Content Promotion Tips for Online Community Managers

In a few weeks I’ll be giving a talk at the University of St Thomas in Minneapolis to a class on community management on a topic that I think will interest many of our readers.
Online Community Management is a function that has existed in the digital world for a while now, stretching back to the days of bulletin boards and online forums. Today that role looks a bit different.
Not be confused with a Social Media Manager, a Community Manager is typically the “voice of the brand” on the social web as well as the voice of the community back to the brand. Functionally, this translates to social media listening and engagement but also includes some promotion of brand messaging.

Content Promotion Tips for Online Community Managers

How Personas Guide Meaningful Content Creation & Optimization

As marketers accumulate information about customers, it is also important to identify common characteristics and patterns to help guide messaging, engagement and offers.
Behaviors that contribute to your business objectives like, sales, advocacy, sharing, referrals and repeat business might contribute to your understanding of an “ideal” customer that can be characterized as a persona:
Admin Bob – Influences the CEO on software purchases and cares about price, service and speed.
Being able to identify your “best” customers also means there’s another end to the spectrum: patterns that reflect undesirable customer behaviors and an “avoid” persona:
Gatekeeper Jane – Maintains power by filtering information to the CEO about software purchases. Cares about control, recognition and status quo.
Companies that solve different problems in different markets may determine that multiple personas best represent their target audience.

How Personas Guide Meaningful Content Creation & Optimization

20 Plus Tips on How to Optimize Your Presentations & Public Speaking

What does it mean to “optimize” your presentations? Keywords in your speech? Including your Twitter handle on all slides? Repositioning the slide content through Slide share, Flickr, Visual.ly and on blogs? The answer is yes – all of the above. And more.
More marketing and communications pros are getting on board with the idea that public speaking is fuel for content marketing. The problem is, the focus on creation and promotion centers around individual content objects or presentations.
An optimized presentation strategy means having a narrative or story that includes your brand’s key messages and how the live presentation is connected to other content objects.
A live presentation can be connected to other content objects like a research report which might be connected to a series of blog posts which are connected to individual digital assets like images, polls, influence r interviews, info-graphics, press releases, podcasts and so on. You get the idea.

20 Plus Tips on How to Optimize Your Presentations & Public Speaking

10 Small Business Internet Marketing Tips

Looking for some basic Internet marketing tips for your small business? While there are hundreds of suggestions we can make, here’s a list of 10 that we think might be the most useful for 90% of small business owners.
1. In the words of Ron Simon, “What the hell are you trying to do?” What is the goal of your website? Ultimately, it should be to drive more business, but how exactly will it do that? Start with one goal – such as increasing the number of phone calls – and branch out from there. It’s important to set goals, but it’s just as important to come up with a system for measuring those goals.

2. Evaluate your website’s content – Content is King. What does your website say? Is the content unique and useful? Will people learn anything when they visit your site? When was the last time you added new content? Does your website have content worth reading? Does your content match your business goals?
3. The <title> tag. Visit your website. Look at the very top of your browser window. What do you see? Does it describe the page you’re looking at? Is it a unique description? Does it contain the keywords you want people to associate with that page of your website? If you’re a local business, does it contain your key local search keywords? If you can’t answer ‘yes’ to all these questions, check out this article all about title tags.
4. Call tracking and analytics. You can’t improve upon what you can’t measure. Analytics provide a tremendous amount of incredibly useful data, such as where your website visitors come from, how long they stay, and what they do on your site. Google analytics is free and pretty darn good, and we recommend it. We also recommend you make sure you can track every lead that’s generated by your website.
If you don’t have a dedicated phone number for the website that you can track calls on, visit Mongoose Metrics. They’ll issue you a unique tracking phone number and then forward every call you get to your main number while tracking the number of calls you receive, who called, how long the call lasted…etc. It’s surprisingly inexpensive.
5. Take advantage of free local business directories. There are a few great local business directories that are completely free. Get your business listed in each of the directories below and you’ll see a boost in website visitors and hopefully a boost in business too. (By the way, we don’t advocate paying for any directory listings anywhere unless you’ve got a very good reason.)

6. Check out your competition. Visit your competitors’ websites. Do searches for keywords related to your business. Find out what others in your vertical are doing and saying. This is a great way to get ideas and take stock of your own company’s online marketing efforts.

Does this dog look ugly to you?

7. Repeat after me – “I have an ugly baby.” A lot of business owners love their websites, but the first step to improving your website is to admit that it has some deficiencies. No website is perfect, and every website can use improvement. If you have a website, you have an ugly baby [sorry]. Just how ugly your website is, however, is open to discussion.
8. Start blogging. Every business, and we mean every business, has something to gain by blogging and absolutely nothing to loose. The list of benefits is long, but here’s a short list of reasons small businesses should blog.
9. Post online video. Video is still a little cutting-edge for some, but the benefits can’t be understated. Online video is the wave of the future, and every business needs to have something on YouTube, Metacafe, etc. If you’re concerned about expense here, keep in mind there are some low-budget options that won’t damage your brand while still providing concrete benefits.
10. Contact us. We can help your small business rise above the rest. Contact us so we can discuss your business and your basic goals – our initial consultation is free of charge.

Amazing Auctions Let You Buy iPads and Other Electronics for Under $40

Few things match the thrill of getting an incredible deal on an item we really crave. It’s a basic human response that we all can relate to.

That’s why auctions are so much fun – they present the titillating chance of scoring something for a lot less than we would expect. And that leaves us feeling great, because we now have the object of our desire and we have money left in our pocket.
Marketers know this and exploit it all the time –hence the profusion of sales, discounts, coupons, and the like… so much so, in fact, that we become numb to the tactic. People just don’t believe they’re really getting a bargain.
But now there’s a new online company that has actually figured out a way to sell new must-have consumer products for jaw-dropping prices.
It’s called Quibids – and it turns out that they are selling everything from the latest new Apple iPads and iPods, to MAC and PC notebooks, to HDTV’s and gift cards from the top retailers at prices as low as 5% of regular retail prices.
Now, of course, anyone in their right mind would be skeptical of such a claim – so we looked into it to learn just how they do it.
It turns out that both the prices and the products are real. Quibids runs a unique version of the traditional auction - when you bid on an item you actually get charged a small fee of about 60 cents. Collectively, the amount collected for all of the bids on an item allows the company to sell the item at a price far below actual retail and even below the wholesale price they paid the manufacturer for it.
Figuring out how many bids to place and when to place them involves a little strategy but on QuiBids it’s actually a lot of fun. Each auction has a strict time limit and when you place your bid, the system adds a little time to the auction to see if any other bids come in. If you have the winning bid when the clock runs out – you win the item for that price. According to QuiBids CEO Matt Beckham, “Thousands of people are trying QuiBids every day – and then coming back again and again - so we must be doing something right.”
For the auction winner, the true cost of the item is slightly higher than their winning bid price because they have also spent a little for their bids, but this amount is usually modest, and the savings still work out to be spectacular in most cases.
And then there’s the “Buy Now” feature. This allows bidders who did not win an auction to still buy the product they want and apply the cost of the bids they placed as a discount on the regular product price. So, you still get the item and the bids you placed previously in the auction don’t cost you anything.
So, if you want real deals - like a new iPad for under $34, a new Nikon Digital SLR Camera for less than $24 or a new 46” LED HDTV for under $25 – check out the action at QuiBids.

Online Markating

Ads By Google