• You build relationships through engagement
• Your content will be shared through social media
• People are more likely to comment if they are engaged
• People will stay on your site longer
• People will come back to your site more often
• Prospective customers will trust you and will more more likely to contact you

So how do you go about engaging your readers? It’s not easy, but here are some tips:

Content is king!

How many times have we said that here at SMEketing? It’s the mantra we live by. Without good quality content, your site will never get ranked and will never achieve its goals. Writing high quality blog posts and articles that tackle industry issues, that solve problems, that educate and advise your readers is the key to your success. If you’re answering a problem via a blog post and it successfully helps one of your readers, there’s a very good chance that they’ll come back to your blog on a regular basis and they’ll also tell others about their experience.

Take time to think about your titles

We always talk about the important of subject lines in email marketing, but it’s also important to take this theory and apply it to your other content. The titles are the first things people read – they’re what pulls them in to read more. You’ll use the title when promoting your content in social media and many people will use the title as the anchor text if they’re linking to you. So make sure your titles has been designed to lure people in. And while you’re at it, try to add a good keyword in there too, so any links you do get have good anchor text.

Make it easy to comment and share

The Internet has changes rapidly in the last few years. People want to engage with you – so make sure you make it easy for them! If you want people to comment – make it easy, don’t force them to register with your site before they can do it. Likewise, if you want them to share it on social media sites make it easy – give them a button, let them click and share. Voila! Easy peasy. Remember, it’s an unfortunate fact that people are lazy. We want to be able to do things quickly and easily. No one wants to take the time to open their Twitter in a browser, cut and paste the link (sometimes going via a link shortening tool to do this first), cutting and pasting the title then sharing it. Install a plugin and make it easy for them, otherwise they won’t do it!

Remember to add a call to action

If you want readers to comment, want them to share or even want them to retweet a tweet, then you have to ask them to do it. Sometimes just saying ‘Pls RT’ at the end of a tweet will get people to retweet it. Likewise asking people to leave a comment also works.

Build relationships

If someone comments on your content (be it a blog post, and article or even through a tweet), then please say thank you. Manners cost nothing! Have you ever left a comment on a blog, only to get an email a day or so later saying someone had commented on your comment… you go back to that page to see that the blog owner has personally thanked you for your input. It feels good. It takes hardly any time at all to go back and say thanks. It also shows other would-be commenters that you appreciate any engagement you get.

To summarise, engaging with your readers is something that takes effort and time. But if you remember to be polite and appreciative and direct people to do the things you want then you’ll start to see an increase in engagement levels.

Have you had any success in getting people to engage with you and your content? Give us your tips in the comments below.

Extra content for the search engine robots

The backbone of SEO is content. The more content the search engines can find and index the better. If you’ve got a well rounded blog, covering a range of different topics, you’ll have more chance of being found for a wide range of terms (and your long tail terms will get a boost too). If you’re having trouble creating regular content for your blog a guest author could help out by giving you a post on a regular basis to add. You can schedule these in whenever you need a break (or during busy times when your efforts may be taken elsewhere in the business).

Variety for your readers

Guest blog posts help to keep you blog fresh, but also gives an additional viewpoint and tone of voice. As they say, variety is the spice of life! Having a good range of blog posts with a variety of content and views makes your blog more rounded and helps to keep visitors engaged, as well as giving them a reason to come back on a regular basis.

A different range of keywords

Because everyone has a different tone of voice and a different writing style, you’ll find that by using guest bloggers you’ll get a different way of promoting the topics that you want to focus on. A lot of the time guest bloggers may approach you, in which case you can tell them the topic you want written about and the keywords you want targeted. But how they go about writing those keywords into their copy, and the different synonyms and ways of saying these terms is up to them. You have the right to edit or amend your guest posts, but you might find it beneficial to keep them as they are (apart from spelling and grammar fixes), as they may have a fresh or different approach to your own posts.

More content to support your social media marketing

If you’re active on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Google+, you’ll know that they live off fresh content. You need to constantly promote new content – be it your own or others (which is always a good way of doing it, please don’t constantly promote your own content alone!). The more blog posts you upload, the more content you have to tweet about and the more posts you can add to your Google+ and Facebook page. You need to keep a steady stream of communication going in these mediums, and guest blogging gives you this.

Additionally, you can bet that if your guest author is an active blogger, they’ll also be active on the major social networking sites. And they want to promote their content just as a much as you do. So you’ll also benefit from them tweeting the blog post to their network of followers. Although it’s their content, it’s on your blog, so you’ll be opening up your site to a whole new range of people/contacts that you previously didn’t have access to.

Plus, we’re seeing that Google and the other search engines are starting to place more emphasis on social signals – so each tweet, mention, Facebook like or Google+ share is an additional signal, all pointing in your direction!

Generate more high quality inbound links

If your guest author promotes their post on their own blog or website, then you’ll get a good quality inbound link from that promotion. Even if you only get one link from them, it’ll be a high quality link (good anchor text, from an authoritative site, on a relevant page with relevant content surrounding it), so it’s worth it. Lots of these individual links soon grows to a wide and diverse link portfolio for your blog.

Attract a new wave of visitors to your blog

In an ideal world, your guest blogger will be well known in their industry, and have a loyal base of regular readers already. This is a great way of adding value to your blog, so when they promote their guest post to their readers, you’re essentially driving traffic from their site to yours. Even if you only get a few of those readers to come back to your blog again, you’ve managed to successfully increase your readership.
If you’re struggling with generating enough content for your blog, or you just want someone to manage the proces for you, please get in touch, or read about our Content Marketing services. Alternatively, if you’re an active blogger and fancy writing a guest post for SMEketing, get in touch!

So in no particular order, here are the things we like to do on a daily/every other day or at least once a week…

• Check Google Analytics: Ensure there’s no unusual activity (which can be a good or bad thing!)
• Log into Google and Bing Webmaster Tools: Quick check to ensure there are no crawling errors, jumps in page load speeds, broken links etc
• Check any paid advertising campaigns (such as Google AdWords, Facebook/LinkedIn ads): Review the click through rates (CTR) of keywords and adverts (particularly any new adverts you may be testing), adjust any bids or budgets, add any new negative keywords you may have recently thought of
• Check your presence on social media sites – Twitter, Facebook, Linked, blogs: Review and reply to any mentions, comments etc, engage with other users, make a useful contribution
• Read through any new articles you have loaded in Google Reader: This is a great way to keep up to date on a range of blogs – just add any RSS feeds to Reader and go through it on a daily basis
• Browse through your competitor sites: Are they up to anything new/interesting. A good way to monitor this is to set up Google Alerts with their name, then any new activity from them can either be emailed to you, or added to your Google Reader account
• Have a quick check of the rankings of your major keywords you may be working on: Although rankings do fluctuate on a regular basis and you shouldn’t rely on a small number of keywords, but giving these a quick check can alert you to any issues early on (remember to turn off personalised search!)
• Have a bit of an explore around your website: Check that everything is working as it should, forms are working, links are working etc

Are there any other checks you do on a daily basis? Share your ideas in the comments below.

12 months ago: Facebook has 350 million active users on global basis.
Now: Facebook officially hit the half-billion member mark last year. According to figures from Socialbakers, there are now some 640m Facebook users worldwide.

12 months ago: 50% of active users log into Facebook each day. This means at least 175m users every 24 hours.
Now: Still citing the 50% active rate, using the official 500m figure, this means at least 250m users every 24 hours. This is more than a 40% increase in 12 months.

12 months ago: 65m users access Facebook through mobile-based devices.
Now: It may well be the year of mobile… For Facebook. Users accessing the site through mobile devices now tops 200m – an enormous 200% increase in around a twelve-month period.

And…

• The average Facebook user creates 90 pieces of content each month
• People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active on Facebook than non-mobile users
• People on Facebook install 20m applications every day

Fast forward to March 2012 – what do you think will happen to these stats? Will they continue to grow, or will the growth we’ve seen start to plateau? Needless to say, with almost 1 in 12 people globally on Facebook, this isn’t a medium you can afford to ignore anymore.

So how can you take advantage of this medium? Well you can create a Facebook business page, engage with other Facebook users via your own or other pages, or take advantage of their advertising opportunities (see our recent blog post Google AdWords (PPC) vs. Facebook Ads).

We’ll submit your website to 500 social bookmarking sites for just £50. Imagine getting 500 valuable links on high PR websites pointing to your domain… for just £50! That’s just 10p per link!

We’ve probably all had an email like this at some point, but unfortunately sometimes people get lured into the idea of all those wonderful, high quality links and actually follow these spammer up with their offer.

There’s so many things wrong with this offer, it’s hard to know where to start, but I’ll give it a go:

• Firstly, you don’t submit websites to social bookmarking sites, you submit a URL that contains a particular piece of content – so if this company is just submitting your homepage URL, there’s a good chance it will be rejected.
• Most social bookmarking sites use the NoFollow attribute on their links – this means that you don’t get any link juice from the linking site. Some social sites remove this attribute if your content becomes very popular and makes it only the first page, but this takes effort and it’s unlikely that this company will be putting in any extra effort for you.
• It’s unlikely that all 500 social bookmarking sites will relate to you, your product/services or industry. Many of these will be niche sites which won’t even accept your content.
• At the same time as submitting your site to the social bookmarking website, they’ll also be submitting the links of the other poor buggers who fell for this scam – owners and administrators of these sites don’t take too kindly to this kind of activity.
• Many social bookmarking sites don’t offer permanent links – the links stay on the site for as long as the submitting account stays open and active – spammer accounts often open and close quickly, which means your links get deleted too.
• Some of the more popular, influential social bookmarking sites (such as Stumbleupon and Digg) could also ban your domain indefinitely, meaning that when you want to manually submit high quality content on your own time, you’re out of luck!

Social bookmarking isn’t about generating as many links as possible – it’s about sharing high quality content to people who will find it interesting. It’s a social thing and something that takes time. But if done correctly it can have fantastic repercussions for businesses.

So next time an email with an offer like this comes into your Inbox, mark it as spam and forget about it!

If you’re interested in the benefits of creating and promoting high quality content online, get in touch with SMEketing. We love writing copy for the web – blog posts, articles, website copy and more! Call us on 023 8083 7271 or email info@SMEketing.com.

So we’ve decided to put down the top 20 business benefits we think Twitter can have on a business (in no particular order):

1. Engage and converse with your target audience
2. Create brand awareness
3. Promote of any new offers, services, products etc
4. Keep up to date with industry news and developments
5. Promote your blog content
6. Find prospects – use the search function and look for people mentioning requirements for services/products you supply
7. Customer services – keep customers updates with any issues etc
8. Event management – keep delegates up to date and help them network online
9. Keep up to date with what your competitors are up to
10. Market research
11. Give your company a more personal feel
12. Online reputation management – find out what people are saying about you and react immediately
13. A method of gaining feedback
14. SEO boost/increased online footprint
15. Q&A tool – have a question? Your Twitter network will have the answers
16. HR resource – find new employees quickly and cheaply
17. Internal communication
18. Help find new suppliers and partners
19. Promote images via TwitPic and other Twitter based image viewers
20. Use Twitpolls to help make decisions, undertake research etc

There are so many other great business uses of Twitter – if you can think of anymore add them to the comments below!

Some LinkedIn statistics (as of April 2010):

• More than 65 million registered users
• Covers more than 200 countries and territories worldwide
• On average 36.5M people visit LinkedIn.com every month
• 51% male, 49% female
• Average age – 35-49
• 47% college educated, 27% university and above

So how can you use the tools LinkedIn offer to promote your business, your products and services and any offers or events?

• Members only groups can be created to provide your customers with a exclusive opportunity to network with other customers
• For customers with a particular product or service interest, focused sub-groups can be set-up
• You and your customers can upload photos, videos, create online polls, take part in forums, and receive email updates
• Groups can be used to communicate news and start online discussion and debate
• LinkedIn can also be used to promote events very effectively

Like most free social networking sites, you will get out what you put in. It can be resource intensive in terms of time, but for small businesses on a budget it can be an effective way of promotion.

If you’re interested in using LinkedIn or any other type of social media to promote your business, get in touch. We can help set you up with social media accounts, and can give you training and guidance on making the most of them. Alternatively we can completely manage all your social accounts for you!

Call us on 023 8083 7271 or email us on info@SMEketing.com.

Some Twitter statistics (from April 2010)

• Twitter now has 105,779,710 registered users
• New users are signing up at the rate of 300,000 per day
• 180 million unique visitors come to the site every month
• Twitter users are, in total, tweeting an average of 55 million tweets a day
• Twitter’s search engine receives around 600 million search queries per day

So how can you use Twitter to promote your event?

• Depending on the type of event you are holding, choose to either use your main corporate Twitter account, or create a new account – purely focused on just this event (which might be the best choice if you have an event which is reoccuring)
• Create a Twitter hashtag unique to each event and use this in each tweet
• Encourage delegates to update their own Twitter feeds with tweets about the event using this hashtag
  • This hashtag measn that anybody at your event, or interested in your event can instantaneously see what you, your delegates and other interested parties are doing and saying
• Twitter can also be used to provide mini-updates for one-on-one delegates
• Use Twitter as a way to inform event participants of the latest event updates/changes
• Include tweets containing links to new information, advice, tools and resources on your website
• Use Twitter to instantly communicate important messages and ‘calls to action’ to their delegate/customer base
• Delegates can subscribe to your Twitter feed or your hashtag search result via mobile or RSS for instant notification

Twitter’s social nature, combined with the ability to create instant updates and announcements makes it a perfect took to keep delegates up to date with the latest event news. Used wisely it can have a real impact on the success of your events.

For help creating and managing a Twitter account, get in touch with us here at SMEketing. Call 023 8083 7271 or email info@SMEketing.com and one of our social media SMEketers will be in touch!

May is here – the sun has been shining throughout April and it has put us here at SMEketing in a wonderful mood. So because we love the sunshine and because we enjoy helping small businesses succeed in social media, we are launching our Facebook/Twitter offer again.

We are offering to create a Twitter and Facebook Business Page for you, for the reduced price of £120 – all in!

What your Twitter account will include:

• A Twitter logo created based on your existing corporate logo
• Bespoke background created (to include contact details and about us summary)
• A Twitter ‘bio’ created with the aim of a) getting people to follow you and b) luring people to your main site
• Follow 100 relevant people based on a criteria you set
• Create up to five Twitter lists for you
• A ‘How To Guide’ informing you how to use Twitter to boost your business effectively

What your Facebook Business Page will contain:

• We will create your page for you
• Add all relevant information – logo, website, email, telephone, about us etc..
• We will populate your wall with up to twenty posts
• We will add up to five events that you may be hosting/attending
• We will add up to five photo albums, populated with your photos/images (limit to 10 photos per album, or 50 photos overall)
• We will provide you with a ‘How To’ guide, explaining how to manage your Facebook Business Page, and what kind of information you should be adding

We will then link your Facebook page to your Twitter account – so any new Facebook updates will automatically be posted on your Twitter account, with a link back to your new Facebook page.

All the above is based on the information you provide us. We have a limit of only ten and this offer is only valid in May 2010.

You can order now – we require payment before any work is undertaken. You can contact us and pay via BACS or alternatively, pay via PayPal now; click on the PayPal logo below:

For more information on Facebook and Twitter, read these posts:

• Why Should Your Business Engage In Social Media Marketing?
• How To Use Facebook Pages For Your Small Business
• How Can Your Small Business Track Twitter ROI?
• Twitter: Small Business Success Stories – Will yours be one of them?

Social Media Revolution

Or is it the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution? This video details out social media facts and figures that are hard to ignore. This video is produced by the author of Socialnomics.

• Years to Reach 50 millions Users:  Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
• % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
• The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
• Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
• There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
• 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
• Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
• 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
• More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.

JESS3 – The State of The Internet

JESS3 designed and animated this for the JESS3 lecture at AIGA Baltimore in Feb 2010

• 1.73 Billion Internet users worldwide
• 90 Trillion Emails Sent in 2009
• 81% of Emails were Spam
• 126 Million Blogs on the Internet
• 27.3 Million Tweets Per Day
• Faceboook serves 6 million pages per minute
• 4 Billion photos hosted by Flickr
• 182 Videos watched on average per month (per user)