Thursday, February 21, 2013

I Love Internet Marketing Through Social Media!






What can I say? I love social media! I love Internet Marketing! That's how I make my living. I pay my bills and bank money that flows in from all the sites that I'm listed on.  People always ask me how it's possible to make an extra income online. I always respond with this:

Making Money Online is easy. It's just time consuming at first, but if one sticks with it, the end result is worth the hard effort. It takes persistence, resilience, and mental fortitude. It takes branding one self, sharing knowledge with others that help benefit them!

The process is repetitive most times. I've taken steps to make things much simpler through automating many of my posts through Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc...otherwise it would take up much of my day. With a little bit of study, anybody could do the same.

I teach others how it can be done, for a fee of course. No self respecting marketer works for free, matter of fact, nobody works for free! Email me at andrewcallegati@gmail.com if interested.

How would you like to make an extra income online in your own spare time?





It works for me, just using social media! I don't even have a personal website yet! Granted I will in the near future, once I up my game...





I've been sharing tips and tricks on how to effectively use social media for years now. I've taught others how to do it, and they're now making a decent income from their efforts! Why can't you do the same? I say you can. The real question is, do you want to?



Gallon Jug Lateral Raises 4 Shoulders by Attitude = Performance

The 5 Pillars of New Media Strategy: There is no box!



While you may read success story after success story, we cannot make any great assumptions in how they’ll impact your work.

There is a great myth that a winning formula exists for success in social media; that if you deconstruct the most popular case studies, you’ll find a winning recipe for your social media strategy.
It’s easy to get caught up in the creative examples we read about. Many times however, they feed the very impressions that can work against you.

- If we can introduce the right viral content we can get more views or friends.

- If we can maintain a rhythmic editorial calendar we can spark conversations that create a social effect.

- If we can develop the most amazing app, we can rise to the top of our customer’s attention span!

- If we get our company in social networks, we can build better relationships with our customers.

Rather than seeking shortcuts, we should see these examples as inspiration. In the end however, we each have our own question we need to answer…what do successful relationships and experiences look like in social media for our customers?

The formula for success in social media begins with first defining what success is and how it will be measured. This is one of the most important steps in any social media strategy, yet it is the first step that many businesses miss. The truth is that there is no formula for success. It requires something special for each strategy and it’s dependent on the people you’re trying to reach, their expectations, your business objectives and how this engagement ties specifically to your organization (sales, marketing, service, products, etc.)


To help, let’s put social media strategy into an approachable framework. Begin by organizing the most important themes to form what I refer to as The 5 Pillars of Social Media Strategy. This will contribute to a meaningful social media presence as long as you revisit this approach through every step of the strategy process.

1. Listen, Search, Walk a “Daily in the Life” of your customers.

Research is critical in understanding how your connected consumer makes decisions, how they’re influenced and where they engage and learn. This is the dynamic customer journey. Here, you’ll learn that your social customers are not at all like the traditional customers you know. Please note that they’re still important, but a new approach is required to expand your reach. Essentially here you discover new touch points and decision-making cycles. You’ll learn that this isn’t just about social media at all. In fact you’ll see how social, mobile, digital and other traditional channels need to work together to guide a complementary, integrated and converged journey. Think of it as customer journey optimization (CJO) or customer journey management (CJM).

2: Rethink your Vision, Mission, and Purpose.

When’s the last time you read your company’s vision or mission statements? Did it or does it speak to you? Would you Tweet it? Take this time to redesign customer experiences and articulate your vision for how you will use social media to improve customer experiences now and over time.

3. Define Your Brand Persona

Take some time to answer the following questions…What do you want people to see and appreciate? What do you want customers to hear, see, think and feel? Who are they engaging with? What do you stand for? Defining your brand persona will humanize engagement and make takeaway impressions and value consistent across every network and in every scenario.

4. Develop a Social Business Strategy.

Make your presence matter. This isn’t just about concepting the next Facebook Like or Twitter Retweet campaign. Based on the first 3 steps, develop a business-level strategy that meets the needs and expectations of your connected customers. As you’ll learn in step 1, new touch points emerge. If you are not part of the awareness stage of the decision making cycle, you will not benefit from consideration nor a decision in your favor. They key is to also tie social media back to key business objectives while investing in the necessary roles to engage customers at the functional level (service/support, sales, marketing, collaboration/innovation, etc.)

5. Build and Invest in Your Community.

Don’t just think about social media as an editorial or marketing program. That’s just table stakes.  In fact, don’t just limit this to social media at all. This is a chance to rethink the entire engagement strategy and the customer journey. Ultimately, you’re setting the stage for something more meaningful and substantive…the experience. Community isn’t defined by Likes or followers. Those are essentially “in the moment” actions. We’re talking about human beings. Community is much more than belonging to something; it’s about doing something together that makes belonging matter. Participate in the communities that you host and also the communities that host the conversations that are important to your business. That’s the secret to earning a lasting affinity the contributes to you becoming a trusted resource.

By repeating steps one through five over time will help you achieve empathy, which will inspire meaningful strategies to earn relevance.  It’s important to remember is that in social media, mobile, and in the face of innovation, there is no box to think outside of. In fact, there is no box. There is only a blank slate and a series of unanswered questions that separate you from your connected customers.

Saturday, February 9, 2013

Rear Delts (Resistance Band) Home Workout by Attitude Equals Performance







I'm not only into tech, I LOVE keeping fit. As a Former U.S. Marine, I've been instilled with the notion that health always comes first. Yes, we all love making money, securing our future and that of our families, but it's nearly impossible if you're not at your peak fitness levels. Once your health is gone, it's basically game over.

Join Latia Del Riviero and Myself, as we show you how to stay in shape in the comfort of your own domain, with minimal time spent. You don't even need exercise equipment, although you don't have to spend an arm and a leg if you choose to purchase some minor things like resistance bands or even a couple of dumbbells...

Hope you all enjoy the videos, check out our Youtube channels for more!

http://www.youtube.com/user/andrewcallegati

http://www.youtube.com/user/latiadelriviero

Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Eric Schmidt: Google Will Give Higher Rankings to Content Tied to Verified Profiles



google-plus-youIt's no understatement to say that Google's former CEO Eric Schmidt is quite outspoken. His "talk first, think later" approach has a tendency of providing some great soundbites for the media.
This time, it's not an impromptu interview providing the interesting opinion. The Wall Street Journal has obtained some excerpts from Schmidt's upcoming book, "The New Digital Age." One of those excerpts clearly spells out where Google is heading in the future:
“Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.”
When Google introduced authorship markup in 2011, Google did note that they were "looking closely at ways this markup could help us highlight authors and rank search results."
Now Schmidt has made it explicit: in the future, you can boost your rankings by using Google authorship, and as we've reported before, Google+ has been designed to be an identity verification network.
But Schmidt doesn't stop there. He essentially predicts that privacy will cease to exist online. Governments, he says, will find it "too risky" to have thousands of citizens "anonymous, untraceable and unverified" online, suggesting they will want to require verification of all online accounts at some level of government.
As all this new online identity reform frames place, more and more privacy and user security issues will begin to arise. Schmidt postulates that tech companies will have to start investing in bigger and stronger legal departments to litigate all the lawsuits that are sure to arise over protection of information and intellectual property.
Is this the world we are to look forward to? I remember reading Bill Gates' "The Road Ahead" may years ago. I'm it, he spoke of technology bettering our lives with ideas like automatic climate control as we walk onto a room and other cool things.
In Schmidt's view of the future, we will have full wash to wear clothing cleaning machines reminiscent of "The Jetsons" that will also pick our outfits for us, based on our schedule. That concept takes Google Now to a whole new level.
Aside from that, the rest of Schmidt's predictions seem bleak and full of moral issues.

Monday, February 4, 2013

Recharge Your PPC Profitability: 5 Ways to Diagnose & Treat a Paid Search Slump

profit-graphEvery so often, after having worked on an account for several months (or years) with successful results, there can be a plateauing or declining period. Core KPIs just fluctuate without a seeming trend, profits slump and it becomes an uphill battle simply to return to the base numbers of the past.
You’re frustrated. Management is worried. Nothing seems to be working and you’re possibly considering making sacrifices to the Google gods in hope of salvation.
You don’t need to be a master diagnostician like Dr. House to solve the issue; taking these five key steps will allow you to breathe new life into your account. Even if you aren't necessarily seeing a dip in profits, proactively performing these steps will help your account operate at peak performance.

Go Macro

Separating out the search network and display network, gain a clear understanding of the big picture by looking at the macro trends across each of them. This top-level overview of performance will provide the best roadmap for problem-solving.
First, look at the totals for each network as a whole, month over month, for the past 12 months. This will give you the best insights into how your core KPIs such as click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate (CR) and cost per conversion (CPA) have been trending.
Chances are high that you will immediately spot an issue such as a slow, but clear, decline in any of them.
For example, a slow decline in conversion rates may be less obvious when you are working on the account month to month; but looking at the last 12 months, you can see how big the dip really has been. Alternatively, response rates may be consistent but you’ll notice a decline in the number of impressions you receive per month, which could mean increased competition or declining impression share reducing your order volume. You can now easily glean the problem areas that need improvement to help you pick up the pace again.
To do this, pull your data from AdWords and organize it in an Excel sheet with the following columns:
  • Month
  • # of Days in the Month
  • Campaign Name
  • Total Monthly Impressions
  • Total Monthly Clicks
  • Total Cost
  • Click-Through Rate (CTR)
  • Average Position
  • Average Cost Per Click (CPC)
  • Conversions
  • Cost per Conversion (CPA)
  • Conversion Rate (CR)
  • Profits
Then, to normalize the trends for months with differing numbers of days, and really compare apples to apples, add on:
  • Impressions per Day (Monthly impressions divided by # of Days in the Month)
  • Clicks per day
  • Orders per day
  • Profits per day
It could look like this:
organized-adwords-data
Next, drill a little further down by looking at a similar month–over–month analysis, but this time doing it for each of your campaigns in the search and display networks individually. This will allow you to quickly identify the problem children (i.e., the campaigns that have seen the biggest declines).
Now that you have identified which campaigns to work on and which metrics have been under–performing, you can quickly dig deeper into them to identify the solution.

Analyze Quality Score

As most PPC managers well know, quality score has a big impact on cost efficiencies as well as ad position. If you find CPCs and thus CPAs creeping up, chances are a large percentage of your impression volume is going to lower quality score keywords.
Regularly keeping track of your quality score is a good practice to consistently measure the health of your account.
You can either use a quality score monitoring tool such as Tenscores, or for a more detailed report with a greater degree of accuracy, use Excel and pivot tables to gain an understanding of weighted quality scores by campaign.
Using excel for this exercise is actually quite easy, and is explained perfectly by Brad Geddes, in this absolute must–watch video on how to identify AdWords quality score problems. A great watch for both beginners and intermediates, the video explains exactly how to download the data from AdWords and pivot it for your analysis. Geddes also shares some phenomenal insights into analyzing the data to determine the greatest opportunities for financial benefits and how to prioritize where to start.
Now that you know where the problems lie, you can take measures to improve quality score such as:
  • Separating out low-quality score keywords into their own ad groups.
  • Regrouping your ad groups into tighter themes with closely related ads.
  • Improving landing page load times.
  • Testing new ads that improve CTR (while keeping CR the same or higher as well for your bottom line).
  • Testing dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) to help improve CTRs.
  • Analyzing comparative indicators to find additional insights into optimizations you could make.

Back to the Basics

Every so often, especially when things aren’t running as well as they should, it’s good to go back to the start. Take a look at the basics and settings, since often in trying to work on more advanced tactics, the simpler items get missed, when in reality they could have a big impact.
  • Review your negative keywords list, to either add negative keywords to save costs or remove potentially damaging negative keywords that could be limiting you.
  • Review your placements report. Some managed placements could no longer be working as effectively as they once were, and there could be underperforming placements that should be excluded under the automatic placements.
  • Review your ad group set–up. Could your “all” search query report indicate that there is room for additional ad groups with more focused ads? Check to ensure all ads are running.
  • Check your campaign settings. The daily budget cap could be limiting you; perhaps the settings are targeting computers as well as mobile devices and tablets, which don’t convert as well with traditional landing pages and thus could be wasting money.
  • Check for any technical errors. Some landing pages might not be working, or perhaps the AdWords conversion pixel isn’t firing, which could be a huge problem if you use CPA bidding.

Analyze Your Bids

If you want to manage AdWords keeping the 80–20 rule in mind, then adjusting bids would fall well into the top 20 percent of things you could do to make an 80 percent impact. Run a report on the top 15 percent of your highest spend keywords — if the majority of them are unprofitable, then it’s time to review your bidding strategy.
Manual bidding, while providing a greater degree of control, can easily get cumbersome with large numbers of keywords. Switching to automated bidding is one of the quickest edits you can make, and the results can really pay off.
  • If your focus is on maximizing clicks, you can test automated bidding to maximize clicks, while letting Google know to stay within a CPC bid limit. Alternatively, you can try enhanced CPC bidding (as long as you have conversion tracking installed), which still works on manual bidding but will adjust your Max CPC bid on the chances of the ad converting.
  • If you have a clear understanding of your ideal CPA, or perhaps the maximum you’d like to pay for each conversion, then consider either target or max CPA bidding. CPA bidding works by using the historical data on a rolling past–30–day basis (with greater emphasis placed on most recent history), to enter you into auctions where and when you are most likely to gain a conversion. It adjusts factors such as your bids, times of day, as well as keywords and placements.
  • For the display network, consider testing the Display Campaign Optimizer (DCO). To use it, simply set a CPA and set up ads in the campaign. Google will do the rest of the work for you to choose different placements and either spend more on winning ones or cut losers and continuously look for additional placements to run. It’s a great way to expand your reach.
However, when using automated bidding be careful to:
  • Not change bids too frequently. Especially with CPA bidding the DCO, slower changes to bids work best. The system takes a couple of weeks to really settle in and figure out what works best, so if you must make bids, make them in smaller increments.
  • Keep an eye on response rates. If conversion rates decline, then you can see impression and order volume fall, as the system will bid lower in order to meet the goal CPAs set.

Analyze External Factors

If elements in the account are looking good but you’re still losing impression share or seeing costs rise, then external factors could be having an effect.
  • Competition: Has there been a new competitor? Are current competitors working heavily on their account and bidding up, thus causing you to lose clicks or perhaps your CPCs to rise? Are they offering a new promotion or deal? Keep a careful eye on your top AdWords competitors, and look for changes to their ads or positions. Use tools such as WhatRunsWhere.com to keep an eye on their display ads or SpyFu.com to track their keywords and text ads. Also check their landing pages frequently, to track any tests they may be running there.
  • Creative burnout: Even the most successful ad or landing page can lose its effectiveness over time. Simply, there comes the saturation point when the creative has just been there and done that, and is now past its peak. This is seen even more frequently with image ads on the display network. Carefully analyze the response rates over time and always be testing new creative that you can roll out to keep performance strong.
  • Other marketing channels: If the downturn is only in paid search then the problem can be fixed within AdWords. However, if several marketing channels are also experiencing downturns, then the company has a larger problem at hand. It could be symptomatic of a bigger issue such as an online reputation problem or an uncompetitive offer. Speak to other channel managers or the director of marketing to get to the root of the issue and jointly seek a solution.

Summary

Doing a thorough check and audit of the account is recommended on at least a quarterly basis to keep things running smoothly. When working on day–to–day tasks it’s easy to get lost in the trees, and looking at things from a big picture standpoint will help you more clearly see the proverbial forest and create an action plan to keep the profits flowing.

Friday, February 1, 2013

Social Media Hacks for Landing Your Dream Job

post1 300x154 Social Media Hacks for Landing Your Dream Job
Social media can be a powerful tool when it comes to marketing a business, but you can also use it to market yourself. Similar to a business that works hard to build brand awareness in the marketplace, standing out and getting noticed is important when you’re in the job market.
There are a number of social media strategies that you can use to land your dream job.

Advertise Yourself to The Target Company

Companies run advertisements for their products and services to their target customers constantly. You can do the same to market yourself directly to a company that you want to work with.
For example, you can write a blog post talking about your work experience and why you would be a perfect match for the company.
Then, you can create LinkedIn advertisements that are targeted specifically at members of the target company.
The goal would be for members of the company, and specifically employees involved in the interviewing process, to notice your ad and the initiative you took to get noticed.
ID 100576421 Social Media Hacks for Landing Your Dream JobThis is a great way to show a potential employer your creativity and to stand out from the crowd of other applicants in the job market.
Use the #Company’s #Hashtag
On Twitter, when you prefix a hashtag to a keyword, for example #direct #marketing, it acts as a search tool. People actively using Twitter will find your tweet when they search for any of these keywords. You can also see all other users on Twitter who are talking about that particular tag.
When you use a hashtag that mentions the name of the company that you are trying to get a job in, people from that company may find you.
For example, you can use a similar blog post as we shared above discussing why you think you’re a great match for the company.
Then, you can share that blog post with your social media network and use the company’s hashtag in the tweets.
People within the company, especially marketing departments, will often monitor social media for mentions of the company. If members of their team are monitoring Twitter, then the tweet will come up in the results.
This can lead to a conversation between you and employees at the company, which can serve as an inroad to the company to get an interview.

Connect With Key People

ID 100223841 Social Media Hacks for Landing Your Dream JobLinkedIn is great for networking with people in specific positions or industries. This allows you to network with other like minded people that could potentially help you find that perfect job.
You can join groups and talk about almost any topic with people who are interested in it.
You can even search for people who work for certain companies and hold specific positions.
If you want to get a job as a marketing consultant for a specific company, you could find the person who would oversee that department on LinkedIn. You could then connect with them and get to know them a bit. When you befriend enough people through this method and interact with them over time, you will start to develop some relationships that can pay off in the form an “in” at your dream job.

When using this tactic, it’s important to keep a few things in mind

In all of your communication, whether it’s in a group discussion on a forum or exchanging messages with a specific person, you need to demonstrate your expertise.
Let your real personality shine through in order to form a real relationship with people that you interact with.

Have a Professional Online Presence

A potential employer may search for your name online during the hiring process. It’s critical that your reputation be as spotless as possible. If they find anything unflattering or unprofessional, they will not hesitate to pass over you and move on to someone else who wants the job.
Search for your own name online to see the results employers see
If you have personal social media profiles with content that is not professional, consider revising these accounts to be more professional.
It’s difficult to find a great job in today’s economy that is seeing a slowdown. You may as well give yourself the best chance possible and exploit these online tactics.