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Why The Hell Are You Following Me?

March 29, 2011 By Leave a Comment

You’re sitting at a table in a restaurant with a friend. You’re talking about cars and you mention the new BMW you just leased. A car salesman happens to walk past as you mention the word BMW. He grabs a chair and joins your table.

The two of you continue your conversation and after a while, the car salesman leaves the table.

That was a stupid scenario and would—hopefully—never happen in real life, but on Twitter, it happens all the fucking time. Car dealerships, affiliate marketers, online shops, those pesky “gurus”… They start following you after you’ve mentioned a keyword they’re targeting and they unfollow you once they realize you can’t be arsed to follow them back. The fact that the process is often automated makes it look completely stupid. After I reviewed the Audi A1 last year, an Audi dealership from Florida started following me on Twitter.

It’s good to monitor conversations that are related to your brand, your market or your niche, but please include a human being and human interaction in the process so you won’t look like a complete idiot.

Filed Under: Musings Tagged With: , ,

Social Business: Analysis – Part 2A: Reasons To Participate In Social Business: Marketing

May 4, 2010 By Leave a Comment

The Fundamentals series continues the analysis phase with a mini-series on assessing the value and effectiveness of social business. This mini-series will cover the following aspects:

  • Reasons to participate in social business
  • Internal considerations
  • Debunking myths
  • Social business in B2B environments

I’ve divided the reasons to participate in social business into three categories:

  1. Marketing
  2. Reach & Community
  3. Internal reasons & Reasons to avoid social business

Today, we’ll look at prevalent marketing-related reasons to participate in social business.

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The Online Marketing Framework

February 18, 2010 By Leave a Comment

The Online Marketing FrameworkOnline marketing can take place in many forms. Banner advertising, search engine marketing and content marketing are a few examples. Every marketing activity works differently and serves a different purpose.

The Online Marketing Framework is my attempt at providing an overview of what the main disciplines are, how they relate to each other, which types of activities they consist of, and what they focus on achieving. The framework is not meant to be all-inclusive and I hope to have addressed the key aspects of online marketing with it, but I definitely welcome your thoughts in the comments section.

The Online Marketing Framework is built up as follows:

  • Purpose First it looks at the purpose, i.e. what should the efforts focus on achieving?
  • Activities Then it describes categories of activities that look to serve each purpose.
  • Disciplines Finally, it positions the driving disciplines that incorporate the activities.

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The Difference Is Linkability

September 29, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Earlier this year, I experimented with a series of articles for SEO (search engine optimization) purposes on certain keywords, including my own name. I have to say that this experiment was wildly successful with highlights being:

  • Ranking higher than a feature with a similar title on the New York Times website
  • Increasing traffic up to 30-fold with a 30 day run-up

The key part of this experiment was to create content that will receive a decent number of inbound links (other sites linking to my website/article) which leads to better search engine rankings.

I’ve buried the experiment now, but I’ll share some of my findings with you here.

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Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: , , ,

Summer Of Search – Part 2: 5 Quick Tips To Help Your SEO

August 17, 2008 By

In part 1, I posted about the main difference between white hat SEO and black hat SEO. I also mentioned that simple white hat SEO tactics are capable of producing profound results. Here in part 2, I’d like to elaborate on that by providing some simple (white hat) pointers to help you improve your search rankings. These pointers that are related to the various elements of a webpage are:

  • Title: This is the text that you see in the top bar of your browser and represents the title of the particular webpage you’re visiting. I tend to cringe whenever I see “Untitled Document” or “New Page” as the title because this is a missed opportunity. The title is the #1 ranking factor for Google and should contain at least your company/website name and keywords related to the page.
  • Headings: Your content should be clear and easy to read and using headings is an easy way to separate the content. But headings also contribute to SEO, especially the H1 heading. If that contains relevant keywords, it will help improve your search rankings.
  • URL: The webpage’s address (URL) is also a critical factor for SEO. I often see pages that have the URL www.yourwebsite.com/page1.html and this is a missed opportunity as well. By including relevant keywords in your URL is another step you can take to optimize your website for search engines.
  • Meta Tags: There are two types of meta tags, meta description and meta keywords. The former is more important than the latter because the description is what appears under the page title in search results. Therefore, it is more important to have relevant keywords in the meta description than it is to include these keywords in the meta keywords.
  • Relevance: I used the word “relevant” in relation to keywords because the relation between the keywords and the actual content is also an important search ranking factor. Using the keywords “Britney Spears” while your website is about refrigerators will NOT help your search rankings!

Look at your website critically and see where you can apply these quick wins to boost your search rankings.

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