Internet Marketing and Advertising

Dallas Social Media Consultant Lee Thurburn, President of NetOffer, offers specific advice on how to use Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to market your business.

One of the key things to keep in mind is that blatant sales pitches are generally considered extremely impolite and inappropriate on all three of these services, with a few exceptions.  With that thought in mind you should focus your efforts on being a good ‘citizen’ of the community before you start trying to use your status as a good citizen to promote your products or services.

• Q: What does it take to become a good citizen?

• A: For the most part the secret is to share things of value and interest with others.

That leads to the next question…

• Q: What kinds of things are considered to be valuable and or interesting?

• A: Most people find the following list of things to be valuable and or interesting (not presented in any special order:

1. Notices of upcoming events that others may want to attend.
2. Reports on recent events that you attended that others may appreciate knowing about.
3. News events that you have come across that are obscure.
4. New developments and announcements in your field of expertise that others may find interesting.
5. Reports on businesses that you have dealt with where your experience is particularly positive.
6. Recommendations about people who you have in your circle that others may want to know or work with.

A great example of the power of social media is the following…

Daniel has a Facebook page and his friend Denise is a photographer who offers a service where she uses digital technology to restore old, aging, and damaged photographs to like new condition. Denise sent Daniel some before and after photos and Daniel posted them on Facebook touting Denise’s abilities. Someone who just found Daniel’s Facebook page noticed the posting about Denise and asked Daniel how to connect to Denise. Denise got some business and Daniel was able to help a friend connect to someone who provides a quality service.

The above example is a perfect example of how social media can be used to build business. It is sort of like the concept of Karma… doing good things for others will result in good things happening to you.  Zig Ziglar has always said… “the Key to Success is to help others get the things they want.”

I like to keep it short… “The Key to Success is Helping Others.”

Use social media to help others and you will be able to build a vibrant community and become a leader in that community.

As you develop that community and become a leader in the community you can gradually, and occasionally, insert messages about your business.  But be careful to not overdo it and to follow these guidelines…

Do Not Post a Sales Pitch!

Use a BLOG to create an Article about your Products or Services. Post a message in the social community forums about how you just wrote a new BLOG article and ask for comments or feedback. Provide a link to the Article. Keep these types of postings to between 5% and 10% of your total postings.

Posting a note about your BLOG and using the BLOG Article as a way to exhibit your authoritative knowledge and expertise is a great way to maintain top of mind awareness within your community about your expertise on your industry and people will have the chance to read your postings and realize how much you know and how you help others.

Lee Thurburn is a Dallas Social Media consultant who has developed a Business Social Media Marketing System that is extremely effective at helping small and medium size businesses reach page 1 of Google. The technology is free, however, marketing services and assistance is available for a nominal fee to those who would like to speed up their Google Page 1 Rank positioning.  If you are interested please call 972-239-0850 for a personal consultation.

Dallas Business Social Media Marketing Expert Lee Thurburn, President of NetOffer, Inc., explains the concept of synchronicity and why it is important to search marketing.

According to Wikipedia: Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events that are causally unrelated occurring together in a meaningful manner. To count as synchronicity, the events should be unlikely to occur together by chance.

The reason that synchronicity is important to Search Marketing is that the concept that they are causally unrelated means that there is a heightened level of importance that is directly related to the frequency of occurrence of the events.  Stated another way, if a specific search term occurs more than once in an article the probability that the article is important relevant to that specific search term is heightened.

First, lets consider what is meant by ‘Specific Search Term’.  Generally, it is important that each article or piece of content placed on the Internet be focused on a single search term. Keep in mind that when someone who does not know your company name is searching for your company they are searching for a product or service that they want or need and they use a Specific Search Term.  Simply put… the Specific Search Term is what they type into a search engine looking for vendors to provide that product or service.

When you engage in an Internet Marketing Campaign to elevate your position on the Search Results Pages you may be tempted to try and write one or two articles where you discuss all of the products and services that you offer. That approach is generally a mistake. The better strategy is to create a series of articles, or pages of content, that are each focused on one and only one Specific Search Term.  This approach will generate quicker and more lasting results.

Next, lets consider what elements of a website are considered most important when indexing the website for display in search results:

1. URL - the URL of the page may be the most important single place where synchronicity could occur. It is certainly a place where search optimization is not commonly focused and it is an aspect of the website that can easily be configured to have a specific search term displayed.
2. Title - commonly considered the single most important location on a website to place your important specific search terms the title is certainly as important as the URL, if not more important.
3. Heading Tags - Using Heading Tags such as H1 and H2 are important to making sure that your specific search terms are visible to search engines.
4. Bold Content - most search engines treat BOLD Content as more important than normal emphasis content.
5. Content - having a few iterations of the specific search term in the general content area can help increase the probability that the search engines will find the content more relevant to that specific search term.
6. Links - making the specific search term a link to another web page where the same specific search term is also displayed in the URL and Title will help to elevate the importance of that link and of the specific search term in general.

One of the reasons that BLOGs are ideal for search marketing is because of the way that BLOGs place the Title of the BLOG Article in both the URL and in the Title of the BLOG web page.  These are the two most critical positions and BLOGs automatically take care of this function.  Now, if you will just make sure that the Title of your BLOG Article contains a Specific Search Term you are about half way to having a well constructed search marketing campaign element in place. The only other thing you need to do is remember to use the Monte Cristo Formula for BLOG Article construction.

Lee Thurburn is a Dallas Business Social Media consultant who has developed a Business Social Media Marketing System that is extremely effective at helping small and medium size businesses reach page 1 of Google. The technology is free, however, marketing services and assistance is available for a nominal fee to those who would like to speed up their Google Page 1 Rank positioning.  If you are interested please call 972-239-0850 for a personal consultation.