By Josh Cline
Your company might have clout in your industry – but does it have Klout?
Klout, as you may have heard, is a website that automatically attaches a rating from 1 to 100 to everyone – and every business – who has at least a public Twitter account. Those whose numbers are higher have more “clout” on social-media networks.
And why is your score important?
As Seth Stevenson writes in Wired:
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By Josh Cline
As technological innovations occur at an ever-increasing rate, marketers often develop unrealistic expectations because they think that each new gadget or medium has made all of the previous communications strategies obsolete.
Far from it. For example, social media is a form of public relations and not some heaven-sent technology that has changed everything, and as such, it and other online-marketing methods need to incorporate traditional best-practices from the beginning. It is crucial not to throw decades of communications knowledge out the digital window. Companies today need to ignore the so-called “hype cycles” that occur in all new marketing mediums and methods, instead understanding that classic communications theory never changes.
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By Josh Cline
Over the past five years, many public-relations professionals (some have called them publicists) became “social-media gurus” overnight, writing books and helping to spin what social-media marketing and SEO allegedly really are. Then, they became “digital-marketing specialists” or gave themselves other titles. Eventually, many woke up and realized again that, in the end, they are still marketing and communication specialists. Several have written three or more books since 2007 to regain their places as true marketing professionals.
Read MoreNote: This is the first part in an ongoing series. Part two and three.
If you are using a social-media marketing strategy without a corresponding content-marketing one, you are most likely wasting your time. As different parts of the Internet increasingly affect and influence each other in marketing terms, it is also increasingly important to use an integrated strategy that incorporates these numerous factors.
Read MoreAfter Google unveiled first its +1 social-sharing button and then its Google+ social network last year, my colleague Daniel Goldstein predicted that the changes will eventually influence organic-search results. Google, he argued, will increasingly personalize search results based on what an individual searcher has “+1ed” in the past.
Well, that time has arrived. And if your company does not adapt, you will miss out on a tremendous amount of valuable traffic to your website.
On January 10, Google announced its “Search, plus Your World” revamp of its search-result pages:
Read MoreMost of our previous blog-posts on search-engine marketing (SEM) have focused on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and search-engine optimization (SEO). Here, we wanted to address another important aspect: linkbuilding.
As you may know, Google ranks search results based primarily on two factors: relevance and authoritativeness. The first is obvious: If you search for “Christmas gifts,” you do not want the latest Philadelphia Phillies scores to appear. In simplistic SEO terms, on-page optimization is an effort to tell search engines the topic of each page of your website.
Read MoreIn February 2011, Google unveiled the first in a major series of updates collectively termed “Panda” to its search algorithm. The latest Panda update occurred on November 18, and many websites lost search-engine rankings (and thereby traffic) on and after that day. See the comments in this post for just a few examples of the many that we have seen.
What the Panda updates aim to do overall is devalue the rankings of poor-quality websites including content farms, spammers, built-for-advertising sites, and those with little original content or text that was copied (or “scraped”) from elsewhere. The most-egregious offenders sometimes have their sites removed from Google’s index completely. In a nutshell, Panda wants to judge the quality of a website from a human point-of-view rather than that of a machine.
Read MoreYour website may be duplicating its own content without you even realizing it – and thereby possibly causing negative effects on your search-engine marketing performance.
Say that you are a company that sells widgets. One of your pages will list all of the widgets, say, by price in descending order while another will show them grouped by color. Most of the time, each specific widget will have its own product description – and therefore all of the product descriptions will be the same on both of the aforementioned pages. In other words, both of the pages of your website will have the same content.
Read MoreIn search-engine marketing (SEM) – the goal of which is to rank highly in Google search-results for chosen keywords – there are two general strategies: search-engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Each has its advantages and disadvantages, so it is important to know when to use each one (or even both).
Before you make this marketing decision, you first need to determine and understand your overall business goals. As we at The Cline Group have always maintained, one’s marketing goal needs to be in line with one’s business goal before it can be integrated and executed successfully.
Read MoreInternet-marketing news breaks each day, if not each hour, so online marketers need to keep abreast of the latest headlines. Here’s what we at The Cline Group found interesting this past week.
