SRPI

The inspiration for this post came from a conversation I had with a friend who was very confused as to how he could get any meaningful profit from using Facebook.

Let’s first talk about what Facebook is, and what it isn’t. Facebook is an easy way to stay connected with friends, family, business associates, and even famous people or companies that you consider important. There is literally something for everyone on Facebook.

Facebook is not a way to advertise to a certain demographic of users and convince them to buy what you’ve got. Sorry, all you Facebook advertisers, but not many people are going to buy a car or sign up for a credit card offer through any type of advertising on Facebook. People aren’t there to buy. They are there to get away from life’s little stresses and connect with friends.

So after having said all that, how can it be possible to make money from Facebook? (unless you’re a widget developer and have a wide user base, this next part is for you)

Remember how I talked about the fact that people on Facebook want to connect with other people (what we will call networking) and relax a little bit? Well we are going to use that to our advantage. There is no secret widget or App that you’re going to install. All this will take is your time. And if you can’t spend the time, pay someone else to do what I’m about to tell you. Ready? Here we go.

Step 1. Add all the people you know and have ever met as your friend on Facebook.

Step 2. Update your profile with real photos of yourself (nothing from your last drinking party or late night criminal activity).

Step 3. Search for at least 10 groups to join that are relevant to your business (I don’t care how niche your business is, there is at least 1 group for it) If you have to choose between groups, go after the ones that are active, and have at least 50 members.

Step 4. Contribute useful information to these groups. Answer and ask questions. Get into conversations with people.

Step 5. Add as many of the people in the group as your friend as you’ve had at least a tiny conversation with through the group.

Step 6. Find out which of your friends that you’ve just gotten from these groups have a website or blog about your industry. They usually put a link to their blog or site in their ‘Info’ tab on their profile.

Step 7. Ask your new friends if they would allow you to contribute some content to their site or blog, in return for a link back to your site.

Step 8. Write this content, and send one unique article to each person that accepts your offer.

Those are the eight steps to get you started down the path to success with Facebook. Like all the best things in life, it will take time to really develop Facebook into a useful and profitable channel for building links, but the more you put into it, the more you will get out of it.

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8 Step Guide to Using Facebook to Generate Links & Business

I’m going to go way out here. I’m going way out on the weakest, most rotted out extremity of the nearest and most treacherous tree limb and make a blatant assumption. Here it is…

If you’re reading this, which neither of us can dispute the fact that you are, I’ll bet my salary on the fact that you’ve heard of at least one of these behemoths of social media.

• Facebook - Ain’t just for young kids. The largest growth on Facebook is from 30+ year old patrons and 50 million people in 35 languages use it almost every day. Wow. Facebook is killing MySpace, and not softly. (Oops. I wasn’t going to mention MySpace because I wanted you to connect the dots. MySpace was the pioneer in social media so naturally MySpace belongs in this list of social media giants. Even though it deserves a mention, I’ll leave them MySpace “unbulleted” in this bulleted list.
• YouTube - Nielsen Online estimates that Youtube serves over 32% of the videos watched online. I guarantee you’ve laughed at a video from YouTube. Inescapable.
• Twitter - The incredibly popular micro-blogging platform grew at 752% growth last year. You must get on Twitter. This is one of the best ways to listen to and follow the pulse of your industry.
• StumbleUpon It’s just what you do when you stumble across something cool. (My personal favorite for social bookmarking. If I find some content I enjoy, I can bookmark it using StumbleUpon so that everyone can enjoy it).
• iTunes Podcasts - Even Apple has joined “social media.”
• LinkedIn - Business networking powerhouse.
• Squidoo - Community of content sharing “lenses” created by the Social Media, Permission Marketing Master Mogul himself, Mr. Seth Godin.
• Blogger - Google’s baby. The most popular and user-friendly hosted blogging platform.

If you haven’t heard of any of these mega-sites it’s safe to assume that you have no business reading this blog post either. I’d also guess that if you’ve never heard of them you don’t use a computer (which is impossible), haven’t turned on your computer (impossible), don’t watch television (almost impossible), or you don’t have teenage kids (very possible). So what is this fad? It’s called Web 2.0.

What is Web 2.0?

With technical geek speak aside, Web 2.0 is synonymous with social media. For our purposes, it’s that simple.

The sites I mentioned above are just a few sites that make up a major part of the new generation in internet user experience. Social media is made up of online social communities built around an interactive, conversational delivery and sharing of all things media. Social media is about content.

Just how popular is Web 2.0? Here’s a stat offered by Dave Rosenberg over at CNet: social networks and blogs are MORE popular than email.

“He’s kidding, right?”

No, he’s not.

Why You MUST Be Using Social Media

If you aren’t utilizing social media in your marketing (called social marketing or social networking) you’re leaving mounds of cash on the table. Why? Social media is FREE to use and the absolutely best way to create raving fans of your brand or product.

Is your business struggling? Hit social media and you won’t strain your budget. Is your business already successful? Use social media to bury your competition so deep they won’t be able to get out. There are just no excuses not to use social media. If you’re not using it, your competitors will. Just do it.

People spend more time in social media than ever and the amount of time they spend sharing stuff, and chatting, and posting, and commenting increases by the hour.

The social media landscape just gets better and better and better and better. New social sites are popping up all over the place. What’s more is that supplementary sister sites with software and programs to help you use the behemoth social media sites are showing up more and more. For example, Twitter users have new tools that are published to help them generate more Tweeps (Twitter followers) and analyze their Twitter traffic and statistics and even allow for incredible search capabilities (how you keep up on your industry). There are almost two dozen of these programs that I’m aware of. These useful tools help to eliminate any excuse you have for not getting involved in social media. All these tools allow you to automate and analyze some social networking tasks. Even more evidence that you just can’t ignore social media.

Social media allows for you to brand your business, share media, generate traffic, presell new customers (without actually selling anything), create relationships, monitor the pulse of your industry— and do it all for FREE. You can’t beat that. Social media is the kind of thing that your bottom line loves.

Start with Facebook and Twitter. As of today, these are the two pillars. Set up a LinkedIn profile next. Steadily build your profile and your exposure will increase. Honestly, you won’t find a subject that isn’t been worked over in social media. Just jump in and get involved in the conversation that’s already taking place in your industry. We’ll talk next about social media rules that will help you do social media right.

Basic Rules of Social Media:

• Be real. Be genuine. Be yourself. Social Media is not about selling stuff. It’s about communicating with others. If you “promote” yourself you’ll get hammered and it will ruin your brand. Social media is a lot like high school where everyone will start talking about you, whether for good or bad.
• Most important Rule of Thumb: Add indisputable value to the conversation. Nobody likes people who are always selling stuff. By adding value to a conversation people will seek you out in large numbers and look to you for answers. The biggest way to add value is to give away free stuff and to TEACH. People will begin to see you as an expert.
• Transparency is the social media protocol. Transparency has never been easier to recognize than it is now. It can absolutely catapult your business or rip it apart. If you are real and genuine, people can see you for who you really are in social media. If you’re fake, you can’t hide. So don’t be fake. If you’re real, let people in to your life (Don’t worry, you’re in control of what they do and don’t see about your life). You’re literally bringing thousands of people in to your world through social media so let them pull up a chair, sit in your parlor and chill with you for a minute.
• Use real names and profiles. Unless you’re branding your business, use real usernames and real profiles that don’t sound promotional. People are wary of salesmen. Don’t be salesy.

That should get you pointed in the right direction. Now go set up a Facebook account for yourself and a Facebook Fan page for your business and put a link to that on your site. Sign up for Twitter, study Twitter, and go kill it. Put a link to your Twitter profile on your site as well.

Any questions, concerns, or rude comments?

Post your comments below.

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Web Two Point What?

The countdown is on. Seven days until our workshop “Spring to the Top of the Search Engines!”  on next Wednesday, April 29th. This is the first workshop of its kind to be offered by SEO.com. For the full spread of details and schedule visit our registration page.

The workshop will be two hours of lecture from Dave Bascom and our SEO team. Topics will include SEO techniques, conversion optimization, and social media optimization. The last hour will be for attendees to sit down with one of our SEO Specialists to get specific recommendations of what they can implement on their site.

This workshop is a great opportunity for local business to enhance their online presence and increase their marketing ROI. Some seating is still available. For those of you in the Provo/Salt Lake City area we hope to see you there!

Originally posted here:
Spring to the Top of the Search Engines!

Now that Adobe has made the modifications to Flash so that it will be indexable, and the search engines have begun to index Flash, does that mean you can just put any Flash piece up and it will be indexed without any problems? Not really, you still need to do a little extra work on your part to ensure that the Flash work will be indexed and read correctly by the search engines. Otherwise you may be in the same boat as you were before they were able to read Flash.

So here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Currently Google is the only search engine who is noticeably reading Flash files. They have worked closely with Adobe to develop the right toolset for the Googlebot in order to read the files for indexing. Yahoo! is “working on it.” MSN is developing their own format, Silverlight, which will compete with Flash, so they probably won’t be developing the toolset necessary to read Flash files.
• Search engines still can’t follow JavaScript, so be sure that your links to Flash files are not done in JavaScript or the Flash still won’t be indexable and it won’t be because of the Flash file.
• Include keywords in your content—of course! Use relevant, researched keywords that you want to rank well for.
• As with your website, use text instead of images so the spiders have something to eat and index. If everything is in an image, there will be nothing left for them to index.
• Be sure to use an HTML layer for your Flash file and include all your links in it that are in your Flash file. Remember to not use JavaScript to execute any of your links.
• Use SWFObject 2.0 for the best programming that detects whether or not a browser supports Flash and then serveseither the Flash or HTML text version of the website based on what it detected. Read more about what’s required here on Google’s website.
• Google has noted on its website that they are having issues indexing bidirectional languages (Hebrew and Arabic).

According to the Google website their algorithm follows Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. The algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, undoubtedly better than a person does; that content is then available to be indexed by the algorithm. Google utilized Adobe’s new Searchable SWF library in order to improve the algorithm’s effectiveness.

We’re still waiting to see what Yahoo! has to say about how they will index Flash, but it’s a safe bet that if you follow what Googlebot needs, Yahoo! will eventually be able to read it too.

Originally posted here:
Helping Flash Become SEO Friendly

I always look forward to opening day of the Major League Baseball season, and Sunday April 5th, it finally came. The Atlanta Braves traveled to Philadelphia to take on the reigning World Series champs, the Phillies, on their home turf. Feeling confident because of last year’s World Series victory, I’m sure the Phillies expected to take care of the Braves with little to no problem. However, Derek Lowe dominated the mound for Atlanta and pitched eight, that’s right, eight shutout innings against the heavy hitting Phillies. Lowe only gave up two hits through eight innings and ended the night with four strikeouts. When all was said and done, Lowe had kept the Phillies in check and led his team to an opening day road victory and a big time upset.

It will be interesting to see who the dominating pitchers will be as the season moves on. Granted, who the dominating pitcher is this season doesn’t really have much to do with SEO, but it did get me thinking about what search engines are dominating in the so-called “Search Engine World Series.” So, I started doing a little research. My question: “Who is the top search engine in the top internet-providing markets across the world?”

Here are some things I found in my search for the top search engines (information found from cia.gov):

Number of internet users by country:

1. China: 253 million
2. US: 223 million
3. Japan: 88.1 million
4. India: 88 million
5. Brazil: 50 million
6. Germany: 42.5 million
7. UK: 40.2 million
8. South Korea: 35.5
9. Italy: 35.5 million
10. France: 31.2 million

With so many Internet users across the world, here is a quick look at the top four internet-usage countries to show you who is dominating the search engine market share in those countries.

China: Google takes a back seat to Baidu.com, which has the largest market share. Although some say Google.com.cn is still the best search engine in China, Baidu is still used more. China’s search engines generate approximately 19 billion searches per month.

United States: Google dominates the United States market with 72% share, which is phenomenal. Followed by Yahoo, and then MSN/Live. In terms of search volume, the US searches approximately 12 billion times per month on Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Japan: Yahoo (51% market share) is still the king with over 3 billion searches a month. Google ranks second and in third is www.rakuten.co.jp (2% market share).

India: In the second most populous country, users prefer Google which represents 81% of the market. Yahoo comes in second with 9.4%, followed by Ask (1.9 percent) and MSN (1.7 percent). India’s own Rediff.com ranked fifth with 1.5% market share

More information on search engine market share and volume can be found through comscore.com, HitWise, and Alexa.com.

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The Search Engine World Series

SEO.com, a search marketing firm, is pleased to announce “Spring to the Top”, an SEO Workshop, where attendees can learn what website adjustments should be made to their website to increase search engine exposure.

Provo, UT – In response to client and industry requests, SEO.com is excited to announce an interactive workshop “Spring to the Top,” discussing the best search engine marketing techniques.

The workshop will be held in the Mountainview Conference Room at the Novell Campus, in Provo, Utah, on April 29, 2009, from 8:00-11:00 a.m. Attendees that register by April 17th will receive a free website analysis upon registration. For more information, including registration, please visit http://www.seo.com/registration.

The workshop will feature instruction from Search Engine Optimization pioneer and CEO of SEO.com, Dave Bascom along with his team of SEO Specialists. SEO experts will show attendees how to recognize barriers to the indexing activities of search engines, and increase website relevance specific to targeted keywords.

This is a rare opportunity as in addition to the expert panel, the workshop will also include one-on-one site analysis with account managers from SEO.com. Attendees will be able to spend time discussing specific suggestions and tactics for their site to help them spring to the top of the search engines.

Nelson James, Vice-President of SEO.com stated, “This workshop will provide attendees with the tools they need to begin the optimization process, as well as expand their search marketing efforts. Our team of professionals achieves outstanding results for our clients, and is excited to share their expertise. We encourage attendees to register early, as we expect the workshop to sell out.”

About SEO.com

SEO.com is an internet marketing firm that specializes in organic search engine optimization and pay-per-click (PPC) management. SEO.com has helped numerous clients climb to the top of Google for their targeted keywords. Clients range from small startup businesses to Fortune 100 companies. For more information about SEO.com, please visit http://www.SEO.com.

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SEO.com to Host “Spring to the Top” Search Marketing Workshop