Starting A Business, Beyond QR Codes, Facebook Updates And More

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Welcome to The New Social SEO Podcast. I’m your host Robert Dempsey, the CEO & Founder of Dempsey Marketing. If you’re not familiar this show it’s a weekly update on what’s new and working in the worlds of direct response marketing, social media and search engine optimization.

And speaking of search engine optimization, before I get into the news I want to extend a free offer to you. If you want to know where you rank for your #1 keyword, the one most important to your business, and see your ranking in relation to your competition, head on over to YourFreeSEOReport.com and get your free SEO report.

As always I’ll provide links to everything I mention on TheNewSocialSEO.com. I welcome your comments on the episode posts as well, and expect them. Please join in!

So without further ado let’s get started.

Why Haven’t You Started A Business  Yet?

That’s the question I want to start today’s podcast out with. It’s also the title of a recent article by Small Business Trends. The data which is from 2009 is a little old but still telling – 55% of Americans would prefer to work for themselves, mainly for the personal freedom. And that’s opposed to Europeans polled who said greater potential earnings is why they’d do the self-employment route.

I can relate to both sides of this coin. Working for myself has given me a large degree of freedom I would never have had working for anyone else, and I have had jobs before, many of them. I make more money now than I did before, and I choose who I work with and it’s on my terms.

Because all of my work is online and thanks to the Internet there is no distance between me or any of my clients across the globe, I can work from wherever I want, which for the next few years is going to be Thailand.

So the question for you today is, if you don’t already work for yourself, why aren’t you? Send your answers to robert [at] dempseymarketing [dot] com and I’ll share your answers, anonymously if you prefer, on the next show.

Now let’s discuss what’s working at Dempsey Marketing.

What’s Working At Dempsey Marketing

This week has been relatively slow at Dempsey Marketing. I was in Laos for the week getting my visa stuffs in order. What was going to be a few days turned into a 7 day trip. I felt a bit like Gilligan but we were able to make it back to Chiang Mai, and I’m very happy to be back.

But I do have one tasty nugget to report.

Whenever we build a site for a client we use WordPress, and specifically the Genesis framework. There’s a nice little $37 plugin called Rank Tracker, which will email you each time someone finds a page on your site using Google. Not only will it tell you the page and the keyword they used, it also tells you where you rank. And later if you go up or down in ranking it will tell you that too.

You can get your own copy of this plugin at RankTrackerSEOPlugin.com. The value you get is well worth the $37 bucks you’ll pay for it.

So here’s how we’re using this.

Each time we get one of these emails we’ll run it through our tools to see how many searches the keyword gets. If it seems worthwhile we’ll either further optimize the ranking page or create an entirely new one. Then we start tracking the pages’ progress.

Also any page getting traffic must have a desired call to action. We’ll double check the ranking page to ensure it does, and if it doesn’t, we’ll add one.

This is one of the many services we offer in our monthly done-for-you marketing package.

And now onto mobile marketing news.

Mobile Marketing News

Fast Company had a recent piece titled, “How Mobile Adoption Changes The Game For The Web.” In the article which also has a video they talk about how the first computing experience for the younger generation is using a mobile device, be it an iPhone or a tablet like the iPad. It brings into question how the web will be shaped by mobile computing.

What I do know is this. My daughters’ first computer at the age of 2 was my old iPhone. She’s been using that for almost two years. As soon as my wife bought an iPad she used that. She is now quite fluent at less than four years of age in using both the iPhone and the iPad. The only reason she uses my old Mac is to play games that are made in Flash. Almost makes the case for me to get her an Android tablet.

But here’s the thing with this – a few years ago students were being issues laptops as they began college. Now they are getting tablet computers. For me there are only three things I really need to get a ton of work done wherever I am – an iPad, and Internet connection, and a cup of coffee. Give me those three and I am just about 100% productive and able to produce media of every fashion.

Mobile is only getting bigger, and if you’re market is a younger demographic, you must support them. The first step that we spoke about before is mobile-enabling your WordPress website with the WPTouch Pro plugin. The next step after that is creating your own iPhone, iPad and Android apps.

Now when it comes to mobile marketing QR codes have been getting a lot of press. However to use QR codes you have to have aQR code reader installed on your smart phone, and if you don’t have one of those you’re SOL. Not to worry though, in a recent mobile campaign discussed at Mobile Marketer, Pepsi used image recognition instead.

In their promotional campaign for the The X-Factor TV show, consumers could snap pictures of any X-Factor branded product and either send it in using SMS or email. The person then is sent a response with a link to a promotional video clip. After they watch the clip they’re entered to win.

Pretty cool stuff there and great recognition that not everyone has a QR code reader app on their phone. This allowed Pepsi to reach a much broader audience than going a pure QR code route.

So that covers mobile let’s talk social media.

Social Media News

And holy monkey nuggets this past week was huge for social media. We saw Google+ open up to the public and on the same day Facebook release a bunch of updates including the timeline feature, which I’ve enabled on my Facebook profile. To see what it looks like head over to TheNewSocialSEO.com and check out a screenshot of it. It’s pretty neat.

Robert Dempsey Facebook Timeline

Now we could talk about the implications of this all day or how upset people again got at these changes, but here’s the thing I see in all this – Facebook is facing stiff competition now from Google+ which has somewhere in the neighborhood of 40+ million users. That’s a lot of people, but we are talking Google here. And how many people use Google.com everyday multiple times a day? Only a few hundred million. Yep, this one could be here to stay folks.

So rather than go over all the updates to Facebook I’ll post links to some of the best posts about it at TheNewSocialSEO.com so head over there and check those out.

But speaking of Facebook, one thing a number of people on Google+ have been talking about is that all of the changes to Facebook are for their advertisers. The more information you give them the better advertisers can target you. Now as a Facebook advertiser I’m all for that so please, keep giving Facebook all of your information. My clients and I will both thank you for it.

But this is not mere here say. eMarketer reports that Facebook will double worldwide ad revenues this year. Global ad revenues are projected to be around $3.8 billion with $2.01 billion of that coming from the U.S.  Now here I’d like to mention something.

If your business has the potential to help people on a global scale there is no reason it shouldn’t do so. Something I noticed here in Thailand is the large number of high-school and college age kids using Facebook. Two years ago when we were here they were all using Hi-5. Facebook is now in all the ads for mobile phones, and interestingly I’ve also seen ads for Google Chrome on TV as well.

Using Facebook advertising is a great way to test the global waters before jumping in head first. Just a though for ya.

And continuing on Facebook as we can’t seem to get enough this week, Pam Dyer published a great article on The Social Customer about 10 facts about consumer behavior on Facebook. Pam includes such juicy stats as:

• For the most part, respondents said they “Like” a brand on Facebook because they are a customer (58%) or because they want to receive discounts and promotions (57%)
• 78% of consumers who “Like” brands on Facebook said they “Like” fewer than 10 brands
• 51% of consumers said they are more likely to buy a product after “Liking” the brand on Facebook

I’ll link to the post at TheNewSocialSEO.com so be sure to give that one a thorough read if you’re using Facebook for marketing.

Now let’s get off of Facebook and talk about Tumblr for a second. When I did the “Rock The Job” project with Nick Petit and Jim Hoskins, now with Carsonified, we built the website on Tumblr. At the time you really had to know what you were doing with it in order to get a look and feel that you wanted. It also had such a horrible uptime that my friend and client Zach Inglis of London Made created a website to tell you if it was up or down.

Well as they say, “you’ve come a long way baby.”

According to a recent eMarketer report Tumblr grew 183% and in May alone received more than 11.9 million unique visitors. Not too shabby at all. So who is using this platform that allows you to post photos, videos, links as well as re-post other people’s posts and follow other blogs? Well it’s about 53.5% women and 44.4% 18-34 year olds. Anecdotal evidence also suggests that a lot of marketing and PR folks use Tumblr.

If you’re using Tumblr please send an email to robert [at] dempseymarketing [dot] com and let me know how you’re using it and why. I’ll include your response in the next podcast.

So that’s it for social media, onward to SEO!

SEO News

SEO continues to pretty much be SEO. This past week on his Defining New Media podcast my friend Scott Scanlon did a great episode on “The Truth As I Know It About SEO.” In the episode Scott gives some great SEO tips as well as says what most people won’t – that he nor anyone else will ever give you 100% of what’s working in SEO. And this is very true, if not for the simple fact that that is what they get paid for.

The simple fact in SEO and in business is this – while many people, including myself, will give you a crap ton of how-to information, if you want the most recent “what’s working now and here’s how to do it” you have to pay for it. This should apply to your business as well. Think about it, but don’t let it hold you back from delivering a ton of value.

And speaking of how-to information, Rob Cubbon did a post about on-page SEO that pretty much hits all the major points of on-page optimization. On-page factors help, but links to your site help even more. If you want a good summary of all the factors give his post a read.

That’s the big stuff in SEO this week, let’s get to our final topic – direct response marketing.

Direct Response Marketing News

Gerald Weber wrote a short and to the point post this week with 3 tips to get the most out of your calls to action. In summary, the three tips are:

Do not forget that each of your blog posts and landing pages should have a call to action on them. This could be telling the people to subscribe to the blog, click to download a free white paper, get a coupon or whatever. Have one at all times on each blog post and landing page.

Now here’s a question for you – have you ever visited a website where you could purchase something, left, and then see it’s ads on other websites you’re visiting? That’s called retargeting, and it’s something I’ve been reading up on. The best post I’ve found is from Rich Gorman at DirectResponse.net, titled “Retargeting – What Is It And How Does It Benefit Us?”

Long story short retargeting is exactly what I described – you leave the offer page of a site and its ads follow you around the web. The idea is that you keep seeing the offer until you buy.

A great thing about retargeting is that it’s typically less expensive than standard banner advertising. Check out Rich’s post for a video about AdRoll, a company that can help you use retargeting to capture more sales.

That’s This Weeks Show

And with that story that is it for this week’s show.

Remember to head over to YourFreeSEOReport.com for your free SEO report. Also please do leave thoughts and feedback on the post at TheNewSocialSEO.com site and let me know if you have any questions I can answer on a future podcast.

I’m Robert Dempsey of Dempsey Marketing, and I will see you next time. Thanks for yours.

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