Visibility Marketing

How to get Your Small Business on the Virtual Map

October 19, 2010 by Basil Puglisi Leave a Comment

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.

Social Brand Visibility: Mixx

October 18, 2010 by Basil Puglisi Leave a Comment

Mixx is a user-driven social media site that combines social networking and bookmarking with web content, blogging and personalization tools.

There is so much information of the web these days that we don’t have the time to find the good stuff that interests us or is important to our business. Who knows better than you what informs you, what makes you think, what makes you laugh?

With Mixx you can be in charge. Using YourMixx you can tailor the content categories, specific users and groups and see the top-rated content as chosen by you and people who share your passions. It is like whipping up your own version of the web. Just tell the site how you like it and they’ll deliver the best the web has to offer—whenever you want it. You can create a personalized blend of web content that includes text-based articles, images and videos, using either free-form or pre-determined meta tags to define items by subject matter or geography.

The content on Mixx comes from various online sources. Mixx is in partnerships with a growing list of online publishing outlets that include CNN.com, USA Today, Reuters, The Los Angeles Times and The Weather Channel.

Mixx users can also follow other users with whom they share common interests, as well as create, join and invite other Mixx users to private groups to further share and discuss relevant items among peers.

There are a few methods you can use Mixx: –

Mixx Channels – Publishers of content must fight to be noticed. Mixx Channels enable companies to gather topical chatter and shared stories, photos, and videos into one place, an experience that cuts through the noise and delivers relevant content and information.

Mixx Sitebox – Promotes increased engagement and recirculation. It allows users to get a box of their favorite news channel and see what others have chosen and how much interested the news bit has generated.

Mixx Sifter – The Mixx community gives direct feedback on advertising. The better ads will get impressions – not based on how much is paid, but on how positive the feedback is from users.

An advertiser uploads five different ads, in virtually any format. Mixx then invites its frequent users to review those ads, rate them and provide direct private feedback. The most popular ad is then run on the site. Mixx is highlighting the value of direct feedback to advertisers.

Social Bookmarking Sites – Blinklist

October 13, 2010 by Basil Puglisi Leave a Comment

Using the big search engines; Google, Yahoo, and Bing has become a way of life for us. Google became a verb in the English language. The problem with the search engines is the amount of information they present. If you want something specific it is sometimes like searching for a needle in a hay stack.

The main reason, apart from the wealth of information, is the indexing system which is done by machines. What will happen if all those pages were vetted by humans, not machines?

Social Bookmarking provides that vetting.

Social bookmarking sites allow the users to choose the website they like, bookmark them, tag them, categorize them and share them with others. Other users can pass them on to their groups of friends, and the word spreads. It is a way for like-minded users to rank and store websites, articles, blogs and videos.

Blinklist is one of those sites that proved to be very affective.

With an extremely simple and free registration, Blinklist installs a button on your toolbar. In a few quick steps you export all your existing bookmarks to their site.

You have entered a world of human interaction. You can see what others have bookmarked, you can check what is the most bookmarked page in a certain topic, you can see what your friends found interesting and you can rate their finds.

And by going to their site, you can access your bookmarks from any computer. That is a great feature when you want to show your friends, your coworkers or your boss something interesting you have found.

Blinklist enables you to save a copy of the web page on your computer. If the website disappears or is blocked you still have a copy. You can bookmark articles you are interested in reading later, a copy is saved on your computer and you can read it even when you are offline.

Social Bookmarking has become a great way to increase the visibility of your website, articles, blogs or product and is increasingly incorporated in an effective marketing campaign. It provides an instant statistics tool that enables you to measure, assess and learn what is working and what does not.

To use social bookmarking to your advantage you need to know which sites cater to your target audience, especially if you are dealing with affiliate marketing programs, or specific blogs. Birds of feather flock together, they say, and so do internet users.

Reddit- News Before it Happens

October 12, 2010 by Basil Puglisi Leave a Comment

Another way of finding what’s new and interesting on the World Wide Web, is call Reddit.

Launched in 2005 by two 22 year old graduates from the University of Virginia, Reddit is a social network news website, for, as they call it “News before it happens”. Users can post news that is happening right now in their area, before it gets to the big news organizations. They can post links to content they like on the internet and comment on what others have found. They can also comment on the comments and rank them. With a simple response of like or dislike users mark their interest in the story posted. Every positive reaction gets a +1, every negative reaction -1. The more positive reactions a comment or link gets, the higher up the link goes. The front page is constantly in motion as new stories are uploaded and voted on.

Since 2008, Reddit is an open source community of more than 370,000 where postings get indexed not by crawlers as is the case with search engines, but by users, based on interests, not keywords.

Reddit content is divided into sub-categories; pics, funny, politics, WTF, gaming, science, world news and more and is a good place to find popular articles or have a discussion. It is a place where you can market your own blog and get instant reactions.

The effectiveness of Reddit has been tested after the earthquake in Haiti. The community of Reddit users raised $185,000 for the victims of the earthquake.

Another example is about to happen. In September 2010 a Reddit poster started a campaign to persuade Stephen Colbert to have a rally in Washington DC. The idea was described in a post talking about a dream the poster had.

The idea resonated with the community and webpages and Facebook groups have been created. Social networking machine started spreading the idea. Colbert acknowledged the momentum and the followers, to prove that they are serious about it, managed to raise $100,000 in 24 hours to support a charity where Colbert sits on the board of directors.

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are heading rallies in Washington DC on October 30, 2010 – a direct result of a campaign that started on Reddit.

Colbert challenged the community even more. He wanted to help teachers around the country get supplies for their classrooms, something that used to come out of the teacher’s pockets. Within 3 days the community raised $250,000.

The power of social networking sites has become a force to be reckoned with. Reddit in particular leverages its own network to rank and recognize the validity of what’s being shared. This gives Reddit added value to those looking for information that is relevant based on real user reviews and not spam.

Pubit! A New Self-Publishing Platform

October 11, 2010 by Basil Puglisi Leave a Comment

The writing is on the wall; we are moving from reading books printed on paper to eBooks read electronically. That has become the reality for publishing companies and book sellers. Following the example of the music industry, you either adjust or you become obsolete. What the iPod and iTunes did to music distribution, smart book sellers are doing with the written word. Amazon came out with the Kindle, Sony with its E Reader, Apple with the iPad and Barnes and Noble with their Nook.

On October 4, 2010, Barnes and Noble launched its new service, Pubit! that takes care of the other side of this issue – publishing content electronically.

Pubit! allows authors to upload their work to the site and have access to millions of readers. Authors can self-publish books they have written, short eBooks, articles, short story collections or poems and make them available for sale through Barnes and Noble e-book store.

With a free and simple set up and registration process, books can be uploaded, including the cover and artwork and be available for download for less than $10.

When registering for their service the author enters into a partnership with Barnes and Noble. Every work is prices from $1.99 to $199.99, and every sale proceeding is split between the author and the publisher following a clearly spelled formula: B&N gets 40% -65% of the proceedings, depending on the length of the publication and its popularity. There are no hidden fees, and no upfront costs. The author is able to track sales and payments through their site.

This is a very important partnership since Barnes and Noble has over one million titles in their online e bookstore, and millions of visitors.

Unpublished writers can now get published, E-books have another venue, poets and artists can be discovered by popular demand rather by the tastes of the publisher’s team.

What makes Pubit! even more exiting is the fact that Barnes and Noble went a step further than having it ready to be read on their Nook. They are offering a free e-reading application that enables readers to download and read books on other platforms as well; PCs, iPhone, iPad and Android smartphones. They are making the content readily available, accessed from different platforms, without cost to the authors.

In the same way YouTube provided a platform for people to display their video work and get noticed, Pubit! Is attempting to change the publishing world and allow people from all walks of life, that have been writing ‘to the drawer’, to get published, noticed and become successful by popular demand.

This opportunity also opens the door for hundreds of consultants and coaches allowing them to stretch the hand of social media from helpful advice to expert publications.

Do You Bebo?

October 6, 2010 by Basil Puglisi Leave a Comment

Bebo is a social network that is very popular in the UK, Ireland and New Zealand and is said to be the 3^rd social network in the US.

In existence since 2005, Bebo enables users to create profiles, watch videos, listen to music and connect with their friends. In 2008 Bebo had over 34 million users and 7 billion page views per month.

The company was bought by AOL in 2008 for $850 million and was sold to Criterion Capital Partners in 2010 for a fraction of that amount.

Bebo aims to be the next generation High School and College social network. Users can blog, listen to music, share information, photos and videos. Their unique feature is called Bebo Bands and it enables bands and artists to upload their music or videos on the site and reach their fans immediately. A band profile, for example, includes the names of the band members, list of fans, and has an area for announcements such as tour dates, special appearances on TV etc. A blog for the band to write their comments and a list of songs they have uploaded for free. When fans want to have other tracks, Bebo will connect them directly to the iTune store.

Members can see the updates their friends made to this site or to other social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Flicker when those friends linked their accounts to Bebo.

Bebo can create groups as well, people that graduated from a certain school for example, and the group is accessible only to the group members, similar to what Yahoo has.

In 2008 Bebo added a mobile application that can be accessed from any mobile phone on any network. Up until then, it could have been reached only by O2 Ireland and Orange UK.(Hence the popularity of the site in those countries)

This year, Bebo was ranked at number 11 out of the most popular social networking websites by eBizmba.com, with 7 million unique monthly visitors. A big decline from 34 million they had in 2008. It seems their purchase by AOL did not work out as well as most thought, but now, it might rise again.

AOL Lifestream Aims to Stream your Social Life

October 5, 2010 by Basil Puglisi Leave a Comment

These days of information overload, a new class of ideas and companies have come into being. Those are the information aggregators, those who want to save you time by doing what they think you want to be doing.

Take AOL Lifestream for example; there are many social networks and sometime we have different friends in different networks. The more isolated we become, the more connected we want to be. It takes time to check and update them all. AOL Lifestream enables you to put all your social networks in one place for a quick check and update. It provides full visibility to your Social Brand!!!

AOL Lifestream was first introduced as part of the IM (Instant Message) system, but was re-launched later as a standalone application. It is available through a website, an AIR application, iPhones and Android phones.

This is how it works: – Let’s say you have friends on Facebook, you follow people on Twitter, MySpace, Foursquare, Delicious, Digg, Flicker etc. Lifestream will put all those connections in one place and you can see alerts from different friends and posts about your various interests without going to the individual site, logging in and waiting for the page to load. It allows you, of course, to publish back on those social sites as well.

Another advantage of the Lifestream is that it can be accessed through smartphones, making you continuously connected to your friends. You can take pictures with your phone and upload them immediately to all your social networks.

Another application allows you to follow your friends and see where they are at the moment. Using GPS and the status updates, you can see, on one screen, where your friends physically are at the moment. Are you around the corner from each other? Near by? Have time for coffee?

Their new feature and what makes Lifestream unique is the ability to follow places not just people. Let’s say you have a place you like to visit frequently like a corner bar or ice cream parlor. You can see, at any time which of your friends is currently there, if he chooses to post it.

Lifestream is simple to use, mobile, intuitive and useful. It’s a social network all on its own and an integrating system that lets you have all your friends in one place.

Stroome me? Redefining video opportunity…

October 4, 2010 by Basil Puglisi Leave a Comment

It used to be that making videos was the territory of the few. You needed a high quality and expensive camera, you needed editing capabilities and you needed the knowhow in editing. Of course you needed a platform to display your videos.

With the advances in electronics and miniaturizing, cameras have become better, lighter and cheaper. Not the property of the rich and professionals anymore. First problem solved, sort of, because what you are left with is raw footage.

Editing software appeared on the market as well. What used to be programs for professionals only which were rented out, not sold like Avid and Final Cut became affordable the Adobe premiere, Final cut or Avid for home use. Those still are expensive and need a learning period to make them work properly.

With experience comes improvement. Editing the videos you have shot still takes a long time, even after you’ve learned the programs. Here art comes into the equation.

The platform became available with YouTube. Millions all over the world shot what they thought was funny, interesting or smart and hurried to share it with the world. Careers have been made out of home postings, rarely but it did happen (Justin Beiber is a very good example).

But sharing those videos with specific people was still a problem. The video files are heavy and can’t be sent via e mail. They had to be uploaded on a server and could be accessed by people who had the password to that account.

The new trend in marketing is videos. It appears people would rather hear and see instead of read. We have all become film-makers.

Enter Stroome, a site that facilitates making interesting videos and sharing them with friends. Unlike Youtube where you just post the video to the world and let your friends know that you have posted it there, Stroome enables you to post your videos on the site, edit it and share it with others.

Stroome allows uploading of raw footage and mixing it with pictures, other videos and music. The editing program (based on the same principals as iMovie) is simple and easy to learn. The result can be shared with you partners and have them write up notes on what needs to change or they can go into the file and make changes you can view immediately. After the work is finished, you can share that video with a larger group of people via a form of social network.

Stroome, coming from USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism, was launched in a public beta in April 2010 and is based on the Kaltura video editing suite but goes further by adding to the editing suite community tools. It facilitates journalism, they say, by letting a few people collaborate on a story immediately without relying on other sources to move the video file around. In Stroome the file does not leave the site, so there are no problems of loading time, downloading time and things lost in the transfer.

Using their site, a group can work on a school project together, friends can share their latest videos, journalist can communicate and work cheaply and efficiently and every small business owner can become a film-maker.

Their ambition is to turn Stroome into a verb; in the same way Google has evolved to become part of the American language. They want people to say “Stroome me and see…”

But please bear in mind – the content is still the king.

Beyond Google: The truth about growing a business online

September 30, 2010 by Basil Puglisi Leave a Comment

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.

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?
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.
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).
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?