Posts Tagged education
Written on May 31, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: Advertising, book
I’m a big fan of Facebook and as a matter of fact, I spend more time on Facebook than LinkedIn, Twitter or even GMail. One reason is that fundamentally, Facebook Apps make the social network the dashboard for my life on the web. And with Open Graph, Facebook will follow me everywhere I go, especially in the business world.
For example, I love utilizing more business oriented social networks like LinkedIn, it seems to be much more efficient to bring LinkedIn to me on FB, or bring the business into my dashboard (ie. Profile) as I’m connected with many more individuals on Facebook than LinkedIn. If anything, integrating my business tools as apps in Facebook also help me get better acquainted with my business colleagues.
Last week I was on a business trip and had dinner with clients. We talked about our families, sports and more general topics than just business primarily because we are all connected on Facebook. They know I’m a stand up guy with a baby, an NFL fan and enjoy running my great business. Likewise, I know more about them, so the end result was a new level of trust than can be built by pure business connections alone.
So, if you consider Facebook not just a social networking site but something that can help you promote your business, network with customers, communicate with business contacts and collaborate with coworkers, well then you are right. As proof, here are six business networking tools and apps that I suggest you utilize to integrate business into Facebook, and vice versa.
1. Professional Profile - This app lets you leverage your Facebook friends into business connections by consolidating professional information into one place. It allows you to create a tab on your profile for all of your professional contacts, information, and activities. This app is useful for separating your business and personal contacts.
2. Networked Blogs app - This business app allows you to promote your blog on Facebook as well as to discover new blogs. It shows up on your profile or in your boxes tab displaying your blog and any of the blogs that you like to read, including business-related blogs. The app also lets you import your blog feed to your profile or fan page, read news and vote articles you like.
3. My LinkedIn Profile - Although not officially affiliated with LinkedIn, this app connects your LinkedIn and Facebook accounts, allowing you to display your LinkedIn User profile or company profile on Facebook.
4. Tag Biz Business Network - This is useful for business networking purposes in the sense that it does the networking for you, hence saving you time while expanding your business network. Tag Biz automates the relationship networking and referral process by putting a custom business keyword tag cloud on your Facebook profile and on the Facebook profiles of your friends in your business network. TagBiz also adds your business to the Tag Biz business directory which has over 7000 listed businesses. You’d also get a Tag Biz customizable business card and signature line for all your Facebook messages and wall postings when you install this app.
5. Working It - At first you might think that this Facebook app is good only for thanking friends or for giving props to people in your business network. But it can also be useful app for job search by letting you share your education, work experience and skills, and search over 5 million jobs and internships. The app also lets you build relationships with coworkers and network with professional contacts.
Do you use Facebook as a business connector? And if so, please recommend apps in the comments below.
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5 Ways to Connect Facebook with Your Business Life
Written on April 9, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: book, marketing, searchengineguide, seo
by Jennifer Laycock
The last year or so has seen a mad rush of marketers heading into the world of social media to set up Twitter accounts, gather Facebook fans, produce YouTube content and drive people to offer reviews on sites like Yelp and FourSquare. Unfortunately, that mad rush has also caused a lot of companies to neglect or even abandon their blogs. This is a big mistake. In the world of marketing, blogs are an absolutely integral part of any company’s online marketing.
Earlier this week, I posted about the six reasons SEOs love blogs. That post addressed some of the search related reasons a blog can help boost your business. Today, I want to look at things from more of a marketing perspective and explore the top reasons your marketing team has for wanting to see you properly utilize your blog.
Once again, I’m going to call on some supportive data from HubSpot, who has been cranking out some great posts on the ultimate impact of blogging on search, traffic and leads. There are hard hitting, easy to understand numbers like:
Sites with blogs generate an average of 67% more leads
And there are slightly more complicated, but still important important stats like the increase in leads seen by blogs that have at least 25 posts. Better still, blogs with more than 52 posts see another large jump in the number of leads they generate, presumably because all that extra content leads to more (and higher) search engine rankings).
But just what is it about blogs that make marketers love them so much? Let’s take a look at six key factors that help blogs outperform your average business site when it comes to attracting potential buyers and winning them over.
Reason #1: Focused on Education and Awareness
While it’s true a good corporate web site integrates education into the mix as a way to build credibility and move people through the sales process, there’s still a limit to how far toward the educational side most business sites can go when it comes to focus. Ultimately, your site’s primary goal is (and should be) to convince visitors to buy your products or services. The content on the site must reflect that goal.
Blogs, on the other hand, offer nearly unlimited opportunities to analyze, educate, question and converse with your target audience. Your blog gives your marketing team a unique chance to test different approaches to presenting your information and to do it without always being concerned about pushing people to the next step.
Reasons #2: Editorial Freedom
Because business sites need to focus on moving someone through a goal oriented process, the content created for the site needs to do the same. That leaves writers with very little freedom in terms of how they present their information. Everything needs to be goal oriented.
Blogs offer far more editorial freedom to the skilled writer, giving them space to explore related and complimentary topics that may catch the eye and interest of the reader but that do not directly relate to the goals of the site. For hard working writers, this small bit of freedom can make an enormous difference in terms of ability to continue cranking out quality content.
Reasons #3: Finesse them with a Softer Sell
There’s a certain level of hard sell that has to be implemented on a standard business web site. You’ve got to focus heavily on benefits, unique value propositions and getting the conversion. It’s a fine art to get those points across without pushing too hard.
Since there’s less of a focus on an immediate push to conversion on a blog, there’s more chance to master the art of the soft sell. Bloggers can offer content designed to answer questions, reassure the customer, or simply build up a level of trust and rapport over time. These soft selling techniques tend to work on a completely different set of people than the hard sale, allowing you to use your blog in tandem with your business site to target a wider range of potential buyers.
Reason #4: Chance to Define the Personality of the Company
The larger the business, the better the chance its customers view it as simply another nameless, faceless, profit driven company. The smaller the business, the better the chance it’s customers will feel it lacks credibility, capability and accountability. These are the challenges that can be difficult to address when your site’s focus is on getting the conversion.
Incorporating a blog into your marketing mix allows large companies to seem a little smaller by adding some faces and personalities to the mix. At the same time, blogs allow smaller companies to look more personable, which can also enable them to build credibility and the type of one-on-one connection that creates a sense of loyalty and trust in the consumer.
Reason #5: Content Spreads More Easily
Another problem with corporate sites is there’s very little reason to return to them once you’ve done the requisite looking around. Unless you are coming back to check prices or make an additional order, most people won’t visit a corporate site over and over again. Even if you wanted to return to read updates or new information, there’s no way to know what changes have been made. Companies can blast updates to email subscribers, but many consumers are reluctant to give their email addresses up to businesses.
The great thing about blogs is they are updated frequently and visitors know they are updated frequently. A visitor who likes your content is far more likely to subscribe to receive post updates via RSS or email than they are to subscribe to a marketing message. Additionally, content spreads quickly and easily via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social sharing options. This makes it far more likely that someone will learn of, and return to read, your new blog content.
Reason #6: A Chance for Conversation
While there’s always space to invite feedback on a standard company blog, they don’t lend themselves while to true conversation. People simply don’t feel prompted to engage with web sites the same way they do with blogs. That’s why one of the biggest advantages of a blog is the ability to inspire back and forth conversation with potential customers.
Since a blogger can ask a direct question of a reader and then engage in conversation via the comments, there’s greater opportunity to gather the type of feedback you can use to edit your offerings, your services or even just your marketing approach.
Boost Your Marketing by Getting Back to Your Blog
If you haven’t gotten around to launching a blog yet, or you’ve let your efforts slide, you may want to rethink your strategy. There’s no replacement for a corporate web site when it comes to selling products, accepting leads or showcasing your company, but there’s great value using a blog to reach out to consumers in ways that cannot be easily done via a standard business web site.
If you haven’t been paying as much attention to your blog as you could, stop and rethink your strategy. The blog gives you a unique opportunity to reach your audience at a period when they might not otherwise wish to engage with your brand. Make use of it. Your sales team will thank you for it.
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Six Reasons Marketers Love Blogs
Tags: book ,consumer ,conversion ,customer ,education ,facebook ,goals ,information ,sales ,search ,search-engine ,searchengineguide ,seo
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Written on April 4, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: Advertising, Object, chat, marketing, seo
Posted by Kate Morris
civil war n. A state of hostility or conflict between elements within an organization.
Alright, so search marketing isn’t really an “organization” but there is a certain hostility within its ranks. It’s the war of the acronyms and funding. For years there have been articles, studies, and conference panels surrounding the debate of paid search versus organic search. That rivalry is rather ancient now considering the new kids on the block: CRO, SMO, and LPO. Who will win the war? Simple. If any one side wins the war in your organization, you are the loser.
Tags: business ,child ,conversion ,cro ,education ,flash ,marketing ,Object ,same ,search ,seo ,title ,user ,work
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Written on December 6, 2009 by admin
Filed Under: Advertising, book, seo
Posted by willcritchlow
Bing recently came out of beta in the UK and we are seeing the beginnings of the advertising campaign to promote it.
For SEOs, however, there is a more immediate opportunity with Bing than hoping it gathers some market share from Google(*). Linkfromdomain is a search operator that is unique to Bing. It returns the pages that are linked-to from a domain. There are obviously other ways of getting this information in raw form (maybe including Linkscape one day, but certainly including Xenu for mid-sized sites), but for large sites especially, it can be really hard to gather it in any kind of usable form.
The usage of linkfromdomain is to search on Bing for something like:
- linkfromdomain:ox.ac.uk (returns pages linked from the Oxford University site - more on this below)
- linkfromdomain:ox.ac.uk intitle:broadband (filters to broadband in the title)
- linkfromdomain:ox.ac.uk wimax (searches for wimax anywhere on the linked-to page)
The set of results is generally returned in a similar ordering to a regular search query - with a combination of highly relevant and more powerful results first. Unfortunately linkfromdomain does not support searches for sub-domains (even www.) you have do search for linkfromdomain:exampledomain.com.
How do you use this for SEO?
This is a linkbuilding tip post - the idea being two-fold:
- suppose you have a powerful target website (such as an educational institution) and you are seeking ways of getting links from them, this gives you tools for finding techniques, content types and targets for those links (more on this below but it’s very effective for building highly trusted links)
- sometimes the “one-step-removed” linkbuilding model can work superbly well for identifying linkbuilding targets. If I were running a cooking blog (wait, I do - it took superhuman effort not to drop a shameless link there), it might be a good idea to look at something like this as a superb linkbuilding target list
The information contained in the second approach is typically findable through other means (or the targets are likely to appear on your radar in other ways) and there is a lot of searching through chaff to find wheat. I wanted to run through a worked example today to show you how powerful method #1 can be:
Worked example
I had to pick a niche and a target for my worked example. I decided to imagine I was linkbuilding for a technical but not-specifically-web-related company. I’m trying to get links from trusted authoritative domains so I start with big educational institutions.
As some of you may know, I studied at the University of Cambridge (ending with a year at the Statslab). I don’t want them getting link requests from all you lot, so I picked Oxford (**).
I’m pretending my imaginary client works in some area of telecoms and has resources and technical papers on subjects like wimax and spectrum usage.
First up, wimax:
It turns out that conted.ox.ac.uk is a goldmine for linkbuilders. It’s the Continuing Education section of the Oxford University site and seems to be very generous with linking out. I might suggest that my client gives a talk or writes a resource for a CPD course. At the very least, it might be worth creating some content to target this kind of page.
Tip: I find it best to look for links to pages that aren’t homepages because it’s typically easier to find where the link originates from. Bing doesn’t have an effective link: operator meaning that we have to use Yahoo, Linkscape or similar. Because we are then not using the same index, it can be tricky to track down the link found by linkfromdomain.
Another example starting with spectrum auctions - sometimes it’s funny where this kind of research can take you:
(Incidentally, I found a very similar opportunity on the Cambridge site, but no, I’m not going to tell you about it.)
In an unexpected turn of events, I also found some pretty active blogs writing about my target subject matter on ox.ac.uk URLs. Even I’m not mean enough to fill up those guys’ inboxes with outreach from you lot just because they picked the wrong university.
(*) I don’t know about anyone else, but I am rooting for a more balanced search market (particularly in the UK, where Google has a ~90% market share). I think competition is good for consumers and for businesses.
(**) seriously, we don’t get on (US folks, think of the relationship between Duke and UNC) but I’m not encouraging anyone to spam Oxford University. Really. I’m not. Even though the varsity match is this week.
There are some other great resources on linkfromdomain - I really liked PPC blog’s tip about expired and for sale domains.
Rand has also written about the uses of linkfromdomain for finding spam you are linking to as well as teasing you with the fact that he “gave up” a similar tip to my worked example above at SMX Advanced.
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linkbuilding, bing, linkfromdomain
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Linkfromdomain - a linkbuilding tip for use at Bing.com
Written on November 22, 2009 by admin
Filed Under: seo
Posted by RobOusbey
Introduction
We’ll often rattle off various metrics quite casually in conversation, but it’s easy to forget that others (such as your clients!) might not know whether these are big numbers or small ones. For example: “We’ve just published a guest post on a site with Domain mozTrust 5.67. Mr_Gadget mentioned it to his 64 thousand followers, and it managed to get over 1,000 Diggs.“
This post should be useful to anyone who needs to orientate themselves around such numbers. The Website Benchmarks section shows metrics for around half a dozen sites from ten different niches (based on the list originally prepared for comparing SEOMoz Trifecta data.) This is followed by Social Media Benchmarks, to give an idea of the impact and influence of votes and people on three popular social websites.
Links and Traffic: Website Benchmarks
This section uses three particular metrics:
- Domain mozRank: the strength of a website, based on the sites & pages that link to it,
- Domain mozTrust: the trustworthiness of a website, based on links from trusted sites & pages,
- Unique Vistors: Compete.com’s estimate of the number of monthly unique visitors to a site.
N.B.: The ‘moz’ metrics use data exposed by SEOMoz’s Linkscape, and are on an exponential scale from 0 - 10. Data collected in 2006 suggested that the no visitor metric - Compete included - could be used to precisely estimate unique visitors to blogs at the time.
| Website |
DmR |
DmT |
Visitors |
| U.S. Department of Education |
7.63 |
8.33 |
6,270,175 |
| ConsumerReports |
6.94 |
7.24 |
4,339,086 |
| Consumer Web Watch |
5.97 |
6.31 |
12,213 |
| Consumerist |
5.63 |
5.91 |
796,933 |
| South Carolina Department of Education |
5.44 |
6.12 |
4,467 |
| No Nonsense Self Defense |
4.86 |
5.34 |
18,278 |
| Inner Strength |
3.71 |
4.32 |
1,055 |
| Acqua Beauty Bar |
3.55 |
3.84 |
1,383 |
| Website |
DmR |
DmT |
Visitors |
| Apple |
8.84 |
9.33 |
21,407,512 |
| Google Mail |
7.22 |
7.14 |
9,336,542 |
| Blackberry |
7.10 |
7.30 |
2,551,692 |
| Government of India, Department of Information Technology |
5.82 |
6.47 |
1,862 |
| Internet History |
5.72 |
6.43 |
20,749 |
| The Society for the History of Technology |
4.98 |
6.32 |
688 |
| The Loop |
3.71 |
5.58 |
17,332 |
Social Media Benchmarks
Digg is a well established social media site. After a user submits a link (refered to as a story) other users ‘Digg’ the story if they like it. Stories with a greater number of Diggs are more likely to be promoted to the site’s front page, be seen by more visitors, and receive more traffic. Users can also ‘bury’ stories that are off-topic or duplicate. Read more at How Digg Works.
| # of Diggs |
Likely success |
Example Story |
| 1+ |
Little or no exposure |
Example |
| 10+ |
A little exposure |
Example |
| 100+ |
Mild exposure, moderate success |
Example |
| 500+ |
Reasonable exposure, good success - likely to have been promoted with the submission category |
Example |
| 1,000+ |
Good exposure & likely to be promoted to the front page, successful content |
Example |
| 2,000+ |
Lots of exposure, highly successful |
Example |
| 10,000+ |
The very top echelon of articles, extremely successful content. |
Example |
Reddit is a newer, but increasingly popular social media site. Users can up-vote and down-vote submitted links to give a link a total number of ‘points’. The most popular stories are promoted to the front page of their category, or the site. Read more at the Reddit FAQ.
| Points |
Likely success |
Example Link |
| 1+ |
Little or no exposure |
Example |
| 10+ |
A little exposure, may send some visits page |
Example |
| 100+ |
Good exposure & likely to be promoted to the category’s front page, sends a moderate amount of traffic |
Example |
| 500+ |
Very good exposure & likely to be promoted to the front page |
Example |
| 1,000+ |
Excellent exposure, highly successful & will send considerable traffic to the page |
Example |
| 3,000+ |
Amongst the top links on the site, extremely popular and widely viewed |
Example |
Twitter is a networking website where individuals share their ’statuses’, and follow others doing the same. The most fundamental metric available on the site is the number of ‘followers’ a user has - and provides a reasonable indication of their popularlity and influence. Read more at Twitter’s Getting Started page.
| Followers |
Typical behaviour |
Example User |
| 1+ |
Very new, or dormant user |
Example |
| 10+ |
Likely to be using the site for social purposes, has influence within a close circle of friends |
Example |
| 100+ |
Connecting with a modest number of people, has influence amongst a wide circle of friends or industry colleagues |
Example |
| 1,000+ |
Fairly well known within their industry, and likely to have influence well beyond those they know personally |
Example |
| 10,000+ |
Very well known with their industry or niche; likely to have some off-line awareness |
Example |
| 100,000+ |
Popular amongst a wide variety of users; likely to very influential and be widely ‘retweeted’ |
Example |
| 1,000,000+ |
Amongst the top 200 users and very influential within the site; almost certainly a genuine off-line celebrity |
Example |
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SEO and Social Media Benchmarking
Tags: beauty ,education ,entertainment ,football ,history ,housing ,information ,online ,post ,recorder ,science ,search-engine ,sports ,time ,traffic
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Written on July 20, 2009 by admin
Filed Under: chat, seo
Concerned that your competitors are ahead of you in the search engine results pages because they boast more backlinks than you do This article will show you how to find out the truth with a free online backlink tool it will also show you how to use that data in your own SEO campaigns….
Adobe Solutions for Higher Education Teach Students the Skills They Need for Career Success. Download Free Curriculum
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Analyzing Inbound Links Using BacklinkWatch Data
Tags: a-free-online ,adobe-solutions ,article ,article-will ,career ,competitors ,curriculum ,download-free ,education ,engine-results ,find-out-the ,pages-because ,seo ,skills ,tool-it-will
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Written on June 29, 2009 by admin
Filed Under: chat
This is the second part of a two-part article on local search engine optimization. In this part we are going to cover how different factors affect local search engine rankings the number of user reviews positive and negative reviews reviews on third party websites the age of the business listing keyword location categories phone number and more….
Adobe Solutions for Higher Education Prepare Your Students for a Brighter Future.
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More Ways to Optimize for Local Search
Tags: affect-local ,brighter ,business ,education ,local-search ,part ,search-engine ,second ,students ,the-second ,websites-the
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