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Twitter Marketing Basics -Metrics

There are a set of primary Twitter metrics every social media marketing specialist, more with any startup enterprise, should be tracking. Even early measurement programs can benefit from a few simple metrics, for the Twitter metrics that matter. And indeed, they are very much encouraged to be monitored.

The first, and easiest, social media metric to measure is Volume. Volume is a great initial indicator of interest. People tend to talk about things they either love or hate, but rarely talk about things they simply don’t care about, at all. While volume can seem like a simple counting metric, there’s more to it than just counting tweets and retweets. It’s important to measure the number of tweets about your brand, “Mentions” of your account and “Unique People” talking about you. Track how these numbers change over time and look for spikes outside the normal range, like if there was a cause that triggered an increase or if there are days or times when more people seem to be talking about your brand. Use this information to post more during these times to increase engagement.

Reach measures the spread of a social media conversation and can help you understand the context for your content. How far is your content disseminating? How big is the audience for your message? Reach is a measure of potential audience size, showing you how many people could have seen your tweets. The larger the reach, the more different people talked about a topic. A high reach indicates a diversity in contributors, some of them potentially influential.

A large audience is good, but reach alone does not tell you everything. Reach becomes very powerful when compared to other engagement metrics. Use reach as the denominator in your social media measurement equations. Pick important action or engagement numbers like clicks, retweets or replies and divide them by reach to calculate an engagement rate. Of the possible audience for your campaign, how many people participated? Reach helps contextualize other metrics so you can better understand impact.

Engagement is one of the most important areas to measure in social media networking, like how people are participating in the conversation about your brand, what they do to spread your content and engage with the topic. On Twitter, content can be both shared and replied to. Twitter retweets are helpful to know who spreads your content, while replies and mentions show who engages with your content, and favorite tags show who likes it.

Think carefully about your social goals and the kinds of engagement you’re interested in measuring. Measuring spread or amplification is important to know how far your message reaches beyond your direct audience. Measuring interaction helps you know which content is resonating and informs future content strategy. Find metrics that reflect what’s important to your particular needs. Measure your efforts to learn what works and what doesn't. Tweet, measure, adjust and repeat. 

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Twitter Marketing Basics - Searching

Twitter’s search functionality is a great way to discover new people and content, which is imperative for startup marketing tasks. In particular, it’s an easy way to find new Twitter accounts to follow. Type a phrase or hashtag relevant to your industry into Twitter search and look at the people who come up in your results. Twitter will surface a list of people who use those words or hashtags in their bios, giving you a whole new community to get to know. Follow those people, learn about them and what they tweet about.

Try searching for your brand or company name as well, to see what kinds of tweets are posted about you. It's also a great idea to set up ongoing monitoring for key search terms like these so you can keep up with the pulse of the conversation as it occurs. You can find new hashtags to add to your tweets and Twitter chats to participate in.

Beyond the basic keyword and hashtag search, Twitter supports a variety of advanced search operators that can further refine your results to only the most relevant tweets. For one, Twitter does not require an “AND” or “+” operator to search for multiple keywords. Just type together multiple keywords into your query and Twitter will return tweets that include of those terms. For example, “social media metrics” will find any tweets that include all three of those words in any order.

However, sometimes you might want to find tweets that include one keyword or another keyword. Use the "OR" operator to separate those terms, like metrics OR analytics. You can also chain together multiple keywords to create a more complex query. The OR operator will attach to the word that immediately precedes it, very much like order of operations in algebra.

If you want to limit your results to tweets that include a link, like an article in the news or a blog post you’ve recently shared. It’s also a great way to track link shares for a Twitter contest. Use “filter:links” to search only for tweets containing links.

Twitter search works best with fairly simple queries. We recommend that you only add in a few advanced operators per query and try to limit the total number of keywords in a search query to a maximum of 5-8. Most common and proven effective queries would be Username, Date, Exclusion and Specific Phrase. And now you’re done with Step 1 of Twitter Marketing.  

Curate Compounding Content

The compounding formula varies according to your industry and customers, but the posts do share common characteristics. While you can’t always predict which content will become compounding, there are definitely some commonalities in posts that grow in traffic over time.  How to choose a topic focus, how to title a compounding post, which types of content to include, and how to structure the post, these are all to be considered, especially for content marketing of startups or small businesses. Even in social media marketing.

Most compounding posts are tactical. They intend to help readers, typically by providing instructions. These articles fall into one of three categories, namely, broad tactical, narrow or topical. Broad tactical posts are the most likely to grow and compound.

Broad tactical posts attract ongoing attention. If you’re trying to create a compounding post, write about a broad topic and offer tactical advice with mass appeal. In other words, write for as large as possible a segment of your potential customers. Broad tactical posts include product reviews, breakdowns of processes, or instructions on how to diagnose a practical, mechanical, or health-related issue. As a compounding post generates more traffic, its search authority increases, generating more search hits and more traffic in a virtuous cycle.

Narrowly focused posts rarely grow. Posts that cover niche topics appeal only to a subset of your total audience. Because the total audience is small at the outset, narrowly focused posts generate less traffic overall. Since the number of people searching for the topic is also low month-over-month, these posts have little search authority and rarely compound. You may want some narrowly focused posts in your content mix to speak to those niche audiences, but note that they are unlikely to compound.

Topical posts create a surge, but then decay rapidly. Posts that focus on current events, a technique known as “news jacking”, would decay rapidly over time. You can expect visits for these posts to taper off as readers move to the next news event. And as in this new are wherein “content is king”, all of this is no longer to be ignored. It’s a different game now and make sure you’re content is heavily loaded when you go out on the field.

Groundwork For The Modern SEO

By now, you should have figured out that traditional marketing methods are becoming both ineffective and expensive, an that neglecting to market your business online, or at least do social media marketing, you’re missing out on the powerful business results that an effective internet marketing strategy can bring about.

Whether your business is a startup or is just getting started with web marketing, you need a foundation to implement and in turn, create a successful internet or web marketing strategy, step by step.

If you really want to attract visitors and potential customers to your business’s website, you need to do more than simply build it, you need to optimize it. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the key to getting your website discovered via search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.

The traditional approach to SEO involves two sets of tactics, called on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO is the strategic implementation of keywords on your website, including in page titles, headers, meta descriptions, and more. Off-page SEO, in comparison, refers to improving your website’s overall authority on the web, which is determined by what other websites are linking to you. The goal with off-page SEO is to attract inbound links or backlinks from relevant, authoritative websites.

While on-page and off-page SEO are helpful concepts, they are rooted in an approach that is going by the wayside. In the past, the goal of SEO was to impress, or trick to some, the search engines so that they’d give you higher rankings, with the ultimate goal being to achieve the coveted number 1 spot in the search results for one of your target keywords.

Today, search engines are smarter. They can tell the difference between spammy websites that are designed to game the system, and legitimate websites that are providing, relevant high quality content. Modern SEO is about optimizing for the searchers, not the search engines.

Facebooks Aims Recatigorization

In recent months, Facebook has introduced a range of tools and additions to better position itself as the place to be for journalists and news makers – and by extension, news consumers. There was the introduction of “Instant Articles”, which encourages journalists to post content direct to Facebook by providing better publishing tools to improve the reading experience. Then Facebook updated their algorithm to factor in time spent reading, which, of course, benefits longer form content, giving journalists more incentive to post inside Facebook. More recently, Facebook opened up access to their new live streaming tool to journalists, urging them to post breaking news and content direct to Facebook and the 1.49 billion users of the website.

Facebook is very keen to have more journalists posting more news content on the site. And more exclusive material means more content for users to read, which means users stay on-platform for a longer amount of time. In line with this, Facebook has launched a new tool for journalists to help them discover trending content and information on the stories and issues resonating with the Facebook audience. And given that Facebook is one of the leading source of referral traffic for a great many sites, reaching that audience is increasingly critical.

Facebook’s new tool, “Signal”, is a dashboard which journalists can use to discover relevant content from across the Facebook network. This type of search functionality has traditionally been difficult to navigate on Facebook, as while you can use the “Trending Content” tab to find out what’s being posted about current topics on the platform, what’s displayed via Trending Content is specific to you, based on your historic actions and preferences. Signal’s listings provide a more general, unfiltered perspective on what’s popular, enabling users to find wider insights and trends.

These tools will help uncover more targeted and refined content, which journalists will then be able to use as reference material for their work. The use of location tags is particularly interesting, in a journalistic sense, as this will enable creators to find relevant content around news events and add that to their posts for context, quickly and easily. In  the  marketing  world,  when  Signal  is  opened  to  more  users, it  could  give 

web marketing, social networking, advertising people and even the startup entrepreneurs and small businesses, the ability to look at how other businesses and individuals are discussing specific events and what’s resonating, helping to create better content.

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Optimize Visual Content For Social Marketing

You can work all you want to increase the visibility of your content, but if the content itself isn't good enough, any audience that finds it won’t stick around. To truly increase engagement, you need to create quality content that resonates with your audience. But that isn't as easy as it sounds.

How can you optimize your social content to increase engagement for your web marketing? In its simplest form, content optimization is dependent upon three main things, which would be what to post, when to post it, and how to keep it fresh. This is a little different on each platform, so remember, you don’t need to figure everything out on your own. You can take advantage of social media analytics to measure and keep track of the impact and reach of your strategic social SEO and presence, which will tell you what content is working and what isn’t.

We no longer just think about Twitter for words, Instagram for photos and Tumblr for GIFs. We're in a new world of social media marketing where optimized content is a smart combination of words and visuals tweaked for each channel. Whether you’re a social media pro or just getting started, there are a few best practices to follow for what content to post to get the best response from your audience.

These days, visual content like photos and videos have power, but other visual content formats are also popular, like GIFs and increasingly, cinemagraph, which is similar to a GIF with only one section of the image animated. Arresting images and funny GIFs perform well, but don’t feel like you have to post only cute or humorous content to be successful. Some of social media’s most popular brands aren’t what you might initially expect. GE, IBM and NPR all stay true to their brand voice while creating rich, often visual content.

Be sure to post high-quality photo and video content, no matter your industry. Remember that every social media platform has different best practices for image specifications and regulations, so do your research so that your posts are approved and optimized for the platform they appear on.

Social Marketing Requires Real Conversation

Social Media is the place where so many people go to ask their friends, family and acquaintances questions. We are starting to go to our social networks before going to Google to ask the fundamental questions about what we should be buying, or to find solutions to our problems. Hence, the admonition “Let me Google that for you.” is becoming a less effective come-back as people prefer to trust their friends and connections for information rather than Google.

The obvious social networks are Facebook and Twitter. But LinkedIn Answers is a functionality within LinkedIn specifically designed for this. And Quora was created solely for this purpose. The beauty of the explosive growth of social media is the proliferation of social listening tools.

Google Alerts was one of the earlier entrants into this space. While not really a social listening tool, it provided us the ability to “listen” to blog posts, web pages, and tweets according to pre-determined keywords you wish to track.

Then tools such as Hootsuite, TweetDeck and many others appeared. They let you to monitor, in near real-time, conversations on Twitter, and then expanded to the most common social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus. By setting up alerts for keywords or questions related to your industry or product category, you could find out what is on your target audience’s mind. The mistake companies make, however, is when they answer questions with an invitation to come “try us out.” That’s just a sales solicitation to prospective customers, and will get you blocked.

It has been generally stated now how important blogging is in generating leads or web marketing. But the question is, why bring them on to your blog if you’re already doing such a great job of answering their questions on social media?

Because in this new world of ubiquitous content marketing, your customers want to find out as much as they can about the topics that are interesting to them.

Answering questions on Twitter or Facebook is limited, because the nature of social networks is transitory. We log on to Facebook or visit our Twitter stream because we want to quickly see what our friends are saying and doing. It’s not the place to provide detailed, in-depth answers to your questions.

But if your prospects want comprehensive information that answers all the questions they have about a topic they’re interested in, they will go to your website or landing page. Gently ask your prospects to visit your blog to learn more.

And please, don’t invite them to visit your product sales page. Your prospects are still in question mode. They are looking for information. They want to start a conversation about their problems and goals, not about your product or service.

Once you’ve answered your customers’ questions, don’t push it. Don’t try to sell to them, don’t push your product down their throat. But do provide them with an opportunity to find out more. Lead readers to your blog, but your blog should be an in-depth, information-rich resource that helps answers your customers’ questions. And don’t use your blog to push your products. Use it to start your conversation. When you approach your customers with the value mindset, everything else will fall into place.

Drive Customer Satisfaction With CRM's

To drive customer satisfaction, organizations deploying CRM solutions must think about the customer relationship in an integrated and comprehensive way. In today’s multichannel world, this is particularly important. Customer interactions take place everywhere. From sales, support, service, finance and on the web. Beyond traditional sales and support management, companies need to be able to see real time, cross channel views of all interactions to deliver superior customer service, whether the interaction occurred on the web just seconds ago or in person with a sales rep yesterday. This enables every customer interaction to be based on a holistic view of a customer’s history.

Self-service has also become a critical driver of customer satisfaction. Many organizations are deploying customer self-service portals to meet their customers’ expectations around the ease of doing digital marketing business with the company on the web. Customer portals enable customers to view outstanding quotes or orders, or even request returns, improving service while reducing the cost to serve. 

On the call center side, the support team can benefit from cross departmental customer visibility, with a detailed order history allowing the support team to check service level subscriptions. This also gives the team an opportunity to deliver customized up sell and cross sell offers that both anticipate customer needs and drive revenue.

For organizations whose business model requires delivering ongoing service for their customers, project management is a critical but often forgotten component of CRM. This includes the tactical aspects of creating jobs and linking them to specific customers, as well as tracking estimated end dates, percentage of work completed, actual end dates and the income and expenses associated with each project. Project management is particularly important for businesses whose models are predicated on customer renewals or subscription revenue.

The final area of customer satisfaction is billing. Billing errors can create significant customer attrition, and in many cases, billing errors may stem from manual processes in the original sale, project management issues or simply duplicate or out of date customer data.

Designing An Agency Structure

Structure your team, around your business goals. Perhaps you’re trying to build new service offerings into an existing team. Or maybe you’re trying to grow your team to service the growing demand from your brilliant inbound marketing or web marketing efforts.

There are many different types of organizational structures, and a world of pros and cons to each. But pros and cons don’t exist in a vacuum, they need context. So in order to assess the suitability of one structure above another, you need to evaluate them against your own goals.

Traditionally, decision making is centralized in an organization and often sits, and often slows, with senior managers. In the kind of agile content and digital marketing agencies we’re seeing prosper today, specialists tend to sit in the middle levels of the organization. Give them the power and responsibility to make good decisions for the client, and you’ll not only see strong, speedy decision making, you’ll be creating a true sense of ownership and pride in your leaders of the future, your corporate motivators.

For smaller agencies that are trying to grow quickly, a more generalist approach allows for more flexibility as your people can tackle a broader array of tasks. This increases your productivity and the value of each hire. However, for larger and more established agencies, refining some specialist areas will make it easier to establish your agency as a leader in certain areas. Don’t be afraid to create new roles for stellar specialists that come your way, particularly if their skill set is in high demand.

Employees love an opportunity to learn new things. And once you have the right structure, it is easy to see who could potentially pick up a new job related skill. Before you jump into training mode though, check off a few things.

Does this person have a natural aptitude for similar tasks? Do they pick things up quickly and apply them intuitively? Are they interested in the field you want them to grow in? Once you’ve decided who should do what, get them involved in finding the best training or mentoring program for them, and create a plan with a timeline for completion and commercialization of their new skill. Remember, always try new services and skills out on your own web marketing or social media marketing process to refine it before you take it to market.

Making A Selling Point

You need to develop a unique selling point, or USP, a reason for people to buy from your company. There are thousands of companies very similar to yours, and you are competing with every one of them around the globe for every single customer. Even the person that is standing outside your physical premises has in their pocket an instant connection to the Internet and every business that is online, doing small business web marketing or social networking from all over the world.

Why should they buy from you? You must give them a reason to do so or they will buy elsewhere. Your branding or brand marketing and USP are your tools. They are the only reasons they will take out their wallet in your store or on your website today.

Ideally they will be aware of your branding, granting you have persevered in your web marketing efforts, before they’re standing outside your store or viewing your website, but even if this is not the case, your branding can still win you the sale. If your branding is welcoming, with great customer service then they will likely complete a sale. They’re also more likely to come back for future purchases and to recommend your company to friends and contacts.

If your customers were just half as loyal as Apple customers then your business would be a run-away success story. Yes, Apple makes great products, but they do have imperfections. Their customers are so forgiving because of the loyalty they feel towards the brand. They overlook the imperfections and high prices because they need the brand more than they need the product, so they are prepared to pay a hefty premium.

Making sure customers come back should be a top priority for every business. They have made one purchase and if they are happy they are likely to become repeat customers. It’s your job to make sure they are happy.

The Role Of Landing Pages

A solid web marketing plan and great web design are critical elements to your success in a global online marketplace. Having a website with content that provides quality information should be one of your main focuses for capturing the interest of your visitors.

                                 

A landing page is basically a single web page whose purpose is to guide your users or customers to a specific action, like providing their email address for further communication, to offer other information about themselves that helps you do a better job of serving their needs, or to purchase a product directly.

The focus and simplicity of a good landing page is why it works so well in a cluttered and noisy web world. Directing users from search engines or social media marketing links to your homepage usually means they jump through a series of hoops in order to get to where they want to be. Redirecting a person to a landing page gives them the opportunity to take an immediate action, ease of use is everything.

Landing pages are optimized with that specific purpose in mind, reducing the number of steps between the point of searching, to the point of landing on your page and purchasing, commonly referred to as maximizing the page conversion rate. Think of landing pages as action pages, delivering one strong message and compelling one clear action, such as signing up to your mailing list or downloading a discount voucher.

One of the reasons landing pages are so important is their unique capability to optimize conversion rates. It may sound very technical, but it’s really simple, the percentage of visitors that go to your landing page and perform a specific action, such as filling in a form.

If you’re a marketing agency, small business owner, affiliate marketer, corporate motivator or professional marketer, this is a big help for you to generate more sales without increasing your expenses on purchasing additional web traffic. For online marketers it means increasing their return on investment, or ROI, without continuously searching for cheaper traffic sources.

Corporate Motivators, The Power In The Middle

With the rise of social media, consumers demand compelling, relevant content, developed internally or through a community of key influencers. While they appreciate product information from brands, what influences their purchase decisions the most are opinions from people just like them. New moms want to know what products other new moms prefer and marathon runners want product feedback from people familiar the pains of racing. Socially savvy, business influencers, corporate motivators and directing advisors represent something a brand cannot, and that is the perspective of another consumer.

Marketers can authentically tap this trust by partnering with influencers who show a natural affinity for their product and brand values. For instance, Udi’s, a national provider of gluten free food products, works with dozens of bloggers who specifically create and share content about gluten free recipes and products. Their readers trust their opinions and the products covered and a partnership is win-win-win for the Udi’s, the bloggers and their readers.

Finding, engaging and collaborating with influencers used to be a very manual process and only allowed marketers and web marketing pros to coordinate and manage the efforts and content of a handful of influencers. That, combined with the assumption that big numbers meant big influence, motivated web marketers to just want to work with bloggers and influencers who had high monthly unique visitors or millions of followers on Twitter or YouTube. This meant that the same bloggers ended up working on programs over and over. Those top 5% might represent big numbers, but they don’t necessarily represent the millions of consumers who have targeted needs and therefore follow niche influencers who produce highly targeted content. These include marathon runners, cat lovers, military families, cancer survivors and those with allergies or special diets. Collectively, the millions of influencers who cater to these audiences are impacting exponentially more consumers than the top 5%. This is the power of the middle.

Tips On Facebook Marketing

Everyone is into Facebook nowadays and you might think to enhance and expand your business using this social media site. In fact, almost all businesses are investing on Facebook appearance so that they can easily be noticed by their prospective or existing clients. But starting Social Media Marketing on Facebook might confuse your mind as there too many things you need to consider in order to come up with a successful and effective Marketing strategy online.

There is no shortage on Facebook marketing advice. Why not take advantage of it and use it to help grow your business? This article identifies the basic steps needed if you want to have a successful social media marketing campaign, particularly in Facebook.

Consider holding online contests as a means of your Facebook marketing plan. Offer prizes or special deals to those who like your page. Of course, be sure that you come through in awarding your prize, or no one will trust you again.

Think of Facebook as a way to share content. It's not just about silly informal conversation, there's real content, even content marketing, going on in Facebook. And use Facebook to promote your blogs from other channels. Facebook will bring you a great deal of traffic if you do.

Facebook Offers is a great tool for promoting giveaways and contests on your site. Set up your offer and then change the status to "Promoted Post". This will encourage people to come to your page.

Consider purchasing Facebook ads. You can customize your ad by great filtering, or having people of a certain age or gender view it. You will also able to keep the ad within a particular budget, spending only what you can or want. And best of all, you are not committed to a long term advertising contract.

You need to know when you should post about your products on any page. Posting on Facebook pages or walls that are not your own can get you a lot of attention. Remember that the comments you leave on another page should be professional in nature. You should be posting when there is something important to say. Don't resort to spam.

When all is said and done, many folks follow trends because it's the easiest thing to do. This article should give you some great advice about Facebook marketing. These tips will increase the network reach and visibility of your company and ultimately improve ROI.

For more Facebook marketing tips and advice, you can visit my website, Need a VA and let’s have a chat. 

Jenny Jordan

Need a VA CEO

CRM Integration Into The Basic Platform

Ever since marketing technology has been created, it has been a protocol pattern that when a challenge emerges, software providers rush to deliver a solution. Then, with time, that solution becomes part of a more powerful, integrated experience.

Take the web browser, as an example. It was once a standalone solution and has now been absorbed into the modern operating system, which incorporates a wide range of other tools that were also previously sold as standalone products.

As we look to the next evolution in technology, there is a clear case to be made that customer relationship management, or CRM systems, will logically converge with the ecommerce platform. As it seems inherently obvious that a company would want to have a single system of record for customer information and interactions as well as the customer’s commerce transactions.

In B2C ecommerce, the next generation convergence of CRM and the ecommerce platform introduces a wealth of new possibilities to monitor and measure everything that happens online and capture every interaction with a customer or prospect, and both automatically and on a massive scale. Main reason would be combining interaction and order data in a single repository will enable the ability to drive dynamic and personalized merchandising and offers online.

Despite the undeniable value of capturing and analyzing as much customer information as possible, the traditionally separate worlds of ecommerce and CRM have made integration economically unviable. Even most companies, according to official research, agree that recording all customer actions on an ecommerce site is useful, yet few are willing to make the investment to replicate that data into a separate CRM system. The only way to achieve this goal is to build CRM and ecommerce directly on the same platform, creating a single data source.

Another factor that is driving towards integrated CRM and ecommerce is increasing awareness that the traditional linear transaction funnel is obsolete. In today’s digital, mobile and social world, customer interactions with a brand leading up to a sale are far too frequent, haphazard and variable to fit that old school, linear model.

Market Segmentation Method

Segmentation is the process of dividing markets or customers into distinct groups with common needs and characteristics. It provides a deeper understanding of both your current customer and your potential customers. Segmentation tools enable marketers to group businesses into segments by selecting various business signals that comprise each segment.

Once you create segments, you can target each with a unique marketing mix tailored to their common characteristics. This contrasts with the alternative spray and pray approach, which uses the same product and marketing mix for everyone.

There are two types of segmentation, which is customer and market segmentation. The purpose of customer segmentation is to provide a data driven understanding of your customers. Effective customer segmentation can empower you with a granular view of the characteristics shared among your best customers, which enables you to make better decisions about how to identify future prospects. Customer segmentation utilizes the historical performance and customer data in your internal CRM to show you who buys and who doesn’t, which marketing campaigns are most effective and which prospects should be prioritized over others.

Market segmentation informs your decisions about marketing and product development. It shapes where you build new marketing campaigns, which new products you offer, and how you plan for growth. Market segmentation requires external data sources and can help you determine your TAM, or Total Addressable Market analysis, market penetration, and largest market opportunities.

By using both customer and market segmentation you can gain a deeper understanding of your customers, your market potential, and the specific segments with the highest likelihood to convert. For most teams, these two processes are done separately due to data silos and fragmented tools. However, if you are able to run these analyses simultaneously, the results from your customer segmentation can inform how you segment the market, which removes the guesswork of trying to understand where to focus your marketing resources.

Introduction To API

Business executives are under increasing pressure to improve efficiency, increase profitability, and transform their value proposition in order to thrive in today’s hyper connected world. Having a viable digital strategy can make the difference between transforming your business and watching your competition capitalize on previously inconceivable opportunities. Application Programming Interfaces, or API’s, play a foundational role in realizing that strategy.

Today, every business is a digital business. Companies that successfully navigate this digital world will make both a technology and a mindset shift. The technology is less important than understanding that APIs are the fuel powering the apps and processes that represent digital business platforms.

The mindset change leads to wins in today’s digital world, rewarding those who make it with accelerated time to market, improved agility and the ability to leverage new channels and extend their brand as never before.

An API connects your business processes, services, content and data to channel partners, internal teams and independent developers in an easy and secure way. API’s are quickly becoming the de facto standard by which companies exchange data and build consistent inter channel customer experiences.

For example, Best Buy makes a Deal of the Day pricing special available through its website. This same data is in its mobile application, or mobile app. So the app doesn’t need to worry about internal pricing systems as it can simply call the Deal of the Day API and ask for the current pricing special. Then, the Best Buy API responds with the requested information in a standard format that the app displays to the end user.

Businesses are organized into units and departments. These entities often have different leadership and budgets, so it’s easy to see how a brand can become fractured. This fracturing leads to inconsistent employee, partner and customer experiences.

The important thing to understand about APIs is that they help you leapfrog your competition, accelerating and competing in the digital economy even if you aren’t a digital native.

The Call To Action

One of the first steps in starting your own online business is making a website. This website is your place of business over the internet, but must be treated the same way as your actual store or office, if there is one. Here, potential customers will visit site and can decide within seconds if they will stay or go. Turning these quick browsers into buyers is one of the major obstacles in Digital Marketing.

Do not make your site a maze for your visitors. Have a simple, clean design with that’s easy to navigate back and forth between pages. Use short, straightforward sentences and use easily read text fonts. Make all your pages uniform and professional.

Graphics can help increase sales, but unless your business is about children, then do not use childish looking cartoon clipart. Use professional, well designed graphics. There are some sites where the cartoon clipart will fit but most will need sharp, clean professional graphics.

Telling your visitors what to do can help turn their indecisiveness into action. So give them clear and concise instruction or a Call To Action. And of course, a good reason why they should follow your instructions. Tell them why they should buy from you and that they should "Buy Now". Tell them to “Click Here” to make the purchase.

One sure way to lose a customer is by having a long, drawn out ordering process. Having to click through too many pages to order will have your potential customer clicking to another site. Be sure your shopping cart is secure and doesn't give your customers arthritis while in the process of check out because of too many things to type and click.

And of course, since you want people sending you those emails or calling you, then you should always have your name and contact info on every one of your web pages. Be sure to write an About Us page too. People will not trust you if they do not know who you are. And make up a Privacy Policy page so your visitors feel secure, which will add to that trust.

                                                                                                                            

The Panda In SEO Habitat

Good SEO is all about finding a balance between your content, on page SEO and the amount of links you build. Because without the proper balance, an SEO campaign can hurt a website far more than it helps. To explain, if you build too many fishy links and point them at your homepage, the odds are, your website will get penalized by Google once noticed. 

Before SEO became a common practice in the field of Marketing, Google’s algorithm ranked websites naturally. This means, it is based on how many people enjoyed the content of a website, which means they will be referenced and shown by the number of backlinks. And websites with authority in their niche naturally ranked on page 1.

As internet marketers learned to play with system, Google found their rankings were being overrun by low quality SEO sniper websites, which are sites designed to rank well for one specific keyword. And as a result, they’ve made significant algorithmic changes over the years in an attempt to get only the most high quality websites to the top of the rankings.

Although they’ve struggled with this in the past, when they released the Panda Update, and it looked like they may have finally found a solution. Because the Panda update is so effective due to its approach. Instead of using external factors or backlinks to completely gauge rankings, Google now determines how much value a specific website offers its viewers. By keeping bounce rates, average time on site, and new social media votes, such as those from Facebook and Twitter, as a factor when ranking websites, the Panda Update seems to be working well for the time being.

Although social votes may replace backlinks in the near future, right now, backlinks are still a great way to get your website ranking. The Panda Update changed the game completely, but by playing along with Google’s rules and naturally building links, we can push our websites to the first page of Google for the majority of keywords.