Most people by now have seen the “Like” button — that little thumbs-up icon in Facebook that lets one user tell another the liked something they posted. When you click on that Like button, moreover, you also reveal the content you just “liked” to all your friends in your Facebook network, which is how so much content these days goes viral.

When Facebook introduced its Open Graph ecosystem earlier this year, it made it possible for any website — from corporate websites to e-commerce sites — to add the “Like” button next to any content of its choosing.  Want your shoppers to “Like” one of your products?  No problem: Facebook now provides a simple-to-add piece of Java script for you to add to your site’s HTML and voile! You’re now part of the “Like-o-sphere”. (We added Open Graph social plug-ins on the Yield Software site, including our product pages and the community pages you’re on now.)

But who clicks on “Like” buttons and what value can the addition of the little thumbs to your site produce?

Facebook has some answers.

First, people who regularly “Like” are some of the most connected and active people among the 500 million or so users of Facebook.  These folks, it seems, are the key influencers among their group of followers. According to Facebook:

The average “liker” has 2.4x the amount of friends than that of a typical Facebook user. They are also more interested in exploring content they discover on Facebook — they click on 5.3x more links to external sites than the typical Facebook user.

These active and engaged people are the Web’s curators: they’re constantly exploring, discovering and sharing, usually with their own sensibilities overlaying that which they curate into their streams.  They are the recommenders.  They provide warnings.  They shape opinions.  And they shape decision-making — from purchases to votes to charitable contributions.

They are also younger.  Again, from Facebook:

As publishers work to identify the best ways to reach a younger, “always on” audience, we’ve found that the average “liker” on a news site is 34, compared to the median age of a newspaper subscriber which is approximately 54 years old, as reported by the Newspaper Association of America.

Most marketers will tell you 34 is right in the middle of demographic sweet spot, and who it is they’re aiming to influence with advertising, promotions and other marketing tactics.  And when you successful win the heart and mind of that 34 year-old, you’re also winning all the hearts and minds of everyone she or he influences, particularly at the moment the “Like” button is pushed.

And the results?  According to Facebook, many publishers who’ve optimized their websites for Open Graph have seen impressive increases in traffic.  For instance: ABC News (+190%), Gawker (+200%),  TypePad (+200%), Sporting News (+500%), and  NBA.com (#2 referral source).  Facebook also sites evidence from publishers using their social plug-ins of increased site engagement and longer stays.

One more important data point from Facebook: Every day, according to Facebook, campaigns on its site increase search traffic by an average of 2.8x and click-through rates by 50 percent.

Given the ease of optimizing websites for Open Graph, there’s no real downside. More importantly, joining the “Like-o-sphere” is a relatively simple way to leverage key influencers’ power to move decision-making among their social networks.  Here are some quick tips to make this happen successfully:

Implement social plugins, beginning with the Like button. When a person clicks Like, it (1) publishes  a story to their friends with a link back to your site, (2) adds the article to the reader’s profile, and (3) makes the article discoverable through search on Facebook.

Optimize your Like button. By showing friends’ faces and placing the button near engaging content (but avoiding visual clutter with plenty of white space), clickthrough rates improve by 3-5x.

Publish back. Publishing engaging stories or status updates (things that are emotional, provocative, related to sporting events or even simple questions) increase on-Page engagement by 1.3-3x

Integrate the Activity Feed or Recommendations plugins. Highlighting most popular content on your site leads people to view more articles. Those who click on the Activity Feed plugin in particular generate 4x as many page views as the average media site viewer. Place it above the fold on your home page and at the bottom of each article for maximum engagement

Use the Live Stream to engage users during live events. The live stream box can serve as a way to reach your audience, facilitate sharing of your content, and get them involved in what you’re streaming, be it an interview, conference, or other type of event. This week we released new updates to the live stream box. More info here.

If you’ve been considering optimizing your site for Facebook’s Open Graph, hopefully the data here will provide the motivation to go ahead and get the work done.  It can’t hurt and chances are, it might actually help your business.

(1: Create a catchy title that will entice people to read your post.)

All I ever needed to know about great content, I learned at the movies.  These learnings can be distilled down into seven keys (hidden throughout this fantastic post!) (2: Keep the reader in active anticipation of what’s coming next.)

Upon reading his daily Google Analytics report, the internet marketing manager took his iPhone and, in a complete rage, threw it at his whiteboard.  He had tried everything and this was the end of the road for him.  (3: Grab attention so your audience will read on.)

According to analysts, 46.5 percent of all internet marketing managers were in complete and utter agony that month due to unprofitable pay-per-click campaigns. (4: Share some previously unknown, valuable data to emphasize significance.)

All these marketing managers have one thing in common: their hopes and dreams of overnight internet success were quashed by websites that seemed to care about giving visitors a good bounce more than taking their money.  (5: Enable the reader to relate to you and your story.)

How could he go on? As he paced around, he plotted one last course of action, knowing the boss would soon likely pull the plug on his campaign and show him the door.  Aha – he had the answer!  Forget this PPC, CTR, CPC stuff: social media marketing is all the rage these days.  He would start a viral marketing campaign using a chain letter!  That was sure to get the dollars pumping into the site!   (6: A little humor never hurts.)

He patched the hole in his whiteboard, gave his iPhone an apology kiss and set off to work.  In the world of online marketing, there is no such thing as giving up.  There are so many different options to try, you just need to keep testing new channels and messaging until you strike a balance that brings you the results you desire.  It’s OK to make mistakes as long as you are actively engaged in learning from them. (7: Motivate change or action; move your audience to think differently.)

We hope you are able to use all seven of these “hidden” keys to get two thumbs up (and a ton of links) from your readers.  It may take some time to regularly produce amazing content, so until your articles are getting a proliferation of “Likes” on Facebook or re-tweets via Twitter or multiple links from many blogs, be thankful there is no way for readers to throw rotten tomatoes online!  With practice, you’ll get there.

But, did you know?  There are many generous acts of kindness you can do right from the convenience of your home  laptop that will truly add value to someone’s life or business.

We’ve compiled a list here to help get you started!

1)      Write a glowing review of a product that you like on Amazon

2)      On Amazon, click the Yes button that you found someone’s review helpful.

3)      Write a glowing review of a place you like on Google Local.

4)      Write a glowing review of a place you like on Yelp.

5)      Retweet something you like on Twitter.

6)      Comment on someone’s blog post.

7)      Answer a question on a community forum, such as Yahoo Answers or Google Groups.

8)      Digg a news article you like on Digg.

9)      Make a blog post of interesting people to follow on twitter and tweet a link to it.

10)   Follow those who follow you on Twitter,  but you don’t currently follow.

11)   Tweet something glowing about a webinar, presentation or a blog post.

12)   Follow someone new on Twitter.

13)   Give out props or thank a colleague or friend via social media (Twitter or Facebook).

14)   Comment on a Linked-In post.

15)   Comment on someone’s Facebook status.

16)   Find a new friend to add on Facebook.

17)   Tell others about a product you love on Facebook.

18)   Write a nice tip about a  business on Foursquare.

19)   Say happy birthday to a friend on Facebook.

20)   Give a special promo offer  to your fans on Facebook and followers on Twitter.

21)   Thank a person who Retweteed you.

22)   Thank a person who commented on your blog.

23)   Link back to a person who linked to you or mentioned you.

24)   Follow a company you like on LinkedIn.

25)   Like an ad on Facebook.

26)   Like an article or product using their Facebook like button.

27)   Share an article you’ve read with others via any social media channel.

28)   Join a group on LinkedIn.

29)   Join a group on Facebook.

30)   Like a company’s page on Facebook.

31)   Forward an email newsletter you love to a friend or colleague.

32)   Share a YouTube video with someone.

33)   Thumbs up for a YouTube video you enjoy.

34)   Suggest a product to friend via Facebook , Twitter & Linked-In.

35)   Write a nice recommendation for someone on LinkedIn.

36)   Rate an iPhone app.

37)   Recommend a new friend to someone on Facebook.

38)  Scan and post some great old photos and share them with your friends and family.

Make today your day to volunteer in the online social media community and you’ll be sure to bring a smile to someone’s face.

School is back in session and soon homecoming will be upon us.  Girls across the country will be pursuing their dream to be voted homecoming queen.  What do these homecoming queen wannabes have to teach us about social media marketing?  When it comes to social popularity, the rules for success haven’t changed since high school.

1)      Be nice to everyone.  When success involves being voted by your peers, you need to be nice to everyone.  This is true for homecoming queens and social media marketing success.  How can you be nice to everyone on social media?  Behaviors that are akin to sharing a table at lunch include retweets, comments on blog posts, comments via tweets or on Facebook pages, voting for content, participating in polls and sharing content via other social channels.  Try asking people questions via social media channels – everyone likes to be the expert.

2)      Be attractive and well groomed.  Let’s be honest, if you aren’t attractive or well-groomed, you won’t get the vote.  What does this mean for social media?  Images used on Twitter, your profile page on Twitter, your page on Facebook, and your website all need to be visually attractive and easy to digest.

3)      Try enhancing your look. If you’ve been trying to go it alone, now is the time to get a professional to help you out with your logo or website to make sure you are presenting the best image possible.

4)      Try not to act slutty. Acting slutty can cause others to lose respect for you.  In the social media world this translates to acting salesly and self-promoting, making cheesy complementary comments to people in hopes that they will follow you, or being a copy-cat without attributing credit.

5)      Flirt! If you want to be someone that everyone loves, you’ll need to put a little pizzazz into it.  Conversations on social media channels shouldn’t be boring and drab – “hey, great article.”  Think about what it takes to be a successful flirt – making connections, getting personal, and being witty, engaging and humorous.  Your social media conversations need to leave your readers thinking – “I want some more of that!”

6)      Keep your grades up. Good grades add to your respect level, and make sure that you don’t get kicked out of school.  In social media marketing, this means staying on top of the pulse of your industry and the sentiment and burning desires of your target audience.  If you push any content that is off the mark, outdated or incorrect, you’ll quickly become an social media fail-out.

7)      Be yourself. Put your own unique personality into it.  Corporate speak and only professional news postings won’t build strong social connections.  Use your own voice in your content and give it some personality.  Include tweets and posts that give people a peak into who you actually are.  We love people who can add value socially and that we can identify with and feel like we know personally.

8)      Be comfortable everywhere you go. Shy, nervous, unsure people don’t rise to the top.  Be assertive and confident in your social media conversations.

9)      Be known. Even if you are amazingly attractive, witty and intelligent, if you aren’t well-known, there will be no crown for you.  How to get known online?  Join applicable online groups.  Follow all of the popular people for your space online.  Push content that is controversial or incredibly funny.  In your tweets be sure to use hash tags appropriately for keywords.  Push “best of” type lists that include valuable lists that link out to lots of other people.  Comment to the in-crowd online.  You can even simulate “dating” someone popular online – if you can get some social endorsements from a leader in your space and have some online conversations with them via social media channels, you will be tweeting with the in-crowd in no time.

10)   Hang out with everyone, unless they are into bad things. Make an effort to get to know everyone in your space that is active in social media.  Do this in an effort of self-learning and to build connections, not just to be cool.  Follow everyone who is interested in or a leader in your space.  If someone follows you, follow them back.  The only people to avoid are those who demonstrate obnoxious online behavior (like just going for sales) or are just pure copy-cats without giving credit where credit is due.

11)   Be Gracious. Be gracious to everyone who takes time out of their precious life to engage with you.  Be gracious to everyone who posts something that you find valuable or interesting.  If someone mentions you, thank them.  If someone makes a comment, thank them and be sure to comment back.  If someone links to you, link back to them.  If someone follows you, follow them.

When the day is done, just be grateful that unlike becoming homecoming queen, social media marketing success is something you can add to your resume.

How to Blog for Maximum SEO Benefit

Valuable and unique content is a critical element for SEO success.  Putting together a targeted blog plan now can help you be at the top of the natural search results in the upcoming holiday season.

1) Keyword Research

It’s common to think about keywords for Pay-Per-Click Advertising and SEO, but keywords are often an afterthought when it comes to blogging.  In order for blogging to achieve SEO success, it is vital to start with a keyword strategy.

Start by thinking about the products that you want in the lead for traffic and sales in the upcoming holiday.  We’ll use an example of a retailer who sells grill accessories: Grill Mitts, Grill Lights.

The next step is to generate a list of keywords for how people are going to be gift shopping for these items.  Whom will they be looking for gift ideas for?   What type of person is it for?  What problem does it solve?   If you get stuck you can always check out question sites, or read reviews on product pages to get ideas for the most favorite uses and solved needs.  Continuing on our example: Gifts for dad, Gifts for grill man, Grilling accessory gifts, Gifts for men who love to entertain, Lighting up grill space, Handling hot grill pans.

For other great ideas on generating keywords, check out the keyword tools list here: .

2) Blog Plan

The next step is to create a plan around blogging for sufficient coverage and awareness.  Your blog plan should include:

How will you provide sufficient coverage for each keyword? We recommend 2-5 blog posts for each of the keywords that you identified in the first step.  You can use different format and content approaches for each such as lists, guides, how-to’s, humorous slants, or consolidated summaries of all the reviews available.

How frequently you should blog? You can back into this answer by the volume of keywords and the number of posts necessary to cover the keywords.  We find that blogging a minimum once per day is a good start.

Who will be writing the blogs? Get everyone at the company involved, or try outsourcing if you can’t meet the demands internally.  There are some interesting outsourcing options out there such as TextBroker.

How will you promote the blog posts? After you’ve spent the time putting together your amazing blog content, it’s important to get the word out. Some options include:

• Push blog entries via social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter.
• Push your blog articles to social bookmarking sites such as Digg.
• Syndicate your articles to other related industry sites.
• Post your blog entry to relevant questions on answer sites such as Yahoo Answers and Google Groups.
• Comment on other related blog posts with a link back to your blog.
• List your content on Craigslist with the relevant product.
• Run a long-tail pay per click campaign.
• Include links to blog posts in the Site Links of your other PPC campaigns.
• Make your blog posts easily sharable and encourage people to share.
• Include coupon codes or discount offers in your blog posts to encourage sharing.

How will you keep your blog content fresh? Allow others to comment on your posts and you can also add updates to the blog article based on feedback received or new information.

3) Blog Content Optimization for SEO

The content on the blog article itself will need to be constructed in such a way that it yields you the best possible SEO results:

Blog Title. Include your target keywords into the title of the blog post.

Blog Tags. Use keywords as tags for your blog post entry.

Blog Post URL. Include your keywords in the URL itself.  Make sure to separate the words using dashes.

Blog Images. Optimize the names of any images used within your blog post with variations of your keywords.  Separate your keywords by dashes within the image name.

Blog Content.  Use secondary keywords and variations of target keywords throughout your content in a natural way.

Internal Linking. Inside your blog posts, link to previous related blog posts and product pages.  From within your website, links to your blog posts from relevant product pages, or product category pages.  Be sure that all anchor text includes keywords.

Link Building. Beyond internal links, you’ll want to get external links to your blog post.  One of the easiest things you can do here is to link out to other partner-type sites and complementary bloggers – and make sure they know about it.

Holiday shopping research will soon be in full swing, so now is the time to be getting your blog plan into place and actively producing and promoting your exceptional content for the best possible natural search traffic.

You just know your blog is incredibly valuable, but how can you prove it?

To help measure the ROI of your blog, we put together 8 metric areas you can track. These metrics will enable you to track the value and costs associated with your blog, and compare results to other online marketing efforts such as pay-per-click advertising and SEO.  This cost and value comparison is very helpful when determining marketing budgets and resource allocation.

1)      Traffic. Easy to Track.

It’s easy to track traffic generated by your blog inside Google Analytics and other analytic applications. This chart tracks the traffic numbers from your blog along with the percentage of total traffic that it represents.  It’s important to compare the cost to attain this traffic, to the other methods of pursuing online traffic such as PPC and SEO.  If you know your SEO and Blog cost of work, you can pretty easily get to a cost per click.

2)      Traffic Engagement. Easy to Track.

This chart compares traffic engagement indicators including bounce rate, time on site, pages per visit and contribution to repeat visits across the different online marketing strategies.

3)      Links. Some Effort to Track.

This chart tracks inbound links to your blogs, along with anchor text and the “link juice” each link is contributing.  It compares inbound links to your blog with other website links attained through the more traditional SEO.  The goal here is to get down to the cost per link level to help compare the tactics.

4)      Keyword Rank & Click Share. Some Effort to Track.

This one can be a bit more challenging depending on the depth of your analytics system.  This one also assumes you are targeting keywords in your blog posts (which if you aren’t, you should be.)  This chart compares the rank of your blog posts, web pages and pay-per-click ads for target keywords, along with the % of clicks that each brings in.  Often times the CTR of blog posts in the natural search results is much higher than other listing types.

5)      Social Buzz.  Easy to Track.

This chart tracks the social buzz generated by your blog posts including retweets, social bookmarks, likes and social mentions.  While this chart is not a direct comparison to other online marketing efforts, it does help to articulate the value of your blog.

6)      Twitter Followers. A Bit Tricky to Track.

This chart measure the number of Twitter followers and quality of those followers achieved from your blogging compared to other social efforts.  You can do the same type of analysis for other social media venues in which you participate such as Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn.

7)      RSS Subscriptions, Newsletter Subscriptions. Easy to Track.

This chart tracks how many site visitors from your blog signed up for an RSS feed or your newsletter, versus sign-ups you receive from other organic and paid traffic.

8)      Conversions. Easy to Track.

This chart tracks conversions from visitors who visited a blog post, or came to you via a blog post.  It includes the number of conversions, the percentage of total conversions, the conversion rate and the cost per conversion.  It’s also really important to track conversion assists and not just leave it all to last-click attribution.  You’ll be pleasantly surprised by how many conversion assists your blog contributes.

These metrics will help you articulate the value of your blog. This type of reporting also helps to focus your blogging efforts so you can continue to improve the value it provides.  It is quite rewarding to see the value, rather than just continuously creating content and hoping for the best.

If you check out popular crowdsourcing websites, you will find the “jobs” sections dominated by requests for social media marketing activities.  It can be difficult to get your social media up and off the ground–especially a regular, high-quality blog publishing effort–so it seems many small businesses have turned to what I would consider to be “black hat” techniques.

Consider the following most common social marketing “job” listings…

Blog and Article Writing. The pay for these ranges from $0.50 to $5.00 per article.  Most article requests range from 350 to 500 words and specify the keywords to be used and the keyword density.  These jobs seem to fall into a gray area.  If you can find good writers out there who can provide you with legitimate content, why not?  However, the quality of article you will get for the most popular price of $1.00 is very questionable to me.  It’s clear these businesses do not agree that truly valuable content is the best approach.

Now we will exit the lone “high-end” job category and get into the low-paying jobs.  Most jobs in this category pay anywhere from $0.01 to $0.50 for the tasks below.  (Personally, I think these folks could do better at the penny slots, or even begging on the street corner.)

YouTube. The jobs pertaining to YouTube involve getting paid for watching a video, voting on a video (some request likes only), leaving comments about a video, sharing a video or subscribing to a YouTube channel.

Twitter. Jobs pertaining to Twitter pay people to make tweets that link to a particular website (tweet included), retweeting messages, or becoming a follower for a business.

Facebook. These jobs typically pay for liking a Facebook fan page, leaving positive comments on a fan page, liking posts on a fan page or liking products or content on a company’s website.

Social Bookmarking. The tasks for social bookmarking are based on bookmarking a page on multiple social bookmarking sites.

Website Evangelism. This one involves posting a comment to popular forums, groups, or other related websites.  The post text and link are provided, along with posting frequency guidelines to avoid raising any spamming flags.  Obviously most of these are no-follow so it is not going to help with SEO.  However, these do certainly help drive traffic through online word-of-mouth which people attribute a high level of trust to.

Joining New Communities. This job involves getting paid to sign up for a new online social group or community.

Forums. These businesses are typically trying to quickly build out large forums in order to give their site more credibility.  Some tasks involve creating questions, most involve writing short answers to questions.

Contest Voting. You can get paid to vote for a particular participant in an online social contest, for example a best photo contest.

Posting Comments. This job requests that you post comments on forums, or on articles to help them appear more popular.

Blogger. This one involves getting paid to become a follower for a blogger account.

I will stop there, but it does get worse on freelancer sites — much worse.

Is it clever to employ the masses? Or, is this all shady?  The more I read the more in need of a shower I felt.  The things I value most about social media are the great content and the implied trust that comes with a comment or “Like” or other social endorsement action, and this type of behavior breaks both.

I am in no way saying that all crowdsourcing jobs are bad.  There are a ton of legitimate jobs out there and thousands of great ways to leverage crowdsourcing.

But, I was heartbroken to see all of the unethical social activity going on.  It’s probably even sadder to see what people will do for mere pennies – I mean, you can’t even get a gumball for a penny anymore.  (Although, in some countries this pay probably ends up working out to be a pretty decent job.)  The best way a business can get a social following — and the endorsements that come with it — is by diligently publishing high-quality content on a regular basis and winning fans for your efforts.  The pay-offs are often in the longer-term, but having earned it the honest way will mean you see real business benefits rather than just a list of hollow gestures.

Everyone has gone social: you, your competitors, your partners, your customers, your leads, your friends–everyone.  So now what?

It’s time to set up a system to mine all of the qualitative data that is floating around out there and put it to good, practical use.  Try using this list of 13 truly useful things you can actively learn from monitoring social media:

1. Who’s in bed with the competition?

Who’s blogging favorably about them?  Who’s providing them with good reviews?  Who’s following them on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and active in their community?  Who’s presenting with them on webinars and co-sponsoring collateral with them?

Get some good monitoring going on around your competitors names, and keep an eye on their online reviews and their social media account followers and activities.

Find their biggest fans and start to court them away.  Everyone knows how big a competitive win is – but a competitive win who is loud in the social media world is the biggest competitive win of all.

2. Who loves you?

Similar to above, who’s blogging about you? Tweeting about you? Commenting about you on Facebook? Giving you positive reviews?

It’s standard practice to reward someone who refers you new business, so make it standard practice to reward those who are essentially referring you to the masses.  Provide these “fans” with some appropriate reciprocal love.  Perhaps it’s a link back, or a coupon or some other offer.  But make sure you let anyone who speaks positively about you know that you are listening, you really appreciate it and you’d love it if they do more!

3. What do people love the most about you?

Monitor trends in positive mentions about you in reviews, blog posts and other social media channels such as Twitter.

Sometimes what we may think are our biggest selling points are not what people love us  for most.  Pay attention to what people like  best about you, and start to actively promote those.  One technique we like is to actively call them out in your search ads using quotations.  Quotations lend more trust than just touting yourself, plus it will be in your audience’s own words.

4. What do people dislike the most about you?

While you’re poring through all of your praise, also start to document trends about any negative comments, or “if they only had….” comments.

Use “if only they had” information to inform your product development, road map and / or inventory adjustments.

5. What are your competitors hiring for?

Keep an active query in your reader (i.e., TweetDeck or HootSuite or Seesmic) that monitors job postings for your competitors.

One of the biggest hints about what they are up to next can be inside of those job postings.  Many companies are surprisingly candid about direction and weaknesses inside of their postings.

6. What are your competitor’s future plans?

Along those same lines, keeping an active query in your reader that includes your competitors name along with the word plans or powerpoint or pdf docs.

Many companies are surprisingly lax about what gets out into the web, you’ll be surprised about how much free competitive intelligence will flow your way.

7. Negative keywords for PPC campaigns.

Keep a query of your head keyword terms inside of your reader and monitor the headlines and themes of blog postings and news articles that are coming in.

Add anything and everything that isn’t relevant to you as a negative keyword in your ppc advertising campaigns.

8. New target keywords for PPC campaigns.

Same query as above, but this time monitoring for new ways people are talking about your space, or new needs and reasons that are rising up.

Take advantage of these by adding them in as new target keywords to always have your PPC campaigns on top of current trends.

9. Who are the influencers and thought leaders in your space / area?

Same head terms query – both of blogs and also of Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

Use this to identify who the big influencers are online in your space.  Then, make them your best friends and court them to talk about you.

10.  Hot topics for blogging

With that same head terms query, you can easily get a pulse for what is trendy.

Use trends to write blog posts about with your own opinion, expertise, and helpful information.  When you promote trendy blog posts, they will garner you the most value.

11.  Audience profiling

Where is your audience and how do they participate?  Do they blog? Do they write reviews on local sites? Do they attend webinars?  Do they download podcasts? Are they active on FourSquare, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo Questions or other communities?

Monitoring your audience’s activities and where they are most prevalent will help you figure out where to spend your precious marketing dollars and dedicate your marketing content and time.

12.  What should your Sales Tools & Collateral address?

What don’t they like about you? What is your competition promoting as their biggest advantages?  What are the current hot topics and needs?

Develop sale collateral around these so your sales force is always armed with the latest and greatest sales objections they are likely to run into and the most prevalent ways of discussing the current market climate and needs.

13.  Link building opportunities

Did someone mention you, but forgot to include a back link?

Reach out to them and kindly request that they add a link!

It’s all free data, so start to make social media one of your best sources of information today!

1) Natural Search

Get the benefits of “page one” without actually being there! Many small companies don’t have the expertise or time in order to get and maintain a page one ranking on Google for the most popular short keyword phrases.  If being on page one isn’t feasible, then make sure you are only just one click away from every page one listing.

Use the most popular, relevant short keyword phrases for your offering and then comb through the websites on the first page.  Except for websites of competitors, you should be able to get a presence on all of these pages.  And since 70% of traffic goes to the natural listings on page one – this means a lot of exposure for you!

Put a link to helpful content on your site from any Wikipedia type listings (don’t worry about no follow, this is about traffic)

Comment on blogs and article that are on page one (don’t worry about no follow)

Create partnerships with applicable sites

Identify key associations and organizations to join

Target the sites for your ads to display on via Google’s content network

Buy display ads on these sites

Since many searchers check out a couple of sites before being fully satisfied, this gives you many opportunities for exposure for each keyword phrase – increasing your presence and credibility with each exposure.

2) Paid Search

Now for some successful strategies for a strong presence with keywords you can afford.  Many keywords in today’s paid search ad space have moved out of the budget range for many small companies.  But don’t give up – there are still lots of cheap keywords out there to be had.  Here are some ways to uncover paid search traffic that you can still afford:

Mine your analytics data for keyword queries that brought you traffic.  Look only at five-plus word phrases.  This can be a great beginning to a long-tail search network campaign.

Bid on your competitor’s brand and product keywords.

Bid on your partner’s brand and product keywords.  Use your ad copy to clarify how to fit in and benefit from using them both together.

Promote yourself for everything you will be attending- conferences, charity events, etc.  Bid on the keyword names of the events and highlight your presence at them.

Promote your blog posts individually using longer-tail terms (5+ words again) from your posting.

Go beyond Google into Yahoo and Bing.  Also look at further expansion into Facebook, LinkedIn, Business.com, etc

3) Highly-targeted Content Network Campaign

The rock bottom CPC’s of the Google Content Network attracts many small companies.  However, if the campaign is not highly targeted it is just another waste of money.  Here are some tips on how to enjoy the lower CPCs while getting actual brand and click results from the Content Network:

Use managed placements only. Select prominent websites in your industry – places your target customer goes to for their news.

Set ad groups of keywords.  For the content network you use those popular 1-2 word phrases in thematic ad groups.  Just enough information to help Google relate to the type of content on the managed placement site that your ad is most relevant to.

4) Display Ads – One at a Time

Buy prominent space (rotated through different sites) on the most predominantly viewed authorities in your space and on the most widely read newsletters in your space.  Doing one at a time will enable you to spread your presence on a smaller budget and avoid ad fatigue.

5) Re-targeting Campaign

These are the campaigns which can be run through Google which will show your ads to previous visitors of your website as they cruise around other websites that are a part of Google’s content network.    You’ll need to place a snippet of code onto your website in order for Google to start tracking visitors.  You’ll need to get to 500 cookies before Google will show your ads.  Some small companies are turned off by this number, but just be patient – you’ll eventually get there and the rewards will be worth it.

Previous visitors will be impressed as they cruise the web – “wow, these guys are everywhere!”

Be sure to limit how many times a previous visitor sees your ads in a day or week.  While you want to project a big image, you don’t want to become irritating noise.

Check out the sites that your visitors are frequenting – these may be good managed placements for your content campaign, or great link building opportunities.

6) Blog

A blog can be your free way to demonstrate your helpful expertise and get a natural search presence for longer tail terms.

It’s also great material to push out through more social avenues such as Facebook , Twitter, Digg, Reddit and others.

Great content can gain you popularity on Facebook and Twitter and also will have people show the article to their friends so you can experience viral growth.

7) Newsletter

Having a professional regular newsletter projects the image of being big.  It helps remind people about you and is your chance to become a regular helpful source to potential and current customers.  There are many very affordable email systems out there that can help your emails to look professional and help you maintain your email list with ease.

If your newsletter contains truly valuable content – people will share it with their friends and you will experience viral growth.

8 ) Enlist Bloggers, the Media, Customers and Partners

Small companies can’t go it alone, so leverage every single person out there that can help you.  Here are some tips on who can help and how to engage them:

Find influential bloggers and get them interested to blog about you, or think about you for certain topics.  Providing them with interesting data that you have from internal studies or leveraging them as an expert can be a great way to build the relationship.

Reach out to journalists (whether from your local newspaper, or national industry publications) and make sure they know about you.  Again – offering unique and interesting data or topic thoughts can be a helpful way to them that can start the relationship.

Get Noted / Awarded – whether by an analyst, a publication, or an annual reward – get your name in the hat.

Partners – build some partnerships –whether it’s with the owner of the jazz bar across the street from your restaurant or a technology consultant who helps to implement your software – have them mention you on their site, in their blogs and link to you and recommend you.  Referral fees are often good motivators here.

Enlist your customers.  Offer incentives for reviews on local listings.  Offer contests on Twitter and Facebook.

9) Free Listings

Get list for free wherever you can and make the listing as complete as possible.  Listings can include:

Google Merchant Feed

Local Listings

Topical industry directories

Employ these strategies and in no time, you will be projecting an online image of a larger, professional organization that is knowledgeable, reputable and here to stay.

It’s been another big week in Silicon Valley. The annual Ad:Tech San Francisco Conference is wrapping up today after playing host to 12,000 visitors and a huge range of exhibitors anxious to show off the ways in which they’re innovating across traditional, online, search and mobile advertising.

At the same time, Facebook kicked off its Developers’ Conference, called F8, also in the Bay Area. Like Twitter’s conference last week, the gathering is for third-party developers of applications that live on Facebook itself and across its growing ecosystem. Founder Mark Zuckerberg (pictured above, at the opening of F8 on April 21, 2010) announced a stunning array of changes and new initiatives that will directly affect the nearly 500 million people who visit the site each month.

But wait, there’s more: Google, Apple and Yahoo!, all headquartered in the Bay Area, released their quarterly earnings reports this week. And what earning they are:

Google, though disappointing analysts, saw revenue increases of more than 20% over the same period last year, bringing in a total of $6.7 billion, with profits of nearly $2 billion. (What’s to be disappointed about?) Search advertising remains the principal driver of Google’s revenues and profits.

Yahoo!, which everyone said was on a death watch, also produced respectable results for the quarter. Revenues were $1.6 billion for the first quarter of 2010, a one percent increase from the first quarter of 2009. Income from operations for the first quarter of 2010 was $188 million. Nearly all this was driven by display advertising across its network.

Not to be outdone, Apple also reported stunning results last quarter, which officially made it bigger in terms of market cap than cross-town rival Google. Total revenues for the quarter were nearly $15.7 billion, with profits at nearly $3.4 billion. They’re selling more Macintosh computers, iPhones and iPads than ever; only iPods saw a small decline in sales—about a one percent decline. Increasingly, however, Apple is deriving significant revenues from sales of apps, various forms of entertainment and advertising.

Reading this, you might ask “What recession?” While Silicon Valley did see some impact from the Great Recession, which most economists believe is now over, it wasn’t as adversely impacted as many other sectors of the economy. And its rebound is pretty darn impressive.

Capitalizing on the robust return to growth of online display, search and mobile advertising–not to mention the massive adoption of smart gadgets like the iPhone and iPad–Facebook is moving aggressively to expand its ecosystem across much of the Web. In summary, Facebook’s new default is “globally social” – which is to say, it presumes all members of the social network want to be social not only on Facebook but wherever it may have extended its tentacles across the Web.

For instance, if you see a “Like” button next to an article on, say Huffington Post, and you click on that button, your endorsement of that article will appear in your news feed on Facebook for all your friends to see, comment on and share. That this button exists at all on HuffPo has to do with Facebook’s new Open Graph effort, which provides website publishers with simple tools to integrate Facebook features and functions directly into their own sites.

This new initiatives also means that the HuffPo will be more personalized to you – showing you, for instance, what your friends on Facebook previously read and shared on HuffPo.

Like Google’s search advertising engine, AdWords, Facebook will target ads to its users. But instead of using the words typed into a search query to dictate what sort of text-based ads to serve around search results, Facebook will target ads that are mostly text but also include a small graphic based on what users have declared about themselves in their profiles and news updates. It will also factor in your age, location, gender, education, and other demographic, psychographic and geographic considerations.

Facebook believes it can help advertisers more precisely deliver ads that are directly relevant to the person who sees them. Moreover, it’s hoping that because users see ads that pertain to their immediate needs, interests or desires, they’ll be more receptive to those messages. All of which, of course, should lead to better ad click-through rates, increased sales, and lower costs to market products and services.

At Ad:Tech, all the buzz what less about the kinds of ads you might expect to find on networks like Yahoo’s or AOL’s new Advertising.com platform, which serves the AOL network, and more about how to integrate better into the interactions and conversations you might find on social networks, including Facebook and Twitter. While advertising on networks is still big business, ad-buys on those properties are now a default in any ad plan. Everyone in the business is more interested in those 500 million monthly visitors to Facebook or the millions more who are publishing billions of tweets across Twitter’s network every day.

Another big topic is how best to leverage advertising on smart phones like the iPhone and Blackberry, and on tablet devices like the iPad – and how best to efficiently integrate advertising into the hundreds of thousands of apps people place on those devices.

Given the pace of technological innovation, you’d think the advertising models for all this new technology would be a little more advanced. But you’d be wrong. Seasoned pros and young entrepreneurs alike are struggling to find the right ways to best leverage the range of new advertising channels effectively and efficiently, and which also integrate well into the new experiences all this technology makes possible.

Whether leveraging mobile search to get relevant coupons and offers into the hands of those who’d use them right when they need them, to whether and how to place ads in apps like Condé Nast’s Epicurious such that they’re seen as helpful is still being hotly debated.

What is clear is that the future of Silicon Valley’s hottest companies remain pretty darn bright. Not to mention those earnings.