Online Marketing Blog

Want more blog traffic? Want more eyeballs in front of your content? Then why not translate it into other languages to appeal to a wider audience?

We often forget that no every speaks, or reads, English. The US, Canada, Australia, UK, Ireland and Guyana are the only areas that speak English as the main language. There is a handful of other countries that speak English, but not as their primary language. Then there is everyone else.¹ There are billions of people who don’t read English, yet few blogs offer translation options on their site.

To easily translate your blog from one language to anther you can add a Google Translate menu to your site and let Google handle the translations on the fly. They may not be perfect, but they are better than having none.

Photo credit hayzlett.com

Jeffrey Hayzlett is the former CMO at Kodak and author of “The Mirror Test: Is Your Business Really Breathing?”. You might have seen him on Celebrity Apprentice with Donald Trump or speaking at a variety of industry conferences. He hails from South Dakota and considers himself a cowboy. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any photos of him online with a cowboy hat.

I connected with Jeff yesterday morning to talk about his success with social media, corporate change, Kodak, ROI and his upcoming keynote presentation at SES San Francisco.

Jeff, it was great to finally “meet you” on the Beancast recently and thank you for inspiring the idea behind a pretty popular blog post “Why Do So Many Companies Suck at Social Media” which has had well over 1,100 retweets and multiples of that in page views.

One of the many ways companies have engaged their customers, gained insight into a marketplace and conducted research for a variety of purposes has been through surveys.  If you think that list of activities almost sounds like the reasons many companies engage in social media monitoring, you’d be right.

It’s a fundamental question that many marketers who use surveys have: How can social media can play an important part of an online marketing strategy?

Companies incorporate social media into their marketing mix for a variety of reasons:

• Website Traffic
• Brand Awareness
• Engagement with Prospects
• Engagement with Customers
• Brand Reputation
• Prospect Lead Quality
• Revenue
• Prospect Lead Volume
• Useful Product Feedback

What are the best Search Engine Marketing blogs to follow? Which are the most popular? The chart above from Feed Compare shows a comparison of the RSS feed subscriber counts published by Feedburner for: Google Webmaster Central (red), Search Engine Land (blue), Search Engine Watch (green) and our very own Online Marketing Blog (purple).

As evidence of how successful a well executed business blog can be, TopRank’s Blog has about as many RSS subscribers as top industry publication Search Engine Watch (37,517/37,028). It’s a great position for an agency to have that kind of reach and also to be able to bring first hand, successful business blogging expertise to our consulting clients.

Facebook Marketing is a topic we’ve covered for several years and with the significant increase in Facebook users there’s even more interest in how to make sense of what people do there. I’ve seen a significant increase in referring traffic from Facebook to web pages over the past 6 months and while a lot of that lift comes from marketing activities, I don’t anticipate the trend in Facebook users leaving to visit websites slowing down any time soon.

Participation on Facebook has traditionally been behind the login or confined to your network. With increasing amounts of content available “to the entire internet”, it’s worth exploring. Here are a few tools that you can use to search and visualize what’s happening on Facebook.

As I look at my calendar over the next month for speaking events, it’s looking a little busy. Topically, these speaking opportunities are in-line with our online marketing consulting services as you would expect, but the mix is what makes this schedule worth a blog post. Plus I always enjoy connecting with readers of Online Marketing Blog whenever possible and hope to meet you at one of these events.

If you have any tips for San Francisco, Skydiving with the military or fun things to do in Hong Kong, please feel free to share:

Should you optimize for Facebook? Can you improve Google search results with Facebook SEO?

At the 2009 MIMA Summit I gave a presentation on the intersection of SEO and Social Media suggesting that companies become publishers in their marketing and that the opportunity for search doesn’t just lie with Google, but also with social search.  At the time, Facebook’s internal search emerged as one of the search engine engines tracked by comScore. The idea being marketers can optimize their website content for standard search but also the content they publish within social networks and on social media content sites.

Fast forward:  comScore’s June 2010 U.S. Search Engine Rankings report shows that Facebook search queries have grown from 395 million in January of 2010 to 621 million queries in June. That’s almost half the monthly queries reported for Bing (1.7 billion) but not anywhere near the 10 billion plus queries on Google.

Last night I had an enjoyable conversation with Scott Monty of Ford, Jeff Hayzlett (formerly CMO Kodak), Mike Monello from Campfire and our host Bob Knorpp of the famous BeanCast about a variety of topics including foursquare, Facebook, Hulu, social gaming and even small logos. One of the topics that emerged from that discussion was the astute observation of how many companies “suck” at social media.

The current iteration of what we all call social media has been around for at least 3-4 years but apparently brands are still irrelevant on Twitter and companies continue to blunder on Facebook and show a lack of understanding of what makes social media conversations succeed at reaching business goals.