By Allison Reynolds

Warning this article is rated M15+: contains aggregating scenes, marketing language, social media/networking explanations and a sloth.

You are a smart cookie and you have definitely heard of social media and social networking. You have also seen around the place that you can use these tools to help you to market your stuff, but where do you start?
Contemplate for a second, how much effort are you putting in on one blog post/article….First you write it, all nicely SEOd. You might add a picture or two; flick some links to friends and then hope your PPC advertising, back-links and organic searches bring the boys to your yard. Sounds like a pretty hit and miss affair to me with no clear direction or required outcome.

By Ben Wills

I still hear people ask “What’s the point of Social Media?”

I still hear people say “Social Media is a waste of time, and new marketers’ playground.”

I hear people talk about the value of Social Media for businesses. And they have no idea what they’re talking about.

But the absolute worst of all is this: They don’t know, that they don’t know, that they have no idea what they’re talking about.

Ontolo-what?

An ontology is a way to observe things or systems, and to organize these observations for use in a more powerful way. For your business, this “more powerful way” will be to ultimately contribute to the survival of your business.

By Reynaldo Villar

Yes, it’s true. The Internet has brought the WHOLE world to your doorstep. But what if you only want to focus on local prospects?

That’s a challenge many entrepreneurs and business owners have faced as they’ve tried to establish a website presence. You know that your website can be an effective marketing tool. But prospects from states, counties or parts of the country you don’t service could just as well be from Madagascar.

You can’t really filter out the rest of the world from your website. But I’ve got five FREE tips for you to attract more local web shoppers.

All five rely on various elements of search engine optimization (SEO), today’s big Internet buzzword. But for many entrepreneurs, SEO is just a tekkie term for fine-tuning your website so that search engines will rank you higher when prospects are searching the Internet for what you sell.

By Chad Klingensmith

The QUESTION:

For the duration of 5 year web marketing career I have been asked the same question. How do I get my website ranked higher? How do I get more traffic? Or sometimes, almost incredulously, how do you get websites ranked higher? In the modern day of ultra-sophisticated borderline artificially intelligent search engine algorithms (formulas Google and the other the other search engines use to rank websites) this question could be considered along the lines of “what is the meaning of life”….anybody who understands search engine holistically knows there is no one right answer for marketing a website.

By Joe Hall

The internet has become well known as a force that can completely transform entire industries during the course of just several years. This is no exception to the Real Estate industry. Brokers, sales associates, appraisers, developers,landscapers, interior designers, home inspectors, auctioneers, and marketing firms are all using the internet to engage the real estate industry like never before.

To a great extent I am a beneficiary of this technological expansion. A little over a year ago I started a full time position as an IT Specialist and Web Developer for a real estate company. Prior to working in real estate I had been a freelance web developer for about 5 or 6 years. My time in the real estate industry has been extremely educational as I have been able to get a first hand account of how a unique industry can prosper through the internet.

By Patricia Kendall

This is a question I recently heard from a client and at first my reaction was – Dah! -of course you need a website what are you thinking?

The client is in the medical device industry and has a consumer site with the goal of promoting their particular medical device. This site is a few years old and they utilize a variety of marketing tactics including PPC to drive traffic and encourage visitors to request more information. The question “do I even need a website?” surfaced because it is very difficult to measure the effectiveness of the website. Potential patients do not go to this site and select a medical device and then place it in a shopping cart to be shipped to them. This audience is prescribed a device by their physician. This particular client wants to reach potential patients and empower them to have a voice in what device they are prescribed and ultimately implanted with.

By Linda Bustos

Are those really your conversion rates?

Do customers actually find your site using that keyword?

Are you sure that Digg story sent you all that traffic?

Google Analytics may be lying to you, even though it tells the truth — simply because you’re not telling it how to track your site effectively. Are you guilty of any of the following?

Heads Up: All inks open up in new windows, don’t say you weren’t warned.

Tracking Too Much

1. Tracking Your Own IPs

Google Analytics allows you to set up filters for any IP that you don’t want to track. You should consider adding a filter for any user who doesn’t represent your target audience – including company employees’ home computers, the office IP block, SEOs and other web consultants and, if you can identify them, competitors! There are a number of problems tracking unnecessary IPs causes: