If you are an owner or a marketing peer of small or medium business you definitely should spend 15 mins of your time for making first step in Facebook marketing.

For those of you who are still not familiar with Facebook the following facts are listed:

• The total count of active Facebook users is 55M+;
• 250.000 users join the network daily;
• 35% (and growing) users of Facebook are professionals, in 2006 Facebook shifted the focus away from being a students social network;
• Because of the focus shift the fastest growing age category is 25+ years.
• 1000+ developers start using Facebook API daily to develop applications covering every aspect of life.

The above mentioned means that Facebook is the perfect marketing opportunity for B2C businesses and the first steps toward marketing of Facebook will be creation of a corporate page there.

The following guide explains the corp page setup process step by step:

1. On the profile setup page select the industry relevant to your business;

2. Enter all the necessary descriptions about your business (overview, mission, product – the more the better) and upload corporate logo so the visitors can recognize the business.

3. Click on your business name hyper link and then click ‘Publish this page’

4. Become ‘fan’ of your business. And here is where the magic begins. As soon as you became ‘fan’ of your business your Facebook ‘friends’ will get the notification similar to the following one: Peter Melnikov became fan of MoveYourWeb. Assuming that the big part of your ‘friends’ would be your customers part of them most likely become ‘fan’ of your business to and ‘friends’ of ‘friends’ will see it too…

5. Optional. Might be number 1 if you played with Facebook arleady – before creating a corporate page add a lot of new ‘friends’ to your account by converting the database of your customers to facebook friends (many are likely have a Facebook account already). That will increase the results of this small marketing campaign proportionally.

Want to see a sample corporate page? Check out MoveYourWeb on Facebook and feel free to try becoming ‘fan’ of our business. Questions? leave those in comments and our Facebook developers or marketers will reply asap!

Tags: internet marketing, web 2.0
Posted in internet marketing, web 2.0 | 4 Comments »

As a Director of Marketing here at MoveYourWeb it falls under my radar to update and maintain our own corporate web site. The shame thing is that our portfolio section was really outdated (yeah in bold). We do have the set of customers that we work with for many years so they are perfectly aware of our technology expertise as well as solutions that we’ve created. We also have enough management at different levels who are always ready to suggest on the work in specific technology or industry that we’ve accomplished. A big percentage are contacting us thru WOMM so a lot of our new prospects are already educated about our company’s services and past work.

Anyway there is a still put of prospects coming from sources other than WOMM and it takes our Sales Dpt additional time to compile the list of projects accomplished for specific industry, especially when the same work should be done again and again on a daily basis. So here I go – researching the ways to organize and structure Case Studies section for offshore outsourcing company. 30 companies located in TOP50 Google under a relevant search quarries were reviewed. Find the results of the research below:

1. Downloadable Case Studies – a prospect is able to select the case study of interest and download the pdf by filling out a short form. Service Provider can use this data for further promotions, prospect education by sending relevant promo info to the subscribers thus trying to convert the prospect into a customer with time. The negative aspect of this model is that it takes time to fill the form/check email/open the pdf. The other negative thing is that the Case Studies published are generally presented in a A-Z list rather being structured by industry/technology/etc.

2. Client List – list of customers is published on the web site with additional description of their business. This model is relevant for companies handling small projects (their prospect is luckily to see similar company at the Client List and sign up).

3. Portfolio – list of finished projects, normally provided with the screenshots. The services providers should really choose this model if they are in creative business only. So web design studios and companies should choose it because it allows to reflect the style of the finished work, not the technical details which is critical for complicated projects focused on back-end rather the UI.

4. Case Studies grouped by Services – e.g. web development, software development, emended programming. The prospect is able to quickly find the relevant projects finished by a service provider and estimate the level of vendor’s proficiency. The question that arises is why service providers put Offshore Dedicated Center as a separate service. One customer may hire a team of web developers and another of software guys, the third will be hiring SEO Consultants. Shouldn’t that fall into the Service grouping directly? I think so. Ask me what to do with the Case Studies for Offshore Dedicated Center – don’t include this ‘service’ in a case studies structure at all! From a sales/marketing prospective Offshore Dedicated Center is an engagement model not a standalone service (well unless an ODC is of 20+ full-time people or ‘Build Operate Transfer’ model which is a different story).

5. Case Studies structured by Industry – e.g. banking, real estate, financial. No comments on that – clear for everyone

6. Case Studies by Solution – e.g. CMS, ERP, ecommerce.

7. Case Studies by Platform – e.g. .net, java enterprise. That one speaks for itself as well.

Our choice is to show case studies sorted by 1. Services (the most important and demanded), 2. Industry, 3. Platform and 4. Solution. The ‘Portfolio’ section that we’ve used before will fall under ‘web site design’ and ‘web site development’ services. Coming to production and will be reflected on the web site soon!

Tags: internet marketing, management
Posted in internet marketing, management, outsourcing | No Comments »

Imagine that your company wants to start a business blog – a blog, which will be a part of the company’s image, and a benefit to your company’s search engine optimization and internet marketing campaign. The first important question that you should answer before launching a blog is: “Who will actually write the contents?” A blog is useless without regularly updated posts… A blog has to be dynamic, brisk and informative; it has to be posted with catching, well-structured, and informative articles. Along with writing the contents, blogging also includes answering comments and building the community, not mentioning the technical aspects of blogging. So before launching a blog, think if you really have a person in your office to do all the things mentioned. Does this person write well? Can he or she find new ideas for regular posts? Can he or she take care of the blog’s templates and plug-ins?…

Instead of appointing a person from the office who has never been involved in blogging professionally, it might be wise to hire a professional blogger.

But who is a professional blogger?

A professional blogger is a person who gets paid for writing consistent posts for your blog. This is a person who has already written hundreds of posts before; a person with vivid imagination and inexhaustible ideas; a person with a perfect command of the language and sense of the language; a person able to play with words, build sentences that flow nice and make lots of sense.

Contracting a professional blogger is truly a win-win situation for everyone involved. If you are still not sure that your company’s estimate should include blogging services, remind yourself of the additional financial revenues that your company will gain through a business blog over time.

Besides, if you are far-sighted enough and buy professional blogging services from an offshore outsourcing company, i.e. MoveYourWeb Offshore Web Development Company, you will benefit twice. You can use great imbalance in global economy to your advantage if you send your outsourced work abroad. It makes sense as it will allow you hire a professional blogger for a more affordable price than in your own country. You see the point? The fees charges by the blogging professional will turn out to be much less than the added revenue or the cost of hiring an additional staff member for blogging.

Having a strong company background, which has been formed for many years, MoveYourWeb has a cohesive team of professional copywriters and bloggers to make your business prosper. Our extensive experience in the sphere of Copywriting, Internet Marketing and Search Engine Marketing helps us create high-quality informative content for various types of businesses from mortgage and real estate to sports and tourism. Our excellent knowledge of the language and language skills along with innovative attitude to everything we do helps us create well-structured sensible and interesting texts as well as be on top of the things happening on the net. Having played with blogs a lot, our professional bloggers will also relieve you from the technical aspects of blogging, or train your staff to maintain the blog.

In a nutshell, outsourcing professional blogging services from a reputable offshore company is certainly a wise solution from all points of view. However, before hiring a professional blogger, make sure you specify some things about the services they offer.

Tags: blogging, blogging services, copywriting, internet marketing, offshore blogging services, offshore company, professional blogger, web copywriting
Posted in copywriting, internet marketing, outsourcing | 1 Comment »

A blogger and copywriter myself, I tried to put myself in my employer’s shoes and create this list of recommendations: What would I be concerned about if I were a blog owner? What posts do I want to see on my blog? How often? What will be the style of my posts?… Below is the list of questions that you should specify before contracting a professional blogger.

1) Have the blogger ever written posts on my topic or on the topic similar to mine?

This is important because the web copywriter should understand the business, and should be able to use the language of your industry. If your industry is that rare, that a blogger with such knowledge can hardly be found, ask your future blogger to carry out a thorough research of the business before writing any posts.

2) Will the posts be optimized for my prime keywords?

Search engine optimization is important for your blog, because being an Internet marketing tool, your blog will help you promote the website of your business. Therefore, ask your blogger to optimize your posts and provide them with up to 7 prime key words or phrases you would like to be searched by.

3) What is the minimum word count per post?

The information you get from different bloggers may vary. Most bloggers write posts no shorter than 250 words. Overall, the optimal text length, which will ensure that your text is informative, well structured, and unobtrusive, is 350-500 words.

4) What type of posts will these be?

Normally, you can distinguish between personal posts, adjunct posts and ghost posts. Personal posts are posts that you write yourself. Adjunct posts are posts that are authored by someone else, and the name of the author will appear under the post. However, your name will be attached to the post. Having such posts on your blog will show the reader that you are getting somebody else’s help in keeping the content fresh. And, finally, the last type of posts is ghost posts. When dealing with ghost posts, you pay somebody to write for you but still have your name under the post. This is the most preferable type of posts from the point of view of a blog owner. You don’t have to write anything, or ask anybody authoritative to place a post on your blog – you just pay the money and get the high-quality post which is to the point and makes sense, and has your name under it showing you as an expert in your field. We are not deepening into moral issues here, it is not our aim now to discuss what is honest and what is not. We are here to make our blog a powerful marketing tool and we are looking at this issue from the point of view of our business. In the business world such type of writing is quite acceptable.

5) Can I review the posts before you post them? And, if I dislike something, will you revise?

This is a very important question to specify with your offshore copywriting company. To make your cooperation solid and effective, you need to discuss such issues in advance. As a rule, companies offering copywriting and blogging services welcome you to make comments and give ideas. You won’t have time to read the posts all the time of course. However, please, draw special attention to the first five posts written for you. You need to adjust the style, to choose the right “voice” of the post, to let the blogger feel what you need. Once you are comfortable with the quality of the posts, you don’t have to review their writing as closely or as frequently.

Besides, you can also provide the blogger with specific links, interesting posts or articles that you may come across on the net and might want your blogger to use for your blog.

6) How often should new posts appear on my blog?

My experience shows that the ideal number of posts per week is five. You have 5 working days in a week – and each day you must say something new. Though you may stop on 3 posts per week. It will be quite okay, too. Keep in mind that you don’t need more than 5 posts per week.

7) Will the professional blogger also take care of comments coming to my blog and handle technical things when necessary?

Very important question. As a rule, blogging companies include this in their blogging services. However, it is always better to clarify.

Above I tried to summarize the main recommendations to a blog owner who has never dealt with bloggers and blogs and who might need some education in this new and exciting sphere. As a blogger myself I know what questions I can expect from the clients and can help the people who are unaware of blogging but who want to get involved in it.

Tags: blog, blogging, blogging services, copywriting, internet marketing, offshore blogging services, offshore copywriting services, web copywriting
Posted in copywriting, internet marketing, outsourcing | No Comments »

Social bookmarking seems to be the web 2.0 version of what catalogues and directories were originally created for back when the web was born – sites that contain useful links. Or trusted links. Or categorized links. All kinds of links.

But with social bookmarking instead of a few trusted editors for each directory (or topic within the directory as in DMOZ) here comes the power of the crowd that chooses the best sites and pages, instead or limited number of categories – myriads of tags that describe the links as precisely as possible and instead of just one place where the link would be found in a catalog, one wise submission to a social bookmaking site might mean tens or hundreds of links to your site syndicated all over the Internet.

Submitting your link to social bookmarking sites might seem a nice alternative to submitting it to directories. You do not have to wait till the link is approved by the editor (it will appear at the site at once, you can add as many tags describing the links as you need, and much more. If you just want to keep your bookmarks somewhere online instead of just within your browser and share selected links with a few friends and colleagues then any of social bookmarking sites will do for you. You can even go to semi-automatic submission to several sites, with the help of this tool for example.

You can test it on our page if you like: Socialize this page

If you follow this link above, you’ll get a list of services the link will be submitted to. And choosing any service in which you already have an account will bring you directly to the page where you add your link. You will not even have to type the link and page title into each form, the tool will do that for you.

But of course for each good idea there will be people who misuse it. People who will try to spam the social bookmarking sites. And of course these sites will fight such spammers. Some sites would use redirects instead of direct links. Some sites would use nofollow. This means that while any site from the list they use at
this Socializer tool will be fine for just using it to store your link collection not each and every one of them will be fine for SEO. My own top list will include del.icio.us, Yahoo MyWeb and stumbleupon.com and in the following posts I’ll cover each of them more in detail, explain why I chose these 3 sites and give a list of services that seem a complete waste of time for someone who is promoting a site, not just collecting links for fun or future use.

Tags: catalog, cool links, del.icio.us, dmoz, internet marketing, links, SEO, social bookmarking, social bookmarks, stumbleupon, yahoo
Posted in SEO, cool links, internet marketing | 2 Comments »

At recent IT English classes that are organized in our company (personally I attend upper-intermediary level as a lot of other management do, we also have intermediary level classes) we discussed the evolution of advertisement on the internet. Everybody could remember the crappy ad banners that were flooding the web sites 4-6 years ago. Those were simply untargeted and spent a big deal of advertising budgets of .com companies. Nowadays the advertisement is getting more context and relevant with ad programs starting from AddWords and Overture and finishing with Amazon  having ‘customers  who  bought that  book also  bought‘ feature, which provides the results based on the sales history. The advertising and marketing are getting less offensive and are getting more and more focused on target audience.

The world of marketing is definitely getting smarter with the marketing masseges hitting very small targets. The successful marketers of the future and successful business ventures are those who will be able prepare X versions of the same basic ad delivered to X different users based on both data that is mined behind the scenes, and data that they directly input.

Web 2.0 is in power now and the most valuable companies are those focused of competitive differentiation based on data. Those services succeded because they effectivelly gather and use the data – there is no much sense listing all of YouTubes, MySpace, Facebook and others here. They are known not for the security, reliability or security. In fact many have experience outage that would have killed any other traditional web company. Data is the most important component of internet success nowadays. Think about the way you utilize and use the data while starting your next business venture or rethinking the functionality of the current solution.

 p.s. I’m a big fan of our English classes not just because we polish our English speaking skills here but because this is a great opportunity to discuss ideas, trends and innovations happening in the IT industry.

Tags: advertising, general thoughts, internet marketing, marketing, web 2.0
Posted in general thoughts, internet marketing | No Comments »

Having worked in SEO department for some time, I found out lots of interesting and extremely useful things about traditional SEO. However, I thought I could enrich my knowledge, and started looking for some other effective ways of getting traffic to sites, which together with traditional methods could contribute to my site’s promotion. What I discovered is a peculiar branch of Internet marketing, which is Social Marketing.

The idea of Social Marketing is in using a variety of Internet resources (weblogs, social networking sites and communities, social bookmarking sites) in order to increase popularity of your sites.

Many of us have heard of blogs. In fact, blogs can be found anywhere on the Web now. However, few people know exactly what a blog is and what it is used for, except for expressing thoughts… My personal vision of a blog is that this is a personal journal on the Web, and its main difference from the site is that it is updated frequently, displaying its content in chronological dated entries. Most blogs allow readers to post comments to posts, and link from their blog to your posts. Besides, readers can subscribe to your blog (with the help of an RSS feed), and automatically receive updates.

There are 5 most popular types of blogs: Wordpress, Blogger,Movable Type, TypePad and My Space. To create a blog you just need to sign up for a free account, set up the blog, customize it to improve your blog’s usability, and start posting. When setting up, make sure that you incorporate an XML feed which allows you to say that you can share an RSS feed with others. Besides, using an RSS feed will enable you to ping the blog each time you update your content. Pinging is another process unfamiliar to many. By pinging, you alert the various services that there is some new content on the blog, which needs to be crawled and indexed. If the content on the blog is updated regularly, the popularity of the blog is rising. If you want to profit from your blog, keep it alive!

I think that My Space is of special significance for internet marketers. It can be called a huge Internet community with millions of registered users. This is your unique Internet space, where you can write about yourself, promote your products, brands, or sites in your own blog, make thousands of friends, with whom you can share your product’s or site’s info, post bulletins announcing your product, or site, and thus increase your site’s traffic. Making My Space friends has become easier with availability of a number of friends’ adding tools (i.e. Adder Robot), which allow you to automatically send out more than a hundred friend requests a day! What’s more, My Space is crawled by Google all the time, meaning that your sites will be indexed faster.

Another step is to start your own interest group within My Space. If you do that, you can bring together a group of people interested in the same thing (i.e. in the topic of your website), recruit affiliates, network and promote you site. If your group counts over 20,000 members, you can easily create your social network and promote your site within the network.

Digging blogs, their life and functioning, I eventually had to deal with Technorati. In fact, creating a blog and simply posting it will lead to nothing unless you let other people know about it. For this purpose, you can use Technorati, which is one of the best traffic providers for bloggers. Its main function is to make your blog easier to find when people search by technorati tags. Tag is a very important term in Internet Marketing. Simply put, this is a category, under which you publish your site on a social bookmarking site. As a rule, this is a keyword, or better say, a set of keywords, preferably 8-15. Your site will be stored in the site’s database under the categories you will point as tags, and people are most likely to find your site by tags.

Besides, Technorati is often called a large blog ranking engine. Your blog is ranked depending on the number of links to your blog from various websites. It is similar to a Page Rank for the site: the higher your blog ranks the easier your blog is to find among others. To create your own account, and find out more about Technorati, go to http://www.technorati.com.

Now, let’s shift away from Technorati, and talk about the largest social bookmarking service which I found quite useful – del.icio.us. By creating your account, and submitting your site to del.icio.us with correspondent one-word (!) tags, you allow millions of other users view your favorite sites, bookmark them, and comment on them. This service offers users a unique opportunity not only to store their links online, but also to share them with others.

By the way, you can submit your sites manually from the social bookmarking site, or if you have a blog, namely, WordPress, you can install an Auto Social Poster plugin, which would auto submit your post’s link to del.icio.us, furl, simpy, spurl, blinklist and several other bookmarking sites each time a new post appears on the blog. In your blog’s admin area (Plugin’s options) you can point the tags you want your post to be published for. Besides, the plugin automatically converts your tags to Technorati links.

Of course, Social Marketing is not limitted only to what I have just described. I will get back to this topic in my future posts, trying to focus on more specific things rather than talking in general.

Tags: blog, internet marketing, social bookmarking sites, social marketing, technorati
Posted in internet marketing | 4 Comments »