When starting an online store what do you do first? What should your concerns be, your target consumers, how will you drive traffic to your site?
How do you start a business & how the heck do you figure out how to sell online? Everyone makes it sound super easy or rather intangible. Here are two articles that have helped me immensely in figuring out these topics.
Don't follow your Passion this article explains why it is important to not only sell products that you are passionate about. Rather smarter ways to find products to sell.
Research, research, research this article made researching your competition way to easy. In layman terms after reading this and going over the advice I just sat at my desk thinking that this is so easy anyone can do it!
The step-by-step instructions offered by these articles was way more than I bargained for and hopefully you find them interesting too!
In case you missed it, Justin Bieber had a concert last night in Glendale, Arizona. Who cares right? Well what makes this worth blogging is that he threw up on stage mid-song. He then runs off of stage.
Pretty nasty...
what I like about Justin is how smoothly he handled it via Social Media.
After the show he Tweeted, "And .... Milk was a bad choice! Lol"
Just goes to show how Twitter can be used properly. Bieber needed a way of cleaning up the mess, not literally, that would be ensue when the media got hold of this footage. Using n Anchorman reference is always a good way to play things off.
Top Comment:
"Awww, She's Pregnant"
-ThisAreRandomVideos
iPhone 5
The Noc
- "The Noc is an entertainment channel about the personalities and lives of
athletes."
On a recent episode, starring Iman Shumpert, the famous Knick's ball player demonstrates the new "features" of the iPhone 5. Even though the insight about the product isn't exactly helpful per se, it still promotes the new iPhone because it is shown with a well known person. Just the action of having the product on screen makes it beneficial to Apple as a brand. The video does focus on how there aren't many improvements to the devise, but it is one of the first looks at the product which is nice if you are excited for it.
Virality seems to be the word on everyone's mind and the goal of every marketing and ad department.
Since the creation of social media, the holy grial, so to say, has been creating the most popular and most viewed advertising. Just as the medical term "Viral", in marketing, being viral or virality is the spreading of information from person to person. Unlike the sickness however, you actually want to infect everyone with your marketing genius.
How do you create such a massive marketing infection? Over time, many marketers and self proclaimed advertising profits have conjured up ways to achieve this marketing super-stardom. Some have been successful, as other have not. (see examples below) These campaigns have included every tip and trick from contest incentives to catchy jingles to dancing animals and talking babies. But not all of these maneuvers work for everyone.
Dollar Shave Club viral video success.
PSP's racy subway advertising fail.
So, is virality a science or luck?
While working on creating my own viral video and covering related material in numerous marketing classes, I became curious about Virality myself. I researched blogs, websites, social media sites, and of course, youtube. After this laborious effort of trolling the internet, I finally found the answer.
Virality, while not quite a science, does have a pretty effective recipe and if followed, will increase a campaign's chances at reaching the viral level.
Viral Marketing Time: < 60 seconds Yields: Millions 1 C. Effective Content 2 C. Sharing 1 Pinch Accessibility 1/3 C. Strong Branding 1 Tsp. Humor 1 Stick User-Generated Content Mix together, cross your fingers, and share with anyone and everyone.
Now, while this recipe may change and serving sizes may be altered, the basics are still the same. Viral marketing must have interesting and useful content. Without a concrete back bone, the rest of your campaign will fall apart. There is, however, one exception and one only to this rule: humor. What viewers love more than things that they can actually apply in real life is a good piece of comedic advertising. Comedy is a balance though, so be careful. It can elevate a brand or it could ruin it.
The next key element in becoming viral is sharing. Although this may seem like a no-brainer, sharing is usually the biggest obstacle when achieving virality. You have to put yourself in the shoes of the consumer and think - what will not only grab their attention, but what will make your advertising so interesting to them that they want, no NEED, to share it with everyone they know. Knowing your targeted audience and how to reach them is the key to success here.
Last, but certainly not least is user-generated content. Referred to as UCG in the internet world, user-generated content is, well, exactly what is sounds like: content created by users. This is important when creating viral marketing because the more active a user can be in a campaign, the more interest is drawn and the likelihood of them sharing your advertising significantly increases. Forums, photo contents, Twitter contests, Facebook likes, and blogs just like this are superb examples that will engage your audience and send your advertising to the top, or, well, pretty close. So next time you or your company wants to create the next best viral thing on the internet, try this recipe and pray to the marketing gods and maybe, just maybe, you'll be among the few to achieve internet marketing greatness.
Google currently
uses its PageRank formula in order to determine ranking in Google
searches. By ensuring that pages have good content through linking
to other pages, Google can be confident that there searches are going
to give their users the content that they're looking for.
However,
Google's patent on PageRank is coming to an end, and they need
another search funcction that will give value to the companies that
use their ad systems, and their users that use the search engine.
AuthorRank is Google's solution to this problem. Like Panda,
AuthorRank will be an update to the logorithm Google uses.
AuthorRank will
use an author's rank as another element in ranking searches through
the search engine. Google's Google+ service will be the main way
authors will be determined. When making an article, if an author
uses their Google+ profile to connect themselves to the article, they
will be used in the ranking.
Google has
wanted to rank web pages by the people who created them for some
time. Originally, AgentRank was going to be used for this matter.
Back in 2005, Google created the concept, but it never went anywhere,
mostly because there was no simple way to identify individual people
efficiently. However, with the release of Google+, Google has an
easy way to connect their authors and know what people make good
content. When an author posts their article and connects it to their
Google+ profile, they build a network of articles that will give an
idea to Google as to how good their content is.
This has large
repercussions for Google+ and other social network. Since most
authors will be using Google+ now so that they rank higher in Google
searches, Google+ is not going away. The popularity of Google search
is going to support and fuel the future popularity of Google+ as a
social network.
Go to the website klout.com and see what your "score" is.
That's right, Klout, a social media influence website, has set up a way to score how well you influence others through your social media outlets. This includes number of followers on Twitter, likes on Facebook, retweets, comments, shares, etc. You can link up your other social media accounts (LinkedIn, Youtube, Google+, etc), but these do not have as much influence as Facebook and Twitter yet.
Users have a number of "topics" that they can be influential in/ These are determined by Klout or by the user. Users can then vote on the influence of others by giving them "+K's" in certain topics. These can help lead to score increases, both to the reciever and the giver.
Does having a high score matter? Some people argue yes. For example, from personal experience, I applied for an online marketing job and they asked me what my Klout score was (at the time of this blog post, it is 63). Klout has a number of perks you can unlock depending on your score and what you are influential in. Finally, it can fuel competition with friends and give someone bragging rights.
But how much can truly be determined by an online algorithm? It is a starting point, but not everything. A downside to it is that quite a bit of the influence is determined by how often you use Klout. For example, I did a comparison of my score to scores of people I learned how to utilize social media from. My score is 63. Neil Hair, one of the faces of the Saunders College, has a 44. Mike Johansson, my "Social Media and Public Relations" professor, has a score of 68, only five points higher than me. Both of those individuals are much more of an influence than I am.
In conclusion, in my opinion, influence cannot be simply determined through a score online. It can be a good start to digging deeper into it, but if you want to make a profound impact on the world, take it outside of the computer.
Say and act like what you tweet.
Instagram is all about pictures. I never heard of it, until my facebook friends have posted on my news fees stating that my friend posted a "picture" from instagram. I started using it and now I am addicted to it. I like looking at my friends pictures and celebrity. Im not the only one whos addicted, i have seen people post pictures like 4-5 times a day. My opinion on on girls using them to get attention when they are posting themselves almost half naked or being so sexy and boys use them to look at girls. I want to know what is your opinion on instagram if you have one. How did instagram boom so quickly?
