SEO Pal No Comments June 18th, 2013 Blog

Internet Privacy: Is There Such A Thing Anymore?

Recently, some news broke that the Obama Administration had gotten “metadata” from major phone companies like Verizon and AT&T, detailing phone records for many millions of Americans. While the records did not show names, they did show what calls were made for a particular number, as well as the time of call. And as a simple Google search of your phone number can show you, it is easier than you think to connect even your unlisted cell phone with your name.

But that governmental search for information was just the beginning. It was also recently revealed that the feds asked for information on email, web searches, videos, online chats, photos and the like. Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, AOL, and Apple reportedly shared at least some information with the government, according to the New York Times, although it is not yet known what the extent of the information revealed is. However, there are some denials from the companies named about wholesale sharing.

What does all of this mean for internet privacy and intellectual property?

At any rate, the controversy is still raging at press time, and it is enough to make you wonder about how much internet privacy you have, and how much of your intellectual property is being snooped at by the federal government. Is Big Brother really watching your every move? We do not really know the full extent of it at press time, and it is unclear just what is being looked at, and how big all of this is.

However, there are some things to keep in mind when it comes to protecting yourself on the internet:

You never know who is watching: We say this over and over again when it comes to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and the like. No matter how good your privacy settings are, and whether only a select few can read your posts, there is always the chance that your posts and comments can be used against you, or you can get in trouble in some way. When in doubt, don’t. Even if you delete your post after writing it, it could potentially still live on in cyberspace forever, if somebody has already copied it.

Aside from the potential of the federal government looking at what you write, the more immediate issue is this – all it takes is one person who has an issue with what you have written to potentially put you in a world of hurt. So keep this in mind – think before you write. Always. Even your emails to an individual person could end up in the wrong hands if you have a fight.

You could see your ideas go uncredited: This also means that great ideas you come up with can end up getting popularized without you getting the credit. This is why it is a good idea to put your name and copyright information on any information you want credit for, such as blog posts or photos. For photos or memes, this is especially important. You can do this with a watermark or a URL or email address on the photo or meme.

An intellectual property attorney in New York can help

There are a variety of other issues here, and this article can only scratch the service, to learn more about what an intellectual property attorney in New York can do, click here.

Featured images:

License: Image author owned

Lisa Swan writes for a variety of technology sites. She lives in New York City.

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SEO Pal No Comments June 17th, 2013 Blog, Blogging, Web Design

4 Simple Design Tweaks Every Blogger Must Do To Look Professional

It’s easy to get your website up and running within a few hours these days because of the resources you have available to you. Most blogs on the Internet are powered by WordPress and setting up a site on your hosting account can be as easy as clicking one button. That doesn’t mean to say your website will look beautiful because most usually don’t. I suppose it doesn’t really matter in the beginning, but eventually you will want people to appreciate the look of your site.

That is when they will view you as an authority in your niche. Nobody will think you know what you’re talking about if you can’t afford to make your website look pretty. They will also trust you more, so if you’re looking to make some money from your site you are in luck. We’re going to look at a few design tweaks you can make without spending money on a full re-design. You might have to spend more money in the future, but your site will definitely look more presentable now.

You need a proper logo

You don’t need to open up Photoshop if you don’t feel like you can design your own logo. If you look around online I’m sure you could find someone who could make you one for a decent price. You just need to tell them what you’d like and it will be yours a few days later. If you have a decent theme installed it should be easy to upload the logo into your header. Don’t worry if it doesn’t look perfect because the only important thing is that you have one.

Increase the size of your text

You want everyone who visits your site to have an enjoyable time and an easy way to do that is by making sure everything is easy for them to read. The standard font size is usually 12 which is pretty small, so don’t think you can’t bump it up to 14, or even 16 if it looks good. You should also be able to do this inside the backend of your dashboard if you use a decent theme. If you have to mess with the code you might want to pay someone to do it for you.

Clean up your sidebar

Your design needs to look clean and you can start by getting rid of most things inside the sidebar. You don’t want anything in there unless it is essential. Too many people still have the widgets inside their sidebar that died out years ago. It’s a tell-tale sign that you don’t know what you’re doing. The most important thing to include is the opt-in form and we’re going to talk about that in more detail because it’s so important.

A great opt-in form

I hope you’re collecting email addresses because it’s vital if you ever plan on making money. I’m going to assume you are, but I’m also going to assume you are using a standard form that looks horrible. You need to find someone who will design you a new one that looks great. If twice as many people sign up to your list you will make double the money. Unless you really want to know someone’s name you should also just ask for their email address.

This is the minimum

If you want to make your site even better looking there is nothing to stop you from changing more of the design. The things we’ve talked about today are just the basics that need to be carried out because you will see better results. You can wait until your site starts making money until you invest anymore into it.

Featured images:

License: Creative Commons image source
License: Creative Commons image source
License: Creative Commons image source
License: Creative Commons image source
License: Creative Commons image source
License: Creative Commons image source

Today’s guest post is written by Neena Jones. She works as a web developer for a well known website design company in Toronto. She is a passionate blogger and her blogs usually contain tips and tricks for better website designs.

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SEO Pal No Comments June 17th, 2013 Blog, Link Building, Traffic Tips

Building Links And Improving SEO Through Content Creation

SEO has changed significantly during the last couple of years. Thanks to Google’s continued efforts at making search more effective and information research friendly than ever before, new algorithm changes to search ranking such as Penguin and Panda, amongst numerous others have created a search environment in which mechanical black hat tactics that revolve around algorithm manipulation no longer work nearly as effectively as they used to.

Instead, the focus now is becoming more on organic development of popularity and visible distribution amongst a base of readers and fans. One of the hallmarks of this is the process of link building.

Link Building Then vs. Now

In previous times, link building used to be something that, as an indicator of site popularity, could be simulated on the internet through spam tactics that gave the appearance of numerous other sites linking back to your own by posting backlinks on blogs, link farms and low quality content mill pages. The end result was largely artificial and showed nothing about the inherent content value of a backlinked page, but gave the impression of real popularity.

Today, this no longer applies. Thanks to its major algorithm changes, Google now scrutinizes the nature of backlinks far more carefully and will derank anything that stinks of artificial tactics or spam. Thus, site owners have been brought back to the process of building links that genuinely were organically, voluntarily shared.

For some, this can be daunting and overwhelming. Agencies like Chicago’s Digital Third Coast and Philadelphia’s Seer Interactive provide a way of outsourcing key SEO tasks

What Kind of Content Gains Popularity?

What does this mean for you as a webmaster and content creator? Simply this: you now really have to create valuable content on your site. In creating this content, you are given an opportunity to demonstrate your trustworthiness, expertize and entertaining qualities. In doing those things, you can steadily build a fan base that not only avidly visits your site and raises your visitor count in doing so, but also starts sharing your content with their friends, on their social networking accounts and on their websites.

Guest Posting your Way to Backlinks

Having built enough of a reputation, or possibly even before that, you can also search for guest posting opportunities. Assuming you site has gained a certain amount of popularity and reader base within your niche, some of these visitors will more than likely be other players in the digital content landscape of your topic. You need to build relationships with them with frequent communication and rapport development. Doing this and enjoying the resulting debate gives you even more opportunity to demonstrate your knowledge to other site owners, especially influential ones.

Eventually, you can leverage this into guest posting requests; offer to write on their sites or blogs in exchange for links back to your own site. This kind of link building applied over and over again as much as possible is not only organic but also favorably viewed by Google’s algorithms and their little bots.

In short time, having built a solid content base, you can work your way up to posting on major sites under your niche’s categories or on sites specifically devoted to the general area of your niche. You can use your sites content base and visitor quantities as persuasion tools to get you posted on a major site, which will obviously be more picky about who it lets write and links to than many smaller pages.

The importance of relevance also can’t be understated. Avoid highly general sites and especially avoid content mills as a source of guest posting backlinks. They are often looked down upon as being too general, easy to backlink from and not good indicators of real quality in a site that’s been linked to.

Instead, focus your energies on pages that are related to your own content and more picky about their quality of content. These kinds of links have the most SEO value and will create a wonderful link profile that gives you long term ranking growth and visitor flow.

Content Freshness and Frequent Updates

Another highly important hallmark of building up search engine optimization through quality content and building links as well revolves around frequently creating fresh new content that is not only informative and relevant, but also ties into the latest in your niche. People are always on the lookout for new newest possible information and analysis for their searches, in almost any subject. By giving them this, you will gain an advantage over your competitors who don’t.

Although it’s true that Google still (in an example of misguided bias) still favors older, more established links for its page 1 rankings, this is slowly changing and by moving as soon as possible to have the latest content in your niche posted, sharable and indexable, you’ll increase your chances of being the first to rank highly for a given search term whenever Google decides to refresh its listings in a user query.

As a bottom line that’s more important than anything else in the link building and content SEO process, remember to make the material you post to your website rich, as unique as possible and maximally informative. Make it as relevant to your readers’ interests and urgent information needs as possible.

Stephan Jukic is a freelance writer who generally covers a variety of subjects relating to the latest changes in white hat SEO, marketing, marketing tech and brand promotion. He also loves to read and write about subjects as varied as the idea of a location-free business, portable business management, and strategic marketing and advertising tactics. When he’s not busy writing or consulting, he spends his days enjoying life’s adventures either in Canada or Mexico. Connect with Stephan on LinkedIn.

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SEO Pal No Comments June 16th, 2013 Blog, Link Building, Traffic Tips

Effective Off-Page SEO Strategies You Can Implement To Improve Your Site Rankings

Incorporating search engine optimisation (SEO) into site development is crucial if you want to ensure your site’s visibility on top search engines like Google. Apart from using relevant keywords in your pages, you also have to engage in SEO activities such as content creation, video and image publication, and link building. However, working on your on-page SEO strategies alone will not guarantee a first-page listing on Google’s search results. You also have to put some effort into off-page SEO strategies, some of which are listed below.

Get Your Site Listed in Top Directories

Web surfers have varying preferences with regards to the directory they use to look for product or service providers. Therefore, it is useful to have your site listed in the top directories such as Yahoo Directories and DMOZ. Apart from increasing the number of backlinks to your site, you are also improving your chances of connecting with prospective clients and your intended audience. Remember that your website description is important, so take the time to write and revise this before submitting your site. You also have to list your site under the correct category for a more targeted site listing.

Participate in Relevant Forums

The best way to reach your target market or audience is by utilising existing media such as forums. The great thing about participating in forums is that you get to share your knowledge about industry-related topics, help prospective clients with their questions, and ultimately prove that you are knowledgeable on a specific topic and are therefore capable of providing excellent products and services. You may also want to include links to your site in your forum signature, which interested parties can then follow to visit your site.

Be a Friendly Guest Blogger

Aside from forging good relationships with your existing and prospective clients, it is also important to have good rapport with people in your industry. Contributing to other sites as a guest blogger is advantageous because: 1) it will help you reach a larger audience; 2) regular visitors of the site where you posted your guest blog might decide to check out your site after reading your post; 3) it drives traffic to your site; 4) it helps you to illustrate just how much you know about your industry, and; 5) you get to build links to your site which are important when it comes to improving your site rankings in the search engines.

Comment on Relevant Blogs

You don’t always have to write lengthy blogs to aid your SEO campaign; sometimes, all it takes is a respectful and intelligent comment on another blogger’s site within the same niche as yours. Saying that the post is “great and entertaining” will not pique the interest of your fellow commenters. If you want them to become interested in your site, share something interesting which hasn’t been mentioned in the blog or comment thread yet. Don’t forget to include links in your comment; aside from increasing the backlinks to your site, you are also improving your chances of increasing traffic.

Be Active on Social Bookmarking Sites and Social Media

Social Bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon, Digg and Delicious, provide an excellent opportunity to increase traffic to your site by means of backlinks incorporated in your contributed content. However, if you are planning on sharing content on these sites, do make sure your articles are keyword-rich, submitted under the correct categories and labelled with the right tags.

It is also important to be active on sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ if you want to reach your target audience. Remember that the more people are talking about your posts and site, the more likely you will be to find new clients and followers. Frequently share updates on as many social media outlets as possible and you will definitely see an increase in traffic and may even see your site rise through the SERPs.

To conclude, the most effective means of getting high rankings on Google is by continuing to increase your backlinks which should be strategically placed on other sites. There are other strategies you can try that will also help improve your site’s rankings. You just need patience and perseverance as the desired results may take some time to show, but the fruits of your labour will surely be worth the effort.

Featured images:

License: Creative Commons image source

Lukasz Zelezny is an SEO expert. He highly recommends mixing up your link building in order to create a diverse link profile and improve your site’s rankings.

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SEO Pal No Comments June 15th, 2013 Blog, Marketing, Traffic Tips

How To Create A Squeeze Page That Will Drive You Tons Of Subscribers

Attracting leads are the most important aspect of email marketing. Email marketing can’t be done effectively if you don’t have lots of subscribers in your mailing list. The number of your subscribers will be determined by the way you attract your leads. In other words, your squeeze page is responsible for your email marketing success. Here are 5 tips to create a squeeze page that will drive you tons of subscribers:

1. Be Different From The Crowd

There are thousands of squeeze pages on the internet, even in the same niche as yours. Most marketers are using the same template for their squeeze page. The result is that there are hundreds of squeeze pages that are similar to each other. If you are doing the same thing, then you are diminishing your chance of being recognized by the audience in your niche. That’s why you should tweak your squeeze age so that it will be different from the crowd. You can use the same template, but make sure to tweak it so that it will become completely unique.

2. Give Real Value To Your Audience

Many online marketers are not giving real value to their audience. Yes, they are offering free stuff to their audience, but they don’t make it valuable at all. As a result, their audience can’t extract any value from the free stuff that they are giving. The free stuff then goes straight to the recycle bin. If you want to successfully attract subscribers to your squeeze page, make sure to give the best for your audience. Yes, it’s true that you are giving them free stuff, but make it so valuable that your audience won’t dare to remove it from their PC.

3. Use Simple And Clean Design

Do not put too many clutters in your squeeze page. Your visitors don’t like that. Instead, use simple and clean design. It will help your audience to go straight into filling their email address in your opt-in form. If there is too much clutters available, your audience can’t see your opt-in. It will also be a sign of the quality of your mailing list. Of course, people will have a bad impression toward your mailing list if you are putting too much clutter on your squeeze page.

4. Don’t Have Too Much Talk

Your squeeze page copy should be short and to the point. Do not have too much talk in your squeeze page. Why? Your visitors will only see three aspects of your squeeze page. First, the headline . If the headline is good, then they will take a look at the second aspect. The second aspect is bullet points. What are the benefits of joining your mailing list? If they see that the bullet points are impressive, they will take a look at the third aspect before they decide to join your list. The third aspect is the free stuff that you’re giving to them. So, you don’t need to create a lengthy squeeze page. You just need to put three main aspects into it: good headline, interesting bullet points (benefits of joining), and enticing free stuff.

5. Put A Clear Call To Action

Ask people to join your list. Yes, give them clear call to action so that they can take action immediately. This is probably the best way to close your squeeze page. After giving them some good reasons to join, the closing phase should be to include a clear call to action. Let them know where to put their email address. Put a nice graphic in your squeeze page that tells your audience to enter their email address and hit the ‘Join’ button.

Those are 5 tips that you can follow to create a squeeze page that will drive you tons of subscribers. Remember that the quality of your squeeze page will determine whether people will join your list or not. So, you should follow the tips above to ensure that you have a squeeze page that really make your audience wants to join your list immediately.

Author Bio
Mike is a Blogger with special interest in blogging on SEO / Internet Marketing niche. Recently he has seen a surgen in number of website/blog owners who tends to buy pinterest followers to get backlinks for ranking purposes, and he wonders whether this is a ethical and good practise or not.

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SEO Pal No Comments June 14th, 2013 Blog, Traffic Tips

3 Reasons Why You Should Consider Voice-over Dubbing In Foreign Languages?

3 Reasons Why You Should Consider Voice-over Dubbing in Foreign Languages

One of the best ways of sending a message to people is by making a video. This is why it’s no surprise that video making has turned into a multi-billion dollar industry. Great movies that captured the hearts of countless people have greatly influenced today’s culture. Businesses also understand the power of video marketing, hence the countless commercials you see online and on television. Others make video to voice out their opinions, or simply get the attention of people as an attempt to get famous. With the abundance of video hosting sites on the Internet, video has also become the most popular form of sharing information online. It doesn’t matter if you’re making a film, a marketing ad, or just making a personal statement. If you want to reach out to people using videos, you should consider voice over dubbing. Voice over dubbing has been used by a lot of popular video creators for years, giving them an edge over their non-translated competition. You might think that dubbing is something reserved for major films from Hollywood, but it’s actually important for small-time video makers.

Expand your potential target audience

The first reason why voice over dubbing is important for your videos is that it helps them available to a wider audience. With voice over translation, viewers from areas that don’t share your native language will still be able to understand the message of your videos. With more than 75% of the world not being English speakers, it’s easy to see how many viewers you can get by offering your video in English only.

Make your video content more accessible

Voice over dubbing is also important if your target audience include younger viewers. Adding translated subtitles to a video which targets children won’t get you that much viewers. Using subtitles forces younger viewers to read the lines while trying to keep up with what’s happening in your video. They won’t be able to appreciate what’s on the screen and most likely get bored, if not frustrated. Voice over dubbing eliminates that problem, and it also allows children to connect to the video in their native tongue. While many people can enjoy video with translated subtitles, there are also those who still prefer dubbing simply because the content is much easier to consume.

Communicate emotions better

If you look at popular advertisements, many of them use catchy slogans to attract customers. The same goes for making video advertisements, especially those that target foreign audiences. Slogans won’t be as interesting and as memorable to someone if it’s not communicated in his or her native language. Messages can be passed through foreign audio but not emotions. If you want to create that strong connect, you need to address your audience in their native language, with properly localized content. There are other alternatives for translating videos such as using subtitles, but there’s no denying that voice over translation is still one of the most effective ways to reach out to more people. While other options can help your video get more views, none of those options let your video connect to the audience better than dubbing.

Featured images:

License: Image author owned

This is a guest post by Hanna Golota of Globalme Language&Technology. Like them on Facebook if you enjoyed this entry!

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SEO Pal No Comments June 7th, 2013 Blog, Social Networks

Famous Social Media Writing Errors By Famous People

People make writing mistakes on social media all the time. Maybe they’re just writing too quickly to proofread their work, or maybe they simply don’t know how to write properly. Either way, you’ll certainly find a spelling or grammatical mistake on your news feed every day.

Celebrities are included in this group. With more and more celebrities using social media for personal or professional reasons, many of them are finding themselves the topic of conversations when their tweets and posts contain writing errors. The following are some famous social media writing mistakes by famous people.

Chad Ochocinco

Chad Ochocinco is a professional football player in the NFL. In 2010, he was fined $26,000 for tweeting during one of his preseason games. Apparently the NFL has rules against a player’s use of social media, stating they cannot use it 90 minutes before the start of their game up until their post game media obligations are over. Not only did the topic go viral, but Ochocinco’s poorly written Twitter response to the issue also went viral.

50 Cent

50 Cent is always making enemies, and he decided to take out his frustration with French Montana through Twitter. Unfortunately, his poor use of grammar, spelling and punctuation got more buzz than his threat.

Lamar Odom

Even celebrities have to get creative with the 140-character limit, but Lamar Odom took it a step too far when he posted a message of random phrases that contained a variety of misspellings and grammatical errors.

Samuel L. Jackson

Samuel L. Jackson is known to be a passionate man, and he allows his passions to run through on his Twitter feed. Apparently, he’s also known to make up his own words, as some of his vocabulary cannot be found in the dictionary. Here’s to hoping he was just trying to be creative.

Lil’ Wayne

Someone should tell Lil’ Wayne that the “k” sound can also be made with a “c”. He should also be taught how to spell things appropriately, or at least use a spell checker.

Jamie Oliver

Jamie Oliver is a celebrity chef who likes to use his Twitter feed to inform the world of news he hears as well as his own personal endeavors. When Oliver heard a story about UK farmers, he turned to Twitter. Unfortunately his poor spelling, grammar and punctuation got more buzz than the news he was trying to share.

Mary J. Blige

Mary J. Blige used Twitter to express her disdain for those who always question her intelligence. Unfortunately for Mary, her tweet was filled with spelling and grammatical errors, including misspelling the word “intelligence”.

Ashton Kutcher

Ashton Kutcher made headlines when his tweet was misinformed. After hearing only bits and pieces about the Joe Paterno scandal at Penn State, Kutcher took to Twitter to mention his displeasure. His news feed then blew up with people attacking him for endorsing Paterno’s behavior, and Kutcher then handed his Twitter account over to a third party. This just proves that it’s not always about spelling and grammar, but also about your content.

Featured images:

License: Image author owned
License: Image author owned
License: Image author owned
License: Image author owned
License: Image author owned
License: Image author owned
License: Image author owned
License: Image author owned

Caleb Grant is a social media manager and avid blogger. He uses an online grammar check tool to proof his writing before posting it online.

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SEO Pal No Comments June 5th, 2013 Affiliate Marketing, Blog

5 Ways To Easily Dominate Your Niche In Affiliate Marketing

Niche domination is very important and essential for your affiliate marketing success. Without niche domination, you can’t recommend your affiliate products effectively. People will follow your recommendation only if they can trust you. And the way to build trust in this business is by dominating your niche, which means to be known as an expert in your niche. Here are 5 ways to easily dominate your niche in affiliate marketing:

1. Master The Narrow Niche

You can’t dominate your niche if you’re choosing the wrong niche. Can you dominate a general weight loss niche? Most probably you can’t, unless you have millions of dollars to invest on the marketing promotion. Your best chance to dominate a niche is to choose a narrow niche that has enough audience to monetize. This is the best way to do affiliate marketing. So, it is better for you to master the narrow niche because it will give you the way to dominate it easily.

2. Create Interesting And Valuable Content

You will dominate your niche by building strong trust between you and your audience. You need a website and strong branding to do that. But, more importantly, you need to create interesting and valuable content in your website so that people can appreciate your knowledge and trust your expertise. Your website content is everything that you need to have in order to build strong trust between you and your audience.

3. Always Have Different And Unique Insights

How can you make your website so interesting that people want to visit it again? You can make your website interesting with unique and different insights that you offer to your readers. This is a good way to build strong popularity for your website. The more people come to your website, the more solid your presence will be in your niche. Always deliver content with unique and different insights that will tickle your audience’s mind. This is the most effective way to build quick popularity within your niche.

4. Be The First To Deliver The Latest News

Make your website so that people will go to it the first time they think about your niche. How can you do that? You can do it by becoming the first one to deliver the latest news about your niche. So, this is what you need to do. Update your website regularly with the latest information within your niche. If you keep doing this, you’ll be able to become the leading authority in your niche in just a few months. You just need to consistently deliver the latest news to your audience and spread the word about it quickly.

5. Spread Your Promotion Efforts

Don’t just focus your promotion efforts in one area. For instance, many people are only focusing their promotion on guest posting. This might be a good way to attract traffic to your website, but this is not the only way. There are hundreds of promotion methods that you can explore and use to build your website popularity. You need to spread your promotion to many channels so that you can get the best result from it.

Those are 5 ways to easily dominate your niche in affiliate marketing. Whatever the product that you promote, dominating your niche is the first step for success.

Author Bio
Bren is a tech blogger with great interest in SEO and IM Technologies. He occassionally contributes informative resource to Assisted Reputation, one of the leading seo companies in uk.

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SEO Pal No Comments June 5th, 2013 Blog

Customer Feedback: Should You Listen To All Of It?

You can learn a lot by listening to what your customers have to say about your business. When a company is just getting started, listening to their customers can help fuel their growth. But as you may have experienced with your own business, there comes a point when it becomes too difficult to listen to all of the feedback you receive. If you’ve recently been feeling guilty about this, find out why it’s actually not a bad thing.

Don’t Get Bogged Down

Although it can be very useful, not all customer feedback has the same value. At the end of the day, some of the feedback you receive is just going to be noise. For example, almost every business has to deal with at least a few customers who are never going to be 100% happy. Even when people in this group receive the best experience possible, they can still find some small detail to nitpick.

Look for Trends

Since it’s not practical or even beneficial to fully process every piece of feedback you receive, a better option is to look for trends. Whether it’s a feature request or a complaint about some aspect of your operations, if different customers keep bringing up the same topic, it’s definitely one that’s worth your full attention.

What About Social Media?

If your business recently got serious about using social media to listen to customer feedback, you’ve probably been quite happy with the experience so far. Not only is being able to instantly connect with potential and existing customers great, but it’s always exciting to see when someone makes a positive comment about your company.

Unfortunately, the reality of social media is not everyone will only have positive things to say forever. Instead, it’s almost guaranteed that the time will come when someone makes a negative comment in a Facebook update or Tweet.

When you see that type of comment, your first reaction may be to respond in defense or even anger. However, if you want to avoid the types of mistakes that many other companies have made, don’t fire off an emotional response. Instead, take a deep breath and think about what the person actually said.

Unless it’s an obvious troll, you will want to respond. But needing to respond doesn’t mean you have to immediately make a lengthy statement. Instead, something as simple but sincere as “so sorry, trying to get to the bottom of this right now” will go a long way. Then, depending on the specific situation, you can decide whether it makes sense to continue with the public conversation or take it private through a channel like email.

Handling customer feedback is always going to be a balancing act. The best way to avoid getting bogged down by the sheer amount and variety of feedback you receive is to focus on looking for trends. And whenever you receive negative feedback through social media, just remember to pause for a second before responding so that your emotions don’t get the best of you!

Featured images:

License: Creative Commons image source

Craig Klein is CEO and Founder of SalesNexus.com, an online CRM software provider for small businesses and sales organizations. Craig is a sales process guy. His passion is helping small businesses hire, train, measure and manage sales people through their sales process. Follow Craig on Google+ to learn more.

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SEO Pal No Comments May 31st, 2013 Blog, Marketing, SEO Services, Traffic Tips

Creative SEO Tip- Jacking The News Like A Content Marketing Pro

With content marketing quickly becoming the widest form of ongoing link building, traditional tactics are quickly going to become boring and overused. I want to fuel your content marketing toolset, and bring you a little creative tip that you can start using immediately.

Newsjacking is massively underused, and extremely rewarding. When used correctly, it can bring huge amounts of exposure, social signals and links for your site.

What is Newsjacking?

Newsjacking is very new to the SEO world, but is an obvious extension to content marketing. Whilst the term itself sounds negative, and a little black hat, it really isn’t. Newsjacking is a strategy where marketers capitalise on an increasing demand for a certain news topic, and use it to their advantage.

Breaking news can quickly become extremely popular, and smart marketers use it to their advantage by joining in with the overall discussion, by contributing a post of their own on the topic.

In practice, newsjacking works like this:

Pay close attention to breaking news topics that can be angled in a post to be relevant to your business’s niche.
Deep understanding of the key phrases that are being searched for surrounding the breaking news topic.
Produce a well-researched piece of content directly fulfilling the need for knowledge surrounding the topic.
Efficiently promoting the piece of content in order to be found predominantly when related phrases are searched for within the search engines.

It’s important to understand that you can’t simply hijack any news as it grows in popularity. Rather, it needs to be related to your niche, or intelligently angled in a way that makes it relevant. However, most businesses are not going to have a problem with finding breaking news related to their industry.

Newsjacking In Action

In order for you to fully understand newsjacking, I thought it would make sense to give you a couple of examples of it in action:

A high profile celebrity theft could be used by a home security business to highlight the importance of securing your property.
A house fire could be used by an insurance company to promote the idea of insuring your property.

Newsjacking is extremely similar to content marketing, and can even be considered a part of it. Similar to the fundamental aspects of content marketing, the content comes first and marketing second. Fulfill people’s desire for newsworthy content, and use that opportunity to promote your brand on the backend.

Timing is critical with newsjacking. A well-timed, expertly researched, excellently written piece of newsworthy content can acquire a massive amount of attention, and grow your brand hugely.

If this was a bit too advanced for you, and you are interested in learning the basic concepts surrounding SEO and blogging, I host a range of SEO training courses that you may wish to get involved in. We won’t delve too deeply into newsjacking, but we will cover basic concepts that will allow you and your business to get the advantage needed to rise above the competition.

Claire Jarrett, a qualified teacher turned internet marketing mentor, offers a range of SEO and adwords training courses via helpwithppc.com