Because of search engines, inbound marketing became easier for the average small business owner in middle America. No longer are expensive newspaper ads or yellow page listings imparitive to attracting new customers. In today's business world, all you simply need is a website and you have the potential to be found by customers online.
Keywords are vital to your SEO strategy, and though you should research your keywords based on volume of searches and competition, you should also research them on a continual ongoing basis. It does no good to use wrong keywords in all your digital marketing copy and the internet is fluid and constantly changing, so if you did keyword research a year ago, you should consider examining the numbers again. You need words that many of your potential customers are using that apply to what you do or sell that don't have 5 million other companies out there vying for the same keywords. It's all about being found in the search engine's after all and that's hard to do if you have keywords with a high volume of competition using the same words you are.
Google will actually give you the data on how many people searched for what terms on a national level for the previous month. You will want to pick terms that have a lot of hits and little competition. Pick several good terms and use them as a foundation of your digital marketing strategy. This can be an important piece to the puzzle of how people find you online in the search engines.
Keeping up with Facebook can be a chore. It's practically a full time job for me, and I do social media for a living! Here's some of the new features that I like:
Promote
Highlight
Edited
The promote function on Facebook allows you to pay to get your post seen by more people. I can only assume this is because Zuckerberg is spinning his wheels to bring in capital in response to the dismal stock performance of last year. Last August, the stock plummeted to about half of its IPO valuation of $38 a share. The stock is currently hovering around $30 a share, which it finally hit shortly after the first week in January 2013. The cost to promote your post depends on several factors, including geographic location and how many people you're reaching. Simply click the "Promote" link found underneath your post to see how much your post will cost you exactly. Ultimately, if you want to pay for views, you will get more, so make sure you have good user content.
The Highlight function on Facebook, takes something you post on your timeline, and literally highlights it across the whole page, instead of only on half the page, like most timeline posts. You have control over this and it is free. To use this function, hover in the upper right hand corner of the post on your timeline, and click on the star that appears. Once you click this, the post will expand across your timeline.
The "Edited" function is interesting. Here is Facebook's Quick Tip for known issues on Facebook:
If you see an "Edited" link under a post, click on it to see what it used to say...and keep in mind if you edit something people can see what you had said, so keep it clean people!
Keywords are vital to your SEO strategy, and though you should research your keywords based on volume of searches and competition, you should also research them on a continual ongoing basis. It does no good to use wrong keywords in all your digital marketing copy and the internet is fluid and constantly changing, so if you did keyword research a year ago, you should consider examining the numbers again. You need words that many of your potential customers are using that apply to what you do or sell that don't have 5 million other companies out there vying for the same keywords. It's all about being found in the search engine's after all and that's hard to do if you have keywords with a high volume of competition using the same words you are.