Social Media Marketing & Internet Technologies

How to Sell a Product

Posted Wed, 02/27/2013 - 17:48 by webgeek

Every industry will have different sales techniques but the object remains the same; getting customers to purchase your goods or services. There are many fundamental rules for selling that can increase your sales and drive your product into customer’s hands.

Know Your Product

If you do not know what it is you are selling it will be very obvious to your potential customer. You should be aware of all design elements, features and benefits of your product to encourage your potential customer to purchase your product. If your customer asks you a question you do not know the answer to you could instantly devalue your sales pitch and lose the sale. Selling without a sales pitch is like selling ice to Eskimos, it will not happen.

Be Positive and Truthful

While it is common for people to think that all sales people are untruthful it should be your primary objective to gain your customers trusts. Highlight your products features but do not oversell your product. Customer will want to know what the product can do for them, what need it satisfies and how it will improve their lives. If you are honest with your customers and they purchase and enjoy the product they are much more likely to become a repeat customer than if you made claims beyond the capability of the product.

A positive personality makes a great difference when trying to sell. Great sales people have a likeability about them that makes people want to buy from them. A smile and positive attitude can go a long way to creating the sale.

Satisfy a Need

Customers are in the market for the shortest path to their desired solution. Instead of selling the product you should focus on selling the outcome of owning the product. Whether your customers are looking to lose weight, earn more money or build their marketing lists, your focus should be on the end result of your product – what does it do for them?

Diffusing Objectives

When considering a product a customer may have objections to making the final purchase. They may think the product is too expensive, time consuming or that they do not need it right now.

Everyone has objectives when they consider purchasing something. Consider your own thoughts and reservations when choosing a product. In your sales pitch you should work to defuse common objectives.

Ask your customer why they are hesitant to purchase and fix the problem. If you they do not have time, break down your product or service into smaller less time intensive segments. This is especially useful for weight loss systems or email marketing campaigns that take time to achieve.
If customers think your product is too complicated add tutorials and simplify instructions to make it more accessible to them. Whatever objection your customer has your sales pitch should address a solution making your product more attractive to them.

Successfully selling your product is built on these fundamental values that can help increase your sales by satisfying your customer’s needs and focusing on their outcome and experiences. By being knowledgeable about your product, having a positive attitude and concentrating on customer’s needs you can effectively sell your product.

Lenovo W520 Thinkpad - Review

Posted Mon, 01/28/2013 - 19:55 by webgeek

Lenovo laptops have an established reputation of professional high performance for graphics and intensive tasks. The Lenovo ThinkPad W520 builds on this with it’s 500GB hard drive and DVD super multi burner. Pre installed with Windows 7 professional 64 bit, the Lenovo W520 runs on an Intel core i7 Quad-core 2720QM 2.2GHZ. The i7 processor is in it’s 3rd generation keeping up with the highest demanding tasks in multimedia, graphics and HD.

The Lenovo ThinkPad W520 has a screen size of 15.6 inches and boasts a screen resolution of 1920x1090 with a bright LED backlighting ideal for watching streaming movies or DVDS. There are 15 levels of brightness meaning you can adjust the level to suit sunlight or dim lights at night. Weighing just 5.8 lbs the Lenovo 520 has a powerful NVIDIA Quadro 1000m graphics processor, integrated mobile broadband that is upgradable and integrated Bluetooth Wireless. The express card slot has a 4 in 1 card reader.

The Lenovo 520 is great for photo editing, the central processing unit is very fast and the RAM is expandable up to 32GB. There is also a fingerprint reader for greater security allowing you to turn on the computer and logging automatically with one swipe. The built in camera works well in low light situations, idea for Skype and video chatting services. There are four USB ports allowing you to plug in multiple devices for charging or transferring files.

Pros

• High performance for graphics and HD video
• Expandable RAM memory for faster switching between applications and more memory for work space.
• Designed to be water resistant with drain holes that guide accidental spills out safely.
• 36 month warranty.
• Long battery life beyond six hours with heavy use.
• Lightweight and portable.
• Screen light adjustment makes it easy to work outside or in low light situations.
• Graphics processor ideal for 3D animation and rendering.
• Added security with one touch fingerprint technology.
• Machine stays cool under any condition.

The Lenovo ThinkPad W520 427637U 15.6" LED Notebook - Core i7 i7-2720QM 2.2GHz is a fantastic laptop and the performance is great value for the price.

Notification Email Regarding Changes to Google Webmaster Tools

Posted Sun, 09/23/2012 - 00:18 by webgeek

We just received this email from Google regarding changes to the Google Webmaster Tools. Google will now notify you if there is any detected Malware or critical issues with your website.

Dear Webmaster Tools user,

We know that having a healthy and well-performing website is important to you. To keep you informed about your site's status Webmaster Tools will now automatically send you a notification email if there are critical or important issues that we detect with your site.
We'll only send you email for issues that we think have significant impact on your site's health or search performance which have clear actions that you can take to address. For example, we'll email you if we detect malware on your site or see a significant increase in errors while crawling your site.

For most sites these kinds of issues will occur rarely. If your site does happen to have an issue we cap the number of emails we send over a certain period of time to avoid flooding your inbox.
If you don't want to receive any email from Webmaster Tools you can change your email delivery preferences at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/preferences.

We hope that you find this change a useful way to stay up-to-date on critical and important issues regarding your site's health.

If you'd like more information about Webmaster Tools and building Google-friendly websites please visit http://www.google.com/webmasters.

The Webmaster Tools Team

© 2012 Google Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043
You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your Google Webmaster Tools account.

This is an important change for any webmaster and may actually help you in the event you are hacked and someone installs Malware on your website. If Google detects it they will notify you as well any other important issues regarding your site.

Thanks Google!

Adobe Digital Marketing Symposium 2012 - How Do You Measure Social Media?

Posted Fri, 09/07/2012 - 02:58 by webgeek

Adobe Digital Marketing Symposium

On Thursday 6th September Adobe held their annual Digital Marketing Symposium showcasing their social and search engine marketing suite. There were a host of keynote speakers including Matt Langie, Director of Product Marketing and Aseem Chandra VP of Product Marketing alongside speakers from Life Technologies and Caesars Entertainment.

The theme of the symposium was moving forward in digital marketing most specifically using big data for marketing. This means not just gaging metrics through followers and likes because as was said and emphasized during the symposium “Followers are not a metric”. It is not enough to tell CEO’s of companies that you have reached x amount of followers even if it is in the millions, what is important now is to continue to gather data such as followers and likes but to find out what it is doing for your business.

As Time Warner executives bounced around in excitement as Bruno Mars approached 4 Million likes on Facebook a top level executive asked “So, what? What does this mean for business?”.

The focus for your business now should be monitoring statistics such as followers and likes but the next step is to use that information to gain insights into how customers relate to your business. How are they using social and how can you leverage it to increase your company’s revenue?

How Social Media is Changing the way Customers relate to Businesses

There are a wide variety of enterprise analytics programs out there but Adobe has managed to integrate social and search engine marketing analytics together in a way that integrates all the analysis and data for you in a centralized professional way. Using Adobe Site Catalyst, AdLens and Adobe Social you can manage your campaigns from the same dashboard and even post from the dashboard whether it be blogs, Facebook posts or interactive pages. The biggest benefit of managing information for your websites and social media outlets from a centralized platform is instant analytics integration for your posts, blogs and pages. As you post through the Adobe interface it automatically tracks your post to measure statistics such as increased likes and more importantly conversions.

As more organizations enter the social sphere upper management and accounting will start asking more questions about the ROI of social media marketing and as the marketing and communications departments you will need to provide answers. You need to not only be able to measure statistics but incorporate that into data insights that are valuable for your organization. Virgin Airways were able to increase online bookings 15% after adding a “Like” button to their pages. That’s a metric accounting and CEO’s can relate to. Social media needs to be monetarily tangible to them or it’s merely seen as a cost for the company.

Social media and search engine marketing are more important than ever in business because whether high levels of your organization respect or agree with the use of it as being valuable for the business, customers expect it! If you are interested in a company, brand or product it is normal to assume that they have a social media presence and if they don’t you might be tempted to look elsewhere. There is no single measurement of your ROI when it comes to social media it is far too complicated for that and will continue to be so. By using software suites such as Adobe Site Catalyst and AdLens you can strengthen your chances of understanding the metrics and gaining insights for your business and strengthening the relationships between departments within your business.

The Adobe Digital Marketing Symposium was an incredibly informative event and opened the mind to what the future holds for digital marketers and social media for businesses.

Which AdSense sizes work best?

Posted Wed, 09/05/2012 - 20:05 by webgeek

Sometimes making money with AdSense can be a perplexing task as there are so many sizes to choose from it's sometimes difficult to choose which performs best for your website. The following video gives insights into effective targeted placement of ads based on where users automatically look on a page and how they read advertisements. For example most people read from left to right easily but do not necessarily like to read top to bottom. For this reason wider ads are more user friendly and can lead to more click throughs! That's great news for AdSense publishers! By widening some of your AdSense advertisements you could increase your revenue as much as 76%! Watch the video to find out more about targeted and optimized AdSense advertisements.








Still Wonder if AdSense Can Make You Money?

Posted Tue, 08/28/2012 - 21:39 by webgeek

AdSense is one of the most sustainable forms of income on-line if implemented and optimized correctly. Many businesses use AdSense as their primary source of income or supplementary to products and services they offer on-line.

AdSense success story


Phillip Martin is able to be a full time artist thanks to his income from Google AdSense. Phillip creates clip arts on his website for free and AdSense pays for him to do so! Phillip also paints murals for charity. This is the most encouraging and inspiring AdSense success story.


HostGator - Why Sign up for HostGator Hosting Services?

Posted Tue, 08/28/2012 - 19:46 by webgeek

Why I choose HostGator Hosting Services.

I’ve been using HostGator for over six years and have rarely run into problems with them. Any time I need technical support I use the incredibly useful Live Chat function which allows me to talk to a HostGator technician in minutes. The chat technicians are knowledgeable and have managed to get me up and running again in as little as ten minutes! You can also have the transcript of the chat emailed to you for later reference.

The original reason I signed up with HostGator was for the unlimited domains as I build websites for multiple clients and am able to manage them all within the same dashboard and file server. One of my favorite features of the cPanel is Fantastico which enables me to instantly install common CMS scripts including Drupal, WordPress and Joomla which are used for a large percentage of websites on-line today. In addition to CMS’ there are a wide variety of shopping cart and online store programs that can be installed into your website domain to get your online store up and running in just a few hours. Most of the scripts are the latest versions once out of Beta stage meaning that you can stay up to date with the latest plugins and themes for your installation.

Using Fantastico is easy! Select the program you wish to install, choose your domain or subdomain and run the script. HostGator creates the database table for you and will notify you of the name so you can access it at any time through phpMyAdmin. After the install you will be asked to create a user name and password to access the administration panel of your new website. That’s it! You can instantly go to your new website and begin building.

If you want to build your website from scratch HostGator has a site builder with thousands of templates to get you started. If building your own website you can choose whether to attach a database which can easily be created in the database portion of the cPanel. Accessing and editing your database tables is easy through phpMyAdmin giving you full privileges to make edits to your tables or remove data particularly if your site has the misfortune of spam.

I have the BabyCroc account with HostGator which gives me unlimited domains, unlimited bandwidth and unlimited email addresses for just $9.95/month. This is perfect for my needs as a web developer and enables me to test new programs and scripts on subdomains before installing or running them for clients. Domain creating and deletion is simple and you can also back up your websites either by entirety or by downloading copies of the databases. I especially like to back up data before installing new modules, plugins and scripts in the event something goes wrong. If the site goes haywire I can revert back to the previous database!

One of the greatest features of email with HostGator is the email forwarding. I can set up an email account and have it directed to my main email account and receive all emails in one place. What's the point of that? Consider yourname@gmail.com vs yourname@yoursite.com the email address with your site domain looks more professional but if you run more than one website having to check 10+ different email accounts can be cumbersome so having all the email accounts arrive in one place is more efficient for you whilst still giving a professional impression to your website visitors.

Bounce Rate Vs. Pogo Sticking

Posted Wed, 08/22/2012 - 17:31 by webgeek

With Google’s release of Panda and Penguin many websites are still suffering the shock and aftermath of having their site drop out of search engine results. For years SEO experts have been using best known practices to get theirs or their clients websites to the top of Google search results. With Panda many websites suffered a traffic loss of between 20-90%!

How many of them have recovered? According to a recent survey by Internet Ninjas’ 73% still haven’t recovered from Panda and only 4% have recovered fully.

Almost everywhere that you see people advising how to recover or how to get your website ranked are now screaming ‘content is King’. This is true to some extent, but did you know it’s not the quantity of your content but the quality? More is not always better.

If you have 1000’s of pages but there are no citations (people linking to your pages), social links or inbound links, Google catches onto this and can drop your sites ranking as a result (or should we say in results?). Google wants to send users to the page that gives them the answer.

Pogo Sticking is when someone searches, clicks on your site in search results, bounces around your site, doesn’t find what they’re looking for and goes back to Google to search again. All this time we had been looking at Bounce rates and we were being penalized much more for the pogo sticking practice!

  1. How do you find “bad” content? What do you do if you have weak content?
  2. What do you do about pogo sticking?

Use analytics to see which content has dropped. If you’re using Google analytics you can view trends over time periods and see which pages aren’t viewed as much and even which pages are never viewed. Concentrate on the content that is doing well and aim to remove poorly performing content it’s only bringing your site down.

You could however improve the content either by increasing keywords, changing the keywords or writing more informative content that answers a question. Change the direction of a subject or article to answer commonly asked questions.

Internal links: If you have 100 internal links to your bad/poor content it drags your rating down. Let’s say for example you have a block on your page in the left, right, top or bottom sidebar that appears on every page and has a link to poorly performing articles on your website. That link is bringing your website down because it’s not being visited or the content according to Google is poor (think pogo sticking again).

The Ultimate Guide To Building And Marketing Your Business With Google

Remove poor content where possible to make your website flatter. Make your site smaller as no-one is going to those pages anyway.

Going back to analytics you should be looking to find how people ARE coming to your site. What content keywords are being searched and linking to your website, how does your content relate to the actual keywords. A small % of viewers will find the content relevant and will pogo stick back to Google. So how can you prevent this?

Link to other articles on the same subject “If I don’t have it here’s someone that does”. Internet ninja’s even suggest linking to Yahoo search, anything that prevents users going back to Google.

Google: The Ultimate Guide To Building And Marketing Your Business With Google (Adwords, YouTube, Google+, Google Analytics, Google Apps, Google+ Local, Google Shopping)

Google DoubleClick for Improving Campaign Performance and Keywords

Posted Tue, 08/21/2012 - 22:35 by webgeek

DoubleClick Search with Google

The power of platform for the next step in search marketing management

DoubleClick was created by Google because of the need of efficiency in search marketing. There are tens of millions of keyword combinations on any subject so sophisticated tools are a must!

There are new trends developing in digital marketing including

1. Silos converging – separate channels require managing digital marketing as a portfolio. Social media is accelerating these trends.

2. Performance advertising; in house systems are getting more costly, keeping up with them is even costlier.

3. Need to differentiate remains: Data analysis and insights are needed in modern digital and search marketing. By customizing work flows you can increase the efficiency of your marketing campaigns within your business.

DoubleClick has recently been rebuilt by Google for faster, smarter, better search. Your entire search is in one place, integrated by Google into DoubleClick.

In 2011 DoubleClick was rebuilt from the ground up to make it an even better search engine marketing and management tool to provide you the best in it’s class.

DoubleClick

provides:

1. Efficient easy workflows giving you more time to concentrate on your strategy and optimization. DoubleClick allows bulk actions such as scheduled uploads, edits, inventory feed integration, budget-pacing reports and streamlined reporting. You can download reports and spreadsheets in Excel format for offline editing and then re-upload directly into your DoubleClick dashboard.

2. High impact – DoubleClick has smart systems that help drive your performance. You will spend less time managing ads and more time improving campaign performance.

3. Unified – Seamless part of cross-channel on Google technology. With robust tools DoubleClick allows you to streamline your marketing efforts on a large scale impacting your campaign changes. You can upload a single sheet across engine or advertiser account, edit in bulk directly into the interface and a bi-directional sync pushes and pulls changes from the engines.

DoubleClick enables you to manage campaigns around the clock by scheduling uploads and user interface edits.

Recently launched!

Google recently launched the feature in DoubleClick to schedule bulk uploads sheets for one time bulk upload. For example, upload at 11:59 Dec 26 2012. The schedule interface edits for repeated actions for example lowering bids by x% Friday to Sunday or at times where competition may be lower.

DoubleClick provides search that’s more connected to your business with inventory feeds. Inventory feeds and adds connect to DoubleClick search via the merchant center. Rules can be assigned to pause/resume ads, template ads and landing page URL’s.

Budget Pacing

You can optimize campaign budget and goals using the budget pacing report. This gives you insights not just data by telling you why the budget has increased or decreased, is the average bid higher or lower, if lower raise bid, if higher raise bid (within set limits).

Raw data is good but insight is better, DoubleClick reporting tells you why changes have been made rather than just automating the changes. DoubleClick also provides flexible day changes so you can view today’s budget over yesterday’s budget and set limits. This gives you further insight into spending and which campaigns need budget reviews. The less time you spend managing your ads the more time you can spend actually improving campaign performance.

Search Marketing Tools

DoubleClick provides robust tools to streamline large scale campaign changes for example for campaigns that are seasonal or site wide sales. DoubleClick provides smart bid optimization systems that understand your business for best results.

- Flexible goal assignments

- Smarter keyword management

- Faster execution of results

Once you have customized your dashboard and reports you can save them allowing you to spend less time going through data that may not be in your interests. You can capture the data that is relevant to your campaigns allowing you to capture more opportunities for better performance.

Just launched is DoubleClick’s bid strategy to aid you in meeting your business objectives. Set your goals/targets for the key performance indicators you care about. You can maximize for clicks or revenue or set your budget constraints monthly/yearly.

Weighted conversions allow you to target multiple CPA or CRS goals over customizable sets of floodlight activities. Easy business data integrations inform search campaign optimization. By collecting correct silo data sources together you can make better informed decisions for your search marketing strategy. For example call tracking conversions.

Capture every opportunity.

DoubleClick provides

- Trend detection – detects market trends activities option by anticipating jumps in traffic for external events.

- Portfolio bidding – shifts spend from low to high performing keywords.

- Weighted data analysis

- Speed and data freshness

Bid optimization can make or break your ROI. With DoubleClick 88% of users saw improved performance of their bid strategies, 50% doubled conversions at half the CPA.

Sophisticated technology doesn’t mean ‘black box’, DoubleClick’s intuitive interface gives you more transparency. Why is the system making changes? Why did a bid change?

Just launched by Google DoubleClick the bid charts give bid rationale for full transparency to inform you why changes were made to you bid for example if a bid is limited by maximum bid per click, the system will inform you of the limits.

Also just launched is an experimental framework so you can preview bids to better understand bid engine decisions.

DoubleClick’s unified advertising platform allows you to expand opportunity across search engine channels including Google, and Bing/Yahoo. Using one platform you can buy, measure and optimize all your digital media. The unified user interface and native integration (if already using Google analytics and search) makes it easier for you to manage your campaigns providing a frictionless, cross channel experience.

DoubleClick also reacts to emerging channels including video, mobile, social, email, display and organic search allowing conversion tracking with floodlight. By understanding the value of keywords across the search funnel and expose keywords you may have missed through other methods. As keyword strategy becomes increasingly competitive even for long tail keywords an enterprise solution such as DoubleClick will help your business stay up to date with digital marketing strategy trends and provide the solutions to monitor and manage your campaigns to keep them at their most effective.

By exposing keywords to see where they appear in the search funnel DoubleClick assists you by providing conversion ratios help. You can add labels to keywords for future reporting. Search attribution allows you to add your own date into built in attribution models.

The right Search Engine Marketing and management will help you do more in less time with maximum results. It will boost campaign performance to the highest level possible and allow you to understand search better using insights to influence overall strategy for your business.

DoubleClick provides faster workflow, efficient reporting and effective optimization. As a platform it’s unified de-duplicated multi-channel analysis with support to ensure the maximum profitability of search campaigns. With Google’s technology, long-term commitment and focus to providing scale resources with a global footprint, DoubleClick is the ultimate enterprise solution.

To be continued… DoubleClick is working on adding support for other search engines as it does not currently support Baido.

View or Download as PDF DoubleClick Search with Google

Search Engine Marketing, Inc.: Driving Search Traffic to Your Company's Web Site (2nd Edition)

Will Google's Acquistion of Wildfire App Mean Great Things for Google Webmaster Tools?

Posted Tue, 08/07/2012 - 22:56 by webgeek

Social Media & SEO Software

Will the acquisition of Wildfire by Google lead to Google providing a better social media analytics within their Google Webmaster Tools?

Google recently acquired Wildfire App who provide modern social media and search engine optimization tools to centralize your marketing campaigns and monitor performance easily and effectively. There are several similar enterprise and independent search media tool software companies out there providing similar perks such as advertising campaigns, analytics and social media monitoring all for a cost of course.

Google offers enterprise class analytics already, you can track multiple websites whether they’re your own or campaigns for businesses you are managing. You can incorporate AdSense and AdWords into your Google analytics dashboard to see how your campaigns are performing and whether you’re getting a good ROI on your AdWords campaigns or whether those AdSense Ads are positioned well on your website.

Recently Google has incorporated social media analytics into their Google Webmaster Tools. Like other areas of the Google Webmaster Tools you can create goals you wish to accomplish and monitor the effectiveness of your social media campaigns. By default Google Analytics will tell you how many referrals you are receiving from social media outlets such as Reddit, Facebook and Twitter.

How Google sees the social relationship

The Social Relationship

The social web connects people where they share, critique and interact with content and each other. Social analytics provides you with the tools to measure the impact of social. You can identify high value networks and content, track on-site and off-site user interaction with your content, and tie it all back to your bottom line revenue through goals and conversions.

Here's how we see this story:

Sources & Pages: Identify networks & communities where people engage with your content.

Conversions: Measure the value of social by tracking your goals, conversions and ecommerce transactions.

Social Plugins: Measure your on-site user engagement.

Social Visitors Flow: Compare traffic volumes and visitor traffic patterns through your site.

You can discover where your social media traffic originates as well as where it’s being shared.

So what does Wildfire App offer that Google doesn’t already?

Wildfire allows you to serve marketing and advertising campaigns on Google+ competition social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn (Wildfire ads also serves on Google+ and YouTube) through their partnership with Adaptly.

In addition to advertising Wildfire has a variety of services similar to other social media and marketing tools offered by HubSpot, Optify and AdobeSocial such as analytics for social media monitoring.

The New Rules of Marketing & PR: How to Use Social Media, Online Video, Mobile Applications, Blogs, News Releases, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly

One of the biggest unique selling points of Wildfire versus others in its class is the ability to send messages across multiple social networks from a single unified application, now wait doesn’t HootSuite and TweetDeck do that?

Other advantages of Wildfire include:

Pages: design, run and manage engaging social content across multiple social properties and networks.

Promotions: grow, engage and monetize your social audience with industry leading social media promotions.

Wildfire are very happy about the acquisition as you would be after a $350 million price tag.

We truly could not think of a more perfect home for Wildfire. It makes us so happy to know that joining with Google will make it easier for us to realize our vision of changing the world markets and enable us to live up to our commitment to make Wildfire an incredibly place for our team and our customers

Wildfire offers an amazing suite of products but they are very similar to other companies as mentioned. The advantage of Wildfire is their partnership with Adaptly who publish advertising across all the popular social networking platforms.

What will happen next? Will Google incorporate Wildfire into their suite of Google Webmaster Tools or will the two remain separate with Google gaining greater marketing share of internet advertising across multiple networks?

Personally I’m hoping Google will integrate the social media monitoring and page management into their Google Webmaster Tools. Although Google offers some social analytics it’s currently limited in scope. Hubspot, Optify and AdobeSocial are great social media software tools for enterprise businesses but a little out of price range for smaller businesses.

One last advantage to Wildfire is that they do have a flexible pricing scheme whether you host one website or hundreds. Basic plans start at $5 per promotion and 99cents per day up to premium plans running at $250.00/promotions and just $4.99 per day and a White Label Plan whereby if you have to ask, you probably can’t afford it.

I’ll be watching what happens over the next few months to see how Wildfire App and Google adapt to their new partnership. Hopefully it means great things for Google Webmaster Tools and social media integration.

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