Keep Your Page Title ShortPage titles that get attention are smart, short, and compelling. Without a good page title, the rest loses importance. If you want to write a page title that works, stop using so many words. Write like you want it to be read.
I am a conversational writer, and I use too many words. I write books and long blog articles. You use too many words, too. Most of us use too many words. We make sentences too long. If we word-it-up, we (think we) seem smarter.
Page Titles Get Clicked
Page titles are a top priority for SEO. Titles are indexed, and page titles are what people click to read the rest. Practice writing page titles. Write it in fewer words if you can. Make it easy to understand.
Join My Online Contest ContestOnline contests have become extremely popular, and with good reason. People love getting things for free! So I decided to offer you the “Online Contest Contest”. Yes, you read it right … a contest contest. So what do I mean by that? Allow me to explain.
I am going to give you a chance to win cash and prizes and also gain free exposure to a lot of people. Since my blog is about Internet marketing, this is both an online contest and also an article to help people think about how to better market their business. This way, you can still gain a lot of value from it, even if you do not win the contest. Yes, you still win, even if you do not “win”. While I give you the rules I will provide tips to run your own contest. Each “Online Contest Tip” below will outline this particular contest.
I hope you will enjoy this. I look forward to rewarding some very excited winners.
Online Contest Tip: Defined Timeframe
A contest should have a defined timeframe so that participants know when to expect their winnings. This contest will run from April 5th to April 20th 2010 and winners will be announced by the last day of April.
Online Contest Tip: Easy to Participate
This is a contest for the best online contest ideas but you do not need to submit a contest idea to win! I am going to give you multiple easy ways to participate and win. You do not even have to fill out a registration form or sign up for anything!
Online Contest Tip: Make it Relevant
Since prizes are a huge piece of any contest, they should be relevant to the contest promoters’ business model. For example, if you have a fishing store, you may want to give away fishing poles, but you probably do not want to give away knitting needles. It should be relevant to your industry.
As an Internet marketing guy, I help people to make their business more successful online. So, when I decided to hold a contest, I determined that it should be relevant to people seeking more success in their business. This is why I am providing ways for you to achieve more exposure.
Online Contest Tip: The Prizes
The best contests will provide value for the contest promoter as well as the participants. Nobody loses, and somebody gets a great feeling of winning along with some cool free stuff, like money! Here are the prizes of this particular contest:
Cash Prize – The first place winner will receive ten percent of any new marketing contract that I accept during the contest period, referred as a result of the Online Contest Contest, plus ten percent residuals for the first 12 months from any contingency contract. Note that I do not sell $.95 knitting needles, and this could be big.
Win a Blog – The first and second place winners will each receive a custom WordPress blog setup including ten hours of customization and SEO services, or equivalent redesign services.
Business Exposure – Gain more exposure to your business! Each winner will receive spotlighted exposure in a blog post here at aWebGuy.com in a winner’s announcement, plus all participants will receive recognition in the comments and reactions on this blog post. This can add up.
If you run a contest, try not to exclude people. You should make it easy to join in and win. In this case, I am making it really simple to participate. Since my blog will add social media reactions in the comments, it will be really easy for you to show your participation and gain exposure, too.
Everything that appears in the “Comments and Reactions” for this blog post will have a chance to win. For example, my blog is set to include social media “reactions” from FriendFeed, Twitter, Digg, Reddit, Hacker News, Blogger, WordPress, YouTube, Vimeo, Picasa, Flickr, TypePad, Movable Type, BackType, UberVU, and other services. These are just the services that are set up to automatically appear in the comments and reactions. You can also add comments directly. Remember, everything that shows up has a chance to win!
Online Contest Tip: Make the Rules Easy to Understand
If it is easy to understand, it becomes easier to win. In this case, I am using a point system. Winners will be determined based on a simple points system, and can choose how to get more points. Some of these are really easy! Here is how to get points:
250+ Points (New Contract): I will award two hundred fifty points to the referrer for each new client who contracts my SEO and social media marketing services during the contest period from April 5th to April 20th 2010. That is 250 points per new contract, and it adds to the cash prize, so don’t be shy! They simply must express that they heard about it from you.
100+ Points (Contest Ideas): If you submit the Contest Idea that receives the most “likes” (note the “like” button beside each comment) you will receive one hundred points plus five points for each “like”. You surely have friends to help you, right?
100+ Points (Blog Points): If you blog about this contest with a link back to it, you will receive one hundred points for the blog post (or other website) plus one point for every 10 unique visitors linked directly to this page coming from your blog / website during the contest period as verified through a Clicky Web Analytics referrer report. I suggest adding a comment here on this blog to claim your article. I will also provide a “dofollow” link back to your post.
50+ Points (Comment Points): If your individual comment here on the contest page other than a Contest Idea receives the most “likes” (note the “like” button beside each comment) you will receive fifty points plus five points for each “like”.
50-550 Points (Digg Points): If you Digg this article and include a Digg comment, you will receive 50 points. If the article reaches the front page of Digg.com, each person who diggs the article will be awarded an additional 500 points.
25-45 Points Daily (Twitter Points): If you send a tweet, you will receive 25 points, and if it is retweeted, you will receive an additional 2 points for each verifiable retweet up to a total of ten (for a possible 45 points per day). Twitter points will be calculated based on tweets which appear at TweetMeme.com.
25+ Points Daily (FriendFeed, Reddit, Blogger, WordPress, YouTube, Vimeo, Picasa, Flickr, TypePad, Movable Type) Reactions aggregated and appearing on this blog post as reported by BackType and UberVU across these listed social media sites will be awarded 25 points each, with a limit of 25 points per network per day.
Online Contest Rules: The Fine Print
Every contest needs some rules, but the fine print should be easy to understand. In the case of this contest, I have tried to make it as easy as possible to understand, and to win. See the Contest Contest Official Rules.
Twitter is a great place to gather useful information. It can also be a good place to find an audience of people who care about what you have to say. Twitter makes it easy to create a lot of business and personal connections. If you use Twitter with a little foresight, it can become an extremely valuable resource. If I did not believe this, I never would have spent the time and effort to write a book about Twitter, but blogging is even better. I am using Twitter as an example here, but much of this can be applied to other social media resources as well. What I wish to show is that many tools may be used for effective social media communications, and at the hub is a blog.
Many Twitter users have a blog, or even more precisely many bloggers have a Twitter account (or several). Blogs still outnumber Twitter users by hundreds of millions after all. Although Twitter can be useful, particularly in conjunction with a blog, it is not a silver bullet. I will explain this with data that I collected between March 2009 and March 2010, and provide charts to include comparisons as follows:
Twitter update (tweet) frequency and website traffic
Twitter followers and website traffic
Blog frequency and website traffic
Blogging is Better than Twitter, but Twitter is Still Useful
This is not a criticism of Twitter. I like Twitter, and I find a lot of great uses for the service. I meet a lot of wonderful people, I have interesting conversations, I learn from Twitter, and I share information with people using Twitter. However, it seems that while millions of business people have been fascinated by Twitter and a handful of other social media sites, it can be easy for them to overlook the even greater value of creating excellent website content, and doing it often. Social media can bring many people to a website, but consistent and high quality content development is key to keeping them coming back and keeping them telling their friends. This is extremely valuable to most business efforts.
In order to emphasize the importance of content creation (blogging), I will illustrate the side by side growth and reach of a Twitter account and a blog which were both created near the same time. The first blog post was on 7 December 2008 and my @murnahan Twitter account was created on 9 January 2009, so about a month apart. I used Twitter in conjunction with several other sites prior to this (copmagnet.com, stormmagnet.com, and others) but my @murnahan Twitter account and this blog create a good comparison. This is a one author blog and a one author Twitter account of about the same age.
Twitter Update (tweet) Frequency and Website Traffic Comparison
Many people believe that if they tweet at high velocity all day and night that it will bring huge traffic to their website. There has been some validity to this, but the landscape has changed. It should be obvious that influence is more important than simply yelling across a room and the same is true with Twitter. Here is a chart showing numbers of Twitter updates (tweets) compared with blog visits. I will add additional metrics later, but this may be an eye-opener to some people. Since lines on a tiny chart will not do this justice, I am providing the number of actual Twitter updates I sent during this period, below the chart. The high levels of traffic in the earlier part of the chart coincide loosely with a huge numbers of tweets, but then toward the more recent months you can see that traffic went back up (after I finished writing three books in 2009) while there were many thousands fewer tweets per month. Look at March 2009 with 9091 tweets compared to March 2010 with 175 tweets month-to-date.
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
Jan
Feb
Mar
9091
5969
1272
659
671
850
314
406
329
400
355
238
175
Twitter Followers and Website Traffic Comparison
A lot of Twitter followers should surely do the trick, right? It seems that there has been some amazing wool pulled over Twitter users’ eyes with this myth about Twitter followers. Sure, it is great to make a lot of connections, but how does that play into actual relevant website traffic? After all, website traffic is a common reason that a lot of people use Twitter. A squillion followers is a big dream for many people, but the way Twitter follower numbers relate to website traffic is not the same as some people may imagine. There is a lot more to building a brand and building website traffic than sending a bunch of tweets to a large number of followers.
I must say that in the beginning, Twitter was massively helpful in introducing people to this blog. In those days, people were retweet crazy, and it seemed that people retweeted everything I wrote. An example is an article I wrote about Twitter retweets … it was retweeted over 400 times. It was probably actually retweeted a lot more, but that is just what tweetmeme has on record.
Twitter helped to spread the word and create a lot of incoming links from many other social media sites as well. In May 2009, I wrote about how Twitter improves blog traffic (NOTE: “improves” and not just “increases”). In social media time, that was a long time ago. Twitter still holds great value that should not be overlooked or underutilized, but Twitter is different now.
Blog Frequency and Website Traffic Comparison
Twitter gets them there, but frequent content creation keeps them coming back.
Twitter can be instrumental in generating and cultivating an audience for a particular blog topic or service offering. A chart that cannot be overlooked is the one below which shows the direct relation of blog content creation and site visits. I used actual numbers of visits to my blog, so I multiplied the blog post numbers in order to be more visible in the chart. What I wanted to point out is how the lines follow a very similar course. While comparing nearly every metric of my website traffic, the one thing that relates more closely than any other is to continually create useful information for my readers. I hope that you will see this as an important focus in your efforts, too.
A blog is a hub for good social media outreach and is what keeps the machine moving. It is where you can reach more people with the information you want to share the most. All of the many related tools in your social media marketing strategy are fantastic and should be used to the best of your abilities. In the end, the tool that is expected to create more sales for your business is your website, so take good care of it and pay attention to the numbers.
If you have not already read the following articles, I encourage you to take time for these.
Tactics and Strategy Are Not The SameI look around the Internet and see a lot of social media tactics without any overall strategy. It often leaves me shaking my head when I see so-called social media marketers who offer nothing but setting up a couple of social media accounts then find a handful of people for their client to spout advertisements to. Maybe they even offer to do the spouting, but often without a real sound plan. It leaves little wonder why so many people are left to question the usefulness of social media in their business. It is a sad fact for many companies, but it can be fixed.
For the purpose of this article, let us look at the words tactic and strategy like the military does. A military tactic is an action that is implemented by a group of no larger than a division. A strategy addresses the planned outcome of the entire military operation. In social media terms, one way to look at a tactic is sending tweets on Twitter, while a strategy addresses how those tweets fit into the overall business plan and marketing objectives.
I suppose it should not be surprising that many people do not understand the difference between a social media tactic and a social media strategy. After all, most of the people implementing social media today are not marketers by trade, nor have a significant stake in the outcome. Many will say that they are marketers, but most really are not. They are technicians of marketing tools, but not practitioners of the trade. If this insults you, it shouldn’t. It is not saying that the receptionist who was put in charge of tweeting is any less important, or that the guy in accounting who created the last ad campaign is any less valuable as an accountant. We all have our own skill sets, and just because it is popular, you can still be cool if you are not a marketer.
Social Media Tactics Examples
I witness many social media consultants who promote setting up Twitter and Facebook accounts, fancying up the profile pages, and helping customers to find followers or fans. Sadly, this is about as useful as a hammer without a carpenter. These tactics are just creating tools, and without a strategy … an actual understanding of what to do next and why, companies are often left to receive terrible results and disappointment. A tactic without any function or objective in place is only useful on a very short term basis, and that is if they have luck on their side.
A common tactic I see is the social media consultant who tries very hard to reach a lot of people with entertaining messages like a funny video, a joke, or inspirational quote. They tell their clients to be fun, interesting, and engaging. They promote making a lot of friends by being themselves and making it personal. This is all just fine and dandy, but it is only a tactic. In the end, you may have a lot of people who like you but still lose a lot of time and money. The overall strategy of this social media tactic is that if you have a bunch of friends and they like you, it will be easier to sneak in your advertisement now and then and get your friends to help you spread it to the world. The problem is, these are only tactics, and there is really not a sound strategy. Friends are great, and we can all benefit from having more friends. I love the friends I meet via social media. I met my wife back in 2000 using social media. All the friends are fantastic, but those friends alone are not likely to come running make your mortgage payments. You need more to your strategy than this.
In an upcoming article I will show actual statistics which I have compiled regarding the effectiveness of tactics in contrast to strategy, but for now I want you to think about strategy more in terms of short and long-term objectives, and how you can improve yours.
Social Media Strategy: A Plan for Success
Let’s just say that you have a bunch of people following you on Twitter and a squillion fans on your Facebook Page. What are you going to do with that? Will you provide something that nobody else is doing? Do you have a strategy that is sustainable beyond the next Facebook update?
Let us use a restaurant as an example. If you have a restaurant, will you blast out your specials every day and hope people come to see you, then perhaps just keep lowering your sale price until this tactic begins to work? I hope that you don’t think that is a useful strategy. Try to think of strategy more like this: Create a contest among waiters to see which one will have more customers tag your restaurant in a Facebook photo or upload a picture of their good time with your awesome waiter on TwitPic and send it to you as a reply on Twitter. Create a special inauguration party for your latest “Mayor” on Foursquare. Integrate these tactics into an overall strategy to produce a sustainable marketing force of people who love what you do and love to tell their friends. Reward them with something fun, interesting, and preferably delicious. These are things people will remember, and ways to have other people interested, rather than just wasting time with basic advertising tactics.
Even Good Strategy Fails Without Implementation
A good strategy will still not benefit your company without implementation. If you find that you have a handful of tactics without a really solid and productive strategy, stop and take another look. It is not too late to start doing things better, but each day that slips by will mean more money down the drain.
Here is one more example of a strategy. My strategy is to provide something useful. I want to give you something you did not get elsewhere. I want to give you something valuable that you can use today and receive benefit. Using this strategy, a small portion of my readers contact me when they are ready to create and implement a strategy using tactics that work.
In 1982 when the world heard that somebody had laced Tylenol products with potassium cyanide, many people were terrified to take a Tylenol for their headache for fear it would kill them. Some caution was in order, for certain. I remember my mother dumping out any Tylenol we had in the house after watching the reports on television. Was it realistic to believe we actually had laced Tylenol in our own home? Probably not, but similar types of unrealistic caution and chaos are still happening every day in social media. Can you imagine how many more people would have been trying to capitalize on those news stories if Twitter was around back then?
The Tylenol cyanide murders of 1982 changed a lot of consumer views. If you don’t believe me, just take a look at the packaging of nearly any product. Before 1982, product packaging was much less secure. Many products could easily be tampered and you would never know it. This created a lot of change in the world, and it resembles changes that we see in social media. From location-aware service causing home burglaries to swine flu (H1N1) killing millions, to social media marketing, the Internet is wrought with fear-selling. I will give you some examples and hope you see the similarities.
Location Aware Social Media
There have been a handful of reports of people’s homes being burglarized after they made a Foursquare, Twitter, or other social media service update while away from home. This is a very personal matter that I neither strongly advocate nor oppose, but as an observer, I think the reactions are a bit overzealous. All of the sudden, there is a huge wave of concern for home security making headlines. It didn’t take many burglaries to see a mob mentality take shape and for people to use fear to spread a message. A smaller number of people made the point that only because you make an update away from home does not mean that nobody else is home. Even fewer made the point that it may be better to be away from home while the burglar is at work.
Swine Flu Put Twitter Over Capacity
I blogged about the Swine Flu (H1N1) spread on Twitter very early, on 25 April 2009. It was an amazing case of how quickly things can be passed along, but also how little vetting and how much corruption can happen in communications. I also wrote about concerns of real-time social journalism vs. professionally vetted journalism. Fears are easy to promote, while facts are often a bit harder to produce.
Social Media is a Great Marketing Tool
When the world heard that social media is a great marketing tool, the masses rushed in. It seems that every public relations rep, advertising rep, or SEO who was starving in their line of work decided to starve selling social media services instead. Note that those fields are not dead. There are still successful PR firms, advertising agencies, and even SEO who do not sell social media consulting and marketing services at all. Although each of these services are deeply intertwined, many of the people who made significant efforts to focus on social media above their previous focus did so because they were already at a low production level. It seems that since many of them saw a bunch of people talking about their business on Facebook, they signed up for everything they could get their hands on and hung their shingle as a social media expert. That should get them rich beyond all belief, right?
This can initially create more of a problem than a solution for the industry. It creates great challenges for people to filter quality. At the same time, there is the positive side, in that it causes the cream to rise to the top, so to speak. Business uses the same law of nature that we call “survival of the fittest” and the weak will starve and eventually die.
As we wait for the weak or less talented to die their slow miserable death, we endure these times of turmoil. Saying that anybody can provide a justifiable service to a company in social media is like saying that any guy off the street can be Tom Brokaw or Walter Cronkite. Sure, they can report something, and they can even make it believable, but is there a sustained value? We shall see, but in the end, I believe it all comes out well.
In the famous words of Walter Cronkite, “… and that’s the way it is.”
