Demographics in Social Media Network Marketing

The marketing plan for any company includes the demographics of their target audience. Who they are trying to reach can be segmented out so as to allow for different marketing strategies for each segment. It makes more sense to advertise a product appealing to 18 to 24 year olds predominantly to 18 to 24 year olds. Social media networks are valuable marketing vehicles. The demographics of each social network should be reviewed to develop an effective marketing plan for each one.

It’s probably no surprise to anyone that the social networking sites MySpace and Facebook are visited most of the time by people between the ages of 18 and 24. Their gender breakdown is almost the same: 63% female, 36% male. Is this demographic the market for your product or service? If so, it could be very beneficial to develop a profile and actively participate in these communities. If you are not trying to reach this demographic it is still worth your time to develop a presence on MySpace and Facebook. There are still millions of users or 31% over 24 who are using these networks.

Once you know which market segment each social media network appeals to you can focus your message and profile to that segment. For example, Linkedin.com readers have the highest household incomes and are good targets for high-end or premium products or services. Propellor.com and stumbleupon.com have the highest percentage of over 65 visitors if this is the market you are trying to reach.

You can find demographic information on these social media networks on quantcast.com. Enter the domain name and it provides a summary of the U.S. demographics and a traffic summary. It tells you what categories visitors to that domain are also likely to visit broken down into: Communities, Photo/Video Sharing and Movies. It also shows what other sites visitors to that domain are likely to visit.

Reviewing the demographic information freely available to you enables you to determine if that community is a good fit for your message and if it would be a good use of your time. It also helps you enter and participate in these communities with the knowledge you need to interact appropriately. MySpace and Facebook have the most traffic and should be used. From there you need to determine what other social communities are worth your time to participate in. Marketing opportunities differ in each community in terms of how you will get your message out, be it with groups, blogs or other internal applications.

Lynn Jebbia is a Senior Project Manager at ArteWorks SEO, a search engine marketing company. Her focus is SEO Strategy, Keyword Analysis, Competitive Analysis, Web Site Audits, Pay Per Click Management and Client Account Management.

Social Media Marketing for Small Business Entrepreneurs

I was thinking the other day why I have enjoyed consulting with small business owners for so many years. Talk about reality shows. What is more real than talking to the person who created, owns and operates a business? They have made their dream a reality. It’s a whole different conversation and level of engagement from talking to a marketing or business development manager working for a small or mid-size company. I don’t mean to imply that the marketing or business development manager knows less about the company’s business than the owner. It’s about the level of passion for the business. Passion or entrepreneurial zeal, as we know, doesn’t always translate into being able to run a company successfully but I love to hear their story.

I enjoy the initial phase of a search engine optimization or pay per click management campaign for any new client. We call this the discovery phase where we gather quantitative and qualitative information about a business to lay the groundwork for the project. The more we know about what they do, how they do it, who they are trying to reach and what their goals are the better we can develop and implement a successful online marketing strategy for them.

One big difference I notice almost immediately when talking to an entrepreneur is the desire to talk about their business. You never have to worry about keeping the conversation going that’s for sure. Entrepreneurs love to talk about their business. It’s their passion. That’s why they are doing it. Many businesses, if not most, are built based on the personality of the owner and more often than naught these owners have an outgoing, engaging personality. That is why social media marketing can be so powerful for small business owners.

Social media marketing is not just about creating profiles on facebook, myspace, linkedin and other social media networks to try to create buzz and links to your web site. It’s about being actively engaged in the networks. Let people get to know you. Be real. Tell them about your business, why you do it and how you do it. Not from a sales and marketing stand point so it sounds like every other Tom, Dick and Harry selling the same thing but from your personal stand point – your personality – let it shine through. Just a warning here, if you are a real drone with a negative view point on the world this might not work. :>) Find people with the same interests as yours and participate in their discussions. It has to be a two way network for it to work best.

Are you thinking how in the heck am I supposed to find enough time to do this plus run my business? This is a valid point but if done correctly this can reap big benefits for your business. Millions and millions of people are participating in social media networks every day. Instead of actively participating in 4 or 5 determine which one best fits your desired demographic and focus predominantly on that one. Also, you might really enjoy it. Just talk about your favorite topic – your business.

Lynn Jebbia is a Senior Project Manager at ArteWorks SEO, a search engine marketing company. Her focus is SEO Strategy, Keyword Analysis, Competitive Analysis, Web Site Audits, Pay Per Click Management and Client Account Management.

Enough Already About the Importance of Search Engine Rankings

Most search engine marketers are probably getting sick and tired of all this talk about the importance of search engine rankings. Web position gold and other automated ranking software stopped working for a time last month which fired up the discussion.

On one side are those that say SEO’s shouldn’t focus on rankings with clients but on conversions and revenue. The other side feels that rankings are an important focus, not the only focus, but a good measure of the success of SEO efforts for both the client and the SEO firm. Naturally, the most important metric is conversions. What good does it do to rank number one for a key phrase if it isn’t producing conversions for you, however you define conversions. However, you need visitors to get conversions.

I agree with the fact that the focus should be on conversions and revenue but you don’t have the opportunity to make a conversion unless someone finds and clicks through to your web site. Selling is a game of numbers, the more people you get your product or service in front of the better chance you have to make a sale (conversion). Online real estate is similar to offline real estate: location, location, location. I would much rather have 3,000 opportunities to convert a visitor because of a high ranking than 500 from a lower ranking. If I convert 10% of 500 visitors I make 50 sales. I only have to convert 2% of 3,000 visitors to make the same number of sales or if the conversion rate is the same I make 300 sales vs. 50.

We should always be educating our clients to not focus only on rankings. The focus is two fold. Number 1: Get them there. Number 2: Convert. Once search marketing efforts have accomplished the goal of getting the visitor to the web site through good rankings the goal is to convert the visitor. Analytics tell us what visitors are doing when they get to the site. If they aren’t doing what we want then analytics gives us clues as to why. Is it the landing page, site design, navigation or lack of a call to action or something else?

I wonder if those SEO’s who tell their clients not to focus on rankings but traffic and conversions are checking the rankings themselves. I bet they are. If you are bringing in lots of traffic from long tail key phrases isn’t this because of good rankings.

Search engine optimization professionals implement numerous strategies for clients to help achieve search engine rankings to attract valuable visitor traffic. Our clients hire us to make their online efforts successful. We need to not only layout and implement a strategy to accomplish this but let them know how their project is going. Rankings and conversions tell them this. Both are important for us and them.

Lynn Jebbia is a Senior Project Manager at ArteWorks SEO, a search engine marketing company. Her focus is SEO Strategy, Keyword Analysis, Competitive Analysis, Web Site Audits, Pay Per Click Management and Client Account Management.

Use Google Gears to Read Gmail Offline

Google Gears is an open source browser extension for IE and Firefox that allows web applications to be available offline. Gears in its current state offers minimal functionality for offline applications but the idea with it being open source is that developers will quickly follow with enhancements.

Google Gears caches resource files to make them available offline. Gmail users with the Google Gears extension installed are able to read their most recent messages offline. Google Docs users can edit their documents offline without a network connection. Google Gears enabled web applications will ask your permission before storing data offline so you don’t end up storing everything under the sun.

I just installed Google Gears. I am a gmail user and once I realized this would enable me to read my email offline I was hot to trot to get it going. I’ve got it now. Sure would have helped out at the airport between flights Labor Day weekend. I have been using gmail for my personal email for a couple years now. Prior to gmail I used Eudora. I forgot about the fact that I couldn’t read my email offline with gmail until the first power outage. When I realized this I was quite relieved that my work related email addresses were coming into Outlook which I could read offline. Now it’s not an issue with gmail with Google Gears browser extension.

Google Reader is the first Google application being powered by Gears. Google Reader organizes and manages all the content you are interested in reading. It automatically gets the news from your favorite sites through their feeds. You can organize the content coming in and even share things with friends from Reader. Reader can save you a lot of time if you go to all your news and interest sites regularly to check for updates. It will update the news and other content for you and it’s all in one location organized how you want.

I am looking forward to the many enhancements that will be created for Google Gears and love these developments that make the use of our main tool today easier.

Lynn Jebbia is a Senior Project Manager at ArteWorks SEO, a search engine marketing company. Her focus is SEO Strategy, Keyword Analysis, Competitive Analysis, Web Site Audits, Pay Per Click Management and Client Account Management.

Who's the Boss? Google or Microsoft

Lots of people are thinking that Google’s release of its own web browser Chrome is to steal browser market share from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and to hopefully eventually overtake Internet Explorer. Even more people see clearly the direction Google is going here. Matt Cutt’s, head of Google’s web spam team, makes no secret of his desire someday to be able to sit down at any computer anywhere in the world and have access to all of his applications. It would be pretty cool.

It’s the dawning of a new age. Microsoft created the Windows operating system, oh so long ago, which started their almost monopoly in operating systems, software, etc. Google seems to be trying to replicate this business model.

Google has Gmail for email. Google Docs for documents, Google Reader for news feeds, now Google Chrome for a browser and recently released Google Gears, a browser extension, allows web applications to be available offline. You can catch up on your email and news feeds when you are not able to get online. Google Gears is open source software and developers will be adding more valuable enhancements.

Review all the applications on your computer and visualize what it will be like to go to any computer and have Adobe Photoshop and Dreamweaver equivalent applications available to use. These applications might not have all the bells and whistles of your applications but enough to be able to do what you need to do and cache it on your computer.

In the operating system and software world Microsoft is currently the boss. In the search world Google is currently the boss. The question is who will be the boss if Google’s strategy to make the web the operating system and the applications you use available online.

Do you think Microsoft is worried? Do you really care? Competition is the best thing for the customer. It might be nice to feel like we are in charge again.

Lynn Jebbia is a Senior Project Manager at ArteWorks SEO. Her focus is
SEO Strategy, Keyword Analysis, Competitive Analysis, Web Site Audits, Pay Per Click Management and Client Account Management.

Should You Care About Google PageRank?

It’s really too bad that Google’s PageRank was named after one of its founders Larry Page. A more apt term and less misunderstood term would be Peer Rank. PageRank was developed by the two founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and named after Page. Google search engine started as a project in graduate school at Stanford by these two. They developed the concept of PageRank based on their knowledge of publishing in academic journals. Professors get recognition and many are expected to publish in academic journals that are reviewed by their peers. A publication’s importance and ranking is determined by the number of citations from ranking journals it receives. PageRank was developed based on this concept. The peer review of a web site is the quality of the sites that are linking to it.

Google explains PageRank on the Google Technology page as: “PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages' relative importance. “

PageRank was created to provide more relevant results for search queries. Rather than allowing spammers to control the importance of a site by the number of links to it PageRank ranks the backlinks so that higher ranked websites linking to a site have more weight than lower ranked websites. This is Google’s way of determining the importance of a page.

PageRank is an important part of Google’s algorithm but only part of the equation. They consider many other factors in determining the actual rankings of a website for a key phrase. For example, choose a key phrase and review the PageRank of the top 10 serp’s. You will see that the rankings are not listed by PageRank.

Yes it is valuable to have inbound links from websites with high PageRank. It is even more valuable to have inbound links from websites with high PageRank that have a related topic. The number of links outbound from the website that links to another website also determines the value of a link. A high PageRank website with a related topic with only 12 outbound links is much more valuable than one with 50 outbound links. PageRank also looks at outbound links from your website. It is best to avoid links to low quality sites as this may have a negative effect.

PageRank is absolutely worth caring about. However, a far more important thing to care about is creating fresh, high quality content consistently for your website and links and improved PageRank should follow.

Lynn Jebbia is a Senior Project Manager at ArteWorks SEO. Her focus is
SEO Strategy, Keyword Analysis, Competitive Analysis, Web Site Audits, Pay Per Click Management and Client Account Management.

Google Chrome First Look

Google released it's own browser yesterday. It's called Google Chrome. It is very easy to download and install. It imports your bookmarks, passwords, and all other settings from either Mozilla Firefox or Internet Explorer. You can opt to let it do all of this or you can customize the settings.

This is the first beta version of Chrome and the browser looks somewhat sparse if you are used to IE or Firefox. Google will be adding more functionality, bells and whistles to the browser. I kind of like this sparse look. Browsers have become so complicated with so many toolbars, etc. that sometimes I feel like the available space to view websites is minute. One thing I love right off is the placement of the tabs at the top. This makes it so much easier. The tabs look like folder tabs you have in your file cabinet. Just like your folder tabs in your file cabinet you can't see what is in them until you open it and the title is on the tab. The other browsers have the tabs underneath the toolbars which make it harder to focus on in my opinion.

The coolest thing is it uses one box for both the address bar and search. If you type your search query in the address box it will suggest popular sites, searches and pages you have already visited with your search term. I typed in my favorite team: Red Sox. It shows the Red Sox homepage, a couple url's from boston.com - the site I visit most frequently for Red Sox news, a search google for red sox link, 51 recent pages in history containing Red Sox (Ucho! Yes I am a fanatic) and links to articles about the Red Sox. I like this as I use the search box much more than I would actually type in an address.

The last thing I really like on this first cursory review is the ability to see your most visited sites on any new tab. You see thumbnails of your favorite sites and can quickly click on them. If you are like me you have your favorite news sites you visit every day, your favorite sports sites, etc. This allows you to see them and quickly decide if you want to visit them.

I will be writing more on Google Chrome but for now I have to give it a heads up. I like it. Am I ready to switch from my favorite browser right now? No.............but I will keep checking it out and it is definitely worth checking out.

Lynn Jebbia is a Senior Project Manager at ArteWorks SEO. Her focus is
SEO Strategy, Keyword Analysis, Competitive Analysis, Web Site Audits, Pay Per Click Management and Client Account Management.