For a limited time, Influence People is proud to offer FREE 3 month trials. To claim yours, go to Alerti and register with the “MN” Bonus code

Custom Search – Alerti’s customizable search is based on a search engine that continuously scans all types of online content. Alerti empowers you to follow what is being said about you, your brand, or your competitors on the internet, to measure the engagement of your communities, and to interact with them.

Single Interface – Alerti collects all search results in a single interface that allows you to track your keywords, measure the engagement of your communities, and respond from within the same screen.

Work Flow Integration – This feature allows you to share your alerts out to a work-group and respond to relevant posts directly from your Alerti account. The options in the lower right allow you to tag a result or adjust the sentiment analysis. The “Share” button lets you send results out to your own networks, and the “Task” button allows you to delegate results internally to your team.

Metrics – Alerti gives you all the standard metrics, including customizable graphs, sentiment analysis, and profile information on your results.

Cost – Here’s where Alerti makes an even more convincing case- their plans start at just $25/ month.

And as I said, I’m working with Alerti and using this service. Influence People is excited to offer a limited number of FREE 3 month trials to bloggers or business owners who go to Alerti and register using the “MN” Bonus code.

And then come back and let us know what you think in the comments!

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Another online marketing expert recently said that Field of Dreams teaches terrible marketing practices. In that movie, Kevin Costner’s character builds a baseball field and people come to it! He doesn’t do any advertising, he doesn’t do any cold calling, he doesn’t put up any fliers. Unlike pretty much every business in the country, online or offline, he doesn’t have to draw people to his field since he believes that “if I build it, they will come”.

You can be selling the best product in the world and not make a dime if nobody goes to your store or nobody visits your website. In my time in online marketing, I’ve seen plenty of great websites with slick payment methods so that it’s easy to complete the sales cycle and purchase a product, but they don’t sell a single thing because they have no traffic, and the little traffic they do have gets quickly disinterested. I won’t tell you how write a great hook for your landing page but I will share a few things I’ve learned about the crucial first two steps of the online sales cycle.

1) People need to be able to find your site

No matter how good your product is, people won’t buy a single product nor sign up for a single offer if they can’t find your website. In the online marketing world, the main way people find you is through Google and other search engines, like Bing and Yahoo.

Have you ever seen a nightclub without a sign?

I’ve seen one, in San Francisco. It’s called The Slide. There’s no cover and it has a great dance floor, and makes a pretty good screwdriver. It easily beats the boilerplate Ruby’s next door. But nobody ever shows up! Even on a Saturday night, there’s at most a hundred people.

In the online marketing world, your signs is how well people can find you on Google. In order to get people to find you, you need to build backlinks on quality websites that link back to your site on terms that people who will buy your product would search for.

Hire a good SEO company

In the old days, companies would hire an outsourced firm full of writers who could barely speak English to do their search engine optimization work for them. This would work fine for a few months, but eventually the companies’ sites would disappear from Google altogether. All their links would be on spam sites so they would get blacklisted from Google and other search engines.

This is because people who are bad writers can’t get posts on good sites. Google is pretty good at figuring out which sites are and which sites are bad, so it penalizes your site if it has backlinks from a lot of spammy sites, so hiring a company that’s incapable of posting backlinks on good sites will get you delisted from Google. That’s why companies today are increasingly hiring SEO firms with expert writers to build links for them so that they can generate traffic to their site.

2) They need to see your site once they find it

This one really should be a give-in, but web development teams often overlook an Achilles heal in converting these new potential leads into sales. Usually, the content development teams and the web design teams are separate from the technical teams. Even small one-man operations rarely host their own sites anymore, and instead rely on a remote server. This means that they often think that they can’t do a thing about their site’s load time.

Even if they do the hosting on their own, the site is only hosted on one server, so it will load slowly for someone far away. Most potential leads are lost within 8 seconds of clicking on a link so a slow low time in any significant part of your target demographic can kill your conversion rate, but there’s a solution.

Site accelerators

Site acceleration services get around this problem by hosting your site on multiple, high-quality, super-fast servers. This means that somebody in New York won’t have to wait for a website in San Francisco to travel across the entire continent to be able to see it. Good site acceleration companies host the video on different super-fast servers than the rest of the site content, which will further cut load times and increase conversions.

David Henzel

David Henzel is VP of Marketing and a partner at NetDNA, which provides CDN solutions that deliver fast page load times for enterprise and SMB websites. A serial entrepreneur, David has more than 11 years of experience in online marketing, having launched and sold several online businesses in Germany before coming to NetDNA in 2009.

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Since blog marketing has two main purposes, I have divided my tips into two categories: Search engine optimization (SEO) and using blogs to reach out directly to potential customers.

Blog marketing tips: Video marketing

Blog marketing campaigns often involve videos for businesses, but this is a recent development. I remember having to wait for YouTube videos to load before playing, but now high-definition videos stream instantly.

Video marketing adds a personal face to your marketing campaign. For one thing, people like seeing other people’s faces so they will be drawn towards a video.

Also, videos are a better format than text for people who are audio and visual learners. This means that adding video marketing to a blog marketing campaign will allow you to connect with more people than you did before.

Blog marketing tips: Search engine optimization

Blog marketing has not always been a widespread internet marketing strategy, but businesses have tried to get their pages to rank highly on search engines since the last century. Even in 1999, consumers were using search engines to find articles online so businesses quickly figured out to try to get their articles to the top of the first page. However, they mostly only use the top page of searches to decide which site is worthy.

Google has a special algorithm for determining how highly a site will show up on its search engine results and it’s based on two things: The number and quality of backlinks going to a page that are links for a specific term (off-site SEO), and how well the site is written for search engines (on-site SEO).

A good blogger relations campaign publishes articles to link not just to your pages, but also to link to good articles that have already been published about you. This helps both your pages and these articles show up highly in search results, while simultaneously building up backlinks to your site.

Blog marketing tips: Targeted marketing

With the rise in popularity of blogs since circa 2006, marketing directly to blog readers has become a powerful way to connect with customers, but it’s based on concepts that existed even before the Internet.

Why are blog readers good to market toward?

Think of the last few blogs posts you’ve read. Now think about what the blog itself is about. Now think about who reads that blog. What’s the blog’s audience? How old are they? Do they make online purchases?

Now contrast this to an ad by the freeway. What’s the product for? Who’s seeing that ad? What are their demographic characteristics? How closely does this product align with the people who are seeing the ad?

The ad on the freeway is going to be seen by a lot of people who aren’t interested. Yes, a lot of them will be commuters, and most of them will own cars, but most billboards can’t be very specific. In a way, they are even more broad than an advertisement broadcast on TV, since that ad will only be seen by people viewing the show.

On the other hand, most blogs are targeted at a very specific demographic because they are about a very narrow topic. This means that their readers are highly targetable and will have a high lead-to-sale conversion rate if you market toward them. Even compared to other targeted marketing strategies like running an AdSense campaign, blogger marketing lets you focus on a narrow audience that is automatically interested in your product and might have even heard of it already.

Blog marketing tips: Trust marketing

Facebook has recently began putting fake “Like” advertisements up, whereby somebody’s Facebook friend is said to “Like” a particular product or brand. The idea is that people trust their friends more than they trust advertisers, so by masking advertising as friend posts people are more likely to click on the ads.

In this way, people see their friends as “trust agents”, which is a similar role bloggers play. However, bloggers carry extra weight that friends and social media marketing cannot compete with: Like friends, they are trusted for their honest, but they are also trusted because their readership sees them as experts in their field.

Blogging marketing campaigns work because SEO, targeting marketing, and trust marketing synthesize to build your presence online and earn you the trust of people who are likely to buy your product.

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Our founder and CEO was recently listed in the ImpactRadius Top 25 Performance Marketing Influencers List. Congratulations Murray!

From Murray:

“I think the list is a good start and I’m sure that Todd and the team at Impact Radius will work hard to perfect it. This is their best guess at online influence, which is a hard thing to do. Klout has spent millions on their scoring system, and it’s far from perfect. The validity of their list was questioned by Missy Ward. I myself have written and posted over 50 guest posts on marketing sites relating to affiliate marketing (many of which have been tweeted, shared and liked) in the last month alone, which will have had a large influence on the sector which is not accounted for in the infographic. This cross platform influence of people is very hard to measure.”

But how do you win those friends and influence people online?

1. Meeting People Face-to-Face

Surprisingly to many, meeting people who hear about your site, follow you on Twitter, connect with you on LinkedIn and Facebook face-to-face makes a huge difference. Ford Social Media Manager Scott Monty discussed this at BlogWorld. See my post on this topic here: WetWorld blogging

2. Content and Conversation Creation

Make good content for your site, blog, Facebook page, Twitter stream and LinkedIn profile make you an influencer. This can be words, photos or video, but make sure it’s relevant to the audience you want to connect with.

3. Content Curation

When speaking on a one-to-one or one-to-many basis, it’s not just about your thoughts and images. Good conversationalists also reference other words and content, as well. If you can become a good resource for ideas, you can become a go-to source for others.

4. Being Known For Something

Shawn Collins and Missy Ward run Affiliate Summit, the biggest conference in the industry, and they are certainly known in the industry for this. They are also very influential.

5. Have Something to Promote

Running Affiliate Summit, the biggest conference in the industry, gives Shawn Collins and Missy Ward something to promote and at the same time builds their own profiles. Lots of people do this with online book, webinars or other social objects.

Why is influence important?

Brian Solis’ blog Francisco Dao posted on The Illusion of Importance: I think it is a great post that we should not get to caught up in ourselves. However that is missing a point. We all do much of our shopping online. It is a small section of society with creates that online content and a smaller section which does it well. Influencing those people can impact the buying habits of a nation. Fact:  Ford was at BlogWorld because they want to influence bloggers who influence the buying habits of America. That is why online influence matters.

Why does being listed as someone who can influence people matter?

Within 48 hours of hitting that list, I was contacted by someone who wanted to influence the affiliate market and write a quote for a new blogger relations project. Now that is good promotion for myself, which will lead to more work in the near future.

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Once considered illegitimate sources just a few years ago, bloggers are now considered some of the most respected influencers online today. More and more are online users are trusting bloggers and the content on their blogs as the mainstream media’s influence continues to dwindle in the marketplace.

What can bloggers do for my business?

The success of blogs is good news for those interested in marketing a service or product online. One single relationship can potentially lead to thousands of instant relationships with targeted readers—or more—who trust and respect that particular blog or blogger, as well as its back links.

How can I utilize the bloggers and their following?

Unfortunately, establishing relationships with bloggers is not as easy as emailing your press release to the influential blogger and having him or her post it. These relationships take time to establish and maintain and bloggers are quickly realizing the power they hold. Influence People is a great company to help your business reach out to these influencers, as we have connections with the world’s top bloggers.

Thanks to many years of working from within the industry, Influence People is able to effectively help your business succeed with strong blogger relations.

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Those that embrace the changing world of marketing are the ones that go on to succeed. Influence People can help lead you through this new and ever-changing world with the help of its team of dedicated content producers and solid industry connections. Your email newsletters, social media campaigns, SEO and PR activities are all based on creating and publishing high-quality original content. We are here to create and market this content for you.

Why does good content help my reputation?

Many blogging outreach companies produce low-quality posts on sites that are totally irrelevant to the product. This not only hurts SEO, but also takes away one of blogging outreach’s biggest advantages: Targeting demographics that are virtually tailor-made to your product or service. Not only that, but the articles themselves are grammatically incorrect and don’t make any sense whatsoever.

Having high-quality content associated with your name builds a professional reputation. We distinguish ourselves from other companies by producing higher-quality content that people, not just search engines, can read. That’s why all of our bloggers are native English speakers with writing and technical backgrounds. Before we write an article, our writers research the topic themselves so that they know what it’s about.

Why does it matter what people think about my company if they don’t know about it?

Of course, you need to show up high on Google and other search engines for somebody to even be able to look for you. Creating blog posts by having a good blogger relations program that link to your website tells Google that your site is important enough to be referenced by other sites. This improves your site’s rankings for the terms it’s linked for. For example, if somebody links to this site and the text you click is “marketing consulting”, eventually this site will appear higher on Google searches for “marketing consulting” and related terms.

Using blogs to build links is fairly simple on the surface, but doing it wrong can get your site removed from search engines entirely. That’s why most companies hire a professional company to do their blogger outreach and link building for them.

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Video marketing is simply video content distributed online to tell the story of your business—similar to traditional content marketing but with the use of a vibrant, thorough multimedia medium. The most successful businesses are utilizing this medium to reach their target market and Influence People prides itself in being a forerunner in the industry. We own and manage professional video gear that can help you create the video clips you need to excel.

 Example of an Influence People-produced and marketed video clip

What are the advantages of online video marketing over traditional media?

The economics are in your favor, as technology has allowed the video creation tools come down in price and once a video clip, for example, is created and purchased, there is very little on-going fees. This is in contrast to a daily newspaper ad, for example. Quality Internet video content gains trust for your business and the impressions created hit a lot harder than traditional media can. Synergy means the exposure is essentially unstoppable if bloggers and website managers continually re-post or link to a quality video clip belonging to you.

What kind of results can I expect?

Depending on your type of business the results to a quality online video campaign can boost your small business into online stardom virtually overnight. A high level of response can be expected due to the strong pull nature of the medium and the strength of impressions. This does, of course, depend on how good your video content really is—quality is key.

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Influencer marketing, (also Influence Marketing) is a form of marketing that has emerged from a variety of recent practices and studies, in which focus is placed on specific key individuals (or types of individual) rather than the target market as a whole. It identifies the individuals that have influence over potential buyers, and orients marketing activities around these influencers.

Influencers may be potential buyers themselves, or they may be third parties. These third parties exist either in the supply chain (retailers, manufacturers, etc.) or may be so-called value-added influencers (such as journalists, academics, industry analysts, professional advisers, and so on).

We enable you to reach out to influencers by helping you with blogging relations.

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Digital reputation is created by the content found when searching for your business. Managing good blogger relations builds reputation by creating high-quality, digestible content from sources consumers trust: knowledgeable amateurs without any monetary interests. This new marketing concept has turned the online marketing world upside down but Influence People understands the true importance of blogger relations and has the connections with many influential bloggers and the like that will help your business grow.

Why does reputation matter?

Although advertising can go a long way in developing and changing how customers perceive your company and should be part of most marketing campaigns, it’s not as effective at brand management and changing your public image. Most online advertising is designed to sell a product, not a company or a brand, and blogger relations can do both.

Traditional online advertising works fine for products and services where the brand isn’t very important, where the entire sales process doesn’t take very long, or where the potential customer has already been introduced to the earlier parts of the sales process, such as through a costly offline advertising campaign.

For everything else, your company’s reputation matters at least as much as your advertising budget: In order to engage online with the marketplace and audience at early points in the sales process, you need to have a positive digital reputation that fits well with your product and services.

Why are blogs targeted and how does this work for me?

Consider the phrases “auto repair” and “cars.” Somebody looking for “auto repair” is probably looking for a place to get their car fixed, but somebody looking for “cars” can be looking for almost anything that has to do with cars. This can be anything from Hot Wheels, buying new cars, and the history of automobiles.

Most blogs are about specific, targetable topics. That means that if you have an auto parts supply website, you can get articles about auto repair that link back to your shop’s site. The people that see the article probably fix their cars themselves so they’re likely to buy parts directly from you.

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London – 21^st Nov. 2011 http://www.socialmediamarketing.co.uk/

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