Innovative Marketing Tips

Putting up a business is one thing but getting it noticed and start earning profits is a matter of marketing.

Marketing is not just about selling products. This has a misconception for a long time. Selling products is a small fraction of marketing. When it comes to marketing it has never been simple, many organizations spend a lot of money on marketing but unfortunately it does not yield much.

As an entrepreneur, it is time to start thinking of new ways of promoting your business.

All you have to do is put up a strong marketing team that is well versed with the current market trends. On This Episode you’ll find a number of interesting and Innovative Marketing Tips for you to implement on your business

Our Guest Today is Mike Warren:  Mike is an international business maverick whose contrarian strategies have helped his students  generate huge amounts of cash without using any of their own money.

He teaches his students how to make money from the debts attached to property without buying, selling or renting anything using virtual assistants. For his advanced students he teaches the art of flipping a business using the businesses own cash. Students from around the world are passionate to learn Mike’s proven strategies.

On this episode, our good friend James Schramko is sharing with us some very innovative ways on how to use images in Marketing.

James is Australia’s #1 Internet Expert and we are ALWAYS very   proud to have him on the show, if you’re not connected with James, please make sure to go to: www.superfastbusiness.com

On this episode you’ll also learn about the simple yet sophisticated marketing techniques Heineken is using for marketing nowadays.

As a 21^st century way of embracing the centuries old process of beer sales, Heineken has created a position called “Global Leader of Digital Strategy and Media Innovation.” The current holder of this position is Jeremy Brook, a younger man whose formative years were during the Web boom, who has a progressive view about the future of global marketing operations.

The reason for this shift according to Brook is because “digital marketing gives [the company] the flexibility to operate at a global and a local level.” Social media in particular has been a successful digital venture for the company.

Heineken has 8 million Facebook fans, the most of any beer brand, and is the most mentioned beer brand on Twitter accounting for 44 percent of beer mentions. So discover what they are doing to get these impressive figures

Here are some of the handy bookmarks Ernesto Shares on the show:

A) qrstuff.com
It is a Free QR code generator and QR code online creator. Create QR codes ready to print or to add to a t-shirt. Create a cell phone or mobile phone readable 2D barcode containing a URL, Google Maps location, FaceBook link, or Vcard contact information.

B) infogr.am
It creates infographics and interactive online charts. It’s free and super-easy! Follow other users and discover amazing data stories!

C) ewcpresenter.com
Use Presenter to create free professional interactive HTML5 Presentations, animations, banners, Splash pages and more. The perfect alternative to Flash and Powerpoint or keynote to create professional presentations, infographics, HTML5 banners and interactive content in HTML5.

D) videonot.es
The easiest way to take notes from videos. Everything synchronized!

E) archify.com
It captures everything you do on the web, so you can find your stuff later.

If you enjoy these resources, please make sure to download Ernesto’s 2 GREAT resources and Amazing Websites Guides:

www.amazinglyuseful.com and www.evenmoreusefulwebsites.com

Also, if you found the content of the show useful, please remember to register on www.amazingwebsites.tv to receive all our free episodes or check out our archives at http://www.amazingwebsites.tv/archives/

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I would like to share this amazing post on five low-cost local marketing ideas that work. Check it out, you don’t have to waste large amount of money for marketing ideas anymore.

Over the years I’ve found that most entrepreneurs spend too much time and money on promotions that don’t generate new business.

Whether it is local sports sponsorships, newspaper-ad buys or social media, they waste money on marketing strategies that may boost their egos by making them local celebrities, but don’t actually translate into sales.

Entrepreneurs, especially those relying on customers in their local areas, should first focus on networking with other area businesses, major employers, schools, churches and other organizations. They should network and then create marketing strategies and events that are beneficial to all parties.

Here are some marketing ideas to consider before breaking out the big bucks:

1. Hand shake and business card. There is this amazing new social networking tool that’s become popular lately: a radical concept called meeting people in person. Whether you’re a business owner or the general manager, make a point to introduce yourself to at least five people every week. You might be pumping gas or going to the grocery, but say something like: “I’m John Doe, the general manager of John’s Bistro down the street. Just wanted to introduce myself. Have you tried us out yet?” If they haven’t, pull out a business card, write a special freebie offer on the back, and sign and date it. Out of the 250 people you might meet over the year, odds are 185 will use your business-card coupon, and about 50 will become new customers. That’s a significant amount of new business with no advertising cost.

2. Cross promote with other local merchants. It is time for you and your peers to scratch each other’s backs. Provide a special certificate for other local businesses to pass out to customers with a special offer from you — compliments of them. You get your advertising handed out for free, and the promotional partner gets to offer their customers a perk.

Related: How Partnerships Can Help Extend Your Small Marketing Budget

3. Make local employees your VIPs. Got a major employer near your business? Offering a discount to workers who show their name badge seems like a good idea, but often doesn’t work because only those who are already customers take advantage of it. It’s better to persuade the employer to distribute a “VIP card” from your business to each of their workers. Most of them will stick your card into their wallets or purses, and then decide it might be worth it to give you a try. Generally, you should offer something repeatedly for a set period of time to the VIPs — 30 to 60 days is a good time period. A restaurant might offer a percent discount or free desert. A photo shop might price 5×7″ photos as 4×6″ photos. Keep the offer lower than you generally would with merchant cross promotions.

4. Get some bounce-back action. Ever have special circumstances in which you provide products or services to a group of people who normally aren’t your customers? Maybe you own a restaurant that also caters events. Maybe you own a T-shirt shop, and a big local employer asks you for 200 shirts for a summer picnic. Each of these people you’re providing products or services to could also become individual customers. So besides catering a retirement party, provide each of the 420 guests with certificates offering them each a $15 discount on their next meal. Chances are good that 150 of those 420 certificates will be redeemed and a third of those 150 will be first-time buyers. You might get an average meal ticket of $31. So you still made some revenue and got a chance to impress 50 customers who might turn into regulars. Let’s just say a regular customer provides $1,500 in annual revenue. You might increase your revenue by $75,000 from the promotion.

5. Support fundraisers — creatively. One client who owned a restaurant once was approached by a local charity for a gift card for their silent auction. My company found out that the nonprofit expected 400 people to attend the event. So we created special certificates for the restaurant that were handed out to each person that showed up. Each certificate promised a $5 donation to the charity, as long as the certificate holder spent at least $10 at the restaurant. The restaurant received 135 redemptions, and 45 were first-time buyers. The charity raised an extra $710, and the restaurant got a shot at winning a dozen or so new regulars worth about $1,800 a year in sales. The restaurant not only achieved exposure and goodwill, but more importantly got new people in the front door spending money

These strategies don’t take up much time. They cost little. But they generate business. They use a business’s own product as the incentive to drive people in — instead of major media dollars.

Even though there is some cost in products or services given away, the risk is small because people actually have to show up and buy something to achieve the savings. And once they see how great the businesses products or services are, they came back again and again.

Source: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/223917

Learn the great ways on how to change the status of your SEO tactic if it doesn’t work with this great post that I found from online. In this article it will discuss about cool marketing seo tactics that you should know.

Before the likes of Twitter and Facebook stepped to the front of the stage, blogging was all the rage. Successful bloggers garnered audiences that were often greater than what the typical commercial site could attract. In turn, companies created blogs of their own, packed full of search engine optimization (SEO) tactics. The promise being that if you build a blog the traffic will follow.

What most people ignored was that a blog should add value to a site and be used to engage potential and existing customers. In practice, what ended up happening was that the blog became a dumping ground for a mishmash of content that was uninteresting, usually too short and infrequently delivered. But even after their blogs failed to attract traffic or produce results in any measurable way, site owners are still loathe to get rid of them. The most common reason given? Because having a blog allows them to check off another SEO tactic on their list.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for trying something different. In fact, part of what makes SEO so interesting for me is the testing of new ideas. But I also learned from my project manager days that sometimes when a project isn’t completed on time and the window of opportunity the project was meant to capitalize on has closed, the best course of action is to terminate the project. Or if you’re the investment type, you don’t throw good money after bad. Clichés aside, terminating an SEO tactic that isn’t working is a smart move, but can be hard to do.

Confirm Your Assumptions

Don’t start with an assumption that you haven’t verified. In the blog example above, it would be easy to declare that what seems like low-traffic levels as a failure of the blog effort, but what if the blog was created as a testing ground for landing page copy that is far easier to deploy using blog software like WordPress? Once you confirm what the goal was you can then proceed to confirm that it wasn’t met.

Understand the History

Second, find out the history of the tactic. You’ll have a much easier time shutting something down if the person that came up with it is no longer an employee or, better yet, if it was something a previous SEO agency came up with. While the difficulty will vary depending on who came up with the idea, your best approach is one that acknowledges that everyone is just trying to succeed in the competitive organic search engine space. So your justification to end an effort should be one that is based on data, actual experience, or if secondary research is all that is available, then try to make it as bulletproof as possible.

Prepare an Alternative

Lastly, before you go in with a recommendation to end something, be sure to have a replacement idea to present. After all, if you’re about to free up resources, you might as well come up with something new to apply those resources too. Not only will this help move the SEO campaign forward, but it will also provide a good conversation point for anyone that has to explain why a tactic is being terminated, i.e., it is being replaced by a new and improved tactic that holds more promise.

Source: http://mashable.com/2012/06/13/seo-tactic-doesnt-work/

There are a lot of social marketing platform you can choose from, but have you asked yourself this question what marketing platform are you going to use and how can it be effective to boost your marketing? To have an idea on what platform your gonna apply for your marketing you better read this cool post!

While much of the tech and financial world has been focused on Facebook’s post-IPO performance, something else has happened that is starting to define the social marketplace. Savvy firms like Salesforce.com and Oracle have strategically gobbled up some of the top social vendors. These acquisitions signify that social business has become big business. The formulation of meaningful social categories is also taking shape, and marketers — particularly CMOs — should take note as they look to gain real ROI from social.

The best way to determine what social categories and tools you company should utilize is to look at what companies like Salesforce.com and Oracle are investing in. Both companies have identified and invested in three main categories of social technology: social media management, social media monitoring, and social infrastructure. By examining what these categories look like, and what technologies matter, you can determine where to focus your business resources.

Social Media Management Platforms

Social media management platforms have become critical components of every CMO’s off-site strategy. Companies like Buddy Media, Vitrue, Wildfire, and ThisMoment all offer a variety of tools that allow you to manage multiple social channels and create specialized campaigns and pages to reach users on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. These companies have enjoyed success largely because they enhance existing social networks with brand engagement tools like contests, quizzes, polls, and branded content.

These technologies help you manage your brand’s Facebook and Twitter pages, provide different social applications, and can even help you with advertising within Facebook. The sheer number of these types of companies along with the prominent types of clients using their platforms (Coca Cola, L’Oreal, HP, McDonald’s, etc.) shows the need for off-site social marketing technologies.

Social Media Monitoring Platforms

Just as businesses have taken to technologies that help them speak to their users, they also understand the need to listen. To mitigate the challenges of trying to listen to and understand what social users say about brands, a number of social listening platforms have emerged in the last few years.

In essence, these companies help businesses make sense of online brand-relevant conversations. Players like Radian6 (now a Salesforce.com company) took an early lead in this marketplace by offering a hybrid self-serve/automated SaaS product that scoured public conversations across the social web while offering robust analytics to help marketers measure conversation by sentiment and demographic data. While other companies like Collective Intellect and Sysomos — both of which were acquired — have slightly different takes on social listening. Still, they all offer robust sets of tools that help you understand what customers and users are saying about your business.

Social Infrastructure

While social marketing and social listening platforms give brands the tools to reach users on social networks, users don’t just want to be social on social networks anymore. Now users expect a social experience wherever they go, and businesses are reconfiguring their web properties to meet consumer demand. Look at any major media site — The Huffington Post, ABC.com, CBS.com — or a number of brand and ecommerce sites — Pepsi, Microsoft, Wal-mart and the NFL — and you’ll see social network hooks in almost every piece of content. That’s social infrastructure, and it’s critical to keeping users engaged and to building relationships with them when they visit your web properties.

Social infrastructure companies like BazaarVoice, Mass Relevance, and others offer a number of tools designed to bring social experiences to websites. Products like social login, sharing, comments, and activity feeds are designed to give users a social experience while providing sites permission-based access to users’ social data. In turn, you can use this data to offer those users a more personalized experience and market to them by accessing traits like users’ interests, activities, and relationship statuses. It’s essentially a virtual handshake where users grant you access to certain types of data and, in turn, your business agrees to responsibly use the data to offer better deals, content, and products to the users.

The social web has become a tricky amalgam of different vendors trying to carve out niches to call their own. Understandably, this has resulted in a fair bit of confusion for marketers trying to decide what types of technologies and products they must leverage to reach social users. But, it doesn’t need to be so complicated. If you’re a marketer, the questions you must ask yourself are: how do I reach and understand users when they’re on social networks and how do I relate those users when they’re on my site? The goals you must establish should center on how well this technology facilitates brand engagement, and whether it helps users consume your content or products.

Source: http://mashable.com/2012/07/13/marketing-platforms/

Here is a great article on how online marketing can fuel offline conversations. Read through this amazing post to maximize impact on any of your marketing strategy.

The fact is no medium drives offline conversation better than online marketing. In fact, our research shows that in 15% of conversations about products and 23% of conversations about services, somebody refers to something they saw online.

Yet, a key mistake made by digital marketers is allowing the effectiveness of campaigns to be measured with just digital metrics like clicks, shares, and re-tweets. None of those metrics pick up the impact of offline behavior, such as word of mouth, which can be nine times more voluminous offline than online.

So how does a marketer make sure marketing efforts work in both spaces? Here are five ways to maximize the impact of any marketing strategy.

1. Design Content to be Buzzworthy

This means content needs to focus on things that are truly surprising, funny, or exciting. People like to share things that have a strong emotional component. It’s also key that a marketer realize the story — the content — is more important than the delivery channel. This is why the Old Spice Guy campaign did so well. Its humor and sexiness made it one of the most successful viral campaigns in history.

2. Post at the Right Time

Whenever possible, plan for digital content to be delivered at times of the day when people are likely to be in social settings, which makes conversation possible. The reason is that research shows that people are going online and talking with other people the most between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. weekday mornings. That’s just about the time they are firing up the computers at work and saying good morning to their colleagues. This is the ideal time to deliver a digital message that will be shared offline among colleagues. Good examples would be restaurants offering an online lunch deal, or the humorous trailer for a new movie.

3. Make Content Useful and Easy to Find

Make digital content “conversation friendly” because studies show that people often turn to the internet seeking information while in the middle of a conversation. They do this because they are looking to fill gaps in their conversation. For example, they may want to know where a restaurant is located. If you google “Where is the nearest Subway,” a top result is the Subway locator, which provides an incredibly quick answer to a question that might be raised in a real-time conversation about where to have lunch. Quick access to such information is critical.

4. Target Influencers

About 25% of word of mouth comes from 10% of the population who are most active in making recommendations. And here we mean real-world influencers, not just people with high Klout scores. They have their own unique media usage patterns, both in terms of which media, as well as the time of day they use it. For five decades, the oil and gas industry has used these types of audiences to advocate their positions on public policy issues, and for good reason. It’s a strategy that can work for consumer categories as well.

5. Design With Brand Advocates in Mind

Brand advocates are among the most frequent visitors to your site. They are looking for content they can share with others to spread the word about your products and services. These are people who return regularly and need to have fresh material to make the visit worthwhile. They’ll share what they find via their social media channels, but mostly through email and in face-to-face conversations.

Source: http://mashable.com/2012/07/18/online-marketing-offline-marketing/

In your quest in online marketing you got to have effective ways to boost your success, there are a lot of great tips you can found online but the question is where do you start? Start from reading this great post that I found and maybe this can be your strategy.

There are a lot of tools that promise to help, but the better approach may be to focus on the following three areas that every marketer needs to address if they want to succeed online.

1. Speed

Many websites are still under performing when it comes to speed, and there’s a measurable financial cost associated to this. Every second added to a website’s load decreases conversions by a massive 2% to 7% and reduces page views by 1% to 2%. Just as importantly, Google makes no secret of the fact that speed is part of its ranking process, meaning that a slow loading site is going to suffer in search results.

A fast website is, therefore, the first thing you need to ensure if you’re going to win in the increasingly competitive online retail world. There are basic, technical things you can do. For example, ensure your site is technically optimized.Also, check out your hosting and bandwidth providers and make sure that you’re not unnecessarily forcing users to download massive videos or images.

Another route to faster site speeds that’s being adopted by major players in web retail is the tag management system. Website tags are used by third-party technologies to track and control activity on a page. Many sites can have twenty or even thirty different tags per page, and each one of these will slow down a page’s loading speed. A tag management system can manage this process, speed up your site, and improve performance.

That said, speed isn’t just about the rate at which your pages load. The best companies are constantly evaluating and rolling out new approaches. To succeed, your marketing team needs to be working with your technical team to ensure that you can move quickly and make the most of the technologies and approaches that exist.

2. Customer View

Online shopping behavior is becoming more complex. Three quarters of customers use more than two points of contact to make a purchase, whether that is multiple visits to a single site or using different online and offline access methods. As a result, 25% of sales cycles take more than a month to complete from consideration to purchase.

During these extended purchase processes, there are hundreds of different influences, offers, social messaging, and other touch points that can influence a consumer decision. A user might visit your website initially, but then they might friend your Facebook page, see a display ad, visit through a search link, or head into your physical store. Retailers need to stay on top of this journey throughout its life cycle. You need to know what led to a customer buying something from your site and, more importantly, what led to them not buying.

The answer is to take a customer-centric view of your analytics, rather than a web-centric view. Traditionally, analyzing website traffic has been all about tracking individual visits to your website, but instead you need to think more broadly about what customers are doing that leads into their on-site experience.

Amazon does a great job of this, using all the information they have on you to ensure that their recommendations are almost always spot on. Similarly, Apple does a great job of integrating the in-store and online experience. They’ve taken the pain away from in-store lines with their remote iPhone-style checkouts. Would you like them to email you your receipt? Of course! And in doing so, you’ve just handed them valuable information about your purchase that they can use on their website.

3. Personalization

Once you have a distinct understanding of your customer the next step is to see how you can personalize their experience. Personalization isn’t the same as recommendation. It’s not saying ‘you bought that so you might like this.’ It’s about building an online experience that’s truly personal and unique.

Imagine a store owner who knows you by your name, your size, your preferences, and hang ups. Imagine if you’re hesitating to buy a pricey shirt and they offer you quality reassurance or even a special offer if you’re about to walk away? What about if they can help you curate an outfit or even try it on? What if the store layout was adapted to your liking? What if you always walked into the Hugo Boss section? (Assuming that’s your cup of tea?).

This is personalization: The combination of bespoke design, layout, stock, and messaging. Some websites out there are starting to do this, but only a few so far. However, many websites still work on a site-wide change basis, changing everything for everyone. Research by Jim Manzi , has shown that only 10% of site-wide changes actually drive business change. True personalization relies on being able to serve the right content to the right segment at a specific time, nearly guaranteeing that your changes are going to drive results.

Of course, personalization isn’t a simple process, and it requires what could be the fourth game changer: automation. If you’re going to personalize for individual users effectively without killing your backstage team then you need to be able to customize on the fly based on the data you hold.

Source: http://mashable.com/2012/08/01/digital-marketing/

I would like to share this great post from some one about how photos can make or break your marketing campaign and also an informative video on what makes an effect marketing campaign to boost your income without getting stuck and stressed!

Your Marketing Campaign-A Simple Lesson in Boosting Results

How do you put visual content to work for your company? Rather than relying on boring stock photos, the smartest businesses are employing images that help them evolve their brand and tell a visual story of who they are.

Marketing is all about communicating your value. Tapping into the visual zeitgeist is an excellent opportunity to create messaging for your business that is, well … nothing short of revolutionary. Here are some guidelines.

Why go visual? Online publisher Mashable and EyeTrackShop recently found that participants in a webcam eye-tracking study spent less time looking at Facebook wall posts and advertisements and more time looking at the cover photo on brands’ timelines. So this stuff matters. As every brand becomes a publisher charged with creating content to attract customers, the quality of that content becomes increasingly important. In other words, you have to produce stuff that helps you stand out.

Your own website or blog is an excellent place to start sharing images that craft your narrative. So are social media networks; some of the top platforms positioned for sharing rich visual stories are Pinterest, Instagram, Google+ and, of course, Facebook, whose Timeline update this past spring gave all of us — including businesses — the ability to produce more aesthetically pleasing pages.

See content moments everywhere. Many organizations have photographers they contact in times of need — for events, product launches, etc. ”That won’t suffice anymore,” says brand strategist Nick Westergaard of Brand Driven Social in Coralville, Iowa. “Photography can’t be an afterthought.”

The key is to see content moments everywhere. How about showing a behind-the-scenes peek of your warehouse before a big shipment, the way T-shirt company Threadless does? Or look at how the small U.K. company McKay Flooring gives itself a bigger digital footprint by using Pinterest, Instagram and its blog to display cool flooring materials such as leather, reclaimed bowling lanes and whiskey barrels.

This approach even works for business-to-business companies that sell inherently unphotogenic products: At MarketingProfs, we share photos on our Instagram feed of industry events attended by our staffers, or we give a peek into how the proverbial sausage is made by showing our webinar training videos from our point of view, documentary-style.

You have a great fount of inspiration right in front of you, if only you train your eye to look for it. Take active photos that show real customers or staffers doing real things — as opposed to staged shots or logos.

Show how your product lives in the world. Consider how Ben & Jerry’s integrates images on Instagram, Tumblr and Facebook to showcase the beauty of doing business in Vermont. The ice cream maker also uses Instagram to recognize customers by calling out a favorite pic on “fan photo Friday.”

Even old-school General Electric has used online photo sharing to create excitement and build momentum. Last year, GE encouraged social media users to take photos inspired by the company’s missions of Moving, Curing, Powering and Building. The fan with the best photo was awarded a trip to the U.K. that included a chance to photograph a world-class jet engine facility.

Embrace images as brand art. For a lot of businesses, content equals text. But photographs and other visual materials should be staples of your marketing mix. Share your company’s history on Facebook Timeline with visuals from your archives, for example. Or better yet: Populate your e-mails, blog, website and marketing collateral with your own images. To capture attention and entice engagement and click-throughs, you need to have bold, unique visuals in your corner.

Source: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/224229

For more helpful tips make sure to visit our Web tip Directory, Located at:

Amazing Websites TV Web Tip Directory or Watch all our Episodes on the Amazing Websites Television Show

Also we recommend you to check out ou 2 books with great resources:

Amazingly Useful Websites and Even More Useful Websites

In this cool video find out about cool ways from content marketing experts on generating content ideas that will attract your target buyers plus 42 Great Content Marketing Ideas for 2013.

42 Content Marketing Ideas

1. Develop and refine your content marketing mission statement.
2. Find one or multiple partners and launch a content marketing project together.
3. Consider that maybe less content will mean more impact.
4. Find at least three thought leaders in your organization and build them into your content plan.
5. Send each of those thought leaders to Toastmasters to work on their public speaking skills.
6. Define your most valuable audience and consider a targeted print publication.
7. Assign one employee to SlideShare and figure out how to leverage this tool as part of your content marketing.
8. Develop a series of stories for your industry on an aspect that has never been covered before.
9. Make sure that every content landing page for 2013 has only one call to action.
10. Spend 30 minutes dissecting Coca-Cola Journey.
11. Stop one content initiative in 2013.
12. Write your book.
13. Update your social media influencer list before the end of the year.
14. Compile a substantial piece of influencer content (i.e., an eBook of influencer insights) in 2013.
15. Get at least five employees who are not in marketing involved in your weekly content plan.
16. Make it a priority to personalize your content by persona in 2013.
17. Start a podcast series for executives.
18. Sit down with every salesperson and ask them what their customers’ biggest pain points are.
19. Develop a list of the top 100 questions coming from your customer base.
20. Commission a piece of art from a local artist to use in your next content piece.
21. Target one traditional marketing initiative that can be enhanced with content marketing.
22. Set a goal for 2013 to double the number of email subscribers to your content.
23. Attend Content Marketing World 2013 (sorry, blatant sales pitch).
24. Read one non-marketing book each month during the year (it will open up new content marketing ideas).
25. Develop a content marketing metrics plan for your CEO or supervisor that includes only those metrics that will make the case for company business objectives.
26. Stop doing the same old press releases and create them as engaging stories.
27. Find a way to work with the leading trade magazine in your niche on a joint content effort.
28. Commission a piece of research that is important to your customers.
29. Take research findings and use them to build a six-month campaign with at least 20 independent content pieces.
30. Commit to smarter usage of images in your content in 2013.
31. Do an audit of all your blog posts and determine which types of titles lead to the right reader behaviors.
32. If you have the budget, start identifying media companies in your industry that may be ripe for acquisition.
33. Make sure your content is easy to read on both smartphones and tablets.
34. Set up an editorial leader in each of your silos and plan to meet at least once per week.
35. Develop a customer event that doesn’t talk about your projects, but rather educates them on where the industry is going.
36. Create a piece of content in 2013 that would be completely unexpected and see what happens.
37. For every story idea you have for next year, plan on developing 10 pieces of content from it.
38. Send a videographer and journalist to the next industry event and cover it.
39. Give out quarterly awards to all internal content creators based on number of content shares. Make it public.
40. Choose 10 of the top bloggers in your industry and sponsor a one-day brainstorming session on how you can all help each other.
41. Ask whoever is in charge of customer service what their top 10 complaints were in 2012. Build a content program to help with answers.
42. Whatever you do in 2013, make sure you are telling a different story than everyone else in your industry — not just the same story told incrementally better.

Source: http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2012/11/42-content-marketing-ideas-for-2013/

For more helpful tips make sure to visit our Web tip Directory, Located at:

Amazing Websites TV Web Tip Directory or Watch all our Episodes on the Amazing Websites Television Show

Also we recommend you to check out ou 2 books with great resources:

Amazingly Useful Websites and Even More Useful Websites

In the world of internet to get yourself rank at search engines you must have good SEO ranking. So people could search about you fast and check out what stuff’s or latest trends about your brand. But what about this question How interested is the world in SEO? Are you one of those interested or not? If you’re interested continue reading to be able to know how big is the SEO industry on the internet.

How big is the SEO industry on the Internet? Really big, according to a new infographic by Spanish-based SEO service provider BlueCaribu.

In fact, the infographic reveals that 3.5 people look up the term “SEO” on Google each second and 9.1 million web users are digging up information on the topic each month.

People are getting their information about search engine optimization (SEO) from a variety of ways. There are 863 million websites worldwide that mention the term “SEO” and 164,000 YouTube videos are indexed with the topic.

Los Angeles may be the number one city in the U.S. to search for SEO, but India is the top country with an interest on SEO strategy, followed by Pakistan and the Phillipines. The U.S. is ranked fourth, while Canada snagged the fifth spot.

Other fun facts about SEO is that March is the most popular month to search for the term and Thursday is the most popular day of the week to do so.

How often do you search for SEO on the Internet? What are some of your favorite resources? Let us know in the comments below.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, pressureUA

Source: http://mashable.com/2012/07/05/seo-information-infographic/

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In this amazing post that I will be sharing, you’ll be able to know the 5 Companies with Inbound Marketing Strategies That Work. What exactly is Inbound Marketing means? Inbound marketing is a powerful way to market businesses and brands. It uses a ‘pull’ approach to attract potential customers, when they are actively searching for your products and services – instead of the traditional marketing ‘push’ approach of selling to people when they may not be ready to buy or may not want what is being sold. Continue reading to know the inbound marketing strategies that work that might help also help improve your business!

Some companies seem to have an innate sense of just what it takes to attract a market. Or, perhaps it only appears that way. For most companies, it’s more likely that they learn through trial and error, research, and testing until they get it right.

The following five companies have each developed inbound marketing strategies that truly work. Here’s what those look like.

1. Salesforce: Leverages Content to Market the Cloud

According to Kieran Flanagan, inbound marketing manager for Salesforce.com, “The new B2B purchase journey is search-initiated, social powered, and buyer-controlled.” In fact, his take on the 80/20 rule is that for social success, it’s more like 90/10. That means 90% of your content marketing should be about customers and only 10% about your products. As the brains behind the Salesforce strategy, Flanagan’s job is “to produce transformational marketing that attracts visitors naturally through mediums like search engines, the blogosphere, and social media.”

The Salesforce strategy has been able to generate leads by building — and effectively promoting, through multiple channels — a “content-rich micro-site” valued by the target market. Flanagan decided to use four different content types: created (original content created from scratch), curated (round-up style content), collaborative (content contributed by relevant thought leaders) and legacy (re-purposed and repackaged content).

The result? During the first month after implementation, the company saw the following gains: January traffic was up 80% when compared to January of the previous year. Social media traffic was up 2,500%, there were 6,500 newsletter signups, and 10,000 ebook downloads. This effectively translated to 10,000 leads.

2. Cisco: Focuses on the Cloud and Mobile

After a rough couple of years, Cisco is managing a turnaround that, according to Shaw Woo, senior technology analyst at Sterne Agee, is under-appreciated.

In an August 16th CNBC interview, Woo stated that the network equipment vendor’s turnaround was accomplished by “taking advantage of the cloud [and] taking advantage of mobile.” Cisco’s CEO, John Chambers, is said to have set a precedent by changing the company’s strategy. He lowered the cost structure, making the company more competitive. He also made it more “shareholder-friendly” by committing to return at least half of the company’s profits to shareholders.

In that same spirit, the company is publishing a collection of My Networked Life video documentaries, a series it bills as “true stories from a connected world.” The videos, published on the Cisco website and publicized through its social media pages, tell the “personal” and “powerful” stories of “how young professionals, entrepreneurs, artists, and students are using connected technology to achieve goals and realize dreams.” This is just one more way the company is reinforcing its “human” image.

The company also made a calculated switch from conventional advertising to brand journalism, which is helping consumers envision the potential improvements Cisco’s products and services can bring to their lives.

3. Dell: Takes a Multi-Layered Approach

Founded in 1984, Dell has become a force to be reckoned with in the computer sales market, and it has done so, in large part, through savvy inbound marketing practices. While its marketing strategy has always been multilayered, the computer giant has always encouraged customer feedback and participation in its product development. Today it is not only announcing new products on its Facebook page and engaging fans by asking questions and encouraging them to click “like” on its posts, it’s also addressing their need for knowledge through a blog, newsletter and a glossy magazine.

The company is also making the most of the video medium by featuring a growing collection of videos on its Facebook page, tweeting about them on Twitter and promoting them on other social media.

Dell is also leveraging mobile technology to attract greater response to its marketing emails. By adding the mobile element to its standard desktop marketing email and making significant changes to its mobile email version, Dell managed to garner an impressive five-fold increase in downloads of the app the day the emails went out.

4. GE: Focuses on Experts, Ingenuity and Innovation

When GE reinvented its marketing in 2011, much of its effort focused on several disciplines that today would be considered critical components of inbound marketing. These included strategy and innovation, branding and communications, value creation and pricing.

One key strategy the company embraced in its new marketing mix was the practice of highlighting its experts and the critical role they play in bringing GE products to market. Currently, the company is reinforcing that focus by featuring links to its experts’ Twitter profiles on the GE homepage under the heading “Meet the People Who Make GE Work.”

For the past year, the company has also sponsored an online magazine called Txchnologist, which it describes on its About Us page as offering “an optimistic, but not utopian, take on the future and humanity’s ability to tackle the great challenges of our era through industry, technology and ingenuity.”

The company also posts periodic videotaped interviews with its experts, via the Txchnologist YouTube channel. Again, this is meant to reinforce the expert element, although its videos don’t appear to be posted frequently enough to play as significant a role in its inbound marketing strategy as Dell’s do.

5. Starbucks: Works on Connecting with Customers

Starbucks is all about “connecting,” whether that’s chatting with a customer over a steaming latte, interacting with fans on the company’s Facebook page or posting fascinating photos on Instagram. The well-known coffee chain has effectively created an emotional connection with its customers. In countries like the U.K. and Ireland, this connection made the company’s recent campaign to have its baristas start connecting with customers on a first-name basis that much smoother. The company launched the campaign with a promotion promising customers a free latte to come in and introduce themselves.

Starbucks, a pioneer in mobile advertising, is clearly savvy about connecting in more ways than just in person and online. Named Mobile Marketer of the year in 2010, the company launched an app the following year that accepted mobile payments and, less than a year later, saw 26 million mobile transactions, with mobile devices accounting for $110 million worth of funds reloaded to customers’ Starbucks cards.

Starbucks is also making the most of the features and functions of its social networks to grow its fan base and maximize likes, shares and re-tweets. All these digital word-of-mouth marketing opportunities help Starbucks get found by a growing audience that, on Twitter, currently exceeds 2.8 million followers and, on Facebook, has registered more than 31.5 million likes to the company’s business page.

And, speaking of social, the company’s strong focus on social responsibility hasn’t hurt its popularity either. In short, the gentle corporate coffee giant has become the company everybody loves to love.

Source: http://mashable.com/2012/09/13/inbound-marketing-strategies/

For more helpful tips make sure to visit our Web tip Directory, Located at:

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