How to succeed in Blogging?

How to succeed in blogging?


It's not as simple as just opening an account with a blog service provider and publishing articles every now and then. Successful blogging is both an art and a science.

1. Title Tags: Create an informative title tag 60-70 characters in length, describing what your post is about.  If you want to rank a particular post for a particular keyword phrase, include it in the title of the page and title of the post.
2. Meta Descriptions: Provide a short description of 160-170 characters in length to describe the post in the SERPs, including some sort of call to action at the end such as “Show your [industry] awareness by sharing with your friends”.
3. Social Share Buttons: When people read something they like or find beneficial, they like to share it with those around them.  Add social sharing buttons to every top social platforms (Facebook, Twitter, G+,StumbleUpon, Digg etc.), making it as easy for your viewers to share your posts with your friends.
4. Social Profile Buttons: Make sure your social profile buttons and RSS feed sign-up are easy to find on the blog.  When people read blogs, they will often want to subscribe and connect with you through your other social channels (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.).
5. Comments: Enable commenting on each blog post to help entice people to interact with the author of the post.  This is a great way to build relationships with people in your industry, and potential clients.  It also allows you to answer any additional questions that people may have after reading your post.
6. Pictures: “Pictures are worth a thousand words.”  Have at least one picture for every blog post that relates to what is being written in that post.
7. Use Links: Give users access to more information about your topic by linking to other pages of your site, and other trusted blogs and websites that can help shed more light on what you are talking about.
8. Titles: First impressions can make or break you. The title of your blog post is your opportunity to make that first impression.  Create titles that are interesting to your viewing audience and that entice them to keep reading.
9. Content: In SEO, original and unique content is king. Updating your blog on a consistent basis will entice visitors and search engines to continually come back to your site to read more. Blogging frequently with high quality content will make you a reliable and creditable resource in your industry, ultimately helping you rank better in the SERPs, and can create a loyal following and clientele.Write good posts that people want to link to, share, and that provide good usable information. 
10. URL Structure: Use the title of the post as part of the URL structure so it is easy for people to remember and link to. Example: www.seo.com/blog/title-of-blog-post/
11. Have Fun with it: Blogging is meant to entertain and provide useful information. Don’t be afraid to use analogies and jokes to help people relate to what you are saying and endear them to you.  

  

              

SOSTAC Analysis apply to Best Western GB, UK

Best Western GB, UK 
Number 10th ranked of top 30 UK Hotels on Twitter


SOSTAC analysis


Situation

Best Western is the second most recognized mid market hotel brand in Great Britain and now they want to be number one.

Objective

• Repositioning themselves as a ‘Hotels with Personality’ (Logo/slogan in the twitter page). The positioning is not just about marketing strategy it is about the whole experience offered by Best Western from booking the hotel to the stay itself and our campaign aims to reflect all of the unique qualities and personalities that make a stay in an independent hotel special. 
• Create brand awareness
• Increased interaction with customers and potential customers (E.g. new links pointing to hotel website)
• Rankings in Search engines
• Increased traffic to their website
• Save cost – using word of mouth

     Strategy

•        Using Twitter as a source to keep in touch with the customer (Brand loyalty), Get the feedback from the customer, and do the PR & Promotion of the hotel. People can get all the news and promotion every time and everywhere by checking the twitter from their mobile.
•       Main to targeting growth in the leisure sector but also scope to capture more of the corporate market too.
•        Follow their competitors so they can get the information from them.
•         Collect the database of the customer (E.g. they tweet something like ‘Give us the email to received the news or promotion from us’ or Please email your Best Western Rewards number)

Tactics

•        Introduce ‘Social Media campaign’ to give away a weekend break every half hour for 24 hours.

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Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising

E-marketing (29/01/12)

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is an advertising system where the advertise only pays for each click on their advert. The advertising system is mostly offered by Google and Yahoo. 


PPC is a key-word based. It's based on the search term that a user enters into a search engine. A search term can be one word or phrase. Advertising target those words. 


The advertiser users PPC 
1. Creates content of advertisement 
2. Selects the keywords 
3. Choose the maximum amount they will to pay for a click

The search engine algorithm
1. Checks the advert for .....
2. Displays the advert for relevant search ....
3. Determines the rank or position of advert based on the advertiser's maximum bid and the relevance

Making PPC advert: Heading, Line 1, Line 2, Display URL

Keywords and match type: Google Adword use brand, phrase, exact and negative matches.

Geo-targeting: could be .... by languages and locations

For advertisers, they need to access the maximum they will to pay for a click. Search engine will set different  ... on the same keyword. This is bidding the keywords.

Online comparison engines: Nextag, Price Runner, Jump, etc. These engines contract with retailers. The retailers supply the engine with a product feed which contains product name, price, URL, serial number, image, description, keywords.

The success of an advert maybe assessed by CPR but the success of the campaign will be assessed by its conversion rate.

Click- trough rate = Clicks/ impression%
Conversion rate = Conversions/ clicks%

SEO in marketing

E-marketing (29/01/12)

This presentation lecture was from a different group in class.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the practice of optimizing a website to achieve preferred ranking on the search engine results pages.


The importance of the search to marketers: 


1. People use search to find what they want
2. Search engine is a door way to internet 
3. To be found, you must visible 
4. Top of search = top of awareness 


Three-way relationship
- Search engine, web masters and users 
- Search engine is a tool for users to find things. It wants to make money from the web masters to pay for advertise on search page (Pay-per-click) 


Role of search engine 
1. Robot is automated indexing program.
2. Index is a library of pages on internet.
3. Engine will check the index to find relevant pages for users.
4. SERP listing of results for the user's queries.

SEM (Search engine marketing) consists of SEO and PPC advertising. Keywords are involved in SEM

Emerging trends of SEO - Localization, personalized search, usage data.

How do search engines access the data?
They use "cookies" to maintain the history of users search advertise

Google provides services to gather relevant data, such as, adwords, adsense, website optimizer. The web masters can also create metatags, title tags, header tags to optimize their websites so that the search engine could index them to be appeared on the first page.

Viral Marketing

E-marketing class (26/01/12)

Viral Marketing is a form of word of mouth marketing which aims to result in a message spreading. Its name is desired from, "virus", that could connect people. The campaigns are not as easy as they may appear. They require careful preparation and luck. They can be tricky and unpredictable. 


Two types of viral marketing campaigns. 
1. Organic or in the wild campaigns
The message would be passed around in a viral nature without any intention from the marketers. This happens with negative message about a brand. Positive campaigns can build huge brand equity due to unlimited communications. 
2. Amplified or controlled campaigns 
The campaigns are strategically planned. It often deals with distinct method of passing the message. For example, Hotmail has a clear goal of its membership and emails are sent automatically passing on the message.

Viral marketing uses people's electronic connectivity to increase the velocity of word of mouth. For a brand, viral marketing can build awareness of a product or service.

Viral marketing campaigns can ensure success. First, you need to define the aims of campaign. Second, you create something that people want to share. Third, use social media to share the contents. Forth you should remove all barriers to participation. Then, the messages should be authentic and they provide incentives.  They should be available as well. The marketers should use the strong call the action. It should be able to tracked, analyzed and optimized. It should get a little lucky.

The next step for marketers is to prepare for the traffic. They need to make sure that the server is working properly. Also, they should be ready to start relationship by making the first contact. They should maintain the relationship by consists the list of customers, traffic details and conversation details.

However, the marketers need to be careful of fault messages and social media interaction. They should promote transparency and authenticity to track.


                         Example of viral marketing: Will it blend?