If link building is one of the most popular way of building quality traffic to a website, why is it that some (if not most) websites find it incredibly difficult to attract these links? The answer lies in the value (or lack thereof) that these sites offer the Internet community.

We often read people comparing a website to a shopping mall, and indeed they are right. Shopping malls have mastered the skill of creating new and exciting ways of attracting new shoppers – and retaining those customers already frequenting the mall.

Ask yourself why most successful shops routinely rearrange their product displays. Why do they design or manufacture new products? Summer time sees swimsuits making their way closer to the entrance. Fruit salads and lettuce leaves are everywhere to be seen in the grocery section.

People are naturally curious creatures and as such get bored very easily. Its all about satisfying the shopper (user). Give the customer what they want, when they want it and they’ll return. Better yet, they’ll recommend your store to their friends, colleagues and loved ones.

But what does fruit and sexy bikinis have to do with your website? You have to find out what your user wants and give it to them.

Would you link to your site?

So, what does generate return traffic to a site? Well, take a closer look at your site and determine whether you’d link to it yourself? Is there anything on your site that you can honestly say is of value?

We’re not talking about product prices or a profile on how you founded your company. We’re talking about something that is useful and convenient to your target market. A utility or tool of sorts. Perhaps a regularly updated dialogue with your visitors. An invaluable resource that teaches people something they dont already know.

Ideas worth researching

An excellent way to increase website traffic is to ask a “how to” question and write about your solution. If you’ve got a motor-related site, writing an article on how to sell a car could be an excellent idea. In the landscaping business? How to plant a tree? would make for a good article too. What could you write if you have a conference facility? How about what to remember when arranging a wedding or business function??

Not only will writing articles bulk up your websites content, which search engines love, but will also add value to other websites that publish your writing on their websites.

The good thing about good articles is that they tend to circulate the Net pretty well. By adding an optimised link to the bottom of your article you could in turn generate more traffic to your site.

But articles arent the only way of generating traffic to your site. Something that is destined to become more popular is the inclusion of a business blog on a website. This lets you build a personal relationship with your customers. Naturally, the blog needs to be well thought of before being added. Will it be a regularly updated blog or one that is updated less frequently? Will there be one or more voices/writers for the blog? Everyone has their own preference to a style of writing. Letting your staff or departments publish their own blogs will create even more opportunities of attracting more than one type of reader or client.

Adding a tool that people are searching for is yet another excellent idea. It could be a currency converter, BMI calculator or a free online travel organiser  anything that is related to your website and that offers an invaluable benefit to those who find it.

As ludicrous as this may sound, being a hub for industry-related websites and information is another great idea. You could have a section devoted to your reviews of market-related products, services and websites  with links pointing to them. Your users will come to trust your knowledge and advice, and as such will refer your website to their contacts.

The bottom line

Regardless of what you write about or have to offer your visitor, the key is to keep it simple, fresh and non-salesy. Your website should already have a section that does all that sales pitching. Offering genuinely useful content and tools is what will differentiate your website from that of your abandoned peers.

Ideas are everywhere. It takes some time, effort, research and a bit of imagination to come up with soothing other than a good link request email. Your users word of mouth will reward your efforts.

Adopted from an article by our principle consultant, Gino Cosme, originally written in 2005.

Unless your company has someone in-house who knows what they’re doing and is prepared to take ownership of new media activity for you company (sorry, but an ad or design agency-appointed account manager doesn’t fit the bill – especially when their strength lies with traditional media), we’d like to afford these eager corporate beavers five pieces of advice:

1: Make it your priority to understand online marketing and new media technologies. The best way of doing this is to get onto the web and start researching and experimenting with the different web channels yourself. While this is sometimes not always possible, it’s fundamental to at least speak to people in the industry who can afford you non-sales-related advice. Best of all, hire them to join your team.

2: Decide how your brand will use these different web marketing channels for the sake of benefiting your target audience. As an example, developing a social network site without a clear intension of user benefit makes no sense. The same applies to incorporating bandwidth-intensive rich media on your site. How will your user use it to their benefit? Having it there for the sake of making your site look pretty can cause more harm than good.

3: Similar to the above, decide how your brand will use all these additional (and awesome) new generation activities to benefit your own business. Outline which areas of the communication and marketing strategy they will aim to fulfill, and then measure it against predetermined pillars of success. Remember, thanks to the very nature of the Internet and its users, these strategies must be ready to evolve and change on the fly.

4: New media and technologies can be a powerful way of attracting consumer and media attention, building valuable relationships, and generating more leads. Determine how you will deal and engage with this added attention before going “live”.

5: Create internal new media advocates within your company. Involve as many people from within your organisation and make them aware of your new web strategies and why you’re using them. From the sales people and call centre agents to the receptionist and switchboard operator, anyone who has the possibility of being in contact with your potential web user must understand and support these activities and their objectives. Don’t forget the CEO and senior management.

Adopting new media within an organisation takes time, patience, and a lot of knowledge. It also required team work and out of the box thinking. When done properly, the benefits are huge!

To help find your online writing feet, we’ve jotted down 10 online copywriting tips that we hope will help:

1: Communicate the purpose of your site through a unique “tagline”. This will tell users what your site is all about the minute they land on it. Not only does this benefit you but also your user

2: Publish content about what you know about the most and focus on this. This will result in your website becoming an authority for your niche area of interest or expertise.

3: Write about what your target audience is interested in, and take into account how they’d go about trying to find a site like yours through search engines. You can do this by asking select target audience members and doing some research into user search patterns. Then build your site up with this content.

4: Write with “focused conversion” in mind; that is, with one or two clear actions you’d like the user to take. Include calls to actions too – think “nothing asked, nothing done.”

5: Good copywriting style means writing for “lower-literacy users” – people who want plain, simple English and take time to grasp ideas, which will help your readers understand the topic. It’s about making anyone from your grandmother to boss understand your content.

6: Write in an “inverted pyramid style” with your most important content in the first one or two paragraphs. Good journalists do this, starting a piece with a conclusion. Remember, too, to be flexible with your writing style and adjust it according to your audience and/or topic being covered.

7: Split long posts with either subheadings or bullet points. It can sometimes also help to also highlight important points or keywords by making them bold.

8: Use strong page titles and make each page’s different. This is very important because it’s often the displayed text for your site’s listing in search engines, bookmarking services, etc.

9: Put your main points at the beginning of sentences. This helps with scanning and saves time – users won’t have to read every sentence to understand what you’re writing about.

10: Include links within the content and make them relevant to the surrounding content. Not only does this help users navigate your site but it also brings context to any particular point.

Before I explain, let’s identify some typical strategic objectives:

• Generate traffic and and links
• Improve search engine rankings for targeted key phrases
• Build awareness amongst your target market
• Increase your subscriber base or generate a lead
• Build trust amongst your customers
• Sell a product or service
• Help users move through the sales cycle
• Build influence in the market place
• Support your crisis management communications strategy
• Learn new things about customers
• Identify relevant online networks

As we can tell, most of these objectives are relevant to most businesses; however, it’s important to understand that different online strategies address different business objectives. As an example, social media may be great to build influence or learn new things about customers but would need the support of search engine optimization (SEO) to sell a product or generate a lead. It’s not to say that social media could not address these objectives; having the two working in a combined fashion just makes it all the more efficient.

So back to the three important online communications pillars…

The foundation to any online strategy should be a corporate website. It’s what some would call the starting point for customers who are interested in your company – for instance, where they get their news about your company and your product and service offerings. Pay a lot of attention to this because, if anything else, this is the most important online real estate you will own. It’s what pulls everything together and what supports all your other strategies.

The second important online pillar is what I call “traditional digital media” or online marketing. Examples of this includes affiliate marketing, response-driven advertising, pay per click, search engine optimisation and WebPR, to name some. When used properly, these strategies offer a very targeted, ROI-driven manner of reaching out to consumers and drawling them closer to a predetermined goal.

The third – yes, third – pillar is social media. I put this one last because well-executed social media needs the support of some of the above in order to be more effective than its isolated application. Unlike the other two pillars, the social media arm of the online strategy is about leveraging relationships and networks for the purposes of engaging in open dialogue with and amongst target markets, to create influence within the market and to discover new business-relevant information and trends.

If we look at these three pillars, each supports the other very nicely. However, there’s a very real problem amongst this industry… and I may get criticised for saying this: very few people understand how each of these three pillars work together, why each is needed for the other to succeed, and, most importantly, how to leverage the combined efforts to tap into new opportunities.

Surprisingly, there’s a lesson to be learnt from traditional media; various elements working together to deliver on brief. Why should online be different?

by Gino Cosme

The reason why social media is not, yet, a mainstream activity for many B2B marketers is because the outcomes that most B2B marketers seek to deliver on are more suited towards “traditional” online and offline marketing techniques such as pay-per-click advertising, lead generation and traditional public relations.

But when you start scratching the surface of social-media marketing you begin to discover that bottom-line results can positively be affected by social-media activities, even if used for less traditional return-on-investment outcomes such as engagement, interaction, sentiment, research, authority ranking, influence and innovation, to name just some. And surprising to most B2B marketers new to strategic social-media marketing is that these outcomes can have a positive influence on more traditional metrics such as sales and customer retention.

In a post titled “8 Simple Rules for Social Media Marketing in the B2B world” Todd Malicoat once wrote: “Social media applies to everyone. Yes, even B2B folks. The question is how? The answer is — in speaking to your customers, clients, vendors, partners, friends on a one-to-many basis. The magic bullet is in figuring out how to do that. There is no process. There is no direct correlation to productivity or efficiency. There is no solution that will raise revenue in a quantitive fashion for next quarter. What there is, is the opportunity to speak to other humans like humans and have them appreciate you doing so.”

Well put.

This said, more and more B2B marketers are utilising social media in some shape or form, the most popular being blogs and social-networking sites, specifically for the purposes of positively influencing the purchasing decisions of B2B buyers. As Paul Gillin writes: “Some of the most ambitious corporate blogging campaigns have been primarily aimed at B2B uses. Microsoft and Sun, which between them have about 10 000 corporate bloggers, use this tool to reach developers, business customers and prospective employees. The blogs are easily searchable and they allow readers to pose questions to the best sources of information. Among other B2B companies that are using blogs effectively are Emerson Process Management, the New York Stock Exchange, Marriott, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Boeing and Accenture, to name just a few. You won’t find a lot of playful repartee and trivia contests here. These blogs are intended to communicate useful information and reinforce their authors and their companies as authorities in their fields.”

One shouldn’t believe in a one-shoe-fits-all approach. What works for one business-to-business client won’t necessarily work for another, largely because each business, each market and each online marketing strategy is unique. The key is to have a solid, business-focused social-media strategy in place that complements other traditional online and offline communication channels while pushing the boundaries in a pioneering yet “controllable” manner. Come to think of it, its what’s become the foundation of some of the most successful global B2B conglomerates.

Originally published by our founder, Gino Cosme, on Thought Leader

1. Why do you want to use social media?

While many companies should exploit the numerous benefits that social media marketing (dubbed relations) affords them, there are equally as many companies who should stay clear from the medium. Determine what the underlying goal is and why social media should be used to achieve same before you continue.

2. Which department will social media become a vertical to?

Often it’s the technical department that gets the thumbs up. But think carefully. The marketing and PR departments are generally the creative, content-driven folk who hold the key to any company’s target market. This is at the soul of any social media strategy! Also, well-executed social media is a result of an integrated approach.

3. Is the company ready for social media engagement?

Often, so much blue tape exists within corporate society that we forget that it’s not conducive to the pace-of-lightning speed that social media is. Determine beforehand what processes need to be in place for your engagement to be real and timely.

4. Is your company ready for the brutally honest feedback that exists on the Internet about your company or brand?

If so, is the business ready to make positive changes to the business? This includes having access to senior management – even exco level – so that they’re aware of what’s happening in the space.

5. What part of the bottom line are you hoping to improve on with social media?

This is a biggie. You see, brand positioning is important. But it generally costs a lot of money and on its own does very little to a business’ profit margins. Social media, like any other online marketing channel, needs to be used for the purpose of generating leads. Sure, the approach may be different, but there needs to be a financial target. It’s that simple. Anything less is fluff.

6. Have you got access to target social media communities that you can rely on to launch a blogger or social networker seed campaign?

Being able to reach out to influential online networkers with a large following is important to accelerating the campaign and its message into the social media community.

7. Speaking of bloggers, are you aware that social media goes beyond bloggers and blogging?

Often a company will jump on the blog bandwagon, not realising that other social media channels do exist that could offer far more value to both your business and customers. Do the research. Call someone in. Make informed decisions.

8. Have you experimented and ideally succeeded with a SEO campaign?

Because search is the lifeblood of online traffic, it is important to understand the fundamentals of search engine optimisation (SEO) to reap the benefits across online marketing disciplines. Similarly, it’s important to be able to make sense of quantitative and qualitative metrics.

We have also seen how numerous companies, both locally and abroad, find value in social media initiatives.

A problem that is becoming more and more apparent is that many new and traditional professionals are still trying to see how social media, including blogs, can honestly help companies and their bottom line (which, quite frankly, is what it’s all about). And here’s the truth…

Social media is not the most effective advertising mechanic.

A loud cheer I hear from all the above-the-line agencies. Hold your horses!

What I can say is that social media works very well as a public relations tool. Yes, social media can have an impact on a company’s marketing and sales funnel, but that is not its main, direct strength.

You see, as Lee Odden states, social media, among other things, is about gaining insight into ones target market, building brand visibility and improving authority, and influencing and promoting a product and/or service.

This pairs well with my own thoughts that social media is an effective channel for companies to create interest and trust, improve brand support and loyalty, and most importantly, communicate clearly, regularly and honestly. This, too, is probably one of corporate communications’ main tasks within corporate business, and who does PR better than a PR agency…?

So, why use social media for PR? Well, let’s agree on one thing – traditional PR isn’t going anywhere. In fact, I personally don’t want it to go anywhere, as many of my previous and current successes have been through PR collaborations. That said, social media is also not going anywhere. So, how do the two work hand-in-hand?

The answer, I think, boils down to integrating social media with traditional PR, in an effort to give it ammunition. And, in an almost harmonic manner, feed the offline strategies to bring a new level of life to public relations. This in turn improves reach, improves business outcomes, and, most importantly, improves successes, which we’re all (at least, we all should be) accountable for.

So, my suggestion is this – social media marketing needs a new name. It’s called social media relations. And it’s not about competing with traditional billboards anymore. It’s about getting the message across to the right people and harnessing the impact that these people and their influence creates.

By Gino Cosme

Web 2.0 extends this into the digital space with new generation ideas and technologies that we can use to become authors of our own content, and connect and collaborate with communities, all in a fairly simple yet rich environment using the Internet’s historic architecture.

Personalising data

Web 2.0 is about technology and data being personalised to us based on how we use them and what we want from them. Thanks to this, the Internet provides a very flexible way to do just about anything from virtually any location. Previously we needed to know how to write complex HTML language and how to put together technology platforms. Today all we need is access to a computer and a bit of inspiration.

User-generated content has revolutionised micropublishing. Social networking has transformed the way we connect and interact with people. Rich Internet Applications has reformed flat browser experiences to desktop-like environments. Open data has resulted in data integration into almost any data structure. But does this all matter to your business?

In a nutshell, yes. Consumers are forcing brands to engage with them in their Web environments. Mass media sites no longer dictate what news and information we read. Instead, people like you and I are consuming most of the Web’s traffic; they’re generating the most interest on social networking sites, search engines are listing blogs in their results pages, and ordinary citizens are writing the news we read. Major brands are now even soliciting their consumers instead of their PR agencies to market their products.

As broadband usage in this country increases so too will users be looking for better ways to spend their time online. This includes your consumers. Providing rich online experiences that add benefit to their day-to-day lives and that tie in well with your brand’s positioning will afford you an opportunity to leverage the Web in new ways; ways in which your competitors are either too afraid to exploit or are already using. Either way, your target audience is most likely already engaging with these experiences. Can you afford to ignore this trend?

Offer tangible benefits

Having said this, any adaptation of Web 2.0, regardless of whether it’s done for business or personal reasons, must offer both the user and supplier a tangible benefit. This must tie in with a good business and user experience models and should never been done in an isolated fashion.

Web 2.0 isn’t about to replace traditional media any time soon but, in one way or another, it is something we do share. As we become more familiar with it and as we see it evolve, Web 2.0 will continue to become an integral part of our lives. As individuals and businesses, this is something important to know.