All Entries Tagged With: "social media marketing"

Myth Busting: John Kreiss Destroys 5 Blogging Myths

You’ll love this guest article or my name isn’t John Kreiss.

Actually, it’s not. But the author of great article on blogging myths is named John Kreiss and you’d better listen because he knows what he’s talking about.

Five Myths About Blogging and Social Media

By John Kreiss

Based on information obtained by the 2008 Social Media Survey of Real Estate and Construction professionals published by MorganSullivan, Inc., social media are not widely used nor understood by many professionals currently working in these industries. Here are a few perceptions or myths held by some of the survey respondents:

Most bloggers are under 30 years old. According to Technorati’s annual blogosphere report, 58% of bloggers are 35 or older. There are business benefits to blogging and many marketers are starting to understand the benefits.

Blogging is for geeks and is a waste of time. David Meerman Scott’s recent example of how blogging brought Century 21 Real Estate to the top page of the Google search engine is a pretty good example of how quickly a firm can position itself for very little cost. How could positioning your company to get inquiries from clients be a waste of time? When people search for products and services today, they often use search engines like Google. Getting your company on the top page improves your chances of getting inquiries for new business. Blogging is not just for geeks anymore either. Knowledge of HTML code (universal language of the Internet) might be helpful, but it is not required. There are many successful bloggers who don’t know how to write HTML code and don’t need to because blog hosting providers including WordPress, TypePad, Blogger, and many more, make it quite easy and user friendly to build and operate blogs.

Blogging is time consuming. Some blogs can be time consuming, but many blogs get high traffic with postings of 500 words or less and some tasks including newsletters and press releases can be rolled into blogging allowing smart companies to gain efficiencies in marketing and PR activities.

Social Media would not work in construction or real estate. According to the MorganSullivan survey, many real estate and construction companies rely on word of mouth marketing to win new work. Social media are ways to use the Internet to capitalize on word of mouth marketing. If word of mouth marketing is successful, social media should be successful.

There is no way to track ROI with blogging and Social Media. This one is difficult to prove, but it’s also difficult to prove with print advertising, direct mail, and other marketing communication including press releases. Many real estate and construction companies, however, use these old tools because they’re confident that they will produce results. Start blogging and include social media sites like digg, diigo, and delicious, and see your web site traffic spike. Getting more clients to come to you seems like ROI to me.

John P. Kreiss

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=John_Kreiss

John Kreiss – EzineArticles Expert Author

Our clients get great results using these methods of marketing: Blogging and social media marketing. Why not join their ranks?

Your Blog As A Lead Generation Tool

Much has been said about using a blog as a marketing tool but most people writing about this subject don’t really get into specifics. I think it’s necessary to define the purpose for your blog before you begin. Is it going to be a traffic tool where you send traffic to your website then close the sale? Is it going to be a way that you draw people to subscribe to your e-zine? Are you trying to sell through the blog? It’s important to define what you want it to do before you begin.

One of the legitimate purposes for a blog is to use it as a lead generation tool. There are several ways to do that, but they all involve writing compelling content that draws people to read. Then, every blog post you write needs to focus on helping you obtain that overall goal.

Two aspects of blogging that you will use to draw traffic to your blog are SEO and social media marketing. The SEO part is the use of keywords and links to get your blog posts to rank in the search engines for words that you think people will use to find you. If you do that part successfully then you’ll draw more traffic to your blog from organic search rankings. But just because you appear in the SERPs doesn’t mean they’ll click on your link.

Your blog post title will go a long way to getting people to click the link. You want it to be compelling. It must contain your primary keyword and it must get people to click your link in the SERPs to read your blog post. Then your blog post must contain some great content that gets people to take the next course of action: Opt in to your e-zine, visit your website, etc. Make sure that you pick one thing for each blog post that is the goal for that blog post. What do you want people to do? Define the action you want readers of that blog post to take then write the blog post toward that end. This is lead generation. You are leading your readers to a specific course of action.

The Power Of Viral Marketing Through StumbleUpon

One of my customers recently received a comment on her blog that I was responsible for putting there. But I didn’t write it.

The comment came from a woman who discovered my client’s blog on StumbleUpon when she came across my profile. You see, I had stumbled my client’s blog and the woman had discovered my client through that stumble. She clicked through from my StumbleUpon profile to my client’s blog, left a comment, then stumbled the blog post herself. And she added me as a friend. That’s one powerful tool!

The sweet thing is, my client has another reader, one which she would not have had if I hadn’t bookmarked her blog post. StumbleUpon is just one of the many social communities online that allow bloggers and other online marketers the opportunity to make such connections and attract loyal readers. If you have an interest in expanding your network of blog readers, let us know. You have have your blog bookmarked every day at one of several bookmarking and social communities online (a different one every day) for as low as $100, even if you are not a customer of our blog ghostwriting service. Take advantage of this powerful viral marketing tool today. You never know when the price may go up!

BlogCatalog Makes Viral Marketing Easier

BlogCatalog has announced that it will be introducing a new social marketing tool. They’re calling it the Social Dashboard. The idea is to aggregate users’ social networking and social bookmarking accounts.

I just logged into my account and was hit with the Dashboard face, which is pretty blank right now. But it looks like a good tool. Right away, I see the social aspects of it:

The first thing I see is the big red BlogCatlog box in the upper left corner of my browser. Then, below that is the Dashboard header and a little red Beta next to it. Good clue!

Below the two sentence introduction to the Dashboard there are five tabs labeled News Feed, Discussions, Groups, Broadcasts, and Neighborhoods. Below that are two links: “Try adding some friends” and “updating your subscriptions.”

I haven’t been very active on BlogCatalog, but I may start being more active now. It looks like it could actually be a more effective tool for bloggers than Facebook, which is a bit more social than anything else. At least with BlogCatalog you can choose your friends based on whether or not their blog is in the same industry as yours. Facebook is a little more difficult as you have to select your friends based on a collection of interests or geographical location. Neither of those are really very helpful for business bloggers.

What I like about BlogCatalog is you can consolidate your friends and interests from various social sites like:

• Flickr
• Twitter
• MySpace
• StumbleUpon
• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• Technorati
• MyBlogLog

Personally, I think the list is incomplete. There are other social sites out there could be rolled into BlogCatalog for greater effectiveness, but I do like that MyBlogLog, Flickr, Technorati, and StumbleUpon are included in the list. I think Facebook is more helpful than MySpace, and YouTube would be a nice addition.

Anyways, it does look like a useful application and I’m looking forward to playing around with it. Gotta go now. I’ve got a lot of BlogCatalog friends to make.