Web Marketing Buzz Marketing Blogs

With tens of millions of users (but probably not the purported 100 million), MySpace.com is a force to be reckoned with. Especially when you consider that MySpace apparently drives more traffic to online retailers than MSN Search, according to some recent Hitwise data.

But MySpace is hard for many of us adults to get our heads around. It just doesn’t seem logical: How does it hold the interest of so many young people with short attention spans, despite the fact that the design/usability is so atrocious, the Web page creation platform is so frustratingly restrictive, and it’s chock full of so many profiles that are obviously fake, spam, duplicated, or abandoned?

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Heidi Cohen, author for ClickZ, discusses the latest Advice & Opinions. By & for Marketers. In this section, Cohen gives high-level explanations for “Ten Trends to Drive Traffic and Sales in 2007.”

At top if this list are “social media” outlets and proper “search marketing.” Cohen gains input from Netconcepts’ Founder and President, Stephan Spencer for his expertise on these trends.

Spencer first describes the importance of social networks and their key role in today’s marketing. He goes on to explain the dynamics of search marketing and how companies will need to tap into the Long Tail of natural search if they want to seriously compete in the market place.

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P J Fusco’s unscientific survey shows marketers are still missing the boat on PPC. Selecting only jingles and buzzwords that didn’t include brand names, she decided to see if the big names were putting their money where their mouth is when it comes to the Web. And the results were surprising, says Netconcepts’ PJ Fusco in this article for ClickZ.

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• a showcase for Web 2.0 ‘done right’
• site built upon web standards and accessibility
• easy for visitors to find and compare service providers based on referrals and recommendations from business people and past clients
• ranked search result based on peer reviews and user feedback

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Abny Santicola, Editor, FundRaising Success Advisor, calls on the expertise of Netconcepts’ Founder and President, Stephan Spencer last week at Direct Marketing Association’s (DMA) Annual Conference & Expo in San Francisco. Abny caught up with Spencer after his “Blogs, Podcasts and RSS: New Tools for Customer Acquisition and CRM” conference session.

In this article, Spencer discusses how blogs can serve as great marketing tools for non-profit organizations as well. Spencer also shares his success with, humanitarian organization and personal blog of former President Jimmy Carter, The Carter Center.

Spencer closes with 5 insider-tips for making the most of a blog.

Read this entire article and learn key blog concepts to put your non-profit on the blogosphere map.

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Web content guru Gerry McGovern, author of “Killer Content” - one of the best books on writing copy for the web - says that one of the biggest mistakes companies make in regards to their website content is thinking that customers care one little bit about the company. “Customers care about themselves (their loved ones and their community),” he said in an interview with founder and president of Netconcepts, Stephan Spencer. He went on to add that organizations need to be customer-centric, talk about benefits, and speak the language of the customer.

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Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz has graciously shared 21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic, and there are some gems in there. I’d like to piggyback on a few of Rand’s points:

• 1. Choose the Right Blog Software (or Custom Build) — I’d say that over 95% of the time, WordPress will do the job and will be scalable for future needs. I have yet to come across a client blog project that necessitated a custom-built blog software.
• 2. Host Your Blog Directly on Your Domain — Rand makes a bold statement: “Hosting your blog on a different domain from your primary site is one of the worst mistakes you can make.” I disagree. I can think of numerous examples where the blog is more trusted, more buzzworthy, and/or more linkworthy because it’s at an arms length from the company’s site. Consider the hypothetical example of an insurance conglomerate authoring a blog about getting a healthier lifestyle, in order to attract prospects to sell insurance to. Such a blog at Gettinghealthy.com sounds helpful and unbiased, whereas having it at metlife.com/gettinghealthyblog (remember, hypothetical example… metlife is just used here to illustrate the point) comes off as salesy and self-serving.
• 4. Participate at Related Forums & Blogs — I’d just like to make it clear that you’re not doing this for link juice (most links in blog comments and forum posts have “link condoms” (rel=nofollow tags) automatically added). Instead, you’re doing this to increase your visibility to, and credibility with, bloggers who read those blogs and forums.
• 9. Invite Guest Bloggers — I really like this idea, and I’d like to add my suggestion that you also do phone or Skype interviews of guests and podcast those on your blog.
• 15. Archive Effectively — Rand highlights a tough balancing act: “For search traffic (particularly long tail terms), it can be best to offer the full content of every post in a category on the archive pages, but from a usability standpoint, just linking to each post is far better (possibly with a very short snippet). ” I find the “Optional Excerpt” in WordPress to be invaluable for achieving this balance. The Optional Excerpt is one of the fields in the Write Post form that most bloggers ignore, but if you use it, you can code your non-permalink pages (like your category pages) to display the excerpt instead of the full post or instead of the paragraphs proceeding a “more” tag in your post copy. That’s exactly what we’ve done on my company’s corporate site, which runs on WordPress — for example, all the testimonials listed on our Testimonials tag page display excerpts. That gives you more flexibility to summarize and highlight particular sections or keywords from the full post.
• 16. Implement Smart URLs — Rand says that “just re-writing a ?ID=450 to /450 has improved search traffic considerably on several blogs we’ve worked with.” I would definitely agree with that. We too have evidence that a blog or site with rewritten URLs flows PageRank more efficiently throughout the site. So don’t rest on your laurels if you have a blog with dynamic URLs, even if your blog is fully indexed by the engines. Your pages will rank better if you rewrite the URLs.
• 19. Make Effective Use of High Traffic Days — What a great idea, to watch your traffic and increase your posting frequency and posting quality on days where your traffic is highest! It makes the best use of the traffic spikes. In fact, you might even want to hold back on publishing your very best posts and instead save them for high-traffic days.

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In this article written by Patricia Moore, author for NZ Marketing Magazine, Netconcepts makes the public scene, not for SEO, but for their marketing success.

Moore discusses how companies have had remarkable success in the competitive New Zealand export market. How are companies succeeding in this market? What or, perhaps more importantly, who should companies turn to in order to fuel their global success.

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Have you considered incorporating content partners and marketing partners into your online strategy? For example, partnering with content providers who could augment your own content with additional related content? Or partering with sites whose visitors match your target market?… If, for example, you wanted to reach women online, you could partner with a site like iVillage.com and build a microsite together, then have them promote it through their site and subscription lists.

Think about the sites you advertise on as potential partners. Join forces and create a microsite together and then promote it to a joint captive audience. Or make a deal with them and syndicate some useful content onto their site. For example, you could develop a whole library of useful tips and, rather than doing standard banner ads, you could provide these tips to your partner, who would then fold it with the rest of their content. Et voila!… “Sponsored content”!

Even better if, between the two of you, you can develop some sort of “hook” or viral component, such as a funny video, an addictive game, a downloadable ebook, worksheet, calculator, widget, etc…

Got an example to share of a site where the whole is greater than the sum of the partners? Post a comment!

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