Sounds great, doesn’t it?  But how do you get from a traditional marketing strategy to a successful inbound marketing campaign?  It’s all about getting yourself out there so that you can found by the people who are already interested in what you have to offer.  For example:  a designer of fashion laptop bags wants to be found by people who already run in those circles, as it were.  Using Facebook, Google+, SEO, PPC, and other forms of making your products show up when people search, and getting those people to share with other like minded people, is the basis of how this works.  Here is an infographic that shows the difference in old school marketing and inbound marketing:

Well, overvaluation was mentioned above.  It is the culprit in most of the failings of the industry’s biggest and brightest tech startups.  When tech start ups are overvalued, meaning that before there is an IPO for the company, various financial theories and models are applied against the company in an attempt to judge with some accuracy how much its net worth might currently be, and yet the prediction falls terribly short in reality, the results can be devastating.  Let’s have a look at three of the greatest tech IT company start ups in the past decade and check whether they might be a bit inflated.

1. When you choose what to name your Facebook page, make it as relevant and specific as possible, and keep it that way.  For instance, if the name of your company is Irongate Cheese Graters, LTD, the best Facebook page name would be Irongate Cheese Graters, LTD — not IrongateCheese or ICGLTD. Same with Direct TV. You want your vanity URL to read www.facebook.com/pages/directv. You don’t want to use this as an attempt to capitalize on high value keywords.  Generic search terms should be avoided when naming your Facebook page.  For instance, you wouldn’t want to put “cheese,grater,cheesegraters” as the title.  It will only hurt, rather than help, your efforts.
2. Selecting the most appropriate Facebook username and URL is equally important.  This is going to be the address people should easily remember and associate with your name instantly.  As per the above example, you’d want to go with www.facebook.com/irongatecheesegraters.  Here, I would recommend leaving off the LTD, since that is more a corporation style identifier than anything people need to commit to memory about your brand or name.
3. If you want to have certain key words associated with your page, then the “About” box is the place to put that.  Here, you can write short prose that is key word dense, and it will help, rather than hurt.  This is where you would write something like “Irongate Cheese Graters are in the business of grating cheese.  We grate cheese.  Cheese we grate.  Wisconsin cheddar.  Vermont cheddar.  Romano and parmesan.  We are the graters of cheese.”
4. Use that “Info” tab!  This is where you can get some local ranking by publishing your address and phone number, and any other details with keywords that might link you to a locality.  You can also use the “Info” tab to load that page with the keywords you desire to be associate with.
5. Post links directly to your website, right in your Facebook feed.  Using the “raw URL” or “attach link” features of Facebook gives you a couple of options as to how to form these links, and the choice you make depends on the results you are hoping to attain from an SEO perspective.

So get out there and make the most of Facebook, online marketers.

The only way to accomplish this is to attack it from a genuinely organic standpoint.  The Twitter superstars who seem to rise the top effortlessly are usually brands that are so well known, they speak for themselves.  People follow them because they already know all about them, use their products or services, and want to be seen following a winning company or person.  In order for less well known brands and entities to attain this measure of success, it takes a lot of time and attention developing a following, nurturing relationships with other Twitter users, and following and posting useful Tweets on a regular basis.  In other words, if you don’t give people something worthwhile to read, why should you expect anyone to follow you? For example, if you’re ADT, you don’t want to blab every day about how you can help your followers get home security. You want to talk about home safe, crime stats, etc.

Social networking involves relationships, and the first chance you have to impress someone is when they arrive at your Twitter page for that first look.  If they get there and see:

• you have not bothered to customize your page with your company logo or picture
• you have no tweets
• you don’t follow anyone
• no one else is following you

then there is a high probability they will simply leave your page without reading your tweets, re-tweeting them, or even following you.

If, however, you take this good advice and follow these simple steps, you will eventually grow your Twitter following and break free of the limitations of how many people you can follow:

• post interesting tweets everyday
• catch the attention of your audience by not being boring
• do pay attention to trending topics and categories, and join in
• re-tweet valuable content that you think your audience would enjoy reading
• follow only those people whom it would benefit you to follow
• once you find your purpose, be consistent

With these tips, you can organically grow your Twitter following and expand your ability to follow more relevant people.  This will ultimately increase brand awareness, build on your reputation, and bolster your ranking ability in the major search engines as well.

Search engines have become more influential than ever before,  and some affiliate marketers have evolved from the sending of e-mail spam to proliferating automatically generated web pages containing data feeds from various product merchants. These webpages exist solely to game the ranking value of resources indexed by the search engines.  This practice is called spamdexing, and is a black hat technique that should be avoided.  For one thing, it doesn’t work anymore — and for another thing, it’s extremely poor practice.

Spam in all its forms constitutes the biggest single  threat to organic search engines and their ability to provide quality search results for keywords or phrases entered by web searchers. Google’s algorithm update for page rankings  in February 2006 targeted spamdexing with great aplomb. The update assisted Google in the elimination of a large amount of automatically generated duplicate content from its index.

In 2005 Google made some key changes in the way site containing mostly affiliate links are indexed, wherein certain websites were labeled as “thin affiliates”. These websites were either stricken from Google’s index or demoted to lower ranking positions.  The only way to avoid this negative ranking placement is to generate original, quality content for the web pages, instead of having Google crawl and finding only affiliate links.

Many commentators in the industry theorized that affiliate links are most effective within the context of the information contained on the website itself. For example, if a website contains information about web site hosting and design, an affiliate link leading to a web hosting company with whom the site owner has an affiliate relationship inside that website’s content would be expected. If a website contains information pertaining to satellite television, an affiliate link to a satellite television provider’s website would work well, included in the context of articles and information about television programming or channels.

The more recent algorithm update from Google (“Panda”/”Farmer”), went a step further in its attempt to eradicate irrelevant content from web sites, and lessen the rankings of sites featuring gibberish and unrelated affiliate links.  Now, content really is king, and without the high quality of content that has to do directly with a web site’s subject there is a very real danger of losing rankings and facing penalties.

The caveat to you:  write original, high quality content for your websites.  If you include affiliate links, make sure they are nestled inside of articles that are about something related to that affiliate’s company in some way. For example, if you advertise how to get Satellite TV be sure to write an article about satellite tv, and NOT rubber ducks. Don’t just populate your articles, high quality or not, with unrelated links.  If you are consistently following this advice, you will be able to increase the likelihood of rising in search engine rankings. Thanks to our colleagues at cableinternetbundles.com

If you are an avid golfer or golf fan, then the television can give you access to the tournaments taking place from wherever in the world they happen to be.  Watch every ball fly off the tee and every putt sink with channels like the golf channel.  There are even golfing technique tutorials and golfing competitions on this channel that can pique the interest of those who do not even golf.

If you tend to be more of an outdoorsman in the sense that you like hunting, fishing, and other things of that nature, then there are even channels for you.  Versus and other outdoors networks will give you the best of the outdoors every hour of every day.  This is great news if you love watching big catches in the lake or bow hunting or more!

Another great channel for sports loving people on television is ESPN.  This network provides coverage for pretty much every single sport.  There are shows like SportsCenter that give you all the highlights, scores, and features of sporting events.  There are even channels for college sports only.

It’s all on your television, and that is a great thing when you love the sports.