Monitoring your Brand Online: A Case Study with VAMC

August 28th, 2010 Nice Blogger No Comments →

Search engines and social media websites can make or break a company nowadays. With millions of users frequenting Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and more than 1/3 of the world using Google to find information, businesses need to know how their brand is being portrayed online.
Online reputation management through social media websites and search engines is a constant job. How does a company keep track of their brand on these websites? Is it possible to sway consumer opinion through websites like LinkedIn and search engines like Bing?

Search Engine Monitoring

The last thing a business owner wants is for his or her brand to show up as a scam on Google results. However, this has been known to happen to legit companies who do a poor job of monitoring and managing their search engine presence. Avoiding consumer complaints could cause search engines to push the positive down and move the negative up.

Today, consumers are very trusting of reviews they see on the Internet. If a complaint is the first thing a consumer associates with a brand, they will quickly judge the product in an adverse way.

Getting Good Results

Designating an employee to constantly monitor their status on search engines is a good way for a company to manage online reputation. This employee would not only be in charge of monitoring, but also molding public opinion. Constantly throwing positive facts about his or her company in the media will counteract any bad complaints. However, more than one employee is needed. For example, VAMortgageCenter.com complaints are counteracted with customer and employee reviews, videos, and blogs. Another great thing this company manages is its search engine results through social media websites.

Social Media Management

VAMC is all over the web. They create their own review pages to overpower the search engine results. They also use the power of social media such as Youtube, Facebook and Twitter. They constantly update these pages with positive, useful information.

Besides those sites, VAMC has a growing relationship with bloggers. Their articles and ads appear on many blog and informational websites. They use review sites such as Glassdoor to maintain a good rating. They encourage their loyal customers to speak out about good experiences on such review sites.

Perhaps one of the most influential ways to manage a company’s online reputation is to invite disgruntled consumers and false complainants to contact company personnel. Invite them to do this in a public forum such as on Facebook comments and discussion boards. If a company has proof that what a reviewer is saying is wrong, there is no reason why a company employee cannot jump into the discussion and defend their brand’s honor.

In addition, try to persuade troublemakers to complain in the company’s territory. VAMC complaints are handled on their own website as much as possible. Instead of letting an angry consumer express their discontent on other reviews sites, VAMC utilizes their own review page as a leveled playing field.

Respond to complaints promptly. If a company notices complaints on the 24th, respond to the complaints on the 24th.
It’s Not Easy
Managing an online reputation is a continuous and ever changing process that can sometimes be tedious and downright discouraging. However, preparation and factual proof about a company’s brand can take a company to very high levels in the online world.

How to Create Content Specifically For Your Affiliate Product

July 3rd, 2010 Nice Blogger 30 Comments →

The Internet is sometimes called one big advertisement. It is true that, since the first web sites began to appear, web designers have realized the potential of web driven product sales. It may seem like an impossible task to join the fight to make online sales today. However, the door is still wide open for you if you can learn how to create content that is valuable to readers and how to create content specifically for your affiliate product. There are a few considerations that you must keep in mind.

Striking a Healthy Balance Between Promotion and Value

One of the worst things that you can do when creating content specifically for an affiliate product is to make the content one big sales pitch. Anyone that has spent even a little time hunting for products on the Internet knows exactly what such content looks like. It provides little information that is not opinionated and gives no real information. In fact, all it does is prop up a product or service as the best without giving a reason why.

Instead, use a writing technique called selective informational reviewing. This is the same technique that many documentary film makers and some news channels use to spin information. All that you need to do is write a review that gives solid information about the product without including a single opinionated statement. For example, compare the following statements. Both are intended to sell the product but only one is valuable:

Company Inc. is the best company out there for white bread.
Company Inc. bakes their white bread with all natural ingredients and old fashioned clay ovens.

Don’t Just Review – Reveal

One of the worst things that you can do on your web site is to just build an enormous review center. Generate content that not only promotes an affiliate product, but informs your readers about the product itself. For example, a reader might not know the benefit of choosing white bread made from all natural ingredients if they do not know the health benefits of doing so, the methods used to create such bread, the source of the ingredients, etc.

You might also consider creating some content about the history of bread baking to rank for the keyword bread (a challenge, yes) or inform your readers how much fresh bread can be when made like it was in the past. Pretend like your readers have no clue what your affiliate product is. The more information that you can include to increase the strength of your claims, the better.

If you are paying content writers to write your content for you, make sure that you are giving them the proper guidelines. If you expect a writer to just automatically know what to do then you are going to have a lot of issues with the content. If you want your content to be generated specifically for your affiliate product, then you need to let your writers know about that. Give them the details and goals that you have in mind.

The Fool-Proof Way to Fund Your Online Business

June 28th, 2010 Nice Blogger 19 Comments →

You need a solid business plan. For instance, what are you selling and how do you plan to market it? What are your overhead costs? This should be a simple, cost and profit balance sheet. On one side, list the money that you will need, and on the other side, list a profit estimate (if you have one).

When you have an airtight business plan, you leave little up to chance. You will need to make sure that you add six months of overhead (at least) to your cost sheet to enable your business to “float” if the profit isn’t flowing in.

This is where we start to talk about funding sources. Will you save in a savings account? Will you invest in stock? Find private investors?

The less money you require for start-up, the safer your funding choice can be. The safest and most conventional method is a savings account. These are not high yielding, but they are secure. If you need a lot of capital, you may have to resort to “riskier ” funding: stock investment with a high yield, or private investors. These choices have the potential to be high-yielding sources, but they can also be high risk.

Private investors like to see a “growth potential plan”, which reads almost like a job interview on paper. Where do you see your company in 3 years? 5 years? 10 years? How do you plan to make that happen? Make sure you provide examples of companies- like yours- who have been successful.

Funding an online business can be intimidating, but when you have an airtight business plan, it makes the overall process fool-proof.

Guest post by : Victoria of Ratelines.com, a financial portal of the best money market rates.

8 Advertising Techniques that Work

June 7th, 2010 Nice Blogger 37 Comments →

advertising1Whether your business is new, or it’s 10 years old, you’re always going to want to find new customers. We all know that word of mouth is going to be your best bet when it comes down to retaining previous, as well as new clients.

Now, you’re probably wondering what kind of advertising methods work in today’s technological era. I wanted to share 8 ways on how I advertise and how they have worked for me. I run a few online properties and have found that these techniques have always drawn in new business for me. In fact, sometimes, it’s too much! Do a good enough job and you won’t have to worry about finding new customers.

1 Get on Google Maps: People love to search for businesses on the web. With Google maps, you can verify your company. I would advise that you do so. Let’s say that you have a deck building company and someone searches for Atlanta, GA decks. You’re going to want to be there, right? The best thing is that it’s free!

2 Use PPC: PPC (pay per click) is one of my favorites when it comes down to advertising. I can target exactly who I want and the only time that I have to pay is when they click on my ads. All major search engines such as Google, Bing, as well as smaller ones such as Ask offer these services.

3 Brand yourself on Facebook: I love Facebook when it comes down to advertising. Not only does it work great for branding, it can draw a lot of awareness to your company. Create a fan page and either advertise that, or send them directly to your website. The coolest thing about this is that you can target specific audiences.

4 Craigslist: Be careful with Craigslist because you don’t want to spam here, but put up an ad every 3 weeks or so. Don’t make it look like spam and just explain what you can do. Always make sure that the title is catchy enough for people to click on it. Add pictures as well, because people love pictures!

5 Contribute on forums: No matter what industry you’re in, you’re going to find that there are message boards that cater to you. Join these forums and make it a habit to contribute at least 1 time a day. Don’t go there for the sole purpose of advertising, but rather, give information. Since many forum owners allow you to put a signature at the end of your post, take advantage of this!

6 Write for other bloggers: Find other bloggers that are in your niche. Let’s again say that you do decks. Well, it’s important that you have some sort of blog to keep your site fresh. Find other bloggers and write a little piece for them. In return, ask for a link back to your site.

7 Use old media ways: Google Adwords has a cool feature where you can advertise on TV, the radio, and more. All of these advertising platforms are still around. You will want to consider them, if your budget is big enough.

8 Send out press releases: Let’s say that you’re launching something cool and unique. Spend a few hundred on a good press release. This is going to be blasted out to many media outlets. If they like your story, you can get interviews galore!

Advertising, as well as branding takes some work. If you do a good job, people are going to keep coming back. This is why you’re always going to want to consider quality as well. Test out a few of these 8 tips and see how they work for you!

Guest post by Elizabeth Cutten. She contributes to FindBizCards, a business credit card / small business blog helping those owners with tips, tricks, and advice.

Top Five Essential SEO Tactics

June 3rd, 2010 Nice Blogger 36 Comments →

Many people are unfamiliar with the top SEO tactics for making their websites profitable. You need to be sure you follow these tips if you want your website to make money for months and years to come.

1. Keep It Simple, Stupid
The KISS rule is essential for success in the online business world. Spiffy Javascript and Flash effects may look nice, but they’re more difficult for search engine algorithms to understand, which will ultimately lower your page ranking. Because search engine optimization is all about tailoring your website to search engines, you want to make sure to keep your site simple enough for the engine to understand.

2. Content is King
Put lots of content together! Niche content is the best – simply defined as articles about things that everyone wants to know, that nobody already knows. Blogs are great, because they’re a regularly updated source of content. If you need to develop lots of high quality content, go through a freelance writers’ site and put out multiple requests – this way you can get a huge amount of content quickly.

3. Share Links
Send emails to the owners of established quality websites with similar content to yours and offer to share links. Chances are, as long as your site looks professional, like it’s going to make it big, they’ll accept, because they got where they are by sharing links. Search engines track how many sites link to yours, and use that to determine how valuable your site is.

4. Proper Sitemap and Meta Tags
When you submit your site to search engines, they will want to see that your site includes a sitemap that meets their search engine’s parameters, and that each page contains meta tags to help the engine categorize your site. The big engines like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft’s Bing all offer programs to help you figure out the most relevant meta tag keywords, so definitely make use of these.

5. Keyword Optimization
When you’re creating a page that you want people to “land” on from the search engine, you want to make sure that the keyword density on that page is sufficient. You can figure out the best keywords by downloading a keyword generator from Google or other engines. Once you know what your content keywords are, make sure your page contains a 1-3% keyword density – or 1-3 times per hundred the phrase is mentioned. This may seem small, but keep in mind that very high keyword densities often make your content unreadable. Trying to “game the system” often results in penalization by search engine algorithms.

Guest post by  Ratelines.com, find the best interest rates in the money market.

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