Doesn’t matter what you think of Obama or how you voted in this election, you have to give it to him, he knows how to use new media to get his message across.

JPL is using Twitter to to relay information about the Mars Phoenix Lander to us earthlinks.

Yup! You read the title of this blog entry correctly! Here they (marketing VPs) go again. Forum One Networks found in a recent study that 33% of those polled indicated that their budget for social media marketing is $100k to over $1 million dollars (yes…$1 million…as in Dr. Evil!) Of that, 33% claimed budgets of over one million dollars.

I attended Digital Hollywood (you can check out my coverage by watching the EXPOzed Podcast) and learned a lot about monetizing your content, however, it seems that most people feel the only way to monetize your digital content, that is, your web videos, podcasts, blogs, website content, etc. is to get sponsors and/or advertisers.

YouTube is now offering a new demographics section in their Insight analytics for YouTube. Log into YouTube.com, click on “my account” and under Performance and Data Tools, click on YouTube Insight.

If you use social networks for business, then you need to check out Sometrics, a startup that gives you analytics for your social networks.

Check out this great Landing Page Optimization class by CKI Studios and I believe co-sponsored by Google.

1) Try to have more links coming into your site then going out. The more relevant sites linking into you will help rank your site better. I understand that’s not always possible since most people won’t want to link into your site unless you link back to them, however, if your business has partners that really want to do business with you, or vendors that you do business with, perhaps you can make it part of the “contract” between you and them that they must link into your site without your company returning the favor.

2) Large number of RELEVANT incoming links is key to proper website ranking, not just a large number of links. Do not get every website out there to link into you. Only websites that are relevant to what you offer on your site should be linking into you. For example, if you are a homebuilder, then sites that cover “new homes” in different locations or sites that talk about “home remodeling” or sites that talk about moving to a geographic location are more relevant to your business then sites that sell Nintendo Wii. Relevance is key, not company size. So if Nintendo links to your new home site, yes, you will get lots of traffic, but it will not help your ranking with Google because it has nothing to do with homes and the traffic that you get, though large, may not be relevant traffic that will turn those visits into actual conversions.

3) Links from influential sites are better then links from none-influential sites. Suppose you have a choice between two companies to get a link from them to your site. Company #1 is a large fortune 500 company with many employees, lots of yearly sales and a large (in terms of # of pages) web site. It has information that is relevant to your site. Let’s also assume that it has 100 incoming links from other external sites to it. Company #2 is a small business, managed by 10 people, also has relevant information to your site but the site is not as huge (in terms of pages) as yours. However, let’s assume this site is very well known on the Web with many (thousands of) incoming links from external sites to it. It would be more beneficial to your site to get an incoming link from Company #2 then Company #1 because it has many more links going to it and therefore Google would consider that website more “influential” and therefore, it would consider your site more influential (links wise).

For any of you that are not aware, there is a magazine called “Website Magazine” that covers the Website industry pretty well.

The May 2007 issue is out in digital format and covers everything SEO. A must read for any of you managing your site or helping others manage their site.

Read it here:
http://www.websitemagazine.com/scripts/sub/digital.aspx?issue=7

Cheers!
- Marcelo

So I was asked by our eMarkeging team to go ahead and implement a 301 redirect for sheahomes.com to redirect to www.sheahomes.com. Why would you want to do this? The basic and quick answer is because the more “domains” you have, the more your presence is diluted on the web.

So if a customer searches for Shea Homes, they should immediately (and hopefully within the first page), get www.sheahomes.com. Some search engines will think of sheahomes.com and www.sheahomes.com as 2 separate sites and that can dilute the search results.

Anyhow, so I did some research on Google and found a quick an easy way to implement this. Since we are a Microsoft Windows 2003, IIS 6 back end, I found out how to implement this 301 redirect at the IIS level (web server level). You can easily do this if you have access to your server, or you can contact your web host and ask them to do this for you.

First things first. After you log into your web server, bring up IIS either by going to “Start–>Programs–>Administrative Tools–>Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager” or by going to “Start–>Run–>Typing inetmgr and hitting enter”.

As a company, you need to think of your online marketing efforts (aka emarketing) as “expanding the reach of your web presence” beyond your website. In order to do this, you, as a business owner, marketing person, or whatever your title is, need to see the entire Internet “as your web site” and need to start crafting and forming your message wherever you are mentioned online.There are many avenues that you can use on the Web to “craft” that message and help extend the reach beyond your web site. Below is just a sample of ideas that you can use to help bring in more traffic to your site, but think of this is as just the “tip of the iceberg”. I’m sure there are plenty of ideas / sites I neglected to mention here due to time, space and/or not knowing about it.

Google is your best friend. Research, research, research and read lots!

Good luck on your eMarketing endeavors.

BLOGS:
Blogs are extremely hot and are great for building trust with your prospects and customers. There are many companies that have blogs that talk about their products, tips and tricks, etc. You can start an “expert blog”, that is, experts within your organization that would like to blog about your industry, be it commentary, news, tips and tricks, etc. All of this information would be indexed by search engines and make your company and website come up in the rankings. All the blogs could end up pointing to your company web sites.

Social Networks are taking off and I’m not just talking about MySpace, Facebook and the 10 billion other that are out there.

Oh no, I’m talking about businesses realizing the power of social networks, both as a marketing tool, as an SEO helper and also as a brand extension.

What’s more powerful then your own customers talking about your product, both good and bad. So NBC.com is jumping on the Social Networking bandwagon.

Check out www.nbc.com/Social_Networking/

They are centralizing all “user generated” content into this area, including blogs, groups, message boards, etc.

Ladies and gentelmen, this is the future of YOUR marketing in YOUR company. Embrace it now. Jump on it now. Or you will be left behind and then you’ll have to play catch up.

Ok, so at first, I thought what a stupid idea, a site where you just log in and answer one question and one question only, “What are you doing now?”. How lame! Well, 1 week later and 100 entries later, I’m pretty much addicted to it.

And I have friends that follow me and “What I’m doing now.” Oh yeah, I also follow other people. I’m a loser right? Wrong!

Social Networking is the hottest thing on the Web now. Why? Because we are social beings. We need contact, physical, emotional and, yes, virtual!

So why is Twitter so popular? Curiosity perhaps? I want to know what you are doing all day every day. Sure. But there is another take to Social Networking and to Twitter itself that lots of people are overlooking, the ability to use it for business!