Advanced SEO Strategies That Will Help With Search Rankings For Your YouTube Video And Your Blog!

Last Thursday night’s webinar is now up and archived with all the latest information about how to use video for search engine optimization that will amaze you. If you have not seen this webinar before, then you are not going to want to miss it! Click through to the YouTube Training Webinar now!!

This is one of the most popular webinars, and one of my personal favorites. What you can do so simply to help promote your business is no less than astonishing. – Steve MacDonald

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Demystifiying SEO, keywords, and tactical applications

March 17th from 4-5p PST

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SEO is one of those areas of social media that is really tough to get your hands around. The good news is that it’s not brain surgery. It just needs a good explanation that starts with the big picture and takes the discussion down through developing a keyword strategy and how to actually implement it on a very tactical level. That is what this webinar is all about.

Make no mistake, that there are a few moving parts to a complete SEO campaign, but once they are all put together from the beginning to end, it doesn’t look so hard. The most important part is deciding on your company’s brand and target market. From there, your content and keyword strategy is a natural outcome.

All webinars will be archived on the site within 48 hours of the original date.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a school that we could go to that taught us small business, overworked entrepreneurs how to use the basics of search engine optimization?

There is plenty of great places that you can search for online, but none that say here’s what’s important to know, here’s how do do it without knowing how to CODE and here are the tools that you’ll need. We can show you how to implement SEO basics in a way that anyone can tackle and not get flustered!

Since it is really so easy to do, i’s also amazing to us how some of the biggest companies and respected brand names around don’t even use great search engine optimization practices!  Nordstrom.com is one example!  You think that SEO school would have been taught to somebody over there!

Here’s the good news.  We have a webinar that is 100% dedicated to teaching the overworked, soloprenuer to not only learn the basics of SEO, but apply them easily…just ONCE!  That’s right, after you learn the top best practices, you’ll see how easy they are to apply over and over again.  Most SEO strategies are things you configure once and then they keep on working for you from there on out!

Our webinar is a must-see for any business wanting to meet new prospects!  The best news is that it doesn’t take a team of people, specialized expertise or anything tricky at all.  The tools are free.  You just need to know how to use them.

Why Is Search Engine Optimization School So Important?

There are roughly 16 billion searches a month that are conducted in this country.  This is the greatest opportunity for any business since people are typing in keywords to the search engines that identify themselves every day as a high quality prospect looking for what you have to offer.  If you aren’t in the search rankings, you are invisible to your rightful share of those 16 billion searches.  Sound like an opportunity you don’t want to miss?

To learn how to sign up for the Practical Social Media University, and all the training opportunities, including Search Engine Optimization School, click here for more details, and a receive 50% off your first month…that’s just $19.99!  This offer is only available for a limited time!

SEO Tools For Creating A Keyword Strategy

The first question to answer here is “Why is a keyword strategy so important?” The basic answer is that it is the key to being found online by the search engines. Although the search engines look for a combination of things, including lots of refreshed content and links coming in from other authoritative sites, keywords are the most important. Without the right keywords, the search engines have no way of matching your website’s pages up with the words being typed into the search engines by hundreds of millions of people every day. In essence, keywords are the very first signals to Google, Bing and Yahoo that a page is relevant to any particular search being conducted online. Keywords are, therefore, the most important part of getting listed in the search engine rankings.

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Keywords are also how you can strategically filter the stream of tweets from Twitter and search real-time content on Facebook to name just a couple of other uses. Keywords are the online version of a bread crumb trail that leads people to your online doorstep (website). Applying keywords strategically to your website is Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Four Important Keyword Tools

Google has created a suite of three incredible tools that will be a significant aid in developing a particular keyword strategy for your company. The tools are:

1. Keyword Tool
2. Google Trends
3. Google Sets
4. Google.com

However, before we start to explain each of these in detail, we should review a really good way to develop keyword strategy ideas. Ask your friends, family, people in a coffee shop or your hair stylist what they would search for to find XYZ online. There is no substitute for getting it straight from the horse’s mouth.

Here is another tip, people search like they talk. As an example, if you wanted to go get your car repaired after a crash, would you go to the “automotive body repair shop” or the “auto body repair shop?” Or even better yet, wouldn’t you just say, “I’m going to the auto repair shop?” How people think and talk effects directly how they search. So it’s good to get their input upfront.

Google’s Adword Keyword Tool

This tool was put together to aid advertisers in developing better Google Adword (pay per click advertising) campaigns. Those are the tiny ads that show up mostly on the right side of the Google search results page. It is an extremely useful tool for any entrepreneur in developing an overall keyword strategy.

For example, we typed in “Seattle Digital Camera” in order to see how many times it comes up in the search volume on a monthly basis. The results are shown below.

“Digital Camera” comes up 1,830,000 times a month locally (meaning total U.S.) and 4,090,000 time globally. If you were to include a geographic locator like “Seattle” in front of the phrase, the local search volume goes down to 320. But that could be a decent amount of traffic if you are a retailer of digital cameras in the Seattle area. Certainly worthy of your time to optimize your social media strategies for those keywords.

There isn’t always enough data to support a geographic locator like a city in the Keyword Tool. Most often it comes up with the phrase “not enough data.” But you can play with the the terms without the city name to see what combination comes up the most. And then just include the city within your keyword phrase. This is one of the most important tools for creating a keyword strategy.

In the listing of results in the keyword tool, you will also see that there are automatically generated alternative choices with their respective search volumes. This can be a great help in coming up with more ideas.

Google Trends

Google Trends is a way to compare keyword phrases to see which are the most popular. Remember the auto body repair keyword options mentioned on the previous page. We put each into Google Trends (place in each keyword phrase followed by a comma) to see what the difference really was between them all.

Google Trends does not show search volumes, but the ratio of search volume in relationship to the other. In this example, “auto repair” (yellow line on graph) was ten times as popular as “auto body repair” in red.

This tool provides really useful information. I would never make a decision on a keyword phrase without first consulting Google Trends to compare options and see if the trend over tie is heading in a certain direction that might influence my choices.

Google Sets

Google Sets offers even more choices of keywords for your consideration. It calls upon the Google database of searches and finds words that are often associated with the words you entered into the tool.

To use the tool, type in your keywords and click on the large or small “set” for corresponding words that Google predicts will be associated with the words that you placed into the tool originally. For the words couch, sofa and love seat, the predictions to the below are the result.

This provides a great brainstorming tool if you run dry on what other keywords your target audience might be using.

Google.com

Did you know that searching on Google.com can help you with keywords as well.  When you start typing in your search phrase, do you notice that a drop-down menu appears.  This menu shows the most popular searches that are alphabetically correct with what you have already typed in.  This is a great way to see what people are searching for related to a given keyword phrase. Take a look at the priorities that emerge in the image below based on actual searches that have previously transpired.

Testing

Once you have a few options for your keywords, it is time to start testing them. There are two main ways to test. First, install a tool called Google Analytics and click on the “traffic sources” from the dashboard.

This will show you which keywords are being typed into Google that attracted people to your site. This is a “Must Have” tool. If you have not installed Google Analytics before, I would suggest watching the beginning of our Google Analytics Training Webinar.  It is very intuitive once you have it installed, but not always that easy to get up and running.

It is a must have tool for any social media marketer as the benefits are far beyond keyword strategies alone.

SEO Tools Conclusion

There is plenty of opportunity to test numbers of keyword phrase combination within your blog or website…but always stay consistent with your top five keywords, so that you don’t confuse Google about what it is that your site is all about.

See how different primary keyword combinations rank in Google. Be sure to give it a little time to make sure that the post has been seen and indexed by Google. You can see if Google has indexed the post or website page by copying the URL for that page and placing it directly into Google’s search engine like you would any normal keyword phrase. Your page’s listing should come up in the first position of the search results page. Now click on the “cached” link in the lower right corner of the listing. The new page that comes up will tell you when the last time was that Google indexed the page. Good luck on your keyword strategy!

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Getting A Grasp On Short And Longtail Keyword Strategies

This SEO Training article analyzes the different values of the two types of keyword phrases (short and longtail), and how you can make them work for you with proper placement and keyword density.

Most SEO gurus do not recommend using just short keyword phrases (like “car mechanic”) because they are no longer as effective as using longtail phrases (like “the most affordable car mechanic in Phoenix, Arizona”). This is because people still search the way they speak. Also, they are learning that more words often yield more precise results. Finally, longtail keyword phrases have less competition, because the Internet is now saturated with short keyword phrases. It’s time to learn more about longtail keyword phrases, and how to use a new Google Keyword Tool.

Longtail keyword phrases have greater click through ratings in search results, greater sales conversions and lower costs per acquisition.

We will also address placement and keyword density (how many keywords you should you use on your site or blog). These steps will help you create keyword rich content that will be well- regarded by search engines.

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Mindset Marketing and Keyword Strategies

If there is one thing to communicate in this SEO Training video it’s to not try to be everything to everybody in your business. Many small business entrepreneurs don’t want to miss on any opportunities, so they try to appeal to everyone. This training video will not only tell you why that is the exact wrong strategy to take, but how creating a niche marketing strategy is the best thing that you can do for literally everything about your business, including your SEO plans and keyword strategy!  Learn what Mindset Marketing can do for your business!

There is also a great article in the Getting Started series on Target Marketing that expands upon the many benefits that you can achieve in your business with a Mindset Market and Interest Networking strategy.

Please click on the play button on the video below and wait from 20 seconds to a minute for the video to start playing. This webinar segment is roughly 21 minutes long.

You will never think of your business the same again after watching this webinar segment!

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Demystifying Keyword Strategies And Search Engine Optimization

In this SEO Training webinar you will learn everything you need to know about developing your own keyword strategy and search engine optimization plan. And you will learn it all in plain english, in ways that take what is a complicated subjected for most entrepreneurs and makes it simple to understand and execute. Not only are all the recommendations free to implement, but many of them are things that you only have to do once. Everything you learn can be specifically applied to optimize your WordPress site.

The best part about Search Engine Optimization is that some of the most powerful strategies, that have the most impact, are the most simple tasks to complete.  All you have to know is what to do.

Some of the biggest companies themselves don’t use good SEO tactics. This webinar will teach you all the fundamentals and advanced strategies for ensuring that you are doing all that you can to get into the top pages of search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.

More than 90% of what is taught in this webinar are strategies that you are only going to have to implement once, and they will keep working for you forever. Yet, if you don’t implement these recommendations you might inadvertently be ensuring that your site is virtually invisible to Google and other search engines. The time that you devote to this webinar will lay some of the best social media foundation that you can for your ongoing campaign.

You should also read the article SEO Training Basics: An Explanation I Can Understand…Please.  It has a really great weay of explaining the bigger picture down to the tactical level in simple to understand language.

The total length of the webinar is about 54 minutes. You may have to wait 30 seconds to a minute for the video to start playing. Also, many members are finding it very advantageous to watch the webinar all the way through and then keep it open in a separate window to review while executing the recommendations.

To watch the webinar, just click on the play button below.

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An Explanation I Can Understand…Please

Search Engine Optimization and keyword strategies continue to be one of the most mystifying parts of social media marketing for most people.  I continually get bewildered entrepreneurs asking for some level of understanding about what they need to know, and then do, in this area in order to be successful.

If you read through this SEO Training article, the fog should start to lift.  Although this is a bit of a long article, the extra effort you make in order to understand will come with great rewards.  A successful SEO strategy can help transform your business and then your entire life.  We have entrepreneurs that we consult with who everyday see new leads and sales because of their SEO efforts.  It can happen for you too with the right knowledge, diligence and a solid strategy for your business.

Let’s start out by looking at what Wikipedia has to say about Search Engine Optimization.

“Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website may involve editing its content and HTML (code) and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. Promoting a site to increase the number of backlinks, or inbound links, is another SEO tactic.”

What people are searching for is critical to understand, but what they search with is too.  We type words into search engines in order to get our results.  We do the same with social networks like Facebook and Twitter all the time to find people, businesses, groups, conversations or news.  Online, words are the biggest identifiers of what lies on any given page on the Internet.  Thus, words, more popularly known as keywords in the world of SEO, are the bread crumb trail online to any given page on the Internet.

So SEO is really just about finding the right combination of keywords that intersects with your business and what your highest quality prospects are looking for while they search.  The best way to intersect with them is to know what keyword phrases they are using to search.  To identify the most common searches, please use the tools described in detail in our SEO Training Webinar.

In the SEO Training Webinar, we will also run you through a number of things that you will do once to “set-up” your site so that it is automatically more search engine friendly.  In this article, we want to focus on the side of SEO where everyone gets so mystified – the way a keyword strategy actually gets created and then applied as a regular part of your ongoing social media campaign, and most often your blogging efforts.

Companies who blog for a consumer target marketreceive 88% more leads than companies that do not.

The 30,000 Foot Level

Your keyword strategy is dependent on your overall content strategy (it’s a subset of it).  Your content strategy is full of ongoing value that you as a particular business offer to your unique target audience.  If you are trying to be everything to everybody, then that uniquely defined target audience (which represents the best opportunity for you to close sales at a much greater rate) isn’t going to see you as a business that is truly focused on meeting their needs.  Your content and keyword strategy are going to be too generic for them.  And if your target audience thinks that, then what is Google going to think about your blog?

You need to have a balance of really great content, with a great amount of focus, or else you risk being irrelevant to virtually everyone.  Google looks at your site and determines what the site is all about by assigning significance to individual words, in rank order.  That priority is usually pretty closely associated with how often that word is used.  Once Google determines your site is about a certain set of top keywords, your degree of difficulty just went down significantly to increase your rankings on keyword phrases around those words.  So they should be used again and again in ways that create more popular (higher volumes of searches) short and longer phrases that involve your top priority keywords.

Narrowing It Down

So, think of the top five or so words that define your company and brand the best.  I’ll give you an example.  The most important word in my keyword strategy is “training.”  That is not only a great descriptor of the University, but is a great keyword phrase when combined with Facebook, Twitter, Blog, YouTube, etc.  So I do a lot of content development that has “training” related keywords.  Other keywords that are great for my business are “Webinar”, “university”, “education” and “courses.”  All these words tell Google that I am in the teaching business.  Then, when I use social media terms to fill in around these keywords, Google starts to see that I am about teaching social media.

Define what your top keywords are, and then start to use them in everything that you do.  When you blog, you aren’t just writing an interesting post that has great value for your readers, you are creating more ways for Google to know what you are all about.  So don’t be scattered in your content and thus, keyword strategy!  Rank your top priority keywords in order of importance, based on their ability to make keyword phrases that are both relevant to your business, and represent a higher volume of searches for you.

In order to do this, go to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool (explained in the SEO Training Webinar) and start playing around with what phrases contain your top keywords and also represent a volume of “Local Searches” (equals total U.S. searches/month) around 10,000.  You’ll start to see some great combinations suggested that represent enough volume so that your ultimate conversion ratio will lead to a good volume of prospects for your business.  The lesser volume keyword phrases and ones containing four, five or more keywords, that don’t even come up in this tool, will start to work for your business naturally as you start to blog and naturally begin forming all kinds of keyword phrase combination as you write.  You’ll be able to track these longer, or what are know as “long-tail” keyword phrases and understand which are working for you by studying the list of them in your free Google Analytics account (this only needs to be set up once, by the way).

There are members of the PSM University who have thousands of keyword phrase combinations that drive traffic to them, all of which involve just their primary keyword alone!  This means that you need to pick your primary keywords very carefully.  The word “training” from my keyword strategy has over 13,000,000 searches a month.  So the derivations down the line that apply to social media still represent excellent search volume.

Now look at what combinations of keywords align best with your brand and target audience, or as we talk about in the Getting Started series, your Mindset Market (the mindset that all your best customers or prospects share which embodies the reason they are all attracted to your particular business).  That mindest has huge implications on how they think, thus how you need to develop content with tons of value and thus, your keyword strategy.  If you understand your Mindset Market (see the Getting Started Series for a full, step-by-step explanation), you’ll understand much more what your best prospects are going to want from you, and what they are more likely to be searching for.  This is huge.  Please spend the time to read the article on Mindset Marketing and Interest Networks under “Target Marketing” in the Getting Started series.  The SEO Training Video on Mindset Marketing also takes you through some very specific examples that get down to actual content and keyword strategy recommendations.

One client that I consult with had more than 20,000 unique visitors a month coming to his blog, and the majority of that traffic was from the search engines.  He had over 2,500 different keyword phrases that were sending traffic to his site – all of which contained his one main keyword (for example, mine is “training”).  After we started consulting, he went back into his blog posts and changed keyword phrases on about a third of his posts to align with phrases that had a higher search volume (but still used his main keyword).  His traffic doubled in just a few days.  Staying focused really helps!

Stay Focused

Most small businesses that start out in social media are just pretty happy at the beginning to be up with a blog or website, let alone putting content up on a regular basis.  So they forget about the task of managing and optimizing their content.  The end result is a shame because they are putting so much hard effort and work into their blogs.  It might be that every blog post is relevant to their business, but the keyword strategy is all over the place.  Why?  Because most bloggers are not professionals in blogging, so they just write about what’s top-of-mind to them that day.  And yes, they can check that box that marks the blogging task completed, but the confusion factor for Google rises.  Blogging isn’t a chore when you start it out right, and you start to see how it can attract so many of the right people to your business!  The task of blogging very quickly becomes energizing.

Here’s the analogy of why top-of-mind blogging doesn’t work.  Let’s say that you were writing a book over the course of a year, writing pages here and there with content that was top-of-mind that day.  How good of a book would that create?  Would the book have a consistent story (your brand) and be understandable, compelling, or interesting?  Would Google know how to index it well?  No.

Your blog needs to be more like a story…with similar characters who keep recurring (your keywords).  And they are in scenes with other keywords quite often, making regular groupings all the time.  Ones that you see again and again for different reasons (different blog posts).  That makes for an interesting story, and one that Google can understand, index and rank you for.

Getting The Right Structure On Your Site

To take our book analogy further, you need to have a table of contents, chapters and often index pages in your book that tell you where certain content resides.  On your blog, you also need some kind of content structure that helps readers and Google alike.

Start your structure by creating content around a particular, higher volume keyword phrase that you want to rank for and put together a single post or page on your blog.  Then create a number of additional posts over time that are all relevant to that same keyword phrase, and contain the exact keyword phrase in a link back to the one post that you want Google to know is the post that is the top of your post structure (or pyramid) for that keyword phrase.  Make sure that the “supporting” posts in this structure have the exact keyword phrase in a link that points back to the main post at the top of the pyramid.  Now you’ve just placed a bunch of pointers (links) for Google to see.  Google’s conclusion is that your blog thinks that this particular keyword phrase is important enough to be on all those posts with links to one post in particular.  The see it as a content pyramid identifying important information to rank.  Your own internal linking structure thus tells Google what content and keywords are most important.

It is also crucial to have the keyword phrase highlighted in some way at the top and bottom of the posts in your content pyramid for Google to see.  Google notices more closely words that are highlighted in some way (bold, italics, underlined) and uses them as identifiers for what that page is all about. Notice how the keyword phrase SEO Training is highlighted at the top and bottom of this post.  It is also used throughout, is in the title and URL structure and title of this post.  These are all additional ways to tell Google what this post is all about.  The SEO Training Webinar will tell you how to control your post titles, URLs and more.

SEO Training Conclusion

If all this has sounded overwhelming, you will be glad to know that after you figure out your brand and your mindset market (things you do just once), creating content for your blog gets much easier.  You know exactly who your audience is, so it is so much easier to know what you need to write for them.  Content development and value creation is tough when you are trying to be everything to everybody.  When done right, what you chose as a brand and mindset market usually align with your interests and passions which means writing content is that much easier.

Do you see now how the work you put in upfront (Branding, Mindset Market, and Keyword Strategy) is going to make it so much easier on you in the long run.  Content is also just part of what get’s easier. So does every action and decision for your company, because you have a focus!  Pretty soon, the hard work of putting all this together is done, and you are simply creating good, regular content on your blog that is providing value for your prospects and existing customers.  It’s like riding a bike, once you learn, you just naturally keep on doing it.

One Last Topic

So far we have talked about all things that you can do internally within your blog’s structure and content, not any external factors.  It is important to also know that links from the outside world from other websites, coming into your blog, is another huge way that Google knows that you are a credible and important resource on that keyword phrase.  Each external link is like a vote of confidence for your site.

If your keyword strategy isn’t working after you have been diligently trying, then you may need to build some external links coming into your blog.  This can be done in part through article submissions to sites that aggregate article content.  These aggregations sites (Ezines, ArticlesBase, etc.) allow you to place links back to your sites.  This article submission strategy is an effective way to get links coming into your site.  However, just blogging with a focused keyword strategy and internal linking structure to promote a primary keyword phrase is a great place to start.

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Search Engine Optimization is how you direct the right prospects to you.

There are two main ways that you can prospect online. The first is to use social networks like Facebook and Twitter to identify and manually connect with people that pass through your filter of who is a likely prospect or not. This has proven to be a highly effective way to prospect online. The second prospecting strategy is what our SEO Training focuses on, how to be discovered while people themselves are actively looking to meet some kind of unmet want, need or desire. They look by typing search phrases into the search engines and social networks. Thus, the right keywords that you use in the development of your social media content is the breadcrumb trail to you online. It is your opportunity to intersect with the relevant portions of roughly 16 billion searches that happen each month in this country within the search engines alone, not counting the social networks.

This is a huge opportunity to create awareness for your brand with people who have self-identified themselves as good prospects. Why? Because you know that they are actively looking if they are typing search related keywords to the search engines or social networks.

The primary reason survey respondents search online first is to research the best brands to buy and to identify businesses that offer those brands.

Here’s the really good news! If you know what to do, not only will you come up in the search engine rankings and drive traffic to your sites, but the strategy gets more powerful over time. The longer you have your sites up, with the right content and SEO strategy, the more relevance they are given by the search engines. This means that it is a strategy that keeps working harder for you as time goes on. Now you can’t just sit back and do nothing after you reach your SEO goals, because there is always somebody out there trying to knock you off your coveted rankings. But it is a very different strategy than manual prospecting in the social networks. As soon as you stop putting out those manual efforts, the new business pipeline drys up. With SEO, you are building an equity position with the search engines that needs to maintained, but not nurtured every day! If you are serious about social media marketing, then a balance of both a manual and search engine related prospecting is a solid strategy.

The SEO Training contained within this section will put you light years ahead the game. If you are blogging (the most important SEO strategy) right now and not getting the type of results you want, you need to review this SEO curriculum.

Most bloggers have a general idea of what they want to blog about, but it’s pretty random. So they sit down to blog and create posts that come to mind that day. They may all be related to their business or industry, but have no consistent keyword strategy. The end result is that search engines look at your site and can’t decide what it is all about.

Just as you wouldn’t start randomly writing a few pages here and there of a book and then at the end see how they can all fit together. You have a content plan. A content plan and keyword strategy is extraordinarily important to make sure that you’re not just working hard at your blog, but making sure that your blog is working hard for you. The proceeding steps to developing a keyword strategy and content plan is defining your brand strategy. If you do all this upfront planning, then you won’t waste time trying to think of new content or irrelevant keywords any longer.

A friend of mine went back to his blog to re-do past posts in order to embed an enhanced keyword strategy off the advice from this training, and saw his site traffic go up by more than 1,000 visitors a day…double what he use to have before. This happened because he is now using the right keyword strategy. The difference for you and your business can be amazing too. Just follow the instructions in this SEO Training series.

What is equally as important is the ability to grow your business through partnerships, elevating your brand or expert reputation and creating your own marketing annuities through social media.  When has marketing ever been an annuity?  But blog readers, Twitter followers, Facebook fans, etc. are all opportunities to create a communications/relationship channel into the marketplace.  And your own channel will last a lot longer than any traditional marketing, unless you have a ton of money to keep the traditional marketing alive over time.

Social Media Business Objectives

Dabbling here and there without a holistic approach to social media marketing and how to use keywords strategies, SEO, blogging, micro-blogging, social communities, networks, online reviews and ratings, profiles and more is what makes no sense.  Dabbling will also guarantee frustration and a very moderate return on your efforts.  What ever you do, have a plan.  If you don’t have a social media game plan, then find someone who can help you.  It is easy to waste hours of precious time and get little return, and your time is worth more than that.  As it stands now, the missed opportunities are your goldmine waiting to be discovered.