Paid Surveys | Data Entry | Blogging |Pay Per Click Advertising | Internet Marketing I Web Designing
Travel | Weight Loss | Cooking | Communications
Gear Up Your Site for Social Media Marketing
Gear Up Your Site for Social Media Marketing
The year 2006 saw the emergence of social media. If you are engaged in operating a website, you must realign your site to exploit the popular social media sites for increased traffic.
You should also introduce social media components to your site because web users are experiencing these new form of interactions in more and more sites and they may have an expectation of the same from your site also.
If you want to attract repeat visitors and want them to stay longer, your focus this year should be on the social aspects of your site.
Social media use technologies like RSS, blogging, podcasting, tagging, etc. and offer social networking (MySpace, Facebook), social video and picture sharing (YouTube, Flickr), and community-based content ranking (Digg, MiniClip) features.
The central theme of these sites is user generated contents used for sharing among the end-users. The social aspects of these sites are to allow users to setup social communities, invite friends and share common interests.
You don't have to change your site completely within a month or so to take advantages of these new technologies. Introduce small changes incrementally through out the year and you will be on your way to meet these new challenges.
The first step is to declare who you are to the online community. People should be able to relate to you. Unless they know more about you, you will be just an unknown identity and most people don't like to deal with unknowns. Create an About Us page and list your achievements and skills.
Create a MySpace page and link your bio in the About Us page to the MySpace page. Also provide a link back from the MySpace page to your website. Spend an hour every week to develop your online social network in MySpace. Invite a few of these new friends to write blog articles at your site about your products or services.
Install a free blog software and start publishing at least one article in your blog. Provide an easy bookmarking feature to social bookmarking sites like delicious. This is done by providing an action button for each article in your site. The action button takes users to the submission page of the bookmarking site.
Also, provide an action button for direct posting of blog articles to digg. Digg is a popular news ranking site. A well dugg article will bring thousands of visitors to your site.
Provide a forum at your site for users to discuss your products and services. Don't delete negative comments because they provide insights into the improvements needed to serve your visitors better. However, censor hate speeches and meaningless bantering. Register your forum at BoardTracker. BoardTracker is a forum search engine.
If you are offering products, allow users to review and rate your products. This will help you in inventory management because you may want to discontinue low rated products.
Provide RSS feeds for your new products, blogs, forum postings, etc. An RSS feed provides teasers of your contents. Users will use RSS readers to scan your teasers and visit your site for more information if the teasers draw their attentions.
Publish all your feeds at feedburner. Feedburner provides media distribution and audience engagement services for RSS feeds. They also provide an advertising network for your feeds. If you have quality contents, you will be able to monetize your contents using their services.
Create short how-to or new product videos and post these videos in social video sharing sites like YouTube, Google video. Provide a few start and end frames in these videos to introduce your site with your site url. Post these videos using catchy titles, teasing descriptions, and appropriate tags to make them discoverable.
Provide embedded links to your posted videos in your site. This will save your bandwidth and storage space because the videos reside in the video sharing sites.
Besides videos, use social photo sharing sites like Flickr to share pictures related to contents in your site. Use the same title, description and tag techniques discussed earlier for social video sites.
Provide a Send to Friend feature for all products and services you offer. This feature is a link that sends the article, product description, etc. to a recipient via e-mail.
For starter, Yahoo provides a service called Action Buttons (search for Yahoo Action Buttons) that add links to your website for users to share, save, and blog about your website. The Yahoo action buttons use delicious for social bookmarking, and Yahoo blog site for blogging. It also has a print feature.
The social media is not a fad. It is here to stay and bring in profound changes to web surfers' experiences. It is the right time for implementing features that will make your site social media friendly. Also, using marketing techniques that utilize popular social media sites, you will be able to bring traffic to your site.
Tips to Get More from Adsense
All webmasters and site owners who have been trying to earn from their sites must be aware of a monster called Adsense.
Adsense has presented a new and easy opportunity to earn money from your site. Adsense virtually allows any person who has built a content site or a blog to earn money, just by placing some code on their web pages. Adsense has given the ability to the web masters to concentrate on their sites rather than wasting time on trying to figure out what advertisements to put on their sites.
There are many web masters who make living on Adsense, but there are also many web masters who spend lot of time on figuring out the magic trick to earn from Adsense. Making a good living from Adsense might seem difficult but it is definitely not impossible.
Just placing Adsense code on your site is not enough if you are looking at Adsense as your only source of income. You need to experiment a lot with Adsense formats, placement and choice of keywords.
Whatever topic your site deals with, you should take care to build page around a specific topic. This ensures that the Adsense ads placed on the page, are relevant and useful to the visitors wanting to know more on the topic, and these visitors will eventually end up clicking the Adsense ad.
You should take care when placing your Adsense ads. If you read through Google help on Adsense, you will find the heat maps suggesting the best locations for your adverts. It is a proven fact that, one place the visitors look first on the site is the top left position. Since this is the place that will have the visitor's attention, it definitely helps to place your Adsense ads there.
You should also consider placing the Adsense ads on high traffic pages. You will be able to identify the most visited pages on your site by looking at the logs or even your Google Analytics account, which provides you page by page details of visitors.
Though the banner and skyscrapers adverts look pretty good on your site, you should try to avoid using those on your site. Such banners are usually ignored by the visitors. Do you recollect clicking on any banner on a site you visited recently?
You should also use the Adsense formats to make sure your Adsense ads blend with your web pages. Google provides you different palettes to try font colors, backgrounds and borders. There is no point in placing an ad on the page which does not blend with your site and will effectively not be clicked by any visitor.
Another important factor ignored by most of the webmasters is the Adsense preview tool. Google provides with an excellent tool to help you preview the ads that appear on your page. This tool allows you to see the sample ads and formats, preview colors on your page, check the destination of the ads and geo targeted locations to see what visitors in other countries will see. You could also preview the ads on some of the free websites like http://Adsense.toolbot.com/, http://www.websitegear.com/tool/Google_Adsense.asp.
Besides the above mentioned factors, it is also important to have a definite focus on what you want to achieve. No matter how busy you are, you should always spare some time to experiment with the Adsense ads to improve the CTR. Whatever experts say, just following the basics, is really the magic of making more from Adsense.