Notes from a wireframe world

OK so your all set, you have a nice web site, you know the basics of how to use social media to your advantage, and now… How the hell do you find the people who may be interested in your project?

The answer… Google

Google has a whole range of free, easy to use tools that can help you make the most of social media and the Internet.

First off iGoogle, Google’s nice and fancy front end. Based on netvibes iGoogle allows you to add widgets to Google’s search front page (only you see your widgets of course) Google mail, Google notebook, Google Calendar, and RSS reader and Google Doc’s (as well as a phase of the moon widget, but I think you’ll be more interested in the others).

This allows me to use Google’s home page as a one-stop-shop for how the areas of interest my customers have is going, as well as my e-mail and project management tools. It’s really what I link everything else in with.

Next Google Alerts, Google Alerts allows you to set up an RSS feed (that goes into my Google RSS Reader) for any keywords, this allows you to be able to comment on any story that Google picks up that relates to your product.

Google Alerts currently offers 6 variations of alerts – ‘News’, ‘Web’, ‘Blogs’, ‘Comprehensive’, ‘Video’ and ‘Groups’.

• A ‘News’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest news articles that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google News search.

• A ‘Web’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest web pages that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top twenty results of your Google Web search.

• A ‘Blogs’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest blog posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Blog search.

• A ‘Comprehensive’ alert is an aggregate of the latest results from multiple sources (News, Web and Blogs) into a single email to provide maximum coverage on the topic of your choice.

• A ‘Video’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest videos that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Video search.

• A ‘Groups’ alert is an email aggregate of new posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top fifty results of your Google Groups search.

I recommend you go for A ‘Comprehensive’ alert for the major keywords you found in step 1.

This Twitter, Facebook, MySpace (or whatever your targeted social media sites are) searches should provide you with enough information to start to pick-up on the on-line vibe, and allow you to start making your self known (in the right way) to the community.

OK Social media and it’s use withing the context of on-line marketing is huge and I intend to go through every thing in one blog post, however the basics are relatively easy to grasp, they are.

1. There is no magic trick, no magic bullet.

2. Be yourself

3. Don’t try and sell, help.

1] There is no magic trick.

Sadly there is no magic do this and you will earn $700,000 in fifteen minutes rubbish, anyone who tells you that there is is either pushing something that either illegal, did work but then people caught on to it and it doesn’t any more or just snake oil. Just stop for a second and think, you know as well as I do money doesn’t grow on trees, and if it did, if you found a real life money tree, would you tell anyone? Of course not.

Sadly even in a recession, no especially in a recession, people are looking to make a quick buck, and the promise of the big cheque for a few dollars sounds too good to pass up. Sadly all you’ll get if a little poorer. There is a lot of good advice on how to make money on-line mostly from blogs such as this one, and it’s all free, don’t pay for social media snake oil.

That said if you really feel the need to pay something, there is, to the left of this article a section entitled “Help us keep going” their you can donate via paypal or if your feeling really flush buy something on my wish list.

2] Be yourself

Strange as it may sound one of the easily overlooked areas of social networks for marketers is the social side. To some it’s all about spamming their links to thousands of people who don’t then bother to read them.

People really don’t like this type of one way traffic. Hold conversations with people, tweet and post stuff your interested in that relevant to what your customers are interested in, not just about your latest product.

3] Don’t try and sell.

WHAT! DON’T sell. Yes you read that right, don’t sell. It goes back to the previous point, about having a conversation with people. As Perry Belcher said in his video that I posted here a couple of days ago, Social media is like a big cocktail party, and at a cocktail party you don’t run in and try and sell everyone something, you wait till there is someone their who needs what you can offer and you point out you can sell it to them.

And thats it. Yep thats all there is, OK it’s not ALL there is, but it’s a big chunk of it, it’s the right mindset at least.

Internet marketing made simple

Part 1 – Selecting the right keywords for your website.

Part 2 – LinkJuice

Part 3 - Using Social media

Part 4 – Using Google (Will be on-line on Sunday the 13th of Sept, 2009)

Once you have picked a good set of keywords, and scattered them through you web site, your next task is to get inbound links. The whole Google search engine was founded on idea that, like academic papers, the number of ”citations or backlinks to a given page” is important, if a page has a large number of inbound links, it’s more important, and so ranks higher.

That said, Google extends this by “not counting links from all pages equally” if your linked to from a page that has lots of inbound links (i.e. an important page) your page is more important, than if you where linked to from a page with few links.

Stop their. At this point, the more devious amounts you are thinking, “WOW, maybe I could make a page that has lots of inbound links, from other pages I’ve made then just link to my main page. That would boost my ranking loads”, However believe me your not the first, and Google fairly quickly figured out how to spot this, and they then just removed all your pages from their search. That said if your still interested there is are good resource for ”Blackhat” SEO (Search Engine optimization) elsewhere on the net.

So how, without bringing the wrath of Google down on you, do you get lots of inbound links to your page?

Their is fundamentally only one way to do this, great content. Great content will be cited by others, you can ask people if they will exchange links with you (yes I will, more on how to get a link to your site on my blogroll in a bit), but they will only do so if you’ve great, relevant, content. Stuffing your site full of keywords may help a robot find your site, but it won’t help a human reading it.

Thats all for now, in Internet marketing part 3, I’ll talk about using social media to aid your site.

For anyone interested in exchanging links with this site, I’ll be happy to, you must however have a site focused on either social media, marketing (on or off line). If you do, add a link to either my home page “our-party.org.uk” or this blog “our-party.org.uk/blog” and let me know either via posting a comment here or via the contact me box on my homepage.

Selecting the right keywords, words you will ensure are in your pages so search engines find them, can be at best a hit and miss adventure, how do you know the words you select are going to be the ones the majority of people looking for your site are going to search for?

And even if you pick words people are looking for, how do you know if they will find your site? Thankfully Google of all people, provide a free and easy to use service that you can use to do just that.

Firstly point your favorite browser to https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal
This is designed as a tool to pick the right adwords for your campaign, but we can use it to find good key words as well.

OK put in some words you think are useful, words that will you think people looking for you site will use, then click on the “Get Keyword Ideas” button, then open the CSV files (links to them appear at the bottom of each keyword) and sort them in order of number “Global Monthly Search Volume“ once you’ve done so delete anything with less than about 100,000 searches per month.

Then open up a new tab/window and do a google search for each key word. When the results are returned, you will notice near the top of the screen on the right hand side something along the lines of “Results 1 – 10 of about 203,000,000 for social media. (0.12 seconds) “ copy and paste the number of searches into the cell after “Global Monthly Search Volume” and repeat for all your key words.

Now finally you will be in a position to see what keywords are useful to you, and which are not

For each key word divide the “Global Monthly Search Volume” by the number of Hit Google finds for that keyword, the higher the result, the more chance there is some one will find your site via that keyword, there are of course a lot more things you can do to improve your ranking, and I’ll go through some of them in the next article