Well, search engine optimisation is exactly the same. If your site is in the same circle as the top-ranking sites in your industry it will benefit from the association and rank well too; but if your site is not associated in any meaningful way with the industry leaders you will continue to struggle to get a better rank on the search engine results pages.

This is especially true after the now infamous ‘Panda’ update Google made to its algorithm in April 2011. This update reduced the clout of ‘content farm’ sites, sites that aggregate and list other sites based on industry or subject e.g. directory sites.

Such sites used to rank well (they were ‘cool’) and every website they listed or mentioned benefited from the high ranking as their link back counted as a quality inbound link for the destination site. But the moment Google downgraded the status of such sites, many sites listed that had no other ‘cool kid’ associations felt the pain of also falling in ranking.

So, in order to rank well in the search engine results pages, one of the most important items on your search engine optimisation checklist, now more than ever, must be to cultivate inbound links from high ranking sites in your industry.

If you’re not cool, you may not get noticed.

Related posts:

1. SEO : Marketing Silver Bullet or Long-Term Strategy?
2. “My Site and Google” – What every web-site owner should know
3. Cheat Sheets for PHP, Ruby on Rails, MySQL, CSS and SEO

so·cial [soh-shuhl]
–adjective

1. pertaining to, devoted to, or characterized by friendly companionship or relations: a social club.
2. seeking or enjoying the companionship of others;  friendly; sociable;  gregarious.
3. of, pertaining to, connected with, or suited to polite or fashionable society: a social event.

Definition from dictionary.com 

If we look at the definition of the adjective “social” it becomes clear that any social interaction involves two or more people, not a corporate entity.

When businesses attempt to use social marketing channels like Facebook and Twitter, they sometimes do so behind a corporate identity or profile; this just does not work very well.
Even the best known brands require there to be a front-person who creates and nurtures relationships with followers, readers and fans.

After all, when was the last time you sent your gas or phone company a Christmas card? You, as an individual, will not have that kind of social relationship with a business entity; they on the other hand will try and maintain what is essentially a one-sided relationship with you – they will send you a Christmas card – but it’s not because they want to be friends with you.

But on social networking sites, it is a different story – these are one-to-one relationships and a business just cannot hope to nurture a fruitful relationship with a person when the person doesn’t know who he or she is ‘relating’ to.
It becomes another push channel, throwing marketing messages out hoping somebody will see them and react. This may happen initially, when a profile is first set up and word gets around that a brand is now on the same platform, but that excitement will quickly dissipate as it becomes clear that there is no truly social element to the interaction.

It also doesn’t help if the business operates an ‘avatar’ profile i.e. a non-real person who does the engagement. Think about your friends – do you know the personality types of each one, how they react to certain events, news etc. You probably do and that’s because each one of us is a unique individual; one that can be easily recognised by those closest to us.
A non-person profile operated by a business will not have a unique personality, or at least not one that will be consistent. ‘Friends’ and followers will quickly see through this and ignore anything that comes their way from that profile. Worse, there could be a backlash of negative sentiment toward the profile if people feel they’re being ‘gamed’; relationships are, after all, based on trust.

So if you are a business that wants to benefit from social channels be sure to have a real person represent the business; Pick this person carefully as it is with them that a relationship will be formed by your soon to be brand ambassadors and customers.

Related posts:

1. A million giraffes demonstrate the power of social marketing
2. Social Media is changing Customer Service
3. BakeMeAWish.com – The Internet Cake Business That Sends Cakes To Soldiers

Search Engine Algorithm Updates

It is getting harder to maintain a top 10 listing in the search engine results pages (SERPs). This is because the search engines are forever tweaking their algorithms, releasing a few hundred updates every year. With every new update, the chances are that the formula you use for achieving a good ranking for your website will need tweaking too.
And because rankings are relative whichever of your competition understands the changes and is able to update their mix accordingly is likely to achieve a better ranking post-update.

The Rise and Rise of Social

With the launch of Google+, the various new features Facebook releases every year and the waxing/waning popularity of the numerous social networks, the quality of inbound links, one of the prime ingredients of SEO, changes regularly. Every change in the social landscape and the amount of social activity that generates traffic has an impact on the ranking of your site.

Both of these factors are in constant flux and as such they require someone with knowledge and experience to keep up with them; This makes SEO an important part of your marketing mix.

Related posts:

1. SEO : Are you a ‘cool kid’?
2. Cheat Sheets for PHP, Ruby on Rails, MySQL, CSS and SEO
3. A million giraffes demonstrate the power of social marketing

Using the power of social networking tools Facebook and Twitter, Jon and Tracy Morter started a campaign just over a week ago to steal the #1 away from the X-factor winner. And they won!

Figures show “Killing in the name” by Rage Against The Machine at over 500,000 and Joe McElderry’s “The Climb” at just over 450,000 sales. Considering that Rage Against The Machine is little known today and that the X factor final had over 10 million phone votes cast, more than two-thirds for Joe McElderry, this is no small victory. And let’s not forget that “Killing in the name” was only available as a download.

Reasons aside about why this campaign was run, this is a great example about the power of social media marketing and what can be achieved when a message, carefully crafted, resonates with a group of people. The search term #ratm appeared a number of times this past week in Twitter’s trending top-10 list and the campaign’s facebook fan page got thousands of comments to posts, not to mention a following of almost half-a-million facebook users.

If anyone still thinks social media marketing isn’t serious business, think again.

Related posts:

1. What Makes A Good URL For Your Internet Marketing Campaign?
2. Will Facebook survive past 2008?
3. Twitter and LinkedIn announce ‘status update’ partnership

Consumers have never before had such power to reach literally thousands of like-minded individuals with their opinions of a product or service. Where before a bad experience would have been told of to a handful of people, usually family and friends, today those same family and friends too will have hundreds of connections that they can pass the news on to instantly.

Even worse for businesses, anyone can now create a concerted campaign using a cheap video camera and the power of services like YouTube. Ann Minch started a ‘Debtors Revolt’ in exactly this way against the Bank of America when they raised the interest on her credit card. She created a short, 5 minute video stating her case to Bank of America and made the video publicly available to view. The campaign took off rapidly as the link to the video started appearing on blogs, social networks and Twitter. The video, below, has had over 240,000 views since September.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The bank reacted the only way it could without the publicity getting worse – it reversed the hike after attempting to negotiate another rate – Ann Minch refused and made the bank reinstate the original interest rate.

Such stories are going to become mainstream as more and more consumers realise the power they have at their fingertips.  Businesses have only ever had to worry about a small percentage of customers coming back to them with returns and complaints, A small customer service department would suffice in dealing with the low rate of complaints. Feedback involved polling the customer base where typically only a small percentage would respond, never providing a true picture of what customers felt.

Now, a business needs to be more on the ball with how their customers perceive the service or product. They need to feel  the real-time pulse of the marketplace in order to prevent a small number of customers from negatively influencing a larger number of potential customers.

Customer service departments need to become more involved in the marketplace by becoming part of the conversations their customers are having. This will not only enable gathering of real, emotional feedback but allow the business to gauge the direction the marketplace is moving in to give them an advantage over competitors who are not involved in the social media space. If a business engages with it’s customer base where they are most active they have the ability to influence perception in a positive way and increase business as a result.

Related posts:

1. Social Marketing is Person-to-Person NOT Business-to-Person
2. Queeen Elizabeth & the Royal Family go Digital with their very own YouTube Channel
3. Create your own Social Network site fast with Ning

Check out the announcement video from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman -

Click here to view the embedded video.

Related posts:

1. Rage Against The Machine Twitter / Facebook campaign beats X Factor winner to UK Xmas no.1
2. Social Media is changing Customer Service
3. Why you should build a Positive Personal Brand

In this ever-connected world, everyone is a brand, and this gives each of us great power and opportunity to really sell ourselves. If you use social networks or blog or participate in online forums then you are already in the public eye to some degree. Anyone can Google you and find out all kinds of information by reading your tweets, your blog posts and the conversations you’re involved in anywhere on the ‘net. 
Of course, the flip side of this is that if you’re not active in the digital realm then your personal brand profile is going to be pretty small and in today’s world that’s probably going to work against you in the long run. The Internet has enabled transparency and the less transparent you are the less desirable you become, especially as other personal brands around you become more prominent.

The question is, is your personal brand Positive or Negative?

Today, practically anyone who is likely to interact with you at almost any level of your life is going to Google you and find out everything they can. Employers already do this, as do recruitment agents when checking on potential matches for jobs. If you want someone to collaborate or partner up on a project they’re going to check out the ‘digital’ you first for suitability. 

What many people don’t realize is that almost anything they put out on the Internet is likely to remain available to view for all posterity. This includes Facebook posts, Twitter tweets, comments on blogs, personal videos on Youtube and Vimeo – anything and everything, and if even some of that stuff is ‘bad’ it’s going to work against you to some degree. As Gary Vaynerchuk likes to say, “your grandkids are going to be able to check out everything you’ve ever done”! A good example of how negative content can come back to bite is when a few Virgin Atlantic staff were laid off last year for making derogatory comments about their employer on their Facebook pages.
So you want to make sure everything you do in this digital landscape is positive. Anything that can be found out about your interactions need to show you in the best possible light.

Do that and you’re already on your way to building a strong personal brand.

Related posts:

1. 3 ways to Strengthen Your Brand using the correct email address
2. 6 WordPress Comment Plugins To Build Stronger Relationships With Site Visitors
3. 20 Usability Tips For The New And Experienced Blogger

Click here to view the embedded video.

Related posts:

1. National Treasure: Book of Secrets – The Viral Games Web Site
2. The Photoshop Anthology book – Get it completely FREE from Sitepoint

Click here to view the embedded video.

Related posts:

1. Crush It! Why Gary Vaynerchuk wrote his new book
2. Why you should build a Positive Personal Brand

A web designer betting his friend that he could use social networking to make a ‘million of anything’ led to the creation of the website www.OneMillionGiraffes.com, which called for users to send the creator one million giraffes that they’ve made, either as models or drawings.

Although he didn’t really think he’d get much of a response, within hours he’d got over 60 and by the end of the first day he had 134! In just over 2 months he’s received 134,277 and is well on the way to win the bet by the end of next year.

However, all Ola Helland did was to advertise the site and what he was doing on his Facebook page and on his twitter account and he got this overwhelming response; proof that if you have an interesting concept to market it can spread like wildfire using simple social networking tools.

Check out the site here…

Related posts:

1. Social Marketing is Person-to-Person NOT Business-to-Person
2. Leveraging A Monthly Community Newsletter With The Power Of Blogs
3. SEO : Marketing Silver Bullet or Long-Term Strategy?

• Stream
• Posts
• Your Photos
• Birthday Invitations

As always, when using social networking sites watch out what apps you use and ask yourself if you absolutely have to use every app that comes your way!

Read the story here

Related posts:

1. Rage Against The Machine Twitter / Facebook campaign beats X Factor winner to UK Xmas no.1
2. Will Facebook survive past 2008?
3. Two Tricks For Eliminating Spam

Setting up your own system e.g. using something like PHPList is often tedious and  takes some technical knowledge to set up properly and working just right.

MailChimp, SurveyMonkey’s little brother (or sister, who knows?!), offers a Pay As You Go plan so that you can budget how much you spend on your email marketing campaign. The price plan goes from $15 for 500 credits to $2,500 for 500,000 credits.
This kind of plan is especially suitable for businesses that don’t have a periodic mail-out as credits can be rolled over and the there are no standing fees e.g. monthly charges.

Related posts:

1. BSM and The Apprentice – an example of free marketing using an effective email signature
2. 3 ways to Strengthen Your Brand using the correct email address
3. What Makes A Good URL For Your Internet Marketing Campaign?

Most of these are from one site, the brilliantly named “ILoveJackDaniels” by UK web developer Dave Child:

1. Ruby on Rails Cheat Sheet
2. PHP Cheat Sheet
3. MySQL Cheat Sheet
4. CSS Cheat Sheet and more from the same site…
5. The Web Developers SEO Cheat Sheet by Danny Dover of SEOmoz.org 
6. Conversion table for em, px, pt & % in CSS by Suresh Jain

Related posts:

1. Ruby and PHP are the Leading Web Development Languages according to Sun’s Tim Bray
2. BuildingWebApps.com – A great resource for Ruby on Rails Developers
3. How well does a Ruby on Rails Application scale?

Founded in 2000, Threadless is set to hit $5million is sales this year selling, wait for it, t-shirts! Yep, and they’ve never had a single design that hasn’t  sold out!

So how has Threadless managed to sell out every design? By asking their market what designs they’d buy! Simple!

Using a social network, Threadless runs design competitions and whichever designs are most popular make it onto a t-shirt. The t-shirts are then sold through the same social network to the very people who voted for the designs. This way Threadless supply the market with exactly what they demanded in the first place!

The power of social networking is only now becoming apparent and businesses are beginning to understand just how well ‘word-of-mouth’ marketing, the best and cheapest kind of marketing, works within the semi-porous walls of a social network.

Most think of social networks as the domain of bored teenagers but considering that Facebook, a social network that targets the 25 to 35 demographic, outpaced MySpace, a social network that does target teenagers, in May with the most number of unique visits many will need to re-assess their opinions of the importance of social networking to business.

Related posts:

1. Create your own Social Network site fast with Ning
2. Social Marketing is Person-to-Person NOT Business-to-Person
3. Market Yourself With A Free Teleseminar In 3 Easy Steps

With billions of web sites populating the Internet it’s really no wonder ICANN are doing this – I can’t remember the last time I registered the exact domain that I or a client wanted. Practically every good top level domain has been snapped up, a lot of these by cyber-squatterswho register a domain early on and sell it to the highest bidder.

The new rules will allow the registration of ‘anything’ as a TLD e.g. .ny for New York or .ldn for London. I could register .chandeshparekh as long as I had a good enough ‘business’ reason for doing so.

As the TechRadar.com article notes, it’s hard to know whether this will improve the Internet or hinder it; consider the number of yet to come ‘dead’ websites that will litter the Internet landscape as a result of the new rules.

Read more about this on the ICANN site…

Read the TechRadar.com article…

Related posts:

1. Cheat Sheets for PHP, Ruby on Rails, MySQL, CSS and SEO