BroadVision Marketing Blog

As I was reading about inbound marketing strategies concerning Facebook Fan Pages this week, I saw some interesting articles clarifying the growth patterns of the pages. I have read about clients who thought that social media was supposed to vault them into super-fan-dom, but that hadn't happened for them. As I read three blogs from Cyber PR written by Jon Ostrow and Ariel Hyatt, I saw statistics you need to be aware of to create realistic goals for Facebook Fan Pages.

You know how I love shocking headlines. I couldn’t beat the one written by Nichole Kelly, The Death of the Sales Funnel in Social Media Explorer in February 2013. For one thing I have long thought that no matter which way you draw the thing, the sales funnel didn’t make sense, perhaps because it is such a hackneyed, as in overused, term. Perhaps I lost sight of the meaning since in the past two decades the internet has become one of the primary ways people research and then shop, whether online or off. The problem with using the internet as a sales funnel is that people bounce all over the place, staying longer in some areas and gone in a breath in another. Microwave popcorn has nothing on the way or reason why people go where they go, no matter how advanced our analytics and Google rankings are.

So you believe if you blog it, they will come? You need to wake up from that field of dreams. In reality even the best blog in the world won’t bring readers lining the highway to your site. All the experts that say write the best content to get recognized on Google are pulling the wool over your eyes. If you don’t get your work out where it can be found, it won’t be. How do you do that? I’m glad you asked.

I have a one-word internet marketing tip for all you business people, bloggers and website owners—syndication. While it means sharing your content with more people, the whole point of syndication is to move clients to your site by moving your site closer to Page 1 of Google.

The fight for SEO takes place with every blog post, every website page and even goes on Off Page. Off Page SEO is a hot topic this season. There are many articles being written about it. The first thing I learned is that I already knew about Off Page SEO by another name—Backlinks. Oh I see, I hear you saying if you haven’t been following this new incarnation of one of my favorite subjects from last year. To clear up more confusion backlinks are also known as incoming links, inbound links and inward links. Off-page SEO is the process of optimizing your web pages outside your website by getting links back to it. These backlinks act as a vote on the content of your blog. The more and better votes (links) you can get on your webpage the better it will rank in search results. That leads to your site getting closer to page one on a Google Search.

Are backlinks the plague?

Sounds important? Yes, it is; but for a short time everyone ran from backlinks like the plague because of Google’s Panda and Penguin which were looking very suspiciously at backlinks. The reason why Google zeroed in on these is because for a time people were buying backlinks by the barrelful from places that would sell you 1000 for $5 in back alleys and in the dark. Yes, you knew you could get knifed that way; but everyone was doing it and for some time it was a great way to get on page one. That tactic is now strictly black hat SEO for many reasons. For one, the links were of poor quality. For another, they were from spammy sites. You can get your website deindexed by Google if you do that now.

So are Off Page SEO links something to stay clear of? Absolutely not. But they are harder to get than paying someone $5 for thousands. You need a strategy, but then you know that you need one for On Page SEO as well. Here are some ideas I picked up for your Off Page SEO strategy as I researched the topic.

Ram Shengale in Off-Page SEO For Beginners | Social Media Today February 2013 made several suggestions I liked. Here are two of them:

An architect doesn't just throw together a building--he uses a floor plan. What does he do before he draws the floor plan? He and the client discuss designs. Just so before you are ready to create your Web Marketing Campaign, you want to put together a Creative Brief that will guide your Web Marketing Campaign. What is a Creative Brief? It’s a preplan, the idea behind how you will create your Web Marketing Plan. Many times you have a vague idea of what you want in your Web Marketing Campaign, but you aren’t clear about what you want from it. A Creative Brief helps you focus on what you do want. Here are 9 Web Marketing Tips to get you going.

Where did you say that visitor came from again? There are two sets of visitors—organic searchers and paid visitors. A paid visitor is one who responds to one of your ads, on Google, Facebook or otherwise. Are you aware that the Federal Trade Commission has just released new guidelines for Online and Mobile Advertisers? This information came out March 12, 2013 and is known as "Dot Com Disclosures" How to Make Effective Disclosures in Digital Advertising. The rules are intended to protect consumers from fraudulent, deceptive, and unfair business practices. If you are a blogger who sells items, you need to read this. If you are an affiliate marketer, you need to read this. If you put ads anywhere online, you need to read this.

I tried to find an explanation for why Google no longer gives information on all the organic search words our clients use to find us. Have you seen all the articles circulating since the start of the year on the death of Google organic keywords? One from Hubspot, written by Hartley Brody, has as a title, Is 2013 the Year Marketers Lose Keyword Research?A company, Resource, announced Empty Analytics: How “Not Provided” Keyword Data Affects SEO. Here’s another one: The rise of (not provided). Is Google making it impossible to measure natural search ? Get the picture? I tried to find a simple explanation for what Google is doing when it lists these lost organic keywords as (not provided) thereby not telling us what keywords a client used. But most of the article writers assumed that the reader knew how this designation for lost organic keywords as (not provided) came to be. The one with the most understandable explanation was the Hubspot blog by Hartley Brody.

Would you sell long-term-healthcare insurance to a college student or place ads to sell body piercings to people living in-home care situations? Who you are selling to is a simple idea within your marketing strategy. A key factor to success in today's market place is finding subtle differences to give your business the successful marketing edge. You want to sell your product or service in an appropriate way to different segments of the population or only to those in your niche, those who share experiences, values and goals. You could segment them based on demographics, like their date of birth, income and occupation; or through psychographic life-stage segments, like young families, empty-nesters or careerists.

Your landing pages are the places where a search engine decides to send your potential client to. How do you create landing pages that will get people to stick? How do you draw them into your sales funnel? You need to use the right SEO keywords, learn what works, and be willing to change what doesn't. I found these sights when I looked for a few thought leaders' articles on the web that might help you improve all your pages. Amazingly enough the first one I found was repeated on several blogs, but I think I found the original.

Do you feel like you want to scream when you think about another article on how to create a social media strategy? Sarah Mitchell says she does in her article Why Creating A Content Marketing Strategy Is A Big Waste Of Time. Sarah says that social media isn’t worth anything without content unless you like to shoot the breeze. If you feel like screaming at yet another social media strategy blog, you are not alone. I don’t see how anyone can separate social media and create a strategy for it without connecting it to the other arms of the triumvirate--content and Search Optimatization (SEO), which all go everywhere or should. All three need to be interconnected to come up with a social media strategy that’s worth anything. Then you need to consider that social media has become a sales tool and a search tool in your social media strategy.