You've got to Play to Play

No, that's not a typo, it's the new rules for success in social media. In old school advertising you had to PAY to play, but now anyone willing to make the effort can create and deploy social media to their advantage. And don't think that social media marketing is just a compensating tool for small businesses with no marketing budget. Major companies throughout the world are utilizing social media sites all the time. For example, Dell computers has made millions of dollars off of it's twitter feed alone!

A good social media presence can be the catalyst for your customers to start spreading the word about your business. Few things are as powerful as satisfied customers raving about your services to their friends. This social buzz is also starting to be more closely monitored by the search engines. In fact, Bing recently acquired the rights to all the "like" data on facebook. Some searches will even pull up facebook pages in addition to normal websites. Also, if content you post goes viral you can score thousands of rank boosting backlinks, some of which may be rare and valuable, in a matter of hours

Social Media

So I've had to reshape my thinking...

For the longest time I didn't fully appreciate social media. Sure we all (or at least half a billion of us) have facebook accounts and love to post updates about sick pets, car troubles, or the random time-wasting YouTube video, but how can these web 2.0 sites really help a business?

This last week I attended a web marketing workshop and much to my surprise my favorite subject covered was Social Media. Apparently the ROI for utilizing social media (though somewhat harder to quantize) can be astronomical. I'll cover more about all the ways next week.

One key to social media success though is that you as the business owner (or someone else intimately involved with the business who cares about it's success) needs to be the one engaging on social media sites. Sure you can hire a firm to set up all your social sites correctly with proper branding and interlinking, but you need to be the one interacting with your customers. That may be the biggest benefit of Social Media, the ability to engage with your customers. Respond quickly and personally whenever someone posts or comments on one of your social sites. One of the best revenue sources for any company is repeat customers. If you can become a part of someones life, albeit virtually, you can quickly establish long-term profitable relationships.

Backlinks

Popularity Contests didn't end in High School

Last week we talked briefly about the importance of video in creating backlinks. Backlinks are when someone places a link to your site on their site. It you have lots of backlinks coming to your site, that often means your site is more popular and Google will give you a higher ranking. The name of the game is to get as many high quality backlinks coming to your website as possible. In addition to video submissions, consider using the following techniques to get more backlinks:

• Write articles. There are many websites today that want you to write about your business. In exchange for writing and publishing an article, the site will also post a backlink for you.
• Submit to directories. Hundreds and hundreds of business listings are available online. Many of them are free to submit as well.
• Use social media. Have your friends help you spread the word. Kindly ask friends to put links to your site on their facebook pages, twitter accounts, and personal blogs.
• Find complimentary businesses. Maybe your site is all about selling shoelaces and you happen find a website dedicated to selling lace-less shoes. Both of you could benefit by posting links to each other's sites.

And the list goes on and on. Get creative or Google "link building" for hundreds of ideas on the subject.

Video SEO

Continuing on with how awesome video is, let me share a few ways video can help improve your search ranking. First off let me share a little bit about SEO (or search engine optimization) in general. One of the key ways to improve your ranking is to create lots of links back to your website from other sites. The more of these "backlinks" you have the better your site will do. But not all backlinks are created equal. A few backlinks from very authoritative and popular websites will do much more for your site than thousands of others from obscure, useless sites. In fact some great backlinks can literally be worth millions of crappy ones.

The good news is that there are lots of video sites out on the web that will host videos that you post. On many of these sites (such as YouTube) when you post a video you also have the option to display a backlink to your site with the video. Many of these sites are also very popular. So if you have the time (and the patience) you can create lots of high-quality backlinks to your website by simply posting videos on all over the Internet.

What's super-cool too is that Google will display relevant videos in the search results it returns. This means that if your video becomes popular it can get a top ten ranking in Google as well. Video rankings are also displayed with a small icon, making it even more likely that people will click on them. So forget about just having one top ten Google ranking, why not get your video and your website on the first page!