New Kid on the Social Media Block - How to Generate Brand Awareness and Valuable Links using Pinterest

As an admittedly addicted Pinterest user, I’d like to clear up a few things about the relatively young social media site and its potential use for marketing and SEO linkbuilding. With Pinterest quickly rising in popularity, I’m constantly hearing it referred to as a social bookmarking tool for sharing images.  Pinterest is in fact a social bookmarking tool, but it is not only about the images. The site allows users to “pin” or save links to external sites in an organized way, with few limits to what type of site or image can be pinned.  Users can save anything from a favorite blog post to products they love, from recipes to tutorials. Each and every pin not only pulls in an image, but also a do-follow link back to the source site! Can you smell the SEO potential yet? The brilliance of Pinterest is that it combines some of the most compelling features of social media in general: visually stimulating content and the opportunity to share your ideas, interests and inspiration. Upon signing up, users are provided with fully customizable “pin boards” and can easily find friends to follow using the Facebook and Twitter connected features.

As a marketing tool, Pinterest has great potential for small retail businesses that may have a hard time competing in search results. For example, a local boutique clothing store may find it incredibly difficult to outrank Macy’s and Saks in the SERPs for a keyword like “New Orleans shopping.” When users find something they like (usually pinned by someone they follow and are influenced by), chances are they will, at the very least, click the source link. Everyday I’m introduced to new brands and products on Pinterest, and more than once I’ve used what my friends are pinning as inspiration for making purchases. There are currently few brands using Pinterest, but with its popularity and the site’s high (and still growing) domain authority, all signs are pointing to increased use by brands and businesses in the near future.

A few tips for putting Pinterest to work for your brand:

Radiohead and Social Media: The Twitterized Release of “The King of Limbs”

The members of Radiohead are a private bunch, often very selective with their interviews and keeping low-profile lives in their hometown of Oxford, England. As such, the press scrambles over every utterance that the band might put forth, which isn’t much. But their online presence, long established, is staggering. Their website, entitled “Dead Air Space,” has gone through countless incarnations, including wormholes of old information about their previous art and music. It primarily serves as the band’s blog, strewn with “office charts” of the music they’re listening to and links to new music or websites of political and social issues. Some of the members keep more-or-less active Twitter accounts, including one for the band itself, and the people they follow seem to form some of their inner circle, like the artist Stanley Donwood, amongst others.

Secret of Successful E-Mail Newsletters

Many clients ask what the point of an e-mail newsletter is and how it can help them grow their business.  Will people read it?  Will it clog up potential customer inboxes? How much is it?

There are several reasons I recommend e-mail newsletters. Not only do they provide free information, they are also one of the least expensive and most effective tools to draw attention to a site.  Below are some additional advantages to implementing a company e-mail newsletter.

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Simple Landing Page Strategy

Lately I have been doing a lot of research on landing page strategy and as I read about what not to do and what you must do, I think someone needs to break it all down into a simpler form.  Where are we going wrong, maybe it’s all just too much?  Make it simple.  All you need are these 5 things arranged properly and it is most likely going to perform better than what you are using now:

Coming in for a smooth landing

1.)    Your Company Logo clearly marked in the top left corner of your landing page.

Facebook Marketing - Sneaky, Subversive, Effective!

The tactics of Local Facebook Marketing just got a whole lot easier to understand. Sarah Smith gave up the goods in her presentation at the Local Search Summit. It turns out there are some very subversive ways to use current Facebook technologies. Marketing on Facebook just got a lot easier.

Local Search Summit 09

Don Campbell gives a great overview of the ideas presented in our “Using Facebook and Twitter to Drive Local Leads” session. And, I’m looking forward to Aaron Irizarry posting the rest of the video…

Is Your Competition Winning in The Customer Engagement Cycle?

Holy cow it’s taken me a long time to write this! But that’s good news because I’ve been adding to my own understanding in the meantime.

I have been intending to post on this since before my friend Chris Schultz wrote his “10 Tips for Launching Your Startup” in which he brushed on the core concept, the Customer Engagement Cycle: A C I P R (Awareness, Consideration, Inquiry, Purchase and Retention (Referral)).

Take for instance the “Referral” above, I’ve come to realize that this is as valuable as “Retention” in the model. And sometimes is more effectively leveraged toward referral than repurchase.