What is social media?

Even your teenager would be able to answer this.

Face book, Orkut, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, WordPress or LinkedIn.

The latest buzz is the Google Buzz, The Search Engine Master too has augmented in the Social Media Segment.

No one wants to lag behind. Microsoft’s Bing, Yahoo and Google all have a hand shake with twitter, to milk the enormous market share, the micro-blogger posses.

What’s that makes Social Media site, The Head turner?

Man is a social animal; this traditional adage explains the human urge for social interaction.

Social Media Sites blazes into the masses due to their high accessibility and scalable publishing techniques.  It is a platform that connects you to the entire world, through text, images or videos.

The traditional forms of social Interactions transferred the media from ‘one-to-many’. Today the social interaction sites makes media reach from’ many-to-many’.

How it becomes a Media for marketing?

Social Interaction sites or Social Media sites slip the messages in; subtly, through the back door, very elegantly and diplomatically. It creates a ‘pull effect’.

It transforms the ‘content consumers’ to ‘content producers’.

Such a site opens a doorway, to your product, business, weblog or website. Then you form relationships with those coming in contact, by interacting with them.  The relationships have ample scope to reach to new levels, when people start following you or your content.

It comprehensively and judiciously integrates analytics, SEO, Banner Advertising, Flash Games, Widgets, Rich Media and Mobile Communication. If you can tune in with the possibilities this immense integration provides, you can certainly create Brand awareness and generate ‘leads’ and ‘sales’.

The flavors of Social Media sites:

Blogging sites,

Social networking sites,

Micro blogging sites,

Image sharing sites and

Video sharing sites,

The platter has variations to match your needs and keep you socially involved.

How the www has webbed around it:

Many new concepts and services have come up with the advent of social Media Sites.

With the marketing tools and concepts like social Media optimization, social media marketing and others, web marketers are leaving no stones unturned, to reap the immense business possibilities associated with social Media and Interaction.

Every day, we find a new feature coming up in the online scene, which magnifies the scope of business through such social media sites even more.

To exemplify a few,

Micro Blogging phenomena has given rise to URL shortening, Celebrity Tweeting , Account verification and many more such concepts.

A host of interactive games flourish through the Social networking sites.

A crowd of business concepts like, Bookmarking, content writing and Link building revolves around Blogging.

What some might consider drawbacks:

Time consuming, privacy invading and wrought with annoying marketers, a critic might find these as show stoppers for Social media market.

But when introduced to the nostalgic experience one has when you reconnect to someone in the past, even a loner would start acknowledging the benefits that come along.

Its like a room full of people, enjoying each other’s company, sharing ideas and contacts, with each other, playing interactive games. So what are you waiting for…? Join the party!

Unlike any other form of advertising, pay-per-click (PPC) requires a collaborative effort between different departments. Three groups are generally involved in an effective making of a PPC campaign. Content writers who will research for relevant keywords and, which will go to be included in the ads. The ad managers who will oversee the performance and relatives going into the bidding processes, and finally the developers who will help implement technical details like the tracking codes.

Content Management

To begin with, it would be ideal to separate content with search. The contextual listings, campaigns need to be viewed differently from search since the results and customers also differ in this online marketing scenario.

Eliminating unwanted and waste traffic is a necessity and essential step to lowering costs and improving conversions. Most major pay-per-click providers will let advertisers create lists of negative keywords, which would eventually reduce traffic. However, this amounts to the wasteful traffic which would have eaten into your purse without adding any conversions.

It is easy to get traffic, what with you standing on the right side of the first SERP. Persuading the visitor, however, to make a purchase is another story. It would be smarter if in some way the pay-per-click advertiser is able to weed out all unwanted traffic and pay only for those conversions he is able to make. It is very important to keep an eye on the costs per conversion. This will mean cost-per-conversion is more relevant for the advertiser than paying per click.

Ad-campaign Managers

One way to control spending, here is by adjusting bid amounts, and not daily budget spending. Very often the funds are simply not available and demanding; but, if the campaign is correctly optimized, the returns should justify any amounts of spending. Advertisers should carefully lower the bidding costs in order to reach the maximum number of target customers. Daily budget control based spending leaves a lot of prospective customers untapped.

Usually, the number one spot leads to a very poor return on investment. Mostly, traffic coming from the top positions are not buyers, but simply are researchers. Serious buyers will generally go to the third, fourth, or fifth positions. However, when the consumers are ready to buy, they will often come back.

Bid exact, use exact matching, eliminate researchers and go straight to buyers. The traffic will decrease, but conversion and online revenue should definitely increase. Double and triple the keywords by creating broad, exact and phrase matches for every keyword. Review the analytics, then gradually eliminate broad and phrase matches that generally result in lower conversion rates.

Analytics & Developers

A reliable analytics program is essential in managing a successful PPC campaign. It is the backbone of this marketing campaign, which will be able to determine many important factors. Analytics will enable you get costs per conversion rates, unwanted visitor data, negative keyword lists, figures relating to return on investments, and such other dependable analytical data.

Your PPC campaign has got all the ingredients to prove to be a breakthrough in your online marketing and advertising campaigns, provided you play a thorough and professional game. Careful analytics will highly compensate, and being innovative will help you effectively encounter any challenge.

Make no mistake. In the kind of ocean the world-wide-web is, it is essential that you learn to navigate if you do not want to get lost. Building a strategy for your online business is going to help you reach your destination easier and faster. In the absence of being strategic, most of these untargeted efforts would only prove to be a big waste of efforts, money and time. Not knowing your way, or the marks that you want to set are a huge disadvantage to begin with.

Looking strategically is big help

Strategy is a lot about how to think more holistically. It enables you to be innovative, lead teams while helping you deliver value tactically daily.  Shouting at people through television ads are actually days of the past when it comes to online marketing, and no more does this work like it used to. The consumers are really looking at different forms of consuming media, the social media scenario is a good example of this changing scenario.

Seeing what you would have otherwise missed

Normally, we are all on the ‘hit’ mode, and trying to work things out in order to generate value. We are constantly working out, planning and making our way through the thick and the thin of the day. Since we lose a strategic eye, there are a lot of instances, which come as glaring situations or opportunities that simply tend to pass by.

The big question is, when you are busy spinning the wheel and trying to get work done, are you really having the time to provide value to the organization?

You’ll miss the bus. This is why, being strategic gives you an opportunity to derive more of value in this marathon. This will mean, halting your daily grind, analyzing a consumer and finding what exactly are they looking for. Understanding the media and developing contacts with them, and giving them a clear picture of what your plans are all about. Looking at data to understand patterns, user behavior and other relevant feeds; this will mean that as a strategic thinker you are providing more value by increasing your customer list, and actively engaging, re-engaging and retaining customers.

Set aside time to think

Set aside time on a daily or weekly structure to think more holistically as a marketer should. Get to know what people really want from you. Marketing is not pushing or advertising products or services, it is about truly understanding what is important in a marketplace. It is a process of creating value in an industry which will eventually lead to obtaining customers and retaining them.

Take professional help

Consultants will be very helpful for strategically thinking over problems in any organization. Firstly, they provide a fresh set of eyes with a wide angled outlook for your business. They are capable and will be more objective about features, content and other aspects. They will externally analyze a business, an industry, and the customer, and suggest recommendations that you can implement.

Moreover, consultants are also tacticians who help alleviate your daily support needs. Whether it is managing communities, managing SEO or PPC campaigns and many other factor professionals can effectively address. The truth, however, is that they will be able to give you that free time, which you needed to think strategically. After all you know your business better than anyone  else ever can.

Your web strategy is crucial

Spend enough time developing your web strategy. It is very important to think strategically as businesses begin to evolve online. Understanding the growing online market is more important now than ever to make that difference which will set you apart. Your web strategy is what will chart your course and help you score for a long, long time.

• Don’t ever be penny-wise and pound foolish. Realize from a logical perspective, the cheapest SEO might turn out to be very expensive. Different people have different goals and values, it definitely would be wiser, to be wise.
• A good SEO worth the price would also be advising you on other aspects of your site apart from the SEO. The good page in all respects is able to do much more than the http://www.copperbridgemedia.com/services/.
• Make sure that your SEO also has a good social built up network, since a SEO who knows only SEO, is not a very good SEO.

Signing Your SEO Contract

• Every good SEO will definitely have a few valuable testimonials to back up, and must sound like what they claim to have. The reputation of any SEO probably is all that they have.
• When you buy an SEO you are paying for their knowledge, efforts and guidance. When you hire a good SEO, he should be able to prove this with good results. Many to SEO professionals will not sign contracts since most search engines are constantly changing their algorithms.
• It is very uncommon for a good SEO to sign a one time contract for a specified fee. Access to their servers must be essentially desired; so be very careful, coz looking for a good SEO might find you ending up with a bad one.

Pay a Good Price for your SEO

• The most important determining factor controlling the price for a good SEO is the amount of competition for the given category. Like a Diamond, Mobile, Prozac or a Casino website would come with tremendous competition. These types of extreme categories should cost thousands and thousands of dollars, and a regular upkeep fee.
• Extremely competitive markets most likely would require ongoing SEO, and fee for sustaining. Most web-sites do not target to gain in such competitive environments, as these could be highly priced campaigns incorporating ongoing SEO as well. Normally, local shops/businesses could be priced starting with $1000 and sound reasonable.
• A good SEO would want to see your site before quoting a price, since there is a wide spectrum of opportunities on the web, and a good SEO gets to see most of them.
• Price alone is never a function for good quality, hiring any cheap SEO is definitely bad, for many reasons.

The internet has made this world a free interactive zone, where people use various sites to stay in touch with their peers. While some sites are entirely community sites like Facebook, others serve a specific purpose like YouTube. But all of these sites attract millions of views from around the world.

But the search engines are the only web entities which attract even more views than the social media or Web 2.0 sites. That is because they cater to everyone and provide solutions for every problem. And that provides a great platform for advertisers to market their products or services.

When it comes to internet marketing, there are two major options – Search Engine Optimization aka SEO and Search Engine Marketing aka SEM. Both of these are helpful in achieving good business by leveraging the power of internet. But I have seen many people with a common question, as to which method is better.

SEO refers to the process of increasing the chances of a website to appear in the organic results of the search engine. It requires certain tweaks in the website which increases the relevancy of the theme of the website and that helps in better ranking. However, SEO is a time consuming process. It requires consistent work and takes time to show the results, depending upon the competition for the targeted keywords.

SEM on the other hand is a simple marketing concept, wherein you pay the search engines and they start displaying your advertisements. This method is highly recommended for those who are unable to appear in the top organic results due to severe competition. With SEM, your site can easily come and sit on the first page of the search results, of course considering the keyword competition and other factors.

So what’s best for you?

Your decision will entirely depend upon your business objective and your online marketing budget. If you want fast results and are ready to spend money, SEM will be best for you. But if you wish to generate quality traffic to your site and patient enough to wait for at least 3 months, SEO is the best strategy for you.

But in either case, I would first suggest that you consult a SEO consultant. The reason for this being he will provide you an accurate and effective strategy and also guide you through the entire process, if you are alien to these internet marketing techniques. So even you will get to learn new things while driving traffic to your site and earn a good ROI from online marketing.