The next best thing is to be able to defend the honor of your company or brand name. Of course, the only way you can do this is by reputation monitoring or buzz monitoring in order try to find out what it is people are saying about your business or brand. Even if you are getting direct feedback or reading comments on websites such as Facebook in relation to your brand, you still may not be getting the insight you need. So, the trick is to find out what the buzz around the social media networking sites is when it comes to your business.

Using SocialMention as a Tool for Success

When it comes to your business’s reputation, it is important to find out what is being said about it. SocialMention is a useful tool that acts like a spy to pick up what the word about the internet is in relation to your business. Don’t keep your head in the sand about how people view your business. Assuming people are saying only good things or that the direct positive feedback you get is all that is being talked about. Get the scoop and see behind the scenes by getting the real story on what people are saying about your brand and business.

SocialMention is a site that enables you to get notifications on a daily basis about any alerts for mentions of your brand or business name. In addition to utilizing this site for your brand name, you can even include alerts to searches for mentions of your CEO, social media marketing campaign or even your competition. You can use the site like a search engine or set up an alert to receive email notifications.

What about Other Methods?

Probably the top two contenders that come close to providing the same watchdog service for your company or brand name are Google tools. Google Alerts and Google Trends are both methods that can help you get the low down on what people have to say about your brand. Google Trends is better for offering ideas on what keywords are popular and which may be better alternatives based upon what’s trending.

Google Alerts, however, will also send you alerts by email to notify you if certain keywords are used somewhere online or within social media marketing. This can be quite effective, but SocialMention may be even more effective based upon the fact that is geared to do searches for business and brand names. You may want to try both to be a wise business owner.

Whatever method you choose –it is crucial to be aware of how people view and what they are saying about your business.

It seems that nowhere online is safe from the potential spamming from blogs to other popular social media marketing approaches. Even Facebook users find their fan pages can get bogged down with spamming content instead of anything with real substance. The bottom line is that the act of commenting on blogs is dying, and other social media networking sites are taking their place, although even this approach is not without fault. Those who create, maintain and post blogs are wondering if the work and effort is worth it. The return seems minimal when compared to the amount of time and effort spent blogging, especially if the only comments a blog fetches are spam.

About Social Media Networking Sites

The downside to social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook is that while there is no direct help with SEO, there is a better opportunity for direct engagement. Also, users are more likely to be monitoring these sites, which makes it easier to delete inappropriate posts. You can also set up most social networking sites so that others are not allowed to post comments or these comments must first be approved by the administrator.

Does this really help and offer as effective a content marketing platform as blogs once did though? The answer sadly is not really. Of course, the efforts of others through spamming on blogs are a bit wasted as there is no real SEO value for this approach either. As previously reported ‘commenting’ on blogs has little or no SEO value. Regardless, the spammers still take the time and make the effort to use this route to leave their mark and do the damage. While sites such as Askimet come standard now with WordPress installations that help prevent this, it also means the loss of blog comments with real substance.

Other Things to Know

“Marketers” or spammers are causing real damage to the world of social media marketing by approaching things this way. People are reconsidering having blogs at all or disabling the feature that allows others to leave comments. At one point, this was half of the reason people created blogs and content marketing, for the feedback. If you are not convinced this is a problem, think of other examples where spammers have already hurt social media marketing. Consider how spammers have already been abusing technology in an attempt to lure potential customers in through SEO or search engine optimization.

Email is one of the best examples of a method of social media marketing being hard hit by spam abuse. Consider also Twitter’s proliferation of spam content. It seems these methods of content marketing and social networking are being ruined by spammers.

Of course, maintaining a blog takes time. Keeping your content marketing fresh is crucial to the process. It is, in fact, critically important to keep your blog posts up to date if you are going to bother to have one at all. Part of the most important aspect of this is not only attracting an audience, readers and followers, but letting them know you are still around and in business, as well as current with your industry.

How Often Should I Post to My Blog?

According to HubSpot, “companies that blog at least 20 times per month generate 5X more traffic than those that only blog a few times per month.”  The truth is there is not a set answer for this. What is important is that you do so on a regular basis. Content marketing and using sites such as WordPress to create a blog are ideal ways to use attraction marketing for your inbound marketing campaign. Some of this really has to do with the number of visitors you are getting to your blog. The less traffic you have, the less often you need to post.

Of course, to begin to use SEO and get higher rankings and more traffic, making sure you do not lag behind in your posts is crucial. Also as traffic begins to increase, so should the frequency with which you add new blogs posts. Stale content and a good deal of lag time between posts can turn off your usual customers or cause you to lose potential ones. When in doubt, check out your competition. It is guaranteed that the bigger the outfit the steadier and more regular the content marketing efforts through updated blog posts.

How to Create and Compete

Some companies fall behind in their blog posts because they feel they lack fresh content. Even those experts in the field can sometimes run dry when it comes to ideas in the content well. It could even be the field you specialize in does not have groundbreaking news that often. This is no excuse to fall behind in your content marketing. Waiting for the news to break could take a while, so why not cause it to break?

If you have followers who look to your blog for current data as though you are an expert in the industry, you had better come through and deliver on this or lose your market. There is always a new spin you can take or content you can add, as well as ways to find it. One of the best devices for content searching bloggers use these days is Google Fresh. You can search for the most current content on your field of expertise by using Google Fresh as your search tool. Also using Google Alerts will help you be notified when certain keywords come up, which can also lead to more ground breaking and current news on your industry.

Staying current with what your competition is doing with their blogs is also important. If you want to know what they post and how often, get signed up for their RSS feeds. Take the time to read their blog posts too, not just how often they post. Also, see how often they mix it up by using other forms of media such as video clips to convey their message and content. You may not be able to outdo your competitors, but you should at least be familiar with the blog posting frequency and quality of their content marketing campaign.

Speaking of Quality…

People also wonder if quantity is more important than quality when it comes to blog posts. As with almost anything else, quality is still king. If you have to post less often, but deliver interesting and engaging content as a result, followers will forgive this. Make your content worth readers sharing with others and that is more priceless than producing a greater number of posts that no one really wants to read or review.

The tricky part is knowing which company to chose. Without spending too much capital for too little return there are some questions that can help you make the right choice for your SEO firm and your business.

Possibly the most important question to get a response for is:

# 1 — What Is Your Approach to SEO and How Will This Relate to Me?

Avoid working with those companies who claim they cannot divulge the information because it is part of their organization’s secret. Without a firm having to give away all the details, they should have an answer about having a multifaceted approach.

A good SEO company will generally start with the foundation you have built and look for improvements. From there suggestions on how to improve your content marketing should be discussed. The final step is usually to improve upon your inbound marketing through links and other “organic” methods.

# 2 — Will You Get Me on Page One of a Google Search Immediately?

The truth is no company should be able to promise this. If one can, it generally means they are using what can be seen in the industry as an unethical approach. Even if you get that first page result from a search, once the less than ethical methods used to get there are discovered, you are going to be bumped from that ranking.

Not to mention you will still have to pay the SEO firm for this kind of tactic. Inbound marketing as the result of SEO should happen more naturally and gradually. This is what helps build stability as well as keep you from being ousted from the world of Google keywords. A slightly bigger budget may help you get there slightly faster, but should not be immediate.

# 3 — What Can I Do on My Own – for Free?

Industry experts shouldn’t mind giving you some pointers on how to do some of the work yourself, especially as free tools do exist. These are not exactly their secrets; it is just their way of helping to educate their clients on how to assist in getting a better ranking. A company with no answer for this question either does not know of any or is unwilling to share these, even with clients. Either way, this is probably not an firm you would be happy working with.

The bottom line is that there are plenty of questions you should be asking an SEO company before hiring them to improve your organic search results and inbound marketing strategy. However, these are certainly a good top three to start with.

Content marketing

Even those who truly are well versed on a particular subject can run out of fresh content or get lost when it comes to tracking down the latest information on a topic. There is so much information to filter through online that trying to find relevant and current data can be tricky. Not to mention, not everyone has time to do this kind of research just to track down data to spruce up your content marketing to increase your inbound marketing. However, there is a very useful tool that can help make it possible for you to get exactly this type of useful and current information.

What Are Google Alerts?

As useful as Google is for searching for keywords and search terms via SEO, it can be improved upon even more. By using Google Alerts you can actually have the keyword search done for you. In fact, you can have the results delivered to your email inbox. Your inbound marketing relies heavily upon you, as the writer, providing content that represents you as an expert in the field. With the right content, you can even establish credibility as the expert in the industry to refer to for information.

By using Google Alerts you can use keywords and phrases or terms and be ‘alerted’ to news, articles, blogs and other content that could help you with your own content marketing. By being notified via email when new content is posted or generated in relation to your field, you can get the latest quality content without the hassle of searching for it. The best way to be perceived as an expert in your field is to have the latest data, which actually does make you one.

Getting Connected with Google Alerts

Although Google may not catch all posts and web pages put up live that relate to your keywords and search terms, it does a thorough job as a keyword tool. With the time it would take to perform this type of search task, it is probably more efficient than the average web surfer anyway. Creating a Google Alert is simple, too. It’s nothing more than a matter of providing the form with the search terms you wish to monitor, the type of search and how often you would like to be alerted and you have it set up.

Enter the email address you want to use and click to create alert and the process begins. You can add more or alter what you have as you receive notifications and find you may want to change what you have set up. Monitor the quality you get and make sure it is relevant to what you want. If not, simply adjust the keywords and see what different results you find.

According to a study by InsideSales.com, 35-50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first to an inquiry. Further, a recent HubSpot study found that response rates decline as the age of a lead increases.

When you get a lead that isn’t an immediate sale the question comes down to what happens after initial contact. Without proper care, nothing becomes of the lead. Therefore, the efforts put into generating inbound marketing are lost to some degree. It would be great if all internet marketing efforts led to direct sales, but that isn’t the case. It is important to recognize those leads that still have the potential to develop into something that hopefully, is a sale. Maybe even repeat business.

In a nutshell, lead nurturing takes the inbound marketing leads generated and helps them still develop into future sales. It is reported that as high a percentage as 70% of generated leads could still result in sales. Using proper lead nurturing techniques, you can still retain these leads. With proper nurturing, you may even be able to still cause them to develop into sales.

More about What Lead Nurturing Is

If you have invested your efforts in creating lead generation through internet marketing, those leads are crucial to your business. Yes, even the ones that are not direct and immediate sales. This is especially important for inbound marketing techniques because these potential customers have already taken the first step towards buying, which is being aware and interested.

Following up by offering information or promotions that could still help entice consumers is lead nurturing. It is what helps still convert potential customers into actual customers. For this reason, though, it is about building and establishing a relationship not just trying to push someone into buying a sales pitch.

Why Does Lead Nurturing Work?

The bottom line is that people do not like to buy, especially if they feel they are being sold. Even for products they need or want, there is a certain amount of hesitancy. Lead nurturing is a way of taking your internet marketing efforts and making people feel good about buying. In fact, if done correctly, this approach actually helps people feel they made a decision and had buying power, not that they were talked, conned or forced into it. Lead nurturing is about establishing trust.

It is true you will not see immediate results. In some cases, even after investing follow up time and effort into lead nurturing, you will not see a sale. This can be frustrating, but it a small price to pay. Your best return in your internet marketing strategy is to have a direct sale. Second to that, however, is the results you get from lead nurturing.

The trick is that it is difficult to determine the amount of time this may take and how many leads will still end up being converted to sales. The good news is that in some cases with proper nurturing of your leads even if someone falls through on a sale, they may still change their mind at a later date.

If you have build trust and established a relationship, then you can also expect that some of those who say no may still come back around when the competition neglects to offer good lead nurturing.

In fact, comScore reports indicated that from the beginning of November until Christmas Day, sales for ecommerce were up 15 percent versus the same period the previous year. While the overall growth rate of the 2011 Christmas and holiday shopping spell was not as high as the prior year, the overall results were still promising.

Why This Works for Ecommerce

There are many factors that go into consumer spending online. From the merchandise offered down to the e-commerce website design, certain traits make consumers more likely to spend in certain places. One surefire way to gain sales through internet marketing is to offer free shipping. Ecommerce is no different from brick and mortar retailers who must offer promotions to lure in browsers and buyers.

As comScore also pointed out, ecommerce sites began running specials before Thanksgiving up until the final days of holiday shopping. Many of these deals and promotions occurred on Cyber Monday. Cyber Monday is the internet marketing and etailers’ version of real world retailers’ Black Friday. Both of these fall on the heels of Thanksgiving.

Specials and promotions make shoppers more willing to buy. The free shipping promotion seems to encourage consumers to spend even more than the average purchase or order amount. For some ecommerce stores, offering free shipping on certain dollar amounts helps, while others see results from excluding shipping costs regardless of the amount of the sale. One encourages consumers to spend more, while the other simply encourages shoppers to buy something regardless of the amount.

Debt Plays a Role Too

Ecommerce sellers, as part of the internet marketing strategy, continue to offer their specials and promotions earlier each holiday season. In return, consumers seem willing to spend more money. Or as comScore points out, consumers are willing to incur greater amounts of debt. This past November holiday season saw an increase of nearly 10 percent in household installment debt. This percentage was the quickest monthly increase in this type of debt since the same month back in the year 2001, an entire decade earlier.

Though the job market seems to be slowly improving and unemployment rates were down slightly, the average consumer still needs to incur a percentage of debt to get their holiday shopping done. Even with consumers being willing to get into debt for holiday shopping, it seems the specials, offers, promotions and discounts are what helped the 2011 produce as well as it did. Topping that list was free shipping, which helped encourage consumer spending. E-tailers looking for tactics to increase sales or the amount of money spent per transaction might consider offering free shipping even at times other than the holiday season.

Defining a Call-To-Action

A call to action is a method used to cause potential customers to take immediate action. In other words if you want those reading your internet marketing efforts to follow up by going to your sales page the “click here” button is the all important call-to-action that tells people to act now. If you want to gain more contacts for your email lists, then you would include a “sign up now” option somewhere. Of course, the most important one is the direct and straightforward “buy now” tab.

There are other details involved and it is certainly a topic worth more in depth reading. To get a basic idea of what the call-to-action is, however, think of using urgent and active language such as “register,” “subscribe” and “act,” instead of a softer approach that gives people more of an option to think instead of act. Sometimes more incentive helps such as, “call now and receive free shipping.” This is still a call-to-action, but one with a reward to help entice people.

Other Examples of This

In addition to creating a sense of need for immediate reaction to follow through with a call-to-action, you can also add to the urgency.

Use follow up phrases such as:

“Expires in 30 days,”

“For a limited time only,” and

“Act now to receive a free gift – while supplies last.”

One more crucial thing about your website and anywhere you have presence online that allows for it, you should have a call-to-action on every page. These can be different but should be in place. So if one page on your website has a call-to-action to sign up for an e-newsletter, the next should have one that offers free shipping if you buy now.

Best Practices for Call-To-Action

You know all about it without realizing it, but if you aren’t sure watch any infomercial to get a better understanding. Though infomercials use video media, you use content marketing to first establish what problem the product solves. Once you have proven ahead of time the importance of the product or service, the call-to-action is the next logical step. Once your content marketing identifies what issues your customers could have resolved, how could they not want to “act now,” “buy now,” or “sign up before time runs out”?

Keep in mind, not all call-to-action efforts are meant to make someone immediately buy something. It could be to offer them more information about something. In that case, the call-to-action would be something such as “view demo” or “read more.”

The key is getting people to act and not ponder the decision making. It’s not about tricking them; it is about leading them in the right direction thus increasing your conversions.

# 1– Poor Keyword Selection And Usage

SEO is crucial to having the right audience find your content. However, you should do your research to find out what keywords you actually need. Google Ad Words and Google Trends can help you see if your keywords are good or if there may even be something better to use. Also, make sure you use these words enough and in the right places without overusing them.

# 2 — The Content Lacks The Ability To Interest An Audience

Even if you have relevant, useful and current information to share with others, your writing has to do more than lull them to sleep. Find ways to make the writing entertaining, engaging and even humorous when possible. If you know writing is your weak spot, ask a friend or hire a pro to help.

# 3 — Content Is Irrelevant

This usually means what you write about and what you offer have no connection to each other. Readers can immediately get turned off by this or feel they have been mislead. Don’t use keywords in a sneaky way about “the exciting world of fly fishing” and then have content about timeshares where you can fly fish. More than likely the reader won’t even finish the article.

# 4 — There Is No Call-To-Action

A call-to-action is a method used to get people to be involved as a result of your content marketing. So once they have read an interesting blog post, you have a call-to-action to “click here now” to read more of your writing. This helps draw people in and retain them which we call lead nurturing, as well as guide them gently to potential sales, not push them. Every page on your site and every place you have content that allows you, should include a call-to-action.

# 5 — The Content Writing Lacks A Unique Voice

With some much data on the internet these days, it may be more of a challenge to stand out, but you had better make the attempt. Readers can get bored easily or realize this piece on this topic is no different than the five he or she just weeded out before. Do not make the mistake of thinking you simply need content to have content marketing. You need good content to result in a successful content marketing campaign. Again, if writing is not your forte, then find someone to take on the task.

Whatever it takes to make it happen, keep in mind how crucial it is to make your content appealing so you can have a following.

Google It!

Google Analytics has got you covered when it comes to learning about your conversion rate. You can use features and tools built in to Google Analytics to help you monitor your sales conversion. In turn this helps you understand the effectiveness of your site as a sales channel. The site is designed to help site owners understand what happens once the potential customers click through on your ads. For non-ecommerce sites, this usually means finding out if visitors signed up for your newsletter or used other methods to provide you with useful customer base data.

What you can learn from the important features of Google Analytics is which keywords help attract traffic. This type of information is especially important if you are trying to find out which page on your site may be getting the most attention. Learning about your conversion rate can help you plan the proper keywords for your content marketing efforts. You can also find out which ones you are using aren’t working for you. In other words, you have a useful tool for keyword research about your very own site.

Taking It a Step Further

With Google, you can also measure your conversion metrics. Google’s “Goals and Funnels” can help you accomplish this very important task. For those with ecommerce sites, this means you can find the pages you feel are crucial to your sales conversion. Even if you are not attracting customers for direct sales, you still may use your site for inbound marketing. Understanding your conversion metrics will help you improve your site, your pages and even your content marketing.

So how would this work? Take your website’s own ‘About Us’ page for example. This is often a key page in a goal and should have some keywords meant to draw in traffic. The funnel feature enables you to back track where your visitors started from that led them to your site. This helps you to discover what media channels, content marketing and keywords offer you the best resource for leads and inbound marketing.

If you have an ecommerce site this can almost directly tell you what your sales conversion and conversion metrics are. To be informed and make smart decisions for your website, understanding conversions for your site is crucial for success. Without using tools such as Google Analytics you can’t perform thorough keyword research or understand your conversions the way you need to and should to improve upon your site and drive traffic to your site.