The power of blogging is nowhere near the end of it’s time as the number of online bloggers are increasing exponentially.  With so many potential consumers online today businesses are able to utilize blogs for brand awareness, relationship building, consumer feedback, and search engine visibility. Businesses can create a face for their brand, have an online presence and establish themselves as a leader in their industry via business blogging.  According to a survey by Blogads, the most trusted media source for useful information among readers are blogs.

Business blogging allows brands to obtain an audience of current and potential consumers to encourage participation and interaction about the company and it’s industry.  Discussions about current sales, new products, and industry related news gives consumers more insight to your brand and influences their buying decisions.  Combining business blog marketing with other new media marketing techniques allows for  an effective alternative to traditional marketing strategies that are beginning to fade, letting you become a recognized expert in your industry.

Are you a social media leader, or just a follower?  This is an interesting question brought up by Examiner.com and commonly asked by many other social media gurus.  The question comes down to what you want to accomplish through social media.  Is it simply just a networking tool for you, or are you looking to establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry and gain more business?

Social Media followers are simply those people who flood Twitter with retweets and spend their quality time on Facebook adding friends in hopes to gain customers through this technique.  The difference between these social media followers and the leaders is they are always looking for the next trend they think will help market their business.  The truth is, they are simply “following” the media in what they think is the marketing trend that works.

Sure social media is all about gaining exposure, but in order to drive value to your business you have to gain exposure through search engines as well.  Social media leaders utilize social media networks by incorporating industry participation with link building to increase search rankings and promote their brand even further.  They present new ideas, educate the followers, and don’t always go with the popular vote.  Leaders often make use of authoritative social networks such as LinkedIn, Squidoo, SlideShare, HubPages, and blogs who allow followed backlinks in blog posting, articles, videos, and other quality content.  Social media leaders take that extra step to benefit their online business by utilizing the convergence of social media marketing with search engine optimization.

While a recent study from Internet Retailer shows that there are still businesses who doubt the impact of social media as a business marketing strategy, Triangle Direct Media (TDM) continues to prove the value with strategically managed & executed client campaigns. Social networking is beneficial to businesses in gaining brand exposure from the “social” aspect, as well as driving higher search engine rankings. By utilizing powerful new media channels, such efforts are able to develop customized, authoritative content with incorporated backlinks to target websites, in turn, ranking very well in Google, Yahoo & Bing. Channels such as Hubpages, press releases, Squidoo, industry blogs, corporate blogs, etc serve as a foundation for helping establish top rankings, as well as exposing your brand to a qualified audience in online communities; while proactively addressing search reputation management.

TDM has been identifying and engaging relevant blogs for each client that allows “followed” backlinks as another source for “link juice”. By providing useful comments to relevant topics on these blogs while incorporating anchor text link to the client’s site, TDM is able to increase the quality, quantity and diversity of client’s backlinks. With these efforts, along with others within Triangle Direct Media’s Social Media Content & Link Building Services, TDM can effectively impact organic search engine rankings through the influence of social networks.

If considering an agency such as TDM, it’s important to consider your strategy for “first-tier” social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter.  Be very careful here as these should be dealt with in-house, because of the more intimate, faster-paced conversations with your customers.  These first-tier social networks do not provide direct benefit to SEO purposes, as all of their backlinks are “no follow”.  You can utilize these first-tier sites by leading “fans”, “followers” or “participants” to the content created on authoritative social networks.  Don’t operate in a silo, ensure your strategy is holistic and figure out a way to leverage various social media channels in a way to magnifies user and search engine visibility.

No matter if you own a large or small business, in order to get ahead today in the online world you must create content on a regular basis that addresses key issues, problems and needs of your target customers. When you consistently update your blog, post unique articles on your website, as well as pictures and videos on social networks, you will start to see your online visibility grow. When creating content for the web, you not only need to post frequently but you need to post trustworthy content that is valuable to the reader. An article in USA Today points out; if you consistently create quality content, you must market it. But how do you know how to successfully market all of this authority content to benefit your business?

Triangle Direct Media (TDM), a new media marketing company, helps clients market to prospects by creating and producing optimized content for blogs, press wires, article distribution and social networks. Continuously producing fresh content for clients with embedded inbound links, TDM has been able to move its clients higher up in search engine rankings. Utilizing their network of over 3,500 highly-qualified bloggers, as well as highly-authoritative social networks and article distribution sites, TDM produces new media marketing and social media marketing campaigns that are highly-effective for clients.

As social media continues to influence natural search results, companies should be mindful of their content strategy, development and positioning with the intent to eductate, inform and instruct prospective customers —- and help their search rankings in the process.

Perspective can quickly be lost when blog posts are written for the purposes of SEO [embedding keywords, anchor links, etc]; you must remember that you’re also writing to and for ‘the people’. An article on Search Engine Journal reminds us how important it is to write for people and not exclusively for search engines. As blogging is originally intended for social interaction purposes, both personal and business, the posts should be written to engage the reader. Instead of just dropping a link in the post, you need to put focus into making the content of your blog post interesting and useful to readers. Creating posts with valuable content will increase the chance of people re-blogging your link. If you create worthy content, it will spread through social media channels and the aspect of search will in a way take care of itself.

Make sure that you post in your blog often enough so that your blog doesn’t look to be a pure-play SEO strategy. Frequent posting is also a benefit for SEO purposes, as search engines are keen on routinely spidering fresh content. When it comes to SEO, what should be the focus is primarily including a few targeted search keywords in both the title, post, and into your URL. As the attention is on writing for the people, you can focus on SEO when posting images by using ALT tags. Utilize XML Sitemap plug-ins, which will update your sitemap and notify all major search engines when you edit or create new posts. When writing a blog post, keep in mind that SEO is important but don’t forget that you are also blogging for the people.

Starting out as an online journal, blogs have emerged into a cost-effective and easy way to build your brand online. An article from MSNBC introduced four constructive goals in addressing your site’s needs using a blog platform.

Goal 1: Provide Fresh Content

What types of content on your business website frequently changes? This is what you want to update regularly on your blog. Content may include upcoming events, sales promotions, press clippings, or informative articles about your products and services. Blogs will show your newest posts at the top while pushing older posts down the page, so you want to make sure what you post is more recent news than your last.  There are blog plug-ins that can serve your most popular or most viewed posts, above the fold to ensure relevance to your audience.

Goal 2: Stay Connected to Customers

Blogs aren’t meant for one-way communication. Just like in doing business, you have to attach another face to the scenario. Provide a comment area after each post where customers can provide input, feedback and opinions. Give the customer an area to comment on trends that you see in your industry or even submit their own testimonials about your services. The customer will feel more connected with your brand, and more likely to come back to read future posts.  Be sure to use a comment spam filter so your blog does not become a haven for spammers. A great filter is Akismet.

Goal 3: Be visible to search engines

Many SEO experts suggest launching a blog when concerning the improvement of search engine rankings for your business. Blogs effectively serve fresh content with keyword friendly URLs to your business site, which search engines love. These top keywords need to be what you want your business to be searched for, linking directly to your business’ site. This tactic will gradually increase search rankings, and potentially improve business.  Ongoing, relevant content not only educates consumers, but it also educates search engines about your industry knowledge, credibility and expertise.

Goal 4: Add new functions to meet change in technology

As technology is rapidly changing and growing, you will want to consider plug-ins compatible to your blog. To help maintain your brand’s reputation add video about the history of your brand or pictures from community involvement. These tools will keep you up to date with the fast-paced web technology and also provide variation to your site’s content.  Popular plug-ins that are now “must haves” include SEO-friendly plug-ins, comment spam filters, and other social media capabilities.

If you’re not comfortable with web technology or just have too much on your plate, you may want to turn to New Media Marketing & SEO professionals who have a strong understanding in how to execute these goals. Let Triangle Direct Media create and maintain a strong, growing social platform for your business.

Even with the current economic situation, 80% of retailers are claiming the web to be better fit for survival from the recession than offline retail. According to the 2009 State of Retailing Online: Marketing Report, e-commerce sales will increase 11% this year from $141.3 billion in 2008 to an expected $156.1 billion. Almost one-fourth of online retailers surveyed for the study have plans to spend more this year on their web business plan than had initially intended. Cutting back on areas such as staffing, retailers are now focusing on enhancing areas such as search and social media marketing in their online businesses.

Organic traffic was rated over 50% among effective marketing tactics to be used. To increase organic traffic, retailers are using high value marketing tools designed to help address and optimize their site’s performance. Improving areas such as site structure, on-page and off-page content, retailers can increase online exposure using highly-targeted links and social media. Such techniques will enhance performance, brand reach and usability for online customers, in turn, helping to maintain customer loyalty and generate incremental revenue lifts.

There is no doubt that online retail is making its shift from a surviving industry to a thriving industry. With the current economic scenario it has become apparent that traditional retailers must invest in their online presence in order to keep their retail business thriving during the economy’s down cycle. Even in a down market, there is still evident optimism for the internet marketing industry.

I have not tested this yet but if its true it will mean great things for all of our customers. According to a blog post by Andy, that was sent to me by one of our founders, Google may be incorporating blog search results in its main search results. You can Check out his post here. Really its only logical. Most of Google’s Results have in the past months been full of irrelevant and just plain bad results, incorporating blog search results will only improve the quality of those results. Time will tell if this actually proves to be true. In the mean time keep watching.

A 10 item list of guidelines for marketing utilizing blogs and blog marketing has been issued by the WOMMA. (word of mouth marketing association) There have been a few stories lately of fake blogs and fake viral videos that everyone finds out were really just being done by Wal-Mart or some other corporation. These are sometimes called a “flog” or a corporation fronting blog or “fake” blog. Which is different from splogs which are all spam generate content.

If you think about it “fake” blogs or fake blog posts that someone is paid to do or blog that a company has out there that is not acknowledged is just as deceptive as pay per click search ads would be if they were not labeled. The FTC came in and regulated Pay Per Click ads to make sure that the consumer knew they were ads. If we follow that logic should they also step in and require the same sort of labeling on commercial blogs in order to ensure that consumers are not tricked?

The principle is the same. In search results people were trusting the engines to deliver relevant results when some ads weren’t clearly labeled the FTC said no you have to make sure people can tell the difference. Here is an article about the FTC recommendations from 2002…by Danny Sullivan.
Here is a quote from the article “Commercial Alert filed its complaint last July, claiming that a lack of disclosure about paid content integrated into search results constituted “deceptive advertising,” something the FTC regulates against.” Are some of these blogs deceptive? Will Ralph Nader target them? Stay tuned..

You can check out the Blog Marketing Code of Ethics here.

Check out this list from Google. Apparently this is where the most searches are being done for “real estate marketing”

The First one did not surprise at all. But some of the others you might find surprising. I wonder what our people over at Real Estate Blog Marketing think of this data.

This is a list in order of where according to Google searches for Real estate marketing originate.

All agents in Las Vegas, Dallas, Tampa, Littleton, Atlanta, Chandler, Phoenix, Charlotte, San Diego, and Miami… A real estate blog would be an excellent idea with very high return on investment.