Bird Food, Bird Cages, Bird Toys, At The Best Prices - Birdfoodbirdcages.com

Bird Food, Bird Cages, Bird Toys, At The Best Prices - Birdfoodbirdcages.com

Acne Treatments Top Cures in 2012 - Acne treatment cure

Acne Treatments Top Cures in 2012 - Acne treatment cure

Reasons Why You Need To Blog

Blogs aren’t exactly the new kid on the digital marketing block, but boy, they sure do get the job done. Here’s why I think you should seriously consider adding a blog to your company’s website.

1. A blog shows visitors you know your stuff
Whatever your industry, potential customers probably want to know you understand it before they hand over their credit card number, or even call. If they can easily find some articles written by you and/or your staff that show your company’s expertise, they’re going to feel a lot more confident about spending their time or money (or both) with you.

2. A blog helps you get more traffic
Sounds good – maybe even a little too good to be true, right? Nevertheless, if you’re blogging regularly and well – or even kind of well – you’re bound to get some social media attention that will bring more visitors to your website. You may earn links from other sites, too. And then there are the SEO benefits inherent in any decent blog…

3. Blog = SEO, baby
The more content on your website, the better your odds of ranking highly in Google search results for the keyword phrases Google finds in your posts.
Search engines really look for each page of a website to be about one specific thing. Every blog post is a page, so if you want to rank for 50 different keyword phrases, you really need to have close to 50 different pages (such as blog posts) with each page dedicated primarily to a single keyword phrase.
You can’t hope to rank well in search engines for many keywords that matter for your business if your site has just a few pages such as Contact, About Us, Meet Our Team, and a home page that talks about all the various things you offer.

4. Blog posts are link bait
We’re sure you know that links from other sites to yours – also known as backlinks or inbound links – are an important factor for helping your site appear higher in SERPs (search engine results pages). And as you probably also know, it isn’t easy to get someone to link from their site to yours. (Unless you pay them, and we don’t recommend that.)
It’s unlikely that someone will want to link to your home page, or to a page about your product or services. But how about an interesting and insightful blog post about your industry? That might do the trick.
If you regularly put out interesting or helpful content on your blog, you will have a much easier time getting backlinks. Be a good example: When you see interesting or helpful content on someone else’s blog that’s relevant to one of your posts, do include a link to that blog. (They may return the favor!)

5. A blog is food for social media
Just like it’s hard to rank well without blog posts, it’s hard to get anyone to share a link to your website on Twitter, Facebook or Google+ if you don’t regularly blog about interesting topics.
If you can blog well enough that people start sharing links to your blog posts from their social media accounts, there’s nothing better. People like to share valuable articles with their networks, and these social media links will help your SEO. Social media mentions and links are a signal to Google and Bing that people consider a site valuable – and the search engines use that signal to help them rank websites in search results. Plus, you’ll get more direct visitors from the people who actually click those social media links.
For tips on creating blog posts more people will want to share in social media, read our post You Deserve More Blog Comments & Shares.
One more great thing about blog posts – they give you something to mention in your own social media accounts. Some days even the cleverest person runs out of new things to say.

6. Behold the CTR power of Google Authorship
Have you seen a search result like this? That’s called a rich snippet – a Google search result that isn’t just the plain ‘ol link with a little text below. When the author of a blog post is hooked up with Google Authorship, their blog posts will look like this in Google SERPs.
So what? Well, search results like this have a much higher CTR (click-through rate). MarketingTechBlog.com found that their posts with a Google+ portrait in search results were almost 5 times as likely to be clicked on in search results than links without it.
Read more about the importance of Google Authorship and how to set it up for your blog.

7. Unlike social media posts, you really do own your blog content – and you’re the one benefiting from it
For many business owners, the idea of giving up control is scary. But that’s exactly what you’re doing when you post content on a social network.
Facebook could decide that you’re violating their terms of service and delete your page. LinkedIn gets to decide which ads to place around your content. Twitter sometimes goes down and makes your tweets temporarily inaccessible. Pinterest could get bought by some company that doesn’t care about keeping the site working. The list of risks goes on.
When you put out great content on social networks, you get some benefits for sure – and so do the social networks. They get more pages in Google’s index, they can sell more advertising, and their valuation or stock prices could go up – all thanks to you and a few million others.
Now don’t get us wrong. Here at AboutUs, we definitely think social media is something businesses should be using. But we hate to see blogging overlooked when it has some serious advantages for almost any business.

8. Getting and keeping people on your site probably helps your business goals.
Do you want people to buy your product, call you about your services, fill out a lead generation form, or do something similar? If someone is reading a blog post on your website, the odds are much better that they will.

9. Blog posts have a longer shelf life
Email newsletters, tweets and Facebook posts are fleeting, and will likely be forgotten and hard to find a few days after they’re sent or posted. Your blog is a great place for more evergreen topics that will stay relevant and helpful weeks or months after they’re first published.
It’s certainly fine to blog about timely and current things, and we encourage you to do so. But make sure the important things you want people to see now and later are published on your blog.

10. Help with customer support
Do you keep getting the same questions from your customers? Why not turn each question and answer into a blog post? It will lessen the load on your customer support people, and make it easier for them to give more detailed answers quicker. It can also show prospective clients that you are serious about helping your customers.

11. Cred for author
Do you want your CEO to be seen as a thought leader in your space? Do you want to give your employees some publicity? Writing for the company blog and getting a byline can give employees (including the CEO) some street cred, and probably a warm, fuzzy feeling. Bonus points for having each author create or enhance their Google+ profile, and for assuring they have Google Authorship status (more about that here). (Do NOT post everyone’s blog posts as Admin…we’re begging you.)

12. Blog comments – and commentors – are gold
One of the great features of blog posts is that they allow readers to leave a comment. This conversation is invaluable. It can give you ideas for your new product, next blog post, a better customer service process, or something else important to your business.
Because it takes time and effort to comment on a blog post, anyone who does is probably worth taking a look at. Are they a prospective client or business partner someone should follow up with? Is the commenter someone you should follow on Twitter? Is he or she a customer you should reach out to, maybe to offer support or ask for a testimonial?

Yes, Your Company Needs a Blog – 13 Reasons Why - AboutUs

Yes, Your Company Needs a Blog – 13 Reasons Why - AboutUs

How do I get people to my site?

Here is, by far, one of the most common questions I get:Short of me saying "Just hire Me"

 

"I just started a new business. How do I get people to my site?"

 

Another great question from our community... because it's true -- the hardest part about traffic building is getting to your first 1,000 visitors and keeping the momentum going after that.

 

Today you get your answer. If I started a new site, here's exactly what I would do to get my first 1,000 visitors:

 

The first thing to understand is there's an easy way and a hard way to jump-start your traffic. 

 

In the old days, your only choice was to take the slow route: build links to get search rankings, grow your prominence on forums, and other things like that. These were and still are good, but they take time. 

 

And I find that, when you're just starting, the key to keeping motivated is to see quick results. And today that is much easier because you've got sites like Facebook and Twitter with millions and MILLIONs of users on them every day. 

 

(Plus, as an added bonus, it is easy to find people in your target market on them, too. Jackpot.)

 

So the easiest way to 1,000 visitors is by focusing time and energy into building your Twitter and Facebook profile. 

 

With Twitter do the following:

========================

 

1. After you create your profile start following other people and companies in your industry.

 

2. Perform keyword searches on Twitter for keywords related to what you do. Also start following 100 to 200 of those people each day.

 

3. Start tweeting about topics related to your industry (don't just tweet about things on your website).

 

4. You'll notice that after a few days 20 to 30% of the people you follow will follow you back. You can start manually unfollowing the people who don't follow you back or if you don't have the time you can use a service like Tweet Adder which can do this for you in an automated fashion.

 

5. Start participating on Twitter by tweeting at people in your industry and retweeting some of their tweets.

 

6. At this point you should have been on Twitter for more than 5 days and now you can start tweeting about your company and content. Make sure you aren't doing a hard sell and that 80% of the time you are still tweeting about stuff that isn't related to your company.

 

FaceBook

                                                                                                                                    The Website Builder Pro

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1. Friend thought leaders in your industry. Although a large percentage of the people will not accept your friend request, at least 10% of the thought leaders should.

 

2. Start engaging with your audience by posting stuff on your wall. The stuff shouldn't be about your company, but more so about industry news and events related to your sector.

 

3. To create the most engagement post things that are short and during times you think your "target friends" are online.

 

4. Start commenting on your friends' wall and like messages that you like within your feed.

 

5. Start asking questions on your wall. These questions should be related to your industry. By asking questions you'll start to see more engagement from your "target friends".

 

6. After a week of engaging more heavily on Facebook you should start seeing more friend requests. Instead of turning away people you don't know, accept them as they could be a reader or your website or a potential customer of your product/service.

 

7. At this point you should be posting information about your company 30% of the time. But, again, don't hard sell your product... only do soft pitches.

 

8. After you spend a month or so building up your Facebook and Twitter presence it shouldn't be hard to get at least a few thousand visitors to your website just from these 2 traffic sources.

 

And that's all there is to it. It's not rocket science (anyone telling you otherwise is trying real hard to sell you something). 

 

Building on that, the REAL key is to understand how social media fits into your overall traffic strategy.

 

And that's what I will explain tomorrow.

 

And let's not forget, If you'd like to be considered to hire me to help you with your online marketing, apply at http://wordofmouyhmarketting.com I'll be selecting a company shortly.

CraigWSeaton@yahoo.com

Why Content Marketing is the New SEO

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SEO isn’t the same as what it used to be. You can’t just popup an ugly website, throw up mediocre content, and build a few links and expect to rank well. These days you actually have to build a good website, write high quality content that solves peoples’ problems, build thousands of links, and get thousands of social shares.

But there is one big issue, it’s hard to scale all of this. Building thousands of high quality links manually is really expensive and even if you have the money, it will take months if not years to build those links. And if you don’t have anything worth sharing on the social web, you won’t get social shares unless you buy them from spammy accounts.

So how do you build thousands of links naturally and get thousands of social shares? Through content marketing.

Content marketing is the cheapest and most effective way to do SEO these days. Not only does writing highly quality content produce links at a quicker pace than building them manually, but it’s also cheaper. Plus your content will naturally get shared on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus and Pinterest.

My content marketing experience

I’ve always built my organic search traffic through content marketing.Why you may ask? It’s cheaper and it provides faster results.

We were able to launch The WebsiteBuilderPro and get over 100,000 monthly organic visitors in less than a year, just through blogging and creating infographics. We didn’t build 1 link manually… we just spent our time and money on content marketing.

 Google drives around 90,000 visitors a month to the blog, and I didn’t have to manually build 1 link. I just wrote a lot of high quality content.

If you don’t think content marketing is the new SEO, lets take a look at the numbers:

Content marketing by the numbers

 An infographic on average costs us $600, which means we have spent $25,200 on infographics in the last 2 years.

Within a 2-year period, we’ve generated 2,512,596 visitors, and 41,142 backlinks from 3741 unique domains all from those 47 infographics.

And from a social perspective in the last 2 years the infographics have driven 41,359 tweets and 20,859 likes.

If you decided that you want to buy 2,512,596 visitors, it would cost you $125,629.80 if you paid 5 cents a visitor. If you bought 41,142 links from a service like Sponsored Reviews at a rate of $20 a link, you would have spent  $822,840. And that wouldn’t even give you high quality links. We naturally got from sites like Huffington Post and Forbes.

If you want to buy 41,359 tweets, it would cost you $82,718 assuming you paid 2 dollars a tweet. It would also cost you an additional $41,718 if you paid 2 dollars a like.

In total, if you were trying to game Google and get the same results we did at KISSmetrics, you would have spent a total of $1,072,905.80. Now that’s a lot of money… especially if you compare that to the $25,200 we spent to create the infographics.

The big difference between content marketing and paid SEO

There is one huge difference between paying to do all of the things above versus spending the money on content marketing. Can you guess what it is?

Nope, it isn’t the price difference of $1,047,705.80. Guess again…

Content marketing doesn’t get affected by algorithm updates, while paid SEO does. Search engines can tell when you provide value, and in the long run that’s the kind of stuff that they want to make sure that stays high in the rankings.

So instead of investing in short term solutions that may increase your overall rankings and traffic, invest in the long term solution of content marketing.

Conclusion

Now that you know content marketing is the new SEO, spending money on it doesn’t guarantee results. Over the last few years I’ve tested a lot of different types of content and certain types produce better results than others.

• Detailed content – short blog posts tend to get less links than detailed content that is thorough. Don’t try to replicate what Huffington post does by producing hundreds of new pieces of content each day… focus on quality.
• Digestible infographics – if you can make complex data easy to understand in a visual format, you can get millions of visitors to your website.
• Social profiles – a key requirement to a successful content marketing strategy is owning powerful social profiles. Make sure youbuild up your Twitter and Facebook profiles. You’ll need them to spread your content.
• Collect emails – make sure you have email opt-in forms in your sidebar and potentially leverage popups to collect even more emails. If you have a solid email list you can always email them every time you publish a new blog post or content piece. This is an easy way to kick start the virality process.
• Be consistent – if you can’t publish content on a regular basis, no matter how good your content is, it will be tough to get a good ROI out of your content marketing. Make sure you publish content on a regular basis.
• Headlines matter – no matter how good your content is, if you can’t write attractive headlines, no one will read your content. Learn how to write good headlines.

So what do you think about content marketing? Do you think it is the new SEO?  

6 Branding Approaches They Forgot to Teach You in Business School

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Do you have all the basics of branding in place, but you are still struggling to create even a dent in your competitor’s market share?

Most companies don’t get branding… and for the ones that do, it’s often not enough. But if you don’t figure out how to climb out of the clutter and ahead of your competition, your company will fail.

So what can you do? Study the following six companies and the branding lessons they learned as they overcame the obstacles in their markets.

Lesson #1: Start with why

Too often companies start their branding journey by building a product they hope will change people’s lives. They've spent thousands of hours in research and development on an idea, but when they ship, the product flops.

Let’s look at Apple to learn why that is. Instead of the typical what-how-why advertising message, Apple has always promoted the why first. They've promoted the reason behind why they exist. You can imagine them saying this: “Apple exists to challenge the status quo. We emphasize beautiful design. And we make computer devices.”

That’s totally different than if they said, “Apple makes computer devices. They are beautifully designed. We exist to challenge the status quo.”

One starts with the why…the other one ends with the why. This is one of the reasons that Apple is innovative year-after-year and is one of the biggest companies in the world.

In fact, they've been trading places as “world’s biggest company” with Exxon for the last several months.

Apple established a movement based on their why and created a following. They enhance the deal by creating beautiful and useful products… so sales rush in year after year.

The lesson is that when everyone involved… from the founder all the way down to the customer… knows exactly why your company exists, then you create a meaningful way for people to see your brand, instead of just another company wanting to make millions.

So, what is your company’s why?

Lesson #2: Never forget the past

In today’s startup economy, most companies don’t have a lot of history since they are younger than four years or so. But if you’re company is only ten years old, it’s dangerous to forget your past when you are planning for the future.

Let me show you what I mean.

The company Blinds.com tries to stay rooted to their history in a number of ways:

• They hung streets signs from the ceiling with the names of the city/street of all their offices. This even includes the addresses of companies they’ve bought.
• They named one of their meeting rooms “Laura” since the business started as a brick-and-mortar business called “Laura’s.”
• They named another meeting room after their first website they started back in 1996: NoBrainerBlinds.com.
• They named yet another meeting room after their first real location. That meeting room is called “The Alley.”
• They displayed all of the articles written about the company during it’s 16 years of being in business.

If you are part of a company with history it’s important you understand that history and communicate it to all of your employees.

And don’t forget, that foundation includes the why behind your history—it reflects who you are. Neglect to communicate your history and you threaten to weaken a powerful tool to strengthen your brand.

Lesson #3: Create your own market

Jumping into an existing market can be near-impossible. If it’s a competitive or shrinking market you may never succeed. If you truly want to succeed, you need to create your own market.

Way back when e-readers were nothing but a fuzzy concept, Amazon jumped into the market giving early adopters something to play with:

A lot of people felt like they were stupid for taking such a risky move, but they aren’t saying that now with the rise of the e-reader.

And even though the Kindle Fire didn’t turn out to be as great as people hoped and publishers and libraries continue to give Amazon trouble about their privacy and pricing policies, there is no doubt that Amazon… because they created their own market… will dominate it.

What’s the lesson for you? Look for markets like you were a value investor… find markets that are under-valued but have promising growth.

Lesson #4: Rebrand to avoid confusion

When some companies branch out into two or more business lines instead of one, they often run into problems. The problem arises when their name doesn't fit the new line of business.

This is kind of what happened to Formspring, a company that launched a popular social media product that attracted a different user base than its form-building product that is more geared to businesses.

It was easy to cause confusion between the two products so the company decided to re-brand itself. That’s not an easy task since the former name was pretty popular among the costumers.

What the company decided to do was create an infographics that taught users how to create the perfect landing page with their new brand.

The key to success was that they made something that educated their customer. In the end, more than 100,000 people shared the infographics through StumbleUpon in the last year.

What can you learn from this lesson? Try to make your products as distinct from each other as possible. And if you do end up with brand confusion, don’t be afraid to re-brand.

Lesson #5: Create an awesome user experience

Most products will be so similar to each other that you need to figure out a way to make them very different. And one of the easiest and less-expensive ways to do that is by creating an awesome user experience. It doesn’t matter if you are selling mopeds or haircuts, you need to make your customers feel like every interaction with you is what makes youdifferent.

Look at the iPhone and how it entered into a crowded market. Cell phones were all basically the same before Apple entered the market. Because Apple’s why is built around “challenging the status quo” they created a user experience that absolutely blew away the competition.

This all started with the iPod. Apple floated a minimum viable productout into the market to see how it would be responded to. People went crazy over the iPod so Apple figured that the iPhone, which would cost more to create, wouldn’t be such a gamble. They were right.

How can you create an awesome user experience? Start by looking at the customers of your competitor and see what they are missing from their experience. And the nice thing about user experience is you can go after big competitors without having their deep pockets.

Lesson #6: Stay edgy

You would never think that a 216-year old whiskey company would try to go after the women’s market, but that’s exactly what Jim Beam did.

The company wants to get more nimble and act like a start-up rather than a huge company. The key to making that change was looking into a market that most of their competitors were neglecting.

Check this out too

What was that market? It was women. Most of the big spirits companies did not give any attention to women, even with products like vodka where women made up half of the market. The thinking was to advertise to the men and the women will follow. In order to stay edgy, Jim Beam decided to treat them as a profitable market.

What the company ended up doing was adding more brands to their product lines, including a margarita variety called Bethenny Click Here! that’s a number one selling brand.

The Website Builder Pro: Your Greatest Potential EVER!

The Website Builder Pro: Your Greatest Potential EVER!: Mark your milestones on the Calendar as we go! Wow, Absolutely Amazing. It is happening compoundingly fast! Pre-Launch and now we just...

Your Greatest Potential EVER!

Mark your milestones on the Calendar as we go!

Wow, Absolutely Amazing. It is happening compoundingly fast!
Pre-Launch and now we just passed the 275,000 subscriber mark. At this pace we may just beat our target of 10 million subscribers first year!
I want to thank you for validating what I knew
to be true. Whenever given the opportunity and mechanism to do so, people are good, kind and supportive.
You do make a difference, imagine the lives you are about to touch. This is your company too if you CHOOSE. It is simple, all you have to do is GIVE. You may not know it yet, but right now you are a part of something that will make major history. The formation of a company that changes more lives than ever in a very short period of time. All moments have led to now!
If you are visionary enough and can learn to trust a little more you will know what win-win means. History!
Why?
We’ll be the first company to go to a Billion dollars in sales in the time frame we do, and it will be done with VALUE given first (it’s sad that this is so unique in our marketplace today).
We will be the single largest most philanthropic company in history. We will be the example to build a company by. Finally, no limitations on you!
Why?
We give first! Value proven! It’s free to join with no forced purchase structure, inventory or capital outlay. Here, you will use your intellectual capital to create value and BE self reliant.
No geographic boundaries. Share where you want, when you want!
We are counter intuitive to business. Matter of fact some of you still think this is too good to be true. Get used to it, Accept a new home!
I will prove it to you. This is true! I am giving a gift and as you know, I have received nothing in advance, it is funded by me. My time is heavily invested (nearly a solid year of 10+ hrs a day and 1000s of hours by others involved, nearly a skillet to the head by my wife).
So here is the deal, we are in pre-launch …
Be patient, full launch is imminent.
It is rather foolish to think at this point this won’t work don’t you think? I mean, first off… you have no risk. I will say, the only risk is if you don’t share this.
We will go to 10 million subscribers rather quick. The value we will provide to you and the world is much much more than just a coupon 50% discount. That was only to get your attention. We have things in the works that will knock your socks off and its all FREE!
Why am I doing this and why should you do more now too?
No matter where you are worldwide, you must realize the heart of your country is in the jobs that come from small business. We will reverse the funnel of outsourcing and rebuild communities all over the world. And the more successfully we do this, the more successful we all are!
Reach out and meet your neighbor. Do you know your neighbor next door (on each side). You should.
Build relationships because that is what makes EVERYTHING POSSIBLE!
Let’s get back to basics. Trust, Integrity, Honesty, Inspiration, Support, Encouragement. All the things You know in your heart to be true and missing.
I see the lights coming on and excitement in people, the Optimism coming back… All from TCA and YOU! This is a major pivotal point in our time; You must realize how important your involvement is.
Thank you.
www.craigwseaton.thecustomeradvatage.com        http://viralcalculator.com

Sign up now and be ready for the launch....I mean really the whole deal is free, if their was a dollar ask for I'll pay it. WIN WIN GUARANTEE...DID YOU PLAY WITH THE VIRAL CALCULATOR? 

 Check it out here................................................and sign up here..................it's a no brainer