Web Strategy

Guidelines for marketing with social media aren't all that new. In 2006 five members of the digital marketing community collaborated on 16 rules for "social media optimization". Fast forward to nearly 2010 and social media has begun to take a more significant role in the marketing mix.

Innovation around Web 2.0 technologies continues to pick up steam as companies look for ways to cut spending and get more from the solutions they choose. Polly Traylor outlines some of the Web-oriented tools and strategies.

In combination with the first article comment it gives an insight into two different viewpoints on certain aspects in this article.

In the first part of this series, I provided an overview of Online Reputation Management (ORM) and why it's an important activity to adopt in your business and professional life. This post will outline some of the free tools available for monitoring your online reputation.

This simple plugin lets you optimize your landing pages (as posts or pages) using the Google Website Optimizer without needing to edit the HTML code of the theme.

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.

How to Embed Video in Email Newsletters

Exact Target also reported that email subscription via text messaging is the fastest growing list-building tactic among marketers. The company predicts that mobile capture - enabling consumers to subscribe to emails via their mobile phones - will increase 500%, more than any other growth tactic in 2009.Marketers also expect the practice of enabling subscribers to share email content with their social networks is expected to increase more than 348% in 2009.

Do you wonder why your affiliate marketing business has not taken off? The answer is really simple. The days of selling are over and days of teaching are here.

Chris Andersons book "Free" - some inspirational thoughts on business strategies.

Anderson's book gives you some inspirational thoughts on successful business strategies. In my case I preferred to listen to the audio book. Here it is available for free as ebook and audio book versions.

Earlier today we shared 5 Bing SEO Tips and how Bing is starting to generate a good amount of traffic to our websites. Compete.com says Bing is the #13 trafficked website on the web now so it's a good time to learn how to optimize your website for Bing.

The article provides a quick overview if you want to start optimizing pages for Microsoft's search engine. Especially I never used the Bing webmaster center in combination with Google's tool before.

Great list of terms dealing with Google Local search results and local SEO

A collection of terms and definitions from a number of Google's patent filings on Local Search (not everything discussed in these patent applications have been incorporated into Google Local search - but the interesting thing about many of these patent filings is exploring whether or not they may have been).

Quit treating your website like a brochure! You can communicate to your visitors with video, audio, written word, and even in a conversational manner through blogs and discussion forums. If you have the option of communicating so clearly to your visitors … why aren't you?

Great points to focus on conversion rates rather than traffic.

The most important point every online business needs to know is this: Conversions (how many people take the desired action - whether that is completing a purchase, gaining potential leads, or increasing a subscriber base) are more important by far than increasing traffic.

"Bring wine to the picnic." In this case, Conn was talking about the idea that if you show up and try to market, people will be frustrated and will shut you out. Instead, if you bring something of value to people, they'll be more likely to accept you.