The Secret to Successful Viral Marketing: Stop Trying and Start Inspiring

If I were to rank the effectiveness of each marketing avenue for most businesses I’ve worked with, here’s how they stack up.

1. Word of mouth
2. Email Marketing
3. Organic SEO
4. Paid Search
5. Display Advertising

In many ways, items 2-5 are easy. They have well-established best practices to follow. Word of mouth advertising, or viral marketing, is a different beast. How do you stimulate this activity among your customers? Is it possible to create this type of genuine buzz, or must it come organically?

This question reminds me of the in-house debate among SEO’s over the most effective link building strategy. Do you build, buy, or beg for links or do you create powerful, unique, and engaging content that transforms your site into a natural link magnet?

If viral marketing was as simple as throwing up a YouTube video or creating a Tell-a-Friend page, everyone would drop traditional paid advertising methods such as search, email, or display ads. Obviously, a truly successful viral marketing campaign depends requires more.

Simpleology gives a brilliant break-down of the 2 main types of word of mouth marketing.

Incentivized Word of Mouth

This type of WOM marketing attempts to stimulate viral marketing through incentives, usually monetization. An example would be a refer a friend program that allows customers to earn store credit by getting friends to buy.

Inspired Word of Mouth

Inspired WOM marketing, in contrast, occurs naturally and without incentives. This can be as simple as one soccer mom telling another about the great experience she had at a hair salon, or an influential blogger who reviews a product he or she had a great a experience with.

Customers who engage in inspired WOM marketing typically aren’t just customers, they’re raving fans. Their passion may be based on the product, service, or the entire experience. In all likelihood, the customers that are engaged in this type of WOM are your top 1,000 fans.

So how does a company create genuinely inspired WOM?

Back to the Basics

In reality, I believe the most successful viral marketing comes as a result of only 2 things:

1. Creating products that are actually worth talking about and or…
2. Providing legendary customer service that consistently exceeds expectations

The simplicity of this formula is great news for many e-tailers, who will never be able to create a successful viral marketing campaign. For example, how does a website selling printer cartridges stir up viral buzz? Simple, they just do what they know best. They run their business with excellence and by providing an outstanding mix or products and service.

Why do so many viral marketing campaigns fail? Because they’re trying to create something from nothing. They’re attempt to create buzz results in hyped up, blatant, and sometimes tacky advertising tactics.

In contrast, consider Starbucks, who recently closed their doors for 3 hours in order to refocus on customer experience by learning to make better coffee.

Like Starbucks, many online retailers need to get back to the basics, take a “coffee break”, and refocus on what they do best. When this happens, inspired word of mouth will follow.

Seo Friendly Guidelines to Design SEO Friendly Website

If you are planning to design a search engine friendly website you need to take some important points into consideration. Designing your web site as per these SEO search engine friendly tips and Guidelines will help your site in good ranking and efficient web promotion and also provide and easy crawling for the spiders.

What is SEO friendly website: - A search engine friendly web site is a web site rank well in the search engines and can be easily found in the search engines. In simple words it should be formatted and designed in way that provides easy understanding for user and easily indexed by the search engines.

Use Div Layers instead of HTML table: - use of div layer in palace of old html table is more search engine (SEO) friendly that provides and easy crawling to web spiders and crawlers.

Researching for the keywords: - Search for those targeted keywords search by the net surfer
most. But keep in mind the traffic of these keywords. First try to search out least competitive keywords that are mostly searched out.

HTML as well as XML Site map: - Submit html sitemap as well as xml site map which enables visitors and web spiders to understand the changes you have made on your web site.

Validate web site pages: - Html and CSS validation is very essential for a search engine friendly website.

Remove any broken and dead link: - Remove deal or broker link from the web site as they reduces your web site credibility. These links are not goods for search engine friendly website.

Backlinks Are Still The Major Website Traffic Stream

Being on the first page of results on major search engines such as Google, Yahoo or MSN for certain keywords is the purpose of every search engine optimization project. Being at the first page, will bring free organic traffic and of course more business and value to the website. When optimizing for search engines, most optimizers concentrate on optimizing the website itself by enhancing titles, keywords, descriptions, image alts, page text and other factors that with no doubt are very important for any search engine optimization project. However, I noticed that webmasters get lazy when it comes to the most important factor that brings websites to the top of the search engine results.

At the time of writing this article, both Google and Yahoo returned quicktime.com in the first position for the "get it here" keyword. MSN returned the Adobe flash playerpage. The least amount of results was 354,000,000 search results.

When you go to either the adobe flash player page or the quick time player page and take notes from a search engine optimization prospective; "get it here" is not in the domain name, not in the title of the page, not in the keywords, not in the meta description, not in any alt of the images nor anywhere else in the pages text or html source code! Further, you can bet that you will get the same notes if you looked at all the web pages on the first result pages of Google, Yahoo or MSN. The question is: how did these pages get to rank high in search engines in such a way in spite the fact that they are irrelevant and not optimized for that specific keyword?

The domain name, title, meta description, keywords, image alts and page text are all
important seo factors but they are obviously not the answer. The major search engine
optimization factor is backlinks.

Optimizing your website's elements such as the keywords and your page texts is just the beginning. Those elements are important but they should only be considered as a preparation phase. The real work starts right after finishing this phase.

Adobe flash player and quick time is used by millions of users. You probably have
encountered something similar to this sentence "This page requires flash player. If you do not have flash player installed get it here". The "get it here" is a backlink to the flash player page. Millions of websites have a link to the Adobe flash player page with "get it here" for the text of the link and with no doubts that's why adobe flash player is number one for the "get it here" keyword.

An important thing to notice here is that the benefit of having backlinks to a site is not only by bringing the website to the top of search engine results. A backlink also brings even more website traffic from clicks on that link. If you have paid for a pay per click marketing campaign, then you know how much a click is worth! Millions of users click the "get it here" link and go to the Adobe and QuickTime website at no cost to either! You do the math!

Backlinks are with no doubt your primary source of website traffic. Backlinks bring you to the top of search engine results. Backlinks establishes your website popularity. Traffic to your website is the value of your website, backlinks are what creates traffic and therefore, building backlinks should be on the top of your marketing campaign priorities to maximize the traffic and value of your website.

Backlinks are simply the links that you get to your website from other websites. If you do not have sufficient amount of links pointing to your website, you will keep striving and paying money to get a small portion of traffic that probably will not cover your expenses nor will it be worth the time you spend using other search engine optimization methods such as optimizing your website content. Even if you have the best website with the best content, if you do not have backlinks, you will not have any significant website traffic.

Benefits of Search Engine Optimization and SEO Marketing

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimizing and it refers to various activities which are involved in optimizing your website for top results on search engine results or pages. If your website is ranking on top pages of Google, Yahoo and other search engines then it will help you attract more visitors and an increase in website traffic.

Search engine optimization is the technique through which you can make your website
accessible to any search engine users. Some people refer to it as SEO, or SEM ie Search Engine Marketing and several other terms. If your website is not accessible on top pages of Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines then it could adversely affect your business website in terms of visitors and traffic.

Each and every month, several billion users log into various search engines to locate services and products. A business executive from US who might be planning to outsource his SEO work might search for keywords or keyphrases on search engines such as “SEO Outsourcing”, or “SEO Services” etc. Similarly someone searching for internet marketing services might search for keywords such as “marketing company” or “internet marketing services”.

These keywords/keyphrases are the backbone and essence of search engine marketing. In SEO marketing you target those users who are already searching for your product or service. Therefore success rate of SEO marketing is higher as compared to other marketing mediums.

The only drawback of SEO optimization is that it is a slow process. Optimizing a website for a high traffic keyword such as “Website Marketing” might consume more than 12 months. However, the rewards of SEO optimization are excellent. You don’t have to pay anyone for advertising. Once you succeed in achieving top page rankings for keywords associated with your business, you can generate plenty of traffic online without paying anyone a single penny.

SEO Marketing is another term which is used frequently along with SEO Optimization. SEO marketing encompasses various activities which are related to SEO. Take for example, Adsense advertising, Adwords Advertising, and Yahoo Paid Marketing. SEO marketing focuses on the marketing aspect of both Paid as well as Organic (ie Natural) search engine optimization process.

SEO marketing is more inclined towards understanding user behavior and targeting right set of keywords. SEO optimization combined with SEO marketing can yield best results in terms of traffic/clicks. The optimization process for a highly competitive keyword can easily consume around 8-12 Months. Till that time, you can opt for various paid SEO marketing techniques such as Google Adwords/Adsense. Once you apply for Google adwords, your ads will start to show on search results of Google/Yahoo or any other search engine within a day or two. This means that you don’t have to wait too long to make your website accessible to search engine users.

The benefits of search engine optimization are many. In fact, search engine optimization has emerged as a New Technology and several multinational companies are now hiring full-time SEO experts to make their websites accessible to search engine users. Search engine optimization is the latest internet marketing channel which can bring tremendous benefits for your online business website.

2009 Top 21 Social Community Website

1. RoboForm is still on the list: with literally hundreds of profiles, all with user names and passwords, I honestly do not know what I would do without Roboform to keep track of them: i can even create an identity for a client and automatically fill in the details into any number of web forms for them: I use the paid version but there is also a free version for the beginner.

2. Tubemogul.com Very cool, you upload your videos to one place, and they are automatically syndicated to up to 20 others in optimized format, including Youtube and Google video! You can track statistics about your videos and do all kinds of cool things, a must have for video bloggers.

3. Veoh.com Like Tube Mogul, Veoh allows you to fill in a couple of user names and passwords for You tube and Google (but not as many), but Veoh has a very robust and attractive video player which displays the video nicely on your website, and allow for channels that make it very easy to show a streaming medley of videos that you group together. We have had some issues with loading slowly at times ( with their explosive growth is size), but they are worth looking at for aesthetics, and we still use them some. In some cases you want the videos to be hosted and played on your website streaming right from You tube for the sake of the rankings boost you get from the click-through traffic.

4. Realtown: Realtown is owned and fed by the owners of Real Estate Magazine (RISMedia.com), Epro, Lowes, Internet Crusade and many other established icons in the Real Estate industry. they have just re-done their site (went live in October) with new modern social networking features, and they are about to become the forums and local news areas for RISMedia.com with their new site launch. Any group at Realtown will rank immediately for longtail searches, just as those areas of RISMedia.com do now: I know this because I was consulted on how to insure that, and I tested it last week in my first post: it took less than an hour! They have established a way of dividing up neighborhoods by population instead of Zip codes, and they are about to go live in the communities area. I encourage the reader to join, join a group, heck start one, get into the Realtown store while there is room! What they are attempting to do (the grass roots localization of the web) has been attempted before, but I believe they have the resources and the software to pull it off, and they will have the reach any minute!.

5. Plaxo: Plaxo is kind of an online open-social contact management hub, which recently added profiles and many modern features to its already accessible from anywhere excellent Internet based contact management application - you can import your contacts from Outlook, Linkedin, Google, Yahoo and others - then sync them with the same and your cell phone, so that you can always stay in touch with many interactive features and restore everything at will - wonderful -plugs right into my Outlook.

6. Meetup: Social networking with the whole world at will, with actual local meet up events and clubs in person, great, I have contacted and secured businesss here and it is free. Why re-invent the wheel, start your local leads or affinity group here: it can feed your website, and you will rank instantly on google for the name of your profile!

14 of the 15 recomendations from last year still apply: we must have picked them well: here they are:

7. Activerain - social networking profiles and blog for Realtors and vendors
Most people do not notice that you do not need to be a Realtor to join, you can be a vendor like me, and the profiles and blogs are not bad for Search Engine Placement link-building campaigns.

8. Alexa - Traffic and Website Statistics and Archived Information and Reviews
An Amazon.com company, we use it to get quick information about any website according to everyone who has the Alexa toolbar - which collects a wealth of information and statistics. They also archive old websites, and provide links to reviews on amazon.com.

9. Associated Content - Associated Content is a buyer and seller, syndicator of user-generated, user-filtered content
One of the most successful and well traveled sites on the web, this site is a must for branding and link building: your clout and pagerank build as an author - you can even get paid for content, although that is not what I use it for.

10. Delicious - social bookmarking, link-sharing
You install a toolbar that allows you to keep a set of favorites online where you can access them from any computer, and share them with the world, if you like, as an online resource. Excellent for traffic building and link-popularity, I recommend that you add and use the toolbar.

11. Digg.com - social bookmarking popularity-driven site:
This site is great for traffic-building for your articles and blogs, and also for link-popularity for your main site and blog: users submit, describe, review, and rank each others preferences. It is also great for getting real-time feedback on what people actually like and do not like about what you and/or others who write stuff that you read may have to say.

12. Feedburner - a feed aggregator that allows you to monitor various statistics about your feeds,
make them available in every format to your visitors, even sell advertising fed into the feed.

13. Google Adwords Keyword Tool - find out what words are searched for, and how much competition there is to rank for those words
To use it intelligently, you must understand the concept of pack mentality: we track trends in key industries like real estate and get to where the market is going first; many Realtors search daily for the same things, but they are not always each others target market - so be careful how you interpret the results from such tools.

14. Google Friend Connect :
Google Friend Connect instantly awakens and strengthens the community that visits your site by enriching it with social features.

15. Linkedin - most well-known business-to-business social networking site
Linkedin was originally for job and employment placement services - it is a very full-featured business-to-business networking site.

16. Mybloglog.com - Blog syndication, networking, tracking, resources, and communities
Everyone with a blog should be here, and I highly recommend some of their tools, like the one that lets you see who has read this lately at the right of this page! I visit and network with them!

17. Myspace.com - the most well known social media site
If you thought is was just for kids, think again: the average age is over forty, and a profile here can be used for link-popularity and business networking, not just dating and file sharing!

18. www.socialmarker.com - Instant Book Marking Tools Online
Social bookmarking is a powerful tool in promoting a website. But going through all of those social bookmarking sites is very time-consuming and downloading all toolbars is madness. That’s where SocialMarker.com comes in, the free service designed to reduce the time and effort needed to socially bookmark a website.

19. Stumbleupon - another social bookmarking site very useful for traffic building:

20. Technorati.com - a blog, news and file sharing aggregator
Another must for bloggers: you can tag your posts and make them available to millions by keyword search

20. Yahoo! Answers - Home

Yahoo! Answers is a new way to find and share information. You can ask questions on any topic, get answers from real people, and share your insights and Knowledge.

21. Facebook : Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them.

Benefits of Social Bookmarking

[1]Increased Traffic - As more and more people read your bookmarked blog post/ web article and vote for it, the more popular it becomes & the traffic to your site increases.
[2]Increased Visibility & Branding - Submitting to Social Bookmarking Sites puts your blog/website out there in front of millions of people, increasing your visibility ten notches and getting you more branding.
[3]Get more Links - Each of these Popular Social Bookmarking Sites see tremendous volumes of traffic on a daily basis, if your blog/website has good content on it, chances are that several of these users will link to your content, thus getting you relevant links which will ultimately lead to an increase in your Rankings in the Search Engines.

Given below is the list of social bookmarking sites
Url
http://www.a1-webmarks.com
http://bibsonomy.org
http://blinklist.com
http://business-planet.net
http://digg.com
http://www.diigo.com
http://www.dropjack.com
http://faves.com
http://www.folkd.com
http://getigadget.com
http://bestmark.obosor.com
http://bestofwebs.co.cc
http://cloudytags.com
http://del.icio.us
http://desigrade.com
http://indopligg.gofreeserve.com
http://newsfinda.com
http://pageactive.org
http://spotback.com
http://ww2.ikeepbookmarks.com
http://www.blogbookmark.com
http://www.bookmarkall.com
http://www.bookmarkplace.com
http://www.brightsapphire.com
http://www.bukmark.net
http://www.care2.com
http://www.claimid.com
http://www.cmymark.com
http://www.contentpop.com
http://www.dekut.com
http://www.fuzzfizz.com
http://www.gabbr.com
http://www.globusport.com
http://www.hotbuzz.in
http://www.ipopu.com
http://www.justspot.org
http://www.kwoff.com
http://www.linkets.com
http://www.listerlister.com
http://www.memfrag.com
http://www.mysitevote.com
http://www.newsroom.ie
http://www.oyax.com
http://www.pinoymug.com
http://www.quickieclick.com
http://www.sitejot.com
http://www.sitesays.com
http://www.socialdanger.com
http://www.startaid.com
http://www.syncone.net

Microsoft Bing vs. Google: battle of the Search

More and more people have stopped going on to Google.com, not because they do not like the search engine, it is just because it is built into a number of web browsers now. People using Google for search is now more popular than ever, but that is because the competition is a bit out of the loop, but not anymore. Microsoft has been working hard on their latest search engine, and Bing is it.

Google should never underestimate Microsoft, they have been like a sleeping giant and have now woken from a long sleep and they are now ready for a fight. Thankfully, they now have the tools to do it, and Cnet News has suggested that Microsoft Bing is the first real Google alternative.

Cnet have only spent a short amount of time with Microsoft Bing and already the writer of the article is rethinking his search engine options. They explain how fast and accurate Google search results are, but the whole experience is a bit of boring one, there is no fun to it.

Bing is different; they have traded a fraction of the speed in exchange for an improved user experience and a site that is not so boring that it will send you to sleep.