Let’s face it, one of the reason why most people fail to achieve their life goals/dreams, is the lack of commitment and lack of motivation. Well, guess what, Social Media can help! Social Media Platforms like 43things.com and superviva.com let you connect and share with people who are also seeking to achieve the same life goals as you.

Whether you’re seeking to “visit Australia”, “lose weight”, “become financially independent” or simply “be happy”, you can now track your progress along with other like-minded people. You can also ask for help from people who have achieved a particular life goal that you’re struggling with. Don’t forget to also give a few tips to people who are trying to achieve something that you already achieved. Good karma will come back your way!

“We cannot live only for ourselves.  A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men.” ~Herman Melville

In 2010, an even greater number of businesses are getting involved in Internet Marketing, realizing that the booming of Social Networking, Smart Phones and Search Marketing definitely transformed the Internet into an unbelievably huge pool of potential customers. However, we noticed that most clients aren’t looking at the big picture and still focusing all their budget/efforts in only one of the two major aspects of IM: SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or SMO (Social Media Optimization). The question today is: why sacrifice one or the other?

The truth is, Social media and SEO are now bound together like Ying & Yang! You couldn’t separate them if you tried! Today, you simply cannot do a good SEO job if you do not incorporate some Social Media into it, and vice versa… your SMO Campaign is bound to fail if you don’t do some SEO for your Blog/Page to get some Search Engine Traffic flowing and bring in additional views for your FanPage, Group and other SM profiles.

SEO has some advantages over SMO. For instance, if you’re able to reach the 1st page organically for your targeted keywords, you can pretty much sit back and enjoy all the incoming traffic while you just focus on processing orders and responding to inquiries about your products. SMO in the other hand requires constant effort to keep traffic flowing. Your friends/fans/followers are constantly talking and asking questions, so you need to stay on top of it and engage them on a daily basis if you don’t want them to look over at the competition. Also, if you solely focus on SEO and don’t pay attention on what users are saying about your Brand/Products in the Social Media Sphere, your 1st page rankings might turn out to be useless as you will experience low conversions due to the bad reputation that is spreading in the community.

Social Media Optimization has an array of advantages over SEO, one of them being: Quicker Results! Yep, while SEO can take months/years (depending on the niche) to show results, a good Social Media Campaign can bring you results within a few days (even hours!). Launch a good compelling message on Twitter and your followers might massively Retweet it, bringing you hundreds or thousands of additional views. Also, those followers/friends that own Blogs/Websites might even add a link to your site if they like the information you’re providing, bringing you additional SEO juice. Another advantage of Social Media Marketing is that it puts you in direct contract with the people, giving you the opportunity to listen to their needs/opinions about your products/services and enabling you to do effective Reputation Management.

As you can see, SEO and SMO complete each other perfectly. They both have positives and negatives but combined together in a strategic and carefully sculpted plan, they are the Molotov Cocktail of Internet Marketing and they can produce fantastic results for your business.

A lot has been written about SEO plugins for WordPress, but what about SMO (Social Media Optimization)? There are literally hundreds of plugins for SMO out there, but a lot of them are seriously unstable and haven’t been updated for months/years by their developer. Our team has tested more than 25 plugins designed to improve Social Media Presence, and here are the ones we thought you should definitely setup on your blog:

• Simple Facebook Connect: this plugin does a complete integration between your blog and your Facebook accounts. Not only can it post automatically to your profile’s wall, but it can also post to your Fan Page with 1 click. It also lets you add the Facebook “Like” Button to all your posts and/or pages.
• Disqus Commenting System: The Disqus plugin is a real work of art! It replaces  the traditional WordPress Commenting System with a Multi-Login SMO-Friendly Commenting System, allowing users to login using their Facebook, Twitter, OpenID or Yahoo Accounts. Comments load fast and in real time. Very cool plugin, and best of all: it’s totally free!
• WP to Twitter: It does what its title says: posting automatically from WordPress to your Twitter Account. It gives you a lot of customization options, such as how to display your titles, which URL shortener to use, what category of posts to publish to Twitter, etc… simple to use and does the job quite well!
• WP Tweet : this is a plugin that lets you integrate the “Tweet” Button, recently launched by Twitter! It has lots of customization options available. For example, it lets you decide to display the number of tweets beside the button or not.
• Sociable: last but not least… Sociable! No Social Media Optimization would be complete without a plugin that lets your users share an interesting post on all the major Social Bookmarking Platforms out there (such as Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Delicious, etc…). This plugin lets you choose which one you want your blog to support and how to display them.

In an effort to compete with Facebook’s famous “Like” button, Twitter has recently launched their long-awaited “Tweet” button. This cute little button lets you share links directly from the page you’re on. When you click on the Tweet Button, a Tweet box will appear, pre-populated with a shortened link that points to the item that you’re sharing.

If you’re running a WordPress Blog/Website, you should know that WP developers have been pretty quick at developing and launching plugins to allow the users to integrate this button to their blogs. We tested a few of them out, and here are our favorites:

• WP Tweet Button (from 0xTC) – with this plugin, you can implement this button automatically on all posts/pages and position it as you please. You can also style the button to your own taste in the settings page.
• Twitter Button (by  Svilen Popov) – also a nice plugin, lets you include Twitter Button in your blog using 3 methods: automatic, manual or by shortcode. Also lets you exclude it from pages where you don’t want it to appear.
• WP Tweet (by Pete Mall) – lots of customization options available. For example, it lets you decide to display the number of tweets beside the button or not.

Happy Blogging!

When it comes to choosing your keywords for a PPC campaign, any smart SEO professional will tell you that having a solid keyword strategy behind your campaigns is the key to achieving a high ROI. While short- and long-tail keywords each have their place within a tactical marketing plan, it’s important to know which will work best in regards to your particular niche and competition level.

When it comes to PPC and Internet Advertising, Marketers must understand that people are becoming very smart in terms of using search engines.  When the internet first started becoming widespread, the Web users weren’t very well educated about the search standards and advertising practices, but now they are! As the internet user is becoming more and more sophisticated, the conversion rates of short-tail and “generalized” keywords is quickly declining.In 1995, someone interested in buying shoes would have typed “shoes” on Google, hence the importance of ranking for short-tail keywords in that time. But today, what would that person type? Well, probably something like “buy tennis shoes in (city name)”.

The idea of long tail keywords is that the more words that are involved, the more specific they can be.  As we can see from the graph above, long-tail keywords (green area) present a lower CPC (Cost Per Click) and a higher Conversion Rate, compared to short-tail keywords (black area) who in contrast inflict a higher CPC and in return generate lower conversions. The explanation is simple: when people look at the SERPs, they tend to associate short-tail titles as being too general and pushed in there by their advertisers. They are more likely to look for the long-tail, which in return gives them more accurate results and less money-hungry advertisers.

When it comes to Organic SEO, the logic is the same. An SEO agency would charge you a lot of money to get you ranked on 1st page for short-tail and general keywords, while they would charge you much less if you target long-tail keywords. Think about this: if you had the choice, would you prefer to get 1000 visitors from general keywords, or 100 visitors from geo-targeted long-tail keywords? It’s a no-brainer. The latter will cost you less (in both Organic and PPC) and bring you more! (in terms of sales and/or leads)

It is expected that in 2010, 82% of all companies are planning to incorporate social media into their marketing  plans, are you among them?

In order to fully take advantage of what Social Media Marketing has to offer, you need a carefully planned Strategy. This strategy has to be mapped out based on your business niche, your budget and competition level. At IronMonk, we are experts at designing tailored SMO strategies for our clients, ranging from small to large scale businesses.

Social Media is at the forefront of Internet Marketing and today most companies already have a Facebook and Twitter account. However, only a few of them actually know what to do with it, and those are the ones who have a skilled Social Media Specialist to help them. A recent study from the Marketing Executives Networking Group ( MENG) reveals that most marketers are still in the early stages of adopting and measuring social media and that the biggest barrier to online success is precisely a lack of knowledge on how to implement these social media activities.

Some companies have experienced some fairly spectacular missteps in this new field, and mostly because they dived in without a social media strategy. It’s vital that every marketing and PR agency, and in-house practitioner, learns the new rules so they can correctly involve their clients and companies in the social media conversations.

To develop an effective and successful Social Media Strategy, you need to follow these critical steps:

1. Analyse the networks by listening to conversations
2. Set Goals / Benchmarks, what do you want to achieve?
3. Find Groups and Communities where your target audience is gathering
4. Develop and Rollout a Content Strategy
5. Identify your Evangelists / Influencers in the community
6. Offer giveaways / Develop incentives
7. Engage and facilitate conversations by asking questions / launching polls
8. Measure results and adapt your strategy based on what worked and what didn’t

For any further details, feel free to Contact Us.

As more and more Webmasters and Web Marketers are now using their iPhone to monitor their websites (and clients’ websites), we, at IronMonk, decided to write an article about the most popular iPhone apps for Search Engine Optimization and Web Marketing in 2010. Enjoy!

Analytics App

This app basically gives you all the data and reporting features that you get on Google Analytics. This app is free and very easy to use.

Features:

• Quick Overview Reports for at-a-glance data
• More Detailed Reports for deeper analysis
• Supports Multiple Accounts, Multiple Sites, change login anytime
• Change date range, chart granularity by Day/Week/Month
• Ecommerce, Events and All 20 Goal Reports

iSEO

This app contains a set of various useful tools in it. This includes,

• SERP Analyzer – Self explanatory, insert your domain name and the keyword to find its ranking in Google.com
• Inlinks Analyzer – You can find the link popularity of websites. It uses Yahoo Site Explorer to retrieve the number of inlinks for the websites.
• Web Directory – An updated list of web directories which can help you submit a link to your website to increase its link popularity.

SEO Search Ranking

Helps you to monitor keyword rankings for unlimited number of keywords.

Features:

• Unlimited websites
• Unlimited keywords
• Country-specific search results
• Multitasking – Continues to update your keyword ranking even when app is not active. (iOS 4 only)
• History of your keywords’ positions displayed in a simple and nice graph.
• Uses Google AJAX API, which allows unlimited usage. No fear of being blocked by Google like screen-scraping softwares will.
• Color coded latest ranking. Green for improved ranking, red for decreased and black for unchanged. See at a glance your website’s overall keyword ranking position.
• Supports only Google at the moment.

SEO Automatic

This is a very useful application, that provides detailed analysis of many onsite factors and server-side optimization. it also provides evaluation and alerts for 18 page element ranging from alt tags to xml. It identifies critical issues and even offers recommendations. One example is the URL canonicalization review, which is one of the most important issues that can affect SEO.

They have a free and premium version available. The free version provides all of the same organic ranking factors as the full report, while the premium app also saves your URLs andn reports. Also, as of June 5, 2010, the app lets you email the URL reports!

SEM Calculator

This application gives you multiple calculators which allow you to figure out everyday Search Engine Marketing equations. These calculators are also applicable for professionals who do online media buying of banners or emails.

It has a CPM calculator, CPM to CPA converter, CPL (cost per lead) calculator for email campaigns, and several others. Plus if you don’t know what all those abbreviations mean, it has the formulas defined. If you do pay-per-click (PPC) marketing, this is a great tool.

An overview of some of today’s search, ad, tech news

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Research firm Nielsen has released a study on how Americans spent their online time in June. Here are the main findings worth making a note of.

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How to incorporate search engine optimization into your companies and web ventures so they succeed. These principles, if integrated and committed to, will greatly improve your chances for success. …

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