Offshore Sourcing In Social Media Management; Building Street Cred For Your Business

Offshore Sourcing In Social Media Management; Building Street Cred For Your Business

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Social media management is now a staple service in offshore sourcing. Networking tools are now available to anyone, across different lifestyles and tastes. Age demographics, preference in music, and more are considered in sharing and optimizing content. Discovering things and meeting people with same interests are examples of what you can do with media; of course there’s also the opportunity to expand your business reach.

From a business perspective, social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Linkedin are useful to anyone with a marketing strategy to execute. Targeting your market will be easy and convenient because of the features these platforms offer. In some platforms, you can segregate the target market into demographics, by using hashtags, or by analyzing what videos are trending, even by researching trends in search behavior. Marketers love to use hashtgas, since these offer insight on what the market wants for the product/service.

Facebook and Twitter are always top platforms used by offshore sourcing in social media strategy. Have you considered including these platforms in your social media campaign?

1. Pinterest

Pinterest is a great source of high-quality photos, and every user is part of a connected community. This is a visual platform, where relevant and attractive pictures gain more reach; there’s even good chance for content to go viral. Having a profile with many followers is great because of the influence that comes with it. By default, a pinned picture is visible to followers; gain enough pins and engagement, and the photo can become viral. A photo of a product gone viral is a boost to the company brand, attracting traffic and unique engagements.

2. Youtube

YouTube is the definitive video platform for marketers; it’s very accessible, and a relevant post can rake in millions of views. It ranks content with algorithm similar to Google’s, so if there’s one thing viral videos have in common, it’s community appeal. Searching through YouTube is like searching in Google; keywords and keyphrases are seeds in search. With this platform, your product placement (especially if advertised) can do more than demonstrate: it can engage and convert.

3. Instagram

Instagram is yet another visual platform, with very digestible content and appeal. Users navigate content with hashtags. The tags you use can make or break a marketing campaign. For example, using #marketing, the search will show all user photos with that same hashtag. Connect with people through hashtags, connect with the community, coordinate events, push promotions; the simple hashtag is an efficient marketing strategy.

With the variety of social media platforms to choose from, you’ll have to prioritize which to use in optimizing content. Offshore sourcing services ease the process, but it is still your decision that defines what’s best for the company, what’s best for your business.

Customized Service In Marketing: 3 Effective Online Lead Generation Techniques

Customized Service In Marketing: 3 Effective Online Lead Generation Techniques

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There is a massive global market you can tap into for better yield in marketing and financial growth. Even with customized service, can you still make it work using traditional cold calls, or the usual sales campaigns? Stimulate and capture interest in your company’s services and products. There are at least three effective online lead generation techniques you can implement. Use various digital channels to your advantage, and move your business ahead of the others.

You may have tried going through conventional outbound sales techniques. You may have even started generating inbound sales, and there are still dozens of new outlets available online. Considering convenience, accessibility, and target market reach, here are new ways to gain customers: website and search engine optimization, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and social media.

Website and Search Engine Optimization

With growing dependence on technology, it’s no wonder you can easily reach your target clients through customized service. Your company website is the best place to start.

Use customer-focused navigation for better understanding of your site’s content. Then, provide various call-to-action options throughout the site to further engage the visitors. Add buttons to subscribe, download, contact, and other functions. Use engaging visuals for content variety. Think like a customer and find ways to make your site more accessible.

After this, evaluate and implement proper search engine optimization (SEO) as part of your primary lead generation strategy. With heavy competition on the world wide web, it’s important your content is more visible to consumers. Fill your site with properly constructed articles, easily accessible through organic web searches. Once you gain good rankings in search results, you are going to find more prospective customers checking and remembering your services.

Pay-per-Click (PPC) Advertising

This practice has been tried and tested throughout various business portals, as well as customized service. The pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns remain effective in generating highly targeted traffic. This technique also has a high chance for lead conversions. Mostly ideal for new business in the digital marketing world, PPC can easily yield good results. Even though there are many people who don’t like this practice of generating “buying visits” to the site, it is still a reliable source for lead generation. One of the most popular forms of this is the search engine advertising.

Social Media Practices

An active community of social media users is by far a remarkable factor, which helps any business find the most effective sources for lead generation. The variety of unique platforms helps engage and connect you to your targeted, desired audience. Options in social media platforms are also helpful in creating a new digital marketing culture that strongly impacts the consumers’ buying behavior.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others present a promising medium that different businesses can benefit from. However, customized service and social media exposure are necessary to effectively make an exponential advantage for any business.

3 Things You Need To Know About The Millennials Market

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Can you still remember music before the mp3 format? How about life before Facebook? What seems like the distant past actually happened a few decades ago; Millennials were the first generation to enjoy the perks of future tech. Now there’s something new released every month, rolling over the horizon with the craziest features and innovations. New technologies hardly surprise anymore. What will they think of next?

It’s a mistake to ignore the market of Millennials, and it can be fatal to corporations and small businesses alike. The market is insatiable, and this is a good thing because there’s always potential for growth. The challenge is in learning to adapt to an ever-adapting generation. If your business is leveraging staff leasing service to streamline operations, it’s likely the team you hire is mostly made up of Millennials. If you’re into consumer tech and applications, Millennials will surely carve a significant piece of your market.

How do you prime your business so it appeals to Millennials? Thankfully, Generation Y has three reliable characteristics you can leverage:

1. Millennials Love Anything Tech

This is an understatement, but must be mentioned. The generation grew up with technology that instantly gratifies needs and wants. You can purchase products without leaving your home, and you can watch anything in high-resolution on a five-inch screen. Recent surveys confirm that Millennials adore technology, they’ll flock towards anything that has barely any semblance of a cult following.

Engage your market where they gather. Millennials prefer mobile devices over desktop and laptop computers, so your brand should be visible, accessible on small screens. Anticipate new technologies like Google Glass and Oculus, and consider how you can leverage innovations to spread word about your brand.

2. Millennials Love to Socialize Online

Facebook should merely scratch the surface of your social media strategy. If you really want to earn street credibility at social media, scrape as much good reputation as you can on all platforms. Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, Snapchat; there’s plenty more platforms to mention. You can’t underestimate the influence of a timely Twitter hashtag, or a Facebook post that for some fluke of reason goes viral.

The point is to approach your social media strategy the same way Millennials do: try everything until you find something that works. However, you need choose platforms that complements your campaign. What works on Instagram may not work on Pinterest, and hashtags don’t have as much impact on Facebook as they do on Twitter.

3. Millennials Love to Keep It Real

Case in point: Dove’s Real Beauty campaign appeals to women of all ages, but especially to Millennials feeling the pressure of unrealistic expectations. Dove utilized every media platform to push a relevant advocacy, which is also directly tied to a solid brand. Dove has become the brand synonymous to real beauty. You only need one great idea to start a great campaign.

Tug at your market’s heartstrings or pick its brain, whatever appeals to authenticity, social responsibility, or identity will catch on. You’ll know you’re onto something good when your campaign is growing on the social media channels.

Consider current and upcoming generations in your business strategy. Chances are most of the people on your team belong to the Y and Z generations, strong indicators the next generations should be priorities in your business development.

Elsewhere on this blog:

Dear Small Business Owner: You Also Need Staff Leasing Service

Your Post-Sale Strategy: Gaining Leads From Your Customers

Content Management Systems for New Businesses

Website Navigation 101

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In a day and age when information can be easily accessed via the Internet, and websites offer more and more pages of data to sift through, there is a demand for proper navigation to quickly get the readers, the end-users, where they want to go. And while it stands true that designing the website to make it visually appealing is a priority, one thing business owners and web developers/designers should keep in mind is making it easy for their readers, their audience, to find what they’re looking for once they load the website. Otherwise, what is the point of putting up information that can’t be seen or accessed?

Website Navigation, in a Nutshell

But let’s backtrack; what is website navigation anyway? And why is it a crucial presence in a website? Website navigation is simply the system where the links/pages of content can be found. Think of it as the backbone of the website, an online version of the table of contents, or a roadmap of points of interests. Without it, readers would feel lost, not knowing where to go next or how to access the information that they’re searching for. And if they get confused or frustrated, site traffic and rankings in search engines will drop.

Various Preferences, Custom Solutions

So how can business owners better serve their readers (aside from a carefully designed and organized web navigation)? By outsourcing services, providing support for web navigational assistance. Business owners should bear in mind that different people have different ways of searching for information — they have their own habits and factors that make up their navigating processes — and might encounter difficulties when browsing the website.

Support Staff Makes It Feasible

With a dedicated support staff available, readers can be guided to solve the problem encountered; reliable techs who know all there is to know about the structure and content of the website are the persons readers can turn to for troubleshooting the features or services that the website offers. The end-goal is to help readers retrieve the information or product they are looking for, and provide a smooth browsing experience that will, in turn, boost sales.

Elsewhere on this blog:

Developing Your Business: Conducting Market Research in the Virtual World

Business Metrics: What Surveys Can Do For Your Business

Navigating Timezones: Three Strategies for Expanding Businesses

Developing Your Business: Conducting Market Research in the Virtual World

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Market research is a default tool used by entrepreneurs in gathering information: current market trends, purchasing history of consumers, public and private records, and more. The data is used by corporations to stay updated in the current business wave. It also enables them to assess whether their products/services still appeal to their target market, or if they need to establish a new marketing strategy for their brand. While this approach sounds like a lot of work, companies have found a faster and more accurate method to generate feedback and results, thanks to developments in technology.

Since the advent of the internet, communication is as second nature as blinking. And with all the social networking sites surfacing and dominating online, researches and surveys can now be done with just a few clicks. The internet is this generation’s best technology, and everyone (especially entrepreneurs) are happy about it. Businesses experience convenience not only in connecting with their clients, but also in promoting brands. And with the increasing popularity of social media among millennials, it has become easier for business owners to collect data and feedback from their markets.

To further enhance your company’s market research strategy, here are some useful tips on how to generate consumer information using the internet.

Social Media

It is no secret almost everyone have various social media accounts. It is the current trend, and every human being with a smart phone and internet connection (which are both globally accessible) is hooked to it. As a corporation aiming to position your brand in the public market’s interest, utilizing social media for your company’s benefit is a smart move. Conducting polls and surveys in different platforms like Facebook, Twitter and other sites can save you both money and time, as it’s free to create social media accounts and feedback generation is done in real time.

Emails & E-newsletters

Another market research method that can be done through internet is sending newsletters and surveys via email -a good way to gather information and opinions from existing customers. Engaging in an email-based interaction with clients also helps establish a personal connection; this is to your advantage, because having a healthy customer relationship increases the rate of customer retention and potentially advances sales generation.

Online Posts & Articles

Reading market-related articles posted online is also helpful in analyzing gathered data. Collecting insights from published studies can give you a head-start in concluding what would be the best step for your company. Articles written by private and government agencies are usually the most reliable sources, citing statistics essential for your own research. Also, studying what potential consumers write or comment about certain products/services gives you insight on your next product release or marketing campaign.

While almost everything can be easily found in the internet, you still have to verify information before you utilize it. Sites delivering false information has bombarded the virtual world, so it is imperative to be careful and wise in selecting what is genuine and what is not. Always refer to data you can trace to legit sources, like official sites and pages.

Elsewhere on this blog:

Business Metrics: What Surveys Can Do For Your Business

Competitive Advantages of Offshore Staff Leasing

Should You Outsource Your Customer Service?

10 SEO Tips for Small Online Businesses

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Small online businesses are everywhere these days, and they are not limited to just gadgets, clothing, novelty items and knickknacks. If your business is new or have been around for a couple of years but still not getting that stable monthly or yearly sales you are aiming for, then you are probably not SEOing right or have not done it for your website.

SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization. It is the process of optimizing your website to get a better spot or ranking in search engine results pages (SERP). It’s a very tedious and repetitive task that’s why many clients are outsourcing them these days. Don’t worry about any expenses because SEO is free, all the free parts of online marketing!

Try these simple SEO tips to help your small online business get a better visibility on the web.

On-Site Optimization

This refers to your website. If all you have is a Facebook page or an Instagram account for your business, I suggest registering your own domain, it is much better if you have a real website that people can visit, view your products and get to know your brand better.

1. Use the H1 tag for page titles. It helps your visitors to know what page they are in and helps search engine robots to know what that page is all about.
2. Research for keywords. Using the keyword “novelties” is too broad, why not use “novelty gifts” or “novelty items” instead for your online novelty gift shop? It gives you a better ranking in SERP.
3. Page descriptions are not just for visitors. Keywords are also laid in page descriptions, this helps search engine robots rate your website or a specific page on your site for the relevancy of keywords you are using for its contents. The more relevant your keywords are, the better ranking you will get.
4. Register to Google Webmaster Tools. It’s a free SEO tool for analyzing your website, reports on your visibility on the web and diagnostics for a healthy, Google-friendly website.
5. Register to Google Analytics. Another great free SEO tool for monitoring traffic on your website. With this tool, you can see the number of visitors you have per day/month/year, other sites that are linking to yours and what keywords are driving more visitors in.

Domain Tip: If you do not have the budget for a domain name and hosting, go to WordPress.com or Blogger.com for a free domain.

Off-Site Optimization

Off-site optimization, also called link building, is a SEO method for helping your website rank in SERP, increase your brand’s visibility on the web and improve its reputation using other sites. Your small online business will benefit greatly with link building.

6. Get social more often. If you already have a Facebook page for your business, why not add another social media account like Twitter, Instagram or Youtube? The more visibility you have on the web the greater is your chance of getting more customers.
7. Free online directories are everywhere! Make it a habit to register your business online on your spare time.
8. Not all ads are paid. There are free ad sites where you can post your products, try Craigslist.org now!
9. Create your own blog. WordPress.com, Blogger.com and Tumblr.com are great for creative blogs, don’t worry they’re free!
10. Socialize with other blog owners. Join a blogger network and socialize with other bloggers in the same niche as yours. You can even trade links with them by offering an article for their blog with a link pointing to your blog or website.

Link Building Tip: Always add a link to your website when posting your ads, registering to online directories and on your social media profiles. This way, people will know that your business has a real website they can visit and search engine robots can rate you better.

Your small online business will work its way up slowly but surely by using various SEO techniques, and SEO doesn’t need to be expensive. You can do it on your own or by asking a friend or relative to help you.

The time will come that your small online business won’t be so small anymore. The growth of your business will lay more and heavier responsibilities on your hands perhaps that will be the time where you will be able to think of allotting a budget for hiring a SEO specialist. You can start by outsourcing a freelancer in your area or if you’re bold enough, try offshore outsourcing for other types of SEO services.

How to Get Rid of Negative and Unwanted Backlinks

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First of all, you need to identify what are the negative backlinks pointing to your website. If you do not know how to handle this, you can seek out the help of a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) expert from an outsourcing or offshore staff leasing firm, or a part-time webmaster from freelance websites.

After checking for negative backlinks, you may also find links that are not really bad but you do not want them to be linking to your website because of their poor quality, it is okay to remove them too.

Removing negative and unwanted links can be very tricky but there is always a way.

Step 1. Remove Them Yourself

Some negative backlinks were done by bad SEOing, either by you or your SEO guy. For example, you have links coming from web directories which were good back then but now are link farms. If you still have your old usernames and passwords for those web directories, I suggest you login to them right now and remove your links from their website. It can be tedious but necessary to improve your website’s rank in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

You may find some SEO or IT outsourcing firms that offer this kind of service for a low cost, it can be cheaper from a freelancer in Odesk.com or from a staff leasing firm that offers short term project-based SEO services.

Step 2. Send a Friendly Email

When negative and unwanted backlinks gets a little harder to remove, try sending a request for removal by using their contact us form. In case they do not have a form, look for email addresses on their website, or try using GoDaddy WhoIs or DomainTools WhoIs and send them a friendly email.

Step 3. Use Google Disavow

The Google Disavow is a tool used by many webmasters to clean up hard to remove backlinks, but it is not always the first choice. The disavow tool can help you get rid of negative backlinks but it can also harm your website’s ranking if not used properly. If you are planning to hire a full-time SEO expert (or get one from your local outsourcing firm or an offshore staff leasing company) for this job, your guy should be knowledgeable in using this tool, else you will end up with more mess than getting those negative links off.

As the head of Google’s Webspam team, Matt Cutts, says in this video, “… you’ve done some bas SEO, you hired a bad SEO, they mess things up now you need to clean up. You’ve done as much work as you can to get those links off the web, but some people don’t respond or for whatever reason you can’t get every single link taken off the web. That’s the perfect use-case to do disavow…”

If no change happens after a few weeks of using the disavow tool, try sending a reconsideration request to Google but be warned, disavowing a backlink is not the first or best way to remove it from Google SERP, use it as a last resort only. But if your website is suffering from Negative SEO the disavow tool would be the best choice since the unnatural and negative backlinks will be ten folds and much harder to remove.

I still see the negative and unwanted backlinks pointing to my website. So what now?

Have patience, it will take time for search engines to have those links removed from their index. But if you still find yourself deep in the hole after doing everything that you can, maybe it is time for you to get help from the experts themselves. You may opt to hire your own full-time in-house SEO specialist or a part-timer from your local outsourcing firm, or hire the services of an offshore staff leasing company that specializes in SEO. If you do decide to outsource, consider a third party service provider that offers flexible solutions so it will fit in with your budget.

How to Identify Negative Backlinks

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If we want to rank high in search engine results pages (SERPs), we optimize our website and build backlinks to raise popularity and authority. Some seek the assistance from staff leasing companies or hire freelancers while other website owners do it themselves.

Outsourcing the task of identifying negative backlinks can be a great help if you have the budget, but if you do not, get ready because you will need a lot of reading, testing and tons of patience.

How to Identify Negative Backlinks

If outsourcing a freelancer or hiring a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) expert from a staff leasing firm will be your method of doing this, I suggest you get someone who is knowledgeable in search engine rankings, not just someone who can submit your domain to free sites.

But if you do plan on handling this task by yourself, here are some great free online backlinks checker you can use.

  1. Moz Open Site Explorer – It has a 30-day free trial for its Keywords Rank Checker.
  2.  Majestic Site Explorer – it’s free version is limited but otherwise a good backlink checker.
  3.  Backlink Watch – it’s free, but you will have to tolerate the ads.

Other than the above online SEO tools, you can also manually check your backlinks in Google, Yahoo and Bing by simply typing “link:http://www.YourDomain.com” on their search bars. Try it!

To identify what are the negative backlinks, simply look into relevancy of the URLs linking to your domain. Sometimes you can spot the niche of the websites linking to yours just by looking at their domain names. Any link that may look suspicious to you, investigate it! Any link that can potential harm your website is a negative backlink.

Quality backlinks help your website and its inner pages rank higher in SERPs, and in SEO, the more relevant a backlink is to your website the better, of course the content of the linking website has to be good too. Ask any SEO outsourcing firm, whether local or offshore staff leasing, they will tell you that quality backlinks is the best combination for quality web content.

I Have Identified My Negative Backlinks. What to Do Now?

The next step to do after identifying all negative backlinks is to remove them. Google has an online tool you can use and there are also manual ways of getting rid of those links; talk to the webmaster of the site or remove them yourself if you believe you’re the one who placed it there on the first place, like in free directory sites, social bookmarking sites, free ads you posted, etc.

Read now >> How to Get Rid of Negative and Unwanted Backlinks.

4 Ways Social Media Can Help Your Business Grow

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It has been a proven way to increase your business’ online presence by using social media optimization (SMO). It is one of the best techniques for brand awareness, building trust and increasing your profit. But do you know how much more you can get with SMO? If you haven’t marketed your business using social media, better start now!

Here are 4 great ways how optimizing your Social Media profiles can help your business grow.

Better Communication and Customer Service

Live interactions with customers and potential clients are limitless using social networking sites. This is your chance to know more about the people who patronize your products and services. You can even use Facebook’s “Insights” to monitor the activities on your Facebook page and make improvements to your weak spots. There’s also your web analytics which can help you determine the most interesting things that can engage a web surfer to your site and target specific locations or audience. Maximize all the free tools available so you can provide your customers with better services.

Free Ways to Keep Your Brand Fresh and Repeat Exposure

Ever wonder why TV commercials need to be repetitive all the time? It’s because of effective frequency which can determine a response from potential customers based on the number of times they have been exposed to an advertisement. If successfully done, it can then engage customers to buy the product being advertised.

Now you’re probably contradicting, because search engines do not like repeated content unlike the commercials on TV. It’s true that content is king when it comes to online branding and search engine optimization, and that mass duplication of content is the opposite. The best way you can remind your customers about your brand is to always provide them with fresh content; have a blog where fresh content is being uploaded frequently, or a forum where customers can interact with you and with each other, then use social media to connect them all!

Build Loyalty and Authority

You can also build and strengthen customer loyalty and authority using social media optimization; by simply interacting with customers and providing them with interesting information, not by constantly posting advertisement of your products and services. Customers doesn’t like to be force fed with ads. Give them respect through interesting topics, advices and discussions, make your business as their go-to resource when searching for help. Happy customers leave footprints of positive comments all around the web.

Hire and Be Hired!

LinkedIn can be a great tool to find professionals with specific skills you need to complete a project. You can even get a team of individuals with different sets of skills for a very complex project you never thought you could finish.

Aside from hiring people online, you can also connect with other entrepreneurs in your industry and share ideas, and collaborate and create new strategies that can benefit your businesses. You will be more noticeable and influential the more you join and interact with various companies and organizations on social media sites. You’ll be surprised to see other businesses asking you for consultation, inquiring about your services, or requesting quotations for projects they want you to handle.

You’ll never know when prospect clients are peeking into your business’ online profile, so it’s better to be active and productive too online. Help your business grow and improve with social media optimization!

What is Negative SEO?

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This kind of method has been around for so long, people don’t call it Negative SEO back then and it is used to drop page and websites from search results containing false news and offending content that ruins the good reputation of a person, business and organization. Programmers are even more successful in doing this with a simple hacking or just by reporting the site that hosts the offending content, but that could take ages.

Today, Negative SEO is being used to attack people and businesses online with the intent to lower their website’s rankings, popularity and eventually destroys their name. Whatever the reasons are; political, financial or personal reasons, there are people out there who are doing this today, probably right now.

3 Main Reasons Why Negative SEO is Being Used Today

Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM)

It may sound shady, but yes, this is a totally legitimate way on how you can clean your business’ name online, also referred to as Online Reputation Management. Back then, SERM wasn’t widely used but today a lot of businesses are acquiring the aid of SERM specialists due to the increasing amount of virtual attacks. The SERM specialist’s task is to clean up bad rumors and false news against their client over the internet.

SERP Bubbling and Google Bowling

SERP bubbling is the process of lowering a competitor’s website ranking in search result so yours will float up to the top. While Google Bowling is intended to completely remove a page or site from Google’s search results by making Google think that it is spammy. The methods are simple but deadly.

  • Thousands of unnatural backlinks in a short time
  • Backlinks using bad keywords
  • Dropping of links on link farms, adult sites and forums
  • Site hacking and infecting
  • Adsense and Adwords banning
  • Black hat social bookmarking and networking

There are a lot more Negative SEO techniques which I cannot share here, in case you might get the idea of trying them when you get angry.

Senseless Attacks and Racial Discrimination

There are those who are gifted with coding complex programs who use their skills for senseless actions like hacking websites just because they can and even infiltrating a person’s social media account and gather their personal details for the purpose of humiliating them. While other hackers use their skills to target specific ethnicity just for the fun of it.