Social Media Marketing and Search Engine Optimization

You can have simply the best web site or blog in the world. That will not matter if no one can find it. Social Media Marketing does a great job of getting your blog found. But if you leave your marketing to just social media you are not getting the maximum return from your web site.

To get the most exposure for your blog you should be using both Social Media Marketing and Search Engine Optimization (other marketing avenues such as newspaper and radio advertising, mailing lists and even handing out flyers should not be forgotten but are beyond the scope of this post).

Search engines (such as Google) are designed to return to the user the best return for the key word used.  Your job then is to develop tactics for your blog that will bring you as close to the top of the search engines rankings as possible for the keywords for your blog.

Choosing the correct keyword(s) for your blog is a huge topic involving statistical testing and analysis, using a variety of quantitative tools. As an introduction, you should keywords for your blog that you would use to find your blog. If you are a photographer, for example, you would use the simple keyword, photographer. But a word of caution here. If you use a simple key word like photographer, you will never be on the first return page and if you are not on that page you may as well have not bothered.

Think about how many photographer are out there with blogs and web sites. I just did a key word search on the word photographer and Google returned 332,000,000 results. Impossible. To get to the top of a Search Engine return you are going to have to dig deep into what it is that you are. For example, if you specify "Journalistic Style Wedding Photographer in Burlington Vermont" (if that is your speciality) you are competing with far fewer returns.

Once you have determined your keywords you take the following simple steps to get the best possible search engine ranking for your blog:

1. Use key words in your blog title. Journalistic style wedding photographer located in Burlington Vermont is too long to use as a blog title, but shortening it to Journalistic Wedding Photos could work. 
2. Create page titles for your web pages or blog post titles for your blog that have key words in them.
3. Have key word rich posts. There is a lot of debate on how many keywords should be used in which parts of your post. If you use too many, your writing is going to become unreadable, too few and you won't get a good search engine ranking. The old school line is that you should have many keywords in the first 100 words of your post. I think you should remember who you are writing for, an audience that you hope will one day buy from you, and write your blog posts first and foremost to deliver information to them. Don't count key words used. Just write for your audience. You can't go wrong when you do that.
4. Build back links with influential sites. When someone else puts a link to your blog in their site, they have back linked to you. The more back links you have, the more credible and reliable Google sees you as being. Further, the more influential, which is to say, the more back links the site linking to you has, the better it is for your search engine ranking.  There is an entire industry that has grown up around getting back links. I will post on this further at another time. For the moment, suffice it to say that if you are buying back links, they are not going to do you much good.
5. Always test and measure the effectiveness of your key words and their impact on your search engine optimization.

Focus on your Social Media Marketing, but do keep these actions in the back of your mind and implement them whenever possible. Combining Social Media Marketing withe Search Engine Optimization is going to increase your visibility which should in turn, increase your cash flow.

What is Social Media Marketing?

Many years ago, one of my first jobs out of college was as an insurance salesman for Met Life. My sales manager sat me down one day and drew me a picture on a yellow legal pad (the iPad of the day). Basically it was two half circles facing each other. In the lower part of the half circle he put a dot. It looked sort like this:

.) (.

But bigger.

"Brad" he said, "those half circles are bellies and the dots are belly buttons.  All sales and marketing comes down to putting your belly button next to a lot of other belly buttons, and then getting personal". 

So far as I can tell, that is what Social Media Marketing does. It enables the user to connect with a lot of other belly buttons. Except, instead of a smile and a hand shake, there is the Tweet, Follow, Like and Friend. The method of connection is a variety of internet tools. All the rest is just detail. 

I will get more into that detail soon.

More Startling Statistics - Facebook

More startling statistics on Social Media. This time just on Facebook (check back for Twitter tomorrow). The numbers are staggering, sometimes so large that they verge on incomprehensible. By the way, these numbers came, in one for or another, from www.kunocreative.com (I tip my hat to you!) who got many of them from www.mashable.com (another tip of the hat!).

We know already that Facebook has 500 million users. But did you know that 50%, that is 250 million, of them log on every day.  WOW!

Further, that 500 million users of Facebook translates to about one person out of every 14!!!

40% of the Facebook user base is age 35 and up.

One out of every eight minutes on line is spent on Facebook.

34% of Facebook users are from North America, 32% from Europe, 20% from Asia, 9% from South America, 3% from Africa and 2% from Australia.

US Internet users spend 3 times more minutes on blogs and social media than they do on emails (okay, that wasn't about Facebook, but I thought I would slip it in anyway).

Think about the potential for reaching and engaging with people based on these numbers. The potential is amazing.