Social Networking: 10 Steps to Finding Your Target Market in Facebook

How do you find your target market in Facebook? Whether you're an experienced social networker or just a newbie, here are 10 secrets to growing your target market network in Facebook:

1. Update-to-date profile and/or Fan page: Before you begin a "friending" (i.e. request to become another's friend), be sure that your profile is up-to-date with an accurate description of what you do, your interests, and your contact info, including your web site URLs. If you have multiple businesses, invite people in your appropriate target market to become fans of your niche-specific fan page.

2. Follow the gurus. Follow leaders in your field/industry and "friend" them. Anytime you make a friend request, include a personal note, as that will improve the likelihood that they will accept your request. Say something like, "I'm a big fan and have been on your ezine/blog list for several years. I'd love to have you in my network in Facebook." Once they have accepted your invitation, make comments about their status updates to help you get on their radar and in front of their networks.

3. Friends of friends. Take a look at the people in the network of your industry leaders, as they are probably part of your target market as well, and send friend requests to those of interest to you. When you friend someone that you only know by association, send a personal note as well, like "I discovered your profile in 's network and would like to get to know you better by adding you to my network."

4. Use groups. Look for groups that may contain your target market. In your search for groups, use keywords that describe your niche, your industry, your geographic area, the interests of your target market, or whatever other terms you might use to find members of your target market. Join and begin to participate in the group so that they begin to get to know you. Then peruse the member lists for good prospects, sic as the members you've connected with or have gotten to know. Since you won't be able to view the profiles of the group members because they aren't in your network, much of your decision-making about whom to friend may be based upon appearance or how you might be connected to them via other friends in your network.

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Ten Tips For Google Image Search

Google Image Search could be used in many ways.

1. If you want to know if a person is a man or a woman and the name doesn't help, do a search for the name.

2. If you don't know the meaning of a word, the pictures may help you.

3. A better search for Flickr. Google uses information from other sites that link to Flickr photos, so you may find Google search better.

4. Find what's interesting about a site, by looking at the pictures included. For example: wired.com.

5. Find a new wallpaper for your desktop by restricting your search to large images. You can automate this using an application.

6. Find random personal pictures, using standard file names from digital cameras.

7. Type the name of a painter and you can take an art class.

8. Install a Greasemonkey script so you can view the original version of the image directly by clicking on the thumbnail.

9. Find the color of a word. "Word Color is a windows program that uses Google Image Search to determine the color of a word or string of words. It goes out there, retrieves the top 9 images and loops through all pixels, calculating the average hue, which is later converted to a color."

10. If you want to grab search results, GoogleGrab is a tool that downloads images from Google Image Search. It even supports batch search.

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Bing to be Integrated into Search Engine Reports

Recently Microsoft released a new search engine called Bing, which has begun sending traffic to websites with Google Analytics installed. Bing currently shows up as a referring site in the Traffic Sources reports. We are actively working on an update that will include Bing under the default list of search engines in Google Analytics.

If you absolutely can't wait for the upgrade, you can add the following line to your Google Analytics tracking code as a temporary solution. Note, this workaround is recommended for advanced users only. For more information on adding custom configurations to the Google Analytics tracking code, read this article.

pageTracker._addOrganic("bing", "q");

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SEO And SEM: What’s The Difference?

If you haven’t been around Internet marketers very long then you might get a little confused about how terminology is used. Even the veterans sometimes disagree on the labels and get confused between the blurring lies. But I thought I’d take a little time to explain the difference between search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM). They’re not the same thing.
Essentially, SEM is a broader term and includes SEO. Here’s the distinction:

SEO is the process of using content, links, keywords, and meta tags to improve a web page’s search engine rankings. Search engine optimizers tend to get a little tunnel vision where rankings are concerned and make that the No. 1 priority.
SEM involves any task of marketing a web page through a search engine and may not necessarily be concerned with organic rankings. Typically, SEM refers to organic SEO as well as paid search models like pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Some marketers also include display advertising because Yahoo! and MSN both offer display advertising on their search pages. I think you could also include some aspects of social media since many social media marketing campaigns can have search implications attached to them, intentional or not.

6 tactics for maximing your AdWords investment

The current economy has been tough on businesses and customers alike, and it can be a lot harder these days to connect with more price-concious customers. To reach these customers, our internal team of AdWords optimizers has come up with 6 tactics that will help your AdWords campaigns be more relevant to your customers.

1. Focus your ads on low prices and savings.
2. Use value-related keywords.
3. Make sure your ad groups are targeted and relevant.
4. Don't waste money on irrelevant clicks.
5. Make it easy for customers to buy.
6. Focus your money on your high-performers.

You can read more about each of these tips including examples and instructions at www.google.com/adwords/tactics and you can also view these tactics in a pdf format at www.google.com/adwords/tactics/top_tactics.pdf. We hope these tactics will help you continue to see good returns from your AdWords investment.

Keyword Density - How Much is Too Much?

When you're evaluating keyword density, you need to decide on your keyword phrase and then write your page. Once you've chosen a keyword phrase for your Web page, you need to start using it. As you probably already know, you should use your keyword phrase in:

• the meta title
• meta keywords
• meta description
• h1, h2, and h3 headlines (and h4-h6, if you have them)
• the first paragraph of text in the HTML
• in link text
• in alternate text for images
• scattered throughout the rest of the text on the page

But if there isn't a lot of text on the page, repeating your keyword phrase that many times could end up with a page that is too keyword heavy. In other words, your keyword density is too high.

Your First Rule Must Be Readability Not Keyword Density

And not readability by search engines, but by your customers. If your customers find the text annoying to read they won't be your customers very long, no matter how dense or sparsely you've repeated your keyword phrase. So the first thing I do, especially if I think I've written a page that is too keyword dense is have someone else read the article. Once they're done I'll ask them to sum up what they thought the article was about in 2 or 3 words. I also ask them about the writing - did they find it repetitive? Most of the time, if your test audience doesn't mind the repetitions of your keyword phrase, then you probably haven't included it too often.

Strive for a Keyword Density of No More than 5%

This means that out of the entire Web page content, your keyword phrase should be no more than 5% of the total words. If it is more than that, you risk appearing like a keyword spammer to search engines or annoying your customers with hard-to-read pages.

I aim for a keyword density of 3-4% for my target phrases. I've found that this works to get the keyword phrase into the mind of my reader without screaming at them "I'm targeting ________ as my keyword phrase". I've found that if I ask my test readers what they think the keyword phrase is, if they can get it right away, it's probably too dense. But if they can come close without being 100% I'm hitting the mark.

Official Source of Keyword Density

Use Google’s Brain To Find Keywords

I like this trick and use it each time in my keyword research. I came up with it after discovering the great AutoPagerize user script for Greasemonkey. It stimulates a lot of ideas quickly. In keyword research, where creativity is still a key ingredient, this trick not only makes for a great “jump in” point but also provides a bunch of terms that have a higher probability for success.

Take one keyword or keyword phrase and enter it into Google like this: allintitle: ~coffee products where coffee products would be the term you’re looking to expand upon. By using the tilde (~), you’re asking Google to display synonyms and related terms that Google may be using in their algorithm.

The above guest tip is provided by Bill Sebald

New Google search features important for SEO and online marketing

New search features being unveiled by Google could have an impact on search engine optimisation (SEO) and internet marketing strategies.

In an official blog post, the search engine said it was launching a new package called Search Options, which lets users refine their results.

They can choose to filter out results according to time, or run a search for forums, videos or reviews only, for example.

Users can also see various views of their results, with some showing more information about each entry and others including more images.

"We think of the Search Options panel as a tool belt that gives you new ways to interact with Google Search and we plan to fill it with more innovative and useful features in the future," the post read.

Research carried out recently by Guava and Econsultancy revealed that 55 per cent of companies intend to spend more on SEO this year, while 45 per cent plan to increase their pay per click marketing budgets.

More about these Google search features .

Google Analytics and Adsense Get Married

Publishers using both Google Analytics and Google Adsense can now officially integrate their accounts.

Marrying the accounts takes just a few minutes. Publishers need to log into AdSense, select the "Integrate your Adsense account with Google Analytics" on the Reports > Overview tab and simply follow the on-screen instructions. Once complete, publishers will find an AdSense-specific menu under the "Content" section of Analytics containing reports on the top Adsense Content, top AdSense referrers and AdSense Trending. The last reports lets publishers analyze how a site generate revenue during different times of the day and different days of the week.

The Adsense overview shows you ten metrics that summarize the Adsense activity on your site. The total revenue made, revenue per CPM, total ads clicks, the Adsense CTR, the eCPM (estimate cost per thousand page impressions, or the revenue per thousand impressions), the total number of impressions (and impressions per visit).

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12 Simple Steps to Effective Websites

Effective websites should include the following:

1. Your website needs to focus on a specific niche.

2. You need to do keyword research and although Google no longer gives weight to Meta keywords some of the other major search engines still do.

3. Your website should have the main keyword used throughout and each page should be written around 5-10 keywords that are tightly focused on that particular page's topic.

4. Content is still King. Well written, focused content is crucial.

5. Meta titles need to include your keywords.

6. Organization of content should include headings and subtitles to make it easy for readers to scan the pages. Be sure to include your keywords in these headings as well.

7. Most people on the web are looking for information. If you don't give them anything of value or entertain them, they will be gone, probably for good.

8. Use keywords in links whereever possible.

9. Include a call to action and, if possible, provide a Free trial. You have to build trust before you can make a sale.

10. Check your website in various browsers (FireFox, Internet Explorer, etc.) to make sure it displays equally well in all.

11. Your personality is what attracts people to you so why would you create a generic website with all of the excitement of a flat glass of pop. Keep the content fresh so it has Fizz!

12. Most importantly, have realistic expectations of what you want to achieve with your website. With all the hype about overnight successes on the internet it's difficult to put your results into perspective. If you expect instant success and it isn't happening, it's easy to become demoralized and quit before you reach your goal.

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