Online Public Relations

Public relations online is not much different from its offline counterpart. You should post news releases, videos or audio clips to convey your message.

In print, you make a press release. You can do the same online. The format is the same. You write an interesting heading, add your location, time, your content, then end off with a boilerplate and -30- to indicate that your press release ends. You can post it on a blog or in social media websites. Add your blog to Technorati and use social bookmarking sites like Reddit or Digg to maximize views.

You should also shoot video interviews or produce audio clips to communicate with the public. Shooting video is easy. Use your camcorder and make a set in place where you have room to shoot your videos. Make it professional and upload your finished product on YouTube. Post it in your business' YouTube profile and link to it. Similarly, record your audio with noise cancelling headphones, edit it with Audacity and upload it to your website. Create an RSS feed is you have a series of audio releases so that people can download them automatically with a pod-catcher. A pod-catchers lets you download podcasts automatically.

With the internet and social media, you can also create a viral campaign. Make your video interesting so that people will propagate them and let people comment on your video. Make it easy to share so that you get more views. YouTube has a comment section and many visitors so post your video there.

You should couple all these options with offline promotion. Because of the higher barrier to entry, offline promotion gives you an advantage over people who just promote online. Remember that you should leave no stones unturned when you are communicate with people online.

Get Better Content

1. Content Creation

Keep them short and sweet. Use informal language so that youir readers feel like that your are talking to them. This engages your readers.

2. High Performance Website

Redesign your website every few years so that it has an updated look. Responsive design, which is designing your webpages to be flexible sized,  is the new trend because many people use smartphones and tablets to read your site. 

Research the costs and know what you’re getting in a website because low-priced, template-based sites have limited functionality.  These may not be good enough for audiences who have high expectations when it comes to finding and retrieving content. Get a custom made website with an attract appearance and layout. 

3. Guest Articles and Blog Posts

Write on a more popular website or blog to show your best work to a larger pool of readers. Link to your site so that people can read your stuff when they want to. This definitely drives up your site's visitor numbers.

More tips:

http://www.copyblogger.com/celebrate/

* 14 Twitter Mistakes to Avoid

It starts with ‘think before tweeting:’

http://www.jeffbullas.com/2013/03/25/14-twitter-mistakes-to-avoid/

* How to Engage Successfully on Twitter

You can be successful on Twitter by learning from the experts and creating a personalized strategy:

http://www.jeffbullas.com/2013/01/15/how-to-engage-successfully-on-twitter/

* How to Conduct a LibraryThing eBook Giveaway

Unlike Goodreads, Library Thing allows you to offer eBook giveaways, giving you another way to get more exposure and reviews for your book:

http://thefutureofink.com/librarything-ebook-giveaway/

Increase Viewership on you Blog

Want  more visitors to your blog? Then follow these tips:

• Start discussions with comments - use the comment pane on the bottom of messages to start conversations. You can start discussions by you asking questions in your entries.
• submit blog to search engines - submit the URL of your blog to Google, Yahoo, and Bing
• submit blog to directories - submit to Reddit, Digg, Delicious, Technorati and other directory and bookmarking sites
• broadcast your blog with RSS feed - add it to Hootsuite so you can share your entries in your social networks
• tag your posts - add tags so that your entries can be searched more easily
• write description for your posts - same as the meta dsecrption for web pages, it lets search engines know what kind of content your page has
• add images - make it interesting for viewers
• don't write too much for one entry - most people can't finish it in one session
• promote your blog with ads - AdWords, Bing ads, Yahoo ads are popular for selling text ads. You can target your ad to show up when certain keyword are searched.
• SEO - follow SEO tips
• Twitter - link to your blog with Twitter
• link to others - build a blogroll and link to other blogs, link to other websites in your entries
• improve your design - make your site look appealing to visitors
• show on social media events - promote your blog in person there
• participate in forums - make yourself a useful resource and then you can promote your blog.

These tips are tried and true. They are likely to work if you have enough persistence and tenacity to wait for the good results after using these tips.

KPIs

KPIs stands for key performance indicators. They indicate how successful your online marketing campaign is. These are some of the more important KPIs.

1. Unique visitors: It measures how many visitors visit your site inn a period of time.It shows you how popular your site is. 

2.  Geo-targets: this shows you from where people visit your sitel. This allows you to understand your target market and if you are reaching your target market. If the geo-targets match your target audience, then you are doing well. If not, you need to edit your site so that your preferred geotarget is reading your site.

3. Mobile readership: In addition to knowing how many unique visits your content is getting, it is also important to know how the content is being read. Mobile readership is important because more and more people are reading your site with mobile phones and tablets.

4. Bounce rate/time spent: The bounce rate shows how many people quit visiting your site after reading one page. If bounce rate is high (more than 30%), this means that people are not interested in your site opr they are visiting your site mostly by accident. If your site has a high bounce rate, this means you should revise your site to have more useful content or functions.

5. Click patterns & Heat Maps: People read with a pattern. They read following an F or Z path. This means that information on your site should be placed on the top, middle and on the left side of your pages if you want the information read by your website's visitors.

6. Page views: This shows how many people are reading your page. If you get a lot of page views on some page and not on others, you have to decide whether you need to revise those pagews with low views to have more interesting content.

7. Comments: The number of comments is important nowadays if you want a site with a lot of discussion among readers and between you and your readers. If you want more comments, you have to elicit them by asking questions to start the conversation and make it easy for people to sign up and comment on your posts. Facebook, Google, etc. all provide login services to make readers identify themselves easier.

8. Social sharing: To propaget your content, sharing by others is the best way. You should make it easy to share content so that more people can see them. A high number of shares is a good thing.

9. Conversion rate: Everyone want conversions on their site. So you should keep track of this if you want to people to buy stuff on a shopping site or track your subscriber numbers if you want to people to subscribe to your newsletter.

You should pay attention to these indicators if you want online marketing success.

Blog Length

How long should your blog entries be? It depends, but as long as you have good content, the length doesn't matter.

If you have a lot to say, then write longer entries. Thousands of words are fine. However, 80% of your visitors won't finish reading your post. So if it's too long, consider breaking it up to multiple entries.

Otherwise anything longer than 200 words are ideal for SEO purposes.

No matter what the length is, make sure your entries are concise. Fluff is not good reading, so don't fill your entries with fluff to lengthen your posts.

New Ways to Promote

New technologies bring new ways to advertise. It is more personal than ever. Bluetooth and QR code marketing are 2 newest examples. YouTube ads are also up and coming.

Bluetooth marketing involes you sending promotional message via bluetooth to people's phone. They are usually short text messages or pictures. People who come near your bluetooth transmitter's raneg can receive the message.

QR codes are posted on billboards and ad posters so that people with phones can scan them. When people scan them, they receive your ad message, The codes can be generated online with these sites:

• qrcode.kaywa.com/‎
• www.qrstuff.com/‎
• goqr.me/‎

YouTube can be posted with the YouTube ad platform: www.youtube.com/yt/advertise/‎. You can let your ad play at the beginning, middle, or the end of a YouTube clip. Text ads can be played anywhere on the clip at any time during the clip is played.

The newest ways to promote are less competitive, so it may be worth a try since older internet marketing platforms are saturated.

Find Free Photos for your Blog

To save money, bloggers can use free photos. Here are a few sources to try:

• Morgue File (http://www.morguefile.com/archive/)
• Wylio (http://wylio.com/)
• EduPic Graphical Resource (http://edupic.net/)
• The World Images Kiosk (http://worldimages.sjsu.edu/)
• ImageBase (http://imagebase.davidniblack.com/main.php)
• Photos 8 (http://www.photos8.com/)
• Google Images Creative Commons option
• Yahoo Images (http://images.search.yahoo.com/)
• Animal Photos
• Pics4Learning (http://www.pics4learning.com/)
• flickrCC (http://flickrcc.bluemountains.net/)
• Fotopedia (http://www.fotopedia.com/search)
• Flickr Storm (http://www.zoo-m.com/flickr-storm/)

HTML 5 and New Media

The new web publishing standard is HTML 5. It allows you to create web pages with multimedia without the use of plugins. It also adds many markup tags that describe the structure of a page.

New elements in HTML 5 include descriptive elements such as nav, header, footer, section, figure, etc. The meaning of the tags are self explanatory. Nav means navigation, head means the page head, footer is the page's footer, figure is a picture. You should place them on the page in the position where they usually belong on a web page: header on top, footer on the bottom, figures in the middle of the page, and navigation should be somewhere prominent on the page.

Multimedia tags new to HTML5 include audio and video. You can add audio and video clips on the page by directly referencing them in your webpage. Plugins are not required for playback. They should be in MPEG4 format and have no DRM.

Simplifications include from HTML5 include specification of the character set via the meta element and the text/javascript type is no longer needed for script tags. JavaScript is the default.

HTML5 is compatible with the latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer.

HTML5 has many advantages over previous versions of HTML. The description of the page is now separate from the formatting. New multimedia elements are added to make embedding and playback easier.

Importance of Transparency in Social Media

Here is a blog post about the virtue of transparency in marketing:

http://www.sproutcontent.com/blog/bid/105136/Transparency-is-the-Key-to-Good-Content-Marketing

It says that being honest about your product is the best way to market your product because there is nothing to cover up and the audience will happily trust our product. It has examples from Lays, Organic Valley and Patagonia.

Transparency is important to social media because there are so much information that it is hard to find trustworthy sources, especially in social media sites where a lot of people post fake information about themselves. Having transparency allows people to inspect the sources for authenticity. This is important for building trust. For example if a reviewer posts reviews about a product, there is no way to verify if the review is sincere. However, if the company selling the product posts about a product and it hosts tours and allows people to trust their product, then it is being transparent and there is a way to to verify their product. They post the information on social media and people will know the information.

Telling people answers truthfully earns the trust of customers and people will be more likely to buy your product and services because of it. Advertisers and mrketers should be transparent about their products and services so that they can evaluate their products with the most information possible. If your product is good, then there is nothing to hide. If you have something you think you need to hide, then you need to work on your 4P's of marketing. You should make a better product or set a better price. You can spin your product in a better so that people will be attracted to it, but there it is likely to be wrong for you to not be trasparent in your promotional activities online.

So, it is time to be transparent if you are not. It is time to be truthful and reveal the most about the things you are trying to promote online. 

Recommendations on How to Leverage Blogging

Blogging is a very useful tool to distribute information online. They do not have to be long or complicated. Unlike offline media like newspapers and magazines, you can put videos and audio online. You can have links and have comments under your posts. It is very easy to customize the themes to suit your business or organization.

It can enhance a brand by dispelling useful information to the public. It establishes your brand's credibility and authority. This then builds trust of your offerings and this in turn drive sales. A blog also help with SEO if you update it frequently. The comments pane in the bottom of a blog entry can serve a virtual community for your company.

On the web, there are a lot of blogs online, and most of them don't have much readers or audience. However, a lot of people don't take the time to make a proper blog, so they are at a disadvantage from the start. It is very easy to make an attractive blog with interesting content that can make your blog stand out from the rest. I have multiple recommendations for making a good blog. Ypou should link to as many sites as possible so that other people will link back to you in return. Linking to oither sites drives up your blog's search engine ranking and so more people will click on it and read it. You should put a lot of pictures and videos on the blog so that you attract people to read your entries. Words are too hard to read for people on the internet since they are already overloaded with information online. Almost no one has pateince to read text online unless it is really interesting. Short videos and photos are much better because they tell a thousands words.

You should allow people to comment on your so that you create a buzz on your blog. Buzz marketing is one form of marketing online. It makes people remember your blog. If someone responds to your blog, that means that they are engaged. The proportion of people who respond will be a small percentage of your readers, but they are the ones that you should target when you are promoting something on your blog because they are the ones that are the most willing to act on whatever you mentioned in your blog promotion.

You should link to your blog on other social media platforms. This will allow people who don't know about your blog to read your blog. You should also make a RSS feed of your blog so that people who subscribed to your blog will automatically get updates when your blog changes.

Microblogs are also blogs. Twitter should also be part of your promotional campaign. It is a site which a lot of people use so you can target your audience there.

Analytics are handy for you if you blog. Demographic and psychographic information that you get from sites like Klout, socialmention or HootSuite should be considered when you are monitoring your blog. If you find that you are not getting the target audience or you are having low viewership, you can act on it.

If you have a website, you should put your blog in your website so that people can read your website and your blog without leaving the site. This allows you to expand your promotion to your site. You can have an order button on your blog and your website if you are a retailer, for example. This is a great conveience for your readers.

There are a lot to get viewership and make your blog viewer friendly. These are the recommendations I would make for any marketer who blogs since these are the easiest things to do and they are very basic things which many get wrong.