LATEST ARTICLES

Social Media Marketing – Key Steps to Success!

15
Dec

posted by shumin filed under Online Marketing, Social Media Marketing

When most business concerns their Facebook page, Twitter account, LinkedIn profile, we know that Social Media has taken the world of business. Social Media quickly eliminated traditional monolog marketing activities and replaced it with dialog marketing. Properly used, it can establish you as an expert in your field, keep you in close touch with customers, sell your products and services, and market your business or organisation. It is an around-clock marketing machine that doesn’t ever sleeps. You have to care about your activities on Social Medias, otherwise, it could cause damages very hard to fix.

When clients come to me for Social Media marketing, I ask three questions first:

What you expect from Social Media marketing?
Do you know how to motivate your broad audience on Social Media?
What other marketing activities are undertaking at the same time?

Have you got your answers? …

Let me explain the reason I’m asking these questions:

Social Media is not a direct marketing place. Hard sell won’t work on Social Medias. It’s also different to email or pay-per-click marketing which you can always include a purchase link and lead user to click and buy. Social Media is a platform for brand awareness and customer relationship building. Question one clarifies the natural of social media marketing.

To motivate audience on Social Medias, you have to provide something with values, such as good contents, informative answers, discounts, etc. There is no standardised answer to this as your customers, their needs, your employees, your business is unique. This is not a one-size-fits-all endeavour. Knowing what you can give to motivate your audience is essential.

Last question emphasise that cooperate with other marketing activities include offline activities is the way to maximise the power of social media marketing. Don’t think that it only takes place from your keyboard.

Bear above in mind, I’m going to give you the list of key steps to Social media marketing success. Treat these steps as guidelines, record them, combine them and delete any that you care to, but read them all. Nothing could be further from the truth

List goals and verify that they are achievable. Goals are not what you want or wish.
Determine what social media sites are best for your needs. A blog requires writing, a micro-blog requires you to write tight headlines, video requires you to make, edit, and upload them. Choose the sites that fit your needs and create your accounts.
Content. Provide the time and resources necessary to carry out the work. Content must be right.
Motivate your audience by telling what they want.
Listen to your audience. Remember it’s a dialog.
Use campaign. Ask, and provide a premium. For example, a free report, a discount coupon, entrance in a contest, a gift, or something else of unquestioned value for the time they spend responding to your query.
Implement ongoing content creation. Continually provide contents of unquestioned value that your audience wants keep them engaged.
Your website. Bring your website up-to-date and be sure that it supports your social media campaign by providing the pertinent information your audience is looking for. Integrate your site into your social media campaign if possible.
Tell the world about your social media campaign via email, phone call, website, business cards, invoices …
Measure Return-on-investment of your social media campaign. Check web traffic, page views, and numbers of fans to determine the effectiveness of your social media campaign.
Making your social media marketing success via offline activities such as, attend conference, speak at conference or industry event, press release, host seminar, throw a party, join chambers of commerce/business groups…

If you are interested to know more about Social Media Marketing, free feel to contact info@xpress-shop.com

Comments (262)

The 100% Easy-2-Read Standard

9
Oct

posted by shumin filed under Web Design

Most websites are crammed with small text that’s a pain to read. Why? There is no reason for squeezing so much information onto the screen. It’s just a stupid collective mistake that dates back to a time when screens were really, really small. So… Type Size Comparison
Screen vs. magazine: 100% is NOT big; image by Wilson Miner.

Don’t tell us to adjust the font size

We don’t want to change our browser settings every time we visit a website!

Don’t tell us busy pages look better

Crowded websites don’t look good: they look nasty. Filling pages with stuff has never helped usability. It’s laziness that makes you throw all kinds of information at us. We want you to think and pre-select what’s important. We don’t want to do your work.

Don’t tell us scrolling is bad

Because then all websites are bad. There is nothing wrong with scrolling. Nothing at all. Just as there is nothing wrong with flipping pages in books.

Don’t tell us text is not important

95% of what is commonly referred to as web design is typography.

Don’t tell us to get glasses

Rather, stop licking your screen, lean back (!) and continue reading in a relaxed position.

Five Simple Rules

1. Standard font size for long texts

The font size you are reading right now is not big. It’s the text size browsers display by default. It’s the text size browsers were intended to display.

We don’t want to click bigger or smaller buttons and we don’t want to change our preferences. We want to read right away. We want you to adjust to our settings, and not the other way around.

Initially it is more difficult to create a good layout with a big font size, but that difficulty will help you design a simpler, clearer site. Cramming a site with information isn’t difficult, but making it simple and easy-to-use is. At first, you’ll be shocked how big the default text is. But after a day, you won’t want to see anything smaller than 100% font-size for the main text. It looks big at first, but once you use it you quickly realize why all browser makers chose this as the default text size.

2. Active white space

Let your text breathe. Using white space is not a designer’s nerdy issue. It’s not about taste.

“The width of the column must be proportioned to the size of the type. Overlong columns are wearying to the eye and also have an adverse psychological effect. Overshort columns can also be disturbing because they interrupt the flow of reading and put the reader off by obliging the eye to change lines too rapidly.”
Josef Muller-Brockmann, Grid Systems

Having air around the text reduces the stress level, as it makes it much easier to focus on the essence. You don’t need to fill the whole window. White space looking nicer is not a side effect: it’s the logic consequence of functional design. Who said websites need to be crammed with stuff?

Muller-Brockmann: “The question of the column width is not merely one of design or format; the question of legibility is of equal importance.”

Please make sure that the line width (text column width, also called “measure”) is not too wide, and that you add room on the left and right to make it easy for the eye to jump. We don’t want to adjust either the font size or window size. When we open a website, we just want to read away. Column widths that scale are nice; never-ending text lines all across the screen are not.

Good Nielsen – bad Nielsen. The King of Usability recently added white space and a maximum width to his main article column (left). The old layout scaled 100% (right picture). A little bit more line space and you’re perfect.

The basic rule is: 10 to 15 words per line. For liquid layouts, at 100% font size, 50% column width (in relation to window size) is a good benchmark for most screen resolutions.

3. Reader friendly line height

Here is what the reading specialist says:

Lines that are too narrowly set impair reading speed because the upper and lower line are both taken in by the eye at the same time The eye cannot focus on excessively close lines and … the reader expends energy in the wrong place and tires more easily. The same also holds true for lines that are too widely spaced.

The default HTML line height is too small. If you increase the line height, the text becomes more readable. 140% leading is a good benchmark.

4. Clear color contrast

This should not even be necessary to say. But if you still believe you can get away with one of the following combinations:

light grey text on a lighter grey background
“silver” colored text on a snow white background
grey text on a yellow background
yellow text on a red background
green text on a red background, and so on…

…then you are not a web designer, but just a designer with an attitude. If you insist you are a web designer, then you have to be aware that no one will ever know, as no one will ever be able to read what you say. Stop this nonsense and let us see what you type. Note: for screen design, an overly strong contrast (full black and white) is not ideal either, as the text starts to flicker. Benchmark: #333 on #fff

5. No text in images

We want to be able to search text, copy text, save text, play with the cursor and mark text while we read. Text in images looks pretty, but pretty is not what the web is about. It’s about communication and information, and information needs to be readable and usable and scalable and citable and sendable.

If you can’t make your website look nice without text in images, I am afraid that you will have to start again from scratch.

Article Source: http://www.informationarchitects.jp/en/100e2r/

Comments (214)

Choose the Right Time for Email

21
Jul

posted by shumin filed under Email Marketing, Online Marketing

Email Marketing is still one of the most efficient online marketing activities. Most people are caring about what’s in the email. But don’t forget that the right timing is also the key to increase your email ROI. Below are some facts and tips about the right time to send your email.

Most people check their emails between 6 AM to 8 AM. They scan in their Inbox to see what to Open, Save or Delete. They will generally open emails with subjects of interest and those apparently sent by real people;
A lot of people will thrash emails sent between the late parts of the evening and early morning hours. They assume these are from auto-responders since no sane person will be up sending emails during this time.
Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays are good days to send emails intended for businesses while Fridays and Saturdays are good for consumers;
Mondays, people are anxious to know what transpired during the weekend and are eager to open their inboxes as well;
Thanks to the smartphones and iPads, more and more people are now opening the emails even on weekends.
Fewer emails get sent during Fridays because people are already wired up for the coming long weekend. But this can be a window of opportunity for your emails to be read because there will be few in your prospect’s inbox. And there is no law against sending emails on Fridays, is there?
Business emails are best sent from 11 AM to 9 PM. The risk is great for the email to get lost if sent earlier because the recipients are preparing for the day. If sent later, the recipients are already preparing to leave for home or other appointments.
Consumer emails, on the hand, are best when people are at home where they tend to check their emails before or after dinner.

Comments (144)

Am I Doing Well on Social Media?

19
Jul

posted by shumin filed under Online Marketing, Social Media Marketing

Do you have social media accounts, like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, LinkedIn? Are you posting good contents in a good frequency? How good are you interact with other people on social media for the business? Do you know the size of your opportunities from your current social media? Do you know what you want to achieve for the business?

If you have clear answers to all above, then congratulations, you are doing well on social media marketing. If you are hesitate with some of the questions or not too sure about the answers, then I suggest you to read below before you continue with your further social media activities.

Most companies are putting social media icons and links on their homepage. We are probably one of them. We set up accounts, we post on social media, make them available on the main site. And then we expect results. But what results should we expect for? And how good they are?

When you start with Social media, you need to ask yourself why you are participating in the first place. Is it for building the name of your brand? Or is it for building awareness for your new products or services? Or you want to initiate a dialogue with your consumers to encourage them to give feedbacks or suggestions? Or it’s for increase your profits by selling directly via social media platforms? What you’ve answered is what you should be expecting for from Social media.

Once you know what to expect, you want to measure the results. To measure social media returns, most companies use: number of fans, followers, shares, likes to tell how success they are. But bear in mind that this is only the counting metric. It can tell how many people you are or you can reach with your social media messages and if your content is worthy of passing onto their friends and followers.

To be able to tell the real measures of success, you need to look behind it.

We come back to the answer you just had of why you entering social media, be aware that this should be the business outcomes that you are working towards when participating in social media. With a clear understanding of what you’re trying to accomplish with your social media, put efforts to develop your outcome metrics. The outcome metrics is what you should look at to reviewing how well you are doing on social media.

Now you’ve straight on using counting metrics for sizing up opportunities and outcome metrics for quantifying purpose, the next steps is tying all this together to communicate your fabulous progress. To do this, you need to detach yourself from the metrics that you use everyday to manage your social operations and translate these granular metrics into more generalised business language. Think carefully about the things that matter to your company and management team.

Hope you find above useful for your social media work. For further information or assistance, feel free to contact Shumin at shumin@xpress-shop.com

Comments (443)

Internet Usage Statistics in 2010

12
Jul

posted by shumin filed under Online Marketing, Search News

What happened with the Internet in 2010?

How many websites were added? How many emails were sent? How many Internet users were there? This post will answer all of those questions and many, many more. If it’s stats you want, you’ve come to the right place.

We used a wide variety of sources from around the Web to put this post together. You can find the full list of source references at the bottom of the post if you’re interested. We here at Pingdom also did some additional calculations to get you even more numbers to chew on.

Prepare for a good kind of information overload.

Email

107 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2010.
294 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
1.88 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
480 million – New email users since the year before.
89.1% – The share of emails that were spam.
262 billion – The number of spam emails per day (assuming 89% are spam).
2.9 billion – The number of email accounts worldwide.
25% – Share of email accounts that are corporate.

Websites

255 million – The number of websites as of December 2010.
21.4 million – Added websites in 2010.

Web servers

39.1% – Growth in the number of Apache websites in 2010.
15.3% – Growth in the number of IIS websites in 2010.
4.1% – Growth in the number of nginx websites in 2010.
5.8% – Growth in the number of Google GWS websites in 2010.
55.7% – Growth in the number of Lighttpd websites in 2010.

Domain names

88.8 million – .COM domain names at the end of 2010.
13.2 million – .NET domain names at the end of 2010.
8.6 million – .ORG domain names at the end of 2010.
79.2 million – The number of country code top-level domains (e.g. .CN, .UK, .DE, etc.).
202 million – The number of domain names across all top-level domains (October 2010).
7% – The increase in domain names since the year before.

Internet users

1.97 billion – Internet users worldwide (June 2010).
14% – Increase in Internet users since the previous year.
825.1 million – Internet users in Asia.
475.1 million – Internet users in Europe.
266.2 million – Internet users in North America.
204.7 million – Internet users in Latin America / Caribbean.
110.9 million – Internet users in Africa.
63.2 million – Internet users in the Middle East.
21.3 million – Internet users in Oceania / Australia.

Social media

152 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse).
25 billion – Number of sent tweets on Twitter in 2010
100 million – New accounts added on Twitter in 2010
175 million – People on Twitter as of September 2010
7.7 million – People following @ladygaga (Lady Gaga, Twitter’s most followed user).
600 million – People on Facebook at the end of 2010.
250 million – New people on Facebook in 2010.
30 billion – Pieces of content (links, notes, photos, etc.) shared on Facebook per month.
70% – Share of Facebook’s user base located outside the United States.
20 million – The number of Facebook apps installed each day.

Web browsers

Videos

2 billion – The number of videos watched per day on YouTube.
35 – Hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute.
186 – The number of online videos the average Internet user watches in a month (USA).
84% – Share of Internet users that view videos online (USA).
14% – Share of Internet users that have uploaded videos online (USA).
2+ billion – The number of videos watched per month on Facebook.
20 million – Videos uploaded to Facebook per month.

Images

5 billion – Photos hosted by Flickr (September 2010).
3000+ – Photos uploaded per minute to Flickr.
130 million – At the above rate, the number of photos uploaded per month to Flickr.
3+ billion – Photos uploaded per month to Facebook.
36 billion – At the current rate, the number of photos uploaded to Facebook per year.

Data sources and notes: Spam percentage from MessageLabs (PDF). Email user numbers and counts from Radicati Group (the number of sent emails was their prediction for 2010, so it’s very much an estimate). Website numbers from Netcraft. Domain name stats from Verisign andWebhosting.info. Internet user numbers and distribution from Internet World Stats. Facebook statsfrom Facebook and Business Insider. Twitter stats from Twitter (and here), TwitterCounter andTechCrunch. Web browser stats from StatCounter. YouTube video numbers from Google. Facebook video numbers from GigaOM. US online video stats from Comscore and the Pew Research Center. Flickr image numbers from Flickr. Facebook image numbers from Pingdom blog.

Post source: http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/01/12/internet-2010-in-numbers/

Comments (46)

Stop wasting money on your SEO

11
Jul

posted by shumin filed under Online Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation

Over a few years, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is still one of the most effective marketing tactics for generating leads and sales on your website. There are more than thousands companies are doing Search Engine Optimisation for business. Are you using one of them? And can you tell if the Company is doing good job or not?

Below are 10 signs to help you tell:

Sign #1. Making Promises that are Too Good to be True

Sign #2. Using “Black Hat” SEO Techniques

Sign #3. Targeting the Wrong Keywords

Sign #4. Employing Shoddy Linking Schemes

Sign #5. Promising to List Your Site in Hundreds of Online Directories

Sign #6. Redesigning Your Site or Creating New Pages Without 301 Redirects

Sign #7. Focusing only on Metadata Instead of On-Page SEO

Sign #8. Creating Bad Content

Sign #9. Driving Irrelevant Traffic

Sign #10. Offering a One-Time Fixes with No Ongoing Maintenance

If you need further assistance to exam the SEO work has been done on your site, feel free to contact Shumin in Xpres-Shop. We are here to help you to audit your SEO status.

Email: info@xpress-shop.com

Web: www.xpress-shop.com

Tel: +353 870554592

Comments (58)

Amazing statistics about online video from 2010

11
Jul

posted by shumin filed under Online Marketing, Search News

* 172 million U.S. viewers watched an average of 14.6 hours of video.

* Over 40% of consumers watch online videos on a weekly basis – Over 70% watch monthly.

* YouTube serves over 1 billion videos per day.

* YouTube (owned by Google) is expected to hit $2 billion in revenue during 2011.

* Viral video marketing campaigns boost clickthrough rates by 750%. (MarketingExperiments.com, November 2006)

* E-commerce sites that use product videos sell up to 45% more. Onlineshoes.com says it sees a 45% higher conversion rate for customers who watch videos on its website. Zappos.com says it sells up to 30% more for products that it shows in videos instead of just static pictures. (Sources: ReelSEO, Internet Retailer)

Online video marketing first surged in 2007 and has been growing exponentially every year since. Over $3 billion was spent on online video advertising during 2010. With online video becoming such a major marketing player, it’s an important advertising genre to consider embracing.

Comments (144)

Your Newsletter Checklist

5
Jul

posted by shumin filed under Email Marketing, Online Marketing

Here is a quick checklist before send out your newsletter… it is always worth to make sure belows items are done correctly to maximise the returns of your email marketing:
1. Fully tested, e.g. subject line, images, etc.

2. Simple and clean

3. Ensure it works on all mobile devices

4. Social sharing

5. Easy to unsubscribe

6. Send it out in the middle of the week towards the afternoon

Comments (17)

Google And Twitter Figure Themselves Out Makes the Realtime Search Suspended

5
Jul

posted by shumin filed under Search News

Realtime search was suspended after Google’s contract with Twitter for access to the full feed of public updates passed its expiration date on July 2, 2011, according to information Google shared with Search Engine Land. The original Twitter search agreement dates back to October 2009.

But it is not like Twitter will be pulled entirely from the service, Google can still crawl and organise publicly available tweets (each tweet is its own webpages).

Google now suffering from a huge case of “You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.” Can Google’s Realtime search succeed without Twitter?

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