Category: Digital Marketing

There are a number of social networking sites that are announced every month and most of them are forgotten by the end of the next month. Very few of them receive any attention at all and even when they do, they are gradually forgotten. Two exceptions to this rule in recent months are Vine and Pheed. While Vine is a video based iOS app announced by Twitter, Pheed is a full fledged social network that allows you to share media, photos, videos, audio and text. The network was announced late last year and was made public once again in late February. Pheed became immensely popular with teenagers and young adults and quickly became the #1 social networking app to be downloaded on iPhone. Pheed can be used as a mobile application and also on the desktop. It has a very slick and stylish interface and certainly has something in it that will make you lurk around for a little more time than you would normally on any other newer social networking site. Starting to Use Pheed – Step by Step Guide Signing up on Pheed is an easy process. You can either use your Facebook or Twitter account from the mobile application or use your email to register. In order to complete the registration process, you need to subscribe to at least three channels, which are mostly at the moment spare. Pheed offers a Twitter-like profile page, where you can add a short bio and a profile pic along with a background image. You can also choose to set your channel rating to the age group you cater to. If you plan to post adult (not pornography) content, you can choose 17 and above. Similarly, you may choose your own safety filter for the content that you get to see. Pheed also requests you to invite your friends from Twitter, Facebook an email to join Pheed. Just like Twitter or Instagram, you can type tags and usernames in order to find content and people to follow. The choices are many and you should in fact find a number of interesting people and users to follow and interact with. Pheed lets you share what you post on Pheed with your Facebook account. Similarly, you can do the same on Twitter as well. Using your Pheed timeline and filtering the content you see is just as useful. You need to tap the house-shaped icon, which reveals a dropped down of filters for you to choose from. You can choose to view all content or block remixes from appearing in your timeline. A remix is similar to retweeting on Twitter and reblogging on Tumblr. Similarly, you can choose to display only text, audio, photo, video or broadcast from the dropdown menu. There is also a Notifications bubble that lets you know when someone subscribes to your channel or interacts with you. At the moment, you can share pheeds across Facebook, Twitter or email. You may also flag or keep content, depending on how strongly you feel about it. Creating a Pheed is very easy. The interface on the mobile application looks similar to typing a tweet. It lets you add images, video or audio. Moreover, Pheed lets you type 420 characters instead of just 140 on Twitter. What sets Pheed apart is the option to copyright your pheeds. You may click on the little copyright button so that no one can publish your pheeds or content within without your explicit permission. Popularity among Youth Pheed seems to be especially popular among the young. 81% of Pheed’s users are aged between 14 and 25, though the platform is not targeted only at youngsters. One may explain that most youngsters are looking for a space of their won, and Pheed came at the right time to provide an alternate space vis-a-vis Twitter and Facebook, which are more popular among people of all generations. Pheed Has Important Celebrity Friends in Hollywood The popularity of Pheed among teenagers and young adults is also because many celebrities like Acacia Brinley, Pia Mia and others began to use it. We must note that Pheed is based in Los Angeles and the founders have noted that they have a lot of friends in Hollywood, which also explains why many celebrities have begun to use Pheed. While Hollywood connections may have helped Pheed to garner support from teen celebrities, we must not ignore the fact that it is a very well designed platform which is already the #1 application in recent weeks on App Store. This popularity should be enough for us to pay more attention to Pheed before others grab the opportunity to do the same. In fact, now may be the right time to grab your Pheed handles before someone else takes it away. Pheed Is Popular Among Creative People Apart from youngsters, Pheed seems to be especially popular among the creative types. It is being increasingly used by filmmakers, musicians, actors and designers. The network’s slick interface and ease of sharing not only on Pheed but also cross post on Facebook and Twitter alone (without actually sending a Pheed) makes it ever more popular not only as a social networking site, but also as a social networking tool that can be used to handle Twitter and Facebook. Pheed is already one of the top apps in almost 30 countries across the world, and the number is only growing steadily. Its popularity depends on its ease of use, speed, slick interface and the ability to share photos, video, text and audio. Paid Subscriptions and Copyrights Pheed lets people monetize their social status and content, something that no other social networking site has done so far. While it may sound gimmicky and you may wonder why anyone would pay money to read someone’s social posts, it makes a lot of business and commercial sense to not only Pheed but also to users to opt for such services. We can expect a lot of investigative journalists, celebrities, politicians and company

In the past few years LinkedIn has proved to be a lifeline for recruiters and job seekers. It is believed that every second two profiles are created on this social networking site and every user wants to be viewed by potential recruiters. In this hope users try what not to make the most of their profiles and in the process they often end up bungling up. This platform can very well be used to one’s advantage and can provide a significant boost to one’s career, all one needs is a little guidance to optimize results from this social networking site. As we know, LinkedIn mostly focuses on working professionals and helps them to showcase their skills, expertise, experience and academics qualifications, which can help in roping in the best suited job opportunities. This is one social networking site which has the most promising results, but to reap the benefits you need to make your profile as effective as possible. It is not a myth that recruiters spend long hours scanning and skimming profiles on LinkedIn, this social networking site is frequented by recruiters and is probably the only social networking site which recruiters are allowed to access from their workplace without any hassles. Here is a list of few quick tips which can increase traffic to your LinkedIn profile exponentially and help you in picking the best possible option from the surge of job opportunities. 1.Ensure that Your Profile Is Complete It is the primary and yet the most important step to direct traffic to your profile. Incomplete profiles never surface and hence are never picked by recruiters. It is very crucial for you to fill in all the necessary details to ensure the completeness of a profile. Sometimes a trivial section like uploading your picture can render your profile incomplete if not filled in. Remember, every section is vital and needs to be filled in, by doing so you will not only improve the appearance of your profile, but also improve the results you expect from it. 2. Use the Headline of Your Profile to Your Advantage In a typical LinkedIn profile the headline shows up right below your name and briefly focuses on what you are associated with and what you want to associate with. It is advisable to add keywords to your profile headline so that it easily gets picked by the search engine. While adding keywords, remember the idea is to just add keywords and not a prolix speech, strictly maintain brevity in this section. Being greedy may help you get that extra slice of cake but in this section it may prove extremely detrimental for your profile. No recruiter would want to read a long-winded headline, it should only reflect the essence of your professional being. Another approach that can help you score well with recruiters is to add descriptive key words to highlight your multiple current roles. For e.g. Author: Vogue, CEO@ WritersSay, Specialist in Search, Content marketing and social media. 3. Share Your Relevant Past Experience LinkedIn provides an excellent platform to exhibit your professional and academic accomplishments. There is also a section which gives you the opportunity to speak about your company and your role in that company, this space can be utilized to focus on how you have grown in an organisation as a professional and at the same time manifests your expertise to the recruiters.  This is the space to fill in the details and the intricacies of your job you would like to project. LinkedIn gives you an option of providing the job details of all your past jobs thereby multiplying the chances of exhibiting your professional expertise.  Ladle out as much relevant information as you can in this section for the designations have worked in. 4. Never Skip the Summary Section It may appear to be unreasonable and unnecessary as it only summarizes your entire profile, but this section is way more important that you think it is. Recruiters and viewers seldom spend enough time on your profile to go through the intricate details mentioned in it, most of them skim through the summary section to get a rough idea or a gist of your past professional experience. It is important as just any other section, as it not only projects your past experience but can be used to give out additional relevant information as well. Here you can mention your achievements and your future goals. In this section you can also include links and direct your viewers to the WebPages you want them to view, they could be created by you or could be reflecting the work you were associated with. You can also use this feature to direct visitors to view the intelligent presentations made by you, a presentation has a more lasting impact than a prolix speech. 5. Get Your Skills Endorsed The skills you mention on your LinkedIn profile can easily pass for bluff unless you get them endorsed. Getting your skills endorsed increases the credibility of your skills; in turn it increases the credibility of your profile and makes it more believable.  People who endorse your skills are ideally people you have worked with or have been associated with and when they endorse your skill their names show up against the skill they endorsed. Usually it takes an endorsement to get endorsed, a give and take relationship that was defined by ancient LinkedIn users. To have others vouch for your skills makes your profile more reliable and recruiters pick such profiles like hotcakes. 6.  A Good Recommendation Is a Valuable Testimonial You can have your connections on LinkedIn write a good recommendation for you, it is another parameter recruiters take into consideration while evaluating your profile.  Make sure that your recommendation has what you want to project in your profile. Since it is usually asked for, you can even express what you are looking for in a recommendation to your connections. Putting words in someone else’s mouth here won’t be a bad idea after all. It

Customers form the very backbone of businesses and they constitute the very essence of a flourishing business. Indeed, they should be treated well so that it paves the way to a prospering business. With over 175 million registered users, Twitter is a place where small businesses thrive by connecting with a huge number of followers. The main goal of small businesses should be to get acquainted with their followers and retain them. If you neglect your followers, you could lose them. This exodus of people to greener territories can be more or less attributed to a host of factors- as we see in the next section. 5 Tips to Avoid Alienating Twitter Followers 1. Never Stop Connecting and Building a Relationships with Followers There is nothing worse than having an official Twitter account and constantly churning out marketing tweets. It is important to engage with your consumers for they are people and not just a Twitter statistic. Offer discounts, seek feedback for your products and services and indulge followers when they speak highly about your business. Offer a discount, retweet when they have something personal and happy about themselves to say and basically, be cordial. Sometimes, you could share some anecdotes, comment on celebrities, news material and other news items trending on Twitter. 2. Build a Specific Target Audience and Nurture It For example, if teenagers or college students are targeted, the posts need to have an amount of ‘coolness quotient’. On the other hand, Twitter uses SMS lingo for sure, but that does not mean there can be mistakes in the lingo. It doesn’t go well with most followers and you will not be taken seriously. You need to groom your brand to meet some specific requirements. Understand your target audience and limit tweets that can come across as off-putting. 3. Stop Being Offensive Never Engage in offensive comments, ridiculing people or rude behavior: This can get you mired in a controversy. Be outspoken but do not be nasty, which can shun followers and kick up a storm, as it can be detrimental to your brand. It is also wise to refrain from posting sensitive information which can offend certain groups. Recently, Olivia Wilde was at the receiving end of numerous hate tweets from Justin Bieber’s beliebers. The trigger, according to her, was a harmless suggestion to her ‘brother’ to stop roaming topless on the streets, as seen in a recent picture of him on the internet. In another incident, a comment made by a boy on Twitter did not go down well with an emir, who awarded him a 5 year jail term for insulting him, in the neighboring country of Kuwait. Make sure you live in a safe place if you want to extend your freedom to your Twitter channel. 4. Be Grateful Write a few congratulatory tweets when required. If someone retweets something about you in admiration or is in awe of you, saying that you have done a great thing do reply with a thanks. This, if not done, can end up with you being typecast as arrogant or rude. This could be less than amusing to your consumers/followers and they will eventually click on the ‘Unfollow’ button. Be respectful of the time and attention showered upon you by your followers, as they surely deserve it from you. Spare them a thought. Not doing so is a sure way of alienating your followers. 5. Do Not Be an Automaton While automating some amount of social posts is unavoidable, do not do it flagrantly. Too much of automation can be a big turn-off to your consumers. You should be communicating a lot with your consumers for that is what a social platform is all about. If you rely a lot on timed tweets, other than in emergency or on weekends, your followers will eventually desert you. You must also not send automated tweets such as “Let’s see how many likes for this pic”. This won’t do any good. Such begging of likes and comments can alienate your followers. If you really want to retain your followers, keep a tab on the statistical data accumulated over a period of time. This can tell you a lot about consumer behavior. Being nice, polite and courteous and finally, being real will ensure that you will not alienate your followers. Anything that seems to sale-sy or unreal will alienate your followers and that is not what we want from a successful digital marketing campaign.

YouTube is the best medium to share videos and engage with audience who share similar interests. It is no wonder then, that marketing strategies involve utilizing YouTube and increasing subscribers’ to one’s channels. After Google, YouTube is now the second largest search engine. While Google dominated the Internet when it comes to looking for information on anything, YouTube has grown much more popular as people would rather listen to and watch than read and understand. Making use of YouTube in the best possible way is not known to many. There are a few ‘must do’ actions to market your video the best possible way, which will help you reach out to scores of people with similar tastes or people who are plain interested in your video. Gaining publicity on YouTube is not only easier, but there are wide opportunities stemming from making your online presence entertaining and enlightening. Two reasons why it is necessary to have a presence on YouTube: 1. It’s Free Apart from the time taken for you to construct a video and make it entertaining, it is simply free. Unlike a billboard or a TV ad, you can post your video on YouTube and even edit it by making additions whenever you desire to. You can also keep adding any number of videos in your name, creating a niche for yourself. 2. Creativity as its Best: You can get all creative and add your touch to the video, ensuring the message you want to deliver is portrayed the best way possible. As many people prefer watching to reading, a video is now the best option. Making it creative will also excite people and urge them to let it go viral without being asked to. 3. Free to choose your Target Audience: If you desire to showcase your video to a certain set of people around the globe, you are most welcome to do so by using the right set of key words that would direct your video to the audience you choose. Once you have posted a video, you cannot just sit back and expect it to gain a million views. Simply posting it might fetch you a handful of viewers, you need to do a bit more to ensure your video is among the popular videos viewed. You will need to build your own set of followers or subscribers (YouTube terms) who because of your video content have become ardent fans. These fans/followers/subscribers will watch, comment and share your video with others simply because they like what you have put up. A few simple ways to get these followers to follow you: 1. Ensure Regularity: Keep creating new content and make it available with a set list of people, informing them that they have something new to look forward. By creating a cycle, they will know what to expect when. If you get a poor feedback on any one posted video, go back and review your work. Make sure that your video is interesting, exciting and has something new to offer to your viewers. 2. Ask for Subscribers: Don’t imagine your viewers to know what you are thinking. Some might assume that you do not like your video to go viral and hence would enjoy it and keep it to themselves. So, ask your viewers to subscribe the video by clicking the ‘Subscribe’ button placed right above your video. Tell them why you would need your video to be subscribed and even tell them how they can do so. 3. Use Annotations: Annotations are those multicolored notes that you see on a person’s YouTube video. Unfortunately this tool has been overused. Using it to the most of your advantage can give you the best results.  Add a ‘speech bubble’ as an annotation placing it directly under the subscribe button. Do this to all your existing and old videos 4. Publicize your YouTube Widget: Ensure people know that you have a YouTube channel going. Provide a direct link to your video on your blog, email and any other personal communication tool that you use. 5. Show your Interests: Share with people what you like also showing them that you appreciate another person’s work as much as you would want them to appreciate yours. You can do this by adding on your YouTube page other’s video links you like and have shared All these are beginners list to get you quite a number of subscribers, building your publicity even when you are fast asleep.

Google AdWords and other PPC methods can seem easy and understandable. When months pass and you need an audit done for all your PPC accounts, you may end up doing a biased job that supports your own work as a business or miss out on important deficits and lacking in the campaign which an outsider could have noticed. With that in mind, in this article, let us discuss what PPC account audits are, who should do them and when they should be conducted. Why Should PPC Accounts Be Audited Regularly? PPC accounts need to be audited regularly so that you understand and reevaluate the bigger picture in which your PPC campaigns are embedded into. There may be opportunities that you may otherwise miss, or you may be sticking on to campaigns that are no longer useful. A third person’s point of view is always important and crucial for us to understand how PPC accounts are performing. Most of the times, a company is faced with the question of how often they should perform an audit in order to understand the larger picture. The answer to that question is rather simple. It should be at least 4 times a year. A quarterly analysis helps you to correlate your PPC campaigns with quartile sales data. A year end analysis in the same way will help you to gather a larger picture. Importance of Third Party PPC Audits A good third party audit helps you to quickly identify problem areas when your budget does not align with your overall goals. An audit will quickly tell you if that PPC campaign you ran during the festive season was worth the trouble or not. Based on that, you can repeat the campaign next year or choose not to repeat it ever again. Whether you choose to hire an outsider or get someone from your company to perform the audit, you should ensure that it is not the same person who runs the PPC campaign who also gets to do the PPC audit. The end result will invariably be colored and biased. Instead, hire a consultant or an agency that can perform the audit from an unbiased and objective perspective. It helps you to get a third party to point out flaws and assess a PPC campaign for what it really is. If you do not wish to share your information with outsiders and do not want a third person audit, you can choose someone from your own company who does not work with the PPC team. The idea is to get an outside professional’s valued opinion regarding your PPC campaign. Problems with In-house PPC Audits: Lack of Objectivity and Honesty The problem with in-house audits is that it is easy to postpone dates and be satisfied that everything is going according to the plan, when it actually is not. Self congratulatory audits lead PPC campaigns nowhere and ultimately, it results in a lot of money that is not well spent. The in-house professional who conducts the audit may not make all the suggestions he or she thinks need to be made, because they may believe their suggestions may not followed. The end result is an audit that is not honest, objective and unbiased. With this in mind, it is always a good idea to hire someone from outside or at least someone who does not work closely with people responsible with PPC accounts. You may save a lot of money by hiring someone from your own company to do the audit, but it just will not help you in the long run. An audit will tell you how your PPC is actually running and how it ran during specific periods. For this reason alone, it is important to engage your content development and marketing teams when the audit is finally out. It helps them to make better choices and write copy that is more effective, and also choose keywords that are more effective in PPC campaigns. An audit helps you to gain insight that you did not possess earlier and help you to look at things from a new perspective. An honest and unbiased PPC audit can breathe in new life into your PPC campaigns.

As the number of banner ads is increasing, it has created a situation among Internet users, called “banner blindness”. Banner ads which are glaring, in the face, congested with content or even too repetitive will be avoided and in fact ignored. This is something a marketer has to take care of. There are certain tips and tricks which we can employ in order to make banner ads more successful. Before discussing them, let us understand the three different types of banner advertising used in the World Wide Web. Pay per Click: In this method the host website on which you have placed your ad, gets his share of profits as soon as someone clicks on your banner ad. Cost per Impression / Cost per 1000 impressions: For each set of 1000 visitors to your ad, the host company is paid a certain discussed amount. Pay per Sale: The host company is paid depending on the number of sales generated through the banner ad placed on his site. Depending on the product which is advertised and the type of host site/publisher, a combination of these can be used to suit each one’s requirements. In this article, we will discuss a few key points that will result in a successful banner ad creating much needed awareness. Few Basic Tips to Create Successful Banner Ads: Research Well: There are plenty of banner ads out there, observing them will give us a chance to learn from their mistakes. Notice how and where they are placed, how much of content is included, the type of message, color combinations and such details. This will give you a fair idea of how your banner ad needs to look to attract consumers’ attention. Keep It Clutter Free: Make sure your banner ad is clutter free. An ad with too many images and text will distract the mind from the actual message losing out on the sole purpose of the banner ad. It is best to advertise a single product or service on your banner ad and link the ad to the particular page on the website. Choose Luring Text: Attract consumers’ attention with the messaging on the ad. Short and witty messages will do the trick. Also make sure that the font size is big. Medium font and a short message will definitely attract consumers’ attention to your ad. A Light File: You may or may not have size constraints but having a low file size banner ad, will work in your favor. For an average banner ad 45 to 70 kb is a good size that will load faster ensuring its visibility to consumers. Customize your Banner ad: Make your banner ad the prettiest amongst the lot. Colour your banner ad to go in line with the host site. Since, we are talking ads on the internet, it is easy to change the colors of the banner to suit its context. Place it Right: Your banner ad needs to be positioned at a place that will attract a lot of eye balls. You would have created your ad keeping in mind a target audience, so ensure the positioning of your ad at a place where this target group will most likely visit. For this you can use Google Analytics, which tells you where your website traffic is being drawn from. You can find this under the ‘Traffic Sources’ button. Keep a Watch: Ensure that you have something exciting to offer to your visitor who has just clicked on your banner ad. The page you link the ad to should be interesting and informative to turn your visitor into a customer. Your website/store and your banner need to work in tandem to get most sales. One way of doing this is to track your success through banner ads, find out your Return on Investment (ROI), which means to see how many of the clicks have turned into sales. This will give you a better picture of which banner ad is attracting sales and which isn’t, helping you to reposition the ads which are not attracting the desired attention. Banner Ads are a sure shot way of driving traffic to one’s website directly. Looking at the amount of time people spend on the internet, banner ads have proved to be a very successful way of garnering the right attention.

A PPC account manager handles all things related to a Pay-Per-Click campaign and ensures that the money that is spent on PPC campaigns is translated into profits and revenue in the short and long terms. The reason why companies must focus more on PPC account managers more than the immediate campaigns is because it is the managers who run and monitor these campaigns and those who have the best managerial skills will also be the most successful ones. The Need for a Good PPC Account Manager Managers who are well acquainted with PPC accounts previously will be able to ensure that goals are met on a priority basis. They will know how to cross off to-do lists when they are not required and they will also know how to focus on priority tasks instead of just crossing them off. The idea is to hire an accounts manager who knows how to differentiate between getting rid of unwanted tasks and pushing less priority tasks to the corner so that important tasks can be handled immediately. Good PPC account managers should also be able to seek help when they need, whether in-house or outside. They should know whom to contact, when to contact and why they should contact anyone at all in the first place. A Well-balanced PPC Account Manager Can Increase the Success of Campaigns Ideally, your PPC account manager should be a calm and well balanced person who knows that reacting strongly to negative situations will only lead to further failures in PPC campaigns. A PPC account manager who knows how to deal with good and bad situations when it comes to PPC campaigns will be better able to turn advertising money into long term profits. PPC Campaigns Can Be Affected by Short Term Changes A PPC campaign can go wrong within a few hours. Considering how fickle minded Internet users are, and how keywords are either in focus or not in focus depending on various points in a day, a PPC account manager should understand the importance of immediacy. Thus, he or she should be able to spot difficulties and issues within 24 hours of them happening. Fixing issues within a span of few hours will always help account mangers to rectify issues before they blow out of proportions and cause huge losses to the campaign or to the company itself. Pay per click advertising changes with time, just as Internet evolves over a period of time. Personal Qualities of a Good PPC Account Manger Managers who are willing to learn, adapt to new situations and train themselves to be open-minded are the ones who will achieve the most success. PPC accounts need people who are malleable and ready to be subjected to rigor, scrutiny, stress and failures. All may not go well with a PPC campaign and a good PPC account manger should know this. He or she should be able to identify when things are not going well within a few hours and chart out plans that will effectively target the root problems. A good manager will be able to understand the nuances of keywords and keyword allocation. He or she should be good at linguistics and at playing with words. This helps the manager to pick keywords that will particularly fetch good results when it comes to targeting various market segments. While he or she need not be a copywriter, he or she should be able to think like one. A good PPC account manager should also be good at social media, public relations and computer skills. A manager who can understand and use a little bit o coding can prove to be a valuable asset to a PPC campaign. With so many qualities required for a good PPC account manager, it shouldn’t come to us as a surprise that it is quite difficult to hire outstanding and effective managers. However, with a little patience and a few rounds of interviews, one should be able to spot that PPC account talent which is elusive and difficult to find. Once a good PPC account manager is hired, one can rest assured that the campaign will last long and will reap a lot of benefits.

The amount of trust and publicity and the speed at which Word-of-Mouth (WOM) strategy can garner success is unmatched by any other marketing tool. If you analyze it carefully, you will realize that Word-of-Mouth is no marketing tool at all. In fact it is a natural. When a business is genuine and is dedicated to its work, the word-of-mouth is an expected thing. WOM can be attained through many powerful techniques that ultimately lead to the customer talking about the brand’s products. The best part of WOM is that it works only when the information going around is genuine. As long as word of mouth marketers are honest they will earn the respect of their customers, but even a pinch of deception detected will result in backfire. Here are a few WOM techniques that would take your brand a long way: 1. Deliver as Promised; Better Yet- Over Deliver: Make sure you deliver as promised. When a customer pays you for your product or service, you better deliver as mentioned, keeping upto his expectations. To add more flavor try and over-deliver. If an online product is said to be delivered in 7 days, reduce the time to 4 days and witness the customer’s joy.   By over delivering, you are doing something which is more than expected and this naturally makes the customer want to talk about you.  The same applies if you under deliver, not one but two more people will hear about you not delivering; hence always make sure you are never late. 2. Make Sure you Follow the Rules: If you have a few set rules in place, make sure you follow it to the T, irrespective of penalizing the person violating the rules. By standing up for your brand, you will make your customers value what you believe in, automatically making your customers follow the cue. 3. Acknowledge the Effort: If you see your customer has said something nice about you, make sure you acknowledge it. Recognizing your customer’s efforts for something he has done will lure him to do more again. Suppose you have a video on YouTube and you find that a particular customer has shared it the maximum, helping you increase your viewership, do the unexpected by gifting him a voucher or something from the brand. If you have just started your business, the ball game of WOM will be a little different. You would have to start introducing your business to people, double checking that the message sent across is right. Along with the various other marketing tools, WOM is a must and a quicker way of garnering awareness about your business. Coupled with the above tips which you can follow at a later stage, here are a few tips for beginners:  1. Friends are your First Target:  Though you might be hesitant on reaching out to your friends to spread the word, they are the best people who you can trust to send across the right message. 2. The Give and Take Policy: If you are looking at some response from others, make sure you have done the same. Show your support or respond to another person confirming that you have recognized their effort. By showing you care, the others will follow suit and you will see responses on your page in no time. 3. Create Excitement: Your business is your baby, make sure you create some excitement around it, targeting the right set of people. Spread the message across using all the available social media options, but make sure to never spam people with an overdose of mails and posts. By sounding and seeming excited, the excitement will be contagious and will spread along. 4. Strike the Right Chord: Professional and social networks be in it any field has an established set of people writing about the topic. Find these people, contact them and build a relation with them.  The works of these people would have already been recognized by a wide spread of people you would want to reach out to. So making these individuals write about your work creates maximum WOM. WOM also happens to be the most effective and sustainable forms of marketing with a high ROI turn over. The irony of WOM is that because it is such a powerful tool, getting it right, though not a struggle needs more dedication to get it right!

It is time to accept that there are only a few big players in the world of social networking and they include LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. To an extent, we can include Tumblr, Pinterest and Reddit. However, the way everyone used to gush about Google+ back in 2011 made us feel that it was going to be the next big thing. That never happened and Google+ seems to be even more elusive than ever before. Google+: The Statistics against Twitter Marketers continue to click on that Google+ button when sharing content and make sure that a copy of content is shared on Google+ too, along with other mandatory services. For how long this strategy is necessary and why it is necessary are debatable. Google+ receives a monthly traffic of 20 million, whereas Twitter receives a monthly traffic of 40 million. On the surface, this number appears really good and we may be tempted to believe that Google+ is at least half as important as Twitter is. The reality is very different though. Average time on site per month for Twitter is 114 minutes where as for Google+ it is only 3.3 minutes. This shocking dissimilarity tells us how important or unimportant Google+ is. Is Google+ Supported and Sustained Only by Technophiles and Marketers? Most people use Google+ because they think it should be used and because they think content must be shared over there too. Whatever content is shared on Google+ is also shared on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Honestly, marketers only duplicate content on Google+ because it is so easy to do so. According to Matt Anderson, Google+ is artificially sustained by marketers who keep sharing links only because they think it is important. The message does not reach anyone important and all that activity that marketers invest in Google+ is really going down the drain. The Advantages of Google+ Lie in SEO We must also consider a few advantages of Google+. Google+ is after all, a social media venture by the most important Internet company in the world, Google. This alone makes us stand up and take notice of Google+ no matter how useless it is. Anything that is shared on Google+ also becomes easily searchable on Google’s search engine and has a positive correlation with good SEO practices. On one hand, there is no real audience that we can interact with on Google+ other than other savvy technophiles and marketers. However, content that is shared on Google+ seems to be indexed by Google easily and there may also be a positive relationship between high search engine ranking and Google+ engagement. This alone makes Google+ important for marketers to stick with, at least for the moment. As marketers and business owners, we cannot afford to ignore even a straw if it somehow offers tangible benefits. Google+ does offer benefits. It may not be a social network in the real sense but sharing content on Google+ has an effect on the way your website is ranked in Google. Thus, for the moment, it may be a good idea to continue sharing content on Google+ and make sure that it is not completely ignored. The Future of Google+ and What Marketers Must Do A day may come when Google will finally pull the plug from Google+ all by itself. Until; that day arrives, we shall have to continue to do what we are already doing, and that includes sharing content on Google+. To answer the question if Google+ is still alive, or if it is dead, we should assume that it is on life support. It has been on life support ever since it was born and it will continue to be on life support until Google has the money to do so. We do not ignore living people even if they are on life support, do we? Likewise, we cannot and we must not ignore Google+ until is finally dead, which it is not at the moment. Looking forward, marketers will need to concentrate more on the 3 big social networking sites, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Nevertheless, Google+ will continue to be an important SEO strategy as long as the site continues to exist.

The first thing that enters our mind when we say ‘Email Marketing’ is spam. Ever since email came into existence, users have been bombarded by spammers, so much so that it’s almost been more than a decade that built-in anti spam software automatically divert suspected spam email to a designated folder. Most of us do not bother to check it and life still goes on. However, email marketing still remains an attractive way to target customers and clients and it can be very successful if you learn how to market your message in a non-intrusive manner. Here are some tips to make sure that you succeed in Email Marketing. 1. Build Trust and Reputation The only way to make sure that your email marketing campaign is not vilified and sent directly to a spam folder is by making sure that you build trust. You would need to make a list of email addresses of people who fall right into the target audience. This list should not include people who are even remotely not related to your products and services. Buying email addresses can be disastrous. Getting help from social media experts to gather each email address manually is a better idea than making a list of bulk email addresses. In order to build trust, you should also provide a way to unsubscribe from your emails. 2. Content Tips Your text should always be written in a notepad and pasted into the email. It should not be written in colored fonts or font styles that are not common. The text should not be more than 300-400 words in length. The copy should be very professional yet personal. This balance can be achieved if you hire a professional copywriter. A copywriter would be able to write excellent email marketing copy which does not look spammy and will get higher conversion. If you are selling SEO services, do not let the SEO professional write the copy. Get a copywriter to write that! 3. Avoid Images Images should be avoided as email services and web companies have begun to believe that image-based emails are mostly spam. Avoid using graphics within the body of your email. In fact, stripped down emails that only have basic text and your contact details along with an option to unsubscribe from your emails should be the format that you should use always. 4. Be Relevant This is something that can happen only when you understand your target audience and your own products and services. Each email can be personalized for specific groups and sent. In fact, social media can help a lot in tracking the owners of those email addresses.     5. Use Social Media Tools With the help of social media tools, you can easily learn what each individual likes or prefers and format your email accordingly. Unless you are relevant, you are at risk of being sent to the spam folder! Social Media tools like SocialBro, Buffer, HootSuite and others can give very important insights about the people in your email list. 6. Require a Sign Up It is important to get more information about your audience. If you are offering exclusive discounts or some sort of benefits for those who click on your email marketing copy, require them to sign up. This is probably the best way to build relationships. When you ask them to sign up, you will also be able to collect information about their date of birth, marital status, interest, hobbies, lifestyle choices, travel preferences and other such details. 7. Build Your Referrals There is nothing better than a happy customer marketing your company to his or her friends. Genuinely work towards making your customer happy and offer him benefits and discounts for referring your business to others. This can be done non-intrusively through email marketing. All that you would need to do is stay in touch with the customer once your lead is converted. It doesn’t matter whether the customer is going to buy again or not. However, it is important for you to maintain that relationship so that he refers your products and services to others. This relationship building can be as simple as sending birthday cards to offering gifts and discounts time to time.