@BasilPuglisi

Content & Strategy, Powered by Factics & AI, Since 2009

SEO

Why Free is so profitable!

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In the case of digital media and social media, giving it away is turning out to be quite a profitable business.

Every business owner has their niche or talent that makes their business a success, in many cases it requires long hours and a massive commitment to be success, or keep the business alive. If you’re an advertising or marketing professional, you should consider giving away some of your services for free. In doing so, your acting in faith that if you can show value to the business owner they will do business with you.

In some cases many people worry about giving up the trade secrets, and in case you’re curious the trade secret is google and YouTube. If you want to know about it, it’s likely a website, or blog and they give it away for free. Want to know how to do it, use the second largest search engine, YouTube and your likely to find a how to video that will walk you through it step by step.

The truth is teaching someone or telling someone, doesn’t mean they will have the time or talent to do it for themselves. Take Google Places, clearly google places is changing the way people find relevant local sources for service and goods, and in some cases places like automotive centers and florists just don’t have the time to take on simple tasks as listing their business with Google Places.

In the end it’s all about time and resource management, if you can show a business owner value in your service for free, then they know they will find value in the paid product and services you can offer as well.

Social Brand Visibility: BibSonomy

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Many sites are actively advertising in search engines for the most valuable search queries. This high level of competition tends to result in high advertising costs which make it difficult to find attractive advertising opportunities. Resource sharing provides new ways of organizing and sharing information on the web and provides advertisers with another way for Search Engine Marketing (SEM).

BibSonomy is a social bookmarking system that allows users to bookmark and share their favorite sites and publication in a collaborative manner.

The bookmarking is easy, just as it is done on the regular browser, but it saves all the bookmarks to the BibSonomy site, which enables accessed from any computer. Users tag their ‘finds’ and can look at what others have tagged and viewed, in a social networking manner.

The uniqueness of BibSonomy is that it goes further than just being a social bookmarking system. It allows for publication sharing. It is what they call ”A team oriented publication management”.

It offers users the ability to store and organize their publications and supports exchange and integration of different people by offering a social platform for literature exchange.

Both bookmarks and publication can be tagged to help find information. A description can be freely chosen. The assignment of tags from different users creates a new vocabulary called ‘folksonomy’. It evolves from the participants of research groups, individual users and learning communities organizing their information needs. Folksonomies became popular on the web in 2004 as part of social software applications. The word is a mix of the words “taxonomy” and “folk” and allows an intuitive structure for navigating the data.

Developed by a team of students and scientists at the “Institute of Knowledge and Data Engineering” and is hosted by the University of Kassel in Germany.

While about 55% of visitors to the site come from India, it is also popular in the Philippines. The use of this site in the United States is at about 8% only, but is growing rapidly.

How to get Your Small Business on the Virtual Map

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The world is divided into two equally powerful entities today; one is the real world that we live in, and the other is the virtual world, or the world of the internet. Getting your business known and noticed in the virtual world can boost your brand identity recognition and your sales to unforeseen heights, depending on your marketing strategies. So how to put your small business on the virtual map?

The first thing to do is to set up your professional corporate website and incorporating e-commerce to increase the value of your business. However, this alone will not result in an implicit increase in the enterprise value of your business.

What you will need to do is leverage the Internet to increase your sales and profitability, thereby increasing the value of your business. With over a 1000 million people online in the world today, and trillions of dollars transacted over the internet, you can sense the presence of a staggering opportunity.

When you put yourself on the virtual map, you are in effect completely eliminating geographic barriers. With one step, you reach a wider, more diverse audience. A properly marketed Web site can be a very effective means of reaching new and existing customers and expanding your geographic presence. Here are a few tips:

  • Get a smart, professionally designed website designed for your company.
  • Place your logo prominently on all pages.
  • Place brief but informative and useful brochure ware of your company so that your potential customers, vendors and partners get an idea of who you are.
  • Use search engine optimization tools to ensure that your Web site appears at the top of search lists when someone looks for a product or service similar to what you offer.
  • Make sure your site prompts visitors to input comments and feedback. This way, you can capture the information of existing and potential customers to support the efforts of your sales team.
  • Ensure that your website allows a safe and secure online purchasing experience. Use the best payment gateways and incorporate every possible security signatures that you can afford. When you allow customers to purchase your products or services online, you can more than quadruple your sales output.

 

By allowing people to shop online at your Web site, you can reduce your sales staff and other overheads. Imagine what this can do to your business’s bottom-line.  Putting up your brochure content on your site can eliminate the need to print expensive brochures and other collateral materials.

Retain your customers and build customer loyalty by offering customer contact and support online. When your customers’ requests are attended to via real time chat, or email follow up, there’s greater satisfaction and trust in your company.

Beyond Google: The truth about growing a business online

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In the Internet marketing arms race, companies are coming up short on google… here is why.

  • Google Only (100% effective) = 71% Market Opportunity
  • Mixed Search Engines Practices (80% effective) = 76% Market Opportunity

Google, Bing and Yahoo are the largest search engines in the United States, after that no one really comes close. In fact, small and inexperienced advertising and marketing companies would have you believe that google has such an advantage it is the only way to go. In fact, SEO companies promise you first page listings on google as the way to grow and build your Internet exposure, however, the math doesn’t add up.
Case Study:

  • Google is responsible for *71.79% of search traffic.
  • Yahoo & Bing are responsible for  *23.93% of search traffic.

        *Source: http://www.hitwise.com/us/datacenter/main/dashboard-10133.html
Traditional SEO and Internet Marketing Companies push just google, and on occasion some have started to push Facebook ads. Now let’s review the two major flaws in their logic.

  1. First page on Google is a clear way to success – False, Just because you’re the first place they stop doesn’t convert it into a lead or sale, what are you selling? How does the website sell it? Where is the call to action, user friendly environment?
  2. Google is the best way to generate leads from Search Engines – False, Yahoo & AOL communities are the oldest form of Social Media.  As such, they have an amazing and loyal following. In fact, a Yahoo user is far more likely to make a purchase from findings on Yahoo then they are on google.
  3. Google, Yahoo & Bing are the three major search engines – False, Google may own You Tube, but it doesn’t mean that Google and You Tube are in sync with search results. In fact, You Tube is the second largest search engine in the United States. So if you’re not leveraging Video content, you just missed an entire market. If your product has overseas opportunities, then you better learn about other search engines like Yandex (a Russian search engine).
  4. Statistically Google is a better source for SEO or SEPR success – False, Compare two strategies – Google vs. Mixed approach. Others say tailoring to anyone but google results in a lower google score or rank, so why do it?

A look at the real statistics:
If you are 100% effective with Google then you can capture about 71% of the market, but if you are conservative and only 80% effective across the three search engines then you can capture 76% of the market. If you did well and can become 90% effective across all three Search Engines, then you walk away with the opportunity to capture up to 87% of the market.
If you go one step further to realize that Yahoo attracts higher conversion rates, then the scales really start to tip. Now add some video content distributed throughout the web (i.e. You Tube) and now you starting to achieve real market visibility.
Google is an amazing company and an even better visibility tool, providing resources, information and solutions to the largest population searching the internet. That said, you know not to put all your investments in one place in any aspect of life, why would you do the same with your Internet visibility?

Is your SEO or Visibility Company Wearing a Black Hat?

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Since the time when people first figured out that good placement on the search engines is crucial for internet traffic, they have been thinking of a way how to game the system.

Not really game. More, how to use the system for profit. You don’t really have to sell anything, they thought, you can provide information and link to sites that do.

Hence, a game of cat and mouse begun between Google and those thinkers. But to understand that we need a little bit of theory.

Almost everything uploaded on the web is being looked at. Not necessarily by people, although that happens from time to time, but mainly by machines.

One of Google’s systems scans the uploaded pages. “Crawlers” or “Spiders” scan the page to look for repeated words that will help it categorize the site. It looks at headlines, Meta tags, hyperlinks etc.  After that, another system Google uses involves indexing the pages according to the crawler’s find.

That much is known. Once the ‘thinkers’ manage to figure out what works best to get their site high on the search engine page, they took advantage of it. They stuffed keywords and tags and manipulated the system in what is called Spamdex.

Google adjusted. They added a few measures, like the amount of back links and their importance to the ranking on the search engine result page. Once the ‘thinkers’ figured that out, a way was found around the measure.  By 2007 Google mounted a campaign against what is called ‘link farms’ which, in some cases, included thousands of sites created for the sole purpose of creating back links.

This game is still going on. Google announced that it has more than 200 criteria for page rank and in 2005 started personalizing the search results for each user.

That is called White Hat seo. It is a technic used to comply with Google’s guidelines and is not meant to deceive.

White Hat seo is not just about following the rules; it is about providing the costumer with the correct information. It is about creating content for searchers, not for search engines. Making the content easily accessible to the spiders and the easy to index is what White Hat seo is all about. It is in many ways connected to the web development that enables customer’s accessibility.

White hat seo means using all the tools to have an effective marketing campaign.

Black Hat seo is developing a site for the search engine, not for the user. It is an attempt to learn the system and outsmart it. With technics like hidden text (when the text and the background are the same color thus the customer can’t see it, but the crawlers can) or another method, called cloaking, when the site gives a different page depending if it is a live searcher or a machine.

Search engines might remove a site or lower it’s ranking if they are suspicious that the site is using Black Hat seo. In 2006, two big German companies BMW and Ricoh were removed by the search engines for deceptive practices. The companies apologized, changed their sites and were beck on Google. But if you are a small company, this process might take a lot of time.

In order to avoid problems down the line, you should rely on a reputable consulting firm to do the seo for your site. A company like Puglisi Consulting Group which is able to help you in all your website needs and through their visibility arm, Visibility Acceleration http://www.visibilityacceleration.com/#/seo-visibility/4541420003 advise you on the right ways to approach your world wide web visibility.

Commercials and Internet Visibility

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What can we learn from the big boys? The big firms with millions and billions of dollars behind them, and how they approach internet visibility.

The case in point is a product called “Old Spice”. You must have heard the name. Old Spice cologne and aftershave has been around since the 1930. It was the scent of America, since it started in the United States.

Through the years, when transport and import became simpler, the market was flooded by European products. Old Spice market share went down drastically.

In 1990 the company was sold to Procter and Gamble. 20 years later, in the middle of 2010, new commercials for “Old Spice” body wash started showing on TV. Many experts were behind it; P&G, an advertising company and a digital media specialist.

  • They opened a twitter account and a Reddit account for the lead character.
  • They opened a Facebook page
  • They opened YouTube channel and started putting out the 15 second spots, one after the other.

The ads went viral on the internet. Google search went up 2000%, Facebook interactions up 800% and 1.5 billion impressions (The count of a delivered basic advertising unit from an ad distribution point, according to “Basic Advertisement Measures”) since February.

The campaign was a combination of the success of social media and viral success. And it didn’t happen overnight. It took them 6 months of adjusting and changing to get to the point that the reaction was getting to where they hope it would be.

The reaction was immediate; sales went up 107% the first month and are still going up in the rate of 55% in the past 3 months.

Lately the company recorded 183 video answers to question posed by Twitter users. They are staying in touch with their followers.

What can we learn from that success story?

–          The campaign should be all inclusive. All the possible channels.

–          It might take time to develop the correct approach. Some corrections are needed in the middle of the way.

–          If the ‘big boys’ do it, and it works for them, why not do it on a smaller scale?

To see what can be done for you and your business in this new era of advertising, you might be best serve if you approach someone that has expertise and knowledge in the area. Companies like Puglisi Consulting Group at http://puglisiconsulting.com/#, that can design a campaign to your budget. Through their internet visibility arm Visibility Acceleration http://www.visibilityacceleration.com, they can advise you how to be visible on the internet and all over the world.

Why do customers turn away from your website?

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Everybody is talking about internet presence and internet visibility and thinking of inventive ways to increase it. But let’s face it – the purpose of your website is not only to get visitors to your site. The purpose of your website is to turn visits into clicks. You not only want to be visible, you want to make commerce.

There are many reasons why customers that get to your site turn away from it, after one page. To understand what is wrong and change it, takes expertise. But it is a change worth making.

Here are some of the reasons why it might happen to your site:

It’s Booooring – like reading a very long advertisement or brochure. Too much technical information, too much information in general turns people away. The customer knows it will be tooting the horn of the business but he can’t find the important information that is relevant to him.

It has Typos – You want to be trusted, don’t you? Having your landing page written by someone who doesn’t speak the language well, is a turn off. Make sure it makes sense and look at it more than once. If you have many pages it might be hard to weed out all of the typos, but you must try.

It is not enticing and not specific enough – It doesn’t say why you are better than your competition.

It has not been updated – The web technology moves very fast and you have to keep up with the innovations. A site that has been up for 5 years needs a facelift. In web-talk it’s your grandfather’s generation.

It’s confusing – and difficult to navigate.

Not enough information – People want to know who you are. “About” page is important as is providing a real address.

There are no pictures and no endorsements – What people say about you is very important to add credibility to your site.

The best course of action for the business person who wants to make sure all the advantages of the internet have been taken, is to contact a company that deals with those solutions, like the Puglisi Consulting Group and their Visibility Acceleration division to get advice and design a campaign that will turn your visitors into clicks and registrations.

Is your website outdated?

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A website should be updated at least every six months. The website should be your store front and consider upkeep an operating expense. Websites need to be able to be updated, and interact with Web 2.0, but this can only happen if you/r company is participating in web 2.0. You should have social sites and blogs, but also have them syndicated to your website.

A successful website should include:

 – A professional extension of your presentation

 – Be user friendly and easy to navigate

 – Search Engine Optimization friendly or already optimized

 – Use Social Media as a form or networking and community outreach

 – Collect Data about visitors, e-mail addresses etc.

 – Have a “call to action” for an opportunity

 – Provide you with ROI data about your website

When a business starts to struggle cutting back on customer generating expenses is usually the fastest way to run your business out of business. When it comes to cutting expenses choose wisely, while you’ll need to trim advertising and marketing expenses, you don’t want to stop the source of revitalization for your business.

Strategy, Strategy, Strategy…

Instead of running your advertising all over the market, seek the advice of an expert who can help you select a few sources that will produce a reliable and stable ROI. The expenses associated with a professional or expert is easily saved by the expenses of getting your marketing wrong.

Visibility Acceleration is a digital marketing powerhouse that leverages social media, search engines and your website to generate new customers. Puglisi Consulting Group, Inc. has the experience and support of professionals and experts in the field of business coaching and consulting to support a plan to help get your business back on track.

Don’t Say “No” Before you Read 140 Characters

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In the last “State of the Union” speech President Obama gave, some politicians could be seen were busy twitting their remarks about what they just heard. Comedians do it too, to increase their audiences, and if the tweets are funny, they have a following. It’s for fans as well as a way to feel close to their idol. Justin Bieber tweets when he goes to eat, telling his fans what kinds of food he likes.

Twitter is a marketing tool as well and if it is used right can be a very useful tool. Here are a few examples how it can work:

–          A Global Communication company established an account. For a short time they learned the ropes, tried a few things but nothing big happened. The man in charge of the account found out there is a third company application that will alert him to tweets which contain certain words. Not long after, he got one of those from a company that is looking to revamp their communications and asked for recommendations. The man called the company, and less than two weeks later closed a deal for $250,000. He was there at the right time in the right place

–          A small independent Ice Cream shop in San Francisco had no money for advertising, but wanted to increase their circulation. A twitter account enabled them to stay in touch with their regular customers and let them know every time a new flavor is introduced. The reaction is amazing, says the shop co-owner. Every time they tweet about a new flavor, the response is immediate. Almost every customer that walks in asks for this flavor and more and more new customers are joining their ‘community’.

–          A bake shop owner in Los Angeles uses twitter in another way. She likes to experiment with new recipes but can’t afford to wait and see if the new creation will sell. Instead she tweets, and asks her followers to voice their honest opinions. Much cheaper then making a batch of muffins that don’t sell, or investing money in research and polling. Her latest muffins, with bacon, went through 3 changes fuelled by twitter comments before it became one of her best sellers.

These are only 3 examples how small business owners use Twitter accounts. It’s not enough anymore to just open an account and hunt for followers. Twitter is a tool and you have to know how to use it to maximize your exposure.

That is not so easy to do, when you do not know all the possibilities. By hiring someone who does know how to make it work for you, you get an exposure that costs you very little money compared with an advertising campaign. Visibility Acceleration (http://www.visibilityacceleration.com/) is a company that deals with electronic media and increasing your visibility in the market place. A subsidiary of Puglisi Consulting Group (http://puglisiconsulting.com/#), it can provide you with the knowledge and the connection to make every available electronic media work for your benefit and increase your business.

Is Your Online Marketing Hurting your Business?

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It seems so simple; you want to open a business, you look for a field where your business is needed, you design a web site by yourself through WordPress or other sources and, voila – you’re in business.

 Not long after, your realize that your site is not bringing in much business. Where have you gone wrong? Why is your competitor making big bucks and you are making only peanuts?

 Take a look at your site. Here are some common mistakes you should try to avoid:

 –          Are you really marketing to a niche? People tend to confuse niche with demographics. A niche is a group of people that have a common problem and are seeking solutions. Marketing to stay-at-home moms, senior citizens or baby boomers is marketing to a demographic. Potential customers are the ones who have a problem you can solve, like DIY Solar Panels, Baby Strollers or Green Plumbing. Those clients can come from all wakes of life and all ages.

 –          Your web site is not up to par. It looks cheap, it has spelling mistakes, you don’t update it for months and you haven’t added new products in the past year. With the saturation of the Internet, one of the requirements of a successful site is constant updates. You want to be seen, don’t you?

 –          Not having a system in place that analyzes your visitors and captures them. Some people visit a site, plan on visiting it again on a later date, but never do because they forgot, don’t have time now or they lost your address. Having a system of capturing their names and e mail addresses will enable you to contact them, send newsletters and show you are interested in them and in their business. Some of those who forgot about you will come back.

 –          Not making a long term plan and following the advice of every new guru in the field of Internet marketing. Think about what makes you different and what you can offer that others can’t. Your business plan doesn’t have to be 500 pages long. It is important, however, to make sure your goals are clear and you have a plan and a system to know when your plan is working and when it’s not.

 Even if you’ve downloaded all the e books, web seminars and Internet courses about Internet marketing, have you been reading them all? Who’s got the time, you ask yourself. If I’ll be busy reading all those pages, who will run my business?

 That is main reason why it is smart business to hire consultants who deal with those issues on a daily basis and make it their business to keep updated on all the new trends. Companies like Puglisi consulting Group (http://puglisiconsulting.com) which can help you avoid all the beginners’ mistakes. Through their company Visibility Acceleration (http://visibilityacceleration.com/#/seo-visibility/4541420003) they can touch and solve all the points mentioned here and make sure you have to ability to see and be seen.