As many in the online marketing field know, Bing and Yahoo are joining forces in the coming months to bring consumers a whole new way to search the web. Starting in either August or September, Bing organic results will begin to display in the Yahoo organic results. This means that if you have been enjoying high organic rankings in Bing, then you will now have comparable organic rankings in Yahoo. Mostly this merger will impact the paid search side of things with Yahoo advertisers migrating over to the Microsoft AdCenter platform.  According to some estimates between 25-30% of the organic listings found in Yahoo will be from Bing. Some may ask why the alliance and how can I optimize my website to rank better in Bing?

Well, over the past couple of years Yahoo has seen their market share of searchers decline. This same trend has been seen by Microsoft, but in the past year with the launch of Bing and the creative marketing strategies that they employed to get people to try Bing, Microsoft has been seeing some increases in usage. Both search engines are both still sub par to Google, but do offer different population segments to advertise too. The Yahoo and Bing Alliance is contracted for 10 years and slated to bring the best of both search engines to the table. There are high hopes of cracking the semi-monopoly that Google has on the search world through this joining of competitors.

Now you might be asking how can I make sure that my website still is ranked high in both Yahoo and Bing? Well here are some tips to optimize for both Bing and Yahoo:

Signup for Yahoo Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Tools. By setting up Yahoo site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Tools for your website, you will see what the search engine spiders see when they index your site. These webmaster tool platforms will show you areas that you might need to change to gain precious rankings. Bing recently launched a new webmaster tool platform which allows for more insight to what Bing spiders see when they index your website.

Follow proper SEO techniques. They are still search engines, so following proper meta tag implementation and making sure your on-site content is appropriate and keyword rich is still very important.

Check Your Robots.txt File. Be sure to check your robots.txt file to ensure that access is granted to MSN/Bing bot. If it is not, then you might be turning away the Bing spider and possible higher organic rankings in Bing.

This new alliance of Yahoo and Bing is a good thing for the search and online advertising world. Just be sure you are prepared and not left in the dust.

Social media and social networking gives business owners the opportunity to reach a larger audience at a low or no cost aside from the time spent networking.

As business owners we’re always looking to find ways to maintain our social media presence as efficiently as possible whilst still allowing us time to manage our other business activities. Below are 7 time saving tips we would like to share with you that might help you save time and create an effective social media marketing plan.

1. Understand your purpose and have a plan

Before jumping into social media set aside some time to think about specifically what you hope to get out of it. Perhaps it’s to increase traffic to your website, gain brand recognition or to maintain relations with your customers. Since time is limited it’s important to know what your purpose is, how you will approach it.

2. Understand what social media is all about

It’s important to understand what social media is, learn the etiquette and the do’s and don’ts before jumping in. You don’t want to create a negative image for your brand. Take the time to get familiar with the various social media sites, connect with other users and learn how the sites work. One of the biggest mistakes is to jump into social media and start promoting your product or service right off the bat. This will tend to create the impression that you’re only interested in selling and not the conversation or the people who are following you.

3. Targeting specific sites

Another common mistake new users make is to sign up for an account on as many social media sites they can find. You’ll never be able to keep up with all of them and you’ll be spreading yourself too thin. Focus on a just a few sites and plan to be an active and consistent user. You’ll see far greater results!

4. Use Twitter

Twitter is a great way to connect with your target audience with fast and instant results if you have a product launch, event, teleclass, etc and need to market it to a large group quickly. Being active on Twitter doesn’t mean you need to create an account and follow a lot of people or send out tweets about anything and everything. Start by following people and replying to their tweets, start conversations, see who’s following them and if they fit in your target audience/niche follow them. When you have a new product/service/blog posting share it with your followers. As you make more connections and gain influence your results will improve by generating more traffic to your website or clicks to your links.

5. Target niche-specific social media sites

Niche-specific social media sites are on the increase and these sites provide a smaller community of targeted people that you can get your content to. You’ll find a higher percentage of people on these sites will fall into your target market and produce greater results.

6. Cultivate your network

Your network determines the success of your social media marketing. Get to know people in your niche, see who is promoting their content, and reach out to them about the possibility of helping each other.

7. Schedule times for social media

The best way to manage social media is to schedule a set block of time to use social media. It could be 30 minutes a day or 3 times a week. By having set times it can help you to keep your usage down and still be active. Once you decide what’s right for you stick to it!

Do you currently have social media marketing methods that you use to help you save time and still be an active member of the social media community? If so, we would love to hear what works for you!

Measuring social media success is a hot topic for most companies these days as people see the need to include social media as a part of their marketing strategy yet at the same time they are not quite sure what metrics matters when looking to measure ROI.

It is important to know what it is we want to measure before we engage. Doing so will allow us to define a strategy and plan to support activity that helps us reach our goals and objectives.

What is it we want to change, improve, accomplish, etc? Do we want to get more sales, registrations, referrals, links, reduction in costs and processes, better customer retention, lead generation, conversion, etc.

Revenue is only one form of measurement, but defining the “R” in ROI will help us get clarity on our business goals and performance indicators. Some value we should consider as a return are:

• Measurable and incremental sales – through coupon codes, cookies, etc.
• Customer Insight – feedback from customers about your brand
• Customer Satisfaction – how happy customers are with your brand, product or service
• Engagement – growth in fans/followers who receive ongoing social communication from you
• Referrals – people’s willingness to recommend your product or service to others
• Campaign Success – feedback from customers about future campaign launches that help prevent bad ones
• Filter to other marketing efforts – willingness of people to participate in your other marketing efforts such as email list, surveys, website, mobile, etc.
• Brand Awareness – value to your brand by reaching out to customers and ensuring you do better than your competitors

Are you considering using social media for your brand? Do you have a set of metrics that you use to measure performance? If so, we encourage you to share with us your pains and success stories as the measurement of Social Media ROI continues to evolve!

You’ve probably read a lot of articles that strongly recommend you have a strategy plan before jumping into the Social Media realm. Whilst having a plan is always a good thing, the truth is we still don’t know enough about social media and how people will react to be able to design an effective strategy plan.

Conversely, we should try experimenting with new, creative and interesting ways to engage with our target audience. If you are a large or well-known organization with well-established brands you should proceed with a little bit more caution with any experiments. There is a potential you could negatively impact your brand.

There is nothing carved in stone to say doing it one way is better than another. It is through experimentation that we will learn and uncover what works best for our company and brand. The old adage comes to mind, “No Risk, No Gain”!

Social media is about the moment and what everyone is talking about which makes it hard to predict and plan ahead. You need to jump into the conversation that is viral at any given time. If you have a clear and compelling brand and the discipline to maintain it across the different social media platforms, the conversation just flows naturally.

By not having a specific or rigid social media plan it also means we can be more flexible in empowering employees to engage with people through social media and act as ambassadors for our brand and product.

Companies should be engaging in some sensible experimentation to figure out whether social media is right for their business. Depending on the type of business you’re in, you might discover that your customers prefer not to do business with you in an online social environment.

Are you using Social Media for your brand? Did you have a Social Media Strategy Plan from the start or did you experiment with different things till you found the right strategy that works for you and your brand?

Unless you went out and purchased someone else’s blog there’s a very good chance that there is initially only one loyal reader of your new blog – you!

Here are the top 6 ways to increase your blog traffic for new bloggers who have near-to-no audience at the moment and would like to get a jumpstart on things.

1.      Write more solid articles – the single most important thing you can do to get your blog noticed and increase your readership is to have solid articles in place. Aim for one solid article per week and at the end of the year you will have a database of more than 50 feature articles that will bring in more readers.

2.      Submit your articles to EzineArticles.com – a great strategy is to submit your articles to article directories such EzineArticles.com. To increase the visibility of your blog, you don’t want to go chasing the traffic. You want to find out where the traffic is and get yourself in front of it. EzineArticles.com has 30+ million unique visitors a month searching for articles in specific categories for your specific information. This is a great way to connect with your target audience.

3.      Submit to blog directories – whilst this tip might not bring you a ton of new readers, it’s easy to do and only take a few minutes so it’s worth the effort. Go to Blog Top Sites and find the category that fits your blog and submit it. Then copy and paste a couple of lines of code to your blog so you can rank and that’s it. Over time you’ll see your blog climb the rankings creating another source of traffic for your blog

4.      Encourage comments on your own blog – when you can show that you have loyal readers on your blog this convinces someone to become a loyal reader as well. If they see people commenting on your blog they will conclude that your content must be good. You can encourage comments by posing a question in a blog post. Remember to always respond to comments so you keep the conversation going.

5.      Start commenting on other blogs – one way to find the right readers for your blog is to aim to comment on other blogs with a similar niche topic to yours. Chances are the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog.

6.      Use a proper domain name – be serious about what you name your blog. Something that’s easy for people to remember makes it easy for them to spread the word about your blog. A .com is always your best choice if available and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than having the correct keywords. If you can manage to make the keywords work in the domain name that’s also easy to remember then that’s the ideal.

I hope this has given you some food for thought about getting some traffic to your new blog. If you’ve used other methods that have proven successful for you, please send us a comment. We’d love to know!