How to Use Twitter for Your Business

TwitterBirdIs your business on Twitter? Well if not you better get started. Write 140 characters in a tweet and you are going. Last time I read about it Twitter had 500 million members – sending around 65 million tweets every day. So yes your business should get started now and get in touch with all theses people.

But remember – there are a lot of differences between the social media platforms. You cannot establish or engage people the same way on Twitter as you do on Facebook or LinkedIn. Let me tell you about some of the unique aspects of Twitter. And yes – also how you manage it and make effectively communicating to your potential customers.

Are you ready? Okay coffee in your cup right? Music on? (Yes yes yes play some Sting or Paul McCartney)

 

How to get followers

If you only have 1 follower (your mother) or 10 or even maybe 100 your marketing communication will not work. You need followers. Your readers can search your content – they are all public searchable. Your followers is your community, and they are the people you want to engages.

If you are very popular like – Charlie Sheen or Lady Gaga, you don’t have to do much. You will have millions of followers instantly. But if you are like me (well okay I admit it – I am not Charlie Sheen lol) – you will have to do a little work first.

The normal way to get followers on Twitter is to follow somebody and then many of them will follow you back. Also click on the “who to follow” link suggestions. You can also do some marketing for your twitter account on your normal website or blog. Remember also to use your e-mail distribution list. When you write an email put your Twitter address just under your name. Make sure everybody knows you have this twitter account.

There is a free tool called TweetDeck which is a very powerful tool for twitter. It can help you to organize and schedule your tweets. With TweetDeck will let you view and manage a lot of your different social media accounts like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Google buzz and Foursquare.

 

tweetdeck

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So its a great tool to post updates to various connected social networks. You can also manage several Twitter accounts and monitor them all at once. You definitely have to try this tool.

A tool like Tweet Adder software could help you a lot. Well I do have some more tricks to get many more customers. Read my article here about how to get followers – You have a Twitter account but no traffic from Twitter?

 

How to engage your audience

You will have to know the basic of Twitter to get it going. Get to know the best practices – like direct messaging, “@”, replies, and “retweeting”. You can send a direct message to a follower of yours.

You can just type in the letter “d” in front of their user name in your tweet. Then its only your receiver that can read it. You can also use “@” when you replies to somebody. Maybe when you make a comment to a tweet. If you really love a tweet, you can choose “retweet” just by including the letters RT at the beginning of your tweet.

All these different kind of tweets makes your audience noticing you. When you are retweeting something, remember to add something to the tweet. Keep the conversation going. After this you can make a Group Tweet which will enable you to communicate with a lot of people in a group.

 

Don’t use slogans 

Maybe the biggest mistake business are making when they start communicating on Twitter is to use their normal old-fashioned marketing. Maybe using their slogans like some kind of a billboard, or maybe the headlines from a printed ad.

But you have to engage your audience with your thoughts and make a conversation with your audience. Social media is all about engaging in the conversation. Its not the old-fashioned marketing !! Social media is all about conversation right? And a conversation is a 2-way talk. Not 1-way talk.

So make sure your tweets provide value to keep your audience interested in you and your business. Make retweets to keep the conversation going. Try to make your tweets entertaining, witty, original. You must position yourself as an expert in your field. Be sure the audience and see your personality.

 

Twitter

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Only 140 characters

You only have 140 characters in a tweet. So if you have a long webpage address you can say much right? The solution is to use services like www.Bit.ly or www.TinyURL.com. Here you can put in your long address and you will get a shorter one back (amazing right).

I use www.Bit.ly for my tweets.

 

Bitly

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you are using www.Bit.ly you will get some additional value by gathering some valuable metrics which you can use to monitor the success of your tweets. You can check how many clicks any of your shortened links get, and also some information about where in the world you get the most action (this can give you some good information for your business. Where are the people most interested in your business – right?)

 

Software that can help you

I will tell you a secret about Twitter. Did you know you can do much more with Twitter than just type in 140 characters? What about pictures? Well you can start trying out software like TwitPic  or Yfrog. Then you can send photos or video clips via Twitter. That will engage your audience I promise you. Now you don’t have to tell people what is happening around you – you can show it in a video 🙂

I want to do pictures on my Twitter account too now… Wow I get inspired myself now… Love it.

Well that was all about pictures. Another great thing you can do is polls. Try to use a service like twtpool. Or you can use chat rooms like Nurph. If you are standing out from the crowed, you will get much more attention. And your audience will start to put more attention to your tweets.

You can also integrate your Twitter account with other software location-based services like Foursquare. Then people will know where you are. People in that area will get curious and you will have their attention to.

No no no no I am not done yet… Much more to come. Still ready? The coffee is still hot?

Have you ever heard about Klout. I really love this. How good are you doing with your tweets – do you know? Are you good at engaging people? How much influence do you have on your audience? Well with Klout you will find out.

 

klout

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I know my score is 33.. But well I am not Charlie Sheen – I just told you right?

A fantastic tool is Timely. It will take all your past tweets and it will estimate what time of day your audience favored them most. And with this knowledge it will auto-schedules your future tweets according to this (I am amazed).

 

Hash tags
Do you know about hash tags?

Well its the # symbol followed by a keyword. This hash tag makes it much easier to search for your tweets. Again you can use TweetDeck but also a tool like www.hastags.org.

A very common hash tag on Twitter is the #FF which you can include on Fridays together with the name of the account you are following. A golden rule is to reply back to say thank you when somebody is writing #FF to one of your tweets. This is a great way to get the attention of new potential new followers.

Another way to use hast tags is to tweet about a topic while it’s popular. So this is what you can do. First you will have to set up a Google Alert (http://www.google.com/alerts) to your email Inbox. Then you will know what it’s going on, and what people are talking about, and writing about regarding your topic. So make a tweet about an upcoming event, or what is hot in your topic. So if you are in the business of cars you can put in the hash tag @cars in your tweets. (I will start putting SEO into my tweets from now on).

 

Many people are like-minded

You know many of the people that will follow you are like-minded. They have a blog or a website or a small business and want followers like you. So remember that not everybody is hanging around just waiting for your golden tweets.

Well I am sure they are all waiting for my tweets of course lol.

A great way to check your followers is using Klout  or PeerIndex. Then you will have an idea of how many of your followers are actively engaged.

When you have enough followers you will have to change your strategy – and not just following back. Then it’s time to let your Twitter account speak for itself. Then it’s time to let the word of mouth build quality followers. But you still have to post great engaging tweets 🙂
Twitter is not a miracle

Unless you are Lady Gaga or Charlie Sheen don’t expect Twitter to be a miracle for your business. Twitter is a great tool for your marketing. For engaging your audience. To get into conversation. So you can say it’s a little miracle. But it will not give you 2 million dollars from day one… Lol…

You will have to get to know Twitter. How can it help you. How do you want to use it.

But I tell you – all your competitors are here.. So if you are not you are already loosing future market shares. Do it right and Twitter is a very very very powerful tool

Okay.. I know the music has stopped already. I am going to put some Stevie Wonder in my CD player now. Was that 8 golden rules. I am not sure if I wrote 12. Hmm next time I will make the article a little shorter. Lol.

 

FREE Complete SeoCustomer Guide 2011

Get the FREE Complete SeoCustomer Guide 2011. In this guide you can get all the articles from 2011 in one PDF. Most of the articles from 2011 is no more online here on this blog, but you can still use the articles to get higher ranking and more traffic to your website 🙂

Remember to add me to your Google+ circles too. I appreciate that 🙂 thx.

All the best to you all
Henrik
//

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How to check your ranking – free software

One of the most important things to do when you do SEO is to get a higher ranking right?

 

But if you want to get a higher ranking you have to check your ranking to see if all your efforts are working. Yes yes yes I know.. Also if you want to keep your boss happy. So lately I have been looking out for a great ranking checker program or tool.

Let me show you just a few of them – so you can get inspired. And yes I want to start with a free one. One I just discovered here a couple of days ago.

 

FreeMonitorForGoogleFree Monitor for Google
I am so amazed. I just wish I knew this tool way back. Very easy to use. And one thing I really love is that you can put the setting to your country. Free Monitor for Google supports about 50 regional Google data centers. Google web rankings may vary significantly depending on data centers. If your site is on top in one country, it may rank lower in other countries. So if you (like me) want to check www.Google.dk (from Denmark) you can do that too. And yes – of course – you can also check Google.com.

Currently supported countries: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Costa Rica, Cuba, Denmark, Ecuador, Fiji, Finland, France, Germany, Guatemala, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Luxemburg, Malaysia, Malta, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Panama, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Senegal, Seychelles, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, United Kingdom, USA.

Free Monitor for Google is a free search engine position software designed for SEO specialists and webmasters. But if you are working in marketing you can (of course) use it too. Free Monitor for Google sends a query to Google and shows you a position of your site by your target keywords and also how well your competitors are doing. It keeps statistics for several URLs and several lists of keywords.

Try it now, it is free! Just add your keywords and you are going 🙂 Love it guys.

You can download it for FREE here

 


Rank Checker

Let me show you this video about Rank Checker.

 

Rank checker is another free tool. This tool is an add-on for Firefox. You can check two Google domains in one report but you can also check the search engines Bing and Yahoo.

 

brightLocalBrightlocal.com

Another ranking checker where you don’t have to install anything, and where you can check your local Google ranking is www.brightlocal.com. You can get 30 days for free. So go and try it now. But remember it will cost you some money if you want to use it after 30 days.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Advanced Web Ranking

I am using the Advanced Web Ranking. It has over 800 search engines and is very quickly to find out if you are moving up or down in ranking, or if your site is listed at all.

You can save your positions and compare the positions in reports. It will track your progress of your ranking over time.

You can use the scheduled updates ability so when you are starting to work in the morning your reports will be ready for you in your Inbox. Awesome. Let me list some of the key features of Advanced Web Ranking.

  • Unlimited number of projects.
  • Unlimited number of URLs and keywords in a project.
  • More than 300 international and local search engines.
  • Uses Google API to search on Google.
  • Uses Google Suggest to help you find relevant keywords on Google.
  • Generate keywords for your projects.
  • Friendly to Search Engines and their resources.
  • Safe to use for users: no URL data being sent to search engines.
  • Stop the update if the URL is found.
  • Search engine auto-updates within 48 hours when page or query format changes.
  • Automated checks and updates when new search engines definitions are released.
  • Operation indistinguishable from that of a regular web browser.
  • Tracking of the progress of your rankings over time.
  • Powerful, highly customizable graphical ranking reports (charts).
  • Powerful, highly customizable tabular ranking reports.
  • Custom URL colors for quick identification of the competition.
  • Apply Page Markers to your graphical charts.
  • Function from behind a firewall, gathering data through a proxy server.
  • Optimized bandwidth usage with simultaneous multithreaded searches.
  • Backup and Restore functionality for project data.
  • Custom search for localized Search Engines for both language and country.
  • Import keywords from a file and from the META tag of a website.
  • Export keywords from projects to local files.
  • Import URLs from either files or web pages.
  • Export URLs from projects to local files.
  • Import historical data from Web Position Gold projects.
  • Schedule project updates at the time and date of your choice.
  • Localization: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish.
  • 30 day unconditional money back guarantee.
  • 12 months free maintenance plan (product and search engine updates).
  • Free email support.

Check here how to set up a new project

 

You see – very easy to use.

It’s not free. So check out the prices. There are different plans you can buy. Check it out here.

PS… Just be a little careful – don’t run the program every day… Maybe ones a week or once a month. If you  ask to check much below the first page of Google then you are at risk of your IP address being temporarily blocked by Google !

This is also why the program has some time delay between the checks 🙂

 

Please give me a comment – which software are you using – and do you like it ?

Well that’s all from now. I better make my coffee and check my rankings 🙂

Henrik

 

 

 

 

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Display Network Strategy Secret

Google

What is Google Display Network

Google Display Network is a very very large group of websites, email programs, blogs, who has partnered with Google to show Adwords ads. In the Google Display Network you can show text, image, video or rich media ads that are targeted based on your keywords list. You can target websites such as YouTube or other specific Google websites along with Google display partners.

In the old days we all used to say – don’t you ever use it –  But now the Google Display Network (GDN) has become one of the world’s largest ad network, reaching more than 80% of the internet users worldwide. So yes you have to check it out. The question is when you should use this opportunity. Give the GDN another go?

In general its a good tool if your goal is branding – awareness of your brand.

I have read about Jordan – a division of Nike – who did an innovative campaign targeting the niche basketball audience. This result in 188 millions impressions and 296,000 clicks. Great awareness right?

Another example is American Laser Centers. They used GDN to start a chain reaction of leads and conversions. With the GDN text and images ads their conversion increased with 365%, while cutting impressions in half. Again to create awareness of a brand/chain.

 

3 reasons why you should consider GDN

1) Below the fold filter out. Google launched a new feature to filter out “below the fold” ads. When people need to scroll down a page to see your ads, this placement is considered below the fold. If ads are visible immediately when someone visits a page, those ads are above the fold.

You can use the “Below the fold” category exclusion in AdWords for your brand campaigns to show ads only when users will be able to see them as the page loads, and exclude placements that may appear in a lower section of a website.

People use different web browsers, monitor sizes, and screen resolutions, and these factors generally determine if an ad appears above or below the fold. Google considers that ads are above the fold only if they’re 100% on-screen when the browser window loads.

2) Re-marketing. This is a feature that not so many have heard about. If you have had visitors that previously did visit your website but didn’t convert – you can now re-market to those user and show them different messages. So if the customer thought that your site or product was worth visiting they are interested in your product. So showing them another messages – like “did you know we have 3 years buy back guarantee” you might get them to convert 🙂

I tell you this is awesome 🙂

3) Campaign Insights Tool. This campaign Insights tools gives some reliable data about how your campaign has raised the brand awareness or active user interest in your product or service. This tool can is only available for US and UK advertisers.

 

How to get the most out of your marketing budget using 

Google’s display Network Revenue increased by 28 percent, and the CPC’s increase by 5 percent from 2010 to 2011. So its a marketing channel that needs to be run effectively so you can maximize your ROAS.

ROAS stands for Return On Advertising Spending and represents the dollars earned per dollars spent on the corresponding advertising. To determine ROAS, divide revenue derived from the ad source by the cost of that ad source. If companies are taking this marketing channel so serious that the percent can increased with 28 percent we need to get more insight about using this Network.

Display Network requires a totally different frame of mind. Now we are no longer talking about the Quality Score. Now you have to understand who your customers really are. Is it male or female, how old are they, where are they living, when do they buy, why do they buy. You will have to do a lot more segmentation of the customers then you do in your normal Google Adwords campaign.

Theses days we are all living in a digital age and all kind of people are online and searching online. So like in the printed ads you will need to target your audience. If you are selling female running shoes you messages should be very different if you are talking to a 18 years old woman or to a 52 years old woman.

 

So how do you choosing your sites

You might have noticed Network Partner Sites that is not showing up in the Adwords Placement Tool. So first you will have to identify all the potential Network Partner Sites. A good strategy is to create a separate campaign, where you can create multiple adgroups for very different keywords themes and let them run for maybe 2 weeks.

Soon you will see Network Partner Sites that wasn’t on the Adwords Placement Tool. This way you can identify sites that could be very relevant to your audience.

 

Branding your message

Always test your banner ads and use different messages for your different audiences. You can also use different banner ads for people that have visit your site but they didn’t buy anything from your website.

So a different message could show another benefit of your product. In the end you will find the different messages that will target your different audiences.

 

Use Facebook to learn about your audiences
Facebook ads is a great way to test your ads. With Facebook ads you get a lot of information about who is interested in your ads. Who is clicking on your ads. Theses information you can use when targeting your Display Networks Partner Sites.

It gives you a change to learn fast Who, what, Where and When your audience is clicking on your ads.

So Google Display Network Partner Sites might a good way for you to promote your product. But use it with all the insights you have about your customers. Use it the right way before you just throw in a lot of money.

 

And now the Google Display Network secret

The Display Network will provide you much cheaper traffic then Google’s Search Network. This is a fact. I have been doing campaignes for large companies using GDN. And yes you get your click much cheaper.  Many people are worried if they run their ad in the display Network that they might get a lot of unqualified trafic and ends up with a big bill to Google.

But in my experience this is not true at all. Google Display Network has improved a lot doing the last couple of years and you can get tons of great traffic, and it might as well convert better for you then the Search network.

The important thing is to do a little test before running the big campaign.

 

Marketing giveaway
Remember to grab the Free Complete SeoCustomer Guide 2011. Sign up for our newsletter and grab it for free. Get it here.

 

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SEO User-generated Content You Need to Know

,

MenWorldMost of traffic to e-commerce sites comes from search engines like Google. So the SEO is becoming very important for the e-commerce site.

Most of the big website do an amazing job, but there is one thing that a lot of them are totally forgetting – and its the user-generated content.

 

Why you have to take User-Generated Content (UGC) seriously

  • Your customers will leave you additionally information about your product. Maybe you have forgotten to say that your product weights 20 kg.
  • You will get some extra valuable keywords. Your customers will maybe say “cheap black car” a word phrase you are not using in your text, but now your page will be found. (Remember to say thx to the customer)
  • The customers will give you a higher keyword density for the keywords you already have. Maybe you are driving your traffic to your site using the word phrase “cheap cars”. And if all your UGC are talking about “cheap cars” it will help your ranking.
  • With the Google Panda and other updates from Google, it’s now more and more important to have fresh, relevant and always new content. With the UGC you will get this.
  • It’s not only product reviews. Remember the social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedln, YouTube, Questions and Answers, discussion forums and much more..

You can use the UGC on a lot of your pages, but the most valuable inputs are the ones that are shown on your product page where people can actually buy your product. If the UCG leads the customers to another page first (like your Facebook page) you will loose a lot of people for every click they have to do.

So put your product reviews on your product page! Don’t say you are going to do this later.. DO IT NOW.

 

How to let your customers work for you

Here is how it’s going to be done. Take a look at Amazon.com.

Amazon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But there are also a lot of top e-commerce site that doesn’t use the UGC on their sites. A big site like Dell..

dell

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Even Best Buy is not having their product reviews indexed directly on the product page from Google.

BestBuy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Do your own SEO Self-test

Okay the key to all this is that you need your UGC on your product page AND you will have to know if Google is indexing it. And as you could see Best Buy did have customer reviews on their page. But the point is that it’s not indexed – and then its no good.

So this is what you are going to do

  1. Find a page on your website that has customer reviews on it
  2. Search for the product in Google
  3. Find the product link on google. It should look like this
  4. Click on the cache version

I can’t find the cache version of Google Chrome or Explorer. But you can find it on Firefox. If your Firefox doesn’t show the cache version. Do this:

Here is the Firefox fix:

1. Go up to the Tools drop-down menu
2. Select Add-ons
3. Search for “greasemonkey”
4. Click Install next to the greasemonkey add-on
5. After installing and restarting Firefox to complete the installation, the ‘greasespot’ home page will come up (if it doesn’t, go to this URL: http://www.greasespot.net/)
6. Click on the link “Find Scripts”
7. Look for “Google Cleanup Script” – it should be about the fourth one down on the list.
8. The current version, 1.7f, includes the restoration of the Cache. Just click on the green “Install” button in the upper right hand corner.
9. Once installed, just go to google and search for something – CACHE is back!
10. The annoying preview pane is still available which takes up a third of the page, but there are ways to disable this.

(yes I know a lot of trouble to get the cache back – but its worth it)

 

Now do your SEO for your UGC

1 Do you have UGC on your site
2 If yes.. Check if the UGC is indexed in Google
3 If not… Do the technical thing you have to do. You will have to make it work
4 If you don’t have any UGC on your site get it. Use at least one like product reviews or Q&A
5 Get ready to get much higher in search
6 Send me a comment and say thx to me. LOL

Okay that’s enough for today.. Time for coffee and football

 

Free for you

Free SeoCustomer Guide 2011 – just go and grab it …

 

All the best to you guys
Henrik

 

 

 

 

 

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Get your emails opened – and get your traffic NOW

mailIf you read my article about “How To Get 10.000 Visitors To Your Website Or Blog” you know that its important to get your email letter started.

 

So now you gotta know something about emails. Your email must have one or two desired actions. Maybe its to click on a link to get to your website, or maybe its a retweet button.

Here in this article I am going to tell you something about

  1. How to get the email opened
  2. How to get your email read
  3. How to get the desired action

So are you ready? Go and get your coffee and put your favorite music on.

 

Getting the email opened

I have found 2 reasons why a recipient wanna open your email.

  1. If they know you already and they know that they will get some value using their time. Your email will be opened.
  2. Or if your subject line is so exciting and so compelling that they just can’t help opening it to listen to what you have to say. (OMG when I am going to make a email about this article I am going to work hard on the subject)

There is no magic formula, what you are going to write in the subject, but there is a methodology that you can use to test your subject lines before sending your email:

1 make a list of all the subjects which your reader may be thinking already. It could be aobut the economy, if he or she is completely stressed, maybe worried about how he is keeping his job.. and so on
2 Now you are going to write some positive and negative subject lines about it. So you can address what’s already on your readers mind.
3 Now speak out loud the subject line. Does it work you think?

Hopefully it will strikes a emotional chord like envy, greed, lust, fear, curiosity… If your reader doesn’t even open your mail .. well you will not get any desire action from him right?

 

How to get it read

Now the reader has hopefully opened your mail. So now the question is …. should you make the email long or short? Maybe the whole article or just a teaser.

I have found some different examples.

  1. Informational or How-To email. When you are writing informational or How-To related emails, I have found that you should keep it to about 500-700 words in length and include the entire article in your email.
  2. Offer emails. If you are offering something. Like I did when wrote about the free Complete SeoCustomer Guide 2011, you should keep it short. Like a teaser. The click should lead the reader directly to a longer sales page (landingpage).
  3. News updates. This could be a summery of what has happened on your blog or website the past week. Make sure your first text address the topic from your subject line.

 

How to get the desired action – Increasing Email Click Rates

Whatever you wanna tell in your email you gotta have a call to action. So let me tell use the 3 examples again.

  1. Informational or How-To emails. Here you are going to tell your reader something helpful, maybe a tip, trick or idea, suggestion or how-to something. You would like the reader to spread the word, so remember to include social link tags in your mail (I do that too.. please spread the word). Encourage your reader to Re-tweet your email, use Like or bookmark.
  2. Offer emails. Keep it short. Lure them to your landingpage, where you can show them more items. Don’t try to sell anything in your mail. Make them curious and sale whatever you are selling on your landingpage.
  3. News updates. Again you wanna tell your reader to go to your website or blog and read the whole article or articles. So keep it short and make it impossible for your readers not to hit the links to your website or blog.

Remember that more and more people are now using mobil devices. So be sure your website or blog can be read on a smart-phone. If you are using WordPress for your blog you can get a free plugin for this.

 

Remember to add me to your Google+ circles 🙂

Henrik

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The biggest change in the history of Google ?

GooglePlusRead here about “Search Plus Your World”.

 

Google is now introducing a brand new search too called “Search Plus Your World”. This new tool will be fully launched this week. Right now its only used if you sign in to Google.com and searching in English. This tool combines content that you shared with the user privately together with the normal publick web in one single body of results.

Suddenly all our SEO is being mixed with privately shared content – which is content from friends and families. The user also get the option to shift between searching their personalized information and searching the public web. So the user will be able to see post, photos from their friends, profiles of friends and conversations from Google+ when they search people’s name – according to “The New York Times”.

The personalized results means that is wanna find “Henrik Sandberg Jensen” (me) and if you knew me in private it would boost your search ranking. And this is very very important for us in SEO. Now we have to tage Google+ much more serious. If you take Google+ just as serious as Facebook likes and Twitter followers you absolut need some google friends in your circles. If you have a lot of people in your circles you search ranking will tage a boost.

So now I am going to start doing Google+ much more then I thought I would. So in a couple of days you will see my icon for Google+ on theses pages for www.SeoCustomer.com.

There are some concerns about the privacy issues here. Suddenly Google makes the private content more public. Google may also get some criticism that they will favour their own content rather then the content from Twitter and Facebook and other Social Media.

Its not a new thing that Google use personalized results in the search ranking. It started in June 2005 where the web content was giving a higher ranking based on interestes, habits or behavior of the online user. This personalized results was expanded in February 2007 and in the December 2009, where the personalized results were enable also for not signed-in users to Google.

Now in January 2012 with the Search Plus World you will have personal results based on online habits and interests with social results and public search. But here it is folks – it only cover Google+ (and Picasa) not Facebook, twitter, flickr and other Social Media networks.

Check it out here in a video from Google.

 

 

Take care out there … Henrik

(yes yes yes yes… remember to add me to your Google+ Circles)
//
 

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How To Get 10.000 Visitors To Your Website Or Blog

alfaYou have a blog or a website and now you are thinking of starting making a newsletter. But what do you do?

 

Newsletters are old school ?

So you might be thinking that making a newsletter is old school. But think again.

  1. It complements your Web site like a cup for your coffee. The coffee is not good without the cup right?
  2. Email newsletters are more cost-effective than print newsletters. I don’t have to say anything about this. We all low something that is free or almost free. Of course we do 🙂 If you print a newsletter you have costs for printing and then for mailing them.
  3. E-newsletters are interactive so you will of course send a link to your website. So you will get experience about the opening click rate and with the link click rate in the mail. So lets say that you have 100 people in your database. Maybe 50 percent will open the mail. And maybe half of the people that open the mail will click the link inside of it – right? Well then you will get 25 people on your website. Well what if you build up a database with 40.000 people than 10.000 people will click to your website. (That’s not old school – that’s a lot of clicks).
  4. You can test its effectiveness. Which headlines are working. Is it better to show pictures – and which pictures. In most email programs  you can do A/B tests.
  5. E-newsletters encourage word-of-mouth advertising. It’s easy to forward a newsletter. So your friends can tell other friends about your amazing article 🙂
  6. You subscribers love you. Your best customers are the ones that sign up for your newsletter. They love your tropic and they love your website so much that they want to hear more. So be sure to send them a mail when you got news for them. Don’t wait so long that they will forget you. And of course don’t send a mail every day or several times a day. Treat them like great customers.
  7. Get started now and you will have your backbone. Don’t wait for something. Start today – Start now. Start building up your email database and you will get your backbone in your marketing.

 

Now which Email program should you use

The heart in every email newsletter is the database is the software. So take a trip around and search for a great software program.  The reason why I chose Aweber was that ..

  1. I received many emails from experts that I could see was using Aweber
  2. They had great forums with support
  3. It was affordable
  4. When I was searching for auto responder it seems that it was the standard that all the other programs wanted to beat

 

It’s still new to me but it’s very easy to set up. I think I used 10 minutes from the time I signed up until I could start to collect emails. I was checking out a single video about it.

 

Why Aweber

Let me admit it – I love my Aweber already (and yes I am still new to the program). Here are some of the reasons why I love it.

  • Tons of Email Templates (remember to make your own – but that’s easy too)
  • Email Blog Updates Automatically
  • Track Who Opens Your Emails
  • Twitter & Facebook Integration
  • Publish Your Emails Online
  • Hundreds Of Sign-up Form Templates
  • Create Awesome Signup Forms
  • Unlimited Subscriber Campaigns (you can make a lot of lists without paying more)
  • Segment To Send Target Emails
  • Immediately Engage Subscribers
  • Track and Improve Performance
  • Set Your Own Delivery Hours
  • Live Support
  • Knowledge Base

 

I have an affiliate with Aweber. So if you check it out. And check other programs too and you finally want to use Aweber please click my affiliate link here – then I can get some of your link love 🙂

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Wishing you a great day
Henrik

 

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Boost you SEO with your customer reviews

reviewsSo what is this SEO all about? To get high ranking? To get traffic? No it’s not its all about getting more sales without paying for online or offline advertising.

 

So I want to tell you how you can get higher ranking and get more sale. Sounds sweet right? The trick is to encourage customer reviews is what it’s all about.

 

Often the websites are great.

The companies are trying to stand out from the competition. Often they have easy navigation and a great platform, they give good customer service and offer a great range of products. Often the problem is the webshop. The actual product pages.

I see a lot of websites with a standardized product description and only a couple of images. The product is standardized and could be sold in many hundreds of other websites. And because it’s a duplicate content you will have an issue with the search engines. They don’t like duplicate content – and so they don’t like your website. And you you will not get the higher ranking you deserve.

So as we know – content is king right? So first make some high-quality, unique content for your products. This will be the backbone of your SEO campaign. One way to create high-quality content is to encourage customer reviews on your products. This will not only boost your SEO rating – it will also boost your sale.

Reports from Reevoo.com shows that customer reviews can boost your online sale with an average of 18%. So with customer reviews you will get unique content, higher ranking in SEO, more sale from your existing customers. Sweet right?

 

You benefits
With this customer reviews you will earn trust and reliability which are very important factor to Google. You will get unique content without spending a lot of time and money making it.

But there are much more benefits. The customers will share the information with their friends on Facebook, twitter, Google+ and other social media sites. So remember to have a lot of visible share buttons.

According to reports from Hitwise (an online retailer) each of their Facebook fan is worth 20 additional visits over the course of a year. So remember to make sure your Facebook like/fan is visible. So use Facebook in your marketing strategy.

We all know that our friends on Facebook – are very much like ourselves. So if we like a product its very possible that our friends will like it too. You get my point right?

 

How to encourage customers’ reviews?

Customers like incentives. So a good way to encourage customers is to offer a discount or maybe a special offer coupon that they can use next time they are shopping on your site. You can also give the 5 percent discount (but we want SEO without paying for the add right?). You can also do free shipping.

Another way to get your customers’ reviews is to do like Amazon and others. A week after the purchase (they must have received the product before you can ask them) you got to send them an autoresponder (email) where they can click and quickly give you a feedback that will show up on the product webpage.

Ask people to leave a constructive feedback to you about your product. If the review is bad but constructive, you can respond to the bad review and change the bold experiment to a better one. If somebody tells you that your red product wasn’t red at all. You can write back – saying that you have now been in contact with your supplier to make sure it’s red from now on.

You will have control over the reviews – and no – if the comment is factually incorrect, harmful or defamatory you should not publish theses reviews. You can write on your page that those kind of comments will not be published.

 

The conclusion

Remember to take your actual product pages seriously. Write a unique content about the products and let people help you make them unique. This will help you to boost your sale and boost your ranking.

 

Okay time for some coffee now… Take care out there…

Henrik

 

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This happen every minute on the internet

I came across this on the internet (source) and I wanted to share it with you. Do you know what happen on the internet every 60 sec?

 

Let me tell you just a few things..

98.000+ tweets
370.000 minutes voice calls on skype
13.000 iPhones applications downloaded
81 iPad sold
75.000 dollars added to Google revenues
168 million emails are sent

Check much more here…

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Great and fun info – right?

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Wishing you all a happy new year..

Henrik

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