Get More Facebook Comments

It's important to create online enthusiasm about your products and services. An effective way to get people excited about your company is by letting them see how excited other people are. Facebook can help you do this.

Comments on your posts can be a very effective marketing tool. So, how do you get your fans to leave you comments? It might require some time and effort, but getting more comments and letting other people promote your business for you is very possible.

People won't comment on something that doesn't interest them. This means your posts need to be compelling and relevant. Give people something to talk about and they'll be happy to do the rest. By being aware of what topics are hot right now, and what your audience is most likely to discuss you can easily increase your Facebook post comments.

Asking people questions is a good way to get a response. You could even create an online poll. When it comes to making your products or services even better, your customers will be happy to respond to you and give you the feedback you need.

Users are more inclined to comment on pictures and videos than text based posts. They're also more inclined to post on fun topics. Don't always make it all about business. Sometimes it's okay to go off topic. It'll help your fans feel more of a personal connection to you which makes them more likely to comment on your post.

Post often and be sure to include some calls to action to get people to participate. Figure out when people are most likely to respond to your posts and focus on posting in that time frame. Make sure that you take time to respond to your fans comments as well.

Your fans are ready to comment on your posts. You need to give them the opportunity to do it. The more people that post the more your prospects will be inclined to let that positive feedback influence their decision to give your business a chance.

Posted via email from FindYourSearch

Preventing Content Mistakes

New online advertising methods are emerging at a rapid rate. Many business owners allow this to blind them to a simple truth- a great website that holds great content will always be the most valuable marketing tool.

Content is something that many business owners get wrong. Fortunately, it's also something that's easy to fix. With just a little time and care you can avoid the most commonly made content mistakes. Here's how:

Unfocused content is a problem that plagues many websites. It's easy to forget that sometimes the simplest way to say something is also the best. Don't make your readers search pages of content for the point you're trying to make. They'll quickly get bored and leave your site. Be clear and concise and you'll find that your message comes across much better.

Have you been wondering why no one is filling out your contact form or signing up for your newsletter? The answer might be simpler than you thought. The visitors to your website might need to be plainly asked to do so. Including a call-to-action in your content is a quick change that can get you big results.

Another frequent mistake on websites is too many ads. There's nothing wrong with advertising, but as with everything there needs to be a balance. You don't want your content to weave through a page full of ads. Not only will this be difficult to read, it will distract from the message of your company, which is the last thing that you want to do.

Examine your website and ask yourself who you seem to be writing for- your clients or the search engines. If you answer with the latter, there's a problem. Yes, your website needs to include carefully chosen keywords. But it should not be saturated with them. Keyword stuffing will only hurt your ability to draw in business in the long run. Business owners should optimize their content, but take care to never overdo it.

Your ultimate goal should always be to keep the people visiting your website engaged. With the right content on your site making this happen will be easy. Clean up your content today and see the rise in your web traffic.

Posted via email from FindYourSearch

How to Choose the Right Social Network

We all know by now how important it is for a business or brand to engage with its audience through social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Social media is an easy, affordable way to build a rapport with your target market and to establish a meaningful, two-way conversation with them. But before haphazardly joining the latest, trendiest social media sites, you need to make sure that the people you are trying to reach will be there. Otherwise, there really is no point in wasting your time and resources building up profiles on sites that no one uses. So, before you start setting up those profiles, make sure you are where you need to be. Following are a few easy ways to figure out which social media sites are right for you.

Real World Interactions

If you operate a brick-and-mortar business—that is, one that has a physical location offline—you should prominently advertise your social media accounts. You could put up a large banner in a heavy trafficked area of your store, letting your customers know where they can find you online. You should also train your staff to start informal conversations about social media with your customers, informing them about any discounts/special offers they can find on your social media profiles. This is also a good opportunity to ask them which sites they frequent and which ones they think will be a good fit for your business. If your staff keeps detailed notes on any feedback they got, you will start to see a clearer picture of which sites, besides the ubiquitous Facebook, your customers frequent.

Surveys

The easiest thing to do when you need answers is to simply ask. So, if you want to know where your customers go online, creating a short survey is an extremely simple and effective way to find out the information you seek. Keep it short and sweet if you want anyone to actually respond. Just ask your customers what social networks they actively use and which ones they would suggest a business like yours participates in. You can also solicit customer feedback through your print or online newsletter, by including an insert in the monthly bills you send out or by adding a few questions to your online contact form. If you present your questions honestly and sincerely, explaining that you are still learning how to navigate the social media world and could really use their input, you will greatly increase your response rate.

Online Sleuthing

Checking your website analytics is the most accurate way to find out which social media sites your audience is using. By looking at the “Referring Sites” area of your analytics program, you will see which social networks are sending you the most traffic. This is very useful, for if you see that the lion’s share of your traffic is coming from a site that you aren’t using, then you will have found out where your audience is and where you should be. Another online method for determining where your target market spends its time is through your customer mailing list. Most social media sites, including Facebook and Twitter, have a “Find Friends” tool wherein you put in your contacts’ email addresses to see if they are using the site. While it may seem a bit creepy or stalkerish to track your customers this way, it’s purely for research so you can learn which social media sites are the most popular among your existing clientele.

As you can see, it needn’t be complicated or expensive to find out where your customers and prospects spend their time online. Once you’ve determined which sites are the most popular among your demographic, then you will be able to fully harness the power of social media.

Posted via email from FindYourSearch

How to Make Your Site ‘Juicy’

One of the most important tenets of SEO is link building. Volumes have been written about the importance of establishing a good backlink profile—not only will it demonstrate your value and relevance to your audience, it will enable you to rank higher in the search engines so more people will be able to find you. It can be challenging at times to come up with new ideas for creating these links. Following are a few “outside of the box” ideas that can help you gain the brand recognition and high rankings you want.

Provide Value

The best way to entice people to link to you is by providing something tangible that will make their lives easier. For example, if you have the knowledge and the capabilities, you could try creating a free tool or software program that will help other website owners manage their sites easier and outrank their competition. You could also develop a Firefox or Chrome plugin. These plugins are very popular and, if done correctly, can be very useful. Before diving in and developing a new tool, program or plugin, make sure you carefully research what is already out there so you don’t simply copy something that’s already been done. Remember—you are trying to assert your brand’s value and relevance, so take the time to do your homework and create something that is unique and useful.

Get Out There

Sometimes you need to venture outside of the online world in order to take advantage of some good linking opportunities. Joining a business group will enable you to get “face time” with others who belong to the same niche as you and is a great way to create awareness of your brand. If you covet the difficult-to-earn .edu link, you should consider contacting local colleges in your area to see if you can book a speaking gig. Whether you decide to do a presentation on an industry topic for a specific class or if you choose to hold a seminar for the Career Center, you will probably get at least a few links back to your site from the college’s different departmental websites.

Be Proactive

Effective link building requires constant effort and upkeep and if you want to be successful with it; you can’t just sit back and wait. Instead, you need to always be thinking of ways that you can improve your link juice. One thing you should do is set up a Google Alert to track any time one of your branded keywords is mentioned. Check out every site that mentions you to see if they are linking to you properly and if they’re not, contact the webmasters right away so you can get the link juice that’s rightfully yours. You may also want to consider purchasing an existing blog; this way, you don’t have to build up everything from scratch and you can link this back to the main page of your website. Although you will still need to update this blog regularly, you won’t have to take the time to build up an entirely new one.

The important thing to remember when it comes to link building is to not discount anything. Flexibility and creativity are key to successful link building; “juice” can be in the most unexpected places, so keep your options open!

Posted via email from FindYourSearch

SEO Essentials for 2012

            If you have built or created your own web site, you probably have somewhat of an understanding about how search engine optimization (SEO) works. Many proprietary websites do their own SEO while there are some that hire individuals, usually consultants, who are experts at doing search engine optimization. These individuals are effective at optimizing websites and understand the important areas of doing SEO and bring it all together into a search engine optimization campaign.

 

                  So what is so important about SEO? The main reason search engine optimization is used is to increase a websites visibility on the Web, so it receives more traffic. This in turn is what helps website designers and proprietors earn some extra cash. Now lets consider the various components of your website which are on-page and off-page content. On-page SEO is the optimization that is done on your actual website, which includes the code, meta data, and meta explanations. There are many strategies and methods that can be utilized to help your website become search engine friendly. You want search engines like Google and Bing to index and rank your web site properly, so the more effective your on-page optimization the easier it will be for search engines to crawl your pages and put them in appropriate groups for all those people you want to see your information. Ranking for the category that is most suitable requires that your site use key phrases for that category. These key phrases have to be enhanced on each page of your website for the best results. Likewise your site needs completely unique content to be able to be categorized as a signal of authority.

Next there is off-page optimization, which is the part that's done from an external site on the Internet. The purpose of off-page SEO is to improve the quantity of traffic your site receives, with a large part of that being link building. This is done naturally to a certain point, like when a person links to some site that's like using their own. So when that person has an Internet site that is highly rated, it may be able to provide extra traffic, as well as higher rank to your site. Another way to build links for your site is to post articles to article pages, such as an offer to improve optimization of a site, or other various techniques.

 

               Search engine optimization can be time consuming and intensive, especially the link-building part of it. When you are not a specialist, the involvement of doing the items needed for optimization of your site can seem overwhelming. You might not want to do everything you need to do for the greatest results. This is the main reason why many website proprietors have decided to leave SEO to the experts. We have the ability to begin a campaign that considers all of the important areas of optimization and can help you to obtain the top results.

The 3 “W”s of Abandoned Shopping Carts

Much has been written about how to optimize shopping carts for e-commerce sites for optimum conversions and sales, but do you have a plan of action in place when potential customers end up abandoning these shopping carts mid-transaction? If you don’t, you’re squandering a prime opportunity to win back people who might not even be aware that their purchase didn’t go through. Statistics show that a whopping 54% of companies don’t even try to win back these abandoners, making cart recovery one of the most underutilized conversion techniques. Don’t let a golden opportunity to increase sales pass you by; check out the following guidelines and take action today to ensure that you’re doing everything you can to set yourself up for success.

Why?

In order to be successful in winning back these cart abandoners, it’s first to helpful to explore some of the reasons why people aren’t going through with their orders. One of the main culprits is that they are using your cart as a means for comparison shopping. They gather all of the items they’re interested in purchasing into the cart so they can see how much it will cost with shipping and they’ll repeat this process on a couple of different sites. Some other common reasons for shopping cart abandonment include high shipping cost, an overly complicated and invasive checkout procedure or the customer simply changed his mind.

What?

Once you’ve explored and pinpointed the reasons why your customers are abandoning their carts, it’s time to try to woo them back. How you do it depends upon why they left their cart behind. For example, if you’ve determined that people are abandoning carts in droves because your checkout process is too long and/or confusing, figure out a way to streamline it. If your customers feel like you’re trying to gather too much information about them during the purchase process, figure out a different way to get it, like a follow-up survey AFTER the sale is completed. Emails are also an extremely effective way to lure back customers, but there is an art to it (see below).

When?

If you are going to use email as a means for winning back your shopping cart abandoners, time is of the essence. So many companies make the mistake of letting too much time pass before they send out that first, all-important email for fear of appearing too “stalker-ish”. Marketing to people who have failed to complete their purchases is NOT like dating—you don’t need to play it cool for days for fear of appearing too eager or uncool. Instead, you should be sending out an email immediately; in fact, the best course of action would be to have a real-time, automated message go out as soon as the cart is abandoned. Research has shown that the majority of carts that are won back are done so in the first few hours after abandonment, so don’t wait. Also, don’t stop with just one email. If you get no response after the initial email goes out, send another one out in 24 hours and then another 7 days later. Remember—you are trying to recoup money that was almost in your hand, so this isn’t the time to be standoffish and give your clients some space. You need to figure out what stopped them from buying and to remedy it as quickly as possible.

Abandoned shopping carts don’t have to be a bad thing—it’s all in how you deal with it. You should view it as a challenge and an opportunity to improve and hone your check out process. Of course you want everyone to complete their orders the first time, but if they don’t, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they won’t be back. Be proactive and persistent (but not pushy) and you might just be surprised by the results!

When’s the Last Time Your Site Had a Tune-Up?

 Just like a car needs regular tune-ups, so does your website. A lot of time and effort went into building the best site possible, so don’t squander all of your hard work by letting it fall into disrepair. Going back to the car analogy for a moment—when you buy a new car, it’s in pristine condition, with everything working perfectly. In order to keep it in tip-top shape, you need to be vigilant with oil changes, washes, repairs, etc. Well, your website is the same way—it may be perfect to begin with, but it needs constant monitoring and upkeep to stay that way. Keep a close eye on the following areas of your site to ensure that it keeps functioning in optimum condition:

Technical Issues

First and foremost, you need to check for technical problems like 404 errors and broken links. Having a bunch of errors and links that no longer work is very damaging to your site—with the search engines AND human traffic. Because websites are dynamic creatures with content constantly being added and taken down, constant vigilance is required in order to avoid 404 errors and broken links. If you have social share buttons for Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc., you will also want to periodically check them to see if they are doing what they should. Act like you are a first-time visitor to your site and fill out any and all forms you have to test whether or not they work and if they are easy to navigate. Lastly, check your page load speed and adjust it accordingly so you won’t lose traffic because your page loads at a glacial pace.

Feedback and Analysis

Once you’ve made sure that your site is in good working order and is firing on all cylinders, it’s now time to focus your attention on what can be gleaned from any customer feedback you’ve received, unsolicited or not. This data really is your bread and butter and can provide you with valuable information that can have a huge impact on the success of your site. For example, you may think your site’s layout is intuitive and easy to navigate, but the actual users may think otherwise. Whether or not you choose to implement this feedback is, of course, your choice, but this raw data can be your best friend for determining what is and isn’t working on your site. You will also find it helpful to study your analytics data (you DO have some sort of analytics program running on your site, right?) to find out where your traffic is coming from, what pages are the most popular and which ones have the highest bounce rates.

SEO

Last, but certainly not least, you should keep current on the latest happenings with search engine optimization. If the whole Google Panda debacle has taught us anything, it’s that SEO best practices are constantly changing and evolving; just because doing things a certain way took you to the top of the SERPs in the past doesn’t mean it will always be the case. Therefore, it’s vital that you stay on top of the latest changes and developments in the SEO world so you can make sure that your site is easily found by humans and indexed by the major search engines.

While checking under the hood of your site may not be the most glamorous or sexy of tasks, it’s something that you can’t afford NOT to do. A successful, highly functioning website, much like an exotic sports car, requires a lot of TLC, maintenance and monitoring, so don’t neglect these much-needed tune-ups and calibrations.