Links – Can They Hurt Me?

Yes. Google just laid down  the hammer on bad link practices yet again. A Google web search SPAM clean-up update just came out , which you may have heard of – another penguin update. Google names its updates oddly. You can ignore the name, really. All that means is there is a change to the algorithm, …

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Don’t Row Backward

Rowing in opposite directions.
Rowing in opposite directions.

Hypothetically, let’s say you’re the average business owner working to generate interest online. You’ve been blogging, you have a business website, and you have social media accounts. This is a very common business model online. And it can work really well. But not when you’re rowing backward.

When you set up the social media accounts, your expectations for social media were high! You wanted everyone to friend/follow/fan/like you. So you added links to your social media accounts to all of your sites. Cute sparkly, noticeable links and you encouraged people to follow you.

And maybe that’s where you left it. Or maybe you do a lot of tweeting, posting to Facebook, etc, and you’re engaging people in social relationships. But probably, you are also wondering why this isn’t resulting in more customers.
That’s because you’re routing customers further away from you, not toward you.

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Email Open Rates — Quick Study

I was recently asked to review best practices for open rates and provide that research to a client.  I figured we could all benefit from what I found out by studying not only historical data for high-traffic clients but online research as well. 1. What Device are they opening the email with? Many people now …

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How to Squeeze Value out of Twitter

Twitter is only powerful if you don’t waste a lot of time there. Let me amend that.

Twitter is a great tool for managing existing customer relationships. Spend as much time there as you want if you’re using it to manage an existing field of active Twitter users who are your customers already. As far as cold contact, Twitter is a good (not great) tool for marketing, so long as you don’t spend a lot of time on it.

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New Tool for Local Businesses

Whether or not you live in a Major metropolis, you can now benefit from the tools created for social apps and iphones to help draw new customers in. Repeat business is the lifeblood of a successful storefront, after all. https://gving.com/ is a new service that allows you to create an customer loyalty program of your own …

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Authenticity

If you can fake it, you’ve got it made… Just kidding. In reality, it is the key to a good social media campaign. If you want to be popular in social media, find your MESSAGE, find a campaign that links that message to your product, and put your authentic voice behind it. Of course, first …

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