In May 2008 I did an interview about social media marketing with Muhammad Saleem. That’s right, four years ago! As I reviewed the content, I found it interesting how applicable the same social media strategy is today.

The thought came to mind:

Some things will change; but others will remain the same.

Then I found this picture:

As you can see, he’s made some “changes” (to the tune of about 70 total pounds lost)! Congrats to Muhammad.

The core strategies of social media marketing, on the other hand, haven’t changed too much at all.

Using Social Media effectively will DEFINITELY help your organic search engine rankings and recognition in the online communities.

However, if you “expect value without creating value” you’re going to FAIL and fail hard.

Interview with Muhammad Saleem about Social Media Marketing

5 Basic Social Media Steps anyone can use:

1. Building Relationships
2. Being a part of a community
3. Understanding the dynamics of different communities
4. Sharing the right kind of content
5. Voting and commenting on other peoples content

Social Media Manual: 10 Steps to take to become the Next Social Media Maven

Why Do you love Social Media?

The community aspects: you become a part of the whole process of submitting, voting, commenting, engaging and being a part of the process of opinion on things you’re interested in or passionate about.

3 Tips for Beginning to Intermediate Social Media Marketers

1. Understand the community before you start participating: what the age demographic is, what stories are popular, avoid mistakes
2. Build relationships with other visitors: talk to people, IM, comment on their stories, bookmark their stuff
3. Make sure your main goal is to not just promote yourself: create value for the community by submitting other peoples stuff, vote and comment on other peoples stuff, be part of the community, share content from other people to create value that doesn’t come directly back to you – it’s more than just scratching one another’s back – it’s bigger than that

How does effective SMO influence a website’s presence?

• Traffic, Traffic, Traffic: 10′s of Thousands of unique visitors, thousands of page views on a post
• Building links: hundreds to thousands of links – the more links you have, the higher you get ranked in search, which makes long-term organic traffic from search engines.

Thanks again for your information Muhammad. Stay tuned for more podcasting at MollerMarketing.com.

I had a Facebook friend ask me recently if keyword research was still important for online marketing.

Uh…

I wasn’t sure if they were being sarcastic or not so I just didn’t respond.

They followed up with this statement:

We’ve heard that SEO doesn’t really matter that much so we thought keyword research wouldn’t matter either.

That question and comment inspired me to dig into early blog posts. In 2008 I did a podcast interview with Mat Siltala of DreamSystemsMedia.com. Mat taught me most of what I know about keyword research and why its vital when starting an online business.

Here’s the podcast again. Some of the tools he mentions may not be the latest and greatest, but the gist of the interview remains true to this day.

Why is keyword research so important when it comes to marketing online?

• It helps separate you from your competitors
• It helps you learn what your competitors are doing
• It helps you determine who your target audience is

How do you determine which keywords are the quality ones?

Research your competition. Which keywords are they going after? Look at their title tags, content, links, etc. to see what they are using. Find variations of those words. Spend time on keywords that are targeted (niche), not the general phrases that everyone is going after. Targeted keywords tend to convert better too.

How do you use keywords to market your website online?

Keyword research is a key part of my marketing campaign. There are many different tools out there to use. Aaron Wall has a great keyword research too. Keyword Discovery has one. SEOMoz is pretty good. Wordtracker too. Using your competition can help you so much – you can develop more of a targeted niche, something to build the content around.

Once clients have done the keyword research, where do they put those keyword phrases?

• Anchor Text in Off-site marketing – links pointing people back to your site (ie. writing articles, press releases, blog comments, submitting to free and paid directories, and link sharing with related websites)
• Inside the content of your site
• If your site has 500 words of content, need to use specific keywords at least 5 times to show search engines what you are about.
• Blog posts
• Navigation
• Title Tags
• Header Tags
• Friendly URLs
• Alt Tags in pictures and links
• Meta tag title, description and keywords

Why is keyword research an ongoing process?

You never want to stop figuring out what are the best converting keywords. Just because you’re being found for one word doesn’t mean its the best one.
What analytics software do you recommend?

• Google Analytics

What are your websites?

RockyMountainMattress.com sells memory foam mattresses and custom mattresses.

Any other recommendations?

Understand that you’re competing with people that have been doing this for years. It won’t happen overnight. Take it slow, build quality content and links, figure out the right keywords and build trust and credibility.

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Have you ever thought about starting an online business?

What held you back?

Was it money? time? lack of experience?

Or were you just afraid someone might already be doing the killer idea you’ve had in your head for some time or that the market was “over saturated”?

Well, step up, do something, and watch this video to inspire you to continue doing what you’ve always done…

So here’s my new challenge:

Every time I talk to a prospect on the phone who has a “break-through” idea, something we’ve “never even HEARD of before”, the “next Facebook for ______ industry” – or whatever – I commit 110% to sending them a link to THIS VIDEO!

How do you think they will react? Think I’ll “close the deal”?

Have you ever caught yourself saying any of this?

This post was all in fun. If you want realistic help in starting an online business that will succeed, contact Moller Marketing today for a free consultation.

What’s an “Infographic”?

Why do companies even use them?

What help are they, especially for SEO and Social Media purposes?

We get these questions quite a bit and decided today is the day to answer some of them.

What’s an Infographic?

According to a Quora answer,

“…An infographic can be described as a collection of images, charts, visualizations, and text that illustrate an idea or position.  I generally like to think of infographics as more of a combination of other forms of data visualization than a separate form itself.”

Why do companies even use them?

This is a good question and can be summarized with 10 simple reasons:

1. Infographics make information more appealing.
2. Infographics show valuable ideas.
3. Infographics are attention grabbing.
4. Infographics are easier to understand.
5. Infographics lessen boredom.
6. Infographics awakens one’s interest in a topic.
7. Infographics are easily accessible.
8. Infographics can be more persuasive.
9. Infographics are memorable.
10. Infographics can easily relay information.

 What help are they, especially for SEO and Social Media purposes?

Look at this image one more time:

150, 91, 158, and 1,053. Those are the number of back-links for this infographic (not all are followable links but “word of mouth” can work wonders via social networks…).

Not only are we able to track with pretty good accuracy how many links an individual infographic is getting, but we’ve been able to see direct results in SEO placement for specific targeted phrases based on infographic campaigns.

Show me an example

Infographics can come in all shapes, sizes, and topics. They can be really informative, funny, or just plain informational. Here’s an example of a recent infographic, including some of the share numbers it got in just a short time:

If you like this infographic and would like to share it with others, simply copy and paste the code below on to your website and party on:

I signed up for Facebook in 2007 (much to the chagrin of my wife who assumed I was going to hook back up with old high school flames – which is what her little brother was doing at the time ).

Since that time, I’ve seen a lot of changes to the Facebook interface – some for the better and some that didn’t last very long.

The following infographic gives a pretty detailed timeline about the evolution of Facebook. Thanks for sharing!

What are things you like about Facebook changes?

What DON’T you like?