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Great social media strategies for resaurants

The financial crisis is likely to hit the fine dining industry very hard. Already there have been reports of exclusive London restaurants slashing their prices in order to maintain a steady flow of clientele and therefore subsequent cashflow. Competing on price, however, is never a wise, or usually profitable, strategy, so dining establishments need to look for alternate ways to bring in the customers. One easy way is to develop a social media strategy to connect with your customers and create a community of regular diners.

Great rundown on what keyword research means and 7 tips on how to increase traffic using effective keyword techniques. Great ideas for the SEM aspect of your web strategy

Keywords are phrases for which you would want your blog to be found in search engine results. Keywords help your blog get recognized by search engines, and as a result, help your potential customers find your blog. Your keywords are what you would expect your target audience to search for to find your blog content. Keyword research means researching the phrases that are going to be used by your potential customer to find your blog in a search engine. Keyword research should result in a set of keyword phrases that you should target in your blog content.

Good intro into SEO for New Media

Some great insights into SEO for New Media... Excellent thoughts and best practices from some gurus in the space...

3 Tips for Writing Findable Blog Posts

3 Tips for Writing Findable Blog Posts

Though written to solve this "duplicate content" issue specifically for Wordpress (including a plugin to do this automatically for you) the basic jist of using noindex tags in your CMS everywhere BUT the main article page to prevent duplicate content from diminishing your page rank and diluting your website is an excellent point.

You've refined your keywords, optimized your bids, and written AdWords text ads that pull in tons of targeted clicks, but after looking at your Google Analytics reports, you realize that your landing page has a bounce rate of 91%. Which means that 91% of the users coming to your site are quickly glancing around and leaving, deciding immediately that this site isn't for them. One of the easiest, low-tech ways to make users stick around and look at your products or services is to catch their attention with an engaging headline.Recent research suggests that users decide to stay or leave your site in 8 seconds or less -- in that short amount of time, headlines are the one piece of copy that users will actually read. Here are five tips for writing headlines that will draw in user attention.

Even though you're not producing written content, what you put down on paper before you record will make all the difference. Let's look at outlining your audio presentation first before discussing the copywriting techniques that work as well for audio as they do for text.

Excellent hack using the ipad box! I can't wait for version 2 of the ipad because I'm on it.

Many of us actively use sites like Twitter and Facebook to promote our businesses. And those of us looking to connect with more business-related contacts may turn to sites like LinkedIn to develop relationships with people we have worked with or may want to work with. With the growing use of social networking by business professionals, there is a growing number of social networking sites focused on business users and meeting their needs. Here is a list of 20 social networking sites for entrepreneurs, business owners and professionals that are worth a look.

If you use software like aWeber you will get great statistics on whether your email was opened and if they clicked on anything... If you are getting a low read rate chances are you need to modify/tweak your Subject Line.. aWeber does a great job of cleaning out your lists when email becomes inactive.. Checking into these statistics is important to keep your email marketing campaign fresh. This post has some details on "reactivating" your *dead* lists.

How many email messages did you send out in your last campaign? Really? That many? Wow! Now, how many of your recipients actually opened or clicked on your email? Yeah, that's a different story. Remember that with email, size doesn't really matter. Performance is what counts, not just for your email program and its bottom line but also for your sender reputation. A reactivation campaign is the answer here, and it's just as important as any acquisition campaign. It will help you clean out the dead wood, re-energize your list and reclaim some of the money you spent acquiring and engaging those addresses in the first place.

If you've read this post thus-far, you know that Target can join feedback loops (though not for Gmail) and clean its list, which it's already doing. It can also look into optimizing its HTML design for "images off." Beyond this, Target can also: 1. Become authenticated 2. Segment non-responders and market less frequently 3. Segment non-responders and attempt to re-activate them through a "win-back" email, otherwise remove them from the list

Great points on getting your emails past spam filters. Our suggestions... Don't be too flashy.. Be succinct.. Use only Opt-In Lists... And Use aWeber!

Great rundown of social media and new media success in 2008

2008 was a newsworthy - albeit, topsy-turvy - year for marketers and researchers. Importantly, social media evolved from experimental sideline to a mainstream attraction. Twitter saw huge growth rates, Barack Obama rewrote the rules of digital marketing, and user-engagement, and "service is marketing" Zappos.com re-wrote new rules for building brands and rewiring e-commerce. Facebook trended upward, MySpace held steady, and reputation-broker Wikipedia continued marching to the top of Google search results.

In the ever-evolving world of social media, public relations professionals (PR) and journalists have more opportunities than ever to build strong relationships. It serves each of us well to stay up on social media trends-learning faster, easier ways to share information. With that, here are 10 of the best social media tools for PR professionals and journalists:

You're responsible for the direction of your online strategies for your company or organization, specifically using social media and computing tools to reach, connect, and build communities around your brand. Most folks at your company know this space is important, but don't know how to do it, they are relying on your expertise to think holistically, integrated, and strategically.

Learn what bounce rates are, how they affect you, and what you can do to improve your user's experience.

Bounce rates can be an important measurement for your website and web pages. They can help determine whether a certain ad campaign is successful, whether you're targeting the right keywords, or whether changes you make are improving your site. Knowing the bounce rate of your site and individual pages can give clues about what is and isn't working for your site.

But one problem nags at me. Local merchants like "Joe The Plumber" usually don't have a web presence and many don't really even want one. But if you are going to buy cpc advertising, then you'll need a place for the clicks to go. The local ad agencies and local oriented web services are happy to create a web presence for local merchants, but they are often poorly designed and there's no standardization of them.

The influence of search visibility as well as word of mouth on social media sites (the social web) is too significant for companies with any kind of brand equity to ignore. Lucky for readers of this blog or those you pass it on to, there are two upcoming opportunities to learn in depth about how to tackle online reputation management.

For years the Public Relations industry has ironically one of the worst reputations -esp since they are hired to look after the reputations of their own clients. Things only got worse as some brands got punk'd; the introduction of self-publishing tools that allowed anyone to connect to each other using social technologies, causing a shift in power. We've already talked to death about the risks and the changes that are happening to this industry, yet I'm hoping to elevate the viewpoint out of the gutter and focus on the larger opportunities -and risks at the industry level.

Free landing page templates - but most importantly a quick overview on what a landing page is and why you need to use them.

A landing page is a special page created for the express purpose of "converting" website visitors - to get those visitors to take some action such as filling out a lead form or subscribing to a newsletter. If, for instance, you were running an ad campaign to generate leads online, you would point the ad to your landing page, rather than to your home page where the visitor might get lost or frustrated.