Here are a few points to consider before you set up your website:

1. Put someone in charge. It doesn’t matter if you’re planning to have someone outside or inside your company doing the work on your website – you need someone to be responsible for keeping the site up to date and performing well. Websites aren’t “set and forget” sales generators – they need to be regularly updated and fine tuned, or you will find your leads slowly dwindling.
2. Have a budget, and a timeline. Developing a website can quickly eat up more time and money than first anticipated – so make sure you map out a detailed agreement with your developer before you hand over any money. Get your developer to produce and commit to a project brief and a timeline for implementing it, including a definite “launch” date for the site. Make sure it includes all of the features you want your site to contain, and that there are regular reviews built in.
3. Know who you’re selling to, and what your site needs to do for you. Do your customers want to buy online and have their purchase sent to them? Do they just want to research your product or service and then make contact in person? Do you need a shopping cart, or don’t you? How ‘tech savvy’ are your customers, and how important are bells and whistles to them? A thorough profile of your customers and their needs are critical to designing the right site to appeal to them – and can save you a bundle of money if you can eliminate unnecessary website features.
4. Make sure updating your site will be easy. If you plan on managing your site in-house, choose a developer that provides a Content Management System (CMS) so you can update the site yourself. If you only plan on periodic updates to your site and you want to outsource, make sure the costs and scope for this are included in your project brief with your developer. You don’t want to be stuck paying through the nose every time you want to advertise a special on your own site!
5. Check out your competition. Look at your competitors’ websites, and assess what you need to do to be in their league or better. There’s no point spending time and money on a site that won’t stack up again your competitors.
6. List other sites you like or dislike. This is a great help for your developer, and will prevent your designer coming back to show you something you can’t stand! Tell your designer what you like or don’t like about the sites, and remember they don’t have to be in your industry. You’re just looking for design and functionality.
7. Carry your brand through. Your website is more than just an electronic brochure, but it should still look like your website. Give your existing marketing material to your developer, so that they can design a site that ties into your brand and the way you present yourself.
8. Work out what will be regularly updated, and what will be mostly static. Choose a few areas on your site that you update regularly – at least monthly. You might have a news section, specials, a library of articles, or an archive of your newsletters. This is important to maintain your search engine rankings and keep your site looking current for your customers.
9. Get your site ranked. There’s no point having a great website that no one but your existing customers can find. Work out how you’re going to go about getting a great Google ranking, and then do it from day one of your site going live. It takes time to build up a good search rank. If you don’t have someone in-house who can manage your Search Engine Optimization (SEO), find a reputable company to manage it for you. Media One Pro (Google them!) is a favorite of ours, or your developer may be able to help you with this.

• link visibility (placement and appearance)
• link relevance

So, no more small text links in footers, no more links buried in comment spam, no more link exchanges where your link sites on a link page with a bunch of others. You need quality links that stand out and are likely to get the click. (Hear that link spammers, no need to keep emailing to ask for link exchanges!)

Linking methods that are no longer as effective:
• Forum posting and blog commenting. (Still do it to add value to a conversation and help people but don’t count on link juice from it)
• Social bookmarking. It’s still a helpful resource so use it to be helpful but don’t count on link juice from this.
• Bulk directory submission. This has been a bad idea for a while but it’s worth repeating.
• Bulk link exchange. Bad idea and could result in penalties or being banned from the engines.
Linking methods that are effective:
• Guest blogging. Great way to get exposure for yourself and get a high quality link back to your site.
• Link baiting. This means just putting great content out there that acts as bait and people can’t resist linking to it. The content has to be really good and it
really needs to be spread around.
• Press releases. With some effort and some luck, you can get a quality link from big media.
• Social Media. As I mentioned earlier in this newsletter, you can attract links via Twitter (and Facebook).
• Article Syndication. A great way to spread your content (but it has to be good)

• High cost. Depending on its size and location, a Yellow Pages ad can cost up to $20,000 per year. And you can easily spend another $5,000 designing a customized ad. At those rates, it takes a lot of customers just to break even on the cost of the ad. Plus, studies show that the phone directory companies continue to raise their fees far beyond current inflation rates.
• Cluttered media. You spend a lot of money to design and place your ad, and where do you end up? Depending on the size of your market, right next to dozens, perhaps even hundreds of companies all competing for your next customer.
• Lack of flexibility. In today’s mass-media world, it takes a variety of messages to reach your audience and motivate them to contact you. Yet, once your Yellow Pages ad goes into the directory, that’s it. You can’t make any changes for a full 12 months.
• Difficult to test. Because of their inflexibility, Yellow Pages ads don’t allow you to test different marketing approaches. Once you place an ad, you have to wait a year to test a new headline or message. And unless a patient says they found you through the phone directory, you have no way of knowing the effectiveness of your ad.
• Reach the wrong market. Yellow Pages ads tend to attract only elderly and non-internet savvy. While these people can augment your regular clientele, they’re not the kind of customers upon which you can build a healthy, growing business.

With the Yellow Pages, it depends entirely on what you’re advertising. If I owned a shoe store that specialized in orthopedics, I would take out a large full page ad. The elderly who are in need of orthopedics still use this directory. It’s all about your demographic. There are several good reasons to advertise in the Yellow Pages, but it’s nowhere near as valuable as it once was. All advertising (especially print) is undergoing a major revolution. Search engines have taken over as the method of finding products and services. That aside, there is also a tangible SEO benefit to having your website linked in directories like this. However, the cost of the link is most often not worth the investment. If you wish to use Yellow Pages, then try it once. Use a unique phone number and a unique website. Negotiate very hard with the sales representative. They often charge ten times more than the fair market price on print advertising. Don’t get scammed! And carefully monitor the responses you receive. Otherwise you are best to utilize the current major marketing method of SEO and Social Media. Even late adopters such as the elderly are catching on to this. The simplicity of looking things up via Google and Bing have replaced the cumbersome task of thumbing through a yellow pages book. And more and more people are becoming aware of what directories really are. A place to pay for advertising. And people want to know what’s fair information, not what some company has paid to make you believe! Contact Media One Pro if you would like to learn more about the advantages of SEO/Pay Per click Marketing and Social Media. Leave the yellow dinosaur (yellow pages) in the past.

Now, this doesn’t mean that suddenly Twitter and Facebook links are the main ranking factor determining where your content is showing up in organic searches. If anything, Google seems to be tiptoeing into the waters in this area.

“The web search quality team has a lot of different groups in a lot of different offices, so people including the original Blog Search team, people who worked on Realtime Search…have been working on using these sorts of things as a signal,” explains Cutts. “So primarily, it has been used a little bit more in the realtime sort of search, where you might see individual tweets or other links showing up, and streaming up on the page. We’re studying how much sense it makes to use it a little more widely within our web search rankings.”
 
To reiterate, you’ll still see this playing more of a role in realtime search, but Google is “looking at it more broadly within web search as well,” according to Cutts.

“Now, there’s a few things to remember,” Cutts warns. “Number one is: if we can’t crawl a page (if we can’t see a page), then we can’t really assign PageRank to it, and it doesn’t really count. So if we’re able to obtain the data, then we can use it, but if for some reason a page is forbidden for us to crawl or if we’re not able to obtain it somehow, then we wouldn’t be able to use it within our rankings.”

This would appear to mean that links within Facebook will not mean a whole lot when the user isn’t sharing their updates with everyone. Many Facebook users have their privacy settings adjusted to only share with their friends. While Facebook may have far more users than Twitter, privacy settings will greatly reduce that number in terms of links that will potentially help your search rankings.

“This is something that is used relatively lightly for now, and we’ll see how much we use it over time depending on how useful it is and how robust it ends up being,” says Cutts. “The one thing I would caution people about is don’t necessarily say to yourself, ‘Ha. Now I’m going to go out and get reciprocal follows, and I’m gonna get a ton of followers,’ just like people used to get a ton of links. In the same way that PageRank depends on not just the number of links, but the quality of those links, you have to think about what are the followers who mean quality. Who are the people who actually are not just bots or some software program or things like that.”

– from interview with Matt Cutts

Image compression

It is important to make sure that any images used within the website are at their smallest file size without losing quality. There are many graphics programs out there that can help you to re-size your images so that they are smaller. It is also important to use the correct formats such as GIF and PNG.

The GIF format (Graphics Interchange Format) has been very popular on the web for a number of years due to its ability to create very small file sizes.

You do not really want to be creating large images through this format as you will see a loss in quality but for buttons, small images and backgrounds it is ideal.

The PNG format (Portable Network Graphics) has taken over the GIF in recent years due to its great compressed quality and low file size. PNG is great for logos and other large sized graphics.

External CSS Files

CSS is a very powerful web tool and when used well it makes websites look amazing. It can however slow down the performance of a website if it is used internally (inline) because it gives the browser too much code to read through at once. The best way to use CSS is externally, linking it in to your HTML.

Every great website needs a good style sheet or two but there are many websites relying on 4 or 5 style sheets which slows down performance and the way a search engine crawls the site. Try and keep CSS files down to a minimum and make sure they are external.

External JavaScript

JavaScript works wonders on a website helping it to look and feel more dynamic but just like CSS, if it is used too much internally it can slow down your webpage and give search engines too much code to look through when crawling your site.

Use JavaScript files externally and link them into your HTML for optimum performance.

Unnecessary code

When looking through the code of a website there is very often areas of code that really do not need to be there. This could be due to various developers and designers working on the same project or a website that has had changes over the years.

Unnecessary code like this makes the browser read things that are unimportant or non existent, which will slow the load time of the site. Just take the time to read through the code and strip out any areas that aren’t needed.

Server

Good hosting is key to the speed of any website. Make sure that your server is up to date with the latest processors and can handle the traffic your website is getting. If you have a website that attracts thousands of hits then shared hosting will just slow down the website and make it unavailable to others, this is where a dedicated server is needed.

Keeping a check on your hosting can really speed up your website and keep users happy.

Script compression programs

It is a good idea sometimes when running various scripts and style sheets to run them through compression software which will compress JavaScript, CSS and HTML files to ensure that they are as small as possible. This will help to make the webpage fast.

There is one problem when doing this however, if you use a program like Mozilla Firefox’s Firebug to inspect your code, it can be hard to find the exact area you need. This is because it tends to bunch things like CSS together as so it can be hard to spot the areas you wan tot change.

For more information: Media One Pro is a SEO and Web Development company based in Las Vegas, NV and Portland, OR. There qualified staff has years of experience in Internet Marketing and Social Media.  Stop by their site for more information regarding SEO Services in Las Vegas or Web Design in Portland, OR.

“We do use Twitter and Facebook links in ranking as we always have in our web search rankings, but in addition we’re also trying to figure out a little bit about the reputation of an author or creator on Twitter or Facebook,” says Cutts. “I filmed a video back in May 2010 where I said that we didn’t use that as a signal, and at the time, we did not use that as a signal, but now, we’re taping this in December 2010, and we are using that as a signal.”

Now, this doesn’t mean that suddenly Twitter and Facebook links are the main ranking factor determining where your content is showing up in organic searches. If anything, Google seems to be tiptoeing into the waters in this area.

“The web search quality team has a lot of different groups in a lot of different offices, so people including the original Blog Search team, people who worked on Realtime Search…have been working on using these sorts of things as a signal,” explains Cutts. “So primarily, it has been used a little bit more in the realtime sort of search, where you might see individual tweets or other links showing up, and streaming up on the page. We’re studying how much sense it makes to use it a little more widely within our web search rankings.”

To reiterate, you’ll still see this playing more of a role in realtime search, but Google is “looking at it more broadly within web search as well,” according to Cutts.

“Now, there’s a few things to remember,” Cutts warns. “Number one is: if we can’t crawl a page (if we can’t see a page), then we can’t really assign PageRank to it, and it doesn’t really count. So if we’re able to obtain the data, then we can use it, but if for some reason a page is forbidden for us to crawl or if we’re not able to obtain it somehow, then we wouldn’t be able to use it within our rankings.”

This would appear to mean that links within Facebook will not mean a whole lot when the user isn’t sharing their updates with everyone. Many Facebook users have their privacy settings adjusted to only share with their friends. While Facebook may have far more users than Twitter, privacy settings will greatly reduce that number in terms of links that will potentially help your search rankings.

“This is something that is used relatively lightly for now, and we’ll see how much we use it over time depending on how useful it is and how robust it ends up being,” says Cutts. “The one thing I would caution people about is don’t necessarily say to yourself, ‘Ha. Now I’m going to go out and get reciprocal follows, and I’m gonna get a ton of followers,’ just like people used to get a ton of links. In the same way that PageRank depends on not just the number of links, but the quality of those links, you have to think about what are the followers who mean quality. Who are the people who actually are not just bots or some software program or things like that.”

By WebProNews

So what are high PR profile pages?  These are basically websites that have a page rank of 6+ and offer free memberships where you can register and setup a profile page.  There are literally thousands of these sites, probably more.  What people are doing is joining these sites and creating a member profile page.  With the majority of these profile pages you can add one or more ‘dofollow’ backlinks.

Now there is a fine line between setting up a decent profile page and spamming these sites.  I don’t condone spamming whatsoever so you need to be careful when joining these sites and setting up your profile pages.

Before I go into some ‘meat’ regarding profile pages I want to tell you about my experience with setting up profile pages.  A few months ago I joined a ‘Warriors’ service from the Warrior forum whereby every month I was emailed a packet of high PR backlinks.  This included full instructions and screenshots of how to register with each site and where to place your backlinks.  A huge time saver!  (I’ll let you know more about this great service at the bottom of this post!) Straightaway I decided to add my own technique to the process.  To cut a relatively short store into an even shorter story…. within about 2 – 3 weeks my rankings for the sites I was setting the profiles up for went from around no. 300 in Google to no. 55 and another site went from no.58 in Google to no.4 where it still sits solidly now.  I was quite amazed with this.  Such a massive increase in a surprisingly short time!

As I’m a busy guy developing new ideas and adding features to my existing applications etc I didn’t have much time to do any more so about a month later I outsourced some of this backlinking to someone else.  Although the job was done exactly as promised and within the expected timescale the results were….. well, none existant.  Even six weeks after this work was done, no movement whatsover… in fact, some of the rankings have actually gone down.

Now onto the valuable information.  Information that can mean the difference of wasting a few hours of your time, or turning those hours into your best spent hours this year.  Seriously.

This is the difference between the way I set up my profile pages and the way in which this other person (and many others) setup their profile pages.

This other guy registered with a site, setup a profile page with two backlinks on and moved onto the next site.  So what’s wrong with this?  The problem with this is that there is NO theme to the page.  It will be similar or near enough identical to 80% of the other profile pages.  Google and the other search engines will NOT be able to work out what these pages are about because they have no contextual structure and are not topic related in ANY way.  These pages will simply be de-valued and filed on a dusty shelf somewhere next to the trash bin.

Before I go into the method in which I set up these profile pages I also want to point out that when I set up my profile pages previously I only set up 16 of them.  He setup 40 of them!  This goes to show the power of a theme related profile page compared to a blank page.

When you setup a profile page most of them ask you to enter a user name.  The majority of these sites include the username in the url of your profile page.  Having your keyword within the url can add quite a bit of weight to your page and can help with your rankings.  You need to be careful with this as it can be classed as spamming if you just stick your keywords in the username field.  Instead, add something like ‘andy-article-writer’, or ‘john-pens’, or ’sarah-jvmarketing’.  By adding your name before your keyword you are drawing less attention to your keywords from a human perspective.  You also don’t need to put ALL your keywords in your username.  If you have a two word keyword phrase that you are wanting to rank for then even adding one of the words to your username is better than adding none.  If my targeted keyword was ‘promotional pens’ then I could use ‘andypens’ or ‘andy-pens’ as my user name.

The biggest mistake people are making when they are adding their link to the BIO section is that they are only adding their links to the bio section and nothing else.  Now that does look spammy.  What you need to do is spend a minute or two and write a good bio that includes your links.  This is a great way to NOT come across spammy and also get your keywords and related keywords in there.  This is what adds relevance to the page and makes it stand out ‘contextually’ from all the other profile pages.  It’s also good to add some ‘normal’ interests in their too as it makes you look like a real person.  One that site owners and admin can relate to.

Here is an example of a good BIO section:

I’m am an internet marketer and web developer.  I have created a number of web applications that aid other internet marketers and webmasters with their online marketing efforts.  Some of my products include an article creator that allows members to create highly unique articles whenever they need them and also a free article rewriter which helps members to rewrite existing PLR articles making them unique ready for them to submit them to article directories or upload them to their blog.

I also enjoy spending time with my family, going on holidays and playing sport.

What I have done above is add a theme to the profile page.  You don’t need to add backlinks to relevant sites, it’s ALL about relevant pages.  Google ranks pages, it doesn’t rank websites.  When it leads a user to some information it doesn’t take them to a site, it takes them to a page.  By adding relevant keywords and content to a page you are adding a topical theme.  With this theme Google can identify what your page is about and what it is ‘related’ to.  This can make all the difference!

If you have a content spinner such as Power Article Rewriter or any other spinner that uses the {word1|word2} syntax then you can use it to spin a new variation of your bio section.  Then just submit a unique bio for each profile page you set up.  If not then just write your profile pages on the fly.  Alter them a bit, write them from a different angle each time.

As well as the BIO section there is often other areas that you can fill out.  Things like ‘Occupation’.  If your anchor text is ‘Article Writer’ you could add the words ‘Professional Copywriter’, or ‘Professional Article Writer’ in the ‘Occupation’ field.  This will also add relevance to the page.

Profle pages are GREAT for increasing your rankings for ‘geographical’ keyword phrases.  If you are targeting a specific town or county then add them to the ‘Location’ field.  For example if you are a plumber in Manchester, then add the word ‘Manchester’ to the location field.  These are ALL visible within your public profile.

Another good thing to do is to add a profile photo.  Real members upload an image of some kind.  This doesn’t have to be a photo of you although it is advisable.  You can add an avatar or emblem of some sort.  This just shows that you have put a bit of time and effort into the joining process and value their site.  You never know, you may actually like some of these sites and decide to pop back once in a while!

It is always worth taking a few extra minutes per profile page.  You could setup 30 pages quicker without adding these other elements but you’d be wasting your time and effort when compared to the results you’ll get by setting them up properly.  If you’re going to do a job, it’s worth doing properly.

It’s very important though not to come across spammy.  You will look more like a spammer if you just add your links. Do it properly and you’ll reap the benefits in more ways than one!

–  article courtesy of Online Entrepreneur

If you target the wrong keywords, you will lose a lot of time and you will lose a lot of sales.

You will invest a lot of time in optimizing your web pages for keywords for which your website cannot get high rankings at this time. Or you will invest a lot of time in optimizing your web pages for keywords that don’t convert to sales. In both cases, you won’t get much sales.

It is very important that you choose the right keywords that lead to high search engine rankings and sales. Make sure that you choose the correct keyword type.

If you target the wrong keywords, you’ll waste a lot of time, energy and money.

BE CAREFUL: Think twice before you start.

Many webmasters think that they already know the best keyword for their websites. If they haven’t done some research, they are usually wrong. There are several reasons for that:

• You know your business much better than anybody else. You know the special terms that are used in your branch and you know what you should search for when you’re looking for products like yours.
• Your customers don’t know as much as you. They don’t know your terminology and they might use totally different keywords. For example, a recent study found out that many people search for the keyword “nose job”. If you optimize your web page for the keyword “rhinoplasty” then these web surfers won’t find your site.
• Did you consider the intention of the searcher? Just because a keyword is used very often on search engines it doesn’t mean that you’ll get many customers. People who find your website through a special keyword might not be interested in purchasing.

It’s very important that you take some time to find the best keywords for your website. The time and efforts that you invest in finding the right keywords will pay back in no time.

2. Choose the right keyword type to get more conversions

When web surfers want to purchase something online, they go through three research phases. Web surfers usually start with general keywords.

After becoming more educated about a particular product or service, they will use more specific keywords. As soon as the web surfers know what they want, they use specific keywords.

a. Keywords for browsing

During the first research phase, web surfers use general keywords to find information. For example, a web surfer might be interested in an MP3 player. The keyword that the web surfer might use in search engines could be:

mp3 player

People who use keywords for browsing are usually looking for information only. Keywords for browsing usually have a very high search volume. Getting a top 10 ranking for these general keywords is very difficult and nearly impossible.

It is unlikely that a web surfer who uses such a generic keyword will buy something.

b. Keywords for comparing

In the second research phase, web surfers narrow their selection because they now know what type of product they want. For example, the web surfer might have found out the he is interested in an USB stick MP3 player with 1 GB flash RAM. The keywords of these web surfers are more specific:

mp3 player 8 GB
mp3 player usb stick
mp player under $100
trekstor mp3 player
samsung mp3 player

People who use keywords for comparing are more ready to buy. Comparing keywords are probably the best keywords that you can target for your search engine optimization campaign.

They often have much lower search volume than general keywords but they will lead to more sales and it is much easier to get top 10 rankings for these keywords.

c. Keywords for buying

During the last research phase, web surfers know what they want to purchase. They are just looking for the website with the best offer. For that reason, these surfers use very specific keywords:

TrekStor i.Beat move 8 GB Video MP3 Player
TrekStor i.Beat move 8 GB free shipping
SanDisk Sansa Clip 1 GB

People who use keywords for buying are ready to buy. However, these keywords won’t help you much if you offer competing products.

d. The best keywords for search engine optimization

Keywords for comparing are usually the keywords that work best for search engine optimization. People who use that keyword type are looking for a solution to their problem and they are ready to buy.

To get best results with your search engine optimization efforts, you should concentrate on that keyword type.

1. Do not use single word keywords

Single words cannot be promoted effectively. For example, it is not likely that someone looking for “free accounting software download” is going to type just “software” into the search box.

Avoid the most popular keyword phrases because you’ll be competing with millions of other pages for a search engine’s attention. It is unrealistic to think that a new website could rank number one on a popular phrase like “mp3″. More established companies who have been on the Internet for several years will have the big advantage of a high link popularity.

People who whose multiple word keywords are in the compare or buying phase. They are more likely to purchase goods or services than those using fewer words (source: Oneupweb Research).

2. Multiple word keywords make your website more relevant

Search engines analyze all pages of your website and put them in a context. Start with multiple word keywords and then extend your keyword list. If you’re selling MP3 files, you should optimize your web pages for keywords such as “independent bands mp3″, “alternative grunge mp3″, “80s pop music mp3 download” and similar keywords first.

If your website has many rankings for these keywords, search engines will find out that your website is relevant to the mp3 topic. As soon as search engines consider your website relevant to this topic, it will be much easier to get high rankings for keywords such as “mp3 download” or even “mp3″.

Some keyword tools, that may helpful for you:

- Google SK tool: http://www.google.com/sktool/

- Google Keyword tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Need professional help with your keyword research?  Media One Pro can provide research, keyword history, competitive analysis, and a host of other SEO services.  Call us today!

Whether you are a bricks and mortar business or an online Internet-based business, chances are your sales will go up if you are marketing your business. There are many offline businesses that can effectively leverage social media to strengthen and grow their businesses in creative and effective ways. It’s about thinking outside the box.

Most importantly, your social media marketing must fit in with your overall business Marketing Plan. If you are ad-hoc in how you use social media to market your business then yes you will probably get ad-hoc results. Be sure to implement a Social Media Marketing Plan to ensure you get the most effective results for your business.

Many of the popular social media websites, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, all engage prospects and customers, grow the awareness and popularity of your business and inevitably boost your sales.

If you are serious about taking your business into the 21st century, then you will need to embrace social media. There are many ways that businesses can use social media to their advantage. Here are just a few:

* Become an Expert:

The first step is to create your profiles on the various social media websites and then update them on a regular basis. You will need to check your accounts a couple of times a week to respond to comments from your followers. This a great way to build presence, to be seen as an expert and to build relationships with your followers. The more you update and are seen to be interactive with your followers, the stronger your business’s reputation will be. 
 
* Educate Don’t Sell:

Social media is another way to build relationships with people, prospects and customers that you may not ever have otherwise been exposed to. So make the most of it. In today’s market, consumers are getting smarter, plus we live a world of mass advertising. The last thing you want to do is sell your products and services on social media. It’s about educating your fans. Every once in awhile you might promote a workshop or specíal deal. Educate more, Sell less. If people want to find out more about you and your products and services, they can visit your website.

* Get the Whole Company Involved:

If you have a staff, get them involved and task them to update your social media posts on a daily basis. This is an excellent morale booster and your staff’s involvement will strengthen your marketing effort and grow your business’s online exposure. A little suggestion – you might want to keep an eye on how much time your staff spends on social media and that it is for work and not personal purposes.

* Take your message and content to your consumer:

You may want a website where you fill orders, capture data, or simply demonstrate your product, but you shouldn’t assume your customer will instantly come to you. Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, and YouTube are all basically free tools. You need to go where your consumer lives online. If your customers, prospects, and influencers are there, you should be there: listening, engaging, sharing, and helping them.

* Encourage People to Join You on Social Media:

Ask people to “Like” your social media pages. You can promote social integration on your business receipts, signs, brochures and invoices so that your existing customers will want to jump on the social media train as well. You can also ask your customers to check in to Foursquare or one of the other geo-location sites once they arrive in the general proximity of your store, offering them special promotions to entice them to come in.

* Keep an Eye on Your Competitors:

Social Media is a great medium to keep an eye on your competitors and stay ahead of the game. It is a great way to research whether your competitors are offering special promotions, how active they are on social media, who is following them and what they are saying. Always remember to stay on top of what your competition is doing by reading everything that they post. Remember that you and other businesses are always fighting to stay on top.

* Become a Community:

People want to feel like they belong to something i.e. a community. This is your job and social media provides a perfect platform for this. People are more likely to purchase from people They Know, They Like, and They Trust. The way to achieve this is by having live events at your store as well as events online. Promote unique deals, give advice and Be There for your community.

* Start Small:

If you don’t have any help in managing your social media accounts and you try to do it all by yourself, you may find that you aren’t doing it well or at all. Start with one and get comfortable with that. Make sure that you go for quality over quantity.

* Listen and Learn:

Are you aware of what your existing customers and potential customers are saying about your business, products and services, and brand? Pay special attention to the comments that people are posting online. It is also a good idea to set up Google alerts and to immediately handle issues as they occur. This is your chance to show people how much you care about them. Help them to solve their problems and address whatever concerns they have. Generally people are okay if a mistake is made, as long as you resolve it.

* Connect your customers and prospects to each other:

One of the best things you can do as a young company is to foster word-of-mouth conversations among your earliest customers. Whether you do it on Facebook or on your own site, it’s important to invite your customers to talk to each other and share ideas. Allow them to guide one another on how they use your product or service. Not only will you have the opportunity to learn what people like and don’t like about your product, you may end up with a bunch of people you can ask to help you.

* Be Patient:

It takes time to see significant results with social media when it comes to the success of your business. Remember that your hard work will definitely pay off and the more relationships you build and the more you interact with others, the more interested other people will be in connecting with you again and again. It’s also important to remember that social media does provide a means for you to connect with people you might otherwise not ever have had the opportuníty to meet.

* Find inventive ways to create or gather content:

For starters, make your website into a blog. Fresh content, the ability to post comments, and pages that get linked to will add to your online visibility. No doubt it’s challenging and time consuming to generate enough content to populate your network and blog, but there are smart ways to go about it.

First, whatever you’re doing, write about it. Report on your progress. Second, come up with a daily question you’d want someone to ask and respond to it in a blog post or video. Third, save time by collecting content from others. Place your product or service, even in beta form, in front of people willing to blog, make videos, and tell stories about it. Aggregate this content to your blog or video channel. Fourth, conduct polls or ask questions about a related topic and turn these results into future posts as well as “news” you can release to both bloggers and press.

* Get on Twitter and use it actively:

It takes time to build a large Twitter following, but it’s a quick way to connect with industry influencers, bloggers, and press that might matter to you.

No matter what you sell, someone on Twitter is having a conversation about it. It’s your chance to listen, respond, and engage with potential enthusiasts. More importantly, on Twitter there’s a willingness to help each other that you just won’t find anywhere else. Perhaps it’s because re-tweeting information is virtually effortless, or that people practically vie to share new finds, or that users feel a sense of obligation to those who follow and promote them, but for whatever reason, you’re likely to find people who are willing to help promote your brand on Twitter, presuming you learn Twitter protocols and give more than you take.

* Start Crowdsourcing:

“Crowdsourcing” allow your customers to participate in the creation of your brand. If you want a great example, take a look at how HBO seeded True Blood. Instead of advertising, HBO shipped samples of synthetic blood to popular videographers and bloggers, who, of course, couldn’t resist making videos or posting pieces about the mysterious liquid. You may not have anything as cool as fake blood, but you can still learn to think this way.

* Giveaways:

You can use social media to give away free products from your store. This is sure to attract attention. People will want to interact with you and will want to be the first to know when you introduce new products and services. Be careful, however, of not over doing the promotion and competitions.

Social Media is here. Many consumers are spending hours online, so it makes sense to have a presence as well for your business. The real results will come when you are strategic about your social media marketing. It’s all about taking your business into the 21st century. If you are ready to embrace it, so will your clients. Then watch your business grow.

About 702SEO

702 SEO is a firm that specializes in Online Marketing & Sales, helping passionate and committed businesses to grow their client base and reach a new level of success through custom online Sales and Marketing systems. If you want to learn more about how to grow your business, SEO Services in Las Vegas.

1. View high quality videos

Youtube gives you the option to switch to high quality videos for some of the videos, however you can check if a video is available in high quality format by appending ‘&fmt=18′(stereo, 480 x 270 resolution) or ‘&fmt=22′(stereo, 1280 x 720 resolution) for even higher quality.

2. Embed Higher Quality Videos

While the above trick works for playback, if however you want to embed hig quality videos you need to append “&ap=%2526fmt%3D18&Prime and “&ap=%2526fmt%3D22&Prime to the embed url.

3. Cut the chase and link to the interesting part

Linking to a video where the real action starts at 3 minutes 22 seconds, wondered if you could make it start at 03:22? You are in luck. All you have to do is add #t=03m22s (#t=XXmYYs for XX mins and YY seconds) to the end of the URL.

4. Hide the search box

youtube url start time

The search box appears when you hover over an embedded video. To hide the search box add ‘&showsearch=0′ to the embed url.

5. Embed only a part of Video

youtube url to mp3

Just append ‘&start=30′ to skip first 30s of the video. In general you can modify the value after start= to the number of seconds you want to skip the video for.

6. Autoplay an embedded video

Normally when you embed a Youtube video and load the page, the player is loaded and it sits there waiting for you to hit the play button. You can make the video play automatically by adding ‘&autoplay=1′ to the url part of the embed code.

7. Loop an embedded video

Append ‘&loop=1′ to make the video start again without user intervention after it reaches the end.

8. Disable Related Videos

Publishing your content in the form of Youtube video? Don’t want people to see other people’s content that may be related but may as well be in competition to you? Just add ‘&rel=0′ to the end of the url part of the embed code and you just turned off the related video suggestions!

9. Bypass Youtube Regional Filtering

Some videos are only available in certain parts of the world. Your IP Address is used to determine your location and then allow or deny access to the video. Change the url from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=<somecode> to http://www.youtube.com/v/<somecode>

10. Download Video

Although not inherently a youtube trick but useful all the same for downloading videos. Just change youtube to kickyoutube in the url of the video and it will take you to kickyoutube.com with all the options for downloading the video you were watching.

Do you know of some similar Youtube URL tricks and hacks? Fire them in comments!