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A: “Hey, with your new company and all, do you do social media? I heard it can bring you lots of sales and traffic to your website!”

B: “Ah, shut up, I tried this stuff. I set up a Twitter account and a Facebook page and all and spend all this time on it and it did not get me a single lead! Social media is a waste of time!”

A lot of people, companies and entrepreneurs share this point of view. If you want to agree with them, follow these great instructions to finally proof that Social Media is a waste of time. Here is a list of 36 great ways to fail at Social Media:

# 1: Setting up a Facebook page and a Twitter account is all you need to do!

# 2: Have your niece be your social media expert, because she has 300+ friends on Facebook!

# 3: Update your Twitter account every 2 weeks, you don’t want to be a spammer, right?

# 4: Let’s create a company blog on a WordPress domain!

# 5: Sending every single link to your company website or blog!

# 6: Set your Twitter account to protected!

# 7: Make your Facebook page only visible to your fans!

# 8: Tweet about your coffee! Every single morning! Multiple times, somebody could have missed it!

# 9: Send your Followers a DM with a link to a spam website!

# 10: Not  have a single post on Twitter and expect people to follow you!

# 11: Write about yourself, all the time, everywhere!

# 12: Never, ever give advice or share a link! Don’t you ever do that, understood!!!

# 13: Use the pushiest sales talk you can think of! Create new words: Ultraextremeawesomeness!

# 14: TWEET ALL IN CAPITAL LETTERS! EXTRA POINTS!!!

# 15: Have a tirade about your competitors! They suck and it is your duty to warn people about them!

# 16: Even better: Randomly retweet other people’s tweets and send your followers to your competition!

# 17: End every sentence in your tweet with an exclamation point! Darn I am good at this one!

# 18: No matter what, do not listen to what other people have to say! Don’t read your DM’s @’s and delete ALL comments on your blog

# 19: Never use the Search.Twitter to search for your company name. Reading this could harm your company’s reputation.

# 20: Use different user names, spellings and logos for every profile you create

# 21: Now I am getting mean: Let your accountant write your blog posts

# 22: Spend a fortune on the blog design, and $ 3.00 per blog post!

# 23: Your number one goal should be: have 200,000 followers on twitter, so always follow as many people as Twitter allows you

# 24: RT your links to your website at least 2 x per hour! People are not on Twitter 24/7! You have to get the word out!

# 25: Only Facebook and Twitter really count as Social Media

# 26: Close comments on your blog! You are the boss, your customers should listen to you, not the other way around!

# 27: Oh wow, my lucky number

# 28: Talk bad about customers, with several Million users, how should they ever find you?

# 29: Use your keywords, at least twice in every paragraph, so be sure to use your keywords in your paragraphs at least twice!

# 30: Switch all your marketing budget to social media, because if you don’t find 1,000 new customers by next month, you will be out of business

# 31: Don’t waste your time reading other blog posts, especially those related to your industry! You know it better anyways

# 32: Content on your blog is not important. Rather spend this time to write comments on any blog you can find.

# 33: But don’t waste time writing lengthy comments either: Two words max, but be sure to use your keywords as your commentator name

# 34: Don’t worry about “target market”! Your product/service is so great, everyone will want it

# 35: If your blog does not get you a lead or a sale in less than 2 weeks -> stop it, it’s not working!

# 36: It is ok to copy your content from other websites and you do not have to reference them in any way. Social Media is about sharing right?

I hope you liked this little list of ways to fail at Social Media! Do you have more? Please share them and I promise I will delete them without reading!

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Why do you have a website for your business? You have it to draw attention to your company, introduce your products or service, inform your current and potential customers about your company, right? In short, it is made for people. NOT for Search engines. Read on and learn, how customer experience optimization (CEO) will make search engines happy as well as your visitors. I will explain why it is important to write for the people, not for search engines. Well, you might ask yourself: But how can it be any good, if I have a great website, but nobody finds it? or Why is everybody talking about SEO, then?

To answer these questions, you have to understand the goals of search engines. Google, Bing and all the other search engines have created a complex algorithm to find the most suitable and relevant content for the particular search query that was typed in the search field. This algorithm includes functionality of the website (how user friendly is your website), keywords, authority of the site (through back links t), recentness (regularly updated content) and some other ingredients that the search engines do not want to share.

In short: Search engines try to read the mind of the searchers and what information is most useful to them taking relevancy, authority and recentness into account!

While in the past some so-called “black-hat” SEO experts tried to cheat the search engines, for example by adding hundreds of irrelevant keywords to sites to draw traffic to the websites (they hid them by giving the keywords the same color as the background; Result: People searching for family vacations ended up on Viagra-selling sites etc.), and other shady techniques were successful for a short period of time. But guess what, Google and the other search engines figured that out pretty quickly and punished these sites by banning them from their search results. Why? Because it did not make the searchers happy! They did not get the results they wanted. And this made the search engines unhappy.

In short: Irrelevant search results will make searchers unhappy and the customer experience is negative. Search Engines want to make searchers happy by providing useful results!

So how do you make searchers and search engines happy? The first thing you should keep in mind is that not the quantity, but the quality of your traffic is important. Unless your website only makes money from selling banner ads based on impressions, you do not have to care about the volume of your website traffic. The important thing is what your visitors do when they are on your website. If you get large amounts of visitors that are not looking for what you have to offer, all you gain is a high bounce rate (visitors that only visit one page of your site and leave instantly), but in most cases, you will not convert them. Guess what, these visitors will not  have a great customer experience on your website, because you could not fulfill their expectations they had when they clicked on your result.

In short: Don’t worry about traffic volume, care about traffic quality! Focus on driving visitors to your website, that are actually interested in your company, product or service!

Customer experience optimization means that you focus on reaching people that already have an interest in your services, products or companies. Converting these visitors into customers and buyers will be much easier than somebody that was actually looking for something else and accidentally ended up on your website. Instead of trying to increase traffic, focus on increasing your conversion rates. REMEMBER: There are enough people out there that are ready to buy your product! It makes much more sense to invest in finding them, than to mass-market to everybody! Learn how to do keyword research and use it efficiently, on every single text you publish!

In short: Provide a positive customer experience to your website visitors by offering relevant content to them.Therefore, using keywords is important, but use the right ones to drive the right people to your website.

I still did not answer the questions from the top, so bare with me just a little longer, ok? As I mentioned before, search results are based on many different factors. The search engines give some limited insights on what they take into consideration, but there is no definite information on the details. They don’t want to share this information, as this would make it easier for “cheaters” to manipulate the results in their favor. So what do SEO experts do? They provide educated guesses on what works and what doesn’t. Nobody really knows, what the search engines take into account, so how can you optimize your website when you don’t know what is important? In addition to that, search engines constantly work on their algorithms and it changes all the time. This means, what your SEO expert found out the day before through an experiment, could be outdated today. Providing great customer experience to your website visitors on the other hand is the goal of search engines. Great customer experience is what Google, Bing and other search engines are striving for. When you write for people, search engines will find you. So why do you run after the search engines by doing SEO when you can lead search engines the way?

In short: Search engine optimization follows search engines, search engines follow great customer experience! Who do you think will win this race – SEO or CEO?

What are your thoughts on this? Do you focus on SEO or customer experience?

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This video answers the question, whether Social Media is a Fad or not! What do you think?

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Best Keyword Optmization Tips for Your Blog

Keyword Search – Keyword Search – Keyword Search!!! All Bloggers know how important Keywords are for any blog post to rank well with Search Engines. Keywords are your key to a good position on Google and other Search Engines and without proper keyword research and keyword optimization, your great and valuable content might be lost on page 276 of the search results. So here is some advice on how to do keyword research and how to optimize your content for your target audience!

Keyword Search Tools

There are many Keyword Research tools out there, some of them for free and some of them some offer their services for a monthly fee. I usually use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. It is a free and easy to use Keyword tool and definitely my most favorite keyword tool! Just select the correct language and location, enter your keyword or keyword phrase and the captcha and hit the button “Get Keyword ideas”. Google will then do a Keyword search for you and spit out a list of related Keywords, as well as how many searches were made for this keyword/keyword phrase in the past month in your defined language and location, as well as the global keyword search volume. Unter the Show/Hide Columns Drop Down menu you can also enable the “Estimated Avg. CPC”, so the estimated average Cost per Click, if you chose to run a Google Ads campaign. The great advantage of the Google Adwords Keyword Tool is that it also gives you good results for other languages. On the negative side, though, when you export your keyword search results, it will only export the keywords and not the search volume. This means, you either need to have a brain like an elephant or if you are like me, just do it right before your blog post!

Long Tail Keyword Phrases

When you do your keyword research, you should keep in mind, that it will be easier to rank well for longer keyword phrases as for short one-word keywords. For example, when you search for Grand Canyon, you will have 17,400,000 search results, but when you search for attractions Grand Canyon, then you only have 1,200,000 search results. Of course, in your keyword research you will see that about 2,740,000 people search for Grand Canyon, and only 12,100 search for attractions Grand Canyon. So why would you want to optimize your blog post for the keywords attractions Grand Canyon when so much more people search for Grand Canyon? Well the reason is simple: When you optimize for Grand Canyon, you will have a very slim chance to make it onto the first couple of pages of Google, but when you optimize for the keyword phrase attractions Grand Canyon you will not only have a better chance on ranking high for attractions Grand Canyon, but also have the same chances to appear somewhere on the Grand Canyon search. So you don’t have anything to lose, right!

How often and where should you use your keywords in a blog post

When you use your keywords or keyword phrases, it is not only important to include them several times , but also, where and how you include them. Always remember to include your most important keywords in the headline and in the url (when you use pretty links), but also in the subheadings within your blog post. Also, try to make your keywords stand out, so make them bold. Google will recognize that this word has a special meaning and is important when you highlight it! When you include images or links in your blog post, include your keywords in the title.

However, it is also important that you do not stuff your blog post with keywords. You should also keep in mind, that you are writing for your readers, not for search engines. But on the other hand, it is also important to know, that most of your readers do not read your blog post from the beginning to end, rather they are skimming through your text. That means, they will most likely read over half your keywords and won’t notice if you use the same word or phrase within one paragraph. So as a rule of thumb on how many times you should use your keywords: Depending on the length of the blog post, but I would suggest you use your keywords and keyword phrases a minimum of 5 times for short blog posts and about 7-8 times for longer ones. This should not be to hard, if you include your keywords in your headlines, image and link descriptions and then also within your text. Important: Remember that one count is always for one version of the keyword! Your blog post will not be optimized, when you change the keywords and use several versions. For example, do not use keyword, keywords, key word, important keywords, best keywords, keyword search, keyword research, but all of them just once! This way, you will not be able to compete with a blog post that used fewer versions, but several times.

Including keywords and keyword phrases into your blog post is very important and you should not start writing your blog post before you did your keyword research.

Do you have any more questions about keywords, keyword research or have a fool proof tip that has brought you great success? Please leave us a comment! This is very much appreciated!

If you want to learn more about writing blog posts for your company blog, here is some additional reading:

Why you should avoid pushy sales talk on your business blog

Blogging for Business 101 Presentation

How to start your business blog

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What has changed in advertisement and marketing in the past 75 years? Well, a lot, to say the least! While people in the 50s and 60s were brand loyal, advertisement enjoying dream customers, people of today’s world suffer from over-exposure to advertisement. Advertisement is everywhere and marketers try hard to invade the last spaces that are still free of advertisment to get even more exposure for their multiple brands that have lost all of their competitive edge! Rather then following the old ways of mass-exposure, the new way is to provide relevant information to the people that are open to receive this information!

Check out this video by Scholz & Friends, a European Network of Marketing and Advertisement Agencies shows you the dramatic shift in marketing reality! Enjoy!

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Many people enjoy using Twitter just for the social interaction that it provides, still businesses started to use their tweets as another facet of their overall marketing plan. Do you tweet yet? For witty companies, Twitter can be leveraged with many other business activities your business may already be doing. The benefit of doing this, of course, is that it allows you to automate this portion of your marketing activities – freeing you up to pursue other things to grow your business. To be specific, Twitter can help you and your company with the following aspects:

- Market Reseach
- Branding
- Customer Feedback
- Customer Service
- Product Development
- Product Improvement
- Business Development
- Networking with Clients, Partners, Suppliers etc.
- Oh yeah, I almost forgot: Promotion

All in all you can say: KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid!

EzineArticles.com, among with many other sites, has recently added the capability of tweeting your articles. It takes only a few moments to set up, but could potentially provide users with long-term dividends. First, there is the obvious visibility among your own followers, who are likely to visit the article, or your website directly. As you know, creating awareness is the most important task of marketing, whether it is online or offline! Second, a well-titled article could potentially show up in keyword searches of other Twitter users that may also be interested in the same niche – they may seek to reprint your article on their site, contact you for partnerships, or become an affiliate for your product. One important factor that make or break your article from becoming a viral epidemic is the length of your original URL. While most websites already shorten the URLs on Twitter automatically, the original URL determines how many characters you have left to write a catchy tweet. Keep your URLs short to leave space for enough RT @username! Here goes another KISS!!!

When you have a business blog, you can harness the power of Twitter in several ways. First, there are several useful plugins for WordPress that can tweet your blog posts automatically for you. There are also little buttons  that you can install that lets your readers Retweet your blogs easily! You can find one on the bottom of this post, too. Click it! Now!!! Last but not least, you can use TwitterFeed to serve up your blog’s RSS feed to your Twitter profile. Each have their own advantages – you’ll need to compare them to see which one will suit your business best. Another KISS!

Networking sites, such as our beloved Facebook, also have useful Twitter applications. As usual the best advice is: Don’t overdo it! Use the middle way and update your followers only on the most important news. When you use a Facebook Fan Page (btw, Market Your Startup has one, too!)  you can send messages to your Fans! A great tool, when used efficiently. Yeah, you guessed it! KISS, again! Depending on the industry, I would suggest not more than once a week! Frequent updates may become aggravating to your followers. Facebook also allows users to integrate their tweets into their status updates as well. For those who tweet frequently, keep in mind that those who have friended you on Facebook will literally be bombarded with these updates if they have opted to receive them. That said, use this automation with caution – at the very least, let your followers know in advance that they will be receiving frequent updates.

You can safe a lot of time with automation tools and they can be very appealing, but they should always be weighed against the potential for aggravating the very people you are trying so hard to attract. First and foremost, social media is about establishing genuine connections. Read more about Seth Godin’s Tribe Theory and understand that you should connect with the people that already support you, foster them and make them spread the word for you! And the last KISS for today goes to Seth Godin! Do not spamm people that are not interested in your product. (Yes, that is the naked truth, there are people out there, that currently have and never will have any interest in your product!) Use discretion and consider all of your options fully before you place your social media dialogues on auto-pilot.

Oh yes, and enjoy KISSING!

Read more on Social Media and Twitter here:

7 Business Twitter Tips

Characteristics of a Good Business Blogger

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How to Start Your Business Blog

Starting a business blog is not an easy task and needs some planning to become successful! Market Your Startup gives you some helpful advice on how to get your business blog started.

- Find somebody that is willing to take ownership of the blog project and a support team: You need a person that is interested in becoming the blog Manager, has experience with blogging and knows how to write. While this person should be responsible for the blog and become the go-to person, there should also be a support team, that writes articles and promotes the blog through different venues. After you find a suitable and trusted person that will take on the business blog project, the most important step of starting your business blog is done!

- Define the purpose of the blog (Internet Presence, Branding, Traffic, SEO): What do you want to achieve with your business blog? Do you want to increase your visibility, brand your company, drive traffic to your website, improve your customer service or achieve better Google results? Probably all of the above… but you should focus on one or two main goals as the purpose for  your business blog to stay focused and targeted.

- Integrate WordPress as a CMS (Content Management System) on your website or a separate domain: It is the most user friendly CMS on the market and in addition to that, you can find hundreds of free and cheap templates for your business blog. As your business blog wants to be very as professional as possible, stay away from sponsored blog spaces, such as Blogger, WordPress and dimilar blogging services. You  want to set up your business blog either on your website as an integrated part of it, or set up a new domain for your business blog.

- Find and install a template for your business blog:I don’t believe that you need a custom design for your blog right away. Of course it will take away some branding strength, but especially for small startups, the money is better spent somewhere else and not on your upstarting business blog. I would also not recommend to use a free template, unless you are on a very tight budget. I can personally recommend WooThemes. This whole website is actually built on one of their templates! And they only cost $70 and you get a second template for free.

- Use Google keyword tool to create a list of relevant keywords that are searched for often: Depending on how competitive your niche is, the more often you should include the keywords in your text. However, keep in mind that you are still writing for people and not Search Engines. It won’t do you any good, if people find your business blog, but are turned off right away because every other word is a forced keyword. You can also use the Keyword tool to generate new ideas for blog posts and learn what people are interested in!

- Brainstorm topics and establish a topic list: Sit down with your blog Manager and the blogging team to brainstorm about topics that could be of interest for your potential customers. Always a good starting point for your business blog are the following ideas:

- Describe your products/services, their advantages and disadvantages

- Tell your customers what they can do with your products/services (recipes for food items, travel tips for hotels, etc.)

- Inform about company news; and of course the first one will be about the new business blog of your company. Also of interest: Social Activities, employee activities, employee of the month etc.

- Group the topics into categories: After you came up with 30-50 topics, you have to group them into categories. You should focus on a few categories first, so your business blog is not too thinly spread out. Offer your readers deeper insights on these few categories first and then add more and more categories later on. A good starting point would be 4-5 categories with at least 5-10 blog posts in them. After that, you can add more and more categories to your business blog, while still adding to the old ones.

- Write the blog posts: Finally, you can actually start your business blog. Start writing articles for you business blog, include the most important keywords, edit them and proofread them, and finally publish them on your brand new business blog. Congratulations! You have accomplished the first step to promote your business through your business blog! But for a business blog to become really successful, you need to promote it too!

- Promote them on Social Media Sites and other internet venues (newsletters, pressreleases, etc): To get the first heap of traffic to your new business blog, utilize your existing contacts, mailing lists and current and previous customers and inform them that you just started a business blog. You can also use other Social Media tools, such as Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Technorati, Blogsphere and other sites to promote your business blog. The easiest way is to install the Sociable Plugin, which will make it easy for your readers to share your stories with their network and spread the word for you! Read this article to see how you can use Twitter effectively for your business! You can also leave comments with backlinks on related blog post or in forums related to your industry and leave a link to your business blog. However, be careful with this tool, so you don’t earn yourself the reputation of a spammer. Only leave comments on related blog posts and personalize your comments.

- Respond to comments: Even after writing your blog post, the work is not done! Your business blog manager should frequently reply to comments on your blog and engage in the conversations that take place on your business blog. Important: Don’t be afraid of negative comments! People are most likely already talking about you and your company and not always in a positive way! Wouldn’t you rather have them talk about the problems of your product or service where you can monitor and interact with them? A negative comment is only bad, if you ignore it. See it as constructive criticism and give your best to make an angry customer happy again!

Starting a business blog is not easy. It is hard work, needs talent and creativity and of course a budget as well. Don’t give up too soon and stick to it! Good luck with starting your business blog!

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Social Media Marketing Presentation

Social Media Marketing is a great way to promote your company and create awareness. It will establish a positive customer experience for your clients and a dialog between your company and your customers. Social Media will connect you to new contacts, engage them with your company and turn them into loyal customers. Of course, it won’t hurt your existing customer base as well. Find out, how to utilize Social Media tools to get in sync with your customers and find out, what they really want!

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