Social Media Marketing - Social Media Marketing for Growth

Here’s what I see as the big dilemma of online business:  people don’t like to be sold.  This mindset held by millions of consumers worldwide produces highly fickle shoppers that will bounce from a website quickly if they feel the old “car salesman” push.

Where does that leave growing businesses when trying to get the word out about new products features and benefits?  Pay per click campaigns can quickly add up to large amounts of investment for customers who click on your page and then leave.  They also can sit idle because consumers who see those links on the search engine as advertisements will simply skip over them and move on to search results that show up organically. 

What does this one behavior tell you about online shoppers?  I think it says that consumers like recommendations from other consumers over sales pitches from the store that has exactly what they are looking for.  This behavior also accounts for the widespread popularity of Social Media and Social Media Marketing.  First let’s look at Social Media.

Typically, media refers to news and print.  In regards to marketing, using traditional media techniques, called industrial media”, can be so costly that a small business could never hope to invest in marketing of this kind.  Social Media is generated by users, not manufacturers.  Take YouTube for instance:  this highly popular site is filled to the brim with videos ranging from funny animals to business techniques.  What is special about YouTube is that the videos posted there are done so by users, not employees of the company. 

Social media can take many different forms.  These include weblogs or social blogs, podcasts, internet forums, pictures and video.  Just about everyone with a MySpace profile has favorite pictures and videos plastered through their site pages, as well as their favorite playlist.  What happens in Social Media is that users are now active participants in the whole online experience.

Now, how does this apply to your business?  Easy.  Keep in mind that people do business with people they know.  Up until now, it has been a bit of a difficult task to earn the trust of the average fickle pickle consumer.  But for the business owner who utilizes powerful Social Media Marketing techniques, business has never been better.  Becoming active on Social Media sites such as Twitter, YouTube or even Facebook and Myspace allows a company to reach out to the public in a way that is non-threatening. Startrankingnow is a good example to this.

Creating a blog is another way to interact with consumers.  Setting up and posting regularly about general issues relating to your business without pushing a product or service shows them that you are a good source of information, not a salesperson.  When first getting into the blogosphere, it is wise not to talk much about yourself.  Here’s another wise tip:  people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.  Show that you care about the thoughts and opinions of others when posting blogs and you will gain a reputation that will eventually lead to increased site traffic and sales. 

StartRankingNow - Working from Home Really is a Viable Option

With the economy leading companies to downsize, too many people are finding themselves in a situation where they do not have a 9 to 5 job to go do every day.  On the surface, losing your corporate job may seem like a stroke of bad luck; but if you look just a little deeper, you just may find that the opportunity to work from home is a very viable option. 

“Work from home”.  In the past, those words could make the hair on the back of your neck stand up.  Ok, maybe it wasn’t quite that bad for everyone; but at the very least, those words conjured up visions of stuffing envelops or making perfumed jewelry.  Bottom line, most work from home opportunities turned out to be little more than a way for companies to make money off of motivated individuals.  At one point in time, work from home opportunities meant multi-level marketing, a businesses many people just didn’t want to be a part of.

Don’t let these words scare you anymore.  With the steady advancement of the internet, there are multiple ways anyone with a little motivation and some ingenuity can break into business for themselves and be able to legitimately work from home.  Let’s take a look at ways to earn money using the power of the web:

• Blogging - A blog, for the most part, is easy and inexpensive to start and maintain.  The most valuable investment you will make in a blog is time.  Blogs can be specific, dealing with topics from business to fitness.  They can also be very general, acting as a sort of online diary.  The main point is that a blog that is interesting will gain popularity and a following of readers.  When a blog has a large following of readers, it becomes attractive to advertisers who will “rent space” on your blog page.

  It may take some effort for someone who isn’t an avid blogger to learn the ins and outs of how to blog effectively and how to get your startrankingnow blog noticed.  It’s not really as simple as posting a blog and the world instantly sees it.  “If you build it, He will come” does not apply to any internet website!

  Blogging also has immense benefits for small ecommerce businesses as it provides a way of marketing your online business in a way that sets you up as an expert in your field. 

• Ecommerce – Electronic commerce is a way of doing business electronically, typically utilizing the internet as a platform from which to launch.  Most ecommerce falls under the category of e-tail, which is online retail sales of an item or niche items. 

  Thanks to easy to use drop shipping programs, the cost and convenience of really getting your own online store up and running has become a much simpler process.  When drop shipping is implemented in a work from home ecommerce business, products are not paid for until they are purchased by your customer. This eliminates the need for a large up-front investment as well as any inventory control.  More and more people are finding the benefits of drop shipping.

These are just two options that enable people to get into a small business of their own.  If e-commerce or blogging is just not your thing, hopefully this article has given you the starting point to find how you too can work from home.

Importance of Pinging Your Blog

Up until recently, most people wouldn’t be able to discern the meaning of the word Ping if not related to Ping Pong.  But now, with the ever advancing technology of the internet, Pinging is an everyday occurrence. 

Remember that old movie with Kevin Costner, Field of Dreams?  Probably the most famous line of the movie was “If you build it, he will come”.  So famous is that line, in fact, that it has been used all over the world in all sorts of situations.  While many mistakenly thought that they could build a website with a great product or service and “they would come”, they quickly found out that ecommerce just doesn’t work that way.  Pinging can help change all that. 

Here’s how it usually happens:  Mr. Entrepreneur delves eagerly into the fascinating ecommerce world after searching high and low for the right product to sell or service to offer; After the product is in place, Mr. Entrepreneur builds a pimped out website with graphics and images that will attract the customer, maybe he even writes a few articles and places them on distribution sites or creates a blog that he posts to every week.  He then sits back and waits for them to come.  In doing all of the work to increase web traffic, what Mr. Entrepreneur misses is the key factor of HOW.  How do they know to come if they aren’t told where to go?  They will only come if you tell them to!  Pinging takes care of that.

According to Wikipedia, Pinging is described as “In blogging, ping is an XML-RPC-based push mechanism by which a weblog notifies a server that its content has been updated.”  You’ve got to love layman’s terms for describing a high tech process!  The inner workings of pinging are not what is really important to an ecommerce business; what IS important is that it works; and by that, Mr. Entrepreneur earns business. 

As a website owner, you are the CEO of your own business – the driver of your own destiny.  Your most valuable asset in building your business is your time.   You have spent that time choosing a product or perfecting your service.  You have spent it in learning the basics of web development and in hiring a team of professionals to handle tasks you are not skilled at.  Because you have spent your most valuable commodity getting your business going, it is pretty clear that you desire success as the end result.  Without employing the power of the Ping, you may be missing the big boat.  What pinging does is gets the word out that your marketing avenue, typically a blog, has updated.

There are multiple services that can ping a blog.  Instead of spending your time, your greatest asset, to find out how and what and where to ping, contact the professionals at StartRankingNow and have them take care of the service for you.  Not only can they ping your blogs to the most used sites; they can even write the blogs for you!  Those who are serious about increasing web traffic will be pinging.  Otherwise, they simply are not making the most of the marketing opportunities available. 

Smart Realtors Use Search Engines for Marketing

In decades past, a Realtor would spend a sunny afternoon baking cookies and welcoming guests at an open house, and they would actually drum up a fair amount of business this way.  Who would have thought that a time would come when a Realtor would benefit from SEO? 

Well, the time is here and the Realtor who can grasp the concept of SEO will gain a leg up on the competition.  In order to do that, the basics of SEO for Real Estate will need to be understood.  Just what is SEO anyway and what does it have to do with selling houses?  According to realtor.com, over 80% of all home purchases start on the Internet.  This creates a unique problem for Realtors to create a web presence that will show clients who you are.

SEO is Search Engine Optimization.  According to Wikipedia, it is “the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results.”  It is important because it determines a site’s ranking in search engines such as Google.  The higher a site ranks then determines the amount of traffic it will see.  Ranking organically is more effective and far less expensive than attempting to drive traffic with costly pay per click campaigns.

The importance of optimizing your Real Estate web page is so that you get the visitor you want on your site.  What good does it do you if the visitors you are attracting are other professionals like yourself?  None at all.  You are trying to attract home buyers and home sellers, not realtors.  With that in mind, you can set out to optimize your site with basic words that a home buyer or home seller may use in a search; words such as “San Diego Realtor” or “4 bedroom home in Chicago”. 

Here’s the thing; it is ultimately a Realtor’s job to sell homes and take care of the needs of their clients, not write web pages and optimize them for keywords and phrases.  This is why the wisest decision a professional can make is to work with the writing team at Start Ranking Now.  Not only can you optimize your website to attract the targeted traffic you want and need to succeed; you can also establish yourself as an expert in your local area through the use of optimized articles that point back to your website.  Doing this develops your reputation and allows potential clients to feel as though they know you before they have ever met with you in person.

Because people do business with people they know, using SEO in your web content is smart.  It gets you more visibility (which is key for any Realtor) and a familiarity within the community.   So while you are busy putting up signs and baking cookies at your next open house, your website will be working to give you a face on the web.  Use Start Ranking Now to optimize your web page and get ready for business to boom!