Friends. This doesn’t mean you need to know thousands of people, but “friends” in social media terminology simply mean contacts, or people you are connected with through your profiles.

Usually you can add your “real world” friends and customers just by checking whether they have a profile on that particular social site. If so, you can request to add them as a “friend”. As you make more and more friends this way, you will notice that you can easily get introduced to the friends of your friends, join groups – and that’s when things start to move.

The more friends you have, the more influential you become – since all that you publish, will be visible to your friends.

It is also very important that every time you run a seminar or an open day, you talk about it in your profile pages. You can also take pictures of the past events and place them in your profile, so that people can get an idea of what your events look like, and maybe they will want to come along to the next one.

Online marketing has become a huge industry these days, and social media, as one of its part, are a great way of promoting your company online, effectively.

Apart from your website content, another very important factor search engines use when ranking websites is the number and quality of links pointing to your website. This means, how many websites have a hyperlink to your website.

You can check which websites link to any website by going to http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ and putting a website’s URL to the box provided.

There are many to increase the number of links pointing to your website and here are the most common and most effective ways:

• Exchanging links with other your related websites
• Submitting your link to free or paid web directories
• Submitting original articles with your tips to free article directories
• Commenting on other your blogs
• Creating social media profiles etc.

When building any type of link to your website, it is important to follow these rules:

• The website’s content should be somehow relevant to your
• Give priority to local websites if you are targeting a specific area
• Make sure that the hyperlinked phrase is actually one of your main keywords, as opposed to your name or your company name
• If you are asked to send somebody a HTML of the link you would like them to put on their website, make sure it is in this structure:

<a href=”http://www.YourWebsite.com” title=”Keyword1,Keyword2, Keyword3”>Keyword1</a>

If you are looking for a free way to promote your business online, you can have a look at various social media websites, which link customers with common interests or traits.

The main goal is to attract more traffic for your website (potential customers) and to possibly turn that traffic into real clients. Remember that you are dealing with customers, so keep this in mind when creating your social media profiles.

So what are the best known social media networks?

If you participate actively on at least a few of these sites, you will increase your profile and get a bit of free publicity. However, always keep in mind who your customers are, and try to be everywhere where they go.

It is important to understand the structure of your Google Adwords account before creating particular Google Adwords campaigns. Namely there are three levels:

• Your account
• Ad campaigns
• Ad groups

The first one, Your Account – there you have set your email address, password and billing information. Within each Campaign, there are particular settings common for all its Ad Groups, such as the daily budget, geographic and language targeting, distribution preferences and end dates. On the third level you create ad variations and keyword groups which are stated just for that Ad Group.

We recommend that you structure your ad groups based on the individual products you offer.

Google Analytics, or any other tool that measures yoru website’s performance, are vital for success in search engine optimisation:

• Go to Google Analytics and log in with your Google account. In the dashboard you can see a weekly or monthly overview, or any date range you choose.

• In the site usage area you can see the number of visits, page views, pages per visit, bounce rate (when a visitor didn’t look at any other page, just the landing page), the average time on the website and the percentage of new visits. Anyway you can choose the period of time you want to check clicking just above the graphic.

• You can also check the traffic sources overview (if they come from search engines, direct traffic or referring sites).

• In Visitors section (left menu) you can also check visitor trending, location, browsers they used, language or loyalty.

• Clicking on absolute unique visitors you can check how many people have visited the website.

• In Traffic Sources – Keywords (left menu) you can check which keywords people have been searching for to get to your website.

However, Google Analytics do not limit themselves only on the above. If you are looking to learn more about this amazing free online tracking tool, visit: http://www.google.com/support/conversionuniversity

Background

As one of Ireland’s largest and longest established Canon dealerships, Office Technology (irl) Ltd have been selling and servicing photocopiers since 1992. In 2009, having built a brochure-type website which was not delivering sufficient number of sales leads, they decided to upgrade their online presentation and start getting quotation requests 24/7.

After a thorough search for the best online marketing company in Dublin that would help them get more online leads as a strategic partner, they decided to hire 3R Sales & Marketing.

Methodology

After setting up goals and agreeing on the primary focus areas for the first year, 3R started with extensive research in the industry, aiming at the competitors of Office Technology. With their 4 main departments (photocopiers, office furniture, IT support and document management), 3R then suggested a complete redesign of their website, adding a very strong call to action – requesting a quick quote. Good quality content had to be developed as well, so that Google would pick up the website as a valuable and reliable source of information.

Applying the expertise in search engine optimisation, paired with the management of their newly created Google Adwords account, enabled 3R to build a powerful lead generation tool, delivering results within a few months since the cooperation started.

Results

“We started to work with Simona from 3R Sales & Marketing as our online marketing consultant in 2009. From redesigning our website, to successful promoting it in Google with search engine optimisation and Google Adwords management, we are now confident in saying that our online leads increased by at least 100% which is a direct result of the work 3R has been doing for us. We have found Simona to be professional, friendly and an expert in her field. We would have no issues in recommending Simona or 3R to any company and hope to do more business with her in the future.” Pat Duffy, Managing Director, Office Technology Ltd.

About 3R Sales & Marketing

3R Sales and Marketing (http://www.3r.ie) is an Irish sales and marketing consultancy founded in Ireland in 2004, providing clients with proven sales, marketing and business strategies that are strongly based on business growth.  Key services provided are online marketing, sales and marketing strategy, customer service training and business English courses for non-native English speakers.

First enter your keywords list that you have created earlier. Notice that with Google Adwords, you have the possibility to format your keywords with the four types of keyword matching options:

Broad matching: for example => your. Your ad appears each time users search on these keywords, whatever the order or the other search terms.

Phrase matching: for example => “your”. Your ad appears if the keywords are all present in the right order, regardless of other search terms.

Exact matching: for example => [your]. Your ad only appears if the keywords are all present in the right order and no other terms are searched for.

Negative matching: for example => -jobs (use the “minus” character). Your ad for “your” only appears if the word “jobs“ does not appear in the search query together with “your”.

By using these matching options in your Google Adwords campaigns, you should be able to produce well-targeted results.

Make sure that you use your top keywords in your website copy. The text of your pages should contain your keywords in the exact phrasing as you have them in your meta tags and title. To make this even stronger, you can make them bold.

This is a crucial step to get conversions, since when people search for “your [YourTown]”, they want to see a page on your in [YourTown]. A conversion is when a customer contacts you regarding your offering or signs up for a newsletter or takes any action you would like them to take.

When your web page does not include the keyword your customer typed in when looking for your products, it is not very likely that they will keep browsing your website. Moreover, it is recommended that you create a separate page for each of your keyword, or combination of keywords.

The more text, the better for search engine spiders when they index a website; it is strongly recommended that your homepage has at least 200-300 words of “visible” text. Moreover, search engine spiders crawl especially the first 20 words of your website so try to keep an eye on them and make them really relevant to what your website is about.

An ebook, or, electronic book, as it is called, is simply a short or longer book you can view on the screen of your laptop, or even on your iPhone.

Don’t feel daunted by any technicalities – it’s a simple document, usually saved as a pdf file, which you can email your clients or prospects, or it can be available on your website for download.

Even if you are an expert on your, it sometimes might be a challenge to know where to start and how to approach writing this masterpiece. Remember, on every single page of the ebook you will put your contact details, so you better make sure it will only enhance your company image – so the quality must be excellent.

You can come up with free tips for your and give them out as a gift when somebody signs up for your newsletter or just use it as an introduction to your company. Make sure you make the use of all content you have already created – you can even put together your newsletter articles etc.

It is very important to make sure that your ebook has these items:

• Value adding content
• Contact details to your company
• Call to action – eg. “if you need more advice, call us now”

To promote your ebook, here are a few hints:

• Mention your ebook on your website and your blog
• Submit it to ebook directories
• Email your related websites about it and ask them to promote it
• Offer it as a free gift to your customers or prospects

Before we start talking about search engine optimisation and link exchange in more detail, let’s define a few terms:

1.     URL – this is the address of the page you are linking to, i.e. http://www.YourWebsite.com. Make sure that when you are building external links, you include the whole URL address, also with “http://”

2.     Anchor text – this is the clickable text you can see on the website that is linking to your page. This should contain your most important keywords. For example, your website could be using “your [YourTown]”.

3.     Hyperlink title – this is a little bit into coding – but don’t be scared, it’s pretty easy. Every hyperlink looks something like this in the HTML code:<a href=”http://www.YourWebsite.com” title=”Keyword1,Keyword2, Keyword3”>Keyword1</a>

Can you see the title=”Keyword 1, Keyword 2” there? Yes, it should contain your keywords, although you can use a sentence as well – and when you hover over such an optimised hyperlink, you can see these keywords.