What most people fail to see is that having great flow in writing and finding the most suggestive metaphors and vocabulary to get your message through to the audience are often not enough. In order to make your website or blog post more visible on the internet or to rank better in search engines’ results, you need know-how on SEO for Google and on writing SEO friendly content.
Marketing using social media is the latest trend, one that has proven to be responsible for a considerable part of a blog’s traffic and for its new readers. However, practice has thought us that, in the end, one of the most powerful SEO for Google tools is high quality, relevant and attention-grabbing content.

This best practices’ guide for creating great content offers simple and practical rules, advices and requirements, following four easy steps as part of the process.

Start by imagining this hypothetical situation: you have to write a new blog post for the WordPress blog of one of your clients. This a standard task carried out by every online marketing agency. What would be the first thing you would do? Would it be doing research, writing a first draft, looking for keywords, brainstorming?
We know from experience that beginnings can sometimes be hard, so do not worry if you do not get it right the first time.

1. We recommend that you start by creating an editorial plan because it will help you better organize your work throughout the month. Also, it is a really efficient visual reminder for keeping track of the schedule as you go through it.

2. The next step is brainstorming titles for your editorial plan or just for your first blog post. Once you have settled on a few ideas, remember that they need to be created so as to include at least one of the targeted keywords.

Golden rule for keywords usage – in general:
Keywords have to be used in the context as they were given to you as much as possible, except for when you intend to separate the words of a keyword phrase or term with a , ; . – : ! ? and so on. The keyword long tail demand is the SEO philosophy behind the keywords selection, but this all you need to know for now.
Remember that you want anyone clicking and reaching that blog post to stick around for more than a few seconds, and the first step to doing that is coming up with an attractive, interesting, intriguing, even shocking title why not?

3. As you start writing your first paragraph remember that SEO guidelines teach us just how important having keywords at this point in your content really is. The truth is that “the entire science of information retrieval (including web-based search engines like Google) is based on keywords”.
Understanding how keywords retrieval works is just as important as implementing them correctly, and for this reason alone we will explain the basics: when you search in your browser for “tablespoons”, for example, the results that you get, the pages and their rankings, depend on how relevant and popular the content they provide is to your search. One of the ways to optimize a page’s chances to rank higher is if you use your keywords in the title, the meta data and the text.

Golden rules for keywords usage in the introductory, body and closing paragraphs:
Generally, there is a maximum number of 5 keywords that we recommend you use throughout the blog post, out of which at least one should be unique and highly targeted for your content. Also, it is advisable that you use at least 2 of the 5 keywords twice in your piece.
Certain keyword usage tactics are better than others, and with respect to this, while using two of your keywords alone in the first paragraph adds unexpected value to the blog’s rankings, adding more instances of a keyword phrase or term in the content (than recommended) actually has little to almost no impact on rankings (keywords density myth debunked). Therefore, follow the simple 5 keywords-2 mentioned twice-rule and you will be able to reach that SEO friendly content you are aiming at.

Golden rules for a great creative stretch when content writing:
The first thing to consider is the writing style you want to adopt, and to answer this you can refer to previous blog posts, to your client’s special comments and requests, and/or you figure it out on your own based on the type of readers you want to attract (targeted readers’ population). For example, if you are writing about the beneficial effects of acupuncture, your style must be relatively formal, but not academic, informative, explicit and most importantly, friendly. On the other hand, if you are writing for a company that offers online dating services, your writing style will most likely be informal, funny and catchy, making use of popular idioms and phrases, even including slang as part of the process.
Keeping a close eye on your blog post’s central theme, as you progress with your writing, allows you to avoid being sidetracked and helps you focus on the relevant message you want and need to communicate. Remember that your readers have certain expectations and their reasons for looking that content up online are various, but your job is to create great content, both appealing and useful.

4. SEO related meta data, which includes your meta title, a meta description and a SEO friendly URL, is the finishing touch and should be approached with care and much attention to detail.
Thus, the meta title should have a maximum of 70 characters and at least one keyword, the meta description for the blog post should have about 160 characters and preferably at least 2 keywords, and your URL should also contain one of the keywords.
Last, but least, creating a strong inner referencing system for your blog can be easily done by linking one blog post to another blog post that discusses a similar topic or something in connection with it. This way you bring more traffic to your site, improving your rankings and overall visibility.

We hope that the suggestions and best practices presented in this article will bring you a step closer to creating great SEO friendly content. Meanwhile, we are welcoming any comments, ideas or suggestions you might have on this subject! Until next time!

Of course, this might not meet all the needs and wants of some marketers or business owners, but I believe it is a huge step compared to the amount of data available on social marketing we had approximately a year ago.

You can find the following sections related to social stats under Traffic Sources -> Social.

Sources

The Sources report enables you to analyze which social network brings your website the most visits or pageviews, visitors from which channel stay longer (average visit duration) and which visit more pages during a session (pages/visit). As a side note I would mention that you should be careful when analyzing these metrics, because they can be deceptive, especially the Average Visit Duration and the Pages/Visit metrics. Why? Because they take into consideration extreme data. For example, if you have a non-ecommerce website, let’s say a news site, and in a given period of time 100 of your visitors visit 20 of your pages, while 1,000 visit only 1 page. This would mean that the average is 2.7 pages/visit, which might be considered a good result, but in fact 90% of your visitors view only one page visitors, which in the case of a news site is relatively problematic. To get the bigger picture look at the distribution table, which you can find under the Audience -> Behavior-> Engagement section. But in order for you to see the data related only to the visitors who are coming from social media networks you will have to apply an Advanced Segment (in the picture below you can notice that I named my segment Social Networks). I will talk about how to create such an segment in the second part of the article).

By drilling down through each channel you can analyze through which landing pages visitors from each social networks came to your website, and in what timeframe. You could discover that a piece of content from your site, which was shared by you or one of your fans/followers a week ago is still bringing a considerable amount of traffic to you site.

In the Social Network and Action tab you can see through which action the content was distributed. For example in the case of Google+, you can see how many times it received +1s, or how many times it was posted and re-shared.

Additionally, in some cases you can read the conversations that took place regarding your content, in the Activity Stream tab. This feature is available only for social networks that are part of Google’s Social Data Hub.

Pages

The metrics and features available are the same as in the Sources report, but from the point of view of your content. This gives you the opportunity to analyze which of your content was more “viral” and through which social channels each content was distributed.

Conversion

I consider this to be the most important section and you should too, because the value of the visits coming from social referrals and all the social interaction can be found in this report. An important aspect to remember is that this section would be empty if you do not enable ecommerce tracking (if you have an ecommerce website) or set up goals, including a Goal Value (if you have a non-ecommerce website you can use the method described by Google Analytics to calculate the Goal Value .

If one of the two or both ecommerce and goals are set up, the Conversion report will be populated with the social networks you receive traffic from, together with the number of conversions and the conversion value for each social network.

In the Assisted vs. Last interaction tab, for each social media network you can see the number of Assisted and Last Interaction and their value respectively, together with the Assisted / Last Interaction Conversions ratio. But what does this all mean you ask? Let’s see below:

• Assisted Conversions and Assisted Conversion Value shows the number and monetary value respectively, of sales and/or conversions that a particular social network assisted. An assist occurs when a visitor (coming through a social media network) leaves without converting to a goal or without buying something on your ecommerce site, but returns later to convert during an ulterior visit. The higher these numbers are the more visitors came through social media channels before converting on their last visit.
• Last Interaction Conversions and Last Interaction Conversion Value show the number and monetary value respectively, of the last click sales and/or conversions. A Last click is considered that particular visit when a visitor converts. The higher these numbers are the more visitors converted when coming from a social media channel (in the case of that particular visit).

Note that if a visitor comes for the first time through a social network and converts in the same session, the Last Interaction Conversion is incremented, but the Assisted Interaction Conversion is not. The Assisted / Last Interaction Conversions ratio is interpreted in comparison to the value 1 (see chart below).

All the metrics available in this report can be viewed for all goals or just for one goal in particular (just select the goal for which you want to see the data from the drop-down list in the upper-left side).

If you are a marketer who’s lobbying for social marketing within your company, these metrics might just have the power to convince your CEO regarding the (monetary) value of the social networks you are active on.

Social Plugins

If you have social plugins implemented on your home page and you inner pages, with the Social Plugins report you can see what content is liked, +1ed and tweeted directly from your website. This could be another metric which shows you which of your content and what kind of content is more appealing to your visitors to share and on which channels. If you have the plugin implemented only on your home page, then the report will show you data only for this page.

Take note that by default Google Analytics only includes in the Social Plugin reports from Google Plus. To include Facebook and Twitter, for example, changes to the tracking code have to be made.

Social Visitors Flow

This visually represents what pages did the visitors, coming from social networks, viewed during a session on your website, where they left your website and so on. Thus, you can observe which pages are considered important by visitors coming from social networks and which pages need improvement (looking at the number of visitors who left after viewing a particular page). If you want to see more levels just click the arrow in the right. If you want a more thorough analysis, for example for new visitors or visits with conversions, select an advanced segment from the drop-down list in the upper-left corner. You also have the option to see the flow for visitors coming from a particular social network, just left-click on the particular channel you would like to analyze and select “highlight traffic through here” or “view only this segment”. You can do the same with a particular node (page) as well.

Advanced Segments

If you want additional data on your visitors than what Social Reports, the location they come from, the operating system/browser they use, how much of you social traffic are returning visitors and so on you could create an Advanced Segment that includes only social traffic. You can use this method to see the distribution table for social traffic, when it comes to average pages/visit and visit duration (in the Audience section under Behavior).

For example, we created our “Social Networks” advanced segment using the following Regular Expression:

facebook\.com|m\.facebook\.com|twitter\.com|digg\.com|stumbleupon\.com|linkedin\.com|technorati\.com|myspace\.com|bit\.ly|delicious\.com|reddit\.com|t\.co|goo\.gl

If you want to use the same specifications, save this advanced segment to the profile you desire.

After you save it, you can edit it to better fit your analysis needs, or you can add other social networks we did not include.

If you observe that you are using Advanced Segments quite often you might want to consider creating an additional profile, in which you include only social traffic (remember to always keep an “untouched” profile). 

If you add the data available from Google Analytics to the number of followers, likes or +1s, number of interactions, total reach, check-ins and so on, you are able to draw a comprehensive picture about the results your social media activity has and take informed decisions regarding steps to be taken.

How do you measure the results of your social marketing activities?

How to get more followers on Google Plus?

1. Ask your Employees, partners and customers to add your business page in their circles and share it with their circles, they can do this when they plus one the page (which is the equivalent of the Like button in Facebook), or they can latter on Share the Page (you guessed it, the equivalent of Share button in Facebook).

2. Managers should spread the word about the page to their own circles, which can be easily done with the Spread the word button. Of course, assuming they have a large number of followers, otherwise this tactic won’t have significant results.

3. Invite your followers from other social accounts to follow you. The advantage of this tactic is that if they followed you on Twitter or Facebook for example, they will most probably follow you on Google+ as well. Additionally, it’s not very time-consuming. The possible disadvantage would appear if you share the same content on several social media channels, as sooner or later people following you in several of these channels will get annoyed by your repetitiveness. An interesting option you might want to consider to make your Google Plus page more visible is to introduce on your Facebook page a Google+ tab.

4. Add Google Plus pages connected to your industry in your circles. If you are very confident, you could follow even competitors, but I personally wouldn’t recommend it. It is important to mention that as a business page you can include pages in your circles, but you cannot add individual profiles to your circles, before they add you in their circles. So you cannot apply the Twitter strategy of Following many people and hope they follow you back.

5. After you added pages and people in your circles, be active. Comment, plus one posts and so on, even on your customers’ profiles! This is one of the new brand-follower interaction methods Google Plus brings to the table, thus making it possible for you (as the brand) to comment on a post that one of your individual followers posted on their own stream, or even share that post with your community. I hope you are as excited about this as I am J

6. Place the +1 button, or the link to your Google+ profile strategically on your website, blog, guest blog articles and other content you can technically control.

7. And last but not least, as in Twitter, add everyone to your Google Plus page’s circles, who has added your page in theirs.

What is the difference between plus ones and adding into circles?

Well, if you get a plus one, you can take it as a vote of confidence, but you have to remember that the person who pushed the +1 button will not get your stream updates, unless he/she adds you to their circles. So you can consider adding your page into a circle is a deeper commitment to your brand, than a +1. Keep in mind that people can take away their vote of confidence by pushing the +1 button a second time or by “kicking you out” of their circles.

Organizing Hangouts

Hangouts is the video chat and conferencing program, which can include up to 10 attendees. It’s been rolled out not so long ago for business pages as well. After pushing the “Start a hangout” button from the right, you will have to install a plugin, after which you will have to invite other people to your hangout.

Additionally, you have a feature called “hangouts with extras”, which besides the Screenshare option includes some Apps, from which in my opinion the most important at the moment are YouTube, Google Docs and SlideShare. So why not use Google Plus Hangout feature to provide customer service or to enhance the relationship with your clients?

How to manage my business page’s circles?

You can add a person or business into any number of circles (just select the circles tab in the menu and drag people into your circles), which makes possible a complex enough segmentation of your connections (compared to other social media channels at least), which is extremely beneficial. Of course, I can see that organizing your circles can be a tiresome process, not only if the number of your connections increases daily, but depending on your segmentation, it could be hard to maintain. But, think of all the benefits if you organize your connections on geographical considerations or the position they hold within their company – you could share content which is more specific for their interest.

To create a circle just drag and drop a person or business page in the first “circle”, after which you can edit, delete or share circles by clicking on the circle would like to make changes to.

How to do advertising on Google Plus?

At the moment you cannot advertise on Google+, like you can on Facebook, but with a little bit of imagination we could foresee a combination between Facebook ads and AdWords. Or maybe Google will take a different path, like no ads at all on its social platform. Why? Well, Josh Costine from Techcrunch has a pretty good point on how Google+ is made to better target ads on its other features and platforms.

Until then, you can use the +1 feature of G+ in your AdWord campaigns, if you link your business page to your AdWords campaign. This means that all your plus ones (gained by your page, website, ads and in the search results) will be summed up and the grand total will be shown, whether users are looking at your Google Plus page, you ad etc. The feature is called Social Extensions and its impact on CTR is still to be tested, but I guess it cannot hurt.

What other social marketing features would be nice?

Google Plus is a work in progress and hopefully Google will show the same openness for user demands as until now. I found the “user demands” in this Mashable post to be more or less pressing, although being written in November 2011 a few features like multiple managers and mobile have already been integrated into Google Plus.

I believe the most pressing is the analytics for Google Plus pages, which seemingly will be out in the next couple of weeks (but until then Google Analytics does a pretty good job in monitoring Google+ activity, without any additional code). Additionally, momentarily you do not have the option to set your own vanity URL, hopefully this feature will come out soon, although there is a less elegant option, about which you can read at this blog post about setting custom URLs for Google Plus Pages.

I already have a Facebook page, why should I take the time to create and manage a Google Plus page too?

You have to take into consideration the main difference between Facebook and Google+, which is that the latter, even though it has been around the web for less than one year, it is part of a conglomerate of other features and products, from which the most important is (obviously) Google Search. Mainly because it is not hard to foresee that Google will combine in one way or another its features and products, for an improved user experience. A first step in this direction was the launch of Search, Plus Your World, which personalizes your search results based on your Google Plus account. And many believe that it won’t stop here. So considering that Google Search maintains its global search market share of above 80%, if Google says get onto the Google+ wagon, your business gets onto that wagon.

Additionally, Google+ has other features that can help you to interact with your potential and actual customers. On the other hand paid advertisement is not yet available, as Google Plus pages are still in their infancy, but when they will be I am sure that the analytics behind them will be according to our expectations. Customized tabs aren’t yet available either, that I know of. And there are many features that we would be glad to see implemented on Google+, but I am sure that sooner or later Google will roll them out as well.

Now that you know the basics in Google+, go create your business page and start sharing content (and don’t worry if you mistype something in your posts, because you can edit it even after you posted it, avoiding so many embarrassing moments – unlike in Facebooks posts).

Hoping that you found this Google+ introductory guide useful for your business, we are looking forward to answer any questions you might have or to chat more on the subject in the comment section below or on Facebook, Twitter or Google+

At a first glimpse, Google Plus combines the advantages of Facebook pages with most of Twitter’s functionality.

How to create a Google Plus business page?

Categories

Choose the appropriate category, because you cannot change this latter (not yet anyway). There are several categories you can choose from:

Categories in Social Marketing Network Google Plus

1. Local Business or Place is the special category, as these type of pages are designed to help people locate the business using its physical address. So choose this if your business is a restaurant, pub, shop etc. in one particular city. The first step in this case is entering your location and primary phone number, in order to identify the location of your business.

2. Product or Brand – use this category if you want to separate your brands and products from each other. For example if you have a brand of women’s clothing and one for bowling equipment (being a little bit of absurd here, but you get the point) you might want separate pages.

3. Company, Institution, Organization – if the Google Plus page relates to a company or organization as a whole this would be the best choice.

4. Art, Entertainment, Sports – I would recommend this type of page for bands, artists, football clubs (obviously).

5. Other – If you feel that neither of the above is suitable for your page, you can choose this category, as it will not affect any feature regarding your page, every category having the same characteristics, except the local business one.

Big companies with multiple locations, or multiple brands or products, have the option of creating multiple pages for every location/ brand they own, apart from the company page for example.

After choosing your category you can enter you business page’s information, together with the subcategory within the category (in the example above: Consulting and Business Services) and the age for which the content is appropriate (and your address if you choose Local Business or Place).

Tagline and page photo

The Tagline is like the elevator pitch on Google+. It will appear as the description when somebody shares your page. If you don’t have inspiration right in the moment you’re creating your page, do not worry, you can edit it later.

You might wonder, where and how will the tagline appear to your potential or actual followers when someone shares your page. Well, in this case even if it is longer than 10 words the whole text will be shown (and if it is very short it will look a little bit bare if you ask me).

Where the profile photo is concerned you can change it later as well, but do not forget to add one. It can be the logo of your company, your brand, or if you want something less mainstream put your creative hat on

How to edit your Google Plus page?

To edit the information of your business page just go to the Profile Tab and click Edit profile. You can change the name of your page, the tagline and the introductory information about your page, your contact info (email, phone and fax number, address, chat, pager). Additionally, you can change your profile photo and your cover photo. Make sure your profile photo has a high resolution and take into consideration that your cover photo has to be 940 x 180 pixels, but the last 1/3 of it is covered by your profile picture. Take advantage of the cover photo feature by illustrating your brand in an original way. If you already designed a cover photo for Facebook, you can try modifying that one and use it on Google+, as your brand is the same no matter what social channel you use.

To save the changes you have made press the “Done editing” button at the top.

I would like to mention a new little feature Google+ has, which enables you to see your page through the eyes of the “Public” or any other individual profile or business page. You can check it out by clicking on the “View as” button next to the “Edit profile” button.

How to manage your Google Plus page?

To act as your business page just select the page’s name from the list of your pages from the Manage your pages section, which you can find under the “Pages” tab or find the name of you page in the profile drop-down menu, in the upper-right corner.

OR       

To edit settings, as the email address you want to receive notifications on, the managers of the business page and other aspects select Page settings or Managers from the drop-down menu from the upper right corner or in the “Home” tab find the Settings option under the wheel icon.

OR       

This is it for now. In Part 2 on how to actively manage your Google+ business pages we will talk about getting more followers on Google+, managing circles and hangouts and other features available on this relatively new social network. Until then post your questions or comments in the comment section below or let’s chat on Facebook, Twitter and of course Google Plus

Google+ wants to make you “feel like you’re connected to a group of people, like you’re part of something”. That “something” wants to be much more narrow and personal than the “Friends” list from Facebook.

What’s your opinion? Will Google+ be a threat to Facebook?

Facebook matches advertisers to users based on users’ interests, activities, favorites, their job titles, as well as the names of the groups they belong to and the pages they are fans of. That’s a lot of information, and Facebook is still a place where more often than not people are willing to share an unbelievable wealth of personal stuff with their Friends and the Facebook Corporation. From a marketer’s perspective, Facebook can offer profound insights into the personalities and circumstances of one’s target audience. As a gathering place on the Internet, Facebook’s communities and the community demographics developed therein can give marketers surgical precision as they find an arena for their ads.

To begin his talk at SES Toronto, Marty Weintraub identified three classes of Facebook targeting tactics that every Facebook marketer ought to have at their disposal. Literal, competitive and inferred targeting should all inform a Facebook ad strategy. Let’s take a look at these three and summarize Weintraub’s discussion of them in more detail:

Literal Targeting:

These are the most obvious connections a marketer can make. Selling lacrosse sticks to people who like “playing lacrosse” on Facebook would be an obvious starting point. Literal targeting aims to match ads that are semantically related to the interests of users on Facebook. Often a keyword appears both in the interests listed by users and in the ad itself. Literal targeting allows marketers a way into Facebook that is parallel to SEM efforts on search engines. The downside is that these clear relationships sometimes don’t exist and that they unlock only a fraction of community demographics’ potential. As a marketer, Facebook allows you to go deeper into the lives your audience than ever before. The question according to Mr. Weintraub is “how deep are you willing to go?”

Competitive Targeting:

Competitive targeting focuses on both the positive and negative Facebook presence of a brand’s competitors on Facebook. A competing brand’s fans on Facebook might be an effective place to market your superior goods. Explain the added value of your product in your ad, offer a deal, try to win people over to your side. Fans of brands that are vulnerable, either because of an inferior product, negative press coverage, a recall of some sort, whatever the vulnerability may be, present fertile ground for converts. Essentially, marketers should try to find ways to leverage competitor investments in organizing their followers on Facebook both for their own Facebook presence and against the competitors themselves.

Click here to read the rest of the article.

No official word yet from Google

A couple weeks ago, Google’s Matt Cutts talked about a new iteration of Google’s Panda update, which he said was already approved and would be hitting soon. The update has been commonly referred to throughout the search industry as “Panda 2.2″.

This version is expected to more heavily address the issue of scraped content, an issue that continues to plague the web and Google’s search results (the scraped content often ranks higher than the original) even post-Panda. Cutts is quoted as saying in a liveblog of an SMX Advanced session, “A guy on my team [is] working on that issue. A change has been approved that should help with that issue. We’re continuing to iterate on Panda. The algorithm change originated in search quality, not the web spam team.”

Google has not made any announcements or references indicating that the update has gone live yet, but webmasters are thinking it might have been released. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable points to a WebmasterWorld thread, where there is a mix of webmasters claiming they have suffered from the alleged update and some that have recovered. One said, “I’ve recovered as of 36 hours ago. Day1 of recovery, traffic doubled, adsense tripled Day2 of recovered, 4 hours in, traffic has doubled again, back to my best levels of 18 months ago.”

Cutts said he didn’t know when Panda would be launched internationally (in other languages), and that Google has made no manual exceptions with the update, meaning all sites have been affected solely by algorithmic tweaks – none by hand. ”

It’s important to note that Google makes algorithmic adjustments every day, and sometimes even more than once a day. Obviously not all updates get the attention the Panda update has received, but you never know when some adjustment can impact your site’s rankings for better or for worse.

Click here to read the rest of the article.

Strong creative can be a huge competitive advantage in the world of paid search. When you can pay less to get more, you’re doing something right.

The compounding factors of improved CTR, increased quality score, and reduced CPC can make a tremendous impact on performance. Ad copy testing lies at the heart of seizing this competitive advantage.

With an endless number of attributes to test, it can be a little daunting to pick a starting point. Looking for a positive impact? Here are five ad copy attributes you can test.

1. Price Points & Percentage Off

If you’re a retailer, this is must. You’re missing out big if you aren’t testing into specific price points and percent off offers.

Important: don’t make assumptions here. Test out multiple price points and percentages off to find out what will resonate with consumers. Here’s one of my favorite illustrations of why not to assume anything when it comes to price points:

PPC Price Points

A 76.5 percent CTR lift on the higher price point. We can make assumptions as to why the higher of the two price points experienced the higher CTR. Maybe the “or Less” factored in, or maybe “$39” just sounded too good to be true. Hard to say. This is precisely why we test.

2. Google Sitelinks

By now you have hopefully enjoyed the benefits of running Google Sitelinks in your ads. The presence of ad sitelinks can lift CTR by more than 30 percent.

Surprisingly, many advertisers still haven’t added these to their campaigns. Maybe they’ve tested it and found that their ads perform better without sitelinks, but this is doubtful. I haven’t seen an instance where an ad’s CTR decreased as a result of having sitelinks present.

Don’t let your sitelinks get stale. Remember to rotate in new pages to test, and test variations of the ad copy. Keep refining.

Click here for full article!

Social media ROI has remained elusive for numerous marketers despite their best efforts to develop a calculation that will prove the business value of the allotted social media resources.

Through a new feature in Google Analytics, some customization to your Google Analytics tracking, and diligent work on the part of your social media team, the ROI of your social media efforts can be discovered using Google Analytics. To get to the point where you can calculate social media ROI, there are four steps that need to be taken.

Step 1: Implement Proper Social Media Tracking

Ensure that you’ll have the ability to segment revenue that’s generated through social sources by your internal direct efforts and revenue that resulted through external social means. In other words, revenue that’s generated as a result of links your team placed on social sites and revenue generated through links placed by people outside your company.

In order to measure your direct impact, you need to ensure you’re always using campaign tracking on any links you put out on social media sites that point back to one of your sites. It’s a fairly easy process, but one that can be a bit tedious to manage at the outset. Once you’re in the habit of always adding campaign tracking, it will become second nature and the results will be well worth the effort.

Google offers a simple URL builder tool to help create campaign tracking strings, but you should either build your own tool or creating one in Excel that allows you to manage the names that are used for each parameter. This is very important because you don’t want to cause yourself reporting headaches by using different names for parameters that should be the same.

Click HERE form more!

It’s been our experience that asking for a testimonial can be a long and arduous process. Sometimes it seems easier to just ask a friend to repeat after you, or invent a statement that touches on all your key selling features.

The value of a real testimonial can’t be stressed enough in our opinion.

Sometimes getting one is really difficult. I’ve been asked to write testimonials for people I’ve worked with and it’s hard! Instead, we’ve found writing down a client’s comments after a positive discussion and then sending it to them asking for their approval to use their statements to be the most effective.

When someone else basically writes it for me after speaking with me, it’s easy to just reply “approved!” It is in my own words, and expresses what I wanted to say as part of a conversation rather then having fight writers block.

In terms of fake or testimonials written from friends, we always suggest avoiding them. Sometimes potential clients will want to speak to the person who provided such a rave review. If you have a good relationship with your clients, they’re often willing to network with others who are also interested in using your services.

What could be a better sales tool than that?