For businesses, managing the marketing process via Social Media Networking can simply be overwhelming but there are a couple of methods to simplify the process, here is one such method:

It is questionable whether Twitter is a truly a good platform for B2B marketing but one thing is for sure is that it should not be over-looked because of it’s reach. Reach, however, is not everything – any marketer who has ever worked a trade show, with thousands and thousands of visitors, will understand that we do not want to waste our time on ‘tire-kickers’ we want to find our ‘A’ class prospects.  Not easy to do on with a marketing media whose very foundation is the ‘shotgun marketing method’, whereas in the B2B world we really want to adopt a ‘rifle-shot approach’ and create a following from our target market segments.

To collect followers that is in your market space:

• Add a ‘Follow-me’ Twitter Icon to your company web site
• Add a ’Follow-me’ Twitter URL in your company’s email template
• Add a “Follow-me’ Twitter logo on all marketing collateral

By adopting these tactics, you will build a targeted following and as you build this following, not use Twitter to make your Twitter posts but instead use Facebook!

Sorry for switching gears on you!  But Facebook has connectivity with Twitter and we want to take advantage of this connectivity to expand our marketing reach and minimize our work.

In Facebook, create a Company ‘Page’ and then use exactly the same tactics as detailed above to create ‘Fans’ for your company Facebook page.

And here’s the rub…

Facebook provides connectivity to Twitter. Simply set up your Facebook Company Page to link to Twitter and, every time you update your Facebook page, Twitter will send that same information via a Tweet to all your Twitter followers.

Enter your marketing information once and distribute it via both Facebook and Twitter.

Facebook, Social Media Networking, Twitter Hide

When WEB Design RI performs SEO web site check the most common web site ommision especially a site that was designed several years ago (Sitemaps in this format were fiorst used by Google in 2005),  is the  sitemap.xml file. The sitemap specifications are detailed at http://www.sitemaps.org

If you want your web site to be indexed  by the major search engines and you would like the search engines to be  to be notified of changes to your site then you must include a site map XML file in your web site. These files permit the search engines to  crawl web sites in an intelligent fashion.

Sitemaps are what is known as a URL inclusion protocol where we notify the search engines of all of the URLs that we would like to be included when they crawl our sites and this compliments the Robots.txt files which is a URL exclusion protocol. See my Robots.txt blog entry.

Sitemaps are extremely useful on web sites which are not browser friendly and that use rich Flash or AJAX content.

Sitemaps are used by the largest search engines:  Google, MSN, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.

The process is relatively simple:

1)    Create  an XML site map file  – http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ is a free sitemap generator tool  – there are many free products like this

2)    Save your sitemap.xml file to your web site root directory

3)    Upload your sitemap.xml file to your web server.

4)    Create a webmaster account with Google Webmaster, Bing Webmaster, Yahoo Site Explorer and upload the sitemap file.

5)    This step is important and is often ignored: When you make changes, especially the addition of pages, to your website – create an updated sitemap.xml file  and upload the new file  to your web server and the next time your site is crawled the spiders will look for the new pages.

Sitemaps do have limits 50,000 URLs and 10 megabytes , so keep your web site to under 50,000 pages!

Bing webmaster central, google webmaster, robots.txt, sitemap.xml, Yahoo site explorer Hide

Conversion rate is simply the measurement of visitors to a web site that take a specific, desired, action.

These actions will vary from site-to-site but may include, but are not limited to:

• Completion of a request form
• A download
• Membership registrations
• Subscriptions
• ….and ultimate in conversion…a sale

One of the primary goals of an internet marketer is to convert a visitor into one of the following

• A unqualified prospect:  a prospect has taken an action on a web page and through that action we have obtained teh prospects contact details;  and with these details our sales teams can contact the prospect to determine whether or not this is a hot or cold lead and determine next steps.
• A qualified prospect – here the prospect will request product samples, downloads demo software and has taken an action that may lead to an order
• A customer – the ultimate conversion goal – completion of the shopping cart.

If we do not capture our conversion rate all we are left with is anonymous browsers, we will be able to tell our management team how many page hits, unique visitors etc.  but this has little value, other than ego stroking, when you get down to the business-of-business.

If we measure our conversion rate,  we can take steps to increase the conversion rate to meet our desired marketing goals. If we do not measure conversion, we are left with is statistics. No names, no addresses, no email email addresses…just statistics.

conversion rate, WEB Marketing Hide