One of the best sessions held at SMX was the Facebook session; about an hour and a half tutorial on how to use Facebook ads, and some new changes made to the platform (you can also read about it here). If you’ve been advertising on Facebook recently at all, most of it wasn’t breaking news, save for these three things:
Users can now create ads for fan pages. Not only does the ad send the user to the respective fan page, the ad even has the feature of a “become a fan” button on the ad. This means users are only 1 click away from subscribing to your fan page’s updates. This is particularly helpful for clients like MyEstateManager, where lots of traffic is driven through the Facebook fan page. You’re probably thinking– “Well what about groups?” Sorry to burst your bubble, but Facebook is no longer giving support to groups. Also note that once fan pages reach more than 5,000 fans you can’t email all of them at once.
Ads for events are now available as well
. This is especially helpful for people holding events that require paid registration, which allows the user to determine a cost per conversion, and properly manage their bids. Note that users subscribed to events can receive event messages, while users subscribed to fan pages can receive “fan page updates.”
Facebook reporting is awesome. By going to the “reports” section of the self serve platform, anyone can generate a report that includes very helpful demographic data. This includes location, gender, and age breakdown, with respective click through rates.
By far the most helpful tip was to use the Facebook reporting, as one can now easily break down demographic data, while before users were just subject to estimated guesses in which demos to target. We’ve already begun using these features on enterprise clients such as California Pizza Kitchen and AmazingMail. These features are also perfect for our local clients, including a Boulder Massage Therapist, and many others.
The Facebook Engineering Team Hard At Work
What is local?
Local is all about those businesses where there are thousands that do that same thing across the United States, and they differ just by geography. So, it could be the local plumber, the massage therapist, the dentist. Think of all the services that you have. Think of the people that you see day-to-day. Obviously, you’re not going to be able to drop-ship the fact that you need your cavities replaced.
How do blogs contribute to local search?
When you’re blogging locally you can talk about what’s going on at the local shopping mall. You can talk about the new store that opened up in town. You can talk about all those others. But at the same time, why not allow students to blog about their class subjects; to blog about their hobbies?
So, you actually have a matrix organization, and this is where larger-scale SEO techniques will be put into play, because you’re ranking on geo-terms. At the same time you’re trying to rank on category terms. So, you rank in multiple dimensions and when you have a blog-like system, you can tag, right? You can tag this as maybe, you know, you post this video to your student and you tag it as, “Santa Clara,” “SMX,” “local,” “Internet marketing,” and then that goes into a tag cloud and that’s when someone, that might help you rank.
Let’s say you have enough of these videos to talk about local online marketing, and all those will come together and you’ll start to rank when someone types in “local online tutorial” or “university local social networking.” Some of those long-tail, four or five keyphrase terms, right?
OK, so now that I have a blog, how do I get traffic to my blog? SEO = Search Engine Optimization. SMO = Social Media Optimization. Is there a difference?
Here’s how I think about it: People talk about SEO as a hot topic, and rather than the word SEO, which means—you and I will both say “SEO” but another will say SEO, and somebody else will say SEO—but we think we’re talking about the same thing but we’re not.
I would say SEO in its current state will be dead in two years, maybe a little longer. Because it’s not about trickery with how you do your page titles or your meta tags. There’s a lot of people who make a lot of money doing that sort of thing, because you can trick people who have big budgets into doing these sorts of things.
I would say, instead of the word SEO, anytime you say the word “SEO,” say, “traffic.” Because traffic is what counts. And if you break down SEO into legit SEO-it’s traffic, and the rankings come from content and links. You’ve got to have real content. If it’s not real content but it’s scraped content and you’re doing black hat, combining scraped feeds and all that sort of thing, And it’s links: having links from trusted sites. Those are the two that count.
So content … How does content leverage Social Media Platforms, and why are we talking about Social Media?
How does “social” work into the fact that getting ranking or traffic is really about links or content? Well, content is about writing about everything that is going on. You could think of Twitter as like this micro SEO kind of tool because you’re writing about what’s going on: “Oh, I’m in Santa Clara right now having In-n-Out,” or whatever, right? You could write about anything. So that’s … content. What social media does is it explodes the amount of content. Now, unfortunately, that’s a lot of people talking about, “Oh, I didn’t feel good today and now I’m at the shopping mall and I’m taking my dog for a walk.” Well, that’s sort of irrelevant content. When you multiply content, you multiply noise.
So, that’s content. You can think of social as just multiplying content. You can think of links as relationships between, not just Web pages but between people. So, lots of content, lots of people, lots of connections.
Log in and do the following:
1) Click “Posts” at the top left of the page 2) Click on the title of a page you want to edit 3) There you will be able to edit your article. Click your cursor in the article where you want a picture to show up. 4) Right above the article, you’ll see some text that says “Add Media”. To the right of that is a small square that looks like a picture frame. Click it, then click “Select files” at the top of the pop up. 5) Once you’ve chosen your image, hit enter. Input the image’s title, description, alignment, and size, then click the button that says “Insert into post”.
6) To test this, view the front page of your site and confirm that the image displays correctly.
To Post Content to WordPress: 1) Once logged in, click on “Posts” on the left side. 2) Then click “Add New” (located underneath Posts) 3) Type the title of your post in the top field/box 4) Type the content in the second field/box 5) Once you’ve finished typing the post, click the “Publish” button on the right hand side. 6) Then you can view your post at your web site. 7) Each time you add a new post, it will get placed on the front of the site just above the last post you made.
To Add or Edit Existing Pages: 1) Log in and click “Pages” on the left. 2) Then click on the title of the page you wish to modify. 3) Click on the “HTML” tab above the second field.
4) Follow the same steps as a post to save your changes, except you will need to use simple HTML code in order to not mess up the design of your site. Contact Blitzlocal Support us if you need assistance.
Getting people to visit your website is one thing; effectively encouraging them to buy your product or service is another. To turn skeptical visitors into paying customers, you need to know what products or services they are looking for and then work to satisfy their demands.
One effective way to identify your customers’ needs is to keep track of their online behavior. Are potential customers simply viewing your site and then leaving without buying anything? Which products and offers are they most interested in? Which pages on your site are they visiting for longer and more frequently?
BlitzLocal (www.BlitzLocal.com) can help you answer those questions and many more with its proven online marketing and promotion solutions. BlitzLocal not only brings customers to your website, but also helps translate those visits into sales. BlitzLocal does this by providing accurate reports on your customers’ actions and behavior while visiting your site.
BlitzLocal’ slogan is “Measure Everything,” and that is what they intend to do. BlitzLocal tracks everything that needs to be tracked on your site including unique visits, page views, ad impressions and clicks, phone calls, and more. Based on this information, BlitzLocal will advise you on the proper ways to increase leads and sales on your site.
If you don’t know how to promote your website or if you are in need of more customers, let BlitzLocal work for you. BlitzLocal will bring in potential clients to your site and all you have to do is to serve them and satisfy their demands.
Page 15 of 16« First«…1213141516