your SERP rankings. You have very little chance of rating a top spot for a very general, common keyword phrase, and even less chance for a single common keyword. These large volume keywords and keyword phrases are in hotly contested search engine results pages, so it is very difficult to slip in under the top 50 results. Since very few people make it that far into a search before they find what they want or try a different keyword, your efforts will likely be wasted.

On the other hand, if you use a low volume keyword, it will have a great chance of being at or near the top of its SERP. People may not search the term as often, but if you have optimized your content well, they will find you at the top of the results when they do search the term. In the final analysis, low volume keywords have equal or more importance in SEO and PPC as large volume keywords for small and mid-sized businesses.

Scrabble Letters by Anna Cervova

What You Can Accomplish with Mobile Marketing Opt-In Lists

There are several ways to accumulate a mobile marketing opt-in list. You can collect permissions and mobile numbers on your website. You can announce on your Facebook page that anyone sending a text to your SMS number will be included in company offers and information. You can even ask for permissions and numbers through a print media campaign. The bigger question is what do you do when you get the lists? Here are a few ideas.

1. Offer coupons and discounts.

You can send a barcode on a mobile device now, so that customers can simply hand their mobile over to the cashier at a local store and have it scanned as a coupon. This not only makes them happy by saving them money, but it also satisfies their desire to use new technology. The novelty of digital coupons will not last forever, but the savings will go on and on.

For discounts or coupons, all you really need to do is send a text that says, “Show this text for [X] % off [X Service or Product].” Customers who are interested will have no problem redeeming their discount, because most people carry their mobile devices with them at all times. You have just made the process much more convenient for them than if they had to clip a coupon and bring it into the store.

2. Announce events.

If you have a grand opening or a special sale, it is a nice idea to send a message with the specific details to your mobile marketing opt-in list. An even better idea is to have a VIP sale, and invite your opt-in list customers to a special sale held only for them. If you have a big enough opt-in list, this can be well worth your time and investment.

3. Introduce products.

Use your mobile marketing opt-in list to send a short announcement when you introduce a new product. This is only effective if it does not happen frequently. If you are sending out too many new product notifications, people will soon opt-out on you unless they are very loyal customers in the first place. Yet, if you use good judgment, you can send out the occasional message on a new product and your customers will thank you for the information.

4. Get feedback.

Your mobile customers will be interested in giving you feedback if you do not push the matter too far. If you make a pest of yourself, your customers will be turned off. However, if you once in awhile ask them to vote on their favorite among your products or give a simple response as to whether they liked your service or not, you may get some information that will be useful to your company. More important than that, you will let your customers know that their input is important to you as well, and you will have the chance to develop some in depth consumer-seller relationships.

Photo: Mobile Phone by Anna Cervova