Top Facebook Pages: No surprise, people are spending time gaming, following celebrities and their favorite brands. Topping the list: Texas Hold’em Poker remains #1, followed by Mafia Wars and Michael Jackson.
So exactly what is everyone doing on Facebook? Playing Farmville, adding pictures to their pages, sending e-cards, networking on their iPhone, playing poker and connecting with friends:
Need a good checklist for your website design and marketing? Sunday Media can help with a website audit and a redesign depending on your needs. Here is a comprehensive list of things every website owner should consider when making a website both user and Google friendly:
Some very useful tips every website designer and owner should consider to make the website do what it is supposed to do: sell! via Smash Magazine:
#5. AIDA
AIDA is a well-known strategy in sales and stands for: Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. It is relatively simple and describes the sequence of events you should aim for to get a sale. So, first of all, you must capture the attention of your potential customer. Once you have it, you should win their interest by explaining how your product or service can help them.
Then, once they’re interested, generate a desire in them for your product. For example, a story about how this product has helped someone like your visitor can help them imagine what this product would do for them, and especially what benefits it would bring. Indeed, the benefit part is key here because benefits, not features, sell products.
Finally, you need to get people to act. This means purchasing the product or signing up for the service. If people want your product, all they may need is a button to check out. If they are interested but not yet sure, you could use a few methods to motivate them further; for example, creating a sense of urgency with a limited-time offer or limited supply.
Yokaboo features large, eye-catching graphics. You’re likely to first read the short description on the left. The stats on the t-shirt then help build trust. Finally, you are presented with a call to action on the right.
Now, the AIDA approach applies more to copy — the actual marketing text on the website — than design, so what we need to do on the design side is reinforce that copy, make it stand out and ensure visitors read it. This means making sure the first thing a new visitor sees really grabs their attention. The flow of the page should then direct their focus to the items that achieve the other two goals: interest and desire. Finally, at the end of this flow, we need to convert. So, provide calls to action: “Order now,” “Sign up here.”
It’s important to understand that the design alone won’t sell: you need strong copy in place to do most of that work. The design is there to reinforce and support the copy, rather than the other way around.
Reinvigorate captures your attention with three large words at the top: “measure. analyze. evolve.” You’re then led to a more descriptive bit of text below and a call to action link.
This means you shouldn’t design a nice website first and then fill up the space with words. Instead, think about the message you want to send out, write the copy and then construct a design that delivers that. If a delivery truck breaks down, then the package does not arrive, but if there was no package in the first place, then the delivery wouldn’t matter at all.
Clients are always asking for a list of places to market and promote their websites. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a combination of creating links and content on your own site and on many others. Every SEO program is unique, many using geographic or industry-specific websites, but almost every site can benefit from a program that utilizes a combination of the marketing channels, sites and tools below:
Use Good Creative
Create a Emotional Connection
Kids sell – use images that connect to your audience
Search Marketing
Paid Search or PPC – Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, plus lots more smaller players
Search Engine Optimization – The best advertising channel for many businesses
Local Search – Free local listing on Google Maps
Blogging
Blogging – Showcase your products or expertise through your blog. Works great for service based business in which information can be given away
RSS – Feed out your blog content direct to RSS subscribers
Link Bait Content – Generate buzz and links through content
Guest Posting – Guest post on authority blogs
Paid Blog Posts – Reviewme
Social Networking Sites
Stumbleupon – Paid and free models
Twitter – Follow and connect with prospective customers and keep in touch with existing
Facebook Ads – Demographic and geotarget ads can work for DM
MySpace Ads
Facebook Profiles/Pages – Apps / fans pages / personal profiles
Mass Social News Sites – A story on digg or reddit may bring your site down!
Niche Social News Sites – Eg Sphinn for SEO
In Social Apps Ads – Socialmedia.com, fbx
Forum Signature – Advertise in your forum signature
Email
Blanket Mass Email – This is spam, so don’t do it.
Email database – buy/rent – Send your message to an opt in bought database
Email Shot Sponsorship – Sponsor a targeted website’s email shot
Email Newsletter – A regular reason to stay in touch with your customers
Application Emails – You can add marketing messages to other automated type emails you are sending out
Targeted Sales Email – The better researched and targeted your email (recipient and email copy) the better
Personal Email Footer – Add marketing messages at the bottom of your emails
Content Promotion
Podcasts and itunes
Online Videos – Start a channel and publish on YouTube
Articles – Submit articles to ezinearticles & other article sites
Teleseminars
Free eBooks – build a targeted database by giving something away
Question and Answer Websites – Yahoo Answers, Blurtit, Answerbag, WikiAnswers
Online Other
Web Directories – Dmoz and Yahoo
Widgets & Toolbars
Virtual worlds, Secondlife – Would love to hear if this has worked for anyone
Text Ads
ISP level advertising – NebuAds
Behavioral Targeting
Spyware / Adware
In Game Ads
Gamevitorials – Make a Flash game for your brand
Mobile
Mobile Search
Mobile Ad networks
Bluetooth Push
Mobile Apps – iPhone and Android Apps
SMS
Viral
Viral – Google ‘will it blend’ for an example
Viral Seeding – Paid version seeding the above
Viral Loop – Gold dust, if the application spreads itself like Hotmail
Online Display
Banner Ads – Remember to try the ad exchanges for low CPM’s
Video Ads – Embedded ads in videos
Popups / Popunders
In Line Ads – Kontera, Vibrant Media
Contextual Text/Banner Networks – Google Adsense
Blog Ad Networks – BuySellAds, Federated Media
Niche Banner Ads – Eg w00tmedia.net for cult websites
Here are a few more social media sites you might not have considered for your link building campaigns:
Bazooka Buzz [General News]
This Swedish site is a real gem that will send a couple of thousand visits to a popular post and generate linkage. Thankfully stories don’t have to be written in Swedish to make the front page.
Cracked Pipeline [Offbeat]
If you are taking the humor angle with your bait then this is a great place to submit. Not only will Cracked Pipeline send traffic, if your story is made popular you’ll also pick up a few citations from other blogs.
Design Float [Design]
A site to submit anything from graphic design and marketing to architecture and digital art. Design Float doesn’t send a lot of traffic, but you are getting exposure to bloggers in the niche.
DZone [Development]
If you are link baiting on software and web development then don’t miss out on DZone. A popular story won’t crash your server, but a good bait can pick up some good links.
eBaumsWorld eLinks [Offbeat]
The addition of eLinks means it is now possible to get a link and traffic from this aged domain. Strange or funny images and videos as well as humorous stories tend to do best.
Lipstick [Celebrity]
You’ll be instantly familiar with the Lipstick layout and system because it is based on Reddit, only it’s specifically for the celebrity niche. The site doesn’t send much traffic but you can get some decent links with the right story.
Meneame [General News]
When it comes to the ratio of traffic : linkage, I have never seen any site perform as well as Meneame. A popular story on this Spanish social media site will also send you a few thousand visitors.
Shoutwire [General News]
Should you submit a story here, go easy on your promotion as the editors are known to come down hard on anything that looks suspicious. Shoutwire will send traffic to a popular story and generate some linkage.
Sphinn [Marketing]
Sphinn was destined for success ever since it was spun off from the highly respected Search Engine Land. This is the best place to submit articles on SEO, online marketing, usability and other related topics. Users at Sphinn tend to be conversational; you’ll get comments and backlinks.
SugarLoving [General News]
This one is part of the Sugar Inc. network, so by submitting your content here you may also get coverage on one of their blogs.
Apple’s 1984 Macintosh SuperBowl commercial was and is still one of the most viral ads because if it’s everyman, “us against the world” rebel attitude.
It doesn’t hurt that the technology matches the promise. Now Apple introduces the iPad, and the most popular ads are no longer traditional TV ads at all but rather online mashups, parodies and fan generated content. The marketing platforms may have changed, but the medssage is still the same: we still want to be entertained by the marketing.
Web 2.0 tools can be used to do what traditional advertising does: persuade consumers to buy a company’s products or services. An executive can write a blog, for instance, that regularly talks up the company’s goods. But that kind of approach misses the point of 2.0. Instead, companies should use these tools to get the consumers involved, inviting them to participate in marketing-related activities from product development to feedback to customer service.
How can you do that? A leading greeting-card and gift company that we spoke with is one of many that have set up an online community — a site where it can talk to consumers and the consumers can talk to each other. The company solicits opinions on various aspects of greeting-card design and on ideas for gifts and their pricing. It also asks the consumers to talk about their lifestyles and even upload photos of themselves, so that it can better understand its market.
Not only didn’t Tiger Woods win at Doral this week, he’s not even on the Facebook leaderboard. We expect to see his rankings go up after he wins another big tournament (The Masters would be a good start.) Facebook is much like other web trrends; driven mainly by big media and news events, with a few surprises in between:
So you signed up for Twitter and want to use it for targeted advertising. What do you do? Try Twitterhawk. Here’s how they describe it:
Let’s say you just opened a new coffee store in Queens and wanted to let people know about it. As part of your advertising efforts, you could setup TwitterHawk to search for things like “coffee near:Queens within:8mi” (of course you could simply search world wide if you are global).
We would then periodically (at a frequency determined by you) find twitter posts that mentioned coffee by users that are actually located within 8mi of Queens ‘cracksh0t Oh I could really go for a coffee right now’ or ‘loxly Coffse… my one true love’
Now comes the fun part… sending your response
There are 3 ways you can send the reply… 1. Have the system automatically send a response as soon as it finds a match (from a list you create) 2. For those that want more control, you can have the system find the matches and list them ready for you to confirm. Once confirmed they will be sent one by one spread over the interval you set. 3. From the matches list, you can also choose to send the reply immediately to have a faster first contact with the user, and be online ready for their response.
For matches that are queued, you can edit that particular response to be more personalised to that user to give a great first impression!
When you sign up for an account, add a bunch of the suggested twitterers to your follow list. Search for other people and groups you know or want to know. Then change your background and colors. Post a few good items. Soon you will get invites from others who want to follow you. Soon you will be following people, groups and things who have hundreds of thousands of followers. Its like having a cult without having to drink the Kool Aid.
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Here are a few more social media sites you might not have considered for your link building campaigns:
So you signed up for Twitter and want to use it for targeted advertising. What do you do? Try 
the other twits are twittering about.
