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What are the problems that non-English speaking bloggers are experiencing in the process of blogging? They are many, but the two most frequently recurring challenges are the following:

1) Not sure which language they should use to blog – should they use their native language and have a smaller potential readership or to blog in English where their readership could be much bigger, but where they face challenges in writing as well?

2) Another downturn is when they are feeling isolated from other bloggers – many of them reflected that at times they felt that they were not taken as seriously by bloggers in other parts of the world and found blogging difficult.

If you are a non-English speaker, you may still write your blog in English, because you find it much easier to write about technology-related news and reviews in this language — especially when the majority of your readers are from the USA, UK, etc. There is definitely lot more competition for your blog if you chose to write in English and you should think carefully about what content you are going to post on your blog and then choose your niche.

Not a bad idea is to blog in both languages – your native and English, and have every article posted in both languages. Probably you should put a lot more work into this, but it’s a good idea anyway.

Actually, non-English speaking bloggers have to ask themselves two questions: what is my goal and what is my audience? If you blog for people you want to make business with at a local or national level, then blog in you native language. At the end of the day, the whole point is to be understood. Otherwise, you cannot expect to build a blog community. And of course if you blog for an international audience, then you must chose English.

According to many bloggers’ experiences, you can blog either in English or in your own language as soon as your goals are clear, people understand what you have to say, you have good content — rich, interesting, colorful, you know your readers and their needs and you answer to it. In any language, blogging is the same and you have to keep up with the same rules.

Of course, when someone writes in some dialect from a remote place, he/she will never get an audience of million readers. Nevertheless, probably this answers the needs of a handful of local readers and everybody will be happy about that.

The best advice to bloggers would be to write in the language you feel most comfortable with, because this gives you the widest range of expression and the least errors. This way you will probably get a loyal audience much quicker, even if it turns out it is not that huge.

On the other hand, when you have good reasons for blogging in English, such as wanting a larger share of international traffic, but your English is not that good, you should probably try to collaborate yourself with somebody whose English proficiency is much better and have him/her to proofread your posts for corrections before posting.

At the same time, bloggers who post blogs in English, but their niche is more or less locally oriented, will lose their local audience big time, especially where English is not one of the languages traditionally studied at school or otherwise.

In order to monetize their blogs, many non-English speakers are starting their blogs in English with the risk we already have mentioned above. Bloggers who are non-English speakers writing in English are probably millions, and nobody can underestimate their role and contribution to the global blogosphere.

Learn how to make money blogging today. Visit Brian’s website, http://www.HomebasedBlogging.com and learn how you can make money online from blogging and receive free blogging help.

As a business owner, you were probably quick to identify the need for a properly designed and well maintained company website, one that will provide your business with affordable marketing opportunities, help increase sales, and generate new business. You may have gone one step further, establishing a blog with the hopes that frequent posting to the blog will lead to increased exposure of your products and services to new clients. Blogs are invaluable tools for company employees, allowing them to post new articles, videos, press releases, and pages to a website. However, very few businesses are given proper advice or support when it comes to efficient ways to use a blog for business growth, sales, and lead generation.

There is a clear divide that most businesses face when it comes to internet marketing. Most companies find themselves, knowingly or not, increasing the amount of time and effort spent marketing online without generating any significant increase in relevant traffic that will result in new sales. This problem is mostly due to the fragmentation of the website services industry. When you hire a website design and development firm, there is a very good chance that the firm does not understand the importance of internet marketing. They may setup your blog in such a way that it’s practically worthless for the real power and purpose of blogging, which is website traffic and lead generation. Conversely, when employing an internet marketing solution or trying to do it internally, many of the people actually working on your online marketing lack proper website design and web development knowledge. You may, again, find yourself with blog content that does nothing more than take up space and does not result in exposure for your business.

The biggest culprits behind wasted blogging efforts are the online, free blog solutions. Many companies are either sold a free solution by improperly trained website and internet marketing companies or ask employees to establish them, not realizing the loss of productivity that will result. Free blog solutions lack several key benefits that properly developed and integrated blogs do not. Important tools, such as automatic link distribution and site cross-linking are typically not available. The bulk of your product, services, and marketing materials are generally not visible to visitors who click through to read an article on an external blog. Additionally, the majority of free blogs are hosted outside of the company domain and fail to provide fresh content associated with your website, which is extremely important and valuable for a company when it comes to search engine positioning.

Secondary blogs on free solutions, established outside of your company domain with alternative content, can be beneficial for SEO and page rank purposes. However, the primary blog for your business should always be properly hosted on your own website domain, linked correctly from your website navigation, and completely integrated into your existing website. If the URL to your website starts with a URL similar to azmassageforwellness.com, your main company blog should be referenced from within a sub-directory of that site, such as azmassageforwellness.com/blog. It should also be developed using recent, feature-rich blogging solutions such as the open source blog application WordPress. Finally, the blog should be a total integration, with blog pages sharing few differences in heading, navigation, and footer from your main website. Website developers that realize the importance of page rank, relevancy and online marketing will follow these guidelines to integrate blog solutions for your company that provide a deep set of features and support easy to use Plugins for SEO and link automation.

The reason all of this is important deals with the way search engines index and rank your website. When going through the pages on your site, a properly integrated blog appears to a search engine as part of your website. Every post that is made through the blog becomes an additional page of content for ranking purposes. Search engines love fresh content. The more fresh content you have, the more relevant your website appears to search engines and you will rank higher in search results and generate more new business as a result. It takes time, but after 100 or 200 good blog posts, your website should begin to see some significant benefit in search engines.

There are additional factors to consider when posting to a blog, outside the scope of this article, which are important to consider. A good internet marketing solution will provide you with training and will support your efforts by identifying effective keywords to use in posts. You should be provided tips that will help establish your blog in the community, giving you recognition as an expert in your field. Your website team should help you to identify ways to distribute your content and get your blog posts linked out to other websites. Finally, there should be a good level of customer support and interaction between you and the website team that designed your blog, so that you understand the most effective ways to utilize your blog and get the most value from your time invested.

A properly developed and utilized blog can be the most effective tool available for you to generate traffic and increase search engine positioning for your website. If you haven’t already, be sure to search for and consult with a comprehensive website design, development, and internet marketing firm. One that can provide a variety of effective solutions that work together to increase sales for your business.

To contact me or learn more about my business, visit: Affordable Website Design

Andre Morris is the President of my PC Techs. For more information, visit his website: Website for Andre Morris

What You Will Learn By Reading This

This article covers getting your own blog, finding great FREE content for it, how to get interviews from famous designers for your blog, setting up a list and driving traffic to your site. Read on, o great one!

Be A List Rock Star In No Time

Why, you say? Why should I get a list? Well, one, your opinionated right?

Get Your Own Megaphone, & Force The World To Listen To You

Ok, starting from scratch, you are a creative person. All creative people, you, have big strong opinions. These opinions can hurt you and help you! The best thing to do if you cannot shut up is get your own megaphone, a blog, for instance. If you go to http://www.blogger.com and you can get your own free blog. This way, you can start writing about your passion, graphic design, typography, layout, fonts, advertising methods and marketing, photography, etc.

Get Your List On

Starting a list can be hard. Basically you need to have really relevant content for your audience. Websites they have never seen, books they don’t know about, podcasts they would love, other designers they can get inspiration from. You get the idea. Inspire, communicate, create a community.

The Three Steps To Fame & Fortune In Design & Advertising

1. Go to http://www.Blogger.com and set up a free blog. Or go to http://www.godaddy.com, get a domain name, then go to http://www.bluehost.com and get hosting. Then, go to http://www.wordpress.org and install your new blog on your own site. If you don’t know to do any of this, stick with blogger.com for now or http://www.typepad.com or something. A simple blogger platform.

2. Write 15 or so posts on your new blog, the contents. Link to other authoritative blogs in your area. One such site is Brand Nu out of England. Look him up. I think it’s http://www.brandnu.co.uk

He is amazing. Become friends with him.

3. Go to http://www.technorati.com and research what others are writing about. Comment on their blog and exchange links with them. Add them to your blogroll or link bar on Blogger. See traffic grow.

4. If you have a website, but no list, you should start using http://www.aweber.com, which is a free auto responder. It will help you put up forms like the opt-in one to the right of this article. See it? The one with the headline? This is how I capture opt-ins.

The main benefit to the opt-in list is that they get certain products I am working on for a big discount, and they also get more targeted, very specific advice and secret website links to boost their graphic design business.

5. Get Relevant content to your list. How? Contact other designers and advertisers and ask to interview them. It’s simple. Go to their site, email them and ask for a quick interview by email.

TIP: Email the questions for the interview in the same email that you ask them for it.

This makes it easy for them.

TIP 2: Do not ask more than 8 questions.

I’ve already contacted Radim from Brand Nu and he has agreed to be interviewed. Do the same thing. Drive traffic to your site this way. Also, go to http://www.Goarticles.com and http://www.Ezinearticles.com. and get free articles to put on your blog about your niche topic.

There you go!

Lawton

Lawton Chiles Chiles Design

-> Who Is Chiles Design?

Chiles Design focuses on getting your business specific, measurable results from advertising ad campaigns, copywriting, and graphic design. Using these three mediums together, Chiles Design accomplishes one thing: Creative more money from your advertising, and elimiates the guesswork on whether or not you are actually making money from that ad in the paper or the commercial you did, or the radio spot.

—> Benefits of Hire Great copywriting, headlines, bullet points, subheads, captions and copy that does not demand anything, but copy that eases the reader who wants to buy anyway into picking up the phone, cutting out a coupon, or coming in for a sale.

Designs that compliement the ad, not distract from it.

Only a few people have studied the direct response ad masters. Chiles Design is one of the firms that has.

Please contact me today at lchiles@gmail.com or [http://www.songsblog.com]

Simply call me at 850.728.0212 and we can just talk about your needs and desires for your business.

Lawton Chies

If you are new to the world of online dating, free black Christian dating may be the way you plan to go. There is no doubt that these sites can be an excellent opportunity for you to save time and money and still connect with others on the web who you want to connect with. Some free dating sites have all the same features of paid sites for none of the cost. Take a few minutes to consider all of your options in dating sites before you commit to just one.

Why Date Online?

There are many reasons that people are turning to the web for black Christian dating. Your inner circle of friends may offer no opportunities. You may be interested in a person who is not affiliated with your local church or neighborhood. Rather, you may be after someone that is unique and special, someone you just have not found yet. When you turn to the web, you have far more options than you would locally, to find that person that fits your needs. The fact is, on the web, there are far more people who could possibly be that perfect person.

Be Careful

There are some that are outstanding free black dating sites; however, you do need to seek them out. Some of these websites provide you with an excellent opportunity to find others and give you tools to help that process. On the other hand, some only provide a forum where just about anyone can leave a message in the hopes of finding someone else. As a Christian, you might need more information before you contact anyone.

Look for people that you know are going to mesh with you. They should share the same Christian beliefs that you have. They should be passionate about their experience as you are. They should be looking for the same type of relationship that you are. All of these may seem like small factors but they do add up in the end. For those who are looking for a successful relationship, what is critical is having the ability to find a person that you could see yourself with. If your local area just does not seem to offer this, then look beyond that area in the web.

Free black Christian dating sites are one of the best options for this. The more dedicated you are to finding those people who fit your goals, the more successful you will be in finding a person to spend the rest of your life with. Black Christian dating does not have to be difficult to do when you use a service that offers plenty of options in people who come from all walks of life and share the beliefs that you have.

Monica Jones works for BlackChristianDatingForFree.com, a Free Christian dating service for African American Black Christian singles. Our site features the fastest growing database of Black Christian singles online. This site is and always will be 100% free of charge – we will never ask you for a credit card so put away your wallet. You can immediately begin searching our quality African American Black Christian personals but you must register to contact any of the singles that you want to commute with. Once you register your free dating profile you are good to go.

If you are a local business that depends on traffic to your store or website and you have a limited budget for advertising, there are a couple of things you should be doing to generate visibility for your company.

First, go to Google and set up an account. Once you’ve done that you’ll notice that you have access to a bunch of tools (No, I’m not going to tell you to set up an AdWords account). In Account Settings, there is a link for local business listings called Google Places that will allow you to set up a profile for your business on Google. There are two really great advantages to Google places. The first advantage is that the listing is free; it costs you nothing to list and nothing to maintain. Once you’ve listed your business you can watch the traffic to your website generated by your listing on your Google Places dashboard. You have a website right? Second, assuming you set up the keywords correctly, your business will appear on the main page of a Google search under local business listings, organically. Organically means that you showed up in a search without having to pay money.

Here’s a link: http://www.youtube.com/googleplaces

If you haven’t already set up your Google Places listing, stop reading right now and go do it. Now that you’re generating additional traffic to your site as well as your physical location, you’re going to want to keep in touch with your awesome clientele. To do that, you’re going to need their contact information. Place a contact form on your website for your potential and existing clients to fill out if you don’t already have one. For incentive, run a promotion like offering 10% off your next purchase for joining the mailing list. Get creative here; make sure you’re offering something that people will want when they come to your location. Once they fill out the form properly, you can send them their coupon and you have an instant list of people interested in your goods or services. From here, you can send out your e-mail updates, newsletters, sales, or additional offers as you see fit. You also have the option of placing coupons and special offers directly on your Google Places listing, which is all fine and dandy if you’re content to run your promotion that way. Whatever you decide to do to generate traffic to your business, just remember to have fun with it.

Chris Bishouty is the President of Blue Flame Studios, a video production and distribution media group that develops creative, corporate, and direct response productions from script to any screen. Visit us now at http://www.blueflamestudios.com, and register to get your FREE Blue Flame Studios Rate Card for short form video productions.

Website Heatmaps, is a concept, which is often heard but not-that-often used web tool to analyze your website or blog. It is a simple concept to analyze the most click-able segments of a web page. The purpose of heatmaps is to optimize the website for better revenue generation. Most of the webmasters, specially those handling small and medium size websites and blogs, know its importance, yet often overlook it. The reason being unavailability of an affordable and reliable heatmap builder for their websites. In this post, we attempt to let its readers benefit from this concept and introduce some cool free website heatmap generator services.

Let us stat by understanding…

What is a website heatmap

It is a term, which has been borrowed by the Internet community from Molecular Biology, where it represent the level of expression of many genes across a number of comparable samples (e.g. cells in different states, samples from different patients) as they are obtained from DNA micro-arrays. [Source: Wiki]

However in the Internet and web parlance, a website heatmap is a schematic representation of a web page through multi-colored areas, which show where people look the most on a web page. For an publisher or advertiser it tells you the place your ads are likely to be most effective.

Why you need to generate it

Everybody thinks that he has created a perfect design, when websites are concerned. But it is often just a perception. The perfection of a web page design can only be judged by a web tool, which is able to gather information about what the readers of a web page are actually seeing, and more importantly clicking. Since the purpose of every web page is to give maximum exposure to its content, it becomes highly important to place your content in such a location, which generates maximum impact.

This aspects becomes highly critical in case of websites or blogs, whose purpose if revenue generation through clicks. The web master will like to know, which are the hot spots on their web page and where people click most.

How to build a website heatmap

There are many heatmap building services available. But most of them are paid services, and if they offer you free service, it is limited to only few features. Two of the most popular heatmap generator applications are Fusestat and CrayEgg but they charge for their service handsomely. Although they also offer free services, with limited features / traffic, but these limits are so stringent that websites within that limit rarely bother about heatmaps.

The free heatmap generators

However, I have come across at least two services, which are free and give satisfactory results for medium sized websites.

First one is Click Heat, which is an open source program. You just have to upload their code to your site and follow the simple instructions on screen to install.

A basic common feature with all the three heatmap building services mentioned till now, is that they capture the actual clicks in real time. You have to set up the installation, and wait patiently for the clicks to happens. Each click sends the data to the server, and after a definite period / or visitor counts, the report is generated for you to analyze. Obviously this method to build website heatmap is more accurate, but time consuming.

Yet another method is based on some pre-defined algorithms, which simulate the human behavior. A popular and free heatmap generator service based upon this concept is Feng Gui. This service employs the neuroscience concept of “saliency” and claims to “simulate human visual attention and create an attention heatmap”. If you read their blog and their website, it seems their is a high degree of confidence in their algorithm as far as the accuracy is concerned. However, it would have been nice, if they had given some actual data on how close their simulated results are with the actual heat maps. This would have surely increased the confidence level of the users.

How to use Feng-Gui

Use of this service is extremely simple. Just go to their website and enter your URL address. Your website heatmap is generated within 30 seconds. See the heatmap of my blog Web Tools and Tips. Sometimes, the service is not able to load your webpage, in that case your can take a snap shot / screen capture of it and upload it as an image so as to quickly generate the heatmap.

Firefox Addon for Heatmap

And now comes the simplest of them all.

Feng-Gui also provides you a firefox addon, just for building a heat map of any web page. This is real cool. That’s why I love Firefox. You can install the firefox addon for heatmap here.

This article is written by Silki, who writes several blogs including http://webtoolsandtips.com/

If you can build a blog that’s recognized for its consistent, regular and quality postings or articles you may attract advertisers who are willing to pay you a some of money to rent ad space on your website or blog.

Advertisers and other list owners who have their own subscriber lists would happily pay to advertise their products or services on a blog with a good circulation of audience if they can see that your audience can be influenced by what they have to offer.

But Bloggers Beware!

While all those ad offers may be well and good and dollars are being waved in front of your face, care still needs to be taken when it comes to choosing the types of advertising you allow to appear on your blog.

So keep in mind your readers’ views, the ones who are loyal to your blog. Ask yourself, would they mind seeing the types of advertisements that you allow on your blog? While this is a minor issue, many newsletter and blog owners seem to miss this.

Do Your Own Investigation

You can do some due diligence by checking into the list owner’s or advertiser’s products and services and take a look at the quality and the kind of information and markets they attract. If you feel they may contradict what your blog stands for or they may compete or even offend, then stay right away regardless of the dollars offered. Its not worth it!

However if they complement or even add to your blog’s exposure then by all means go ahead to see if you can seal the deal. While its outside the scope of this article to talk about ad rates you can potentially earn from $80 to a $1,000 upwards depending on the size of your readership or circulation.

Like all things internet, test the relationship of these arrangements. If you are not sure, don’t commit to a long-term agreement. So if they turn out to be a nightmare, you can flush then as soon as the advertising term ends.

If earning money by selling ad space on your blog is an attractive proposition, then having or growing a large circulation or audience is imperative, it will impact on the dollars you can earn in selling advertising space. I hear even as small as a thousand members can attract a solid regular income.

One final advice: Don’t over do it with your ads. Just because they have the power to create a regular income, if your blog turns out to look like a community board of post-it ads you are going to lose the trust of your audience. You will be seen, not as a person who writes quality material, but one who cares only about yourself rather than your audience. Pretty soon you will see a fast exit out of your subscription, faster than it took you to find them.

Byrt Mallanyk is a genuine M*A*S*H nut and is recognized for his work in Search Engine ‘page-one’ Ranking Strategies (SEO, SEM). http://gettogooglepageone.com/

He is also a professional musician, and is passionate about creating non-collateral banking for urban & village enterprises. He and his wife and three children live in Sydney Australia.

If your blog is not getting the amount of traffic that you desire, you may need to employ a few simple techniques to help increase and retain your audience. In my experience successful blogging comes down to good content, frequency, social participation, effective promotion and retention.

Every blog needs to start with a base of good content. What I have learned is that it’s not just the message you are delivering, it’s how you are delivering it. As a for instance I have all but given up on writing articles for my blog. Instead I have chosen to do all of my posts as video. This has not only increased my traffic, it has improved the participation in the form of comments. Think about the audience you want to attract, how will you educate, entertain and engage them?

The number of times you update your blog will directly impact the size of your audience. If you only update once a month people will get used to that and not necessarily check back very often. If you update every day your audience will grow much faster. Now I understand that in a perfect world we can’t all fill the YouTube video every day and post it to our blogs. But you can set a reasonable goal of at least 1 to 2 times weekly. The frequency of your updates mixed with the quality of your content will directly dictate how quickly your traffic grows and how viral your posts are.

Many bloggers make the mistake of turning off or moderating the comments on their blog. An even bigger mistake is when bloggers delete comments of a negative nature. I have learned to allow anything that is not spam to be posted as a comment on my site. Recently someone even commented on my physical appearance in a negative way and I replied with laughter and acknowledged the flaw. This not only helps to make your blog appear more genuine, it also helps for people to feel some sense of community there.

The easiest way to promote your blog for free is using a few simple tools. The first I will point you to is the SU.PR plug in. This plug-in is brought to you by stumbleupon and allows you to auto post your new blog entries to twitter and Facebook. The second tool I want you to test is the sharethis plug-in. This plug-in allows your users to easily post entries to digg.com and other social networking sites.

One of the best ways to retain users is by using a good RSS feed management system. Google feed burner is the best free service I have found. The great thing about this service as it allows you to put an e-mail subscription box in your sidebar. Every time you update your blog Google will mail a summary and link to the new post. There is no limit on the size of your mailing list and it doesn’t cost you a dime to maintain it.

Brad likes to write about topics surrounding personal development, Social media and Internet marketing. download his free internet marketing course videos or to learn more about internet marketing, visit Brad’s blog http://www.BradGosse.com/

Blogs are without doubt the biggest thing to the internet almost since the internet itself. Blog as so popular it’s almost as if everyone has their own blog or two to share. While blogs are great, their popularity also makes them among some tough competition for the viewing audience. Creating the blog is as easy as filling in the blank spaces but most bloggers are not aware of how to get their blogs to the front of the line for internet traffic. There are few tips and tricks that can be used to increase your page views although.

Naturally the first step to get hits on your blog is to be sure to have an interesting subject. If you are writing about your professional life be aware that you might find your work fascinating, this may not be particularly exciting for someone else. I have no doubt that what you do does interest many people, but this audience will need to be specifically sought. However if you broaden your subject range you are widening your blogs appeal and target.

When you have decided on your subject matters you can then go about creating your blog. When creating your blogs content be sure to keep it useful for your intended subject. Trick two for content creation, make lots and lots. It is the content that search engines read and index to provide relevant websites to search engine queries, hence the popularity of the blog.

Ideally a high search engine ranking is what increases traffic to your page, but high rankings are not so easily achieved. If your blog appears in page 5 of the search results, the chances are it won’t even get viewed by the searcher who has moved on after page two or three. This does not mean you don’t stand a chance. It does mean that you really should explore a few other ways to attract traffic to your blog.

One of the hottest things behind blogs today are video websites, especially free video websites. These sites allow members to upload their own video creations to be shared online with the internet community. Once a video has been uploaded to a video website it has the potential to promote your blog to the many thousands of browsers surfing the video website. Video websites are an affordable and even free marketing tool for your blog, product or service.

Before you can take advantage of the opportunity to promote your blog using video websites you must actually create the video. You could use your trusty camcorder or even just your webcam. It is important that you should not appear to be spamming your audience, keep it subtle. Let the audience know what theme and intention your blog represents, and a little of what they are likely to find on your blog. Another idea you might consider are perhaps recording yourself or someone visiting your blog and showing off a few of your blogs features using still shots or screen captures.

Once your video has been created, you can upload it to your favorite video website. You may first consider editing your video using one of the many available video editing software applications available on the internet and save it on your computer. Then it’s just a matter of following the steps to upload it to the video website.

It’s important to remember that promoting your blog using video websites does not guarantee increased traffic, but it is a matter of not doing anything to promote your blog isn’t likely to help either. With the fact that most video hosting offered on line being free, and likely traffic your video does attract can be considered free hits.

More Tips and Tricks and even making your video can be found at http://www.vid121.com

I don’t mean that literally, but figuratively. Why would I make such a bold statement? It’s simple. Social Media is changing everything related to Sales and Marketing. The tactics we traditionally used to market things in the past have become obsolete and impotent in today’s crowd influenced reputation-based marketplace. If you think the only change you need to make is to hire a social media expert and put them on your staff, you’ve missed the point. Social Media is driving such fundamental changes in the ways customers purchase that traditional marketing departments just do not have the structure, mindset and skills to be successful. The brand leaders of tomorrow have already made sweeping changes and they are well on their way of stealing your customers and market share. Are you willing to make the changes needed to catch-up?

Shift in Control: Major shifts in the purchase decision making process have occurred in the marketplace enabled by Web 2.0 technology and the rapidly growing popularity of Social Media. This change is so profound that it is redefining the role of marketing and how traditional forms of advertising, public relations, promotions and corporate communications are being used. To succeed, companies will need to modify their marketing mix and take a fresh look at their go-to-market strategies. Social Media has changed the rules of the game. Here are five reasons why you may want to re-think how your current marketing department is structured and staffed.

Power of the Crowd: The sales-driven one-to-many marketing mentality of the past (disruption marketing) will not work with Social Media. We’ve reached the tipping point where pull strategies (attraction marketing) have surpassed the value of hunter led push strategies. Reputation-based decision making using the crowd (friends, colleagues and third-party discussions) puts the power of information in the hands of the consumer. Buyers are no longer as reliant as they have been in the past on gaining information directly from the company. They are going to those they trust first.
Inverted Decision Making: Thanks to search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing and Social Media channels like Facebook, Twitter and Yelp we live in a highly connected world. Access to trusted friends, colleagues and unbiased third-parties in order to gain advice, reviews and opinions has become pervasive. This collective feedback commonly known as the “Voice of the Customer” has influenced and changed the way decisions are made. Bad product reviews and poor customer service complaints can quickly become very visible to the general population. As a result, long before they even contact you, chances are your customers have already made up their mind on which product to buy, regardless of the number of times they have seen your brand message. The traditional purchase decision making process has become inverted which is shifting budgets and focus away from push strategies and putting greater emphasis on pull strategies.
Eyeballs Do Not Matter: Traditional marketing has always relied very heavily on defining success by the number of impressions created with your target audience. The thinking has been that the more prospects you touched multiple times the greater percentage of buyers you could persuade to buy your product. While still a factor, in Social Media the sheer volume of eyeballs you reach is not really that important. Success in Social Media is based on engagement, shared value and building trusted relationships. An unflattering twitter string or blog discussion will quickly erase any positive impressions you have made through push advertising regardless of the reach and frequency you have achieved. With Social Media, the quality of engagement is far more important than the quantity of touch-points you make.
Real-Time Agility: In the past, it was not uncommon to take a couple of days to contact an unsatisfied buyer, respond to a question or even address a poorly written article by a reporter. However, today it is different. With the viral aspects of the Web, a delay in responding by just a few hours can make or break your reputation. Dissatisfied consumers that do not hear from you can send out a tweet, post a blog or comment on get satisfaction.com and their complaint can be retweeted and shared with thousands in a matter of minutes. Social Media is an always-on 24/7 channel that requires you to be ready to respond to at any time, even over the weekend. Given the need for speed and vigilance, marketing needs to put greater focus on monitoring, evaluating and managing their online reputation. There are many free tools available today that can help facilitate this very important activity.
New Currency of Free: “Give to get” has become a standard practice in Social Media. It is the action of giving value to the crowd first in order to make a connection, start a dialog and ultimately become accepted by the community. Value can be provided in the form of free advice through a blog, tips in an eBook, complimentary research and other types of offerings like free tools and special widgets. It is the new currency of the Web. Building your online reputation and providing an on-going stream of valuable content requires a different set of processes. To be effective, marketing departments will need to perform more like a publishing company than the more functionally-based marketing departments of the past. Attraction marketing is a different type of animal and to optimize your effectiveness it will require a change in your people, processes and the technology you use.

In order to make my point, I will admit I probably have overstated the need to dismantle the marketing department, but the fact is there are very significant and fundamental changes taking place in the marketplace. The use of Social Media is growing exponentially, consumers have changed how they purchase and we live in a world that is highly connected and transparent. These changes require us to change the way we market and sell. The need for transformation is upon us and the companies that adapt the quickest will be the ones best positioned for success in the future.

Jim Arnold is a results-oriented marketing executive who has held leadership roles with IBM, HP/EDS, Sabre/Travelocity and other notable companies. He recently co-founded MetricsBoard, a new online performance benchmarking company that is crowd-generated and crowd-verified. Visit: http://www.metricsboard.com

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